Ad Reinhardt

Ad Reinhardt michael corris

With a Preface by Dore Ashton

ad reinhardt

Ad Reinhardt Michael Corris

reaktion books

For m.v.d. – ice met rock / and happily / chewed away

Published by Reaktion Books Ltd 33 Great Sutton Street, London ec1v 0dx, uk www.reaktionbooks.co.uk First published 2008 Copyright © Michael Corris 2008 Publication of this book has been aided by a grant from the College Art Association Publication Fund.

All rights reserved No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers. Printed and bound in Great Britain by Cromwell Press Ltd, Trowbridge, Wiltshire British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Corris, Michael Ad Reinhardt 1. Reinhardt, Ad, 1913–1967 – Criticism and interpretation I. Title 759.1'3 isbn-13: 978 1 86189 356 7 This book is not authorized by the Reinhardt estate. Permission to quote from the letters of Thomas Merton is granted by the Merton Legacy Trust. Permission to quote from material held by The Getty Research Institute’s Special Collections and Visual Resources is granted by the Research Library, The Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles, California (930100).

Contents

Foreword by Dore Ashton 7 Introduction: ‘Starting over at the beginning’ 11 1 ‘Every person is a special kind of artist’ 19 2 Cartoons and Communists 33 ‘Hack’ 33 Public Art and Public Media 36 Comrade Cubist 41 The Origins of ‘Art-as-Art’ 47 Comrade Ad 52

3 ‘Painting-Reason’ and ‘Picture-Purpose’ 61 Abstract Art for Society’s Sake 61 The Inconsolable Polymath 65 Collage as Destruction 68 ‘Painting is more than the scum of its pots’: Beyond Formalism 70

4 The Intellectual Gift of the Post-Historic Artist 75 ‘Blue in art is blue. Red in art is red. Yellow in art is yellow. Dark gray in art is not dark gray’: Aesthetics and Indeterminacy 75 ‘How to Look at Modern Art in America: Fifteen Years Later’ 78 Perfection and the End of Art 83 Neither Secular nor Sacred 86 Systems of Strife 91

5 ‘An Invasion of the Ultimate’ 95 Jamming 95 Rules 98 Convictions 100 Realignment 104

6 ‘Every Dogma has its Day’ 107 ‘The re-reformulation of formalism’ 107 ‘A dark flame, fog forming in the unformed’: Responsive Eyes 112 Unfinished Business 118 The Success of Failure 123

7 Reinhardt and the Art of the Sixties 129 Empty Devices, Dead Diagrams and Invisible Spectacles 129 Trailer 146

8 Political Art and Political Power 149 Scepticism 149 The Artist as Citizen 153 Art and Resistance 158

9 Reinhardt’s Difficult Freedom 163 appendix: guide to visual resources 169 references 172 bibliography 213 artist ’s chronology 228 acknowledgements 235 index 237

Foreword by Dore Ashton

During his lifetime Ad Reinhardt became legendary as our resident scourge, an inveterate nay-sayer whose wit was to be both admired and feared. Those of us who remembered William Empson’s discussion of the power of the negative in poetry, as when Keats began his ‘Ode to Melancholy’ with the ringing ‘No, no: go not to Lethe’, could well understand Reinhardt’s singular value to our community. Few of us, however, were fully aware of the range of his passions. Or rather, the many personae this man of tremendous intellectual and artistic energy inhabited. There was, first of all, the painter, whose evolution from competent Cubist rehearsals, to delicate, even tender informal abstractions, to sternly cruciform black paintings, we watched with admiration for his skill and intelligence as a painter. But there was also the intellectual idealist who searched among the world’s great thinkers for wisdom and moral probity. Every once in a while Reinhardt would issue thoughtful comments drawn from his wide range of readings – everyone from Confucius, to Nicholas of Cusa, to Nietzsche. Eventually we learned of his deep friendship with the poet Thomas Merton, who became a Trappist monk and exchanged thoughts about art and religion regularly with Reinhardt. But what we didn’t know, which Michael Corris now fully explores in this splendid book, was the depth of Reinhardt’s political commitment. Because of the peculiar circumstances in the United States post-World War ii, summarized in the single epithet McCarthyism, even Reinhardt was reticent about his political history, most particularly that of the Depression years. To put it bluntly, Reinhardt was a political radical of the far Left. His life as a political dissenter took place on the pages of the most notable leftist publications, including New Masses and The Nation. Under a number

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of pseudonyms, Reinhardt produced political cartoons reflecting, in various styles that he invented copiously, a burning indignation that even in later years never flagged. Although most artists who knew him after the war thought of him only as a political dissenter within the confines of what is called the art world, a few old comrades remembered his earlier life as a cartoonist, but even they were unfamiliar with the many names he adopted in his life as a subversive. This significant chapter in Reinhardt’s earlier lives is only now revealed in Corris’s book. One of the more complicated questions for any critical biographer is how to treat Reinhardt’s own history of Reinhardt. There are many versions of his fiddling with his autobiography, often modified prudently because of the political climate. Corris has tracked down Reinhardt’s omissions and his camouflage techniques, and offers a portrait of a far more complex person than even those who knew him knew. While I, like everyone else, both coveted and dreaded those missives in elegant art-school script, usually indited on a common postcard, our interpretations of the man always fell short. Since Reinhardt tried to be his own art historian, even art historians were usually reluctant to deal with his pronunciamientos. Yet, a careful reading of all his published writings, and of certain documents that have surfaced since he died, still does not tell the whole story. Who was he? Was he the purist who, in 1948, insisted he was ‘against all involvements’? Or was he a secret agent fulminating from within? And if so, an agent for what or for whom? Was he indeed the black monk gliding in the corridors of an impregnable intellectual fortress, or was he a sly and distinctly public propagator of worldwide moral news? It seems, as Corris amply demonstrates, that he was all these things and much, much more. Those of us who navigated the seething tides of opinion during the epoch of the New York School always paid attention to Reinhardt’s public statements. Sometimes we sat at the famous Club meetings on Friday night, waiting eagerly for him to rise and excoriate. Sometimes, as in my own experience, we had the good fortune to encounter him fortuitously in other countries. To stand in line with Reinhardt in Paris waiting to enter some special exhibition at the Louvre, or to find him in a gallery known only to the few of the most inner vanguard circles, was always exciting, and, I must say, enlightening. Once I had the good fortune to take a long bus ride into Woodstock,

New York, and found myself seated next to him – a conversation I would never forget. I saw him then as a prophet and court jester of Shakespearean dimensions, and he was both, as I now see through reading this book. It is no easy task to tease out a single figure from this immensely active man whose influence is still with us. At the time that Reinhardt was diligently assembling his vast collection of slides of Asian art, most New Yorkers had not yet understood how important a knowledge of Asian thought and art would become, as we now see. Reinhardt, however, was fully aware of the global dimensions of human thought and works, and alerted us. His inclusion of Asian thoughts in his general art philosophy eventually led to his most famous defence of ‘art-as-art’. Although the slogan has been interpreted in many ways, the essential integrity of the thought has remained germinal. All the battles Reinhardt fought – against the compromises of artists, and against, quite simply, capitalism – are still there for the fighting, as a few younger artists know. Reinhardt, for them, is still holding aloft the banner. As Reinhardt once said: ‘God . . . does not wear art on his sleeve.’ Nor did Reinhardt.

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An important rule of argumentation is that an argument does not reveal the ‘true beliefs’ of its author. An argument is not a confession, it is an instrument designed to make an opponent change his mind. Paul K. Feyerabend Science in a Free Society (London, 1982), p. 156

The first word of an artist is against artists. The first word of an art historian is against art historians. Ad Reinhardt ‘Art vs. History’, Art News (January 1966), p. 62

Introduction: ‘Starting over at the beginning’

This is the first study of the American artist Ad Reinhardt to provide an account of all major aspects of his life and work. From the outset, my research on Reinhardt has been motivated by a desire to make sense of everything that seemed to be out of place or left out. Rather than mine the certainties that cluster at the heart of what might be called the orthodox view of Reinhardt, I have chosen to examine the anomalies and marginalia that pepper the artist’s life and work. These are treated alongside Reinhardt’s undeniable achievement as a painter, in an effort to add a beginning and middle to the story of an artist’s life and work that is most often presented to us in conclusion. There is good reason to adopt such a position. My sustained interest in Reinhardt began with the unexpected discovery of a clutch of cartoons and illustrations drawn by the artist for New Masses, an important left-wing journal of politics and culture of the 1930s and early 1940s. By the end of what turned out to be merely the first phase of an extended project of research on the artist, I had uncovered more than 400 examples of cartoons and illustrations, many of which were signed using a variety of pseudonyms and some of which were drawn in collaboration with another artist, Abe Ajay. These works were produced over the course of a decade – 1936 to 1946 – during the most important formative period of Reinhardt’s career. It was the time when Reinhardt studied art in earnest with painters such as Francis Criss and Carl Holty, made the acquaintance of Stuart Davis, Harry Holtzman and Peggy Guggenheim, became involved with the American Abstract Artists group and mounted his first solo exhibitions in New York. While the cartoons, paintings and collages that emerged from this period were clearly intended for different purposes, it is not so clear that they

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were produced in response to different needs. Reinhardt was no stranger to a conception of abstract art that was hardly removed from the political realities of the day and presumed to address social and existential concerns. Harking back to an earlier definition of aesthetics, Reinhardt frequently remarked during the 1940s on the potential of abstract art to challenge the chaos and fragmentation of what he called ‘the impoverished reality of present-day society’.1 That phrase, mildly chastising capitalism, was meant to welcome a certain kind of artistic practice into an imagined socialist future. The kind of abstract art that Reinhardt had in mind would leave nothing to chance. It would emerge from a rational and transformational discipline: ideal, beautiful and harmonious. It would be constructed through a ‘standard procedure’: a ‘sequence’, ‘series of steps’, ‘system’, ‘devices, exercises, problems, frames, collages, cutouts, and paste-ups’.2 Between these two bodies of work – fine art and applied art, as Reinhardt would have said – there are remarkable conceptual and formal coincidences, strong enough and clear enough, I believe, to argue for a causal link. Moreover, the relationship between painting and illustration is fluid, dialectical, since we find evidence of Reinhardt taking full advantage of his dual talents to interrogate and advance both aspects of his visual output. As Reinhardt wrote in 1949, referring to his practice as painter, cartoonist and satirist: ‘contradictory as though these roles may seem, they can be viewed as aspects of a unified stance’.3 As interesting as the existence of this new body of visual work is in itself and as much as it supplements our previous knowledge of Reinhardt’s various visual practices, some might argue that there is little cause to relate it to the artist’s mature practice as a painter. After all, Reinhardt’s major theme for the 1950s is summed up in a catalogue entry with the unpromising title ‘Abstract Art Refuses’.4 That text seems to put an end for Reinhardt to any associative meaning of abstract art. The meaning of painting for any given period may be discerned, Reinhardt argues in his new creed, by attending to what artists refused to do, refused to represent, refused to include in their painting. One imagines that this rhetoric signals a change of heart for the artist and functions as Reinhardt’s renunciation of his own misguided conflation during the 1930s and ’40s of art and leftwing idealism. It certainly rehearses Reinhardt’s dismissal of social realism and puts to rest the kind of semi-abstraction and abstraction from nature that he had worked through by 1940. It was, in fact,

aimed principally at Abstract Expressionism and functions as a draft theory for an art that has been shorn of referential meaning. To the extent that ‘Abstract Art Refuses’ is also an attempt at self-criticism, it is a reminder that a specific material link between cartooning and painting has been severed. Yet it says nothing about the separation of the cultural from the social; nor does it deny Reinhardt’s embrace of versatility. During the 1950s Reinhardt established himself convincingly as an artist devoted to saving art from the mistakes of other artists and the machinations of the corrupt institutions of art. Compared to the 1940s, Reinhardt’s practice of the 1950s is far narrower ideologically, and the artist himself appears as a far more divided figure. By any measure – ideological or formal – the distance between Reinhardt’s paintings of the 1950s and any other visual material he was producing at the time appeared to be unbridgeable. From the early 1950s to the end of his life, Reinhardt remained adamant about the need to separate art from non-art, the cultural from the social, art from life. As far as most of his commentators are concerned, the only sensible conclusion to be drawn is that Reinhardt’s various visual competencies and other interests must likewise be segregated. This includes, of course, the artist’s long-standing political activism. When we consider Reinhardt’s practice from 1960 onwards – the period that seems to overshadow all that came before it and to define his identity as an artist – the reality of the artist’s separate selves is most forcefully asserted as a theoretical armature. This is because there is nothing in the appearance of the ‘black’ paintings themselves to suggest that a reconsideration of the link between Reinhardt’s various practices would add anything to our understanding of his artistic practice. While we might learn a great deal about Reinhardt the concerned citizen and the committed socialist from the wealth of his activist-inspired graphic design and illustration, such activities would say little, if anything, about his paintings as aesthetic objects or their historical significance. Yet the extreme nature of the ‘black’ paintings, the very way they ‘work’ in the world as art contradicts their alleged dissociation from ideology. Thanks to Reinhardt, the discourse on the ‘black’ paintings of the 1960s was fixated on purity and supported by a mass of formidable rhetoric that often buried its historical truths in a torrent of self-aggrandizement. Ironically, this combination enabled Reinhardt’s painting

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to be hijacked by critics promoting Minimal art and, later, Conceptual art. The more astute critics understand Reinhardt’s affiliation with the utopian project of early modernism – particularly the work of Mondrian – and suggest the ‘black’ paintings signal the failure of that project.5 For the most part, however, Reinhardt’s ‘black’ paintings were taken to have no connection to any other world than that of art; to convey no meanings other than the self-evident fact of their own materiality. One of the reasons I undertook this current project was to respond to such criticism and to turn it on its head. The image of Reinhardt’s modernism we have inherited is, I would argue, a caricature and a fraud. It soon became apparent that the principles that enabled me to revalue the first half of Reinhardt’s career – the period from 1935 to 1950 – could not necessarily be applied to the remainder of the artist’s life and work. There are substantial differences to be noted in Reinhardt’s practice after 1950, but the most significant one relative to the previous decade is its consistency and coherence. While Reinhardt continued to produce art cartoons, they all followed the model established in 1946 by his famous series of collage cartoons, ‘How to Look’. By 1952 Reinhardt’s paintings had returned to geometry; the all-over quality of the calligraphic and manylayered surfaces of the mid- to late 1940s were now expressed succinctly as monochrome fields of close-valued hues arrayed in a variety of grid patterns. The sheer volume and inventiveness of Reinhardt’s political cartoons of the 1930s and ’40s – combined with the accelerated pace of development of his concurrent painterly practice – seemed reason enough to be suspicious of folding them into the ranks of the artist’s applied art and thereby rendering them irrelevant to the material development of his painting. The formal stability and coherence of the artist’s painterly practice of the mid-1950s onwards, however, make it impossible to hypothesize the same sort of connection between material aspects of his various visual practices. One can say that by the beginning of the 1950s Reinhardt had learned all that could be learned about painting through cartooning and vice versa. This does not alter my contention that Reinhardt’s work for New Masses should not be relegated to the margins of any serious account of the artist’s development; it merely limits their scope and forces us to look elsewhere for evidence that will fracture the edifice that was Reinhardt’s practice of the 1950s and ’60s.

Whenever abstract art was in danger of being manipulated by the business world or made more available through the innocence or greed of artists, Reinhardt was quick to point out that he valued abstract art as an end in itself and for its own content. Reinhardt likened the making of abstract art to the conduct of scientific research: a disciplined practice that did not necessarily require the interest or understanding of a broader public. This analogy, too, is an act of negation, one that had serious consequences for the artist. Reinhardt’s escape route was the repetition of a simple schema; another way of establishing difference. In the context of post-war America, Reinhardt’s considered, dispassionate mode of working seemed private, self-absorbed, extremist and mute. The paintings did not celebrate the prevailing anxieties of American life or partake of the vulgarity of the New York School. Some commentators have taken this as an expression of dissent and resistance in the face of the Cold War. The fact of the Cold War, however, does not account for everything. Reinhardt’s difference was easily misunderstood; the paintings of the early 1950s, for example, were hailed by theologians as emblematic of a deeply religious sentiment. In response, Reinhardt argued more strenuously for the meaninglessness of abstract art and distanced himself from the call for integration that he had expressed so publicly throughout the first half of his career. Reinhardt was not simply responding to the political climate; he was also responding to the dramatic changes that were taking place in the support structures of art: the art market, art criticism and museums. Even as he dissociated himself from the milieu of the ‘Irascibles’ – many of whom had also exhibited at Betty Parsons Gallery during the late 1940s and the early 1950s – Reinhardt remained deeply wed to the idea of a New York art community and continued to participate in its discourse as an outspoken critic of artists, dealers, critics and curators. These aspects of Reinhardt’s environment – described somewhat abstractly as the conditions and means of production and distribution of art – are real and have their own history. Reinhardt’s response to the upsurge in art during the early 1960s was to represent his personal artistic development as an alienated and autonomous programme of research in art, as if to say: as art is further integrated into the world of commerce and spectacle, I shall retreat further into the Imaginary Museum of world art.

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Some of these literary offerings descended into excruciating self-parody, as in Reinhardt’s 1965 auto-interview, ‘Reinhardt Paints a Picture’, or his ‘Timeless Stylistic Art-Historical Cycle’.6 As documents of self-knowledge, they share something of the attitude expressed by his friend Thomas Merton, when he remarked: ‘I hide my head from the American hubris that starts and will start wars and violence all over the place, I go back to be dean of the small silent calligraphy and weep for the peace race.’7 Among other sobriquets, Merton called Reinhardt the ‘Dean of the Great Quiet’. Merton, of course, was well aware of, if not mainly responsible for, Reinhardt’s engagement with the ideas of Zen Buddhism and Christian mysticism. Unlike Merton, however, Reinhardt had little interest in sacredness and art and would tease his friend, asking if he could tell a Holy Ground from an impasto.8 What was fascinating about Zen and certain mystic tracts for Reinhardt was the way in which they coupled meaninglessness and nothingness to enlightenment and seemed to respond closely to the artist’s need to discover the terms of an alternative discourse of abstract art. Of course, there is more to this embrace of contemplative and devotional practices and their ethical precepts: they engage the body as well as the intellect. Reconnecting the body, vision and thought – another kind of integration – is very much the point of one’s experience of Reinhardt’s late ‘black’ paintings. Reinhardt’s painterly practice from 1960 to 1967 was dedicated to ‘starting over at the beginning’, the point where the same perfection of ‘creation, destruction, creation’ is ‘made’, ‘unmade’, and ‘remade’. The post-historic artist, as Reinhardt called himself in 1966, ‘forms himself by a series of denials, refusals, but continues to be haunted by realities refused, denied’.9 The personal, it seems, cannot be transcended; the hope that one could open oneself to the ‘general’ and the ‘universal’ is really just another form of nostalgia for a non-bureaucratized wholeness of body and mind. Yet integration and security are precisely what Reinhardt struggled for, what he tried to keep alive, in his art. Our experience of the ‘black’ paintings – how they work in the world as objects of art – is never completely articulated by Reinhardt in his writings, although the artist has a great deal to say about what that experience, what that object of art, does not signify. I believe that Reinhardt made a conscious decision not to describe what would be patently obvious to anyone who took the time to look closely at his ‘black’ paintings. This

embodied aesthetic experience was direct and accessible. It is a work to be read and experienced. And the experience is absolutely counter to the essential experience of commodity culture, which is the experience, first, of the image of the thing, rather than the thing itself. What is more, the beholder of Reinhardt’s ‘black’ paintings can control their experience; they can end it by simply walking away. The ‘black’ paintings present the beholder with a challenge: to refuse to engage with them is to risk rendering them invisible and mute. To the careless spectator, the ‘black’ paintings appear to be undifferentiated dark grey monochromes. In one sense, Reinhardt’s art-as-art dogma, with its musings on the making of an art that is un-reproducible and nearly invisible, does more than gently invite us to experience the paintings themselves. If there is one value that seems to run throughout this account of Reinhardt’s practice, it is the value of criticism. For Reinhardt, the aim of art is to be critical, to interrogate its own existence and that of other works in the world. What this meant to artists, from the mid-1930s to the late 1960s, is a historical question; how Reinhardt realized it is the enduring legacy of his work: It’s not what you started that matters, it’s what you finished Not what you began with but what you ended up with Not so much how much you sold but what you sold out.10

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1 ‘Every person is a special kind of artist’ 1

Ad Reinhardt (1913–1967) enjoyed a long-standing connection to cartooning and illustration. By the time he had graduated from Newtown High School in Elmhurst, Queens, New York in 1931, his considerable talents as a humorist and illustrator were clearly evidenced and were continuously exercised throughout his course of study at Columbia University.2 Apart from two brief periods of fulltime employment as a newspaper staff artist on pm between 1943 and 1947, Reinhardt worked in the commercial art field on a parttime or freelance basis from the 1930s to around 1950, engaged as ‘art editor, art director, artist, typographer, layout artist, and visualizer’.3 As is customary for freelancers, Reinhardt worked for several clients at once. While his clients were grouped mainly in the field of publishing, print-based media was not the only area of his expertise; the artist’s commercial art output encompassed many facets of modern communication design, display and marketing. Reinhardt worked for the architect and industrial designer Russell Wright on a number of projects for the 1939 New York World’s Fair; he produced art work for the Office of War Information, several souvenir magazines for the Brooklyn Dodgers baseball team and designed and executed some decorative ‘cartoon murals’ for Barney Josephson’s Sheridan Square jazz bistro Café Society, the cocktail lounge of the Hotel Buckingham in midtown Manhattan and the Newspaper Guild Club.4 As a freelance art director, Reinhardt was responsible for the design and production of in-house publications for R. H. Macy’s (1937–9) and the recording-industry monthly, Listen.5 The artist also designed book jackets, decorative lettering, binding designs and end papers and drew illustrations, maps and diagrams for Harcourt, Brace & Company, Viking Press, Modernage Books, the Foreign Policy Association and the typographic design consultancy

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headed by Robert Josephy.6 Under the esteemed art director Cipi Pineles, Reinhardt’s illustrations were published during the mid1940s in the mass-circulation magazine Glamour.7 Finally, Reinhardt freelanced for one of Madison Avenue’s leading advertising agencies, Batten, Barton, Durstine & Osborne, Inc.8 Prior to his induction in the us Naval Reserve in 1944 Reinhardt’s earnings as a commercial artist were likely to have averaged as much as $125 per week, a salary comparable to that earned at the time by university lecturers.9 Despite his prolific output, Reinhardt claimed in 1945 that he did not ‘like being classified as a “cartoonist” or “illustrator” having spent some good time satirizing these professions.’ Reinhardt also disapproved of the professional titles of art editor and art director, finding them to be ‘too limiting’.10 Reinhardt’s deprecation of the professional trappings of commercial art should not distract us from the fact that during the 1920s and ’30s this industry drew attention to itself by claiming competencies that mapped onto the practice of fine art. The commercial artist of this period was encouraged to grasp vigorously ‘movements in art’ and ‘new products with their modern design’ as resources of expression of pragmatic value to the field rather than as exotica comprehensible to the devotee of modern art alone. This tough talk about cultural levelling, especially as applied to commercial art, appealed to Reinhardt. He would have probably identified such attitudes with the ongoing development of graphic design as a modern profession. As naive as such pronouncements may have seemed to professional artists and critics, this kind of offhand debunking of the aura of modern art was something that Reinhardt could and did use to recover his commercial art practice from the abyss of the routine, the mechanical, the commonplace: literally, the domain of the hack. For longer than is generally acknowledged, Reinhardt’s prominence in the commercial art world actually threatened to eclipse his reputation as a young abstract painter. Nevertheless, his graphic design practice occupied a place of considerable importance in his life, both as a source of income and a marker of his political identity. Between 1936 and 1948 he maintained an active profile in the labour movement and was engaged mainly, but not exclusively, in the production of illustrations and cartoon strips for use in the practical political education and organization of fellow workers.11

As an undergraduate at Columbia University during the 1930s, Reinhardt was a prolific cartoonist and illustrator for student-run publications like The Columbia Jester.12 Thomas Merton, Jester’s art editor in 1936 and a lifelong friend of the artist, praised Reinhardt as ‘the best artist that had ever drawn for Jester, perhaps for any other college magazine’.13 Thomas Hess, editor of the influential New York magazine Art News from the 1950s to the early 1970s, remarked that the majority of illustrations for Jester by Reinhardt exhibited ‘a whiff of the dash, gaiety and Art-Deco-Stork-Club style of undergraduate Columbia during the Depression’.14 Reinhardt’s graphic art for Jester was drawn before he began to consider seriously becoming a fine artist, and owes much to the conventions of illustration and graphic design tinged with an appreciation of Cubism. I wish to set aside, for a moment, the complex stylistic relationship that obtains between Reinhardt’s cartooning and illustration and his interest in modern art – an issue that will be revisited in my discussion of Reinhardt’s total visual output of the early 1940s – in order to concentrate on the social context of Reinhardt’s illustrative work; to consider how that context informed the conjunction of a particular form of image-making and radical political practice. The cartoons and illustrations, which mimicked an earlier Jazz-age sophistication and the visual appeal of illustrations and cartoons found in fashionable cosmopolitan magazines like The New Yorker, accounted for the bulk of Reinhardt’s known visual output at the time; a handful of these images ventured into the realm of politics, prefiguring his later editorial work for New Masses. Striking early examples of Reinhardt’s political cartooning appeared in 1935 as cover illustrations drawn for campus publications while the artist was deeply involved with left-wing student groups.15 These works demonstrate that Reinhardt was prepared to turn what he had learned about Cubism into a means for making illustrations. When the purpose was political agitation or satire, Reinhardt created inventive, dense emblematic compositions that demanded to be decoded rather than simply read off as an unambiguous propaganda image. In one illustration, Reinhardt pairs Hitler with Mussolini, Franklin Delano Roosevelt with Nicholas Murray Butler (an establishment figure who was then president of Columbia University) and Herbert Hoover with Huey Long; individuals tagged ‘enemies of the people’ or ‘social fascists’ by the Communist Party of the

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United States of America (cpusa), to recall a term used by the Party to discredit liberals.16 Each political figure is depicted in portrait form and takes on both abstract and realist qualities. The realism is that of a caricature, while the abstraction of the subject is geometric and tends to push the portrait to the condition of a motif. The portrait is constructed like a puzzle, but here and there the logic of abstraction is rendered incoherent by Reinhardt’s introduction of differing pictorial devices; here an emphasis on transparency and vision, there a return to dimensionality and tactility. Quoting Reinhardt, Hess refers to this play of pictorial resources in the cartoons and illustrations of the mid-1930s as ‘Cubist-mannered’. From this morass of influences, Reinhardt began to select out approaches to painting that centred on colour, geometry, opticality and, above all, non-referentiality. As a student-run publication dedicated to producing mostly gentle satire that surveyed everyday aspects of campus academic and social life, Jester provided its audience with a mildly irreverent, yet ultimately comforting picture of middle-class privilege enjoyed by the majority of Columbia students. All the time, Reinhardt’s understanding of class bubbled under the surface. A typical visual gag showed a young businessman crossing Union Square in lower Manhattan, a favoured site of the Left for mass political rallies, cheering ‘Mellon and prosperity’. The magazine’s overall editorial content took the dynamic cultural and social urban environment of New York for its raw material and then refracted this rich terrain through the pretensions and anxieties of the male, white Ivy League undergraduate. The anxieties associated with such class privilege were hardly abstract. This was, after all, the early 1930s, when the country was still in the grip of the Great Depression, on the cusp of the Roosevelt era of the New Deal and with the ferocious labour struggles of the late 1930s yet to come. Reinhardt’s blasé attitude afforded him a degree of psychological distance from the rest of the student body, who were not quite so hip, so stunningly literate or quite so tortured by the mannerisms and absurdities of middle-class life. Such defensive posturing is understandable; as a young man coming from a working-class background, we can imagine that Reinhardt’s barbs were bristling with a deep-seated resentment. Reinhardt’s gags repeatedly featured class as their hook, refracted through the topics of sex, alcohol, sports and popularly held attitudes towards contemporary political affairs and expectations about academic performance.

