Ad Reinhardt: Sacred and Profane Author(s): Sam Hunter Source: Record of the Art Museum, Princeton University, Vol.

50, No. 2 (1991), pp. 26-38 Published by: Princeton University Art Museum Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3774721 . Accessed: 29/03/2014 02:50
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Ad

Reinhardt:

Sacred

and

Profane

SAM HUNTER

Art is too serious to be taken seriously. Action painting speaks louder than voids. The New York School is a nice place to visit but I wouldn't want to live there. A cleaner New York School is up to you. Ad Reinhardt, unpublished notes, Archives of American Art The idea of an icon is to do a picture over and over again, to lose oneself in a few simple ideasjust to get that rightness ... no composition and color and expression, but invisibility. Mondrian did this; he made icons, not murals. In the original icons, the figures were just formulas, not everyday people. That idea came with the Renaissance. Islamic art is not religious and it's too fanatic and obsessive to be decoration. It is a composite art, an art from art. In abstract art you deal with problems of art. Ad Reinhardt, in conversation with Irving Sandler, 1957-58 The one work for a fine artist now, the one thing in painting to do, is to repeat the one-size canvas-the single-scheme, one colour-monochrome, one linear-division in each direction, one rhythm, one working everything into one overall uniformity and non-irregularity. Ad Reinhardt, "Art-as-Art," Art International (December I962)

The Art Museum has had the good fortune to acquire one of Ad Reinhardt's representative, but also distinctly visible, and thus happily "readable," all black trisected square paintings, conceived and executed in the artist's

Figure 2. The original "Irascibles" photograph by Nina Leen appearedin Life magazine (Life magazine ? Time WarnerInc.). Ad Reinhardt's version grayed out all the competition but left himself in full tonal contrast. Artists from left, rear:Willem de Kooning, Adolph Gottlieb, Ad Reinhardt, Hedda Sterne; next row, Richard Pousette-Dart, William Baziotes, Jimmy Ernst (with bow tie), Jackson Pollock (in stripedjacket), James Brooks, Clyfford Still (leaning on knee), Robert Motherwell, Bradley WalkerTomlin; in foreground, Theodoros Stamos (on bench), Barnett Newman (on stool), Mark Rothko (with glasses).

canonical five-foot square pictorial format (fig. I). Untitled, 1960 is a relatively early exercise in the demanding painting series so solemnly (and with some conscious intellectual contrariety) introduced in New York by Reinhardt around 1954. This important, defining painting phase represented both a culmination of an intellectual process and a quietist, philosophical rebuke directed at the unduly hectic, untidy, and for Reinhardt, certainly shallow Action Painting, which he so often publicly derided and which had then reached a peak of popularity under the leadership of Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Franz Kline, and other "gestural" abstractionists of the New York School. Reinhardt continued to make monochromatic all black paintings on this model with an almost ritual repetitiveness and obsession, each successive work rigorously purist and only subtly differentiated from the last, until his death thirteen years later. He enjoyed his maverick status as the "black monk" of the New York School (fig. 2), much

as he relishedthe fact that his ratheresoteric and severely affiliations reductionist art,with its acknowledgedspiritual in Eastern art and thought, generally proved irritating and perplexing to the more empirical Abstract Expressionists and their partisancritics. Eventually, Reinhardt'sreductionism, both as an aesthetic and a process, would prove to be a major trend within the New York School, and a prediction of, if not
a direct influence upon, the dominant Minimalist styles of the I960s with their austere geometries and impassive, mechanically rendered or produced forms. Just before his untimely death in 1967, at the age of fifty-three, Reinhardt was much heartened by the support his black paintings elicited among the new generation of radically objectivist painters and sculptors, and neophyte conceptualists, among these, Donald Judd, Carl Andre, Brice Marden, Joseph Kosuth, and Frank Stella. Stella was an early collector of his black paintings and lent two im27

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Figure i. Ad Reinhardt, Untitled,1960,oil on canvas, 156.4 x 156.6 cm. The Art Museum, Princeton University, Museum purchase, Fowler McCormick, Class of I92I, Fund. (photo: Clem Fiori)

