Ad Reinhardt spent his last years making paintings that look, at first glance, like nothing at all: a square of black. Stand in front of one for a minute and the black separates into slightly warmer and cooler squares, and a cross appears. The same man also drew sharp, funny newspaper comics that taught the public how to look at modern art. That mix of extreme reduction and clear explanation makes him unusually useful to designers.
A note on images: every Ad Reinhardt record in the open-access collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, the Cleveland Museum of Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art is marked as in copyright, so this guide shows no pictures and describes his work in text. Nothing here suggests the works are free to reuse. For cleared images from museum collections, browse the MGD museum inspiration collection.
Who was Ad Reinhardt?
Adolph Frederick Reinhardt was born in Buffalo, New York, on 24 December 1913 and died in New York City on 30 August 1967, according to Britannica; the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s records give the same places and years. Britannica says he studied art history at Columbia University with Meyer Schapiro in the early 1930s.
In 1936 he joined the easel division of the Federal Art Project; the Smithsonian American Art Museum gives his years there as 1936 to 1941. From 1937 he was a member of American Abstract Artists, the New York group that promoted geometric abstraction, which Britannica dates to 1937–47. In 1943 the New York newspaper PM hired him as a staff artist, according to the Brooklyn Rail, and from 1947 he taught at Brooklyn College, where he stayed until his death.
Key works of Ad Reinhardt
These works are dated and described in museum collection records.
- Untitled, 1939. A small brush, pen and black ink drawing with traces of blue pencil, 18.7 × 27.6 cm, at the Art Institute of Chicago: the graphic, hard-edged work of his American Abstract Artists years.
- Black and White, 1947. Oil on canvas, 60 × 40 in., at the Art Institute of Chicago, from the years when his surfaces were crowded with small, broken strokes.
- Abstract Painting – Grey, 1950. Oil on canvas, 30 × 40 in., at the Met.
- Red Painting, 1952. Oil on canvas, 78 × 144 in., at the Met: a wide field of reds in stacked rectangles, one of his single-colour paintings of the early 1950s.
- Abstract Painting, 1963, Museum of Modern Art. MoMA’s learning pages describe a three-by-three grid of squares in varying shades of black.
- Abstract Painting, 1960–65, Art Institute of Chicago. Oil on canvas, 60 × 60 in., the standard square format of the black paintings.
- Screenprints, 1964–66. The Met and the Art Institute hold 12 × 12 in. screenprints of 1964 with dark squares forming a cross, and the Cleveland Museum of Art holds Untitled (Black Square), 1966, a screenprint on Plexiglas.
What to look at in the black paintings
A fixed format
The late canvases share one size and one layout: five feet square, divided into nine equal squares. By fixing the format, Reinhardt removed every decision except colour and surface. Designers working inside a brand system will recognise the idea: when the grid never changes, tiny variations become visible.
Near-black tones
MoMA notes that its 1963 painting holds three distinct blacks that only become visible after prolonged looking. One set of squares leans towards red, another towards blue or green, and the cross emerges from the difference. This is colour pushed to the threshold of perception, and it rewards close, patient viewing in a way a screen thumbnail cannot.
The hidden cross
The grid always resolves into a horizontal band crossed by a vertical one. Reinhardt kept the figure simple and symmetrical so that nothing about it pulls the eye to one corner. It is the opposite of a dynamic layout: total balance, used on purpose.
Surface without gesture
Next to the drips and sweeps of his New York contemporaries, Reinhardt suppressed visible brushwork. The surfaces read as matte and even, so the paintings seem to absorb light rather than reflect it. That is why a reproduction flattens them, and why the subtle shifts MoMA describes only appear in front of the canvas.
Technique: how the matte black was made
Reinhardt’s method is easiest to read in the paintings themselves. Close up, the black paintings show no ridges of impasto and no visible brushmarks, and the warm and cool squares meet along straight, ruled edges. Every canvas repeats the same moves, so the craft lies in controlling very small differences of hue and sheen across a large, even field.
The Brooklyn Rail records that visitors damaged several black paintings when they were shown in 1963 at MoMA and at Iris Clert’s gallery in Paris. A matte surface shows every mark, a reminder that the physical finish was part of the work, not a detail.
His drawings and prints show the same structure in a portable form. The 1964 screenprints compress the cross-in-a-grid into a 12-inch square of dark ink, close to the scale of a record sleeve or a book cover.
How to Look: Ad Reinhardt as a graphic artist
Reinhardt the cartoonist is the side designers most often miss. Hyperallergic and the Brooklyn Rail describe his How to Look series, which began in PM in January 1946 and ran in the paper’s Sunday magazine. Bookforum singles out How to Look at Modern Art in America (2 June 1946), drawn as a family tree that traces the branches of abstract art.
The strips mix collage, hand lettering, diagrams and jokes, and they make a serious case for abstraction in plain language. David Zwirner Books collected them in 2013 as Ad Reinhardt: How to Look: Art Comics. For an information designer they are a model of explanatory graphics with a point of view. Reinhardt also wrote about painting, built around his idea of “art-as-art”: painting that refers to nothing but itself.
Ad Reinhardt and other colour-field painters
Reinhardt is often grouped with the colour-field painters of New York, but his aims differ. The large, glowing rectangles in our Mark Rothko guide are about atmosphere and feeling; Reinhardt wanted the painting to carry no message beyond itself. His closest design relative is the teacher covered in our Josef Albers guide, whose nested squares also test how colours change each other. Albers works in bright colours; Reinhardt takes the same experiment down to the edge of black.
How designers can borrow from Ad Reinhardt
- Fix the grid, then vary one thing. A strict three-by-three system makes small colour or weight changes legible. The approach works for card layouts and icon sets as well as for geometric pattern design.
- Build a near-black palette. Dark interfaces and luxury packaging rarely use pure black. Mix a warm black, a cool black and a neutral one, and test them side by side with our colour palette generator. Keep text on dark backgrounds at accessible contrast; Reinhardt’s near-identical blacks are for surfaces, not for reading.
- Use matte to slow the eye. Uncoated stocks and soft-touch finishes absorb light the way his surfaces do. Use them where you want viewers to linger.
- Explain with wit. His comics show that diagrams, lettering and humour can sell a difficult idea. Try a hand-drawn family tree or a labelled diagram before a paragraph of copy.
- Write your rules down. Reinhardt’s art-as-art idea worked by excluding everything outside the painting. A short list of things a brand never does is often clearer than a long list of what it may do.
Frequently asked questions
What is Ad Reinhardt known for?
He is known for his black paintings: five-foot square canvases divided into a three-by-three grid of near-black squares that reveal a faint cross. He also drew the How to Look art comics for the newspaper PM in 1946.
Are Ad Reinhardt’s black paintings really just black?
No. MoMA describes its 1963 Abstract Painting as holding three distinct shades of black that become visible only after prolonged looking.
Where can I see Ad Reinhardt’s work?
The Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Art Institute of Chicago and the Cleveland Museum of Art all hold his paintings or prints, though works are not always on view.
Are Ad Reinhardt’s paintings public domain?
No. He died in 1967, and the museum records consulted mark his works as in copyright, so this guide describes them in text only. Check rights with the holding museum before any use.
