Reinhardt charted a unique and radically experimental path in his art during the 1940s. While many of his contemporaries spent much of the decade abstracting from recognisable forms, Reinhardt thrust himself into the project of completely non-objective painting. The works from this decade include pioneering geometric grids, dynamic calligraphic lines, and compositions whose reduced forms and palettes foreshadow the artist’s red, blue, and black paintings of the subsequent decades and anticipate the direction of abstract painting more generally. As art historian Yve-Alain Bois notes: ‘Reinhardt was perhaps the only American artist in the forties ... to understand what the real issues were at the time. In this sense ... he was already (even before the fifties) an artist of the sixties.’^1 ^

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1 Yve-Alain Bois, “The Limit of Almost,” Ad Reinhardt. Exh. cat. (New York: Rizzoli, 1991), p. 17.