It has been pointed out that, as a college graduate ‘rather than the product of an art school’, Reinhardt was something of an exception among artists with working-class backgrounds.17 His education meant that he had much in common with more socially privileged artists of his generation, such as Robert Motherwell and Burgoyne Diller. Of his peers, he was probably closest in circumstance to the poor yet fiercely intelligent Mark Rothko, who had dropped out of Yale University after two years.18 For the most part Reinhardt was far more comprehensively educated than artists he came in contact with during the 1940s. As the son of RussoGerman immigrants, whose father worked in the garment trade as a skilled worker and labour organizer, it is not difficult to imagine the attraction that an Ivy League scholarship must have held for Reinhardt. Speaking of the degree of social mobility afforded by an Ivy League diploma, James Wechsler, a member of the Young Communist League while at college and later a friendly witness at the McCarthy hearings, spelled out the advantages, recalling that ‘we were at Columbia to prepare for conventional success in life . . . to be a Columbia man meant to have a certain running start in the great competition ahead.’19 How Reinhardt responded to this gift and how his level of learning contributed to his future identity as a so-called ‘downtown’ or Bohemian artist is quite another story. One could say that Reinhardt’s enthusiastic participation in the university’s studentrun press, his engagement on campus with radical political groups, and a troublesome, spotty attendance record during his last academic year are evidence of a more detached, even cynical view of Ivy League privilege. According to Hess, Reinhardt’s decision to attend Columbia was a ‘turning point’ in the artist’s life, ‘arrived at under considerable stress’ by an individual who ‘came from a very poor family’. Despite there being ‘every reason for him to begin making money’, Hess continued, Reinhardt had decided to take up a scholarship at Columbia.20 While an Ivy League college education may have struck others of Reinhardt’s generation as ‘an easy way out, a way of floating on the tide, of doing the expected, admired thing’, Hess concluded that for the artist ‘it meant going against the grain’ and ‘evidences his early admiration for learning and formal education.’21 According to Abe Ajay, Reinhardt’s father would have preferred his son to have entered the commercial art profession. By attending

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Columbia, Reinhardt announced his decision to turn his back on a career in commercial art. But his mind was far from settled about the future course of his life. It is not the case that Reinhardt had decided to become an artist by the time he entered Columbia; he was fundamentally interested in studying literature and, like all Freshmen, was required to take a course in the humanities built around the so-called ‘great books’ of the Western world. We do know that Reinhardt was gifted artistically and a high academic achiever at high school. He seemed to place great store in the value of a ‘liberal arts education’ as opposed to a more vocationally orientated course of study directed at illustration or advertising design. Confused, but powerful, signals of intellectual snobbery and class striving seemed to dog Reinhardt’s moves between academia and art for some time. As the art historian James Beck notes, ‘the distance between Columbia College and the Art Students League was much greater than 59 blocks.’22 Reinhardt’s shift to art was due largely to the influence and encouragement of the art historian Meyer Schapiro, who taught courses in art history at Columbia. After graduating from Columbia in 1935, Reinhardt began to take art classes at a variety of schools in New York, such as the National Academy of Design and the American Artists School. By 1937 he was more confident about his prospects as a painter: as with most young artists, he was more certain of the art he wished to avoid, and that was any form of naturalism in painting and especially social realism. The kind of art he longed to create had to be modern, abstract and avant-garde. In his youthful embrace of Communism and abstract art, Reinhardt, like so many ambitious young New York artists and intellectuals of the 1930s, aspired to combine the seemingly incompatible demands of political activism and avant-garde art. This challenge, taken up by many abstract artists associated with the Federal Art Project (fap) during the late 1930s, remained a significant aspect of the interwar American experience of modernity. For Reinhardt and his circle, the promise of a socially integrated practice of abstract art was precisely what modernism offered. Texts and public presentations produced throughout the 1930s and early 1940s by American artists such as Stuart Davis, Balcomb Greene and Burgoyne Diller mainly reflected on the relationship between art and society, abstract art and social change, and the selforganization of the artist as a producer. Some of these statements

echo the utopian tone of the innovative theory and practice advanced by earlier modernist artists, such as El Lissitsky and Ilya Ehrenburg, who asserted optimistically that ‘progress in art is possible only in a society that has already completely changed its social structure.’23 Referring enthusiastically to the paintings and writings of Piet Mondrian, Reinhardt in 1943 noted that ‘in a social structure which permitted the artist only an independent and selfish relation to art’ the most one could hope for was ‘the recognition of the limitations of the medium and the development of individual sensibility to lines, colors, [and] spaces.’ What was required, he concluded, was a new social structure that enabled a different type of relationship to art, for artist and public alike. For Reinhardt, as for so many others at the time, this translated into a passionate commitment to the political ideal of socialism.24 During the 1930s modernist architecture and interior design were of tremendous interest to Reinhardt, principally because of the directness with which these constructive activities exemplified a modernist vision that linked creative practice and social organization in a way that suggested the aesthetic as a model informing social life. Yet Reinhardt remained sceptical of the ability of such a practice to realize its goals in isolation from a specific political programme. While a student at Columbia, he was inspired by writings and lectures on architecture and sociology delivered by Jacques Barzun and Lewis Mumford, and from periodic visits to the Museum of Modern Art, where he most likely viewed the historically significant exhibition Modern Architecture.25 His earliest reflections on the social and political dimensions of architecture may be found in a term paper on the International Style, written in 1934 for an art history course at Columbia. Essentially a critique of Mumford’s liberalism, he concluded his essay on a sceptical note, as he altered Le Corbusier’s famous battle cry to read ‘Architecture would be Revolution!’26 During the 1940s Reinhardt revisited the theme of architecture in remarks on housing made in a text of 1943; in a graduate paper on ‘The Spiral Form in Architecture’, written in 1946 as part of the coursework for his Master’s course at the Institute of Fine Arts of New York University; in an enthusiastic review of Fredrick Kiesler’s ‘environmental’ exhibition of art, which had attempted to ‘achieve an integration of architecture, sculpture and painting’,27 and in a speculative proposal showing the integration of painting and

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sculpture into the plan of a modernist interior. In this last work, one of Reinhardt’s paintings of the late 1940s is imaginatively reconfigured as a ‘partition painting’ that functions as a partial dividing wall or screen in the setting of a generic International Style interior. This is perhaps the singular example of Reinhardt considering such a use for his ‘fine’ art. As such, it was an attempt to realize what had been implicit throughout the 1940s in his thought on the potential relationship between abstract art and everyday life. Reinhardt’s engagement with modern design flowed over into his domestic life, as well. A series of photographs of the Reinhardt family home at 209 East 19th Street in Manhattan, taken by Hans Namuth during the late 1950s, show a modestly furnished openplan interior that is at once stylish and mischievous in its simplicity and symmetry.28 The hoped-for democratization of abstract art – achievable, it was thought, through a continuation of State support for the arts and which might serve, in Reinhardt’s words, as ‘propaganda for integration’ – did not materialize. By the end of the 1940s in America, the active suppression of the Communist movement and the widespread demonization of the Left was under way. Along with an entire generation of political radicals and activist artists that came of age during the late 1930s and early 1940s, Reinhardt was forced to witness the brutal dismantling of what many took to be the only real alternative to the political and cultural realities of capitalism. How devastating this must have been for someone who had devoted no less than half his professional career, from the mid1930s to the early 1950s, to the support of political goals defined by the Communist movement. What had kept the dream of the socialist integration of abstract art and social life alive for Reinhardt and others was the existence of a culture of artist-activists linked, directly or otherwise, to a vibrant radical political party and a popular movement for social justice. In Reinhardt’s case, this political structure was the cpusa operating in concert with the organizations and collectivities that constituted the Popular Front.29 The Popular Front – known initially as the People’s Front, then the Democratic Front, in the United States – was a shift in policy announced by the Seventh Congress of the Comintern in August 1935 that responded to the rise of fascism during the 1930s and sought to address the failures of the Communist movement worldwide. Georgi Dmitrov, a principal architect of the

Popular Front policy, called it a ‘new tactical orientation’ that intended to prioritize the political offensive directed at fascism in order to cultivate a united front with former ‘class enemies’ such as socialists and social democrats. The Comintern resolution enjoined all sections of the Communist International to overcome, in the shortest possible time, the survivals of sectarian traditions which prevented them from finding a way of approach to the socialdemocratic workers and to change the methods of agitation and propaganda which hitherto were at times abstract in character and scarcely reached the masses. 27

In the United States, this new emphasis on linking the Communist political agenda to the ‘immediate needs and day-to-day interests of the masses’ meant that the cpusa would need to take up the formidable task of addressing and organizing workers, farmers and the middle classes in the struggle for ‘genuine social legislation’ and ‘unemployment insurance’; a struggle against ‘banks, trusts, and monopolies’; and, of course, against fascism. To do so, the cpusa set aside its commitment to third-party politics, lent its support to the policies of the Roosevelt administration, and focused strongly on mass organizations that engaged labour and professionals in the fight against fascism, at home and abroad.30 The Popular Front culture and its remnants, of course, did not survive much past the conclusion of World War ii. Historians point to a number of factors to explain this collapse, the most significant being the chaos caused by the cpusa’s doctrinal shifts between 1939 and 1946 and the us government’s attacks on the Party and its associated organizations, which culminated in the McCarthy witchhunts of the Cold War. Along with the collapse of the Communist movement, a specific form of American modernism – what I refer to as the Modernist Left – was rendered redundant and, potentially, seditious. As a veteran of the political turmoil of the 1930s and ’40s, Reinhardt could well understand the tensions that existed between the Communist movement in America and the post-war aspirations of the Truman administration. A map that contains elements in Reinhardt’s hand, though not necessarily composed by him, and published in New Masses in 1946 under the pseudonym ‘Tony’, prefigured the emerging global strategy of the Cold War

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by identifying military bases within the us and the ussr in terms of their distance from their respective sovereign borders. The fact that this map was a polar projection anticipated the geopolitical preoccupation of a generation of Cold War politicians and consultants obsessed with the likely routes that might be traversed by Soviet icbms as they rained down on America’s heartland.31 A decade later, in the devastating wake of McCarthyism and the open criticism of Stalin by Krushchev, the Communist movement, along with a broader spectrum of left-liberal political dissent, was effectively eliminated from American political life. Under these circumstances, the socialist optimism that had underpinned Reinhardt’s artistic practice proved unsustainable. As the artist’s familiar political culture was being altered irrevocably before his own eyes, so too his focus and his choice of rhetoric as an artist underwent profound revision. The partisanship of his politically charged writings on art of the 1940s transmuted into caustic satire and piercing irony. This was no exercise in sympathetic or constructive criticism, either: rather, an expression on Reinhardt’s part of almost total contempt for the social and economic complicity of the so-called art world that emerged in the aftermath of the war. It was a community that the artist subjected continually throughout the 1950s to a strident rhetoric of negation and dissent. More often than not, these attacks were cast in the dour language of moral instruction. One way or another, Reinhardt’s need for political engagement remained vital to his self-identity as a politically conscious citizen and to his self-image as an artist. At the height of World War ii Reinhardt asserted optimistically that ‘every person is a special kind of artist’ and ‘aesthetic values are found to be around in all activities’.32 By the mid-1950s his statements reflected a darker vision of art under siege as the wartime agenda of ‘more leisure, more education, more direct and complete participation of all people in aesthetic activity’ was replaced by the compensatory realism of the ‘universal’ in art.33 From Reinhardt’s perspective, the challenge faced by the abstract artist during the 1940s was to become a whole human being. He was aware of ‘the implications and potentialities of scientific knowledge, projected with a democratic political philosophy of the possibility, ultimately, of every individual being his own artist, his own architect’. Under such an enlightened political and social environment, ‘the central problem in art . . . will be one of democracy and education’.34 The strong theme of cultural

democracy, seemingly remote from Reinhardt’s subsequent statements of the early 1950s on ‘art-as-art’, emerged in a somewhat coded form during the 1960s in the context of the artist’s ‘art-as-art dogma’. Like the mid-1930s and early 1940s, this was another historical moment when the agendas of cultural production and social change appeared to coincide. Radical politics, architecture, graphic design, mass media and abstract art: these are the terms of reference that organize and contextualize Reinhardt’s full creative practice. What is clear is that any account of the fortunes of his vision of art and society must also acknowledge the practices of artists who emerged toward the end of his lifetime and with whom he has been closely linked. Many commentators have asserted that it is the work of young artists of the 1960s – notably Carl Andre, Robert Morris, Christine Kozlov, Joseph Kosuth and Robert Smithson – that truly vindicates Reinhardt’s view of art and that constitutes his enduring legacy. These emerging artists, who were openly hostile to Abstract Expressionism and its apologists, set about inventing the terms for a host of new artistic practices that would eventually be collected under the rubrics of Minimal art and Conceptual art. It is claimed that the work of these artists was informed by the example of Reinhardt’s use of negation, schema and repetition to form a credible artistic practice. On the other hand, it is also true that these artists did not deem it necessary or desirable to emulate the full complexity of Reinhardt’s example. While Reinhardt’s political and moral obligations were considered to be of great importance to figures like Andre and Morris, his position as a writer on art was, for many, far more compelling. What seemed to be most instructive to arch-polemicists like Kosuth and Smithson, for example, was Reinhardt’s apparently endless stream of blistering and inventive attacks directed with precision against the conformist values and errors of his peers. Even Reinhardt’s achievement as a painter was set aside, as Conceptual artists of the 1960s attempted to recast artistic practice in terms of the framework of language or discourse. As Lawrence Weiner aptly put it while explaining how he had arrived at his ‘public domain’ works, which placed the responsibility for the production of the work in the hands of the work’s custodian, ‘the idea of a Reinhardt is always more exciting than a Reinhardt.’35 Initially playful and subversive notions like generic art, meta-art

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and dematerialization in time gave way to grim and often tedious obsessions to discover the philosopher’s stone of art: the art ‘act’ divorced from any material support and rendered pure. For some artists, this was what Conceptual art meant and the humourless quest for a formless, style-less, content-less and timeless form for art defined their project. It has always been Weiner’s hope that art would coexist with human beings in a fluid, matter-of-fact relation. The appropriate form for such art would be one that was unfettered to any particular media, place or time. During the late 1950s and the ’60s Reinhardt proselytized for something very different: he was a painter devoted to seeing through to its bitter end the modernist project of negation through painting. Weiner, along with his Conceptualist peers, had found themselves in a different world of art: a world in which the point of departure for artistic practice – namely, the diminished importance of the object to the idea of art – was already beyond the outer limit set by Reinhardt of art-as-art. Unlike Weiner and his generation, Reinhardt did not reckon on a world of art at peace with the world at large.

Reinhardt was more than a generalist. There was a purpose to the development of his considerable multiple talents, to the mobilization of what he later called his ‘separate selves’. The artist’s reflections on the pragmatics of a compound practice reveal the difficulties attached to attempts to theorize complex, integrated practices in the context of an increasingly managed and fragmented practice of art. To avoid the potential banality of a holistic description of Reinhardt’s practice, we need to attend to the artist’s practice historically while holding at a distance his own self-interested framing of it. Elsewhere, I have introduced the concept of versatility as a means to gain critical purchase on Reinhardt’s ability to enact simultaneously the multiple roles of artist, graphic designer and political activist.36 Accounts of Reinhardt’s life generally mention the artist’s satirical cartoons on art and his polemical writings (the so-called ‘art-as-art’ dogma) only to place them in opposition to his painterly pursuits. Segregated in this way these non-painterly practices are considered to be irrelevant to, rather than in profound conversation with, Reinhardt’s project as an abstract painter.37 In terms of form and process, the explicit cross-fertilization that engaged all of

Reinhardt’s visual practices during the late 1930s and the ’40s remains largely unexamined. As late as 1950 he had made no attempt to segregate his practices publicly; he was simply and widely known as a painter, teacher and illustrator and thought of himself in those terms.38 Reinhardt’s questioning of the claustrophobic professionalization of art led to the conclusion that the mature artist must be more than a mere denizen of the studio; the artist’s insightful and scathing critique of the culture of art serves to illuminate, rather than detract from, our understanding of his paintings.39 Reinhardt’s various activities were far from incidental to his artistic identity, but it was certainly a condition of his culture that such practices should be seen to be, or portrayed as, profoundly discontinuous rather than integrative with respect to the job of the artist. While we pride ourselves on a pluralistic culture of art that admits to no boundaries between subject matter and media, few have been willing to consider the totality of Reinhardt’s practices as a ground upon which our current conditions of art may depend. More common are those voices complaining bitterly that Reinhardt’s paintings are always in danger of being swamped by his polemics, activism and cartooning.

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2 Cartoons and Communists

‘hack!’ ‘Hack!’ is an insightful, even exotic, cartoon drawn by Reinhardt for Jester in 1933.1 Unique among his collegiate cartoons, ‘Hack!’ closely mirrors what we know to have been the actual terms of the personal dilemma faced by the artist during the early and mid-1930s as he pursued his creative and intellectual interests. Beyond the cartoon’s biographical associations, it remains a powerful allegory of Reinhardt’s perception of the struggle between ‘high’ and ‘low’ in art. ‘Hack!’ is neither an editorial illustration nor a graphic intended to fill a gap in the layout of the magazine. Because of its scale and internal complexity, the cartoon presents itself as a visual essay in its own right. While the cartoon’s rendering of social types meshes perfectly with the satirical intent of the magazine, the faintly menacing portrayal of class conflict sets it apart from Reinhardt’s other visual gags for Jester. ‘Hack!’ reveals the hollowness of the selfassurance and snobbish optimism that pervaded much of the undergraduate satire produced at the time for Jester. As a visual document of culture, the cartoon offers a complex and sobering view of urban class hierarchies. In this regard, its message may not be entirely irrelevant to the concerns of the moderately dissolute middle-class undergraduate racing towards a Wall Street job and a house and family in the Connecticut suburbs. Stylistically, the cartoon’s form is inconceivable without the example of late Cubism. The mechanical, abstract quality of its rendering aligns it as well with the ambitious 1920s visual project known as Isotype, conceived by Otto Neurath, a leading logical positivist philosopher.2 As a keen graphic artist with a basic knowledge of modern art, Reinhardt grasped the fruitfulness of a formal relationship between cartooning and Cubism.

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With elegance and economy ‘Hack!’ stages a chance encounter between a municipal sign-painter laying down the road markings of a ‘No Parking’ zone and a more prosperous artist. The image of the worker is a clear enough symbol, the identity of the second figure, less so. In my view, the second character represents a type of artist that has limited currency in our contemporary world of caricature. For Reinhardt, this fastidiously dressed figure, with brushes and canvases tucked under his arm just so, embodies a particular attitude towards creativity as well as calumnizing a specific type of professional. This dandified character, full of arrogance and swagger and suggestive of Jimmy Walker (the dapper, scandalous mayor of New York in the early 1930s), is far removed from the stockbohemian, Greenwich Village artist. The physiognomy and the haughtiness undoubtedly found their target in New York waspishness, or at least some rehearsal of it. The figure could have easily been modelled after A. E. Gallatin, the artist and founder of the Museum of Living Art, or George L. K. Morris, artist, critic and patron of Partisan Review, or any other of the so-called ‘Park Avenue Cubists’ who became an important contingent within the American Abstract Artists (aaa) group. In 1937, when Reinhardt became a member of the aaa, he came into contact with serious abstract artists who were indeed wealthy and as impeccably dressed as his caricature.3 Alternatively, this problematic figure may have simply been a caricature of a different sort of artist: namely, the Madison Avenue advertising artist, the jobbing illustrator of Fortune magazine covers, the work-for-hire creator of tasteful consumer advertising. Reinhardt’s image of the artist embodies a range of imagined qualities of such creative personages, making it an allpurpose repository for assumptions about art, class and creative activity. The worker/sign-painter, garbed in overalls, is a stock ouvrieriste icon. He is going about his job inelegantly, down on all fours, in the gutter. Both figures are depicted with the tools of their profession, yet only one – the sign-painter – is expected to ply his trade in public, literally in the street. Indeed, where else but the street could two characters from such different walks of life find themselves thrust together and forced to negotiate what amounts to a moral right of way? Reinhardt’s use of the urban setting for this cartoon turns out to have been quite typical of modern, sophisticated magazine illustration at the time.4 We must not lose sight of the fact that this is

the street as seen from the perspective of the politically turbulent 1930s, not merely as a sign of the modern urban experience. The expression of disdain on the gentleman’s face is unmistakable, leading one to conclude that such a disapproving gaze is directed at the workman toiling away at the kerbside. The caption, which simply reads ‘Hack!’, would support this reading were it not for the ambiguousness of the gestures portrayed and the spatial disposition of the figures. There are, in fact, several plausible readings. One assumes the artist is addressing the worker directly. A second imagines the artist in the act of hailing a cab. In this case, the utterance ‘Hack!’ – overheard by the worker – could have been misunderstood and taken as an insult. A third interpretation of the cartoon, in an unexpected reversal, positions the worker directly addressing the artist. In all three scenarios, the cartoon assumes a social hierarchy. Yet the third possible reading remains for me the wittiest of the lot. Even if it is not the most straightforward explanation of the joke, it is the reading closest in spirit to the punning humour that Reinhardt deployed in his cartoon captions even at this early stage, and would continue to refine and employ to devastating effect throughout his career as cartoonist and illustrator. The multiple meanings of the term ‘hack’ enabled Reinhardt to dramatize economically a gentleman artist’s brief encounter with the base underside of his calling: in other words, to picture the sensibilities and experiences that the practice of fine art was meant to hold at bay and ultimately defeat. In the eyes of the gentleman artist, the sign-painter will never be anything other than an individual who responds to the order to perform some dull and uninspiring job. The sign-painter is a technician possessing a trivial facility; a degree of manual dexterity, perhaps, but no true creative imagination to call his own. This reading of the caption, then, animates the entire cartoon, to the point of transforming it into a pastoral. If the utterance ‘Hack!’ originated from the workman himself, then surely it must have been intended to be an insult directed at the figure of the artist. If so, it is a delicious example of ‘hailing’ out of synch. The indeterminacy of address does not seem to me to be a failing. Rather, it is the point of the cartoon and a testament to Reinhardt’s inventiveness as an illustrator and his talent for puns. ‘Hack!’ was the first of Reinhardt’s many reflections on the class character inscribed in the hierarchies of visual practices in a modern, capitalist society.

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Increasingly skilful at deploying this sort of visual ambiguity, Reinhardt returned repeatedly during the 1940s to this strategy in order to reflect on the social consequences of the division of labour within modern capitalist society. In his role as editor of Jester, Reinhardt announced his intolerance for ‘pseudo-people’, ‘smug stupes’ and the ‘aesthetically insensible’. This banter conceals a deeply romantic suggestion that the creative artist represents a more authentic personality in modern society. ‘We are going off on our high horse’, wrote Reinhardt, just in case you thought he had meant it. ‘We like radicals’, he said, but ‘we are doggedly determined to be different and much funnier.’ Reinhardt concluded the editorial with an equally Wildean condemnation of the conservative as a person to be reviled simply because ‘he has bad taste’.5 The detached, cavalier tone of the editorial was just what Jester’s knowing readers craved; satire of this sort enabled Reinhardt to reflect on the opposing postures of respectability and radicalism without fear of contradiction. It would not be until the early 1940s that Reinhardt managed to resolve the encounter originally pictured in 1933 in ‘Hack!’. In an important polemical essay titled ‘The Fine Artist and the War Effort’, the tables are turned as Reinhardt levels the cultural ground of applied and fine art practices by asking ‘exactly how less creative are the artists who change our world every day . . . with their practical limitations, than the fine artists, with their imaginative restrictions?’6

public art and public media There is nothing more pathetic than an artist who, with his ‘pictures in frames’, tries to compete with pictures in magazines and movies.7

Undoubtedly, the text that most profoundly influenced Reinhardt’s thinking on art and class was the art historian Meyer Schapiro’s essay ‘Public Use of Art’. The arguments put forward by Schapiro were central to the fashioning of Reinhardt’s own position on the strategic relationship between painting and the mass media. Schapiro conceived ‘Public Use of Art’ as a corrective to contemporary discussions on the Left on the continuation of government funding through the Federal Art Project (fap).8 Called ‘the most sophisticated critical assessment of the New Deal art projects to be

published at the time’, Schapiro’s essay reflects ‘on the wider problems of the audience for art in modern capitalist societies’ that would continue to engage Reinhardt throughout the 1940s.9 Importantly, Schapiro framed his analysis in terms of class, proposing ‘theories that translated into practice – not just the practice of art . . . but the practice of artists reaching out to join with the struggles of the working classes.’10 ‘Public Use of Art’ was Schapiro’s second contribution to Art Front, the official publication of the Artists’ Union. The Union, which had been founded a few years earlier, was recognized by the fap as the de facto bargaining agent for the artists employed on the Project.11 The economic and political circumstances that turned Schapiro’s attention towards this issue were the upturn in the us economy in late 1936, followed by President Roosevelt’s order to the wpa to ‘pare its rolls in keeping with the expected absorption of workers by industry.’12 In response to these redundancies, the Artists’ Union called for resistance to the efforts by the government to eliminate artists’ jobs. In a stunning move beyond the demand for job security, the Union agitated for the fap to ‘become a permanent feature of our social and national life’.13 Against these demands, Schapiro raised a key question: what can artists do ‘to maintain these projects and to advance them further toward a really public art’? Schapiro’s reply lays bare an opportunity for artists: ‘artists must develop a public art, one that presupposes a specific constituency.’14 This call for a ‘really public art’ challenged the fixed idea that the fap Mural Project was the only proper forum for the realization of such aims. Schapiro criticized the belief that the production of murals representing working-class subjects, for example, would invariably function as a bridge between artists and workers. He asserted that there was a real difference between the economic and political interests of artists and workers and that there had never been any real support by the working class for projects that exclusively benefited artists. Artist–worker solidarity would be a hard-won social and political bond. Schapiro reminded artists that workers also wished to return to full-time employment as well as to fight to obtain social insurance, to have the prospect of a skilled job, to gain higher earnings based on a union scale of wages, and so forth. Artists, on the other hand, were more or less satisfied to maintain the projects as they were, which in any case represented a tremendous improvement

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over ‘their former unhappy state of individual work for an uncertain market’.15 Here, Schapiro highlighted the fallacy, widely shared by artists working for the fap, that artists had somehow been proletarianized and transformed into ‘art workers’, thus suggesting a ‘natural’ alliance with the working class. Schapiro called this a delusion arising from a bureaucratic necessity; artists were simply beneficiaries of State-run emergency projects, not employees of the State. Noting the disparate class location of workers and artists in society, Schapiro pointed out that

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Artists are usually individual producers. They own their tools and materials and make by hand a luxury object which they peddle to dealers and private patrons. They employ an archaic technique and are relatively independent and anarchic in their methods of work, their hours of labor, their relations with others.16 It was only a matter of time before the truth of this analysis would be confirmed to the detriment of the interests of artists. Unless the working class acknowledged that a permanent State programme of support for the arts had value for them, they would be justified in refusing to support it. Schapiro argued that a positive position on the part of the working class towards art and artists must be based ‘on a solidarity of artists and workers expressed in common economic and political demands’.17 Schapiro regarded the Mural Project to be seriously flawed on ideological and aesthetic grounds. (To be fair, Schapiro did not have much sympathy for easel painters, either, if they produced ‘pictures to decorate the offices of municipal and state officials, if they serve the governmental demagogy by decorating institutions courted by the present regime’.)18 He insisted that the most promising strategy for artists to pursue would be to ‘demand the extension of the program to reach a wider public’. At the same time, they should present ‘a plan for art work and art education in connection with the demands of the teachers for further support of free schooling for the masses of workers and poor farmers’.19 Schapiro’s hope was that the self-transformation of the artist might also lead to a future in which the artist’s relationship to the working class would be experienced naturally, as was already the case with respect to the present and unsatisfactory relationship of artist to bourgeois patron.

