Papers13 ink on paper drawings2 letters1 ink on paper illustrated poem5 ink on paper postcards5 ink on paper envelopes1 ink on paper poem on Hunter student card

The year before he passed away, Ad Reinhardt was teaching at Hunter College, New York. One of his students was Stephanie Bernheim (Dezwirek), and over the course of that year, Reinhardt sent her a series of written missives and gave her a group of drawings. These letters, poems, postcards, and illustrations comprise The Met’s unique archive. Together they not only testify to Reinhardt’s wit and skill as an illustrator; they also bear witness, poignantly and beautifully, to the relationship between a teacher, who was at the very peak of his career, and his student, a young, aspiring artist. The drawings, which feature abstracted figures, most of them female, are of particular interest, reflecting Reinhardt’s serious study of art history, especially the art history of Asia and Mexico. On two sheets, Reinhardt meticulously and systematically elides the figures into and out of the letters of Bernheim’s first name. Part of the interest of these drawings lies in their emphatic difference from Reinhardt’s contemporaneous paintings: abstract monochromes with cruciform compositions whose purity, autonomy, and self-referentiality the artist vigorously defended.