The Discipline of Leaving Out: Ad Reinhardt

Ad Reinhardt spent the last decade of his life painting black canvases that were not black. They were the logical conclusion of a career dedicated to finding out what painting could not be.

His "black" paintings, made between 1960 and his death in 1967, are actually composed of very dark shades of red, blue, and green, arranged in cruciform patterns that reveal themselves only after extended looking. They are paintings that punish impatience and reward attention.

Reinhardt was ferociously articulate about what he was doing and why. His writings — polemical, funny, sometimes infuriating — laid out a case for painting as a practice of negation. Art, he argued, should be "art-as-art" and nothing else: not expression, not communication, not decoration.