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Room. Reinhardt theJewishMuseum,New York,I966-67. (photo:Art Resource,N. Y.) Figure3. The BlackSquare retrospective,

portant works to Reinhardt's first major New York retrospective held at the Jewish Museum nine months before he died. The admiring but also rigorously analytical exhibition catalogue text (later expanded into the best monographic study of the artist's work to date) was written by Lucy R. Lippard, a leading young critic of the new avant-garde.' Until the last two years of his life, culminating in the Jewish Museum retrospective (fig. 3), which, among
28

other things, produced a "picture story" in Life magazine, much to Reinhardt's bemusement, he was preoccupied by the sense of neglect, as he watched the careers of artists like de Kooning, Kline, and other highly visible Action painters prosper. Although he remained uncompromising in his rejection of popular culture, he brooded on his failure to be appreciated by his own generation of the New York School. His late-in-life prominence followed by the posthumous appeal to the younger

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generation of the extreme form of nonobjectivity of his all black paintings underscore his self-image as a prophet unheeded in his own land. With the other so-called color field painters of his epoch, Clyfford Still, Mark Rothko, and Barnett Newman, he shared certain aesthetic ideas as well as a rather grandiose rhetoric and a profound sense of social alienation. In the end Reinhardt proposed the most extreme rejection of mainline, gestural Abstract he had, curiously enough, emExpressionism-which braced briefly but with some enthusiasm and obviously adaptive facility in the I940s. While his final phase of art, like that of his fellow color field painters, was too restrictive and self-contained to be properly described as sublimist, he strongly objected to the notion of art as expressionist autobiography. In his frequent and invariably caustic critiques of the art of his time, and in his satirical cartoons on the art world, he repeatedly ridiculed Harold Rosenberg's famous phrase and concept that the canvas had become an "arena" in which the artist must "act"2 to define him- or herself, and lay bare the human psyche. In so doing, Reinhardt flatly rejected expressionist brushwork, color texture, space, and movement. He also repudiated chance, accident, and spontaneity in art, in favor of ritual and repetition. For the freewheeling rank- and-file de Kooning followers of post-World-War-II American art, Reinhardt's project of a tabula rasa and the unglamorous discipline and intellectual control it entailed seemed to violate their free expressiveness and sense of existential engagement with the art process. As Action Painting reached its climactic moment around 1950, Reinhardt immersed himself in Eastern art and cultural studies and begun to formulate ever more concisely his unusually singleminded and highly personal artistic model. It was some ten years in the making, roughly between I950 and 1960, beginning with the abandonment of his virtuoso surface markings in the Abstract Expressionist spirit, and concluding with his probing reexamination of the underlying geometric and coloristic structure of his art. At New York University's Institute of Fine Arts, as early as I944 and then again after the war, Reinhardt studied oriental art history with Alfred Salmony. He also attended D. T. Suzuki's seminars in Zen Buddhism at

Columbia University in the early I95os before they became fashionable among the New York avant-garde. He said he was attracted to Zen because "it goes over and over something until it disappears."3 In the forties and fifties he read widely and independently in Eastern art, philosophy, and religion, and in later years he regularly took trips to China, Japan, and Southeast Asia, where he haunted the museums and temples of the region, returning with, literally, thousands of slides of artifacts. These he later projected for the classes in oriental art history he taught for so many years as a tenured member of the art department at Brooklyn College.

