Painting, 1950

Ad Reinhardt

1950

Oil on canvas

Seattle Art Museum

An abstract painting features a grid-like structure of dark, rectangular shapes interspersed with bright orange and red horizontal and vertical strokes. The overall impression is one of layered, intersecting lines and blocks of color. An abstract painting features a grid-like structure of dark, rectangular shapes interspersed with bright orange and red horizontal and vertical strokes. The overall impression is one of layered, intersecting lines and blocks of color. An influential teacher and writer who was rigorously committed to pure abstraction, Reinhardt quipped in 1946, “Looking isn’t as simple as it looks. Art teaches people how to see.” His goal to slow down the viewer eventually led him to make paintings with minute tonal differentiations of a single color that demand prolonged and close meditation. To activate the entirety of the visual field of the canva