Ad Reinhardt: Print—Painting—Maquette

Ad Reinhardt took up printmaking late in his career, producing a small but exquisite body of screenprints. These include several individual screenprints for portfolios of works by various artists and, most prominently, Ten Screenprints by Ad Reinhardt, a monographic suite commissioned by curator Sam Wagstaff for the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, Connecticut, and published in 1966. This exhibition examines the relation of print to painting in Reinhardt’s practice, including factors of process, replication, and scale.

*Unless otherwise noted, texts throughout this page are excerpted from independent curator and critic Jeffrey Weiss’s essay “Ad Reinhardt: Print—Painting—Maquette.” Read the full essay here.

Since the early 1950s, the artist’s paintings had displayed a precise allocation of color and form. Surface structure is established by horizontal and vertical bars that interlock in strict—but not mechanically ruled—bilateral or tripartite configurations. Formats are alternately rectangular or square. Many of the works are monochromatic: red paintings, blue paintings, and “black” paintings, the latter composed of black mixed with red, blue, and green—colors so deep that the distinction among hues can take time to discern. In an unpublished note, Reinhardt called these paintings the “early-classical hieratical red, blue, black monochrome square and cross-beam form symmetries of the fifties.”

Reinhardt’s screenprints correspond to two types of painting. His first print, made for X + X (Ten Works by Ten Painters), a 1964 portfolio of prints by ten artists (also issued by the Atheneum), took the form of a black square.

Conversely, most of the ten prints for the 1966 portfolio derive from paintings of the 1950s that are more complex in design and more explicit in color. There are eight vertical-format images; two are square, including the last print in the sequence of ten, which is another black square.

In the context of Reinhardt’s work, the screenprint afforded an evenness of color, value, and surface and a straightness of edge not natural to working freehand.

Reinhardt did not seek out printmaking but came to it by invitation. Anna Reinhardt, the artist’s daughter, recalls that he considered it an engaging challenge. It was, as a technology, also somewhat familiar. It is likely that he welcomed printmaking as an opportunity to bring his work to a broad audience as well.

Reinhardt made two kinds of maquette to which the printer would refer when creating the screens. (A maquette, as opposed to a study, is a template for the printer to follow in producing the finished print.) The first kind, a painted work on paper, serves as a model for color. Nine of these maquettes for the print portfolio are extant. The dimensions of each—both sheet and image—closely match those of the print to which it corresponds.

The second kind of maquette is a ruled diagram of the design, each section inscribed with a letter or number indicating placement of color. The maquettes are a mediating device through which the screenprints approximate, rather than imitate, Reinhardt’s paintings. All of this is to say that the relation of painting to print is one of equivalence. The second kind of maquette supports this idea. Many of the painted maquettes are somewhat broadly executed; their primary role concerns color and surface, not design. Instead, the diagrammatic maquette functions to make the coordinates of the design as exact as possible, minus color.

Reinhardt applied this kind of diagram to painting as well. One was made for a series of six small black paintings on paper, 12-inch images on sheets measuring 26 x 20 inches overall. The paintings represent the six possible permutations of the contiguous distribution of red, blue, and green (with black) within Reinhardt’s standardized design and are numbered accordingly. The drawing contains quick sketches of each of the six options.

Most of Reinhardt’s classic-period canvases measure in height or width roughly three or four to eight feet, even beyond. Yet he also made many small paintings, works on canvas that correspond in their dimensions to these works on paper, as well as to the prints (and to their painted maquettes). From small to large, configurations of design remain identical throughout, being scaled up or down accordingly.