I should say right at the beginning that I was less than enraptured by the prospect of a major Ad Reinhardt show, even by the prospect of the first retrospective of his work to be organized by an important American museum.¹ Reinhardt is one of those painters I’ve never been passionate about. I’ve always taken him seriously, but more or less for granted. I’d run into him as a personality in the course of working on a variety of Stuart Davis projects, which probably contributed as much to my impression of Reinhardt as my experience of his work. I knew that Davis befriended Reinhardt in the 1930s and became a kind of mentor to the younger artist, almost a full generation his junior. I knew that Reinhardt shared Davis’s idiosyncratic but engaged approach to leftist politics and his intolerance of orthodoxy, cant, and pretentiousness. They appeared to share, too, a fondness for the intensely serious wisecrack, an unshakable belief in modernism, and a taste for deep thinking and exhaustive writing about art. Reinhardt’s wicked sense of humor was familiar to me, mostly from those hilarious art-historical cartoons that neatly ranked almost the entire American population of painters and sculptors according to their degree of commitment to abstraction. Reinhardt’s cranky, incisive “serious” writings confirmed his own uncompromising adherence to abstraction and his rejection of all matters that he deemed extraneous to art.

His paintings were familiar, of course—deadpan, rather anonymous monochromes that seemed to embody the “what you