The next Artist You Need To Know is Ad Reinhardt (1913 – 1967).
Reinhardt was an American abstract artist, art historian, critic and educator whose career spanned more than three decades. He was based in New York City. His artworks were often as controversial as his voluminous writings : both challenged and forever redefined how artists – and the wider world, in the western canon – considered abstraction. Any history of painting has to include his art and ideas : and it’s a testament to his legacy that the debate around them is just as intense today as during his lifetime.
“Ad Reinhardt was a prominent American abstract artist, writer, critic, and educator. Although commonly associated with the Abstract Expressionists, his work had its origins in geometric abstraction, and, increasingly seeking to purify his painting of everything he saw as extraneous to art, he rejected the movement’s expressionism. Although he was in turn rejected by many of his peers, he was later hailed as a prophet by Minimalists. His Black Paintings, which occupied him from 1954 until his death, are regarded as his crowning achievement, while the many cartoons he created that made fun of the art world brought him fame as a wry commentator.” (from here)
“The one thing to say about art is that it is one thing. Art is art-as-art and everything else is everything else. Art-as-art is nothing but art. Art is not what is not art.”
This article about Reinhardt will – appropriately – draw heavily upon his own writings about art and abstraction.
Reinhardt was born in Buffalo, New York : he studied art history at Columbia College of Columbia University under a full scholarship (1931 – 1935) under Meyer Schapiro. He took painting classes while an undergraduate at Columbia’s Teachers College (he had been painting from an early age and was resistant to taking studio classes, feeling his technical acumen already surpassed what he could be taught). Post graduation he did study painting with Carl Holty and Francis Criss at the American Artists School. Concurrently he took classes in portraiture at the National Academy of Design under Karl Anderson.
From 1936 until 1940 Reinhardt worked for the WPA Federal Art Project. He also joined the American Abstract Artists Group and would exhibit with them for the next ten years. Reinhardt always spoke of his association with this group as “one of the greatest things that ever happened to me”. Significant exhibitions of his work took place at the Peggy Guggenheim Gallery and the Mortimer Brandt Gallery: from 1946 onwards he exhibited regularly with the Betty Parsons Gallery. Throughout the 1940s and 1950s Reinhardt was consistently included in the juried Annual Exhibitions held at the Whitney Museum of American Art.
Reinhardt also studied at the New York University Institute of Fine Arts. In 1947, he began teaching at Brooklyn College and would be a mainstay of that department there until his death two decades later. He also was a teacher at the California School of Fine Arts in San Francisco, the University of Wyoming, Yale University and Hunter College, New York.
He was also one of the voices raised in the 1940 protest against MoMA that raised issues about (to quote the pamphlet he designed to accompany the protest) How modern is the Museum of Modern Art? In 1950 he participated in another protest – this time against the Metropolitan Museum of Art – by a group of artists who would become known as The Irascibles. [another Artist You Need To Know – Hedda Sterne – was part of this protest, as well].
Reinhardt was also well known as a cartoonist and employed it as a form of both art education but also furthering the dialogue about art in post WW II United States . These are often caustically funny, but with an informed intelligent directness that makes many of these ‘cartoons’ still relevant over half a century later. We’ve shared a number in the gallery below but more can be seen here.
“An abstract painting will react to you if you react to it. You get from it what you bring to it. It will meet you half way but no further. It is alive if you are. It represents something and so do you. YOU, SIR, ARE A SPACE, TOO.”
“The one object of fifty years of abstract art is to present art-as-art and as nothing else, to make it into the one thing it is only, separating and defining it more and more, making it purer and emptier, more absolute and exclusive – non-objective, non-representational, non-figurative, non-imagist, non-expressionist, non-subjective. The only and one way to say what abstract art or art-as-art is, is to say what it is not.”
But the artworks for which Reinhardt is best known – both praised and vilified but as one of the major landmarks in painting in the Western canon if not beyond – are his Black Paintings. Sharing them here is almost absurd as Reinhardt, with these works, asserted again the necessity of experiencing artworks in person, in a manner that one of his admirers – the painter and critical thinker Frank Stella spoke about, when considering Reinhardt.
Stella’s words : “I can’t stress enough how important it is, if you are interested at all in painting, to look and to look a great deal at painting. There is no other way to find out about painting.” After Reinhardt’s death, Stella went further and asserted that “If you don’t know what Reinhardt’s paintings are about, you don’t know what painting is about..”
Returning to the Black Paintings : “The artist devoted his late years almost exclusively to the creation of the Black Paintings (1953-67), the canvases of bewildering power that brought him the most fame. For Reinhardt, the color black in itself was an absolute point of abstraction. The purity of blackness consumes every other shape or color. The primary inspiration for the Black Paintings was the work of the Russian artist Kazimir Malevich, particularly his famed Black Square of 1914. None of the [paintings] were ever completely black, but, rather, consisted of a careful arrangement of tonalities that were meticulously applied in multiple layers. In this particular example, the blackness of the canvas is dissected by two rectangular shapes, which form a cross. The superimposed silhouettes carry the shades of gray and indigo blue. Reinhardt believed that his Black Paintings (1953-67) were the absolute zero of art. He developed this concept further in his theoretical writings, connecting it to such complex philosophies as Negation Theology, Neo-Platonism, and Zen Buddhism.” (from here)
“There is nothing there. What you see is not what you see. What you see is nothing. Nothing but shapes, lines, colors. What you see is whats in your mind. What you see is something somebody told you to look for. Look out for anything you see! Watch it! Watch out! Take care! Don’t leap before you look out.”
A short video about Reinhardt and these works – from MOMA – can be seen here.
“There is a black which is old and a black which is fresh. Lustrous black and dull black, black in sunlight and black in shadow.”
Significant exhibitions of this work took place at the Jewish Museum in New York City (1966) and a number of posthumous showings were mounted at the Marlborough Gallery (New York, 1970), the Kunsthalle Düsseldorf (1972) which was later at the Stedelijk Van Abbemuseum (Eindhoven), Kunsthaus Zürich (Switzerland), Centre National d’Art Contemporain (Paris) and Museum des 20 (Vienna). In 1980 the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum presented the large show Reinhardt and Color and in 1991 the Museum of Modern Art produced a major retrospective of Reinhardt’s work with a focus on his Black Paintings.
The critic Lucy Lippard – writing about the 1966 exhibition at the Jewish Museum offered the following : “Suppressed to the point of near invisibility, the paintings’ internal glow offers unsuspected rewards to the calm, the patient, the serene viewer.”
In 1967 Reinhardt suffered a massive heart attack while working in his New York Studio and passed away. He was only 53 years old. His legacy has been impressive – despite his career being cut short – in terms of both the decades immediately after his death but also with many of the ideas and theories that were published posthumously from his expansive writings.
From here : “While it is debatable whether Reinhardt ever managed to completely purge his art so completely of references to the outside world, this aim was identical with that of Minimalists such as Frank Stella, Donald Judd, and Robert Morris.”
Reinhardt’s painting can be seen as a ruthless, eminently rigourous manifestation of what abstraction is at its core. His own succinct words, again : “My paintings are the last paintings one can make.”
You can see more about Reinhardt’s life and his artworks here at The Ad Reinhardt Foundation as well as at The Art Story.