New York Times art critic Roberta Smith begins her year-in-review section with “Ad Reinhardt: Blue Paintings” at the David Zwirner Gallery, which brought together 28 luminous abstract paintings from this artist’s early-1950s “blue period” — the most ever.
“With blue fields layered with levitating blocks, or intersecting beams of contrasting blues and sometimes greens or purples, these immersive paintings evoked geometric versions of Monet’s ‘Water Lilies,'” she writes. “Their joyfulness stood in striking contrast to Reinhardt’s relatively daunting if better-known Black Paintings, which suddenly seem a little pretentious.”
Read more of the Times‘ year in arts coverage here.