Ad Reinhardt is probably best known for his black paintings, which aroused as much controversy as admiration in the American art world when they were first exhibited in the 1950s. Although his ideas about art and life were often at odds with those of his contemporaries, they prefigured the ascendance of minimalism. Reinhardt's interest in the Orient and in religion, his strong convictions about the value of abstraction, and his disgust with the commercialism of the art world are as fresh and valid today as they were when he first expressed them.

The renowned American artist Sherrie Levine engages her ongoing practice of appropriating artworks from the Western art-historical canon—this time taking Ad Reinhardt’s Blue Paintings as a point of departure. Monochromes After Reinhardt: 1–28 (2018) is a new body of work by Levine that continues her ongoing investigation of color separated from its representational function. Inspired by the exhibition Ad Reinhardt: Blue Paintings held at David Zwirner, New York, in 2017, Levine has created abstract restatements of the twenty-eight works that were on view, making use of pixilation to consolidate the range of blue tones in each painting into a single, truly monochromatic value. This work revisits a technique first employed by Levine in her 1989 group of woodcut prints Meltdown, where an averaging algorithm was used to create a checkerboard composition based on modernist artists’ iconic paintings. Sherrie Levine: After Reinhardt is published on the occasion of Levine’s eponymous solo exhibition at David Zwirner’s Upper East Side location in New York in 2019. This publication features full color reproductions of Monochromes After Reinhardt: 1–28 and includes the 1965 text “Reinhardt Paints a Picture,” in which Reinhardt famously interviewed himself.

Michael Corris examines Ad Reinhardt’s life and work, charting the development of his entire oeuvre - from abstract paintings, to graphic artwork, to illustrations and cartoons.

Active from 1940 to 1948, PM was a progressive New York City daily tabloid newspaper committed to the politics of labor, social justice, and antifascism—and it prioritized the intelligent and critical deployment of pictures and their perception as paramount in these campaigns. With PM as its main focus, Artist as Reporter offers a substantial intervention in the literature on American journalism, photography, and modern art. The book considers the journalistic contributions to PM of such signal American modernists as the curator Holger Cahill, the abstract painter Ad Reinhardt, the photographers Weegee and Lisette Model, and the filmmaker, photographer, and editor Ralph Steiner. Each of its five chapters explores one dimension of the tabloid’s complex journalistic activation of modernism’s potential, showing how PM inserted into daily print journalism the most innovative critical thinking in the fields of painting, illustration, cartooning, and the lens-based arts. Artist as Reporter promises to revise our own understanding of midcentury American modernism and the nature of its relationship to the wider media and public culture.

Ende der 1940er-Jahre beschäftigten sich berühmte Künstler der New York School - Robert Rauschenberg, Ad Reinhardt, Mark Rothko, Frank Stella und Barnett Newman - intensiv mit der Farbe Schwarz. Es entstand eine erstaunliche Anzahl von nahezu monochromen schwarzen Bildserien, die heute zu den Glanzstücken international bedeutender Sammlungen wie dem Whitney Museum in New York zählen und in Black Paintings erstmals vereint gezeigt werden. Die Publikation mit einem fundierten Essay von Stephanie Rosenthal beleuchtet Unterschiede und Gemeinsamkeiten der im New York der Nachkriegszeit entstandenen Werke und verfolgt die Frage, welche Bedeutung sie im gesamten Schaffen der Künstler einnehmen. Einen der Ausgangspunkte des Buches bildet dabei die These, dass die schwarzen Gemälde für Durchbrüche und Übergänge im OEuvre der Maler stehen. (Englische Ausgabe ISBN 978-3-7757-1860-8) Ausstellung: Haus der Kunst, München 15.9.2006-14.1.2007