Ad Reinhardt began painting in the 1930s and became one of the most influential figures in American painting during the mid-20th century, as an artist and as a writer and critic.
His early work is abstract but comprised of more or less biomorphic forms with curving linear patterns within the composition. In the 1950s he began to limit his canvases to single colours, but usually of more than one hue. These were generally white, red, or blue. He also began to remove all curving lines, restricting his compositions to strict rectilinear geometry. After 1953 he used only black as a colour. However, within this he also explored tonality, and in his many images of black on black, such as this black cross, he expressed the idea that there is no such thing as an absolute. Such work acted as a powerful influence on the development, throughout the 1960s and '70s, of Conceptualism and Minimalism as aesthetic movements. [Another impression of this print is Circ.132-1969]