Figure 4. Ad Reinhardt, A Portend of the Artistas a Yhung Mandala, newspaper collage on paper, 66.5 x 48.6 cm. Originally published in Art News (May Ig50). (photo: Al Mozell, courtesy of the Pace Gallery)
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Quite as important in his artistic development as his passion for the Orient and Asian art forms was his political warfare with much of the rest of the art world. In I950 he published his first polemical "art-world cartoon" in trans/formations,to be followed periodically by a number of other hectoring, instructional graphics lampooning the contemporary art scene, usually to be found in Art News (fig. 4). He also kept himself in moral and intellectual condition, as it were, by publicly airing his ideological differences with his fellow color field painters, who represented an important counterforce to Action Painting in the fertile Abstract Expressionist episode. There is abundant evidence in the exasperated and also moving letters this group of artists left to posterity with their estate papers at the Archives of American Art, and in the recently published collection of Barnett Newman's papers, that their bitter struggle for recognition took its corrosive toll of both their self-regard and regard for each other. The combination of a messianic vision with the experience of rejection, and even ostracism, at least as they construed their sense of isolation, left them all with a bad case of frayed nerves and suspicions of the motives of even their closest artist friends. Given the radical simplicity and unprecedented formal character of their work, the color field group, even more than the gestural abstractionists, found their integrity and authenticity questioned constantly by a powerful, unsympathetic art press and a museum establishment whose bias against avant-garde art can scarcely be imagined today when art novelties have become the style of fashion and dominate the marketplace. In their different ways, Still, Rothko, Newman, and Reinhardt seemed to possess the most vulnerable and aggrieved egos among the Abstract Expressionists, and in time they were consumed by their own rivalries and conflicting claims of artistic priorities. At one point, Newman sued Reinhardt and the College Art Association for statements Reinhardt published in a scathing satirical article in the Art Journal4 assailing the corruption of the art world. Newman could not forgive Reinhardt for contemptuously dubbing him "a traveling salesman of ideas," thereby suggesting he was not only ideologically suspect, but probably not to be taken seriously as a practicing artist. 30

The suit came to trial, but the bewildered judge dismissed it when he discovered, among other fascinating bits of biographical trivia, that Newman had a history of litigation and writing crank letters to public officials, and had once run for mayor of the City of New York on an anarchist ticket. While Still was not a direct artistic influence on Reinhardt, who abhorred his tundralike fields of tarry, knifeapplied pigment, he did represent something of a role model. Still was recognized as an important leader and oppositional spokesman for the entire group of color field artists, who admired his uncompromising moral stance, prophetic posturing in public, and cultural extremism. In the late forties Still was influential in getting first Rothko and then Reinhardt teaching assignments in the summers of 1949 and I950 at the California School of Fine Arts in San Francisco where New York color field painting anomalously had its genesis. Like the pioneers of the American West, whence he came, Still revered the individual struggling in solitary, courageous effort to attain an absolute vision all his own. In rhetoric almost as molten as his abstract imagery, Still wrote of the artist as something of a Nietzschian hero seeking epic self-realization in metaphors of the sublime: "It was a journey that one must make, walking straight and alone.... Until one had crossed the darkened and wasted valleys and come at last into clear air and could stand on a high and limitless plain. Imagination, no longer fettered by the law of fear, became as one with Vision. And the Act, intrinsic and absolute, was its meaning, and the bearer of its passion."5 If Still can be judged the most romantic of the color field painters, then his polar opposite in the group would have to be the equally absolutist but utterly rationalistic Reinhardt. Originally Reinhardt had joined the Abstract Expressionists after Cubist and Constructivist abstraction had gone dead for him and become little more than what Still had described it to be: a mechanical picturemaking technique. Perhaps owing to his Cubist background (fig. 5), Reinhardt succumbed only briefly to gesturalism. By I952 he was painting brilliant, optically active, if more geometrically ordered, virtually monochromatic color paintings in red and blue closely related

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to the work of Rothko, Still, and Newman. Then, in a progressive distillation of form, and a rigorously intellectualized process of elimination, he reduced color, drawing, and, of course, imagery until he had refined his art to its very essence. He was left with a luminescent rectangle, hand-painted in a single color and in the flattest way possible, but with enough differentiation in tone and texture to disclose a hard-edged internal structure of plane geometry. There was perhaps an unconscious irony in these first single-color paintings in red and blue, and in the all black paintings that followed, however. Not only do the squares into which Reinhardt subdivided the field come together as a barely visible cruciform configuration, but the exquisitely subtle variations by which this shape is revealed requires such close, concentrated looking that viewers may find themselves slipping into a trancelike state. Moreover, at the same time that Reinhardt repudiated everything supernatural in art as incidental and distracting metaphysical baggage, his uncompromising quest for an art of absolute purity tended to elevate the nonobjective, totally self-referential painting to the status of a holy object. In fact, it was patently most difficult to impart spiritual values to abstract art since the twentieth century had converted abstraction into a purely formal, material, external enterprise. Yet Reinhardt did find support

