© 2013 Estate of Ad Reinhardt / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
On view
Theodora Walton William Walton III Pavilion
Untitled,
1960
More Context
Deeply committed to the purity and autonomy of art, Ad Reinhardt sought to fuse two of abstraction’s most important traditions: the grid and the monochrome. This ambition was realized in his <em>Black Paintings</em>, which he began in the mid-1950s and described as the "last painting[s] . . . anyone can make." Unforgiving in its harmony and symmetry, <em>Untitled</em> consists of a roughly sixty-by-sixty-inch square divided into nine smaller squares of similar proportions. The tonal gradations between each square are so subtle that the painting appears at first glance to be an uninterrupted field of color. Reinhardt sought to eliminate all visual distractions as well as any trace of labor from his canvases — a goal that required, paradoxically, much effort to achieve. He also drained the oil from his pigments in order to create delicate matte surfaces that capture and absorb light. As the artist once said, "Some people think that if a painting doesn’t have a subject or isn’t a picture, then it doesn’t have meaning. This just isn’t true."
Information
1960
- "Acquisitions of the Art Museum 1987", Record of the Art Museum, Princeton University 47, no. 1 (1988): p. 30-54., p. 54
- Sam Hunter, "Ad Reinhardt: Sacred and Profane," Record of the Art Museum, Princeton University 50, no. 2 (1991): 26–38., p. 26, fig. 1
- Princeton University Art Museum: Handbook of the Collection (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007), 56 (illus.)
- Princeton University Art Museum: Handbook of the Collections (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Art Museum, 2013), p. 56
