Ad Reinhardt was born in 1913 in Buffalo, New York. He first studied art history under Meyer Schapiro at New York’s Columbia University from 1931 to 1935. In 1936 he began studying painting at the National Academy of Design and the American Artists School. In 1937 he became a member of the American Abstract Artists and the Artists’ Union. In 1938 he began making colourful abstract paintings. He had his first solo exhibition in 1944 at the Artists’ Gallery in New York, and in that same year became a marine photographer. From 1945 to 1951 he studied in New York at the Institute of Fine Arts. Starting in 1947 he held teaching posts at various institutions. He was a co-founder of the Artists’ Club in New York in 1948. In the 1950s Reinhardt began to structure his highly colourful pictures geometrically. He travelled to Europe in 1952, and in 1958 took a journey to Japan, India, Persia and Egypt. Three years later he toured Syria, Jordan and Turkey. In 1960 he began creating his black paintings, in which planes of different nuances of black are juxtaposed. Reinhardt died in New York in 1967.
