American Art Collaborative

In the 1940s, Ad Reinhardt experimented with collage, cutting up newspapers, magazines, and books to create images that were “spontaneous and accidental” (“Reinhardt,” Arts and Architecture, 1947). Many of his paintings from that time show the same layered quality as his collages, and in Untitled the hard, jagged edges evoke cut and ripped pieces of paper. These thin, colored rectangles resemble confetti, scattered over the image as if flickering and swirling through the air
“[The painting] says what it says and one doesn’t have to say anything about it. And I never say anything about my paintings, I never explain or interpret them.” The artist, quoted in Lippard, Ad Reinhardt, 198