“Art is art. Everything else is everything else.”
A pristine testament to the power of pure, unmediated color and form, Ad Reinhardt’s Red Painting from 1953 is a masterwork from the legendary artist’s seminal series of Red Paintings. One of a highly limited number of Red Paintings of this significant scale that the artist produced – many of which are already held in museum collections – Red Painting is the ultimate testament to Reinhardt’s singular and defining role within the course of modern and contemporary painting. Distinguished by its remarkable provenance and exhibition history, Red Painting has remained in the same important American collection for over three decades, and was notably included in the first major museum retrospective devoted to the artist at the Museum of Modern Art in New York and Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles from 1991 to 1992. More recently, the present work was selected by artist Mark Grotjahn to be included in the exhibition Oranges and Sardines: Conversations on Abstract Painting with Mark Grotjahn, Wade Guyton, Mary Heilmann, Amy Sillman, Charline von Heyl, and Christopher Wool at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles from 2008 to 2009. Captivating in its majestic chromatic intensity, Red Painting characterizes the apex of Reinhardt’s career-long fascination with monochromatic abstractions which defined the trajectory of minimalism at the advent of the half-century. Attesting to the art historical significance of the Red Paintings, similar works are held in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Virginia Museum of Art and the Yale University of Art Gallery, among other prestigious institutions.
One of the most influential advocates for the purity of abstraction, Reinhardt felt that art should be devoid of narrative and understood, purely and primarily, as an artistic object. Reinhardt’s legendary painterly praxis culminated in his abstract paintings from the early 1950s, a period in which he limited his canvases to monochromatic hues of red, blue, and, finally, black. Executed in 1953, Red Painting marks a watershed year within Reinhardt's career, during which he first received widespread critical praise for these monochromatic paintings. This period saw Reinhardt originate the symmetrical, trisected, and single-crossbeam devices that would become his irrevocable trademark; possessing such a configuration, the grid-like depth of Red Painting is a touchstone for Reinhardt's practice, exemplifying on a compelling scale the artist's mastery over color and form. Divided into vertical and horizontal sections, Reinhardt’s composition is chosen for its absolute symmetry; the cruciform shape pays homage unanimously to form and hue itself. A majestic totem of pure optical brilliance and overwhelming chromatic intensity, Reinhardt's Red Painting exemplifies the artist’s ability to honor the primal mystery and possibilities of color as an essence, removed from any narratives or metaphors. Mesmerizing in its perfectly symmetrical architectural square format, which mirrors the fields of color, the crimson bands seem to vibrate with a startling visual intensity.
Ad Reinhardt’s Red Paintings in Important Institutional Collections
“It's been said many times in world art writing that one can find some of painting's meaning by looking not only at what painters do, but what they refuse to do.”
Freed from any intimation of content, Reinhardt reveled in the potentiality of artistic production in its most essential form. Although most commonly associated with his Abstract Expressionist peers, Reinhardt’s work is simultaneously deeply rooted in Geometric abstraction and Minimalism. Attracted to Cubism, Reinhardt shattered the conventions of the movement by means of its very own forms. Absolving the rectilinear form from its capacity to create an image in perspectival depth, as demonstrated by artists such as Picasso and Braque, Reinhardt rendered it a neutral optical device devoid of image or subject. In this respect, Red Painting formally advances upon the precedent set by Kazimir Malevich, whose revolutionary canvases share the monochromatic rectilinear configuration of Reinhardt’s compositions, while his chromatic austerity advances upon the radical nature of the almost entirely red surface of Henri Matisse's The Red Studio from 1911. Like Malevich, whose paintings called for the reduction of painting to its very essence, Reinhardt’s composition implies both finality and the creation of a blank slate to open an entirely new potentiality. As Lucy Lippard remarked, “If Reinhardt is, as he would like to be, making the last painting anyone can make, it is the first of his last paintings.” (Exh. Cat., New York, The Jewish Museum, Ad Reinhardt: Paintings, 1966, p. 11)
“The one object of fifty years of abstract art is to present art-as-art and as nothing else, to make it into the one thing it is only, separating and defining it more and more, making it purer and emptier, more absolute and exclusive – non-objective, non-representational, non-figurative, non-imagist, non-expressionist, non-subjective. The only and one way to say what abstract art or art-as-art is, is to say what it is not.”
At first glance, Red Painting appears to reflect a brilliant field of unmodulated red, yet upon closer inspection, it is comprised of subtly shifting variegated hues, revealing slight tonal variances that lend themselves to extensive contemplation by the viewer. In its subtly variegated palette of rich crimson hues, the present work powerfully invokes the raw, unadulterated elegance of pure abstraction. The composition of Red Painting is abstraction par excellence; the elegant layers and subtle shifts between bands of rich red hues define its strict and relentless geometry. The entrancing, meditative shades and inimitable compositional elegance of Red Painting represent the pinnacle of Reinhart’s groundbreaking oeuvre.
