Created in 1953, ‘Abstract Painting, Red’ is an outstanding example of Ad Reinhardt’s celebrated series of Red Paintings from the early 1950s. Nearly half of the paintings in the seminal series are now held in prestigious museum collections around the globe, including The Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, and the Museum moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien, Vienna.

Reinhardt painted some of his earliest and most important monochromatic paintings during the first three years of the 1950s. ‘Abstract Painting, Red’ has all the hallmarks of these pivotal works, including a symmetrical grid of squares painted in subtle modulations of red. A passionate advocate of pure abstraction, Reinhardt paid homage to form and color with his influential monochromes that would occupy him for the rest of his career.

Reinhardt’s paintings and writing were instrumental to the development of Minimalism and Conceptual art. Through his critical writing, notably in his renowned essay ‘Art-as-Art,’ he explored painting as something pure, refuting the personal expression often associated with his Abstract Expressionist contemporaries. His insistence on the purity of painting and on the separation of abstraction from everyday life made Reinhardt one of the most innovative American artists of his time.

‘Abstract Painting, Red’ exemplifies Reinhardt’s mastery of his medium with the delicately contrasting squares slowly emerging from the canvas as a viewer discovers the artist’s ingenious handling of paint and color. The critic Fairfield Porter famously remarked that Reinhardt’s red on red paintings ‘make your eyes rock.’ [1] An extraordinary work, ‘Abstract Painting, Red’ encapsulates Reinhardt’s significant contributions to the history of art.