Focus: Ad Reinhardt and Mark Rothko
Painting and Sculpture Galleries, fourth floor

View works from the exhibition

This installation presents five paintings by Ad Reinhardt and six by Mark Rothko in a continuation of the Museum's ongoing Focus series, which provides an opportunity for in-depth and cross-disciplinary presentations of notable aspects of MoMA's collection. While their Abstract Expressionist colleagues relied on grand, expressive gestures and brushwork, Reinhardt and Rothko—two artists rarely exhibited side by side—both pursued subtleties of a radical nature in color and form. The installation focuses specifically on the fertile years between the late 1940s and the early 1960s, the period in which each artist identified the style and format that would engage him for the rest of his career.

By the mid-1950s Reinhardt (American, 1913–1967) was committed to an increasingly nocturnal palette of layered, almost indistinguishable colors laid adjacent to one another in a vertical, rectilinear format. Around the same time, Rothko (American, 1903–1970) began his decades-long exploration of a compositional structure in which soft-edged forms floated atop one another within oversized, color-saturated canvases. Both artists' large-scale works are all-encompassing and seek to sustain the viewer's attention through physical sensations and changing visual perceptions.

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Shown above: Ad Reinhardt. Abstract Painting. 1957. Oil on canvas. The Museum of Modern Art. Purchase. © 2008 Estate of Ad Reinhardt/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Mark Rothko. No. 5/No. 22. 1950. Oil on canvas. The Museum of Modern Art. Gift of the artist. © 1998 Kate Rothko Prizel & Christopher Rothko/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York