The artist could become a genuine ally of the working class through the achievement of a ‘public use of art’. This aim, in turn, was deeply embedded in the ‘achievement of well-being for everyone’ in the form of the establishment in the us of a type of socialism. In one important respect Schapiro was out of step with the Party line and Popular Front rhetoric, which had aimed to support Roosevelt and New Deal projects such as the fap. Schapiro’s veiled attack on the Roosevelt administration, notes the art historian Patricia Hills, ‘would have made the Communists in the Artists’ Union uncomfortable, to say the least, since it was published in November 1936, the month that Roosevelt won an overwhelming majority of the vote in a campaign that involved the active (if sub rosa) support of the cp’.20 Several months later, Reinhardt, employing the pseudonym ‘Darryl Frederick’, published a cover illustration for New Masses that endorsed a policy of critical, rather than unconditional, support for Roosevelt’s legislative programme. The cartoon depicts Roosevelt as a drum major parading a group of Congressmen away from the Capitol building in Washington, dc. A few independent politicians are shown breaking ranks. Roosevelt’s baton is twirling, describing its rotation as a circle with alternating black and white chords; a Futurist illusion of simultaneity modelled after Giacomo Balla’s Dynamism of a Dog on a Leash (1912). By the time Schapiro had presented the talk ‘Public Use of Art’, Reinhardt’s work at New Masses was well under way. When Schapiro asked for whom the artists were painting or carving, and what value their present work might have for this new audience, we can appreciate how these challenges would have helped to inform, encourage and enrich Reinhardt’s dialogue with the Communist movement. Reinhardt’s later vision of the socially responsible artist imagined practitioners ‘working towards a synthesis of the arts’, ‘aware of the implications and potentialities of scientific knowledge’, and imbued with ‘a democratic political philosophy of the possibility, ultimately, of every individual being his own artist, his own architect.’21 Reinhardt had fashioned himself into an artist-citizen whose practices were framed by the pleasures of the drawing board and the closely knit community of artists and activists. His immersion in the Artists’ Union and his experience working for New Masses had a profound effect on his understanding of the complicated relationship between politics and culture. A full-page cartoon by

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Reinhardt titled ‘You’re a menace to civilization’, published on 2 January 1940 in New Masses, illustrates the dialectical view of history as class struggle as expounded by Marx and Engels in The Communist Manifesto. The cartoon is organized into three stacked scenarios, each of which symbolizes a stage of class struggle, covering roughly the transitions from feudalism through capitalism to socialism. At each stage, the personification of the soon-to-be superseded class points an accusing finger at its historical successor. The repetitive format foreshadows Reinhardt’s more radical deployment of cyclical repetition to suggest timelessness. Here, it signifies the iron laws of history. Surely, this is one means of elevating the sly working-class hero of the 1933 cartoon ‘Hack!’ while making a valuable point about the substance of political and social transformations necessary to reverse the fortunes under capitalism of worker and artist alike. Schapiro’s argument presented Reinhardt with a more nuanced relationship between artist and worker, one that hinged on the observation that ‘a public art already exists’: that is to say, in the form of comics, illustrated magazines and the cinema – all the forms of mass cultural production that fascinated Reinhardt and engaged a considerable measure of his creative energies. As Schapiro noted, It may be a low-grade and infantile public art, one which fixes illusions, degrades taste, and reduces art to a commercial device for exploiting the feelings and anxieties of the masses; but it is the art which the people love, which has formed their taste and will undoubtedly affect their first response to whatever else is offered them.22 One thinks not only of the sophisticated illustrations that Reinhardt emulated, but also of Walt Disney’s full-length cartoons or the utopian carnival of architecture and design that was the New York World’s Fair of 1939–40. The artist, of course, does have a choice. If he ‘does not consider this to be an adequate public art, would his present work, his pictures of still-life, his landscapes, portraits and abstractions, constitute a public art?’23 By 1942 Reinhardt was writing in a particularly enthusiastic and convincing manner about mass-market periodicals and the cinema. He agreed substantially with Schapiro’s assessment of the mass

media. Many of Reinhardt’s reflections of the early 1940s on the necessity of separating ‘picture-purpose’ from ‘painting-reason’ are elegant condensations of Schapiro’s original argument. Once ‘painting-reason’ is separated from ‘picture-purpose’, Reinhardt claimed, visual communication techniques would be ‘freed from aesthetic, personal expression and distortion and serve more efficiently as a social weapon’. As far as Reinhardt was concerned, ‘the motion picture taught people more about our natural world than centuries of representational painting’.24 Reinhardt did forge a relationship with the political arm of the working-class movement and he did so initially without risk to his art. By polarizing ‘painting-reason’ and ‘picture-purpose’, he devised a cultural space in which both could flourish and evolve. Unlike so many politically impassioned artists of the 1930s, Reinhardt did not come to political activism as a fine artist. Rather, he mobilized his considerable talents as illustrator and cartoonist for the sake of his political beliefs. Consequently, during the early 1940s he continued to oppose the production of social realist murals as a tool of ideological communication and resisted naive assumptions about the terms of art’s popularization and the substance and structure of the artist’s engagement with the working class.25 The prospect of realizing Schapiro’s vision of sweeping educational initiatives linking artists and worker died with the demise of the fap in the early 1940s. Nevertheless, the Communist movement continued to agitate for a permanent, State-funded agency to fulfill what they saw as the true democratic cultural mission of the fap.26

comrade cubist New Masses began publishing in 1926 as a political and cultural monthly under the direction of a loose coalition of Communists, socialists and ‘radical intellectuals’. In 1934 New Masses was relaunched as a weekly and achieved its peak popularity during the late 1930s. Reinhardt started to draw cartoons for the magazine during the summer of 1936, at the moment when New Masses was regarded as a central organ of the literary-political Left.27 Reinhardt’s initial contribution to New Masses was an editorial illustration accompanying a report by one Alexander Kendrick of a strike at the rca Victor radio manufacturing plant in Camden, New Jersey. Reinhardt’s drawing parodies the corporation’s well-known

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logo, which was based, in turn, on Francis Barraud’s 1899 painting His Master’s Voice. Reinhardt’s caricature portrays the company labour adviser and union-buster, Hugh S. Johnson (a former member of the Roosevelt administration), as a puggish bull terrier, quite unlike the adorable fox terrier ‘Nipper’ depicted in the original logo. A stiff, fussy effort by Reinhardt, the cartoon nonetheless underscores the point of the article that company unions are not autonomous unions. Signed ‘Darryl Frederick’, this cloaked illustrative debut by Reinhardt set in train the artist’s decade-long practice of employing pseudonyms based mainly on the Anglicization of his middle names, ‘Dietrich’ and ‘Friedrich’.28 Throughout its history as a magazine dedicated to the integration of politics, art and culture, New Masses remained embedded in the Communist movement and associated with the leadership of the cpusa.29 However, the New Masses that Reinhardt encountered in 1936 was hardly a blunt political instrument wielded by Party functionaries. The impact that these links had on the editorial content of the publication then remained far from clear-cut, since many shades of opinion on the constitution of ‘progressive’ art and culture were tolerated during the Popular Front period and for some time thereafter. Alongside polemics in support of social realism, one found articles on Picasso and Mondrian and informed reviews of abstract art. On the matter of domestic and international political policy, however, the editorial content of New Masses unambiguously reflected the Party’s line. Nonetheless, artists and writers clearly benefited from the Party’s response to the influx of middle-class intellectuals during the mid-1930s.30 New Masses was split by the fault lines of class and is more accurately described as having been a magazine that ‘came to stand for, and to dialogue with . . . the largest Communist constituency outside the ethnic groups’, namely an ‘unembarrassed, radical middle class’.31 In other words, New Masses spoke ‘in the name of the working class’, not ‘for the working class’.32 Reinhardt was an extraordinary find for the editors of New Masses: an individual with a considerable talent for illustration and design, a youthful activist, an aspiring artist of working-class origins politically sympathetic to the aims of organized labour and a university graduate with a strong interest in art and culture. In all respects, Reinhardt’s engagement with the Communist movement exemplified the increased access gained by artists and intellectuals to the antifascist movement through the avenues of art, literature and music.33

By the late 1930s Reinhardt was fully conversant with the intellectual and cultural debates that characterized the vibrant and fractious New York literary and artistic avant-garde. Yet it was not the promise of a Marxified avant-garde or a ‘creeping Modernism’ that necessarily drew Reinhardt to New Masses and sustained him throughout the course of many, often troubled, years of service.34 I believe he grasped the occasion as an opportunity to reinforce – if not direct – the magazine’s move to embrace aspects of popular and mass culture in the name of socialism. By the late 1930s, popular and mass forms of culture, like folk music and the cinema, were well-established subjects of commentary for New Masses. During the Popular Front, the magazine extensively employed cartoons and cartoon strips to communicate its political message, drawing equally from the venerable tradition of political cartooning and satire as well as the more recent phenomenon of the Sunday supplement comics. What has been referred to elsewhere as the ‘subtle impact of the Popular Front’ on the journalism of the Communist movement as a whole – that is, the general interest in popular and mass culture – was also felt by artists and illustrators. This tendency could only have encouraged Reinhardt and nurtured his impressive gift for caricature and satire.35 Milton Brown, an art historian active in the Communist movement and later a colleague of Reinhardt’s at Brooklyn College, characterized the artist’s contribution to New Masses as journalistic, a backhanded compliment meant to diminish the level of innovation Reinhardt brought to a demanding job.36 While there is little specific detail concerning Reinhardt’s recruitment to New Masses, it is likely that he gained entrée to the magazine through his acquaintance with several key figures on the editorial board, some of whom were highly placed in the Communist movement. The names most frequently mentioned by Reinhardt in this regard were the cartoonists Crockett Johnson (the pen name of David Leisk) and Anton Refregier.37 Leisk was active in the daily affairs of New Masses and served on the editorial board from about 1936 until the end of 1939. Along with the well-known artist Rockwell Kent, he redesigned the masthead and layout of New Masses in 1936 in an effort to modernize the appearance of the magazine. Reinhardt, already a regular contributor to the magazine, may have lent a hand in this process.38 Leisk’s cartoons for New Masses inject a welcome measure of wit into the often lugubrious

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and convoluted political positions that begged for clarifying illustration. A typical example of Leisk’s approach is a pro-Soviet cartoon strip published in New Masses during the dark days of the Ribbentrop–Molotov Pact. Leisk personifies Nazi Germany, Great Britain and the us as a gang of bumbling burglars attempting to break into the ‘premises’ of the ussr. Their plans are foiled and the gang is reduced to picketing under the name of the ‘International Imperialist Union’. The farce alludes to the West’s support of the Mannerheim regime in Finland.39 Later, Leisk would gain a measure of popular fame as the creator of the comic strip Barnaby and as the author-illustrator of exceptionally sophisticated children’s books. Leisk and Reinhardt remained in close contact throughout the mid-1930s and the ’40s. In 1944 Reinhardt illustrated the awardwinning children’s book A Good Man and His Wife, written by Leisk’s wife, Ruth Krauss. Abe Ajay recalls that Reinhardt in particular held a great deal of responsibility for the design and preparation of New Masses for printing. Accordingly, Reinhardt ‘selected type-faces, taught me how to copy-fit . . . and on Friday night both of us would go up to the New Masses offices and paste-up the “book” in galley form. And we’d each get $5.’40 Abe Magil, a political journalist and member of the editorial board of New Masses from 1940 to 1948, asserted that Reinhardt had functioned as de facto art director for the magazine for at least one year between 1939 and 1943, calling him ‘one of New Masses’ most prolific graphic contributors’.41 Reinhardt’s work of the late 1930s for New Masses grew ever more assured as the artist explicitly utilized visual motifs drawn from the example of Cubist painting. These illustrations frequently struck a dissonant chord in a magazine where many of the editorial illustrations and cartoons conformed to realist pictorial conventions. By their own admission, many artist contributors to New Masses drew upon the examples of Goya, Daumier, Walter Crane, John Sloan and George Bellows as models for the task of illustration. In a review of paintings by William Gropper, perhaps the most prolific of all New Masses artists, a young Harold Rosenberg noted the imprint of many of the same sources on the artist’s work, adding for good measure the names of Ryder, Forain and Breughel and the traditions of Japanese painting and ‘primitive art’.42 Cubism is thrown into this mix as well by Rosenberg, and it is interesting to contrast Gropper’s assimilation of the lessons of

Picasso and Braque to Reinhardt’s. An examination of works produced by Reinhardt in 1938 and 1939 for New Masses reveals numerous examples of compact, intricately constructed, Cubist-inspired illustrations, many of which used letterforms as central compositional elements. These works conform nicely to Stuart Davis’s prescriptive notion of the whole picture as a psychological gestalt, a principle that Reinhardt seems to have embraced and simultaneously applied to his painting. Additionally, between 1936 and, say, 1939 or 1940, there was a substantial thematic overlap between the two major bodies of visual work. For example, Reinhardt’s parallel treatment of urban and industrial scenes in paintings such as Untitled (Blue Hook Series), 1938; Untitled (New York World’s Fair), c. 1939; and a cover illustration of a montage of New York World’s Fair pavilions for the in-house magazine Sparks (R. H. Macy’s, ny), 1939. Here we see Reinhardt acknowledging and demonstrating the potential of Cubism as a resource of expression capable of modernizing the practice of editorial illustration, while exploring its pertinence for him as a foundation for his painting. In this new world, Reinhardt believed that ‘illustration, poster-making, applied art, freed from “fine-art” elaborations’ would fulfil ‘their functions more clearly and honestly’.43 The aesthetic territory mapped out by Reinhardt and other avant-garde cartoonists such as Ajay hardly ruffled the feathers of the readership of New Masses. On the contrary, Reinhardt was a highly celebrated contributor to the magazine. The absence of dissent may have masked a deeper, more potentially disabling prejudice of the editors and the majority of readers. This would ultimately rebound against artists whose approach to illustration and cartooning was dependent upon an affinity with abstract art: it is ultimately the journalistic text that renders illustrations, regardless of style, intelligible to the reader. What this implies is that few examples of abstract, modernist imagery were, in principle, unavailable for use – or misuse as Reinhardt, in later decades, never tired of noting – as a tool for political communication. Accordingly, even the wildest of Picasso’s experiments in perceptual dislocation could be plundered and tamed to such ends. For Gropper, Cubism’s appeal was more as a visual spice that made his illustrations more credible to a sophisticated readership aware of modern art. In the event Cubism had no lasting effect on Gropper’s illustration or painting. For Reinhardt, though, Cubism was the means to escape naturalism in illustration as well as painting

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and his editorial illustrations of the late 1930s extensively explored the possibilities of late Cubism. In some respects, they were superior to comparable efforts in his painting that were struggling to find a way out of an exhausted Cubist idiom. Gropper’s practices are an instructive foil to those employed by Reinhardt. In their quest to invigorate the stock icons and motifs that comprised the lingua franca of radical political editorial illustration of the 1930s, there is a palpable sense of competition between the young Reinhardt and the older Gropper. The panoramic narrative cartoon, the full-page political caricature and the strip cartoon (the last being a format that Gropper revived in his own work around 1944) are some of the illustrative genres that were energetically reworked by Gropper and Reinhardt.44 Gardner Rea’s astute use of the conventions of the ‘bourgeois comedy of taste’ made fashionable by the urbane cartoonists of The New Yorker and Ajay’s knowing travesties of Surrealism provided New Masses readers with stark alternatives to imagery derived from social realist painting and printmaking.45 But it is the neglected cartooning of Ajay, juxtaposing blots, brushwork and swirling constellations of calligraphic line, that rank with Reinhardt’s as the most jarring to be seen in New Masses, and the most engaged with the avant-garde of the first quarter of the twentieth century. An example of how Cubism enabled Reinhardt to refashion even the most hackneyed caricature of the bourgeoisie may be found among the artist’s dozens of spot illustrations drawn for New Masses. Despite their diminutive scale, these drawings are remarkable examples of Reinhardt’s considered and sophisticated approach to illustration. In one drawing he combined a number of images symbolic of finance capital, fashioning a squat stockbroker, a ticker tape machine, a dollar sign and the ubiquitous moneybag into a marvellously complex emblem of capitalist greed. As it threads through the figure’s grasp and snakes over crossed legs, the serpentine tickertape moves downwards to form the lower lefthand frame of the drawing. It then shoots upwards, transforming itself into the tail of the s-curve of a dollar sign, which is superimposed in the negative on the moneybag. With the completion of the s-curve, the line terminates at the neck of the bag. At the terminus of this arc, however, it changes direction yet again and abruptly generates a series of verticals that suggest the peaks of a crown, which is Reinhardt’s graphic shorthand for the closure and cathexis of the

moneybag. Finally we glimpse the image of the crown echoed in the lower portion of the figure’s waistcoat.46 As an illustrator Reinhardt was a formidable all-rounder. A surprisingly naturalistic portrayal of the French writer André Malraux drawn for a New Masses cover shows Reinhardt to have been a highly accomplished draughtsman.47 The artist was equally adept working with the traditional media of lithographic and Conté crayon on cold-pressed board, a technique incorporated in a frieze on the theme of Soviet industrialization. This illustration, originally drawn for Soviet Russia Today, accompanied a New Masses lead article defending the conduct of Stalin’s notorious show trials in Moscow.48 Equally compelling illustrations by Reinhardt emerged through his emulation of the contemporary work of Stuart Davis. These included a number of open line drawings of factories and comic figures. He also borrowed a version of montage found in Davis’s 1918 canvas Multiple Views, wherein a series of anecdotally associated vignettes are grouped in an ensemble. This was an awkward solution invented by Davis to solve the problem of ‘infusing the dimension of time into painting that did not rely on the cubist vocabulary’.49 Formal echoes of this quirky painting are found in Reinhardt’s 1938 fullpage cartoon The Greatest Show on Earth: Combined Red-Baiting Circus.50

the origins of ‘art-as-art’ In contrast to most of the illustrators at New Masses, Reinhardt favoured the techniques of the layout artist, the printer and the modern painter to those of the fine arts draughtsman.51 Reinhardt’s systematic application to illustration of the montage-like assembly process of the graphic designer’s basic production method – the ‘paste up’ – resulted in a unique version of the cartoon collé, a compositional technique combining hand-drawn and pre-printed or photographic elements. The cartoon collé is a mode of visual expression most widely associated with the work of the German Dadaists George Grosz and John Heartfield, and the Surrealist Max Ernst. Utilizing a similar technique for the production of his art comics and cartoons of the late 1940s and the ’50s, Reinhardt dutifully acknowledged Ernst’s work as the key model for his mass-media reinvention of the cartoon collé. While the papier collé of Picasso and Braque of 1912 is an obvious precursor to the cartoon collé, the

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iconic and mimetic functions of the cartoon collé in the hands of the Dadaists and Surrealists placed this form at some remove from the Cubist collage. Reinhardt understood the distinction even as he developed the logic of cut-and-paste simultaneously in illustration and painting.52 Because Reinhardt was a graphic designer and illustrator prior to his entry into fine art, the technical skills he had mastered initially in the context of applied art profoundly influenced his art studio habits. Later in his career Reinhardt wrote of the need for an art of ‘self-sufficient clarity’, ‘standards’ and ‘precision’. To achieve such an outcome demanded a system of repeatable sequences, a ‘series of steps’, ‘system’ and ‘devices’. The discipline of ‘standard procedure, objective operation’ prefigured an art more than superficially linked to the world of ‘paste-ups’ and the increasingly rationalized process of graphic design production.53 There are many striking similarities to be found between Reinhardt’s work at the draughting board and the easel during the 1930s and ’40s. Because of a fruitful, reciprocal technical relationship between the two practices, each in turn was inspired, informed and advanced by the presence of the other. By the late 1930s Reinhardt adopted a method of painting that used the collage technique to make preparatory studies and models for the final rendition in oils. By using collaged, hand-coloured paper to work out the structure of paintings beforehand, the need for preparatory pencil or oil sketches was eliminated. Reinhardt learned this technique from Carl Holty and Francis Criss, two of his most important art teachers of the late 1930s. It was a method of working that was widely practised among painters aligned with the American Abstract Artists group and had the virtue of engaging skills and procedures that would have already been familiar to Reinhardt in the context of graphic design layout.54 The impact of collage as a resource of expression for Reinhardt’s fine art was considerable. The introduction of new materials and techniques in Reinhardt’s paintings around 1938 had a profound effect on the nature and formal focus of his work; his increased use of collage accelerated this process.55 By 1940 Reinhardt had lost interest in the game of abstracting from reality. This does not mean that he no longer employed a model for his painting in the form of a collage; he did, but what he painted were remnants of a destroyed realism. By that time, Reinhardt was using a range of

photomechanical sources for his collage material: black-and-white and colour newspaper and magazine photographs and engravings found in second-hand illustrated books, in place of coloured paper. These new raw materials were sliced up and rearranged into patterns designed to produce the maximum defamiliarization of the source imagery. The spatial effect was paradoxically one of continuity, not fragmentation; a new, all-over surface emerged that enabled him to dispense with the faceted space of Cubism or the latent push and pull, or architectonic character, of some of his late 1930s paintings.56 In a statement of the late 1940s Reinhardt remarked on the importance of collage, characterizing it as a combination of ‘spontaneous and accidental aspects, along with the perfectly controlled’.57 From the late 1930s until the late 1940s Reinhardt’s fine art production was freely inflected by technical and formal influences from both ‘fine’ and ‘applied’ art practices. The artist’s knowledge of the technical process of commercial letterpress and photolithography played a significant role in his artistic development because it supplied him with a framework within which to explore and ground his notion of painting as process and construction. Despite his protestations to the contrary, at this point in his career the dynamic between fine and applied art techniques provided him with a valuable opportunity to view illustration and cartooning output as the occasion to work out problems that originated in, and perhaps threatened to stall, his painting practice. As Reinhardt began to apply innovative graphic design tools and new systems of composition to his cartooning, the differences between his illustrations and those of other contributors to New Masses became especially pronounced. His chief innovations were the use of pre-printed, self-adhesive Ben Day screens and, of course, his adaptations of Dadaist collage. The Ben Day screens were a product designed to eliminate the drudgery of cross-hatching, of filling in an area of an illustration or graphic design with a consistent tonal value;58 their use dominated Reinhardt’s contributions to New Masses from 1941 to 1943. What was at stake for the artist, it seems to me, was how to develop visual resources for mass political illustration that were most appropriate to the media of print rather than derivative of the practice of painting or fine art printmaking; in other words, how to make explicit the political implications of the use of readymade technical aids in contrast to labour-intensive, hand-worked

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drawing techniques. A certain kind of directness was sought, as opposed to a reproduction or translation of one medium into another. The goal was to remove from cartooning all vestiges of painterly practice, while concentrating on the essential aesthetic qualities and technical methods deemed necessary for mass production of graphic designs. This entailed a move away from the more conventional pen-and-ink techniques that characterized Reinhardt’s previous cartooning; a process that began in earnest with the use of Ben Day screens, and was advanced through the publication in 1942 in New Masses of a group of anti-fascist cartoon collés such as Four Moods of Der Fuehrer and Horse and Rider on the Eastern Front. Artists such as Gropper may have largely ignored Reinhardt’s experiment to rid cartooning and illustration of the hand, but the lesson was not lost on the younger artist and fellow traveller Hananiah Harari. Harari was already familiar with modern art and had tried to develop a style of political collage that juxtaposed in a literal way an array of disparate, incompatible pictorial conventions. The greatest impetus to Harari’s ambitions as a political cartoonist may have come from Reinhardt’s work at pm; it was only in 1947, after the appearance of the latter’s series of art comics, that Harari inaugurated a collage/cartoon-strip feature of his own in New Masses. Titled ‘On Safari with Harari’, this serial feature employed many of the conventions pioneered by Reinhardt in his pm cartoons, but for the express purpose of political commentary. Harari also integrated other cartooning traditions in his series, notably the amusing and improbable chain-reaction devices depicted in the work of the celebrated cartoonist Rube Goldberg.59 In Reinhardt’s hands the unconventional use of Ben Day tonal screens functioned in much the same way as collage to ‘destroy’ the prominence of underlying images and structures. In turn, the Ben Day tonal screens suggested to Reinhardt a way to construct a work of art through a kind of destruction or ruin. This approach to the making of a painting was sustained, theoretically at least, by the example of Mondrian, who viewed destruction as a kind of constructive act – specifically destruction reined in and tamed by a supervening impulse towards rationality and order. In this context, the act of successively overlaying tonal screens almost to the point of complete obliteration of the base image signified a degree of control over what would appear to be a chaotic mixture

of line and form. It would not be an exaggeration to say that Reinhardt’s portfolio of cartoons for New Masses in the early 1940s took on the character of a covert notebook for his painting. These cartoons would suggest resources of expression that continued to inform Reinhardt’s art until around 1950, at the point when geometry – in the form of the grid – re-established itself in the artist’s painting. Reinhardt’s moiré-patterned cartoons composed of misregistered halftone screens are extreme and unprecedented in commercial illustration. As in the seemingly expressive surfaces of Reinhardt’s paintings of the later 1940s, particularly the so-called Persian rug series, appearances are deceiving. In those paintings, surfaces tend to be built up through a series of patiently applied brush strokes; the surface texture is consequently uniform, tranquil and, characteristically for Reinhardt, matt. It is analogous to the way Reinhardt achieved the effect of tonality in the Ben Day cartoons; a picture of incident, not an example of incident. It has been said of Reinhardt’s collages and paintings between 1940 and 1943 that they systematically destroyed Mondrian’s compositional idiom of ‘balances and counterbalances, the relational idea’, that they are ‘frighteningly all-over’ images seemingly ‘arranged almost at random’.60 Reinhardt’s propensity was to push to the breaking point the notion of ‘destruction’ of the surface of a painting. According to Martin James, the artist went to extreme lengths to achieve such painterly effects: during the early 1940s Reinhardt habitually washed his gouaches under running water to achieve a more uniform surface.61 Other works produced at about the same time display a claustrophobic surface composed using an aggregate of scrawls, washes and cross-hatching. It is generally agreed that Reinhardt’s collages of 1940 were important for the elimination of geometry, projection, sketching and drawing in the artist’s work. What remains to be explored fully is the link between how the collages were physically made and what some of the paintings looked as though they were of. Speaking of Reinhardt’s work of the early 1940s, Lippard observed that ‘there are oils from this time showing how the brush served the same function the scissors did in the collages, even to the point of simulating the angular sickle or blade shapes of a cut edge’ (emphasis mine).62 These are suggestive, highly metaphorical descriptions of one sort of painterly act assumed to be applicable only within the relatively

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narrow field of artistic practice. There is scant reason to believe that Reinhardt was not alert to the expressive possibilities of collage in whatever context he encountered them. The comparisons being drawn here between Reinhardt’s painting and illustration of the early 1940s also argue for a more nuanced interpretation of the frequently cited tension in modernism between high art and mass culture. In Reinhardt’s case, this relationship was expressed on many levels, ranging from the sourcing of imagery to the technical means of production of pictures and paintings. Moreover, at various moments in the artist’s career these circuits of influence seemed genuinely multi-directional. Paradoxically, Reinhardt’s versatility and prolificity as a cartoonist somewhat obscured this relationship. In the face of a mass of hastily worked cartoons and illustrations by Reinhardt, some of which are hardly more than scribbles, a great deal of editing is required to appreciate the dynamic quality of the relationship between illustration and painting. From the 1950s onwards, Reinhardt famously dismissed any contact between art and mass culture while consistently demonizing the latter as fine art’s aesthetic ‘Other’, thus obscuring even more a tension that had been crucial to the development of his art throughout the 1940s.

comrade ad I was never a member of the Communist Party . . .63

Reinhardt was deeply involved in the extensive social network of artists, intellectuals, Party members, mass organizations and publications associated with the politics and culture of the Popular Front. Towards the latter part of the 1930s, he gained entry into cpusa circles and made contacts that he maintained, in some instances, throughout his life. Reinhardt’s participation in cultural and political organizations associated with the cpusa is impressive, but it is important to stress that these commitments continued well beyond the period of the Popular Front. Against the grain of the political tendencies of the majority of Reinhardt’s New York School contemporaries, the artist proved to be consistent in his support for the political policies of the cpusa.64 fbi surveillance of Reinhardt began in mid-1940; more than a decade later the artist was being considered as a candidate for

custodial detention based on his prior ‘membership and apparent activity with the Communist Party’. His work for New Masses, among other activities suspected by the fbi of being subversive, figured in early field reports.65 In 1940 and 1941, prior to us involvement in World War ii, the harassment of Communists and suspected Communists intensified. The Party surmised correctly that this was principally in response to their political line, which, since the Nazi invasion of Poland in 1939, had characterized the ongoing war in Europe as a ‘phoney’ war and an ‘imperialist’ war. Following directives from Moscow, the cpusa vigorously opposed us war preparations and interim measures that the Party believed would lead to military intervention, such as material and financial aid by the us to Britain, France or Poland. In a 1940 policy statement titled ‘The People’s Road to Peace’, Earl Browder, the General Secretary of the cpusa from 1934 to 1945, identified the Party’s first task as to ‘keep our country out of the European war’ and ‘to inform and educate the masses in the program of the socialist way out of the crisis’.66 The cpusa became more critical of Roosevelt’s moves away from neutrality, including the amendment by Congress in November 1939 of the Neutrality Act and the passage of the Lend-Lease Act in early 1941. These new Congressional resolutions enabled the us to support Britain materially in its military efforts against Germany while technically remaining outside the conflict. The cpusa interpreted the policies of the ‘War Party of the American bourgeoisie’ – Browder’s epithet for the Democratic Party – to mean that ‘Wall Street is preparing to take America into the war to save the British Empire from collapse’.67 Speaking to an anti-war mass meeting sponsored by the Young Communist League in New York in 1940, Browder claimed that ‘the second imperialist war, through the struggle of the masses to bring it to an end, will give birth to a socialist system in one or more other countries’.68 This political line was duly reflected in the editorial content of New Masses during 1940 up to the German invasion of the ussr in 1941. Without exception, all cartoons by Reinhardt that addressed foreign and domestic policy issues supported the Party line on the so-called ‘imperialist war’. The cartoon ‘Idle Hands . . .’ shows us a demonized personification of us capitalism gazing longingly at the conflict in Europe; ‘I deeply appreciate your action in this matter, Winston’ suggests the collusion of Churchill and the Axis in the sinking of a Polish rescue ship, and ‘war’ depicts Roosevelt out on a limb, supported by capitalism,

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offering armaments to a grateful Churchill. There is even a drawing of the Capitol building sporting a Union Jack in place of the Stars and Stripes.69 As attacks by the cpusa against Roosevelt’s foreign policies were stepped up, the administration responded with a widespread campaign of intimidation directed at the Party and their supporters in an attempt to limit their political appeal and their ability to mobilize anti-war sentiment. The Voorhis Act, which took effect on 1 January 1941, was intended to compromise the legal existence of the cpusa by compelling it to register as an agent of a foreign power on the grounds of its affiliation with the Communist International (or Comintern). The Party effectively evaded this trap by dissolving its relationship to the Comintern and by modifying its constitution to conform to the wording of the Act. The Federal Government replied in March 1941 by prosecuting Browder on a technicality related to a 1937 passport application; he was convicted and sentenced to a fouryear prison term. The German invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941 led to a crucial reversal of the Party’s position on us neutrality. After the us declaration of war on Germany and Japan following the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor on 7 December, the relationship between the cpusa and the us Government began to improve steadily. The Party became one of Roosevelt’s most enthusiastic supporters, urging repeatedly for the initiation of an Allied second front against Germany. It even ignominiously provided the us Government with documents in connection with the trial and conviction of Trotskyists prosecuted in 1941 under the statutes of the Smith Act.70 Roosevelt recognized the role being played by the Soviet Union in the eventual defeat of Germany and set about forging an alliance with Moscow. In a gesture to ‘strengthen national unity’, Browder’s sentence was commuted in May 1942.71 The immediate pre-war ‘red scare’ was over and the Communists defined the political task for the future as ‘the consolidation of the united nations’ total war effort against our common enemies’.72 Despite the cumulative negative effects on the Party’s influence among the left-wing intelligentsia owing to years of unpopular positions – the support of the Moscow trials in the late 1930s, the Ribbentrop–Molotov pact of 1939 – and the Soviet invasion of Finland in November 1939 – the cpusa was able to maintain its traditional social base. Although the Party

suffered losses to a higher degree than Browder had predicted, defections were not numerous and it was able during the late 1930s to mobilize labour and certain factions of the middle class effectively against war preparations. On the other hand, many of the carefully nurtured alliances formed by Communists with artists and intellectuals throughout the years of the Popular Front were shattered. As the historian Fraser Ottanelli notes, ‘fellow travellers and liberals who made anti-fascism their main concern [and] were bound neither by a sense of Party discipline nor by the priority to defend the Soviet Union’ abandoned the Party and Party-dominated mass organizations.73 Reinhardt, however, was not among them; his work for New Masses attested to his loyalty to the Party’s political policies throughout the tumultuous period from 1939 to 1941. fbi surveillance of Reinhardt was part of the Roosevelt administration’s anti-Communist sweep, an aggressive strategy conceived as early as 1936 and implemented in June 1939 by J. Edgar Hoover.74 Reinhardt’s investigation was triggered by information communicated to the Division of Investigation of the Federal Works Agency, wpa, which had indicated that the artist was a member of the cpusa: ‘C.D. Hollinger, Field Agent in Charge, wpa, Division of Investigation . . . was interviewed and advised from his records that Informant #1 had furnished his office with information that subject was a member of the Communist Party and subject resigned [wpa] before any investigation of this allegation was conducted.’75 The fbi concluded at the time of the initial investigation that Reinhardt had already been drawing cartoons and illustrations for New Masses for four years: ‘In November 1940 [Reinhardt] was employed by Weekly Masses Company, Incorporated . . . as Art Director . . . this firm publishes the weekly magazine New Masses.’ The fbi examined issues of New Masses dating from 31 December 1940 to 8 July 1941 for evidence of Reinhardt’s work. Six of Reinhardt’s illustrations were identified in what seems to have been a fairly desultory investigation; the agent failed to identify cartoons credited to ‘Rodney’ or ‘Rodney Frederick’ as the work of Reinhardt; nor did he widen the search of New Masses to include issues published before 31 December 1940.76 Speaking of Reinhardt’s use of pseudonyms throughout the late 1930s and early 1940s, Abe Ajay suggested that such a practice was ‘as much due to Ad’s highly developed sense of play/ploy as to any considered attempt to camouflage his identity for political reasons’.

