Ad Reinhardt

by Lucy R. Lippard

Ad Reinhardt was one of the most significant American artists of the twentieth century. He was also one of the few artists of the Abstract Expressionist generation to have painted abstractions from the start. “To him abstraction was not a genre or style,” New York Times art critic Holland Cotter writes of “it was an ethos.” This extensively illustrated catalogue--the first comprehensive Reinhardt overview in 13 years--reproduces the artist’s signature “black” paintings (his 60 x 60 inch canvases of the 1960s, which he considered to be his “ultimate” aesthetic expression, and “the last paintings that anyone can paint”), as well as his cartoons and photographic slide presentations. Published to document a critically lauded exhibition at David Zwirner in New York in 2013, the monograph includes new scholarship by curator Robert Storr, in addition to an extensive chronology of the artist’s life.
Ad Reinhardt (1913–1967) was born in Buffalo, New York, and studied art history at Columbia University, where he forged lifelong friendships with the authors Thomas Merton and Robert Lax. After studies at the American Artists School, he worked for the WPA and became a member of the American Abstract Artists group, with whom he exhibited for the next decade; later he was also represented by Betty Parsons. Throughout his career Reinhardt engaged in art-world activist politics, participating in the famous protests against The Museum of Modern Art in 1940 and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1950 (among the group that became known as “The Irascibles”).

Genres: Art

Hardcover

First published January 1, 1982

About the author

Since 1966, Lippard has published 20 books on feminism, art, politics and place and has received numerous awards and accolades from literary critics and art associations. A 2012 exhibition on her seminal book, Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object at the Brooklyn Museum, titled "Six Years": Lucy R. Lippard and the Emergence of Conceptual Art", cites Lippard's scholarship as its point of entry into a discussion about conceptual art during its era of emergence, demonstrating her crucial role in the contemporary understanding of this period of art production and criticism. Her research on the move toward dematerialization in art making has formed a cornerstone of contemporary art scholarship and discourse.

Co-founder of Printed matter (an art bookstore in New York City centered around artist's books), the Heresies Collective, Political Art Documentation/Distribution (PAD/D), Artists Call Against U.S. Intervention in Central America, and other artists' organizations, she has also curated over 50 exhibitions, done performances, comics, guerrilla theater, and edited several independent publications the latest of which is the decidedly local La Puente de Galisteo in her home community in Galisteo, New Mexico. She has infused aesthetics with politics, and disdained disinterestedness for ethical activism.

Reviews

[Kamakana · Rating 5 out of 5]

if you like this review i now have website: www.michaelkamakana.com

200317: i have found what i have been looking for in abstract art. art is art. art is abstract art. art is ad reinhardt more than any other i have seen. this is a favourite. reproductions are great, even later plates of his 'black' paintings, showing the progressive history of stripping away the inessential aspects he wanted to communicate his art: no symbols, no forms, no colours, no compositions...

reinhardt is that rare and best artist who is also exacting critic and lucid theorist. this book on rather than by, is reprint from 1969- just after his death, with a useful epilogue for the '80s, which notes his ongoing effects and rise in stature. though of the same era as abstract expressionists, he is different not only in politics, approval, popular acclaim, but also in essence of his conception of art. not only hostile to surrealism/dada and regionalism/socialist realism, he believed in art as art, as ultimately nothing other, as abstract but not 'expressionist', not personal, emotional, angsty, nothing but art. which has precedence in other traditions, older traditions, eastern and Islamic cultures- art as spiritually meaningful as art...

this book has colour plates from his early work to his last- though if you are not looking intently you might see nothing but black squares in the latter. there are throughout critical indications, appreciations, sense of where he is going and what he is trying and what is the result, but it is of course the paintings that explain themselves. included are a few of his 'artworld' cartoons. indeed, if his work is seen innocently it might be thought of as parodied 'abstract' art that makes no sense, simply because it does not 'refer' to anything but itself, is just some 'big city trick' on honest folks... read this critical work and profundity, seriousness, earnestness, of all his work is apparent...

now if i could only see his work in person. for that is the key to any art thought: the work itself! as it is right now, i must content myself with books like this...

[Michael Vagnetti · Rating 5 out of 5]

An attempted reconciliation of Reinhardt's painting and writings, and their paradoxes.

Part Two of this very rare book is a meditative critical viewing of the Black abstracts that prefaces, in relation to Reinhardt's "Twelve Rules for a New Academy," among his other explicit dogmas, their "non-relational and non-referential" qualities, their rejection of color for light, the inadequacy of retinal explanations, the requirement of a "more exaggerated period of perceptual lag" that their viewing requires.

There is an extended looking at the light of the paintings: their self-generated "pervasive luminosity," their "hermetic light source," their dull glow, how "the oil-drained surface, so susceptible to damage, nevertheless seals the light within the plane, rather than allowing it to reflect and be acted upon by its environment." Or, "Reinhardt's [light] is a steady, almost uninflected presence, an intangible gloom held tightly on a tangible plane by the absolute symmetry of its armature."

Also, notes on color, and an art-historical and scientific discussion of black. "Reinhardt's development...traces the process of draining color from light...[he] achieved an extraordinarily refined intensity by using color almost invisibly as the basis of the blacks. The graying glow does at times lack visible color, but the quality of its grayness is dependent upon its color component...the opaque black surfaces have paradoxically become transparent containers of light....Black is both inclusive and exclusive, a condition bound to appeal to Reinhardt's sense of paradox."

The criticisms of the paintings is that they are solutions, that the idea predominated the subject, that they are a platform less interesting than the accompanying polemical language.

Part One, in comparison, is a more bloodless biographical, developmental approach. One wants to know, but they are not here, the great crises of Reinhardt's life, his passions, his loves.