Painting, 1940, oil on canvas, Figure 5. Ad Reinhardt, Abstract I02.4 x 81.9 cm. (photo: courtesy of the Pace Gallery)

for a spiritual reading of his intention when he made a gift of a small, all black painting to the Trappistmonk and poet Thomas Merton, who was a Columbia University classmate and remained a lifelong friend. Significantly,Merton thankedReinhardtfor his generosity in this way: "It is a most recollectedsmall painting. It thinks
that only one thing is necessary and this is true, but this one thing is by no means apparent to one who will not take the trouble to look. It is a most religious, devout and latreutic [conducive to worship] small painting .... "6

style, Reinhardt felt that meaning lay somewhere beyond reason and beyond the mind. Both artists invented for themselves a suprarational process by which connections could be made transcending the laws and limits of the everyday world. In one of the more intriguing articles recently published on Reinhardt,7 Naomi Vine made the point that he consciously sought a repeatable spiritual, yet not explicitly religious, experience in his highly ra-

tionalized, mandalalikeblack paintings. Although Reinhardt called his black paintings "art-as-art," insisting upon their separation from life, his thesis did not exclude spiritual implications. In his more private writings and ruminations, Vine pointed out, Reinhardt associated his black paintings with

For all his antiromanticfulminations and bias against the gesturalAbstractExpressionists,Reinhardtmay have had more affinities with the mystical Kasimir Malevich than he would have cared to admit, in content as well as in the form of the RussianSuprematist's radicallynonobjective, cruciform pictures. Like Malevich, the first nonobjective Western painter who espoused a geometric

references to "Oriental and Occidental mysticism that relate religious concepts to darkness, geometric shapes
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Figure 6. Ad Reinhardt in his Manhattan loft, July 1966. Life magazine ? Time WarnerInc. (photo: John Loengard)

andcruciform whichwere,in fact,theformal imagery," characteristics of his allblackpaintings. Theyearhe died he seemedto wish to give further credence to his spiritual intentions,when he wrote: "I have been calleda a mandarin, a godless Protestant, puritan,Byzantinist, a a an black an monk, Zen-Buddhist, iconoclast, mystic, Ahab.I supposethere'sa reasonfor makinga religious analogy.Maybethat'sthe best analogytoday."8 wasopento question, could YetReinhardt's religiosity and even have enthusiasm, may only persistas a partial been somethingof a charade, constantlysabotaged by the free play of his innateskepticism.He conducteda full of contradictions, career for he life andprofessional was by turnsan ambivalently utopic and disillusioned with a profoundmistrustof any transocialreformer, belief systems.At heart,he repudiated scendentalist the
32

content of works of art with overt religious meanings, feeling that they falsifiedthe aestheticobject by preventing it from functioning as an end in itself. To succumb to religious or mystical faith actually undercut the full power and essential purpose of Reinhardt'sstrategy of negativity. For Reinhardtit was the religion of art, I'art pourl'art,or what Henry James called the "sacredoffice" of art, that drove and valorized his creative project. He conceived his all black paintings, dating from 1960 especially,as a negative statementin the service of a positive cause:artisticfreedom. The less a painting conveyed (the more rigorously its formal components were restricted),the greaterlatitudein retinalresponseit allowed the viewer. The less a painting contained, the more it conveyed. The reduction of art to its pure formal characteristics was, for Reinhardt, a statement of absolute