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Ajay recalled: We’d joke about it; ‘Frederick’ he chose because it was his middle name. Both for reasons of amusement and security, since we both needed to cast about into the freelance art world, such as it was, and make a living. Also, being on the wpa and drawing for New Masses was not necessarily a friendly combination.77

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Indeed, the first fbi report stated that Reinhardt had voluntarily resigned from the Federal Art Project in late 1940 ‘during the course of investigation for private employment’. Apparently Reinhardt was dismissed earlier, in August 1939, because of continuous employment for more than eighteen months. He was then re-employed by the fap at the end of January 1940, only to resign in December of the same year.78 What the fbi did find of Reinhardt’s in New Masses between December 1940 and July 1941 is hardly incriminating; the field agent reported that ‘the sketches in themselves did not have any specific Communistic significance’ and noted that Reinhardt’s name ‘was not mentioned on any of the editorial pages as an art contributor’.79 While many of Reinhardt’s New Masses cartoons and illustrations between summer 1939 and June 1941 are chillingly subservient to the Party’s political line, astonishingly none of them is cited by the fbi. The fbi pursued various leads – there is a good deal of blotting out of names of informants on all the field reports – yet neither a criminal record under Reinhardt’s name in the New York Police Department files nor evidence that the artist had voted for or registered with the Communist Party in 1936 and 1939 was found.80 The investigation was concluded in 1942, a moment that coincided roughly with Roosevelt’s pardon of Browder. Allegations of Reinhardt’s Party associations haunted him. In 1958, in connection with the artist’s invitation to participate in an exhibition that was part of the American pavilion at the Brussels World’s Fair, Reinhardt was requested by the Passport Office to submit an affidavit concerning the claim that he had been a member of the cpusa in the 1930s and had been affiliated with other organizations described as Communist-controlled or as Communist fronts.81 Reinhardt complied with this request, writing: I was never a member of the Communist Party. I was a member of the American Artists Congress and I permitted my name to

be used as a sponsor of the Cultural and Scientific Conference for World Peace. I was never an ‘art director’ of ‘New Masses’ or a ‘member of the editorial council’ of ‘Soviet Russia Today’, but worked occasionally for those magazines as technical advisor [sic] with regard to typographical layout and artwork. I illustrated a pamphlet once for the American Jewish Labor Council and helped a friend of mine conduct an experimental ‘cartoon’ workshop for a few weeks one semester at the Jefferson School of Social Science. I was a freelance typographical designer and artist in the late 1930’s and early 1940’s, and none of my jobs had anything to do with the politics and editorial policies of the magazines, organizations, and institutions mentioned above.82 Reinhardt’s response is measured and clearly misleading in terms of his actual duties and responsibilities at New Masses. As de facto art director of New Masses during the late 1930s and early 1940s, Reinhardt was not simply producing work on specification; he illustrated key Party political lines through his editorial illustrations and cartoons and he wrote the captions accompanying his cartoons, thereby exercising a degree of control over their interpretation.83 Ajay and Reinhardt worked closely together on various publications and in a number of Left political organizations throughout the 1940s; both artists published cartoons in pm, The Guild Reporter and the National Guardian.84 Employing the pseudonym ‘A. Jamison’, Ajay and Reinhardt collaborated on the production of a number of illustrations and cartoon collés that were published in New Masses during the early 1940s.85 Ajay and Reinhardt also taught a class in political cartooning at the Jefferson School of Social Science during 1946.86 Ajay maintained that ‘there was no difficulty in agreement with [the Party’s] politics’ for Reinhardt, adding: he never Red-baited; he never was attracted to the people who were ‘running the show’, except Dave [Crockett] Johnson, Bruce Minton [Richard Branstein], and Joe Starobin. They [the Party stalwarts] could do it on a political level, but not art. They were so serious and unable to conduct an aesthetic argument on an abstract level.87

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Ajay shared Reinhardt’s pragmatic view of politics and his disdain for the social realist artists associated with New Masses. As part of an informal educational campaign, Reinhardt gave a number of slide lectures to the editors of New Masses, using what he called his ‘wine glass’ theory, which occurs in one of the pm pages. He apparently bombed-out with them. Quite enraged with this, after a few such lectures, he came to the conclusion that the gap was too big . . . he could never really communicate with them.’88 58

Reinhardt’s relationship to New Masses was further strained in 1943, when Mike Gold, a leading Communist and novelist, attacked Reinhardt in The Daily Worker, blasting the artist’s paintings as ‘an extreme example of where the tenets of extreme abstractionism can lead one’.89 Thereafter, the frequency of publication in New Masses of original illustrations by Reinhardt decreased sharply. Between 1944 and the end of 1946 virtually no new work by Reinhardt was published in New Masses, a fact easily explained by his military service in the us Navy. Instead, one finds earlier examples of Reinhardt’s work being reprinted, some of it dating from the early 1930s and his student days at Columbia, or illustrations appropriated from his other political activities, such as his work on campaigns for the Congress of Industrial Organizations-Political Action Committee (cio-pac).90 Readers of New Masses were informed in early 1946 that ‘Reinhardt . . . will contribute regularly’; the artist’s name is mentioned along with those of other mobilized artists such as Gropper and Ajay in an advertisement inviting readers to ‘Meet the Returning Artists and Writers’ at the magazine’s ‘34th Annual Artists and Writers Ball’.91 Charles Keller, a staff-artist for New Masses during the late 1940s, reported that Reinhardt quit the magazine sometime in 1946, after a minor dispute with the editor, Joseph North.92 Other artists associated with New Masses and eager to vindicate the Party leadership have claimed that Reinhardt merely drifted away from New Masses for unstated reasons.93 Reinhardt did not diminish his pro-Soviet, anti-imperialist stance when he ceased to contribute to New Masses. By the end of the decade he appears to have successfully weathered the first wave of post-war anti-Communism and continued to participate in political and cultural activities in which the cpusa played a leading

role. By the 1950s Reinhardt would have been well aware of the risks associated with overt displays of sympathy for the Party or participation in its allied mass organizations. Based on Reinhardt’s denial of his membership in the cpusa, the Criminal Division of the Department of Justice considered prosecuting Reinhardt in 1958 for perjury. Reinhardt was never charged, however, since his connection with the cpusa had ‘existed at a period some twenty years before the denial in question’ and the Department of Justice concluded that such a prosecution would be unsuccessful.94 It is no wonder that he took care to veil his precise political allegiances throughout his lifetime. Recalling his experience with the Artists’ Union and the aac, Reinhardt pleaded ignorance of the political issues involved, adding disingenuously that he was certain that politics ‘wasn’t very serious except for some artists who felt they needed it in relation to their art’.95

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3 ‘Painting-Reason’ and ‘Picture-Purpose’ abstract art for society’s sake Our present civilization is caught in the maelstrom of economic disorder and changing standards. An intense need for constructive thought predominates. The message of abstract painting, when utilized to serve this need, will be found to ring in accord with the life concepts of those great economists whose prophesies and plans are being notably fulfilled.1

During the 1930s a diverse group of American artists sympathetic to the Popular Front began to consider the problem of art and social agency and to theorize a relationship between non-figurative art and a passionate desire for a better world. The artists and critics that I collect under this term included, among others, Rosalind Bengelsdorf, Stuart Davis, Balcomb Greene, Gertrude Greene, Hananiah Harari, Louis Lozowick, Jan Matulka, Irene Rice Pereira, Meyer Schapiro, David Smith, Joseph Solman and Charmion von Wiegand. The institutions that they constituted included the Artists’ Union, the American Artists’ Congress, the American Abstract Artists and the Artists’ League of America, but also publications such as Art Front and New Masses. The Modernist Left occupied a cultural space in which versions of non-figurative art and formulations of socialism confronted each other as familiars, rather than adversaries.2 In contrast to the anti-Stalinist artists and intellectuals who effectively dropped out of mass political work during the mid- to late 1930s and early 1940s, many of these artists continued to subscribe to a range of modernist practices while remaining aligned with Marxism and organizations associated with the Communist movement. It is within this cultural space that we find the true home of Reinhardt’s practice throughout this period and, with its demise, the beginning of the artist’s turn towards negation. For Reinhardt, negation functioned in two ways: first, as a rehearsal of the idea that a completely abstract work of art

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was not entirely disadvantageous; secondly, as an expression of resistance directed principally at the politics of culture embodied by the New York School. The extremity with which he set out his position during the 1950s was in part a reaction to the commonly held belief that to be an artist engaged with abstraction and geometry during that time was to be second rate. During the late 1930s and early 1940s it was still possible to imagine geometric abstraction at the leading edge of art and culture in New York. The Modernist Left crossed generations, national and ethnic backgrounds and encompassed a fairly wide range of aesthetic interests, all of which clustered broadly about abstract art. No manifesto was ever issued, although individual artists wrote copiously about their aesthetic and political aspirations. As was the case with the painter Rosalind Bengelsdorf, these aspirations included a sense of solidarity with revolutionaries abroad and coded references to the Soviet Union. What the artists of the Modernist Left shared above all was the desire to advance the practice of non-figurative art and to promote that art as a species of realism. The first and second generation of the inter-war Modernist Left may be distinguished in terms of the vectors of age, national origin, gender and orientation towards modernism. Regarding gender, the first-generation Modernist Left was overwhelmingly male. By the mid1930s – the moment of the beginning of the emergence of the second generation – this changed and the number of women artists among this population increased dramatically. This shift can be linked to the existence of the pwap and fap projects and the financial security they provided; consequently, women were able to participate more fully as professionals in other institutional aspects of art and culture of the 1930s. From the time of its inception in late 1936 to the mid-1940s, the proportion of female members in the American Abstract Artists remained relatively constant at nearly 25 per cent. With respect to national origins, we note that a high proportion of the first generation of the Modernist Left were European immigrants. This fact contrasted sharply with the demographics of the second generation, whose population was almost entirely composed of native-born Americans. Of this group, many artists, including Reinhardt, were the offspring of immigrants. While this group remained predominantly white and male, it was composed of a far higher percentage of female artists and artists of colour than previous groups in New York of artists devoted to advancing the cause of abstract art.

Within the Modernist Left one found individuals who exhibited varying degrees of commitment to Party politics and Marxist ideology. Some, like Stuart Davis and Reinhardt, were fellow travellers; others, like Louis Lozowick, remained more closely tied to the cpusa.3 However, the majority of those associated with the Modernist Left held more subjective views of Marxism and were generally more comfortable with a humanistic interpretation of socialism that stressed its potential to release the full range of human creativity. Many of these artists were not members of the cpusa; rather, they tended to express their political beliefs by participating in mass institutions that arose as a consequence of the Communist movement. Most remained committed to a broadly Marxist outlook, yet never succumbed to outright anti-Stalinism or anti-Communism.4 The population of this rich artistic milieu embraced a variety of approaches to abstraction, of which some were tinged with an appreciation of the role of science in the process of modernization. These artists were in general agreement about the need for centralized economic and social planning and actively engaged in antifascist, pro-Soviet and frequently pro-Party political work. Above all, the Modernist Left responded in unison to the social and economic crisis thrown up by capitalism, searching for a role for artists to play in the reconstruction of a more democratic and just society. During the Popular Front period, the activism and theorizing of Stuart Davis exemplified the social ideals of the Modernist Left and provided a strong role model for Reinhardt. Davis imagined a relationship between abstract art and society as one in which ‘abstract art is an integral part of the changing contemporary reality, and . . . an active agent in that objective process’. He was quick to challenge those who argued that abstract art amounted to little more than an aesthetic adjunct to essentially unrealizable social theories: The brains, arms, materials, and democratic purpose of abstract artists have literally changed the face of our physical world in the last thirty years. And it must be noted that the changes they have made were constructive and progressive, which puts abstract painting in direct opposition to the destructive forces of totalitarianism and reaction. Abstract art has been and is now a direct progressive social force, not simply a theory about progress.5

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Reinhardt, who was close to Davis at the time, employed these ideas as the basis for his defence of abstract art during the early 1940s against the attacks of unsympathetic Communists. Most historical accounts of the confrontation between abstract art and the Communist movement stress the negligible influence exerted by the cpusa among non-figurative artists at the end of the 1930s.6 Yet a surprising number of abstract artists continued to identify with the Communist movement throughout the 1940s and, like Reinhardt, continued to press the case for the progressive, rather than meaningless or decadent, nature of abstraction. It was not easy going by any means. Reinhardt’s emphasis on autonomy as a means to accelerate the process of the unification of sensual and practical knowledge undoubtedly contributed to his isolation within the Communist movement.7 Such a view, along with the arguments Reinhardt advanced for the social significance of non-figurative art, proved to be unconvincing to many of the Party leaders he addressed, such as Joseph North, Abe Magil and Joseph Starobin. Moreover, Reinhardt’s insistence on the inappropriateness of any form of fine art as a means of explicit political education represented an unwelcome programme of cultural modernization that Party stalwarts and their allies at New Masses, such as Hugo Gellert and Rockwell Kent, rejected decisively. Reinhardt took this position because he believed in the efficacy of the mass media as the most appropriate means to disseminate political propaganda. What Reinhardt chose to deny was the extent to which the embrace of ‘socially significant art’ was a political matter of another sort. During the Popular Front, the Party’s interest in art and literature comprised one of the most visible and successful recruitment strategies aimed at winning over intellectuals and the middle classes to the anti-fascist cause and, it was hoped, to socialism. It comes as no surprise, then, to find Reinhardt’s position vigorously attacked even by those in the Communist movement who remained sympathetic to modern art. The issue that was most controversial and divisive for the Modernist Left, and thus most relevant to our understanding of Reinhardt’s role within it, was the central question of how the artist, working in a capitalist society, could participate in the class struggle for socialism. In a speech delivered as national secretary to the American Artists’ Congress (aac), Davis offered this response:

In order to withstand the severe shock of the crisis, artists have had to seek a new grip on reality. Around the pros and cons of ‘social content’, a dominant issue in discussions of present day American art, we are witnessing determined efforts by artists to find a meaningful direction. Increasing expression of social problems of the day in the new American art makes it clear that in times such as we are living in, few artists can honestly remain aloof, wrapped up in studio problems. But the artist has not simply looked out of the window; he has had to step into the street. He has done things that would have been scarcely conceivable a few years back.8 65

The artists of the Modernist Left were not unmoved by Davis’s impassioned plea to ‘step into the street’. All were actively involved in the work of one or more of the major organizations that had shaped the cultural life of the Left during the 1930s and ’40s, such as the aac and the Artists’ Union (later the United American Artists, uaa) and its organ, Art Front.9 At the same time, the social significance of specifically modernist artistic practices remained the key issue for these artists. Davis celebrated Picasso and Miró as exemplars of artists concerned with public affairs and Reinhardt and others argued for non-figurative art’s vitality as a general symbol of modernity and social progress.10 In some precincts, non-figurative art had already been charged with an explicitly functional role in the establishment of such a future; at least it had not yet been discounted altogether. In his criticism of the presumed ‘revolutionary value’ of art with ‘politically radical content’, Meyer Schapiro asserted that ‘non-political content’ did not ‘necessarily imply its irrelevance to revolutionary action’.11

the inconsolable polymath For me, there’s no need to bring a ‘painting-reason’ and a ‘picture-purpose’ together any more. I will do one or the other for completely different aims.12

‘Painting-reason’ and ‘picture-purpose’ were the catchphrases used by Reinhardt to reconcile two sets of competing obligations. From the late 1930s onwards the artist’s thinking about modernist art was never far removed from his involvement in advertising design,

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cartooning and the mass media. Reinhardt believed that the artist could not ignore the impact of new forms of media of mass communication such as film and photographic magazines.13 He did not develop this notion beyond a general level, yet it served his polemical purpose well. Reinhardt asserted that painting – characteristically a ‘relatively private, individual activity’ – could not compete on a pictorial level with images found in magazines and on the screen. Taking a swipe at the entire public mural movement in American art of the 1930s nurtured by the wpa, Reinhardt wrote in the early 1940s that ‘if an artist is concerned with communication and a larger public he should get a job in some mass-publishing or picture industry.’14 Reinhardt’s sense of art’s autonomy was expressed through the tension between ‘painting-reason’ and ‘picture-purpose’. In a text for his first exhibition at the Artists’ Gallery, Reinhardt announced an important division within his practice, one that was not simply a consequence of his familiarity with the art theories of the early twentieth-century critics Clive Bell and Roger Fry.15 Reinhardt made clear the debt to art of graphic design and illustration, which, now freed ‘from traditional fine art elaborations’, had the potential to ‘fulfill their functions more clearly and honestly’. Consequently,‘abstract art relieved painting from its picture purpose and permitted a freer and more complete individual expression and a more direct and positive thinking in form and color’. The works in this exhibition, Reinhardt wrote, ‘are not pictures . . . The intellectual and emotional content are in what the lines, colors and spaces do.’16 Reinhardt drew these functional divisions in response to critics of abstract art who dismissed such painting as decorative and devoid of true artistic merit. Rather than inflate the practice of art so that it attained the status of spectacle, Reinhardt adopted the opposite stance and set about to clarify art’s difference from mass media in order to establish its autonomous value as art. In 1943 he wrote about abstract art as though it could be a constructive practice within a greater social and political movement. His understanding of certain Marxist texts was crucial in the development of his notion of art’s autonomy and its relation to the ideal of an integrated life. These texts provided Reinhardt with the central concept of versatility, which he related explicitly to a wider programme of social and cultural change. In this way, artistic practice and concrete political work were linked as activities that contributed to the formation and integration of the complete human being.

Numerous references to Marxism and dialectics are found throughout Reinhardt’s papers of the 1930s and ’40s indicating more than a passing familiarity with this literature.17 In a widely quoted passage from The German Ideology of Karl Marx and Fredrick Engels,18 a work that Reinhardt was capable of reading in the original German, we find the basis for the artist’s endorsement of versatility and his advocacy of a more broadly democratic conception of artistic creativity: The exclusive concentration of artistic talent in particular individuals, and its suppression in the broad mass which is bound up with this, is a consequence of division of labor . . . [W]ith a communist organization of society, there disappears the subordination of the artist to some definite art, thanks to which he is exclusively a painter, sculptor, etc., the very name of his activity adequately expressing the narrowness of his professional development and his dependence on division of labor. In a communist society there are no painters but at most people who engage in painting among other activities.19 During the mid-1940s Reinhardt advocated a future in which the ‘democratization of art’ would be guaranteed through the political transformation of the ‘social structure which permitted an imaginative artist, still, only a selfish and “isolationist” relation to his work’. This image of a world where it is possible, ultimately, for every individual to be ‘his own artist, his own architect’ was not disconnected from the Stalinist longings of the cpusa.20 The artist’s most telling paraphrase of Marx, one that also reveals Reinhardt’s deep yet conflicted affinity with Neo-Plasticism, shows him speculating on the link between the ‘direct experience’, ‘honest communication’ and clarity of ‘pure painting’ and ‘a creative completeness and total sensitivity related to personal wholeness and social order’.21 Reinhardt outstripped his artistic peers by his ability to embrace contradiction. He also understood that the fight for a new political and social world did not automatically guarantee the negation of traditional, ‘reactionary’, bourgeois cultural forms and values. While the artist may have agreed partially with Jean Hélion’s assertion that ‘the work is a solution of the subject, after which there is nothing more to do about it; it does not call for action, but contemplation’, it was Reinhardt’s optimistic conjunction of Marx and

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Mondrian during the 1940s that exemplified and sustained his agenda for art and the future.22 Because of his commitment to create a space for the practice of abstract art within the political and cultural horizons of the Communist movement, Reinhardt announced that no artist, regardless of aesthetic persuasion, could ‘avoid both political responsibility and aesthetic criticism’.23 Along with other fellow-travellers, Reinhardt was ‘against a left culture which consistently valorized a realist aesthetic and treated modernist forms as at best problematic innovations which needed an infusion of “social content”’.24 Throughout the 1940s he repeatedly stressed the ‘democratic’ and progressive potential of non-objective art, which was commonly referred to by abstract artists as a higher form of realism. Twenty years later Reinhardt would offer a harsh assessment of this claim.25 Reinhardt’s uncompromising defence of fine art’s independence was directed, as well, towards other targets. He reasoned that if non-objective art claimed a privileged status within culture, it could only do so because of its intimate relationship to the technological and cultural forces found throughout modern society as a whole. Whether or not the artist is aware of it, Reinhardt wrote, ‘paintings must mean something and, at this time, very clearly’. In the context of the war emergency, Reinhardt stated flatly, one must question the ‘wisdom of any concession on the part of the painter to reach a larger audience by compromising his peculiar quality, granting also the importance of his effort in the war, as a fine-artist, not as a soldier or anything else’.26

collage as destruction A paste-up artist like Reinhardt – a ‘layout man’ – spends all day laying down columns of type and drawing red key lines to indicate the position of illustrative material on a page. This is how the architecture of the printed page was constructed before computer-aided design and desktop publishing. The resulting conglomeration of galley proofs, line illustrations, key lines, captions, page numbers, running heads and all the paraphernalia of the completed design is called a mechanical. All these bits would be affixed to a stiff, white board using rubber cement. The layout man proved himself a collagist with a purpose, which was to translate as clearly as possible the graphic design indicated by the art director’s plan, called a compre-

hensive, or ‘comp’, for short. When an illustration or cartoon was needed, the layout man was often called upon to select that image, choosing from hundreds of photographs and illustrations filed by subject matter in the suggestively named picture morgue. Today, we expect to retrieve pictorial resources from digitized clip art files resident on disks or downloadable from the Internet. In Reinhardt’s world, the layout man would need to rummage through large manila envelopes stored in a flat file or plan chest to locate his artwork. For mass-market trade magazines, an illustrator or photographer would have been commissioned to supply the required images. For a budget publication like New Masses, or any of the small magazines that Reinhardt helped to design during the 1930s and ’40s, the order of the day was to use stock photos or copyright-free artwork, or to cannibalize and modify existing illustrations. The layout man is a collagist: ‘As for collages, they are abstractions made with scissors and paste.’27 Reinhardt was producing papier collés by the end of the 1930s and into the beginning of the 1940s that were constructed of sliced magazine photographs. His painting began with the construction of a papier collé that functioned as a plan. Custom-coloured paper was cut into a variety of forms and pasted up into a composition that served as a model to be scaled up and transferred to canvas. The point was to avoid working from a preliminary sketch, to experience directly ‘color, and space structures and relationships’.28 If the artist did produce a preliminary sketch or block out the main thrust of the composition, these have rarely survived. Most likely, Reinhardt worked directly with coloured papers, pasting down and shifting areas until the right composition was achieved. The completion of the painting would then be a more or less straightforward matter of reproducing the papier collé. (Adjustments to form and colour could be made.) Sometimes the papier collé would be painted over, rapidly and freely, and blotted, as in Reinhardt’s postcard-sized Abstract Collage of 1940.29 This would soften the geometry and push the work, with some uncertainty, toward a lyrical play of floating bands of colour. These small, odd, experimental works were bridges to larger, more assured paintings that were constructed of continuous fields of deliberate brush strokes ‘simulating the angular sickle or blade shapes of a cut edge’.30 The layout man is a collagist. So it is not surprising to learn that Reinhardt sliced up photographs and assembled them in mitred compositions that destroyed every last bit of referential meaning

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the photograph had to offer. We can puzzle over the identity of this and that object, but for the most part our game of hide and seek eventually succumbs to the muffled ecstasy of the surface. There is nowhere to go to find meaning, so we have no choice but to skate across the half-tone skin. It is a thin skin, to be sure, but not entirely mono-layered: overlaps and parquetry reveal Reinhardt’s fastidiousness. It was important for Reinhardt to interrupt each photograph, each fragment of an image, absolutely perfectly. The scale of these collages is remarkable, as well. With some of these from the 1940s onwards no larger than seven by nine inches, we are reminded of the dimensions of jewel-like Persian miniatures, a pictorial form admired and studied by Reinhardt, along with other non-Western and ancient art. The paintings derived from these collages were small, no larger than a tabloid newspaper page or a political pamphlet – large enough, though, to invent a universe of abstraction from a photograph’s grain. Collages are sometimes visual puzzles to be solved; a metadimension of reality to be read off the page. Reinhardt’s papier collés are nothing of the sort. They are interruptions, obliterations and exemplifications of the principle of creation through destruction. These papier collés are the result of applying the spirit of Synthetic Cubism to the matter of the mechanically reproduced photographic image. You cancel out a photograph by shredding it, artfully – just enough to dissimulate the reference, but not so much as to transform it into an ungainly patch of grey. Reinhardt’s photo-collages mostly stand on their own as artworks. Occasionally a papier collé is revisited a year or two later. This is an occasion to translate the overall effect using pen and ink, to reduce the papier collé to an elegant, spare tracery in black and white. To what end? For the sake of conjuring out of stray details arabesques, spidery compartments and labyrinths drained of their mythic charm. Yet, it remains a kind of abstraction from nature. Only now, it is the world of photographic images that is under the knife.

