In looking at Ad Reinhardt at work on an unfinished black painting in one of John Leongard’s 1966 photographs of the artist in his 732 Broadway studio one notices in the still wet paint evidence of the rhythmic application and uneven reflection as it is spread across the canvas surface. In the finished black paintings the movement of Reinhardt’s brush strokes are no longer visible. Before 1954, the year Reinhardt decided to only make black paintings, there are many paintings that retain the visible making and varied surface effects of each painting’s progress toward completion, though this term in the works from the 1940s remained a relative term then.
By this, I mean that through this decade, given that Reinhardt made very few sales, most paintings remained in his studio, available for further reworking if necessary or for continued exploration if desired. And, these paintings, some never exhibited before, make clear—because of the recursive experimentation—that a chronology is not always obvious. In working toward the “indefinable thing” of pure aesthetic communication, Reinhardt felt that he needed to “get rid of” everything that inhibited or obscured this.