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principle made in negative terms-negative in the sense not of denying any of the purposes of art, but of radically expunging all the accrued social, psychological, and iconographic values from painting. Reinhardt produced the grayed yet luminous, nocturnal appearance of his paintings by draining most of the oil from the pigment. This dry, almost chalky surface is reminiscent to some extent of essence, a similar kind of pigment used by Edgar Degas and Edouard Vuillard, which so much resembled pastel. The resulting subliminal effects of a kind of dim, matte radiance with a cruciform afterimage were achieved by painting the surface in successive thin turpentine washes (fig. 6), first with red, then green, and finally blue pigment, building up these fragile layers into a composite "black" chroma that reads first as opacity and then as a softened plane of grayish black light. The viewer is gradually engaged by the formulaic process and the tempo of experiencing the work, getting accustomed to its particular "light," as if in a darkened room to which our eyes slowly adjust. Lippard remarked that the viewer must learn to bridge the gap between uneasy "confrontation and delectation. "9 The ambiguity of the object and the interplay between impressions of illusive depth and flat opacity are rendered even more complex by the matte black shadow box in which the canvas is set. This framing device represents yet another in a series of stunning redundancies that may well defeat the casual viewer's best intentions to penetrate the work's manifold mysteries. It is intended, Lippard noted, "for protection though it also adds another degree of aloofness."'I The element of duration-the enforced acclimatization of eye and mind to the faintest imaginable color contrasts that operate slowly in real time-and the existence of perceptual problems tend to activate Reinhardt's shifting formal configurations within a symmetrical but open-ended system. Reinhardt created, finally, only an ambiguous order despite his stated absolutist views. Even his highly controlled, single-minded art-as-art synthesis could not purge itself of a residual element of uncertainty regarding the viewer's presence and responses-the indeterminate human factor. The optical dynamics of his severe cruciform configurations link the work to sen-

sation, and to the act of perception as well as to the viewer's state of self-awareness. To study a black painting by Reinhardt, in fact, involves a process similar to Zen meditation-a deceptively simple affair that "consists only in watching everything that is happening, including your own thoughts and breathing."" In either mode, art-as-art or art as individual awareness, the all black paintings step outside the boundaries of classical definitions of self-containment and confront us more dynamically as a moment in a process of consciousness. Despite his aloof intentions and verbal strictures of the self-indulgent emotionalism of the Action painters, Reinhardt nonetheless associated himself with their work and ideology to some degree. His delicate modulations of color and tone at the far end of the dark value scale, close to invisibility, and his narrow specialization of pictorial means can be interpreted as a form of risk and brinksmanship, no matter how premeditated or conceptual his approach appears to be. He also never abandoned the handmade painting or the artist's "touch" in favor of the kind of mechanical means that subsequently dominated Minimalist productions. It is said that Reinhardt once considered having a studio assistant execute one of his all black paintings, but he decided against the idea as too impersonal and inauthentic.12 His resolute oppositional stance, abhorrence of facile expressionist abstraction, and the relish he took in testing his audience's commitment to contemporary art by pushing his own painting to its outermost limits all held out a special appeal for a new generation of Minimalists working in three dimensions and for the nascent conceptualists. There is some question whether Jasper Johns, who has so often been cited, or Reinhardt, who has not, was the more important influence around I959 on the youthful Frank Stella, just two years out of Princeton University and already embarked on his first major series of radical black-stripe paintings. In any event, Stella was quick to express his appreciation of Reinhardt's contribution to American art upon his death: "[Ad] can't play the game anymore, but nobody can get around the paintings anymore either. If you don't know what they are about, you don't know what painting is about,"'3 he wrote. 33

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Figure 7. Frank Stella, Die Fahne Hoch, I959, black enamel on

canvas, 3II.0 x I86.8 cm. Collection of the Whitney Museum of American Art. Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Eugene M. Schwartz and purchase, with funds from the John I.H. Baur Purchase Fund; the Charlesand Anita Blatt Fund;PeterM. Brandt;B.H. Friedman; the Gilman Foundation, Inc.; Susan Morse Hilles; the Lauder Foundation; Frances and Sydney Lewis; the Albert A. List Fund; Philip Morris Incorporated;SandraPayson; Mr. and Mrs. Albrecht Saalfield;Mrs. Percy Uris; WarnerCommunications Inc. and the National Endowment for the Arts 75.22.