‘painting is more than the scum of its pots’: beyond formalism 31 The series of works that Reinhardt produced in the Virgin Islands during the summer of 1949 allude to figurative or semi-abstract subjects partially obscured by a field of daubs. The substructure or

visual ground of these paintings, described by the artist’s friend Nancy Flagg, consists of a medley of ‘exquisite drawings of shells which [Reinhardt] brutally smothered with casein paint’.32 Reinhardt’s act of destruction in the service of creation has been compared by the poet Robert Lax to the richness and variety of a coral reef, with its myriad encrustations and convoluted forms. In one sense, these watercolours of the late 1940s are sedimentations that perversely subvert traditional expectations of transparency and clarity associated with that medium. As strange as these watercolours are, there is nothing of the overall greyness or levelling of tone that we find in works on paper produced by Reinhardt around 1950. Reinhardt continued to transfer to more ambitious paintings what he had discovered through the making of a relatively incidental work. Consider Untitled (1949), in which an ultramarine ground is overlaid with a dark blue-black matrix. The ground is unevenly applied and in some areas the weave of the canvas is allowed to show through. The overall hue of the ground is also varied, with touches of lighter, greenish blues and darker, reddish blues. The blue-black matrix imparts a luminous quality to the ground, which peeks out from the thick bands like inset jewels. The ground appears to be a source of illumination, emanating through chinks in an otherwise occlusive overlay. The process of dark over light is reversed, for example, in Red, Green, Blue and Orange (1948) or Red Painting (1950). In these works, the colour appears to hover and is applied using more or less regular short, squarish strokes and deposited tone upon tone. As Reinhardt altered the composition of the ground, he moved from a calligraphic miscellany with polychrome accents that mapped out the topography of the interstices, to colour fields of minimal incident and fewer hues, and finally to uninflected monochrome. There is a corresponding change in the form of the superimposed elements, as well. Sometimes they remain relatively inconspicuous, functioning as grace notes enlivening an otherwise visually static surface, as in Blue Abstract (1947). The majority of the paintings of 1947 and 1948, riotously colourful as their ground pattern may be, are finished as it were with a monochrome matrix that functions as a framing device collecting the overall pattern into something vaguely like a centralized field. Abstract No. 1 of 1948 is typical. It shows its allegiance to Reinhardt’s spectacularly claustrophobic collages, like Untitled (1943), which is constructed principally of fragments of colour illustrations of

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modern art. Number 11 (1949), one of the works completed during the summer at Henley Cay, shows a rich and visually active field of drawing and colour literally whited out as though a blizzard had ravaged the tropics. By limiting his palette and regularizing his brush strokes, Reinhardt found he could fashion a painting that settled into a kind of visual calm. Some paintings, particularly the small-scale gouaches that persisted into the early 1950s when he had already begun working on a much larger scale, effectively function as studies for more ambitiously scaled works. One can imagine Reinhardt gauging the results of his various configurations: a group of unimaginably thin slabs floating in infinite space, or a swarming field of standardized daubs deformed under intense pressure, massing against the field of vision like bugs splattered on a windshield; neither figure nor ground, pattern nor monochrome. October 1949 is an important painting of this period because it clearly reveals Reinhardt’s abiding interest in classical Chinese landscape painting and calligraphy. In this painting one finds the trails of dry and loaded brushwork and agitated, compact, oscillating and feathery strokes. His repertoire includes smooth curves, verticals, horizontals and a single ‘criss-cross’ just to the right of the optical centre of the painting. This and other similarly ‘denuded’, virtuoso skeletal compositions exemplify a parallel body of work that Reinhardt developed in the late 1940s alongside more layered, though no less meticulously constructed, gouaches and oils. Another set of variations, dating from around 1948, is far more rectilinear in composition, larger in scale and virtually depthless. In these so-called ‘brick’ paintings, which are grid-like but asymmetric, Reinhardt had discovered a way to reconsider colour. With colour areas laid mainly side-by-side, Reinhardt was able to demonstrate the relative quality of hue. These early examples are precursors to the largely monochromatic works of 1952. What they reveal is how Reinhardt’s earlier polychromatic paintings, striving for a tonal uniformity, are realized fully in the artist’s work from 1950 onwards. The absence or presence of gesture, by which I mean those highly stereotyped and modest calligraphic strokes so favoured by the artist, in one strand of Reinhardt’s production of this period is neither a sign of renunciation nor affiliation with the New York School. For Reinhardt, gesture grew out of cartooning, calligraphy and a study of Asian art. The lesson Reinhardt drew from a painting like October 1949 is that the gestural, when rendered in the

spirit of the letterform or the conventions of cartoon representation, can be used to construct a uniform, shallow visual field. October 1949 achieves this through the absence of colour. Yet it was the problem of colour that occupied Reinhardt’s energies when the kind of painting exemplified by October 1949 had run its course. The series of paintings that were most clearly driven by colour eventually prevailed and were transformed over the course of several years into the familiar symmetrical geometric schema that enables Reinhardt to focus sharply on colour. Between 1947 and 1952 Reinhardt seemed to have systematically worked through the most significant combinations and permutations of this painterly format, arriving by 1953 at a point where his production consisted entirely of blue, red or ‘black’ monochromes. In ‘Timeless Stylistic Art Historical Cycles’, a self-parody of the path of his painting since the late 1930s that Reinhardt composed as an interpretive text for his 1966 retrospective, the artist condensed and academicized this highly productive period across two dramatically defined stages: ‘archaic color-brick-brushwork impressionism and black-and-white constructivist calligraphies of the late 40’s’ and ‘early-classical hieratical red, blue, black monochrome squarecross-beam symmetries of the early 50’s’. What Reinhardt had, in practice, patiently and diligently teased out of a limited group of painterly oppositions was transformed, under the influence of George Kubler’s The Shape of Time and other rubrics scavenged from the artist’s encyclopaedic knowledge of art history, into a comedic script that was used to guide the installation of his survey exhibitions of 1965 and 1966. Reinhardt, of course, was hardly interested in presenting the struggle to reach the ‘black’ paintings of 1960 in any terms other than those related to his sense of faktura. These developments in Reinhardt’s painting obviously took place in a wider artistic and social context. Looking back from the mid-1960s – as Reinhardt did – on this period of work is not simply a matter of constructing a chronicle of negations. A conversation was taking place on many levels: between Reinhardt and himself and between Reinhardt and his peers. Personal antipathies – accumulated over the course of a decade – and the need to establish one’s work definitively in a hostile context coloured Reinhardt’s retelling of the recent past. This is why we cannot seriously expect the artist to disavow that, between the late 1940s and early 1950s, the works of Mark Rothko, Barnett Newman and Josef Albers represented little more

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than a set of negative examples. Yet it always takes me aback to see how Reinhardt had subjected his own history of production to the kind of reduction he had previously reserved for the entire sweep of the history of art (and through his obsessive photography, other aspects of visual culture). The moment of time’s retelling, which is both coercive and liberating, was assured a happy outcome. But the resolution had a price.

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4 The Intellectual Gift of the Post-Historic Artist ‘blue in art is blue. red in art is red. yellow in art is yellow. dark gray in art is not dark gray’: aesthetics and indeterminacy 1 ‘A color in art,’ wrote Reinhardt in 1965, ‘is not a color.’ Similarly, ‘colorlessness in art is not colorlessness’.2 The process of symbol formation teaches us to expect that colour may signify something other than a visually perceptible hue. Colourlessness, too, may serve to express metaphorically, signifying non-aesthetic attributes like lassitude or the proclamation of a defiant non-conformity. Reinhardt took great pleasure in this interpretive loophole provided by polysemy, enthralled by what he called the ‘mysterious delights of multiple meanings’. But it was really the possibility of colour in the abstract that appealed to him – colour drained of its meaning, colour as pure quality, as Platonic ideal.We revel in the linguistic perversity of those inventive and maddening texts by the artist known as ‘art-as-art dogma’, as hues and their possible references couple and uncouple apparently at will. For Reinhardt, the directness of the visual experience of pure colour that lurked in the infinite complexity of the colour sign was nothing less than beautiful.3 Reinhardt ‘makes of black something witty and perverse’, but the black in Reinhardt’s paintings does not appear black: rather an extremely dark, matte grey.4 Reinhardt tells us that ‘gloss black in art is gloss black’, not simply because gloss black is a kind of black he eschewed, but because gloss black functions as a mirror, seductively reflecting the painting’s environment. Under such conditions the situation of looking can never dissolve into nothingness as it is always drawing attention to itself and providing the viewer with an opportunity to fixate distractedly on her reflected form. Reinhardt did not immediately abandon the lusciously glowing chromatics of the blue and red monochromes of the early 1950s for the dark paintings. Rather than make a decisive break with ungreyed hues, he lingered for close to four years on the problem of

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how to make a painting nearly ‘black’ or very dark. Discussions of Reinhardt’s ‘black’ paintings tend to concentrate on the series inaugurated in 1960, where uniformity of size and schemata complements the single-mindedness of the artist’s project. More needs to be said about the way the ‘black’ paintings constitute a radical reinvention of the art of painting owing to the sheer novelty of the paintings’ unfolding optical effects. The rectilinear, geometric format adopted by Reinhardt from the early 1950s onwards is absolutely crucial to the generation of these optical effects. In paintings completed during 1949 and 1950 we can see Reinhardt’s ambivalence towards the adoption of a strictly geometric structure. Red and blue hues, utilized separately for monochrome paintings and in combination to produce visually dissonant canvases, were the means Reinhardt chose to eliminate illusionist space. These works were greyed or ‘un-done’ from 1952 to 1953. (With the greying also came a change of heart concerning the scale of the painting, no doubt influenced by the examples of Jackson Pollock and Barnett Newman. There are no dark grey canvases in Reinhardt’s body of work to match the heroic scale of his 1952 Red Painting, save Black Quadruptych of 1966, which was constructed of four 60 × 60-inch paintings to prodce a single 120 × 120-inch work. Assembled on the occasion of Reinhardt’s 1966 retrospective at the Jewish Museum, New York, to the best of my knowledge it has never again been exhibited in that form.) To account for the radical ‘draining of light from color’ that characterizes Reinhardt’s work from 1953 onwards, it has been suggested that the artist was responding negatively to the strong figure ground illusion present in Josef Albers’s series Homage to the Square. At Albers’s invitation, from 1950 to 1952 Reinhardt was a visiting critic at Yale University School of Art, working mainly during the summer terms. It seems likely that this contact with Albers was instrumental in convincing Reinhardt of the need to revisit geometry and to develop a more analytical approach towards colour. In Albers’s work these two aspects went hand in hand: without the stable, straightforward armature of the mise-en-abyme of squarewithin-square, the relativity of colour perception could not be demonstrated convincingly. The question that remains is, quite simply, ‘Why black?’ It is undeniable that Reinhardt had already encountered the lyrical black monochrome paintings of Edward Corbett during a 1950 summer

residency at the California School of Fine Arts (csfa), San Francisco.5 Shortly thereafter, Reinhardt saw the early series of monochrome paintings by Robert Rauschenberg: the white monochromes at the Betty Parsons Gallery in 1951, the black, glossy monochromes at Stable Gallery in 1953, and the red monochromes at Charles Egan Gallery in 1954. Many, but not all, of Rauschenberg’s monochromes are gestural, collaged paintings where paint is applied over newspapers (two important exceptions are the artist’s fourpanel white monochrome, and his matt black triptych, Untitled, of 1951). As examples of monochrome painting, the works of Corbett and Rauschenberg were suggestive, but not necessarily seminal to Reinhardt’s project. In the artist’s view, Rauschenberg’s white monochromes were a kind of sceptical nihilism, while the black glossy monochromes committed the cardinal sin of being reflective and thereby allowing the introduction of distracting, art-negating elements into the experience of looking. Reinhardt makes no mention of Rauschenberg’s matt black work. At any rate, a distinction should be drawn between the significance that the monochrome held for these two artists in the early 1950s. In contrast to Rauschenberg’s neo-Dadaist gesture, Reinhardt’s monochromes are constructive, in that the possibility of painting, rather than its hybridization or utter negation, prevails. Nevertheless, coming to terms with these various conceptions of monochrome painting bolstered Reinhardt’s conviction of the fundamental correctness of his resolve to adopt an unmotivated geometric format to structure monochrome painting. It also strengthened his resolve to present his work in a manner that emphasized its distance from the everyday. It was black that most effectively negated hue while allowing for sufficient subtle variations through the use of progressively deeper tonalities. Black also carried connotations for the Abstract Expressionists that Reinhardt would have found impossible to resist taking as a ground for contention and deconstruction.6 The aesthetic issues that Reinhardt had attempted to work through during the early 1950s included the all-over composition as a marker for non-illusionist, shallow painterly space and the use of formal symmetry to destroy hierarchical or dynamic composition. The monochrome enabled Reinhardt to reduce the number of variables in his painting so that he could concentrate on the matter of colour. The charge of ‘minor key Orientalism’ levelled against Reinhardt’s paintings of this period, while harsh, underscores a

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common perception about the lack of resolution in the artist’s body of work at this time. It remains the case that for several years during the early 1950s he was groping towards a solution that was only partially revealed by any given work of the time. These paintings showed Reinhardt what would not work within his scheme. Having worked through red and blue and white, the problem of affecting optical resonance using close-valued hues based on black was the only untested option. Once that decision was reached, Reinhardt gave free reign to his vivid comic imagination as he explored through his writings the manifold and suitably gothic cultural associations of black and the religious connotations of a symmetrical, tripartite grid – the so-called Greek cross – that defined the structure of his paintings from 1960 to 1967.

‘how to look at modern art in america: fifteen years later’ 7 Reinhardt’s last collage cartoons were published between 1961 and 1963.8 These included a single-image ‘review’ of Selden Rodman’s study on art, The Insiders, published in Jubilee magazine, an updated version of the art cartoon ‘How to Look at Modern Art in America’, which had originally been published in pm in 1946, and a flyer for a group show at the Dwan Gallery in Los Angeles.9 Of the three, the art cartoon was the only item that is invested with the vitality and relevance we ordinarily associate with Reinhardt’s use of print media. A diminishing appetite on Reinhardt’s part for illustrated campaigns aimed principally at artists is suggested by the fact that a gap of five years separates the publication of his last major cartoon for Art News – the widely reproduced, much-discussed and complex ‘Portend of the Artist as a Jhung Mandala’ – and the pictorial ‘review’ of The Insiders. By the early 1960s Reinhardt’s ideological distance from his peers (and the critics and museums that supported them) could not have been greater. He had decided to confront directly what he viewed to be the inadequate critical response to his paintings and the establishment’s relative indifference to his historical role in the development of abstract art in America since the post-war period. His resolve would have been further bolstered by the fact that the Museum of Modern Art was planning a retrospective in 1961 of the work of Mark Rothko. Reinhardt’s ‘art-as-art’ dogma eventually emerged from this

process of self-reflection, as well as the desire to publish in book form a more comprehensive statement of his aesthetic and moral position. Another significant outcome of this shift in Reinhardt’s attitude was the realization of a stunning pair of self-curated retrospective surveys. These were organized in 1960 and 1965, with the Betty Parsons Gallery having played a central role in each exhibition. Reinhardt’s 1960 exhibition was publicized through a wideranging and extremely complimentary article on the artist’s career written by the British-born art historian and faculty colleague, Martin James.10 The second exhibition, however, was far more ambitious and ultimately provided Reinhardt with the critical leverage he had hoped for. The so-called ‘red’, ‘blue’ and ‘black’ exhibitions – originally planned as an even more provocative and novel four-gallery event – presented works from the 1950s and ’60s simultaneously across three galleries. At the same time Reinhardt began to cultivate relations with galleries outside New York, a move that led to important solo exhibitions in 1963 and 1964 in Paris, Los Angeles and London. In the catalogue for the 1960 exhibition, 25 Years of Abstract Painting, Reinhardt’s graphic policing of similarly scaled reproductions of his paintings converges on the seemingly inevitable perfection of the near-black trisected square, a format he employed exclusively for his oil paintings until his death in 1967. The reproductions for 25 Years of Abstract Painting are set in a sea of whiteness that is the page to create a fittingly decontextualized index of selfsustaining production. We ought to bear in mind that Reinhardt produced this layout for a self-curated retrospective organized, in part, in response to what the artist perceived as the chronic lack of interest in his career shown by New York’s museums of modern art. The chronicle of Reinhardt’s production presented in the catalogue is a supremely rhetorical example of graphic design, intended to generate the maximum cognitive dissonance between his painterly practice and that of his Abstract Expressionist peers. While the photographic reproduction of paintings and painters at work in their studios helped to construct the mythology of Abstract Expressionism that Reinhardt found so distasteful and frankly corrupting, he employed the same media in an effort to contest and demystify the encroaching culture of self-expression in painting. Reinhardt’s catalogue layout chronologically orders two and a half decades of painting as a quintessential image of ‘art-as-

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art’ and nothing else. Unlike André Malraux’s musée imaginaire, which used photographic reproductions of art to unify culturally and temporally remote objects into a single concept of world art, Reinhardt’s layout, with its strict diachronic ordering of series of developing forms, edged closer in spirit to the philosophy of art of George Kubler. Ironically, the catalogue becomes the space where Reinhardt’s art is encountered on its own, largely formal, terms. The significance of this project is not only to be found in its bald reaffirmation of the aesthetic autonomy of art. It aims, as well, to place the destiny of painting, which for Reinhardt means abstract painting, squarely in the hands of the artist.11 Finally, it was a project that engenders a seriously comic view of modernism, wherein art is compelled to wear its ludicrous fate of meaninglessness with a wry smile. By all accounts the first half of the 1960s was a difficult, dispiriting time for Reinhardt. Although he had exhibited regularly with Parsons since the late 1940s, by the early 1960s he did not consider her to be his exclusive ‘agent’ and therefore felt free to establish relationships with other dealers. While Reinhardt remained with Parsons’s gallery to the end of his life, like most artists he was sometimes critical of the way his dealer handled affairs. A few years earlier he had confided to Irving Sandler that Parsons was always prone to be manipulated by her artists, implying that she simply was not forceful enough to play the game. ‘At one point’, wrote Sandler quoting Reinhardt, ‘the gallery was taken completely out of her hands.’12 In a strong letter to Reinhardt prompted by his ‘withdrawal’ from the gallery, Parsons confronted the artist with his apparent hypocrisy: Dear Ad: I have always respected your point of view and have gone along with it whether I agreed with it or not, as I have always felt that the artist had the right to express ‘himself ’ in his own way. If you wish to ‘withdraw’ from the art scene or ‘crap’ as you phrase it, that is your privilege and right. But when you ‘withdraw’ from the Betty Parsons Gallery and yet show at the Iris Claret Gallery [sic] in Paris and Dwan Gallery in Los Angeles that is distinctly ‘unfair’ and that I cannot allow as it is belittling to both of us and I would not be your friend, let alone gallery dealer, if I let this happen.13

Parsons continued in this vein, writing that ‘protest’ rather than ‘despair’ or ‘withdrawal’ would be the proper response to the ‘whorishness’ of the art scene. The prospect of Reinhardt’s collaboration with Clert so exercised Parsons that she referred to the Parisian’s gallery as a ‘notorious whorehouse . . . where corruption seems all right’. Parsons accused Reinhardt of having adopted a double standard in New York, for which ‘morals’ were demanded. Apparently unaware of the extent of the artist’s personal relationship with Clert, Parsons claimed that Reinhardt’s problem was that she herself was ‘not corrupt enough’ and suggested sarcastically that he would be happier if she ‘was more of a belly dancer in the art world’. Parsons concluded on a rather more playful, conciliatory note, writing that she and Reinhardt ‘could learn to “sin together” in New York more happily’. Then she reported the gallery had sold Blue, No. 1-1960 to Union Carbide Corporation and that she would purchase Dark Painting No. 6-1956.14 Reinhardt had remained throughout the 1950s a highly visible and vocal artist of the New York and national art scene. If we accept his own harsh standards of success and take seriously his less glowing self-assessment as an outsider, we will be compelled to dwell solely on his mediocre sales figures and the failure of major New York museums to celebrate his achievements through substantial purchases and survey exhibitions.15 Reinhardt, though, remained adamant that it was the job of an artist to exhibit work publicly; this was something he had managed to do thanks to the determination and loyalty of Parsons, with whom he exhibited regularly from 1946. His participation in various professional art forums of the 1950s, such as The Club, the College Art Association, the Woodstock Artists Association and Philip Pavia’s little magazine It Is (an attempt to extend the reach of the group that constituted The Club), remained a significant personal investment and resulted in some of his most finely crafted and genuinely humorous polemical interventions. On the whole, these gestures were aimed at his peers and produced few discernible results; indeed, they served mainly to reinforce his colleagues’ view of him as an extremist, a moralist and heir to the purist doctrines of Mondrian. The exchanges that took place at the Philadelphia Panel – organized by Pavia in March 1960 and chaired by Harold Rosenberg – must have made Reinhardt painfully aware that his criticism of the subordination of artists to the corrupt machinery of museums,

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commercial galleries and art journalism had only served to highlight his ideological isolation.16 Reinhardt argued that the attempt to introduce representation into abstract art was not only aesthetically incoherent but morally wrong. Yet, by collapsing art and ethics in this way, his argument proved unintelligible to a liberal audience. ‘How to Look at Modern Art in America’, subtitled ‘Fifteen Years Later’, graphically drives home Reinhardt’s unwillingness to establish a common ground with his peers. The 1961 version of the cartoon bears a number of significant revisions that reflect Reinhardt’s sense of loss of community, isolation and a feeling that the possibility for artists to exercise their sovereignty was now far less promising than it had ever been during the immediate post-war period. The most startling of Reinhardt’s revisions was the elimination of an entire generation of painters, consisting largely of the artist’s peers and fellow-travellers of the 1930s and ’40s: the socalled ‘abstract’ branch of the tree of modern art. To selected remaining aspects of the 1946 original, Reinhardt had set about exaggerating the corrupting influences on art that were present during the 1940s but at the time, only dimly seen. By 1961 these conditions constituted the norm that Reinhardt asserted was driving the production and distribution of art. For example, the meagre funding of damagingly competitive prizes for artists by the naive ‘business as art patron’ had expanded enormously, thanks to the sophisticated intercession of foundations that funnelled funds from business to art. Kandinsky’s slogan ‘abstract art is concrete’ had been replaced by the resolutely vulgar quip ‘money talks’. The cornfield that had once served as an allegory for American Regionalism – the cultural place ‘where no demand is made on you’ – was now populated with a more diverse canon of American (more properly ‘Americanized’) art heroes. This was where Pollock, Hopper and Gorky now resided, testifying to the accommodation of the most non-conformist artists to a univocal understanding of national culture celebrated by museums and their corporate benefactors. Even Alfred Barr’s founding triumvirate of modern art – Picasso, Braque and Matisse – is replaced by Reinhardt with an idiosyncratic trinity that defies chronology but upholds the artist’s view of the privileged position of abstract art in the history of twentieth-century art. At the same time, this grouping reaffirms the artist’s famous demonization of representation, anti-art, and the confusion of art and life. Thus, we find Poussin (a genuine hero of Reinhardt, signifying all that is vital

in seventeenth-century art), Schwitters (the quintessential Dadaist) and Rubens (in Reinhardt’s view, the antithesis of Poussin) cast as precursors of a proudly ‘plural’ twentieth-century art. That the cartoon projects a bleak prospect for ‘art-as-art’ goes without saying; its bathos resides in the way in which it lays waste to the very historical and social context from which Reinhardt claimed, in his more florid pronouncements, direct descent. Despite their satirical purpose, the widely known and highly popular art comics of 1946 to 1947 are optimistic and expansive. Reinhardt’s cartoon broadsides of the 1950s, by comparison, are meaner, nastier and unsparing of fellow New York artists. Reinhardt’s strength is to be found in his use of all manner of polarizing devices intended to reveal the poverty of the art world’s liberal consensus. His collage cartoons of the mid-1940s were intended to wage a different battle and had contributed heavily, with his blessings, to his public image as an artist. Now they had served their purpose and needed to be retired, a fact that gives Reinhardt’s final 1961 art cartoon for Art News the quality of a parting shot.

perfection and the end of art How well are we prepared for the idea of post-historic art and the arrival of the post-historic artist?17

The French intellectual and adventurer André Malraux (1901–1976) devoted the last three decades of his life to publishing works on the ontology of the museé imaginaire. This phrase, which has been suggestively mistranslated as ‘museum without walls’, raises photography as a spectre haunting our understanding and consumption of art. Photography, wrote Malraux, ‘seems to reveal or to develop the creative act; to make of the history of art primarily a continuing succession of creations.’18 Malraux imagined that the album of reproductions formed a portable museum that might replace, for the mass of people, the museum gallery. ‘A museum without walls has been opened up to us’, Malraux declared, as he deftly exploited the suggestive potential of photographic reproductions of works of art, demonstrating how images function both as pictorial resource – a record of the formal qualities of an object – and as index of the power of photography to manipulate and transform art dramatically through the use of the photographic detail, angle of attack and lighting.19

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On the assumption that one must not yield to the temptation to engage in what Malraux considered to be the impossible task of reconstructing the original intentions and meanings of historical works of art, the selection and sequencing of works in the musée imaginaire can only proceed from the significance accorded these works by our contemporary experience of them.20 For Malraux, the musée imaginaire was ‘a place of the mind’ where ‘it is always at the call of living forms that dead forms return to life’.21 The musée imaginaire presented the image of a world of transhistorical art, founded on ‘affinities’ and arrachement, literally the rending of the work of art from its context. Reinhardt was obsessed with all sorts of systems of classification and ordering: his teaching notes for art history, like his writings on the negative attributes of the ‘black’ paintings, were often little more than inventories that suggested an incantatory reading and bespoke a healthy disregard for the academic conventions of the discipline. In an art cartoon by Reinhardt published in the June 1951 issue of the Parisian art magazine Art aujourd’hui, an issue devoted to American art, one finds the bountiful genealogical tree of modern art boldly retitled ‘Imaginary Museum’ in deference to Malraux.22 With its mapping of historical origins and relations of succession, the genealogical tree – hardly a Malrucian trope – charts the imprint of influence and demonstrates the affinities of schools and styles of art. Malraux’s notion of the museum as a site that ‘divests works of art of their function’, and invites the viewer to witness the confrontation of works of art as art without recourse to historical context, presented Reinhardt with an enthralling, radical proposition: that there is no such thing as a history of art, only a succession of forms in space and time, the significance of which is revealed through a process of serialization that highlights contemporary attention to, and interest in, specific details re-described as formal conventions. Art could be confronted, as it were, directly. The work of art is no longer seen as a reflection of its time and place or even a moderately dense iconographic puzzle; rather, it now functions as a cipher for art itself, its voice that of the literalist. When arranged chronologically – a type of ordering eschewed by Malraux but favoured by Reinhardt – the forms we call art reveal a number of startling patterns. In this setting, a typology of form is the conceptual new tool with which to understand the significance of art. The first glimpse we have of Reinhardt’s interest in this idea

is found in ‘How to Look at More Than Meets the Eye’ (1946), an ‘art comic’ composed for pm. One of the panels – absurdly titled ‘Naked-Mind’s-Eye-to-Eye-Witness-Report’ – is an inventory of representations of eyes, harvested from the work of Klee, Miró and Picasso. Reinhardt encourages ‘gallery artists’ and ‘commerical artists’ to pilfer this stock at will. If, as Malraux suggests, the meaning of art is known to us only in the present and is determined by the conditions of the photographic reproduction of art, then any number of sequences of images of art may be devised to fit a particular hypothesis about the meaning of art. One advantage for Reinhardt of this anti-historical approach is the way in which it privileges a formalist reading of art. Comparing works of art that are historically and culturally disjointed encourages the perception that art is truly autonomous, self-contained and beholden to internal laws of development. Moreover, the Malrucian conception of the imaginary museum provides a powerful model for contesting the ground of metaphor in art. If ‘art-as-art’ is the fate of all aesthetic production – the proper home of which is the museum or archive – then appeals to the artist’s intentions regarding the meaning of art are irrelevant. In place of the existentially charged semantically specific work of art, one finds the generic work of art, the value of which is determined solely by its position within a series of other works of art. This is a grand system to which all examples of art, artefact and architecture, regardless of origin and purpose, may be assimilated. Presented in this way, Malraux’s notion of a musée imaginaire is a direct challenge to the empirical methods of art historians. This suggests a lethal attitude of indifference to the historical meaning of works of art. Indeed, this was the basis of Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s and Ernst Gombrich’s criticism of The Voices of Silence.23 The application of Malraux’s ideological system to artefacts and architecture found in Asia, the Middle East and Africa, from antiquity onwards, seemed to have brought into being a category of ‘world art’ that paradoxically tells us little about the world but a great deal about that celebrated fiction, the ‘world of art’. For Malraux, an emphasis on non-Western art and artefacts was derived, in part, from earlier, decidedly controversial dealings during the 1920s with Asian art.24 In public presentations and throughout his writings, Reinhardt made numerous references to Malraux. In an interview on the eve of his retrospective at the Jewish Museum, Reinhardt advised artists

