Ad Reinhardt

Born in Buffalo, New York, on 24 December 1913^[1], Reinhardt studied art history under Meyer Schapiro at Columbia and became editor of the student humour magazine Jester (the preceding editor had been the novelist Herman Wouk). During the 1940s he contributed cartoons to PM, a left-wing New York newspaper, including a widely reproduced series called "How to Look at Art." This playful satirical output, which he maintained throughout his career, sits oddly beside the severity of the black paintings; Reinhardt appeared to see no contradiction. He also wrote extensively for Art News, covering Asian and Islamic art with genuine scholarship.

Within the Abstract Expressionist generation, Reinhardt was an insider dissident. He rejected the movement's core values: gestural improvisation, autobiographical content, emotional expression, and the cult of artistic personality. By the late 1950s he had formulated his aphoristic list of prohibitions: no texture, no drawing, no colour, no light, no space, no time, no size, no shape, no movement, no object. These were not decorative paradoxes but working constraints, enforced in canvases that demanded prolonged attention before their barely-there geometry resolved. Critic Jed Perl described his writings as "a celebration of negativity, so irredeemably dark that they generate their own kind of revelatory black light."

Barbara Rose, writing in the mid-1960s, noted that his rules had become "nearly canonical for the young artists" then developing Minimalism. Reinhardt refused to acknowledge the connection; he was equally hostile to any co-option of his ideas. He died of a heart attack in New York in August 1967^[1], aged fifty-three, having completed the last of his black paintings the year before. The Minimalists moved his ideas into three dimensions. He would almost certainly have disapproved.