ABSTRACT
The untimely death of Ad Reinhardt at the age of fifty-three is an event that prompts some reflection on the nature of his accomplishment as an artist. Though he had been an abstract painter since the 1930's and had come of age, artistically, in the era of Abstract Expressionism, it was the work of his later years–the notorious "black paintings"–that brought him his greatest measure of fame and influence. Like many of the inhabitants of this new territory, he was an active ideologue as well as a painter. He was highly conscious of what he was against, and it was in certain of his negative judgments that even his antagonists could find a kind of comfort. The "essence," offered in the form of an extreme pictorial distillation, was Reinhardt's abiding obsession as an artist. Reinhardt was an extreme case of an artist whose works signify a position but shrink in importance once divorced from that position.