In his notes for one of his best-known symmetrical, cross-shaped black-stripe paintings of I959, Die Fahne Hoch ("The Flag on High") (fig. 7), Stella remarked that it provided him with "the final solution"'4 for that particular series, before its possibilities were exhausted, and he felt compelled to shift his attention to the next grouptype of shaped canvases. While the formal connection between Stella's first mature painting series and Reinhardt's work may not be direct or conclusive, there are in Stella's early phase of nonobjectivism, with its deliberate formal monotony, exclusion of color, and strict geometric order, decided affinities with many of Reinhardt's concerns. At least by implication these include the challenge of obliterating traditional abstract form and pushing art toward a point of perceptual, if not material, extinction. For Reinhardt this kind of end-of-theline purity and reductiveness also meant consciously attempting to make the "ultimate" painting. Reinhardt, in fact, jokingly entitled a number of his late all black paintings in the I96os Ultimate Paintings, and then, in deliberate self-mockery, added sequential numbers to their titles, as he resumed this occasional series from time to time. Reinhardt was, of course, consummately aware of the dangers of bogging down in an "ultimate" culde-sac, as the logical consequence of his intransigent purist position. Once painting could be stripped of all elements superfluous to its essential structure, it stood reduced to its final statement. Reinhardt was also aware of the perils of mysticism in art, which like reductivist painting threatened to undermine the artistic enterprise, or even throw it into Dadaist disarray. Susan Sontag eloquently formulated some of the dangers and the paradox inherent in the negative strategy for both the mystic and the modern artist, whose dilemmas are curiously similar. She wrote: "As the activity of the mystic must end in a via negativa, a theology of God's silence, a craving for the cloud of unknowingness beyond knowledge and for the silence beyond speech, so must art tend toward anti-art, the elimination of the 'subject' (the 'object,' 'the image'), the substitution of chance for intention, and the pursuit of silence .... Therefore, art becomes estimated something to be overthrown. A new element enters the art-work and becomes consti-

34

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tutive of it: the appeal (tacit or overt) for its own abolition -and, ultimately, for the abolition of art itself."'s Whether Reinhardt had painted the last painting anyone can paint, or just the first of the "last paintings," it is clear that his focus on the purely formal essence of art stirred and motivated a younger generation of new age formalists, who were at the same time more concerned with the material object as such and eager to stake out their own aesthetic territory. After his death, Reinhardt's elevated and uncompromising style was entrusted to the

fresh revolutionary generation of Stella, Andre, Judd, Sol Lewitt, Marden, Jackie Winsor, and others who were at first loosely associated as the new Primary Structurists, or Rejectivists,'6 but soon also answered to the name of Minimalists. With a purist obsession and partisan zeal worthy of the original color field painters, they brilliantly carried forward many aspects of Reinhardt's reductivist visual program and even some of his complex intellectual strategies, with significant modifications, needless to say, each in his or her own individual manner.

POSTSCRIPT Reinhardt was an inveterate letter writer, who could not resist correcting presumed art-historical errors and setting the record straight. His letters are famous for their sharp wit and, even at times, venom, as they are for the studied affectation of their archaic script. He enjoyed playing the roles, by turn, of exhorter and protestant, fearlessly taking powerful individuals and institutions in the art world to task with his rich verbal and cultural resources or by lampooning them in his half-moralistic, half-humorous cartoons. They were published irregularly in Art News, where the editor, Thomas Hess, was one of his favorite, although steadfastly sympathetic, antagonists. Not so Barnett Newman, whom he regarded as an artistic fraud and didn't hesitate to say so in public. They carried on a bitter vendetta for many years. Each insisted their quarrel was over aesthetic principles, but it was also clearly fueled by an unbecoming rivalry and intense mutual dislike. The first of the two letters reproduced (fig. 8) arose in connection with "American Art Since I950," a major exhibition at the Seattle World's Fair organized in I962 by this writer. Marie Hartley, an assistant at the Betty Parsons Gallery in New York, helped arrange the loan of Number 5, I952, and Number 10, I959, a transitional "brick" painting and a large monochrome red painting, respectively. Curiously, the only black monochromatic painting in the show was an eight-foot-high untitled black-stripe painting of I959 by Frank Stella. The second, undated letter (fig. 9) reflects a marked change in demeanor from the first. The acerbic and injured tone has been replaced by an equally parodic, bantering, and cozy confidentiality, as Reinhardt, still a bit fretful behind the mask of cordiality, urged the author to get on with preparations for his first large museum retrospective in New York scheduled later that year at the Jewish Museum. The decision to have a retrospective at the Jewish Museum, which in the early sixties had become identified with avant-garde shows as well as the display of its distinguished Judaica collections, represented an extraordinary compromise on Reinhardt's part not only with the system but with himself and his own exalted standards. At his insistence, and much to the consternation of the museum's trustees, the show was dominated by Reinhardt's all black paintings exhibited on the two main floors of the museum (see fig. 3), with a miniretrospective of 35

