Ad Reinhardt

In 1953, Ad Reinhardt married Rita Ziprkowski. The couple had a daughter named Anna.

On August 30, 1967, while working in the studio, Reinhardt had a heart attack and died from it the same day. At that time, he was only 53 years old.

Today he is remembered as a prophetic figure in postwar abstract art and a major contributor to contemporary art of the mid-20th century.

Ad Reinhardt was born as Adolph Dietrich Friedrich Reinhardt on December 24, 1913, in Buffalo, New York into a working-class family of German-Russian immigrants. His father was a skilled worker in the garment trade and also a labor organizer. He had a brother named Edward.

Initially, they lived in the Riverside along the Niagara River, close to his extended family. In his childhood, he was especially close to his cousin Otto. Later, his father’s work took them to the New York City, where he started schooling.

While in grade school, he developed an interest in painting and won many prizes. As he entered high school, he started acting as the illustrator for the school magazine and also won several prizes. Apart from his interest in art, he was also a good student and did extremely well in academics.

After passing out from school, he received several scholarships to study arts in various colleges. Although his father wanted him to take that up and go into commercial art he felt that he had already learned enough techniques and going to art school would be futile.

Instead, he chose to study history of art. In 1931, on receiving full scholarship from the Columbia University he enrolled at Teacher’s College, an independent institution under the said university, for his undergraduate study. There he studied art history with Lithuanian-born scholar Meyer Shapiro.

In 1936, soon after graduating from Columbia University, Ad Reinhardt was accredited as a painter by Burgoyne A. Diller. In the same year, he started his career in the easel division of the WPA Federal Art Project. Concurrently, he also worked as a freelance commercial artist.

In 1937, sponsored by his professor Carl Holty, he became a member of the American Abstract Artists and for the next ten years, he participated in number of exhibitions with them. Although he left AAA in 1947 he had always considered it to be an important event of his life.

At the WPA, he made friends with many would be members of the New York School. Among them were Arshile Gorky, Willem de Kooning and Stuart Davis. Another important associate of this period was Russell Right, for whom he created cartoons and exhibits for the 1939 New York World's Fair.

Reinhardt’s association with WPA ended in 1940. Thereafter, he worked freelance, taking up various projects such as making posters for the War Bond drive and artwork for the Office of War Information, painting murals for the Café Society, designing promotional materials for the Columbia Broadcasting System etc.

At the same time, he kept on painting in private. Until now, his works exhibited brightly colored hard-edged geometric designs. But from early 1940s, he started adopting rectilinear patterns of small abstract elements, which were evenly distributed over the canvas. Overall impact became much softer.

In 1946, after being released from war duties, Ad Reinhardt rejoined PM. At the same time, he enrolled at the New York University Institute of Fine Arts for his post graduate studies and resumed his association with Betty Parsons.

In 1947, he left his job at PM and accepted a teaching post at Brooklyn College, a position he held until his death. Concurrently, he also started holding yearly exhibition at Betty Parson’s Gallery (1946-1965) and also at the Whitney Museum of American Art, Manhattan.

However by early 1950s, his style underwent further change. He now began concentrating on monochrome paintings, in which he had squires and oblongs placed symmetrically against a background of similar color. Initially, he used red; but later switched to blue.

He took his monochrome paintings to a greater height when from 1954 he began to concentrate on black. Known as ‘black paintings’, these works mainly consisted of large interlocking rectangles done in various shades of black.

During this later period of his career, he also took up writing, commenting not only on his own works, but also on the works of his contemporaries, often inviting controversies. Many of his writings were later incorporated in a book entitled ‘Art as Art’ and published posthumously in 1991.