Adolph Frederick Reinhardt's Life And Art

Adolph Frederick Reinhardt was born in Buffalo, New York to a family of immigrants. They settled in New York City soon after his birth, Reinhardt excelled at school and showed an interest in the visual arts from an early age. For example, in high school he worked as an illustrator for the school's newspaper. As a reader he was interested on the elite universities of the east coast and turned down several scholarships from art schools to settle for an undergraduate study in art history at Columbia University in New York in 1931.
While in Columbia, his two majors were literature and art history where he was well informed from the latest trends in visual arts and theory. Meyer Schapiro an iconic American Historian of art known for his Marxist
Engaged in his work he met leading artists such as Willem de Kooning and Arshile Gorky who would would be important friendships to Reinhardt. His works during this period we influenced by the geometric abstraction he learned as a student. Working as a freelance illustrator and cartoonist for several New York Publications such as Pm and ARTnews.
Ad Reinhardt as an art world outlier and Visionary, an uncommon proto-Minimalist. Creating reductive paintings that have influenced generations of artists. Much of his artistic philosophy is spelled out in biting satires where he makes fun of both friends and foes. Along with art, there are many political cartoons in which deal with themes such as Fascism and World War II to the Cold War, race war and the war of the sexes. Having political flyers, sketches, tear sheets, diagrams, color charts,
Deeply influenced by the art and theoretical writings of Kazimir Malevich the Russian Supremist. Malevich's Black Square (1915) inspired Reinhardt to begin using solid fields of color arranged in rigid geometric patterns of squared and rectangles. Experiments in the early 1950s resulted into several series of paintings devoted to a single color the red paintings, the blue paintings and finally the black paintings 1954-1967. From 1954 to his death in 1967 Reinhardt devoted himself exclusively to the black paintings. Believing in the symbolic potency of the color black where to him it was the absolute zero, end of light that painting as a genre was pushed to its limit of expression. The viewer is stunned by the absence of narrative or coloristic interplay yet the canvas is overwhelmingly full of color and a closer look reveals that the monochrome surface is composed of various shades of black from light to black. Reinhardt developed a sophisticated technique to create the effects he desired. His matte surfaces were so fragile and the original technique so complex that the conservation and restoration of each canvas is always expensive and time consuming. Repainted the same painting, same structure and applying shades of the same color on the surface. His black paintings were square format, identically divided into nine equal