AD REINHARDT

By the time Reinhardt made his first screenprint in 1964—for Ten Works by Ten Painters, a portfolio of prints produced by the Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, Connecticut—he had already spent more than two decades developing the matte surfaces and subtle chromatic compositions characteristic of his late paintings, including monochromes in red and blue as well as the so-called black paintings, in which black is mixed with red, blue, and green. The success of his first screenprint, based on the palette and square-format design of a classic black painting, resulted in the monographic print portfolio 10 Screenprints by Ad Reinhardt, published in 1966 by the Wadsworth Atheneum as well—a project that allowed the artist to continue to challenge and explore the possibilities and limits of the screenprint medium. Featuring these prints along with preparatory studies and maquettes, this exhibition will reveal a unique and underexplored facet of Reinhardt’s practice. In addition to being the first solo exhibition to focus on the artist’s screenprints, the exhibition will include a number of small paintings, demonstrating the similarities and differences between painting and printmaking during Reinhardt’s all-important late period.

As curator Jeffrey Weiss writes in a new scholarly essay on the prints and other works featured in this exhibition:

Reinhardt’s screenprints are, in and of themselves, hieratic icons of colour and form, almost unique in printmaking of the era for being at once sumptuous and austere. Yet, as images, they are derived from his painted work.

Reinhardt’s screenprints correspond to two types of painting. His first print, made for X + X (Ten Works by Ten Painters) ... took the form of a black square.... Conversely, most of the ten prints for the 1966 portfolio derive from paintings of the 1950s that are more complex in design and more explicit in colour. There are eight vertical-format images; two are square, including the last print in the sequence of ten, which is another black square. Published as an edition of 250 and printed by Ives-Sillman in New Haven, Connecticut, the portfolio lies at the center of Reinhardt’s printmaking activity....

In keeping with the state of his late practice, [10 Screenprints] was iterative, not genealogical or nostalgic—a group of variants rather than a developing “history of forms.” This makes the portfolio a brilliant constellation of images. The impression is heightened by the whiteness of the sheet, which functions much like a wall, allowing the printed images to be controlled—with respect to placement, isolation, and orientation—in a way that the paintings never could be.