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to adopt ‘a kind of Malrauxian point of view, in which the whole history of art is known to and is part of them’. If they did not, they would be considered ‘idiots, children or romantics’.25 In a series of unpublished notes on modern art, we find Reinhardt’s transcription of a number of statements from Malraux’s Voices of Silence, including ‘art imitates art’, ‘prime mover of artist is never life but always another work of art’ [sic], ‘Cézanne does not set out to render life, but to speak the tongue of Manet’, and ‘a painter is not a man in love with scenery; primarily a man in love with painting’.26 Reinhardt’s legendary marathon slide presentations at The Club, during which up to two thousand slides of art, artefacts or architecture drawn from diverse cultural traditions were projected over a period of three hours or more, were variations on Malraux’s theme of the ‘museum without walls’.27 In place of photographic reproductions of art printed in book format and available to the reader for leisurely contemplation, Reinhardt introduced the much more confining and excruciating spectacle of hours of projected images of thematically grouped art objects occasionally interspersed with morphologically similar objects drawn from everyday life. His narrative sensibility was probably better suited to cinema and animation, since the slide shows were less about photography, and more about constructing an image flux composed of hundreds of photographic frames. It was as if Reinhardt had conceived of a film of the visual culture of the world and projected it one frame at a time.

neither secular nor sacred There’s something nice about religious points of view in which the central meanings can’t be pinned down.28

When Reinhardt complained ‘what’s wrong with the art world is not Andy Warhol or Andy Wyeth but Mark Rothko’, he added: ‘the corruption of the best is the worst’.29 Reinhardt’s invective was prompted by Rothko’s decision to take up a commission to decorate the De Menil chapel in Houston, Texas. Since the early 1950s, Reinhardt, something of an expert on the contemporary question of art and religion, had been chastising New York colleagues such as Robert Motherwell for accepting a commission to decorate a synagogue and Barnett Newman for aspiring to religious painting in his series Stations of the Cross.30 While Reinhardt was mounting these

attacks he was, alongside Motherwell, a trustee on the board of the New York-based Foundation for Art, Religion and Culture (farc), an organization that encouraged dialogue between artists and theologians for the purpose of developing a more modern understanding of the place of religion in contemporary art and culture. Reinhardt’s reasons for maintaining an interest in religion are encapsulated in a series of remarks made in 1959 while lecturing at the Dayton Art Institute: A great many people are trying to make art a religion or have it replace traditional religion in which a god or the central essence can’t be pinned down and named. But pure abstract art is very limited as to what can be read into it. Abstract Expressionist art, on the other hand, is very open, in that people can read their own wishes and fantasies and subjectivities into it. Pure abstract art doesn’t permit that.31 Reinhardt rejected left-wing criticism of Abstract Expressionism as an art devoid of meaning. On the contrary, he sought an antidote for the glut of associative meaning it enabled and to this end he turned to Zen Buddhism. By the late 1950s he had become well known for his interest in Zen Buddhism, a set of moral precepts rather than a theology, and was deeply immersed in the writings of Christian mystics. For Reinhardt, Zen Buddhism provided a clear argument for detachment that would render a particular mode of consumption of art problematic. Similarly, the writings of a figure of piety such as St John of the Cross provided Reinhardt with a vivid description of spiritual revelation expressed in terms of darkness or the void. This resource, among others, enabled him to conceptualize further his ‘black’ paintings and to demolish what he held to be the inflated metaphysical claims of the Abstract Expressionists. During the early 1950s Reinhardt’s work attracted the attention of theologians owing to its allegedly transcendental and meditative qualities. One admirer of Reinhardt’s ‘black’ paintings was the artist’s lifelong friend, Thomas Merton. Since the early 1940s Merton had been a monk of the Cistercian Order of the Strict Observance, commonly known as the Trappists.32 Throughout the mid-1950s Merton repeatedly asked Reinhardt for ‘some small black and blue cross painting (say about a foot and a half high) for the cell in which I perch’ in the Abbey of Our Lady of Gethsemani in

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Lexington, Kentucky.33 Nearly two years passed before Reinhardt relented and produced such a painting. Summing up his consideration of the work that Reinhardt gave him in 1957, Merton wrote: It has the following noble feature, namely its refusal to have anything else around it. It thinks that only one thing is necessary and this is time, 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 small painting.’34

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The painting’s effect on the beholder, especially its fitness of purpose as an aid to contemplative prayer, is eloquently articulated by Merton: Almost invisible cross on a black background. As though immersed in darkness and trying to emerge from it . . . You have to look hard to see the cross. One must turn away from everything else and concentrate on the picture as though peering through a window into the night . . . I should say a very ‘holy’ picture – helps prayer – an ‘image’ without features to accustom the mind at once to the night of prayer – and to help one set aside trivial and useless images that wander into prayer and spoil it.35 By the late 1950s Merton was making a reputation for himself as a scholar of Zen Buddhism and the Christian mystics, such as Nicholas of Cusa (1401–1464) and, most importantly, the sixteenthcentury Spanish figure Juan de Yepes. Canonized in 1726 as St John of the Cross, de Yepes wrote eloquently in his allegory on negative theology of ‘the dark night of the soul’ as a path to enlightenment; both Merton and Reinhardt cite him in their writings.36 According to the theologian Peter C. King, ‘Merton very clearly understood himself as standing in the tradition of [St John of the Cross]. He used John’s language and concepts – among others – to describe his journey of faith as a contemplative and a monk.’37 Merton was well known for promoting a meditative practice known as contemplative prayer that drew upon his extensive knowledge of Hinduism and Buddhism, both of which refreshed his practice as a Cistercian monk. In New Seeds of Contemplation, he discusses three modes of contemplation while referring explicitly to similar practices in Zen Buddhism. Reinhardt’s most private

reflections on the ‘black’ paintings are indebted to Merton’s writing on this discipline and to his lively correspondence with the artist. For Merton, contemplative practices are classed as ‘beginnings’, where the decisive moment is ‘a sudden emptying of the soul in which images vanish, concepts and words are silent, and freedom and clarity suddenly open out within you until your whole being embraces the wonder, the depth, the obviousness and yet the emptiness and unfathomable incomprehensibility of God’. 38 In Contemplative Prayer, published posthumously in 1969, Merton cites the mystics of the Rhineland, such as John Tauler and Ruysbroeck (author of Spiritual Marriage), and the Philokalia, all of which stress the encounter with God ‘without intermediary’, through ‘imageless’ contemplation.39 The dominant figure of speech is that of a ‘simple light’ that ‘shows itself to be darkness, nakedness and nothingness’.40 The contemplative’s knowledge of God is a knowing ‘about’, an allusive knowledge that denies the meditative subject mastery of the object of his contemplation. Merton called this a doctrine of ‘mystical unknowing’, one that did not necessarily disregard images, symbols or other sacramental art, but prevented them from becoming ‘idols’.41 Merton wholeheartedly endorsed the notion of art as ‘a calculated trap for meditation’; that much was clear in his plaintive letters to Reinhardt requesting a small, dark, ‘cruciform’ painting.42 In Merton’s reading of St John of the Cross, ‘dark contemplation’ and ‘the night of sense’ does not necessarily signify a complete renunciation of sensation, but allows for another mode of being within a sensual life. Throughout his long and close friendship with Merton, Reinhardt found a valuable and compelling partner in conversation and a benchmark for profound attachment to the spiritual life against which to measure the ersatz or secular spirituality with which certain artists cloaked their painting and constructed their persona. In a wonderful passage that encapsulates Reinhardt’s achievement as an artist, Merton writes that ‘in the world today, one would have to make heroic efforts to keep still’.43 Yet the point of intersection of Merton’s theological concerns and Reinhardt’s aesthetic concerns is surely an uneasy place for the ‘black’ paintings to reside. While Reinhardt shared Merton’s enthusiasm for these religious doctrines and precepts, the artist chose to consider them in terms of a matrix of social and ideological concerns. In Reinhardt’s mind this may have blunted the wayward

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spirituality that Merton was prepared to project onto the ‘black’ paintings. During the 1960s, however, only Merton explored the conjunction of religion and politics through his substantial commitment to what might be called a prototype of liberation theology.44 As early as 1940 Merton was convinced that Reinhardt’s painting was religious and pure owing to the artist’s rejection of naturalism in favour of ‘formal and intellectual values’.45 The ethereal quality of the experience of a ‘black’ painting – exemplified by Merton’s commentary – is frequently used to justify a connection between Reinhardt’s art and the spiritual and has been a perennial topic of interest for contemporary critics, notably Joseph Masheck, Naomi Vine and Paul J. Spaeth.46 Rather than dwell on these associations, I prefer to explain Reinhardt’s interest in theological and moral texts in terms of their practical value as surrogates for conventional aesthetic discourse. Publicly, Reinhardt had always kept religion at some remove from his painting and was bemused by being dubbed the ‘black monk’ by Harold Rosenberg.47 For Reinhardt, the classic texts of Buddhism, Hinduism and Christian mysticism were intellectually engaging resources that provided a fertile ground for the increasingly elaborate and esoteric framing of his ‘black’ paintings. These doctrines were treated in an analogous way to Reinhardt’s treatment of the religious art one encountered in the museum: such art was no longer an object of veneration or a ritual object, but an aesthetic object. One of Reinhardt’s most pertinent citations refers to the ‘art of the Adamantine path’. Whatever connotations of self-sacrifice and martyrdom may be associated with that phrase, Reinhardt’s selection of it as a point of private reflection seems to me to be emblematic of his self-declared achievement, to bestow upon painterly practice values grounded in the discipline of egoless process. In these and other instances, the self-aware subject ‘is not final or absolute’ and the moment of self-awareness is characterized as an un-visualizable void, dissolution of self rather than a self-centred entity posited by the Cartesian cogito ergo sum. Reinhardt understood this culmination in terms of ‘destruction, negation, refusals’, an ‘unencumbered, empty space . . . absolutely intangible’.48 ‘Painting that is almost possible, almost does not exist, that is not quite known, not quite seen.’49 Here the lack of finality is grasped in terms of cycles of ‘creation, destruction, creation, eternal repetition’; the ‘made–unmade– remade’ that so clearly found expression in the various processes of making that Reinhardt had employed since at least the beginning of the 1940s.50

Merton’s analysis of Zen shows it to be a means for ‘explosive liberation from one-dimensional conformism, a recovery of unity which is not the suppression of opposites but a simplicity beyond opposites’. A well-known Zen koan cited by Merton had a great deal of resonance for Reinhardt, particularly while the latter was composing his ‘art-as-art’ dogma: ‘Before I grasped Zen, the mountains were nothing but mountains and the rivers nothing but rivers. When I got into Zen, the mountains were no longer mountains and the rivers no longer rivers. But when I understood Zen, the mountains were only mountains and the rivers only rivers.’51 Reinhardt’s version of this koan echoes the ‘repetition of formula over [and] over again until [it] loses all meaning’: The beginning of art is not the beginning. The finishing of art is not the finishing. The furnishing of art is furnishing. The nothingness of art is not nothingness. Negation in art is not negation. The absolute in art is absolute. Art-in-art is art. The end of art is art-as-art. The end of art is not the end.52 Reinhardt’s Zen-like turn to politics suggests that the radical political ideology with which he was familiar may have analysed the main contradictions of capitalism, but was thoroughly unprepared to address the question of how one is to live and go on in the world.

systems of strife The first word of an artist is against artists. The first word of an art historian is against art historians.53

There is nothing academic about Reinhardt’s review of George Kubler’s influential meditation on art history, The Shape of Time.54 Appearing several years after the book’s publication, it is less a review than an opportunity for Reinhardt to decant his churlish wisdom. On this occasion Reinhardt asks the contemporary artist to consider the superiority of Kubler’s notion of a ‘meaningless’

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history of art unconnected to any other history and devoted solely to the evolutionary problem of aesthetic form. As an artist with an intense interest in art history, Reinhardt appreciated Kubler’s criticism of art historical narratives based on the work of the formidable art historians of nineteenth-century Germany. Such conceptual tools, asserted Reinhardt in concert with Kubler, could no longer provide a convincing account of the development of art. In his role as a professor of art history, Reinhardt was also interested in Kubler’s assessment of the teaching methods used by that discipline over the past thirty years. Kubler’s notion of a meaningless art history was particularly resonant for Reinhardt; it became a major theme in his polemics and a catchphrase that peppered his public talks.55 By ‘meaningless’, Kubler meant the study of artefacts in terms of form classes over time, as opposed to an approach that charted the meaning of objects through iconography or textual exegesis.56 A theory of meaningless art history, for example, certainly provided Reinhardt with a justification for his practice of organizing reproductions of his paintings as a formally coherent, reductive series. Typically, Reinhardt mined Kubler’s text for material to use in his satires. For example, Kubler’s analysis of the consequences for an artist’s creative potential of his chance entry into an ongoing tradition of object-making was wryly twisted by Reinhardt into a diatribe against the so-called six types of careers for artists. Kubler’s conclusions, noted Reinhardt, ‘are not very much help to artist-careerists looking to find out where and when to make their entrances or exits in and out of the stream of contemporary art business’.57 There are other, more poignant comments in Reinhardt’s essay on Kubler on the artist’s identification with accidents of birth, remarks that underscore his well-publicized sense of alienation from his peers and a wickedly self-deprecating humour: How will any future accounts of any sequences or series of artists in our time not take into account (as old expressions go) artists caught with their bridges down, artists born at the wrong cut of time, artists left holding bags of visions and images, artists not knowing their entrances from holes in the ground . . . artists not being able to read handwriting on walls, last-exit signs, etc.?58

Kubler’s discussion of irony offered Reinhardt a means to launch a strong challenge to existential and poetic readings of Abstract Expressionism. Kubler notes that irony is always a danger to those who believe they have a stake in interpretation, whether it is a question of deciding on one meaning or on a freely articulated set of meanings or on a controlled polysemy of meanings. An ironic temper taken to the extreme can dissolve everything. In Reinhardt’s ‘art-as-art’ dogma, which demonstrates a prodigious appetite for irony or ‘absolute infinite negativity’, the artist shows how his ‘black’ paintings destabilize a conventional interpretation of referential meaning. This argument, in turn, recalls Kubler’s attack on the philosopher Ernst Cassirer’s definition of art as ‘symbolic language’.59 Reinhardt valued Kubler’s theories immensely, but parted company with the art historian over the relationship between word and image. Reinhardt agreed with Kubler’s critique of style and eagerly applied to his body of work the concept of organizing artistic production in terms of form classes rather than style. Yet the artist could not resist using his ‘art-as-art’ dogma as an interpretive counterpoint to the beholder’s experience of a ‘black’ painting.60 In a sense, Reinhardt was endorsing an aesthetic in which word and image stand in a dialectical relation to one another. The paintings required this tension in order to be seen because the interaction between art and life, in Reinhardt’s view, had threatened to subsume and destroy art. But, it was only by virtue of the possibility of art’s final demise as a token of common culture that, paradoxically, ‘pure’ abstract art could sustain itself and appear to be ethically compelling. If the wealth of associations that came to be attached to the various public interpretations of Reinhardt’s ‘black’ paintings had not existed, the artist would have had to invent them.

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5 ‘An Invasion of the Ultimate’

jamming Reinhardt’s circle at Columbia College during the mid-1930s was obsessed with jazz. The poet Robert Lax, recalling that time, refers to that select group of undergraduates as ‘the crew’ – slang for musicians in a group – and speaks of their moments together in terms of jamming. Lax felt that the group’s intensive repartee was not ‘a competitive thing except in the very best way’; a sign of ‘being perfectly in realization, not in potentia, but right there’. Reinhardt must have had this dynamic in mind, rather than the more obvious influence of cinematic narrative, as he fashioned and calibrated the sequences of his mid-1940s art comics.1 For example, ‘How to Look at Art Talk’ takes as given the form of a standard comic strip. Each cell encloses a dialogue between unlikely interlocutors presented in the form of humans and animals or humans and artworks. Most of the images employed by Reinhardt were sourced from engravings scavenged from a wide range of illustrated books. In three locations Reinhardt inserted a hand-drawn element to set the scene, but most cells are starkly graphic, containing a couple of black-and-white line prints and dialogue balloons. In one cell, two swordsmen duel; one asks: ‘Was not the painting freed from a “picture-purpose” so that it could become freer and more imaginative?’, and the other replies: ‘Yep.’ And so the pattern of call and response, comic and straight-man, continues across the dozen-odd cells. The captions are sharp and memorable, the puns infectious. Another in the series – ‘How to Look at Iconography’ – provides a do-it-yourself kit of images and fragments to enable the reader to create her own ‘representational pictures in easy lessons’. In a sidebar – the ‘Lines seen about town lately’ column – the punning combines the visual and the textual. ‘Frau lein’ indicates a supine female; ‘private enterprise line’ is a graphic rendition of barbed wire; ‘enough line’ shows a fish

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head at the end of a fishing line.2 It is easy to be seduced by the rhythm and playfulness of these puns and find yourself taking up the challenge of inventing your own versions. While the strenuous intellectual demand that Reinhardt places on his viewers and readers has been consistently pointed to as the salient feature of the artist’s aesthetic, few commentators have taken the time to consider the sociality accompanying such an encounter and the important role played by mutual invention lubricated by humour. As Lax put it:

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I mean it’s just telling each other better and better jokes . . . It was a room full of people who were trying to have a good time, in which all of them were included. I think that that was it and we all knew that if we swung right we would. We all knew each other’s riffs in a sense.3 Knowing each other’s ‘riffs’ was one remarkable element that underpinned the thirty-year friendship between Lax, Merton and Reinhardt. It was also the social glue that Reinhardt tried to apply to the corner of New York’s post-war milieu he knew best. Reinhardt conceived of the relationship between the spectator and his ‘black’ paintings of the 1960s in a similar spirit of give-andtake. In Reinhardt’s words, that encounter is simultaneously ‘personal, impersonal, transpersonal’. The relationship between viewer and work is one of reciprocity; if you commit yourself fully to the work it will, in due course, reveal itself to you. Obviously, one could own a Reinhardt, but the relationship that the artist was able to evoke through the perceptual delay of his ‘black’ paintings exemplified anything but the brisk, soulless transactions of the marketplace or the certainties of ownership. Reinhardt enunciates the entailments in a wonderfully succinct, rhetorically complex text of 1963 that announces, somewhat belatedly, the consequences of the public debut of the 60 × 60-inch square painting. The value of the ‘black’ paintings is to be found in the way they destabilize the dominant culture of art by forcing one to consider the possibility of an art object that ‘belongs to anyone who wants it’ and ‘does not belong to anyone who doesn’t want it’.4 Clearly, ‘belonging’ here means something like a state of consummation rather than the mere physical or legal possession of an object.5 ‘An invasion of the ultimate’ was one of the many catch-phrases Reinhardt employed to summarize his formula of schema, square

and repetition.6 This formula was repeated mantra-like from 1960 to 1967 so as to guarantee that the ‘black’ paintings were considered to be devoid of meaning, save the perceptual fact of the ‘monotonous disappearing image’ that was the ‘focus of required one-pointed attention’.7 Reinhardt’s carefully crafted texts on ‘artas-art’ and copious notes that fleshed out that subject for a projected book place the ‘black’ square paintings at the pinnacle of abstract art. From 1960 onwards Reinhardt pursued the potentially unlimited replication of one model for painting about painting, or ‘art-as-art’. In Reinhardt’s post-historic universe, 1960 symbolizes year zero of the project to construct an artistic practice that embodies the performance of negation in modern art. The decision to fix the limits of painting to a 60 × 60-inch square format, divided into a tripartite grid, with cells assigned close-valued dark grey hues in such a manner as to yield the image of a central, symmetrical cruciform was intended to settle, once and for all, the nature of creativity, originality, stylistic development and the signifying function of art. It did not, of course; and we are apt to find the very idea of such an ambition – a practice capable of addressing and resolving every significant aesthetic issue faced by artists of the 1960s – to be ludicrous. Indeed, Reinhardt’s manic drive to wipe clean the slate of art points to a profoundly comic side of his 1960s project and highlights a thorough disregard for the conventional historian of art. The fixed schema makes stasis, rather than change, a virtue. By announcing a definitive end to the more reactive or dialogical negativity that had initially motivated his painting up to the late 1950s, Reinhardt admitted that the battle lines of art and culture had now hardened beyond accommodation or compromise. From now on, inflexibility and dogma would be the constitutive elements of Reinhardt’s autonomy. Always the fastidious intellectual, Reinhardt gathered together the most convincing models of discipline and dogma; namely, those associated with Catholicism and the practice of Zen Buddhism. Square, schema and repetition are terms that summarize Reinhardt’s quixotic programme to eliminate all exogenous elements from art. It is only when Reinhardt establishes this ‘one speech’ to which ‘nobody listens’ and about which nobody complains,8 and this ‘one art’ that few people ‘see’ and about which nearly everybody raised objections, that we can see the grand sweep of his project of painting. Reinhardt’s joke, if you will, is that the price

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of clarity of an artistic project caught in the grip of modern society is to demand the undivided attention, utter silence and immobilization of the spectator. Reinhardt’s painting of the 1960s aims to project the image of immutability without necessarily lapsing into sheer repetition. Each of Reinhardt’s ‘black’ paintings is subtly different and differentiable from the rest. It was undoubtedly a difficult path to tread, and one that became all the more so as Reinhardt pushed his paintings further towards darkness and the condition of the uninflected monochrome. The task was, in his words, to drive to the very edge of the precipice where the gormless eccentricities of art are rejected decisively, where the fashionable varieties of art are exhausted and where there is nothing to do except the same thing, over and over again, endlessly. This was Reinhardt’s glimpse of freedom, which registers for the beholder of his paintings first as blindness, then as exasperation and finally as sheer exhilaration.

rules The one work for a fine artist, the one painting, is the painting of the one-size canvas – the single scheme, one formal device, one color-monochrome, one linear division in each direction, one symmetry, one texture, one free-hand brushing, one rhythm, one working everything into one dissolution and one indivisibility, each painting into one over-all uniformity and non-irregularity.9

Within Reinhardt’s schema of painting, various shades of red, blue and green are assigned to the four corner cells that comprise the infrastructure demarcated by the so-called Greek cross. He began his work by mixing mars black oil paint with, for example, ultramarine blue or alizarin crimson in a particular ratio. The ratio, however, was based on experience and would have been altered at will to produce the desired effect. The pigments were prepared in screwtop jars by progressively denaturing the oil paint using turpentine or white spirit to leech linseed and other oils from the mixture. Reinhardt mixed the colours, poured in turpentine and continuously stirred the suspension before allowing it to settle. Through this process the oily component of the paint separated and rose to the surface of the suspension, where it could be decanted. The procedure was repeated until Reinhardt was left with a freely flowing

pigment that could be brushed onto sized linen and would dry to a powdery, chalk-like consistency. Once dry, this suspension produced an extremely fragile, matte surface. Because he wished to produce flawless surfaces, Reinhardt painted his canvases horizontally, on a low bench. Working under natural light, he would set about adjusting the tonality of the cells until the desired chromatic relationship had been achieved. Gazing intently at the canvas under a raking light, Reinhardt was able to pick out the slightest surface imperfection or sign of residual brushwork. Sometimes, he used an electric eraser to eliminate the ridges that would spring up at the boundary of two tonal areas. The work of producing a ‘black’ painting was painstaking, delicate and, above all, tedious. Confronted by twenty or two hundred of these canvases, there would be little or no sense of ‘development’ over time. What we do experience is the subtle difference between each canvas in terms of the varieties of hue and their relative optical activity.10 During the 1960s Reinhardt published several statements to announce the culmination of his painting in the form of the dark, square canvas. The first effort, ‘Art-as-Art’, appeared in 1962 and attempted to consolidate themes that Reinhardt had mulled over during the 1950s, particularly his assertion of the autonomy of art, which he expressed cryptically as ‘the one thing to say about art is that it is one thing’.11 A second statement, published in Thomas Merton’s journal Pax, was also included in ‘Autocritique de Reinhardt’, a montage of three texts published in Iris-Time (the newsletter of Iris Clert Gallery) to coincide with the opening of Reinhardt’s second Parisian solo exhibition. Interestingly, the texts of ‘Autocritique de Reinhardt’, which date from 1955, 1960 and 1961, are presented in reverse chronological order as if the directional flow of time no longer obtained and the paintings described by them are somehow outside time, beyond the very idea of historical struggle. Indeed, Reinhardt’s most potent statement masquerades as an objective re-description of the qualities and processes that characterize the repetitive enterprise of his ‘black’ paintings: A square (neutral, shapeless) canvas, five feet wide, five feet high, as high as a man, as wide as a man’s outstretched arms (not large, not small, sizeless), trisected (no composition), one horizontal form negating one vertical form (formless, no top, no bottom, directionless), three (more or less) dark (lightless) no-contrasting

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(colorless) colors, brushwork brushed out to remove brushwork, a matte, flat, free-hand painted surface (glossless, textureless, non-linear, no hard edge, no soft edge) which does not reflect its surroundings – a pure, abstract, non-objective, timeless, spaceless, changeless, relationless, disinterested painting – an object that is self-conscious (no unconsciousness) ideal, transcendent, aware of no thing but art (absolutely no anti-art).12

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Reinhardt’s assertion of repetition as an adequate response to the expressionist position was not without admirers, many of whom fell outside his own generation. The elegant banality of the art-asart dogma that unfurled during the early 1960s allowed Reinhardt to supplement and eventually move beyond a rhetoric that was almost exclusively centred on a critical engagement with the culture of art of his contemporaries. When he ceased to address his own generation directly, he set the stage for the reception of his work by younger artists. As the critic Priscilla Colt phrased it in one of the more perceptive reviews of Reinhardt’s work of the first half of the 1960s, ‘today there are a significant number of younger artists using Reinhardt’s discoveries both as mannerism, and more legitimately, as a state of mind and a base upon which to build new structures’.13 The younger generation that took Reinhardt seriously was heartened by his work, which ‘stopped short of abandoning painting to pass into object making’ and demolished the inflated meaning claims of Abstract Expressionism.14 At the same time, it is important to recall the remoteness for this younger generation of Abstract Expressionism and the issues that defined its discourse from the 1940s through the late 1950s.

convictions There have been five shows of these ‘timeless’ paintings in the past three years in the four major cities of the Western Art World. Each show consisted of six or seven oil paintings, all monochrome, all black, all the same size, all five feet square, all painted the same, all dating since 1960.15

The year 1963 was a turning-point for Reinhardt, as his career began to gain considerable momentum. In March 1966, while preparing for his first museum retrospective, Reinhardt published

what amounted to a declaration of independence from the milieu of Abstract Expressionism. ‘The Black-Square Painting Shows, 1963, 1964, 1965’, one of three texts appearing in a feature in Artforum devoted to his painting since 1960, is another example of Reinhardt’s unembellished, forceful prose. It celebrates the socalled extremism of his exhibitions in New York, Paris, Los Angeles and London, proclaiming them ‘the most “modern” modern art’ and extolling their virtue as the ‘logical development of personal art history and the historic traditions of Eastern and Western pure painting’.16 This statement of consolidation was composed rather late in Reinhardt’s career. Since 1953, he had used his writings actively to police the distance between himself and such prominent figures as De Kooning, Pollock and Motherwell, as well as just about every other artist working in New York at the time. Because these chastising statements were filled with humour as well as invective, they held out the promise of common social ground.17 By contrast, Reinhardt’s statements of the 1960s abandon satire and stress instead the triumph of the artist’s ‘personal art history’, which is identical, of course, to the climax of the historical tradition of ‘pure painting’ in the twentieth century. Reinhardt concludes that ‘we have to face the fact that the art work itself is the problem along with the artist and let the social situation go for while’.18 This represents a significant departure from Reinhardt’s socially informed criticism of the 1950s and one that sits somewhat uneasily with, for example, the analysis advanced in ‘The Artist in Search of An Academy, Part i’. There Reinhardt addresses his ethically challenged colleagues with a barrage of stinging questions: How can a free artist accept this managed or managerialized condition? How can an artist exist without or outside institutions? Why are so many mature artists so pleased to compete for such slight prizes, purchases, and praises? Why are there still artists who feel it’s an honor to be asked to serve on a jury to judge other artists? Why are artists so eager to accommodate their behavior to the undignified and standard forms in fashion, such as artist as entertainer, parasite, sufferer, actionist, crybaby, primitive, handicraftsman, acrobat, beggar, expressionist, clod, hobbyhorse, parrot, puppet, designer, jobber, etc.?19

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Reinhardt’s ideological strategy of the 1950s amounted to a relentless interrogation of the conditions of the production of art. This included speculation on what form art would take and what role artists would play in the absence of the current institutions of art. This explains the resonance and mild anarchy of the outlandish suggestion of a ‘new’ academy, but also reveals Reinhardt’s ultimate failure to locate a new social base within which to ground artistic practice. While Reinhardt adroitly positioned his own work during the 1960s within the various strata of the New York art milieu, he could do little to develop a community of artists capable of exerting the same clout as the market-driven system of art. As an individual artist, he idealistically framed his ‘black’ paintings as works that would compete for the attention of the spectator without falling prey to the corrupting influence of having to function as one commodity among a sea of others. This issue, which preoccupied Reinhardt for much of his later working life, was never resolved socially, which is why it is generally expressed through writings that adopt the syntax of artistic practices alien to modernism in the West. His insistence on the link between the public demeanour of the artist and the conceptual nature of the work of art itself is supposed to remind artists what they lose when their production is alienated and their aesthetics no longer insinuate an ethical position. Reinhardt’s appropriation of the literary style of the Tao treatise on painting that closes his widely quoted ‘Twelve Rules for a New Academy’ reflects this loss, by once again presenting his own working methods and aesthetic aspirations through the prose style of another author, another era in art. Reinhardt does not address his contemporaries in the statements published in Artforum or invited them to dialogue. This is sheer dogma: defiant, clear and bolstered, no doubt, by Reinhardt’s recent successes and growing prestige among younger artists and critics. After all, it was the editor Philip Leider’s invitation to Reinhardt to publish in a relatively new and serious art journal with a younger readership that brought to light these benchmark statements.20 This good fortune, however, was tempered by the fact that Reinhardt remained unsettled over the lack of acclaim for his achievement and by the highly visible success of his allegedly ‘despised’ contemporaries. With the exception of Andy Warhol and Marcel Duchamp, it is the names of the New York School artists that fill Reinhardt’s daybooks and animate his most personal, vitriolic notations.

