Ad Reinhardt - Contemporary Art Part II New York Friday, November 14, 2008 | Phillips

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  • Provenance

    Marlborough - Gerson Gallery, New York; Private Collection, USA; Marlborough Gallery, New York; Private collection, USA

  • Exhibited

    New York, Marlborough Gallery, Ad Reinhardt: Early Works, February 16 - March 13, 1999; New York, Barbara Mathes Gallery, Reinhardt & Contemporaries, October 17, 2003 - January 17, 2004

  • Literature

    R. T. Buck, Ad Reinhardt: Early Works, New York, 1999, catalogue no. 32 (illustrated)

  • Catalogue Essay

    In abstract painting the aesthetic realities of rhythmic relationships were developed far from the simple compositions and arrangements of illustrations and pictures.  I want to mention the misconception of abstracting painting as something to be used for a picture, or layout, as some empty activity that needs a subject or a representational element to give it meaning.  The way to enrich or socialize painting is to get more and more people to paint, to use and handle colors--not to acquire skills of illustration.  Mondrian, like Marx, saw the disappearance of works of art when the environment itself became an aesthetic reality.  In its dissatisfaction with ordinary experience, the impoverished reality of present-day society, an abstract painting stands as a challenge to disorder and disintegration.  Its activity implies a conviction of something constructive in our own time.   It is more difficult to write or talk about abstract painting than about any other painting because the content is not in a subject matter or story, but in the actual painting activity.  Consequently, anyone not actively involved in line, color and space structures and relationships will find abstract painting difficult to understand, naturally.             Ad Reinhardt, from "Abstraction vs Illustration," (unpublished essay, 1943), from B. Rose, Art-as-Art: The Selected Writings of Ad Reinhardt, Berkeley/Los Angeles, 1999, pp. 48-49 

151

Abstract Painting

1947
Oil on canvas. 
20 x 16 in. (50.8 x 40.6 cm).
Signed and dated "Reinhardt '47" lower right.  Signed, titled and dated "Reinhardt Abstract Painting 1947" on the reverse. 

Estimate
$250,000 - 350,000 

Sold for $314,500

Contemporary Art Part II

14 Nov 2008, 10am & 2pm
New York