{"data":{"id":"1084","type":"artist","attributes":{"id":1084,"topgoose_id":867,"tms_id":1084,"display_name":"Ad Reinhardt","sort_name":"Reinhardt Ad","display_date":"1913–1967","begin_date":"1913","end_date":"1967","biography":"\u003cp\u003eA prominent member of the mid-twentieth-century New York avant-garde, Ad Reinhardt\ndistanced himself from his Abstract\nExpressionist contemporaries by focusing\non the formal relationships within a work\nrather than compositions that emphasize\nself-expression. His writings, lectures,\nand artistic output are distinguished by a\nphilosophical meditation on the meaning\nof abstraction and the virtues of art-for-art’s-\nsake, or, as he termed it, “art-as-art.”\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eReinhardt often expressed his views in the form of cartoon collages he published in select newspapers and journals.\u003cem\u003e\u0026nbsp;\u003c/em\u003e\u003ca href=\"/collection/works/397\"\u003e\u003cem\u003eMuseum Landscape\u0026nbsp;\u003c/em\u003e\u003c/a\u003esatirizes the art world’s liberal use of the term abstraction by taking aim at the Whitney Museum’s 1950 Annual. Featuring collage elements from a review that declared, “Abstraction Crowned at Whitney Annual,” the work depicts, among other elements, finger paints as the medium of \u003ca href=\"/artists/1039\"\u003eJackson Pollock\u003c/a\u003e and \u003ca href=\"/artists/339\"\u003eWillem de Kooning\u003c/a\u003e.\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eReinhardt’s search for a “pure”\nabstract art culminated with his “black”\npaintings. Beginning in 1956 he worked\nexclusively with five-by-five-foot square\ncanvases featuring dark, matte, hand-\npainted surfaces. The somber variations of\u003ca href=\"/collection/works/11686\"\u003e\u0026nbsp;\u003cem\u003eAbstract Painting\u003c/em\u003e\u003c/a\u003e’s nine extraordinarily\nsubtle black-on-black squares are\nperceptible only through sustained viewing\nand are lost in reproduction. The only\nviable experience, Reinhardt felt, was in\ncontemplating the actual painting.\nIn their elimination of subject matter and\npersonal expression, these works not\nonly represented a distilled vision of art\nbut also prefigured the concerns of\nMinimalists whose work would gain traction\nin the 1960s and 1970s.\u003c/p\u003e","on_view":false,"artport":false,"biennial":true,"collection":true,"ulan_id":"500013982","wikidata_id":"Q345569","created_at":"2017-08-30T15:55:44.000-04:00","updated_at":"2026-04-10T07:02:55.709-04:00","links":{"artworks":"/api/artists/1084/artworks","exhibitions":"/api/artists/1084/exhibitions"}}}}