In the painting before us there are two colours that establish a relationship with space between them and that maintain, in this parallel use of colour, a primacy—still—of the pictorial.
In this work from 1950 we can appreciate, on the one hand, the abandonment of the organization of the painting, through structures that were an influence derived from Mondrian. On the other hand, one can also see a decrease in the chromatic value, which was, in this case, an influence that came from the powerful colouring that Stuart Davis had used. The painting is previous to a series that he was going to carry out, two years later, where he used mainly reds and blues.
In the search that Ad Reinhardt maintained for the purity of the painting, he ended up making the relationship between figure and background disappear. And, to do this, he uses an experiment—which had already been used to open up 20th century painting by Malévich and Mondrian—and that is the use of the grid and monochrome.
It also has a special feature, comparable to this series of reds and blues, and that is its verticality. In this verticality, which Ad Reinhardt usually used at that time, one can still appreciate a matter of spatiality as a problem. A matter that he is going to abandon, little by little, in the same proportion as he is going to abandon the use of colour.
Ad Reinhardt was the most radical of the artists of the New York generation of the 1950s, and he maintained very critical positions with respect to the group, establishing controversial relations with Rothko and Newman, whom he accused, because he considered that they were making—with their painting—a mystical reference to art. It is curious because Ad Reinhardt's radicalism, by using black and cruciform structures as the only colour, also brings him closer to a sense of the mystical and the sacred, thus approaching the position of the comrades he had criticised.