About This Artwork

Ad Reinhardt
American, 1913-1967

Black and White, 1947

Oil on canvas
152.4 x 101.6 cm (60 x 40 in.)
Restricted gift of Dr. and Mrs. Edwin J. De Costa; Walter E. Heller Foundation, 1981.76

Ad Reinhardt’s work bridges the period between the Abstract Expressionism of the 1950s and the Minimal and Conceptual Art movements of the following decade. Black and White bears witness to his understanding of Expressionist ideas concerning the materiality of paint, which he applied here in thin washes and thick impasto. The artist eventually abandoned all aspects of gestural abstraction in favor of solid fields of color arranged in rigid geometric patterns of squares and rectangles. This painting prefigures Reinhardt’s later highly structured, reduced work, while still revealing ties with artists such as Franz Kline and Jackson Pollock. It articulates his subtle sense of color, which he came to define in its purest sense as multiple possibilities of black. Reinhardt once said, “There is no such thing as emptiness or invisibility or silence.” His career was a pursuit of this belief.