Artists of the 1960s who believed that Reinhardt’s project was in sympathy with their own ambitions, such as Carl Andre, Robert Smithson and Joseph Kosuth, were not inclined to view Reinhardt’s works as complex paintings that necessarily excluded other types of art. Donald Judd, who was interested in writing on Reinhardt’s work as early as 1962, refused to accept the artist’s statements wholesale. In a letter to Reinhardt, Judd wrote that while the artist’s art dogma represents ‘an awesome procession’, these were clearly Reinhardt’s own rules. Judd stated with candour: ‘I agree with some, partially agree with others and disagree with others, especially, as a general consideration, the one evolution.’ Robert Morris, who was involved on a more personal level with Reinhardt, expressed his admiration differently, writing to the artist in 1963 that ‘anytime, just anytime, I would be much more than pleased to put up my things in a room with your paintings of the walls’.21 Broadly speaking, the selective reading of Reinhardt’s practice by younger artists ensured that his paintings would be grasped first as abstract, polemical objects: an idea of art, out of time and space, that was supportive of their personal and varied artistic agendas. Reinhardt’s contemporaries, on the other hand, were artists who would have felt most threatened by the suggestion that a painting is a bearer of moral authority only in so far as it represents an idea of art rather than a map of lived experience. Reinhardt’s alienation from his own generation imparted a kind of homelessness to his work of the late 1960s that facilitated its embrace by younger artists. Reinhardt’s desire to locate art in a non-sacred, non-secular space was not satisfied within the existing institutions of art; yet neither was he able, or inclined, to organize a practical alternative to the network of dealers, collectors, curators and critics. Despite the financial security Reinhardt enjoyed as a professor, he craved something more than the settled life of an academic and painter. The reality that remained unmoved by the power of his satire was the formidable presence of the institutions of art, the power of the art market to influence critical attention and the burgeoning spectacle of the artist as public figure. No tenured post in academia could compete with that. It was obvious, for example, that the artist was compelled to exhibit; as far as Reinhardt was concerned, this was the main responsibility of a practitioner. While that may have been the case during the late 1930s and early 1940s, from the mid-1950s onwards

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it was clear that in order to sustain a practice, the artist needed more than the recognition of his peers. When the State was a significant patron of the arts and expectations among artists of financial success were relatively modest because of an undeveloped market for contemporary American art, getting your abstract painting seen was an achievement. Now art needed the legitimating machinery of publicity, the gallery sales room and the salon of the museum trustee. By the close of 1966 Reinhardt had indeed become a public figure; his work was the focal point of interest for a number of younger artists and a new generation of increasingly influential, widely published art critics including Gregory Battcock, Lucy Lippard, Annette Michelson and Barbara Rose. Reinhardt also began to receive offers for teaching positions and even an offer from Syracuse University to house his personal papers. Reinhardt’s market profile was improving, as well: the artist was being courted by major players in the international art market, including Frank Lloyd of Marlborough Gallery and important young European gallerists, like the Swiss dealer and collector Bruno Bischoffsberger. It would be comforting to think that Reinhardt rejected their advances, yet we have no evidence to support such a claim. While Reinhardt remained with Betty Parsons Gallery, it is evident that he felt unconstrained by that professional relationship and exhibited at other galleries in and outside New York, as he pleased. Reinhardt’s rhetorical ‘new academy’ did not survive into the 1960s. Once his vision of art was secured through the stable production of the ‘black’ square paintings, Reinhardt was more inclined to return to another of his deep convictions, namely that ‘art is involved in a certain kind of perfection’. Specifying what this might mean in terms of the realities of social and political organization, for the artist among artists or the artist within society, was a task that fell largely to the new generation of artist-activists of the late 1960s.22

realignment A general ungentlemanly agreement that ‘artists should not talk’ prevents artists from twinging each others’ consciences nowadays. A popular myth that ‘the dirty work’ takes place only outside the artist’s studio and not in his own mind also helps ease the artist’s

burden and helps make his shame a little more shameless. But if the art world is a ‘sink of corruption and crime’ that the poor struggling artist never made, who did?23

Against the likes of Andy Warhol’s expert manipulation of the media, the scripted anarchy of Allan Kaprow’s ‘Happenings’ or the participatory avant-garde antics of Fluxus, Reinhardt’s interventions must have seemed ever more quaint and alienated from the new historical configuration that revived an interest in the conjunction of art and programmes of social transformation. That is, until the late 1960s, when younger artists and critics began to rally behind Reinhardt’s slogans, and the artist’s pronouncements began to sound to them less like elaborate jokes. Reinhardt’s objections were understood as something other than an acceptable adjunct to mainstream art discourse or a provocative spice interjected by a man only half-serious. By the early 1960s, in Reinhardt’s view, the art world had outstripped his literate criticism and was beyond his reach as a satirist. Reinhardt was doubtless aware of the limits of irony and satire; nevertheless that knowledge did not shield him from experiencing a profound sense of pessimism about the future of his artistic project. The crisis of his last years was fuelled, in my view, by his realization that it was no longer clear how he could mediate or fix the meaning of the ‘black’ paintings, or even if such avant-garde work had a future. He was adamant about the necessity for an artist to control the reception of his work, yet found it impossible to control this framing without resorting to controversy of one sort or another.24 At the opening of the 1960s Reinhardt had not yet established a firm position of authority from which he could turn the art world on its head. Reinhardt’s inclination to befriend and accept younger artists, especially during the 1960s, pointed to the possibility of establishing a new base of authority. The emergence of artists like Robert Morris, Donald Judd, Bridget Riley and Carl Andre presented him with the opportunity to claim a bit of turf that was far removed from the sordid social entanglements of his contemporaries. There was also the support of artists Reinhardt had known since the 1950s, such as Tony Smith, Ellsworth Kelly and Agnes Martin. In the event Reinhardt did not have the opportunity to adjust himself successfully to what he termed the non-environment of the New York art world. He simply died too soon after hitting his

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stride to make much of his newly found prestige among younger artists. Reinhardt’s hilarious and sarcastic confession directed to the art critics Thomas Hess and John Canaday, exclaiming that 1966 would be the year he had decided to ‘sell out’, may be read in this light.25 For all its sarcasm and irony, it stands as a veiled admission of a terrifying personal prospect for the artist, that the art world could render his life’s work a bit of harmless fun. Such a reception had the potential to do more than transform Reinhardt into a clown. What was truly at stake was the survival of a conception of artistic freedom, constructed out of the conjunction of ‘old left’ Marxism and abstract painting, that Reinhardt fought to uphold for three decades.26 The eclipse of this paradigm amounted to a cultural ‘death’, the utter collapse of a space for learning and sharing that Reinhardt’s versatility and allegiance to negation had struggled to maintain and make plausible as a means of continuation of a critically inflected artistic practice. That death – in the guise of a contemptible cultural indifference by capitalism to art – would amount to genuine meaninglessness, as opposed to merely the ‘meaninglessness’ of ‘reform’ and ‘atonement’ or the lyric cycle of the ‘almost’.27

6 ‘Every Dogma Has Its Day’

‘the re-reformulation of formalism’ 1 During the summer of 1964 the young American artist Robert Morris was travelling in Europe. While visiting Great Britain, Morris posted the following message to Reinhardt, written on a picture postcard of the Neolithic and Bronze Age stone circle of Stonehenge in the Wiltshire Downs: ‘Before plywood they did pretty good. Fantastic sights in The National Gallery and British Museum, too. The artists import a lot of Greenberg here. I’m on my way to perform in Stockholm. Best regards, Bob Morris.’2 Morris’s remark on Clement Greenberg’s influence on British art is borne out by John Hoyland, one of many British artists who had visited New York during the 1960s and encountered first hand the work of Kenneth Noland, Jules Olitski, Barnett Newman, Mark Rothko, David Smith and Reinhardt. While some critics held the Americans in high regard, Greenberg’s reception in Britain was not entirely welcoming; John Latham responded to the critic’s authority through the much-discussed performance prop, Art and Culture (1966–9).3 Reinhardt enjoyed a different reputation in Britain, one that was based in equal measure on his art and his polemics. The latter were decidedly opposed to Greenberg’s machinations in art; that struck a chord with some young British painters who were more than willing to tackle the challenge of comparing the aesthetic positions of the two. Reinhardt’s paintings were first received in Britain as part of the considerable influx of American art that began during the late 1950s. Yet he was absent from The New American Painting, a major European touring exhibition curated by Dorothy Miller and Frank O’Hara under the auspices of the Museum of Modern Art’s International Council and remained far from Greenberg’s imprimatur.4 In a pattern that would become typical of Reinhardt’s exposure in group exhibitions during the 1960s, he was presented to the

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British public in a context far removed from the expected generational setting of contemporaries such as Rothko, Newman and Still. Initially, Reinhardt found this state of affairs distressing but did not refuse to participate in such exhibitions; ironically, his presence in group exhibitions that consisted principally of younger artists did much to enhance his reputation during the mid-1960s. An anecdote by the curator Bryan Robertson on the subject of Mark Rothko’s retrospective mounted at the Whitechapel Gallery, London, from 10 October to 12 November 1961, suggests what would have been lost to the public when Reinhardt’s work was torn from the sympathetic aesthetic context of one of his contemporaries: 108

Late one winter afternoon, when the daylight had practically gone . . . [Mark Rothko] asked me to switch all the lights off, everywhere; and suddenly, Rothko’s colour made its own light: the effect, once the retina had adjusted itself, was unforgettable, smouldering and blazing and glowing softly from the walls – colour in darkness.5 Reinhardt, of course, was mindful of the resonance that existed between his work and that of Rothko’s. When he wrote that ‘Abstract-Expressionists acted as if I were betraying them but they were betraying me for two decades’, Reinhardt reserved a special chastisement for Rothko, whom he accused of having ‘sold out’ during the 1960s.6 After Reinhardt’s death, his estranged friend Rothko returned the compliment after a fashion, remarking with regret that he should have painted those late, dark works.7 Reinhardt’s exclusion, during the late 1950s, from major museum survey exhibitions of post-war painting was personally hurtful, removing him from a context that he considered to be necessary for the continuation of his project, effectively isolating his work. It was one thing to place oneself intentionally at the margins, or, to set oneself the task of working against one’s peers; it was quite another state of affairs to suffer exile. British artists who had seen Reinhardt’s paintings in a setting that explicitly worked against gestural painting were astute enough to distinguish his work from the mass of so-called ‘hard edge’ painting and the work of other young American abstract painters being strenuously promoted in London by Greenberg. As early as 1961, Reinhardt’s close-valued ‘black’ paintings were presented to

Londoners in the context of ‘hard edge’ painting in a provocative exhibition titled Six American Abstract Painters at Arthur Tooth & Sons gallery (24 January–18 February 1961). The exhibition included work by Ellsworth Kelly, Agnes Martin, Alexander Liberman, Leon Polk Smith and Sidney Wolfson. The accompanying catalogue contained an awkward introductory essay by Lawrence Alloway that sought to justify this grouping of artists. The artists under scrutiny, in fact, were all represented by Betty Parsons, who must have grasped the strategic importance of introducing to the London art scene artists who were not necessarily part of the charmed circle of painters that would eventually be endorsed by Greenberg under the rubric post-painterly abstraction. Alloway, a British art critic well known for his associations with British Pop art, was favorably disposed towards American art and would eventually find a home in the us, where he held the post of curator at the Guggenheim Museum. In his essay for Six American Abstract Painters, Alloway stressed a set of common aspects to be found in the work of these painters that he enumerated as ‘forms that are few in number, though not necessarily simple in function’, immaculate, yet active surfaces, forms bounded by edges that are ‘hard and clear’, and the absence of the ‘traditional primacy of figure–field relationships’.8 The emphasis placed on these formal qualities and their bearing on the perceptual effects experienced by the viewer allowed Alloway to argue for their importance as art against the prevailing aesthetic of so-called Action Painting. Turning to Reinhardt’s work – represented by three paintings: a 152 × 101 cm (60 × 40 in) red painting of 1952 and two, smaller paintings, dated 1958 (‘black’ and blue) and 1960 (‘black’) – Alloway remarked on the ‘subtle activity of the colour’ that dissolves their symmetrical schema into a kind of ‘optical drama’. This drama, exemplified by Reinhardt’s ‘tender, fine, matt surfaces’, was named by Alloway as ‘incertitude economically presented’. This phrase referred to a wide range of perceptually complex art that simultaneously attracted and repelled the spectator. The spectator is involved, in Alloway’s view, because the close-valued colours render the schema difficult to perceive. This essential tension of Reinhardt’s work, as described by Alloway, would be challenged a few years later by Michael Fried, who brushed it aside as little more than an ‘incidental effect’, asserting that the ‘zones’ of close-value colour characteristic of the artist’s trisected ‘black’ paintings

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remained, in his view, constantly and unfluctuatingly bounded.9 David Sylvester, in an insightful and enthusiastic review of Reinhardt’s 1964 exhibition at the Institute for Contemporary Art, London (ica), also tackled the question of the painting’s surface and its role in shaping the spectator’s engagement with the work, writing that it began to ‘sing’ as the ‘subtle variations of tone and colour’ became perceptible. ‘Once involved in any of these paintings’, continued Sylvester, ‘my entire capacity for attention has been focused into gazing at a contrast of colours that is scarcely perceptible and totally absorbing.’10 To be fair to Alloway, both Fried and Sylvester were describing the experience of engaging with a group of Reinhardt’s later, darker, identically scaled, ‘black’ paintings. Nevertheless, Alloway recognized a similar, though far less intense, sensation in the Tooth gallery’s modest and less coherent selection of Reinhardt’s paintings. For Alloway, however, the ‘drama’ of engaging with Reinhardt’s paintings was far from unequivocal in terms of the demands it made on the viewer. Presumably this means the difficulty one experiences in trying to resolve the schematic divisions of the surface painting while at the same time trying to grasp it as a monochromatic gestalt. It was ‘the difficulty of making accurate observation’ that registered for Alloway as the hook that Reinhardt used to snare the spectator. The technical means employed by Reinhardt to achieve this duality – ‘the tender, fine, matt surfaces’ – serve to withdraw the painting from the spectator. Alloway remained unnerved, though not unmoved: ‘one’s feeling is . . . of facing something deposited with us by a fanatic craftsman’, something ‘arrested and yet out of reach’.11 In the end Alloway must have surely understood the need to revise his judgement regarding the ‘common subject’ of this disparate grouping of artists. A common problem, perhaps, was in everyone’s sights, yet it was resolved by these artists with something less than an identity of motives and means.12 What Alloway’s remarks point to is the difficulty at the time of seizing a critical space for non-gestural abstract painting that lay outside the scope of Greenberg’s theory of modernist painting. This is particularly the case when the kind of optical experience invoked by Reinhardt’s paintings is so nuanced and fugitive compared to the works of Morris Louis and Kenneth Noland. The critical reception in London of Reinhardt and other American abstract artists was clearly not a matter of detached

aesthetic debate within the confines of the art world. At the time American cultural exchanges were seen by many as an unwanted imposition on an already vibrant cultural scene; this was a response that persisted throughout the 1960s and ’70s. Nevertheless, Greenberg’s view of modernism and the American and British artists he promoted remained influential and vital to the artistic development of one stratum of British artists and critics who came of age during the 1960s. This remained the case well into the late 1960s, even as Minimal art and Conceptual art were beginning to gain a foothold in the uk. By the mid-1970s, however, Greenberg’s critical theories were being widely challenged by artists and his influence had waned considerably.13 Some artists, such as Latham and Bridget Riley, were early sceptics of Greenberg’s imperiousness, which exemplified, in their view, the harsh, often crude commercial realities of the New York art scene. Above all, what lay behind the resistance to the prevalence of American art in London was the reality of the Vietnam War and the basing of American nuclear weapons on British soil. Both political policies were highly unpopular and gave rise during the 1960s to formidable mass protests and informed many of the artistic practices of the time, from the controversial performance work of Stuart Brisley to the extreme ‘destructive’ art of Gustav Metzger. While artists working in London during the 1960s would have had an opportunity to acquaint themselves with Reinhardt’s work first hand, it is fair to say that until 1964 they had hardly encountered a sufficient concentration of works to appreciate fully the artist’s achievement. Then came what must have seemed a veritable onslaught: three ‘black’ paintings were included in Painting and Sculpture of a Decade, 54–64 at the Tate Gallery (22 April–28 June) and a further nine for Reinhardt’s first one-person exhibition in London, which took place at the Institute for Contemporary Art. Reinhardt, already travelling in Europe, made his way to London, with wife and daughter in tow, to deliver a talk at the ica. Thanks to the efforts of the British artist Robyn Denny – an important abstract painter of the 1960s and an ardent admirer of Reinhardt’s work – the transcript of Reinhardt’s talk was published several months after the artist’s death.14 For Denny, the qualities that set Reinhardt apart from other American artists were his reputation as a severe critic of Abstract Expressionism, a debunker of the fraudulence of the art world and a guarantor of art’s independence. In

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general, the response by London in 1964 to Reinhardt’s paintings and his ideas was thoughtful and highly favourable; they made a tremendous impression on young artists and helped to establish his reputation as an uncompromising, sophisticated and critically astute American artist. While the London tabloids were predictably aghast at the prospect of blank ‘black’ monochromes, more serious critics such as Sylvester and Guy Brett lauded Reinhardt’s consistent development and ranked him ‘among the best of American abstract painters’.15 In the wake of the ica exhibition, Reinhardt was invited by Gustav Metzger to participate in the Destruction in Art Symposium (dias),16 a seminal protest event for the politicized avant-garde. Among the more notable works included was Latham’s infamous tower of burning books (the so-called ‘Skoob towers’), conceived to foreground the artist’s eccentric theories of time, space and information. In 1961 Metzger had demonstrated his ‘auto-destructive art’ in a performance work titled provocatively Acid Action Painting, wherein acid was sprayed onto three large nylon panels, the point being literally to destroy the ground of illusion in the course of ‘creation’ of the work. Metzger’s manifestos on auto-destructive art offered a blunt, panoramic critique of culture, referring openly to the Cold War, the threat of nuclear armaments and the massive expenditures by the British government on defence, as well as the stifling influence of the art market and its institutions. Reinhardt asked that his text ‘39 Art Planks: Programs for “Program” Painting (Art-as-Art Dogma, Part vii)’ be read at the symposium. In these patently hilarious principles of aesthetic unity, one finds stinging references to precisely the sort of painting championed by Greenberg’s adherents, alongside Reinhardt’s characteristically hyperbolic moral dicta: ‘1. The re-obliteration of the horizontal band . . . 12. The re-abstraction of abstraction of abstraction . . . 31. The re-reformulation of formalism . . . ’ and ‘35. The re-rejection of the hero-whoreo-artist-man-of-the-world role’.17

‘a dark flame, fog forming in the unformed’: responsive eyes 18 Around May 1964 the Scottish artist Ian Hamilton Finlay encountered Reinhardt’s paintings for the first time in reproduction. Despite the fact that Finlay had not actually seen Reinhardt’s paintings

face to face, their impact on him was considerable; enough, in fact, to prompt Finlay to ask Reinhardt to produce an entire issue of his self-published journal of lyric and concrete poetry Poor. Old. Tired. Horse.19 What impressed Finlay most about Reinhardt’s painting was its ‘great dignity and seriousness’, a ‘cool quality but by no means cold’, ‘the only thing really like Malevich I’ve ever seen’. Finlay had been inclined to pepper with irony his own intimate captioned images and concrete poetry and was beginning to feel restless with that approach. ‘I used to use humour to make a distance and keep it art but now I feel that as being an inadequate means.’ What Finlay learned from Reinhardt’s example was a kind of gravity and a possible way out of his own creative impasse. Finlay told Reinhardt how the presence of humour in his concrete poetry functioned as an antidote to what he called Scottish heaviness, a quality that Finlay opposed to gravity. Finlay elaborated on his dissatisfaction with humour in his work, arguing for the necessity of the distinction between ‘evening poems as well as afternoon ones’. Taking Reinhardt to be a kindred spirit, Finlay had confided to Robert Lax, with whom he had an independent relationship, that Reinhardt ‘is a man I would like to talk to – and there aren’t many people I feel like that about nowadays’.20 Finlay made good his intention to invite Reinhardt to produce an issue of Poor. Old. Tired. Horse. (p.o.t.h.), proposing that the issue consist of the usual eight pages and be printed in offset lithography on stiff card stock, the final trim size measuring 16.5 × 23 cm (6 × 9 in). ‘Your pictures’, Finlay wrote, applying a typically British colloquialism to abstract paintings that would have certainly irritated Reinhardt, ‘please me very much by having this distance, they are absolutely art, and by not being funny.’ Finlay’s tone remained respectful and generous. ‘I like them and I wrote everyone about them. With a certain sense of awe, for I reckoned that anyone who is not thick, and who can have that distance, and yet be grave, is remarkably an adult.’21 Ultimately, Reinhardt never produced an entire number of p.o.t.h. as Finlay had hoped. It would not be until late 1965 that Reinhardt would begin to devise his contribution to Finlay’s journal. The passage of time and the circumstances under which it was offered make it a lukewarm gesture of support for Finlay’s concrete poetry project and more of a testament to his newly forged friendship with the young British artist Bridget Riley.

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Reinhardt met Riley for the first time in 1965 when she travelled to New York to open an exhibition at Richard Feigen Gallery and to participate in William Seitz’s Museum of Modern Art exhibition, The Responsive Eye.22 A detail of Riley’s painting Current (1964) figured on the cover of the catalogue. At Reinhardt’s urging, Finlay invited Riley to contribute to p.o.t.h. Riley agreed to participate in the project, writing to Reinhardt that ‘this [Finlay’s invitation and a selection of his books] with your own letter, made the whole idea irresistible’.23 ‘The little publication for p.o.t.h. was a collaboration’, noted Riley, ‘Reinhardt wrote to ask me to do the images and he wrote one of his wonderful “Art is not” [sic] pieces around them.’ The resulting work is a double-page spread in which Riley’s large zeros – Untitled (Fragment 4) of 1965 – dynamically complement Reinhardt’s text, which is rendered in his distinctive calligraphic hand and arranged at a diagonal on the page. There was certainly much of mutual interest that Reinhardt and Riley could discuss and argue about in terms of painting. ‘In my earlier paintings’, Riley explained, ‘I wanted the space between the picture plane and the spectator to be active. It was in that space, paradoxically, the painting “took place”.’24 The issues that were central to her work during the mid-1960s were revealed in a short article, ‘Perception is the Medium’, commissioned for Art News by Thomas Hess.25 Riley shared with Reinhardt a handwritten draft in which she not only elaborated ideas that formed the basis for her painting but also expressed ‘feelings of violation and disillusionment’ at the way her work Hesitate (1964) had been ‘vulgarized in the rag-trade’ by the art collector and dress manufacturer Larry Aldrich. Riley, like Reinhardt, was hardly interested in ‘boundary-crossing’ to the extent exemplified in the work of the late 1950s and early 1960s of British painters such as Robyn Denny and Peter Hobbs. Her first experience of New York was coloured by the depressing consequences of The Responsive Eye, which elicited ‘an explosion of commercialism, bandwaggoning and hysterical sensationalism’. ‘Virtually nobody in the whole city’, Riley bemoaned, ‘was capable of the state of receptive participation that is essential to the experience of looking at pictures. Misunderstandings and mistaken assumptions took the place of considered and informed judgement.’ The substance of many of these complaints resonated alongside Reinhardt’s aesthetic morality, although he would have probably been perturbed by Riley’s suggestion that

her ‘paintings have some affinity with “happenings”, where the disturbance precipitated is latent in the sociological and psychological situation.’26 Following Reinhardt’s lead, commentators have generally questioned the appropriateness of the artist’s inclusion in The Responsive Eye. On that basis we might be inclined to conclude that The Responsive Eye merely compounded the error that landed Reinhardt in the 1961 exhibition Six American Abstract Painters. (Some of the artists in that exhibition – Ellsworth Kelly, Alexander Liberman, Leon Polk Smith – were also selected for The Responsive Eye.) By 1960 Reinhardt’s reputation among some curators as a difficult character coupled with his middling commercial position did not allow him to argue effectively for the placement of his work in key, historically appropriate exhibitions. Rather than stoically accept relegation to a marginal position with respect to his contemporaries, Reinhardt remained open to the prospect of working with younger artists, many of whom were not yet securely ‘located’ within contemporary critical discourse. Reinhardt’s interest in the work of Ellsworth Kelly, for example, and his willingness to collaborate with Riley should be viewed, in part, in this light. While Reinhardt’s painting enjoyed a relatively high degree of critical visibility throughout the 1950s, the terms of its reception during the early 1960s clustered unhelpfully about a lexicon of extremism and ‘purity’ and the artist’s link to Mondrian. In my view, Reinhardt’s inclusion in The Responsive Eye was a boon to his career. In his catalogue essay, Seitz deals with Reinhardt’s painting under the rubric ‘invisible painting’. Such a category possesses the virtue of acknowledging at least one salient point of the artist’s project. In the overall context of the exhibition, which included far more optically active and jarring works than those of Reinhardt, the artist’s work would have certainly seemed mild or even out of place. While the drama of invisibility may have been truly Seitz’s concern and part of his larger programme of developing a typology of extreme optical effects in painting and sculpture, his choice of the large-scale, striking Red Painting Number 7 of 1952 rather than a later ‘black’ painting revealed, perhaps, the overarching requirement to maintain a consistent level of spectacle or glamour throughout such an extensive group exhibition. There is an important tension here that informs our understanding of the curatorial practices of the modern museum in relation

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to the broader public. By the mid-1960s Reinhardt’s ‘black’ paintings would have been seen as the standard by which to gauge his distance from the field assembled by Seitz. Still, Seitz was intent on making a more subtle point about the historicity of Reinhardt’s ‘monochrome’ paintings of the 1950s, one that would have been easily lost had one of the artist’s late ‘black’ paintings been introduced into the perceptual carnival that was The Responsive Eye. By choosing Red Painting Number 7, Seitz was reminding us that Reinhardt’s choice of close-valued hues was particularly at odds with the way in which most Abstract Expressionist painters regarded colour. Writing in 1955 against what he viewed as Greenberg’s mistaken concept of the role of value contrasts in defining pictorial structure, the artist and critic Fairfield Porter referred explicitly to Reinhardt’s red on red paintings, remarking famously that they ‘make your eyes rock’.27 For Op art to be taken seriously, it was necessary for the curator, in addition to celebrating and popularizing a particular kind of visual pleasure, to address explicitly the aesthetic theory that underpins the work. Unavoidably this means taking account of the achievements of Abstract Expressionism. Grounding Op art in perceptual psychology did more than endow it with accessibility and a ‘natural’, biologically privileged autonomy; it demanded of Seitz that he push history – specifically, the history of American painting of the past two decades – quietly, yet firmly, into the background. Despite Seitz’s confidence, the worry that Op art was all visual confection must have always been present. The curator’s selection of a relatively early red painting by Reinhardt appeared to be informed by a sense of propriety as much as historical acuity. The issue for Seitz was clear: which works by Reinhardt, whose achievements as a painter were not in doubt, would simply be able to hold up against the brasher, more disorientating and jarring optical illusions and devices that constituted the majority of works on display. ‘It is wrong, perhaps, to show close-valued paintings in crowded exhibitions, for their viability lies at the threshold of invisibility. Each work should be seen in isolation, for a meditative state of mind, proper lighting, and passage of time are absolutely essential to a meaningful response.’28 Seitz recognized Reinhardt to be a ‘pioneer’ of this sort of ‘quietistic’ painting. Yet Seitz’s respectful presentation of the artist’s nuanced paintings risked disarming them. Reinhardt gleefully admitted that the ‘black’ paintings never hung well in group exhibitions. This can be taken to mean that the ‘black’ paintings deserve

the cloistered treatment suggested by, among others, Seitz, or that we should accept the tension that the ‘black’ paintings introduce and try to learn something from it. In the crowd assembled by Seitz in 1965, a ‘black’ painting by Reinhardt might have been rendered ‘invisible’; yet for some intelligent eyes, it would have undermined the very notion that Seitz sought to promote and celebrate. Following the art historian Richard Shiff ’s insightful analysis of Riley’s paintings, we may begin to appreciate the critical fissure that existed within late modernism over the issue of optically active abstract painting. Reinhardt, as well, may have learned something important from the other work in The Responsive Eye. ‘The trick’, wrote Shiff, speaking of Bridget Riley’s paintings of the 1960s, ‘is to get as close to the impossibility of autonomy as is possible.’29 Shiff continued by citing Seitz’s argument that ‘the perceptualism of the present is more concentrated than that of impressionism because the establishment of abstract painting has made it permissible for colour, tone, line and shape to operate autonomously’.30 Riley, it seems, concurred with this judgement; so, one suspects, did Reinhardt. Perhaps the greatest strength of so-called Op art, as Shiff claimed, is this type of ‘autonomy . . . even if it could not be absolute’.31 The absolute objectivity of optical illusions could not be denied. Here, it seems, was a common ground expansive enough to accommodate Riley and Reinhardt. For Reinhardt to consider autonomy in this sense – that is, in perceptual, rather than social, terms – would arguably advance his campaign to rid the reception of his paintings of all unnecessary associations. Reinhardt, still considered by some of his peers to be a ‘utopian’ geometric painter, remained mindful of the need to discredit such associations and would have relished the relief provided by Op art to liberate his painting from unwelcome interpretations. Speaking of the achievement of Riley’s ‘colourless’ paintings of the 1960s, the art historian Thomas Crow has suggested that she provided a real challenge to Fried’s disembodied aesthetic by filling in ‘the psychological component’ of the process of looking at abstract art. Consequently, these works ‘turned out to be neither trivial nor transcendent, but rather some interesting place in between’.32 For Fried, the danger of such work was to turn spectators into subjects. For that reason, the painting of Riley and others, such as Larry Poons, would be deemed in some sense coercive. Fried actually admired Reinhardt’s work of the 1960s and stressed

