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Ad and Artists
The Prize: An Exchange of Letters between Ajay and Reinhardt
By Abe AjayMeeting Ad Reinhardt for the first time wasn't very interesting. He was nibbling the ear of a little old lady on the back stirs at Webster Hall during the tail end of a Mad Arts Ball.
Mark Rothko
Postcards from Ad Reinhardt to Mark Rothko, 1965–56. Courtesy James E.B. Breslin Research Archive on Mark Rothko, 1940-93, Getty Research Institute, Research Library.
Robert Motherwell
Postcards from Ad Reinhardt to Robert Motherwell, March 2nd, 1954; December 12th, 1954. Courtesy Dedalus Foundation.
Ad Reinhardt
ARTnews, November 1966.
Bridget Riley / Ad Reinhardt
Ad Reinhardt and Bridget Riley collaboration for Poor.Old.Tired.Horse, 1966. Courtesy the artist.
Robert Smithson
Postcard from Ad Reinhardt to Robert Smithson, 1967. Courtesy Robert Smithson Estate.
Donald Judd
Here’s a speech I made last week in a Michigan museum, last month in a Wisconsin art center, last spring in a California museum and last year in two places in New Jersey. You know anything about New Jersey?
Joseph Kosuth
Ad Reinhardt to Joseph Kosuth, March 10, 1967. Ad Reinhardt’s copy of Julia R. De Forest’s Short History of Art (New York: Dodd, Mead, and Company). His submission to Kosuth’s exhibition, Fifteen People Submit Their Favorite Book, Lannis Gallery. Courtesy Joseph Kosuth.
How to Ride a Spiral
By Bob NickasIf Ad Reinhardt had not made the black paintings would we be here today?
How to Look at a Spiral
Ad Reinhardt, “How to Look at a Spiral,” 1946. Courtesy the Ad Reinhardt Foundation.
Ad Reinhardt: My gadfly and my friend
By Irving SandlerAd Reinhardt was my personal gadfly, and he had much to goad, since I was an avid devotee of Abstract Expressionism and a member in good standing of “the boys,” Philip Pavia’s term for de Kooning’s coterie, condemned by Ad as “impure.”
Ping/Pong: Lucy Lippard and Barbara Rose talk about Reinhardt
Don’t you find it odd that two very young women did the first serious writing about Reinhardt? My explanation is that he managed to be so far outside the accepted New York School macho man stereotype that he made no gender distinctions, just intellectual and moral distinctions, which is one reason I was drawn to his writing and personality.
Reinhardt and the Next Generation
By Lynn ZelevanskyEven in the early 1960s, when Abstract Expressionism still dominated the concerns of the contemporary art world, Reinhardt was not without partisans.
Reinhardt Over and Over Again
By Alistair RiderOver the course of the 1960s the narratives many artists tell about their creative development take a distinct turn.
Ad Reinhardt, Sixties Painter
By Matthew L. LevyOne of the most well-worn themes in the Reinhardt literature is the artist’s unique, if problematic, pertinence to the art of the sixties. Writing late in that decade, Lucy Lippard commented on his peculiar asynchronicity, describing him as a “‘thirties painter’ in the forties and a ‘sixties painter’ in the fifties.”
Reflections on “Mondrian/Reinhardt: Influence and Affinity”
By Bernice RoseIn the summer of 1996 I organized an exhibition for the Pace gallery, which represented the estate of the artist at the time. Rita Reinhardt, the artist’s widow, had long wanted to see an exhibition of the two artists.
Making Friends: Ad Reinhardt and Agnes Martin
By Suzanne HudsonIn 1967, Agnes Martin left New York City, where she had been living for a decade. She traveled for two years in Canada and the American West before settling on a remote New Mexican mesa, building a house by hand, and living in relative isolation for the remainder of her years.
Good Painters
By Christina RosenbergerOn the occasion of an exhibition of Agnes Martin’s work at the Serpentine Gallery in 1993, Irving Sandler interviewed the artist for the popular “Talking Art” column in the British publication Art Monthly.
Ad Reinhardt / Sol Lewitt
By George StolzAs early as 1963, Ad Reinhardt had been flagged as “the intellectual pivot of the new art” that did, in fact, follow.
Sol Lewitt
Sol LeWitt, Autobiography, New York and Boston Multiples, Inc (New York) and Lois and Michael K. Torf (Boston), 1980. Courtesy the Estate of Sol Lewitt.
Between Ideology and Poetry
By Benjamin BuchlohIt would seem that Sol LeWitt’s proto-Conceptual work of the early 1960s originated in an understanding of the essential dilemma that has haunted artistic production since 1913, when its basic paradigms of opposition were first formulated—a dilemma that could be described as the conflict between structural specificity and random organization.
Reinhardt and Artist Writers
By Greg LindquistAd Reinhardt’s paintings have been generally understood to be aligned with modernist purification. His thought, however, as revealed through his writing, was significantly more expansive than his paintings appeared.
Negating the Negation of Art:
Pictorial Violation in the Late Work of Ad Reinhardt and Its Significance for Painting Today
By Klaus Merkel
The end of the New York School is one of the most important phases in 1960s American painting and had a far-reaching impact. At now famous events such as so-called “Philadelphia Panel” in 1960, Ad Reinhardt and Philip Guston in particular contributed towards ending this episode in art history.
How Modern is the Museum of Modern Art?
By Ad ReinhardtAmerican Abstract Artists protest leaflet, 1940. Courtesy the Ad Reinhardt Foundation.
Lee Krasner and Ad Reinhardt: Notes on a Friendship
By Gail Levin, Ph.D.On August 30, 1967, Lee Krasner’s friend Ad Reinhardt died of a heart attack. Widowed since Jackson Pollock’s death in 1956, she held a wake for her him at her home on the East End of Long Island. Reinhardt was buried in the same Springs cemetery as Pollock. This unusual gesture on Krasner’s part marked her long affection for a painter who stood out among his male contemporaries for the respect which he showed for her work.
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