Ad Reinhardt

This major museum retrospective of the work of Ad Reinhardt was co-organized by The Museum of Modern Art in New York and The Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles in 1991. Curated by William Rubin, then Director Emeritus at the Museum of Modern Art, with MOCA's then-Director Richard Koshalek, Ad Reinhardt included 94 paintings, collages, and gouache works dating from the late 1930s through the 1960s—far more than had been shown in an earlier retrospective at The Jewish Museum in New York in late 1966.

Presented in New York from June 1–September 2, 1991 and in Los Angeles from October 13, 1991–January 5, 1992, the exhibition met with critical acclaim. In a review for The New York Times, Michael Brenson wrote, "It shows an artist who was constantly tested by the pictorial issues of flatness, drawing, directness and composition, but whose achievement cannot begin to be measured in pictorial terms alone. It shows a painter whose blocks and 'bricks' of color have a blend of ancientness and newness that is a prerequisite of a prophetic artistic tone: Reinhardt's paintings can seem to speak entirely in the present and yet breathe space and time." For William Wilson in The Los Angeles Times, the exhibition confirmed Reinhardt as "an artist so seminal that he is claimed by both Minimal and Conceptual schools as a source of innovation."

The exhibition was accompanied by a fully illustrated publication with texts by William Rubin and Yve-Alain Bois, co-published by The Museum of Modern Art, New York, Rizzoli International Publications, Inc., and The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. In the preface to the publication, Rubin writes, "We judge art . . . not by what the artist doesn't do but by what he does. And if the range of experience in Reinhardt's painting increasingly narrowed, the quality of his work became increasingly profound. He seemed instinctively compelled to reduce the picture to that area in which he could make his most individual, most personal statement . . . We feel that the faint light which emanates from the resplendent 'black' pictures that end his career is the vestige of the refiner's fire."