Ad Reinhardt (1913-1967) was one of the most significant American artists of the twentieth century. He was included in many important museum exhibitions during his lifetime, including Abstract and Surrealist Art in the United States (1944), Cincinnati Art Museum; Abstract Painting and Sculpture in America (1951–52), Americans 1963 (1963–64), and The Responsive Eye (1965–66), The Museum of Modern Art, New York; The New Decade: 35 American Painters and Sculptors (1955–56), Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Abstract Expressionists Imagists (1961), Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Painting and Sculpture of a Decade: 1954–64 (1964), Tate Gallery, London; and Black, White and Grey (1964), Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, Connecticut; among others. At the end of 1966, Sam Hunter, with the assistance of Lucy Lippard, mounted a major retrospective of Reinhardt’s work at The Jewish Museum, New York.

Posthumous museum exhibitions of Reinhardt’s work have been organized by the Städtische Kunsthalle, Düsseldorf (1977-78); Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York (1980); Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (1980-81); Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. (1984); and Staatsgalerie Stuttgart (1985). The Museum of Modern Art, New York, presented a comprehensive survey of the artist’s work in 1991–92. More recent exhibitions have taken place at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York (2008); Kröller-Müller Museum, Otterlo (2011–12); Josef Albers Museum, Bottrop (2010–11); and the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London (2011). A selection of Reinhardt’s paintings were more recently included in the exhibitions Abstract Expressionism at The Museum of Modern Art, New York (2010–11); Blacks: Louise Nevelson, Ad Reinhardt, Hiroshi Sugimoto, Kawamura Memorial DIC Museum of Art, Japan (Spring 2013); and Letzte Bilder: Von Manet bis Kippenberger, Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt (Spring 2013).

The Estate of Ad Reinhardt has been represented by David Zwirner since 2013. On the occasion of the centennial anniversary of Ad Reinhardt’s birth, David Zwirner presented an exhibition of the artist’s cartoons, photographic slides, and “black” paintings in collaboration with the Ad Reinhardt Foundation (2013). In conjunction with the exhibition, David Zwirner Books/Hatje Cantz published How to Look: Art Comics, which includes new scholarship by Robert Storr. A new monograph published by David Zwirner Books is forthcoming in 2015.