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earlier work crowded into much smaller gallery spaces on the third floor. Aside from Life magazine's sizeable picture spread and a favorable story on the show, it encountered a great deal of resistance, antagonism, and even outright hatred in the art world, which truly shocked Reinhardt. The world, it seemed, was still not ready for him.'7 Despite their marked shift in tone from antipathy and alienation to a somewhat strained sense of camaraderie, both letters seem quite touching today. At a time when the word avant-gardeis equated with an extravagant and often facile success, these and many similar, painfully aggrieved letters found in the artist's archives remind us of the psychic wounds Reinhardt endured for his difficult art and long years of neglect and isolation.

no. 4 (I954),

3I4-I5.

5. Cited in Irving Sandler, The Triumphof AmericanPainting:A History

of Abstract Expressionisn (New York, 1970), I70.

6. Cited in Naomi Vine, "Mandala and Cross," Art in America79, no.

(1991): 128.

II

7. Vine, "Mandala and Cross," I24-33.

8. Ibid., p. 126.

9. Lippard, Ad Reinhardt,146.
Io. Ibid., 144.

I I. Maurice Tuchman et al., The Spiritualin Art: Abstract 1890-1985 Painting (Los Angeles and New York, 1986), 5I. 12. Vine, "Mandala and Cross," 130. 13. Quoted in Lippard, Ad Reinhardt,II6. 14. Quoted in ibid., 192. 15. Susan Sontag, "The Aesthetics of Silence." Stylesof RadicalWill(New
York, 1969), 4, 5.

NOTES
I. Lucy R. Lippard, Ad Reinhardt(New York,
1981).

2. Harold Rosenberg, "The American Action Painters." The Tradition of

the New (New York, 1961). "At a certain moment the canvas began to appear to one American painter after another as an arena in which to act-rather than as a space in which to reproduce, re-design, analyze or 'express' an object, actual or imagined" (p. 25). "A painting that is an act is inseparable from the biography of the artist" (p. 27). 3. Ad Reinhardt, in conversation with Irving Sandler, 1957-58; cited in Lippard, Ad Reinhardt,166. 4. Ad Reinhardt, "Part II: Who Are the Artists," College Art Journal 13,

16. PrimaryStructures was the title of the first comprehensive survey of Minimalist sculpture organized in 1966 at the Jewish Museum, New York, by Kynaston McShine, then staff curator. Lippard, however, can claim priority for the rubric, which appeared earlier in her writings in reference to the new sculpture. 17. In a generous eight-page word and picture story, Life magazine art reporter and critic David Bourdon wrote: "Today a young generation of artists, attuned to Reinhardt's paintings and ideas, has brought in a major new style, reducing form and color to a drastic minimum. Called 'Minimal Art,' it generally consists of little more than plain boxes or a few stripes on canvas. The success of these blank, inexpressive works has given Reinhardt new prominence as the prophet of Minimal Art. This winter he was given a huge retrospective show at New York's Jewish Museum and became what he wryly calls a 'howling success.' " (David Bourdon, "Master of the Minimal," Life
62, no. 5 1967): 45.

Despite this vaunted success, Reinhardt sold only two paintings from his show, both to the Pace Gallery, which had begun to represent him, and, with a few exceptions, his all black paintings elicited a response ranging from indifference to hostility in the art press.

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