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how the perceptual effect of his painting was a ‘residual affair’ taking some period of time to register. By comparison, Riley’s paintings of the 1960s hit the viewer powerfully and instantaneously. Fried’s criticism reminds us that the presence of optical effects was not the sole issue here; what is important to an overall judgement of quality in painting is the degree to which the spectator is enabled, in some measure, to moderate the impact of these effects through a subtle interaction with the conditions of address. In Fried’s view, Riley’s paintings would have offered no such latitude to the viewer. On the other hand, Reinhardt’s work certainly did provide the opportunity for the viewer to come to grips with the virtual space that was generated by the paintings as one gazed at them for any length of time, ranging from ten minutes to half an hour. Terms enumerated by Crow to illustrate the polarization engendered by the highly active paintings associated with Op art – the ‘trivial’, the ‘transcendent’ – continued to pepper the critical commentary on Reinhardt’s ‘black’ paintings. Paradoxically, it is precisely the heightened perceptual effect of these works that emphatically distinguishes them from the red and blue series of the 1950s and serves to secure their importance for the art of the 1960s and after.

unfinished business Now I don’t want to make any troubles for the young artists, but leave them free.33

When Ellsworth Kelly decided to quit Paris and return to the United States, he was bolstered by a review of Ad Reinhardt’s exhibition at Betty Parsons Gallery he had chanced upon in the December 1953 issue of Art News. Studying the reproductions while in a bookshop on the rue de Rivoli, so the story goes, Kelly concluded that ‘his own work might be welcome there’ and set out for New York in the summer of 1954.34 Kelly’s affinity for Reinhardt – based, in part, upon a common disdain for Abstract Expressionism and a shared love for the potential of the unarticulated monochrome surface – exemplified the attraction to the older artist’s work felt by many younger painters and sculptors of the 1950s and ’60s. It mattered little to Kelly that his own work of the early 1950s was motivated by a kind of associative meaning that was precisely what Reinhardt had worked so vigorously to expunge from the culture of art.35

The relationship to Reinhardt of some artists who had exhibited alongside him in Ten in 1966 at Virginia Dwan’s New York gallery is roughly similar.36 Younger artists tended to acknowledge their affinity to the reductive qualities of the ‘black’ paintings but seemed to be able to disregard the contradictory implications that Reinhardt’s manifestos may have held for their own work. One thinks of the delicately inflected monochromes of Agnes Martin, the one artist in Ten singled out by Dwan as working in a ‘personal mode’, with their strong commitment to the project of creating an image that maps onto the artist’s experience of landscape.37 Both Kelly and Martin were suggesting that one way for the viewer to gain access to their work was to imagine the ‘natural’ or external trigger that had presumably initiated the production of the painting. In similar fashion, Carl Andre, another participant in Ten who was deeply impressed by the example of Reinhardt’s work, revealed a dependency on the use of analogies with nature, evoking the image of the flat surface of a lake to frame his plane floor works. Explanation and interpretation that posits a metonymic link between form and content is precisely the aesthetic position targeted by Reinhardt for criticism in his 1952 statement ‘Abstract Art Refuses’ and throughout the many versions of his ‘art-as-art’ dogma of the 1960s. The literature on Reinhardt is awash with symbolic interpretations of the late, dark paintings. As misleading as these interpretations are, they have the virtue of keeping Reinhardt’s project in view by offering a number of entry points into the artist’s decidedly reduced, yet complex aesthetic. To consider Reinhardt’s ‘black’ paintings in this way, however, risks denying them their crucial reliance on a strong, uncompromising association with formalism for their unique rhetorical force. Accounts of abstract art that presuppose a circuit from lived perceptual experience to the finished form of the work of art were anathema for Reinhardt because they supported an ideology of consumption of art that empowered the critic and the museum at the expense of artist and viewer. The ‘pure’ abstraction advanced by Reinhardt was less a means of expression than an opportunity for an unmediated experience. Of course, unmediated experience is a nonsense, so long as we possess a memory and encounter art in an institutional setting of one sort or another. But it made for exciting, antagonistic copy that brought into focus the historical dimension of abstract art, while invoking its opposite, the readymade.

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Given the risk of misrepresentation posed by the association of his work with less than ‘pure’ abstract artists, why would Reinhardt agree to place his work alongside that of some of the artists in Ten? The decision, in my view, was an expression of Reinhardt’s generosity, his commitment to a practice that entailed dialogue with other artists, and the shrewdness with which he played the game at that stage in his career. Certainly the young artists of the 1960s who had gravitated towards Reinhardt were far more tolerant of his sting, especially as his attacks seemed to them to be aimed principally at the artists of an earlier generation. James Meyer, for instance, has speculated that Andre may have even devised the metal planes exhibited in 1966 in Ten partially as a retort to Reinhardt’s sarcastic put down of sculpture as something that one bumps into while standing back to admire a painting.38 As far as the group exhibitions of the 1950s are concerned, the true home of Reinhardt’s painting was on the margins. The ‘black’ paintings were supposed to be difficult, churlish and disruptive, possessed of ‘immutable quality’ that represented ‘a stubborn reality divorced from “our times”’.39 This, of course, was the romantic version; as T. J. Clark put it, abstract art is a kind of late Romanticism. The hard-bitten ‘art-as-art’ dogma – intended as an antidote to the blizzard of misreadings crowded about Reinhardt’s paintings – was supposed to close the trap. Any sense of the absolute difference of Reinhardt’s ‘black’ paintings was already under threat by the mid1960s. By the time Reinhardt had exhibited in Ten, his work was beginning to appear comfortable indeed in the company of Smithson, Judd, Morris, Andre and Martin. Critics were quick to label Reinhardt the ‘elder statesman’ in this milieu and to treat his work as a benchmark against which to gauge Minimalism. Annette Michelson called Smithson’s Alogon a ‘deviant homage’ to Reinhardt, ‘whose “black” painting does indeed preside, in the subtlety of its iconic order, over the exhibition, suggesting itself as an emblem of a possible esthetics of “concrete reasonableness”’. In an earlier statement of Minimalism’s concerns, Michelson argued that Ten ‘could provide an occasion for an honorable speculation’ on the reformulation of ‘modes of imagination’ in terms of an aesthetics of negation.40 Michelson’s selection of Smithson was insightful. In a statement written by Smithson for the occasion of Sol LeWitt’s 1967 exhibition at Dwan’s Los Angeles gallery, we have a sense of the

qualities of Reinhardt’s ‘black’ paintings that he would have found compelling. Speaking of LeWitt’s open structures, Smithson wrote that ‘these progressions lead the eye to no conclusion . . . One looks “through” his skeletal grids, rather than “at” them. Extreme order brings extreme disorder . . . Every step around his work brings unexpected intersections of infinity.’41 For Smithson, Reinhardt’s ‘black’ paintings contained the same potential for surprise and variety; one simply had to learn to stop and look. Dwan also contributed to the debate encapsulated by Ten but remained more modest about the significance of the exhibition. In a letter to John Canaday, art critic of the New York Times, the gallerist apologized for not being able to produce the requisite press release – or ‘manifesto’, as she called it – to ‘sum up this aggregate of work’. For Dwan, a manifesto was a term ‘appropriate only to cohesive groups with mutual intent’; Ten was no such animal. Despite its resemblance to Primary Structures, Ten was not an exhibition of ‘Minimal Art’ or ‘abc art’, since ‘not one of the artists participating in “10” will identify himself with these terms’. Nevertheless, Dwan defended this grouping by noting aspects that were ‘inherent to all these works which make them rest easily with each other’, such as ‘stillness, methodology’, or, citing Mel Bochner’s formulation, ‘the non-visual (mathematical) made visible (concrete)’. ‘Above all,’ Dwan concluded, ‘it is non-expressionistic, and, with the possible exception of Agnes Martin, impersonal.’ Ten was a collection of art that was ‘phenomenological’, ‘without mystique, empathy or readable content’.42 Ten closed in New York at the end of October, less than one month before the opening of Reinhardt’s retrospective at the Jewish Museum. It was an exhibition that opened up new opportunities for Reinhardt, deepened his already established relationship with Dwan and, for better or worse, generated a fair amount of debate over his historical and aesthetic relation to Minimal art. By 1966 Reinhardt had already been pursuing a strategy of selective engagement with galleries for about five years. Such tactics were always liable to backfire and give credence to the view, held since the mid-1950s by some of his least sympathetic critics, that he was a hypocrite and an opportunist.43 Reinhardt’s writings, of course, were hardly a programme of ethics. It seems unrealistic to suggest, however, that Reinhardt was entirely comfortable with his perceived complicity with the market/gallery system. He must have felt like a guilty victim

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during the 1960s when he had little choice but to pursue a strategy that would distance him from his origins in 1940s New York and compensate for a lack of museum ‘visibility’. Lucy Lippard remained rather more sceptical of the ultimate achievement of Ten. In a wide-ranging critique of group shows about Minimal art mounted during the 1966–7 season, Lippard characterized Ten as an exhibition ‘largely organized by the artists themselves’, that ‘attempted to establish an “absolute” standard of rejective paintings and structures hitherto blurred by institutional mistakes’. ‘It did not succeed,’ Lippard continued, ‘but it did assemble works of high quality, marred by an occasional inclusion or exclusion.’ Lippard mentioned that the ‘Dwan exhibition has been called, jokingly, an “anti-Stella show”’, paving the way for her assessment of Reinhardt’s role in what she termed rejective art. Nominating Reinhardt ‘the prime prototype for the rejective vein’, Lippard admitted that the level of his influence on the younger artists of Ten ‘has yet to be fully investigated, though it is no coincidence that [Frank] Stella’s early works were symmetrical, black, even at times cross-shaped (“Die Fahne Hoch”), or that [Stella] owns two Reinhardts’. Lippard closed her lengthy description of the formless, ‘evocative qualities of blackness’ exemplified by Reinhardt’s late, dark paintings with a jibe aimed at Greenberg and his followers and predicted that Reinhardt’s forthcoming Jewish Museum retrospective would ‘cause adjustment of historical schemes that minimize his contributions over the last twenty years’. Lippard’s review aimed to highlight the inadequacy of criticism directed at Minimal art. Lippard preferred the term ‘rejective art’ to minimal or reductive, she argued, ‘because it does not imply attrition’. Intellectually rigorous and detached, rejective art reveals a commitment by artists to the making of visual objects, rather than a contribution to what she called humanism. Lippard chastised Lawrence Alloway, among others, for feeling compelled to ‘reintroduce “other experience”’ into the appraisal of an ‘art steadfastly opposed to personal interpretation’. Lippard asserted that Reinhardt’s ‘black’ paintings ‘must be seen whole, as itself, without crutches of associative relationship to other objects or sights’. Critics horrified by the exclusion of ‘lyricism, humanity, and warmth of expression’ – this is Harold Rosenberg’s voice – need to recall, wrote Lippard, that ‘abstract art objects are made to be seen and not heard, touched, read, entered, interpreted’. Memory and

gender, for instance, have no place in the experience of rejective art. In a challenge to contemporary criticism, Lippard asked why painting and sculpture must still ‘explain itself symbolically or humanistically’ when advanced music had not been asked to do so for years.44 Lippard drove home the message that coupling Reinhardt with younger artists of the 1960s was dubious. Regardless of their affection and respect for Reinhardt, some younger Minimal artists were loath to submit to his authority as precursor. For these artists, Reinhardt was viewed somewhat diplomatically as an aesthetic fellow-traveller. To his credit Reinhardt maintained a dignified silence throughout the 1960s on the issue of precedence. Even though Reinhardt refused to ‘make trouble’, as he put it, for these younger artists by making too much of the obvious errors in their assessment of his work, he did not shrink from firmly but politely setting himself apart from their goals.45

the success of failure There’s something about darkness or blackness that I don’t want to pin down.46

‘Meaninglessness’, ‘contentless’, ‘dullness’, ‘monotonousness’ and ‘repetitiousness’ were some of the prejudicial terms that had greeted Reinhardt’s project to ‘push painting beyond its thinkable, seeable, feelable limits’.47 These designations thrust upon Reinhardt during the 1960s were grudgingly accepted and quickly transfigured into a catalogue of virtues. The slow, perceptual experience of the emergence of light from the surface of the ‘black’ paintings was fashioned by Reinhardt into the foundation of an anti-metaphysical argument directed at abstract painting. The conditions of regard dictated by the ‘black’ paintings supported the artist’s contention that there was ‘no such thing as emptiness or invisibility, silence’; simply one’s ‘own nervous system, own eyes’ and, most importantly, one’s ‘own learning’.48 For art to progress, it would be necessary for artists to unlearn all they had been taught, lest they habitually alloy the apparent purity of painting in general. It was in this vein that Reinhardt objected so vehemently to the theatricality that attached itself to Rothko’s paintings and the failure, in his view, of his friend to discourage such interpretations. In

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contrast to a discourse that talked about paintings as tragic projections of the human condition, Reinhardt preferred to concentrate on the practical aspects of his paintings’ construction. Despite the parallels that may be drawn between the two men – their intellectual reach and a shared passion for the customization of the painting medium – Reinhardt remained deeply critical of Rothko’s potentially unruly personification of the canvas and his tendency to personalize his sales.49 Reinhardt argued that a painting’s ‘depth’ has a fundamental connection to the way it is made. This means that the ethical conduct of an artist must be measured by the extent to which his approach to the craft of painting is reasoned and disinterested. Reinhardt favoured labour-intensive studio methods, which he described in various manifestos as a kind of ritual. The method had purpose for Reinhardt in so far as it enabled him to achieve a high degree of control and to guarantee a level of consistency in the paintings. In this way, studio habits were shorn of any therapeutic or spiritual connotations. By the 1960s Reinhardt’s materialist take on painting had already strained his friendship with his contemporaries to the breaking point and severely compromised his position with key museum curators in New York. In 1961 Reinhardt had even considered calling a moratorium on personal exhibition, ‘maybe as a oneman moral strike against New York and “The New York School”’.50 In response to the institutional support lavished on contemporaries like Motherwell, De Kooning, Newman and others, Reinhardt in 1965 mounted multiple, simultaneous exhibitions of his work, in an ‘attempt to form an alternate structure by passing up the museum system and breaking the single-gallery hold’.51 Coming five years after his first attempt to survey his output since 1935, this defiant act of self-curation had a pronounced impact on the artist’s fortunes. These exhibitions effectively consolidated Reinhardt’s achievement in painting by reinforcing the fiction – promulgated by the artist and credible, perhaps, only to those who had little insight into the realities of studio practice – that the artist’s entire career as a painter could be conceived or explained in terms of a single-minded allegiance to the progressive purification of painting. It is plausible that the 1966 Jewish Museum exhibition served to dispel the impression that Reinhardt’s critical stance was merely an expression of ‘sour grapes’ motivated by his failure to achieve a level of commercial and critical success equal to that of his peers.

Reinhardt’s Jewish Museum exhibition consisted of 126 works: a concentration of ‘black monotonal paintings of the past twelve years’ and a ‘condensed anthology of his abstract painting during the thirties and forties decades’.52 In the ‘Chronology’ prepared especially for the catalogue – an expanded version of the format Reinhardt devised in 1960 – the entry for 1966 simply read ‘One hundred twenty paintings at Jewish Museum’.53 Reinhardt, in fact, was not entirely comfortable with the plan for a retrospective survey of his work; he would have preferred an exhibition devoted solely to the ‘black’ paintings, from 1960 onwards. In the event Reinhardt chose to mount the ‘historical’ work on the upper floors of the Jewish Museum. This work was selected and hung with the artist’s outlandish ‘stylistic cycles’ in mind, culminating in the ‘late black square uniform five-foot timeless trisected evanescences of the late 60s’, while anticipating the ‘archaic black square uniform five-foot timeless trisected evanescences of the early 70s’.54 The climactic hanging of the ‘black’ paintings of 1960 to 1966 on the ground floor was meant to demonstrate the artist’s authority. Indeed, the full impact of a phalanx of these formidable, brooding paintings is overwhelming. Reinhardt scored something less than a stunning success with his retrospective; some members of the New York critical establishment made certain it would be a pyrrhic victory. Writing in the New Yorker, Robert M. Coates marvelled at Reinhardt’s ‘determination’ to eliminate the ‘pulsing color’ and ‘perfectly proportioned design’ of the mid-1950s, exclaiming how the last section of the show is by far the largest, consisting of a continuous procession of pictures stretching through four galleries and rarely varying in size, mostly black and all but a few in tonalities with so little variation that they appear on anything but the closest inspection to be sheer expanses of solid color.55 ‘There must be sixty of them’, gasped Coates. Yet this show of admiration set the scene for the kind of crushing critical disdain of which Reinhardt had grown weary. ‘I know I counted seventeen in one gallery alone’, Coates noted, disingenuously. ‘No, I should say sixteen, for I discovered that at first counting I had included a fire-exit door in a far corner, about the size of the paintings, and also solid black. The result of all this, I might say, is pretty bleak’ (italics mine).56

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For Hilton Kramer, art critic of the New York Times, bleakness gave way to comic relief. ‘Exhibitions that dwell on the limit of art’, wrote Kramer, ‘make a claim on our attention altogether different from those that accept such limits with equanimity and function more or less commodiously within them.’ In a bid to deflect the uncomfortable truth of Reinhardt’s ‘dogmatic’, adversarial stance, Kramer argued that Reinhardt’s radical practice was already exhausted. The artist’s ‘drastic, self-imposed austerities’ signified a ‘lamentable diminution of the very idea of art’, rather than ‘a true esthetic liberation’. Reinhardt’s practice was not about accommodating liberal culture; rather, it demonstrated how the performance of intolerance could serve a greater good. For Kramer, Reinhardt must be unmasked as a philistine. ‘Meager visual incident’ is no guarantor of purity; rather it is a sign, variously, of ‘contempt for the artistic process’ and ‘a despair over its inability, at this particular stage in our history, to come to terms with anything but the rehearsal of a standardized pictorial image’. Kramer was perceptive enough to grasp that Reinhardt’s ‘painting is not . . . wholly intelligible in its full meaning outside the polemical context in which it has been conceived’, but took this to be a sign of the work’s bankruptcy rather than its cunning or a general condition of late modernism. Ultimately, Kramer labelled Reinhardt a trickster: a deadpan comic, albeit one who is not very affecting. The ‘black’ paintings, Kramer asserted, are little more than an extension of Reinhardt’s famous art cartoons. ‘The artist reputed to be one of the purest of our abstractionists has succeeded only in making purism itself a comic issue.’57 Kramer touched on an astonishing and potentially productive insight about the relationship between the paintings and the art cartoons. While bluntly collapsing the distinction between painting and cartooning in Reinhardt’s practice, Kramer failed to see how the art cartoon might function for the artist as a foil to his painting. Facing mixed reviews, Reinhardt could at least look forward to touring this exhibition. Unfortunately, the curator, Sam Hunter, was unable to realize such plans.58 The task of championing Reinhardt’s work fell, therefore, to Lucy Lippard, who was undoubtedly the artist’s most important advocate during the 1960s and ’70s. Lippard knew of Reinhardt’s work as early as 1960; she was particularly impressed by his notorious three-gallery exhibition of 1965.59 Sometime in 1966 Reinhardt approached Lippard and invited her to write the main essay for the retrospective catalogue.60

Lippard recalled that Reinhardt approached her because he ‘just wanted new blood; anything would be better than what had been written about him beforehand’.61 Lippard was faced with the daunting task of trying to defend three decades of Reinhardt’s artistic practice and to rebut the myriad misreadings that surrounded his work. From the point of view of many critics, Reinhardt’s work of the 1960s did little to challenge the overall achievement of Abstract Expressionism. He was viewed as a relatively marginal, argumentative and contentious figure residing in the shadow of Rothko and Newman. Reinhardt was an artist ‘outside the circle despite his prolonged participation’; in short, ‘a loner’.62 Frank Stella underscored the danger of allowing such circumstances to cloud our assessment of Reinhardt, who was considered by some to be a ‘gifted’ but ‘minor’ artist.63 Lippard’s strategy has always been to present Reinhardt’s achievement as one of supreme independence, heroic isolation, originality and resolve; she achieves this by neutralizing Abstract Expressionism’s ability to subordinate Reinhardt’s practice, and so purging from the readings of his art any association with a moribund geometric abstraction that had long since been superseded as ‘a symbol of social and artistic integration’.64 Lippard worked hard to recontextualize Reinhardt as a transitional figure bridging the aesthetic concerns of the 1950s and ’60s. She foregrounded his growing prestige among younger artists, identifying Reinhardt famously as one who ‘now appears, unpredictably perhaps, as a “sixties painter” instead [of a late-coming neoplasticist], the missing link between the history of geometric abstraction and recent trends’.65 The ‘recent trends’ Lippard had in mind were known in 1966 by many names, including ‘post-painterly abstraction’, ‘abc’ or Minimal art, and systematic or modular painting. According to Lippard, its leading practitioners included Carl Andre, Robert Morris, Jo Baer, Robert Mangold and Stella. Stressing their commonality with Reinhardt’s ‘black’ paintings, Lippard enumerated the fundamental attributes of this work as ‘symmetry, repetition, inertia’. She took pains to point out that Reinhardt’s ‘black’ paintings had been ‘fully accepted among the younger rejective artists’.66 Indeed, Lippard boldly asserted that Reinhardt was a precursor to this trend, ‘unquestionably the first painter to resolve these regions of lifelessness into a strong esthetic program’.67 As I have noted, Reinhardt was far more circumspect in public about his relationship to Lippard’s generation.68 Brian O’Doherty

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challenged Lippard’s claim that the opportunity arose for Reinhardt’s retrospective because of his ‘emergence in the mid-sixties as an eminence grise of minimal art’. O’Doherty was more concerned with the relationship of the audience to the work, writing that ‘a mark of current art is the way in which it builds in self-protection from the ignorant, there is frequent invitation to boredom, which most of the audience accepts and moves on’. By injecting into the experience of spectatorship a strong element of routine, Reinhardt binds his audience together. Boredom or routine becomes a synonym for order, a protective shell shielding the individual from chaos and disintegration.69 ‘Reinhardt’, argued O’Doherty,‘literally “screens” his audience by detaining them until their eyes adapt to his dull, nubby surfaces, psychologically putting them in a sort of profane cella.’ Reinhardt, it seems, is manipulating our very nervous systems: ‘one could write profitably about his cunning subversion of distinct vision in terms of plain physiology here, the eye’s rods and cones being gradually forced into a curious dialogue between edge and surface, acuity and blindness. Sometimes he actually produces a response without a stimulus.’ The sense is that Reinhardt is imposing ‘considerable power and egotism’; the artist is ‘a complete virtuoso in stage-managing his eye’. Reinhardt’s paintings function ‘like anti-matter to other paintings’. The artist is the provider of ‘one-at-a-time art-stimuli for the more genetically superior members of a rapidly multiplying species’.70 As is the case with so many critical accounts of Reinhardt’s ‘black’ paintings of the 1960s, after having delineated the literal features of the work, O’Doherty slides quickly into hyperbole. Still, this is how Reinhardt’s critics alluded to a condition of his art that the artist, through his frontal attacks on Abstract Expressionism, could not reveal: a description of his paintings as works that attempted to harness the despised power of commodification against art, in the name of art-as-art.71 The kinship between the ‘black’ paintings and, say, the material techniques of commercial art had to be suppressed. Reinhardt’s obsession with the ‘purity’ of art masked this relationship; without this ‘cover’, Reinhardt’s attack on Abstract Expressionism would lose its credibility in the eyes of its intended targets. Pop Art, of course, achieved what Reinhardt had struggled to do since the mid-1950s: to render passé the idea of self-expression in art.

7 Reinhardt and the Art of the Sixties empty devices, dead diagrams and invisible spectacles I don’t know about the artists looking to me as a predecessor . . . They come from the same place I come from, but not from me particularly.1

The year 1966 is generally acknowledged as the time of Minimalism’s ascendancy in New York. Coincidentally, and happily for Reinhardt, it was also the moment when the artist’s achievement was most visible to the art-going public. What every artist, historian and critic knows, to paraphrase Reinhardt, is that by reaching back one is able to leap forwards. An artist who skilfully claims historical figures in order to configure his or her artistic future is considered to be a ‘stronger’ artist than one who does not. There is a great deal of truth in Reinhardt’s dicta – informed by his reading of George Kubler’s The Shape of Time – that ‘the first word of an artist is against artists’ and ‘the first word of an art historian is against art historians’.2 In this context the practice of revisionist history is not simply a process of reordering or revealing the past, but simultaneously an act of erasure and construction. Artists undertake vigorous interpretations and reconstructions of the history of art for a variety of reasons: to legitimize their entry into the art world, to defend their originality as an artist or to enhance their prestige and smooth their claims of affiliation with a community of younger practitioners. At certain moments in the history of art, the aims and interests of a community of artists seeking to consolidate their practice coincide with the ambitions of art critics and historians, resulting in a controversial new account of contemporary art. The moment of flux that concerns us here took place during the mid-1960s in New York, as artists associated with Minimal and Conceptual art stretched modernist art to the limit.

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This was achieved without deferring to Clement Greenberg’s aesthetic model or traversing the same ground as Pop art. Critics such as Barbara Rose, Lucy Lippard and Gregory Battcock quickly assembled a formidable group of eminent artist-precursors, whose role was to plead the case of a stratum of avant-garde artists of the 1960s. Along with Marcel Duchamp and Barnett Newman, Reinhardt’s name was cited repeatedly among the handful of artists of an earlier generation deemed most relevant to the advanced art of the 1960s.3 Reinhardt’s work was embraced during the 1960s by young artists and emerging critics in terms of three main interpretive concerns: first, the reductive tendency in painting and sculpture of the twentieth century (identified by Richard Wollheim when he coined the term ‘Minimal art’); second, the sense in which the new art encouraged in the spectator a particular type of self-conscious ‘physically/sensorially charged’ engagement; third, the need to develop and sustain a totalizing view of artistic practice in contrast to the narrow professionalism of the high modernist artist. With respect to the latter, it has been claimed by some that Reinhardt’s legacy is more properly conceived as a ‘producer of cultural meaning’, as Joseph Kosuth has put it, rather than as a painter working through significant aesthetic problems posed by modernist art.4 The first position was developed principally by those associated with Minimalism, while the second and third views – overlapping with and theoretically deepening the first – were explored principally by those aligned with Conceptual art. Minimal art was seen to be about ‘the reduction or systematization of internal relations’ of a work of art that prompted ‘a new focus on relationships struck up across and within the space between the spectator and the object of perception’.5 ‘For Reinhardt,’ asserted Rose, ‘painting was about seeing.’6 As important as these critical perspectives may be, they need to be tempered by the contemporary development of monochrome painting, since Reinhardt’s late works cannot simply be embraced by Minimal art without remainder. The critical reception of the monochromes of Yves Klein – exhibited in New York at the Leo Castelli Gallery in 1961 and in a retrospective at the Jewish Museum that followed on from Reinhardt’s in 1967 – must be factored into the contemporary interpretation of Reinhardt’s late work. ‘The blue period i.k.b. [International Klein Blue]’, wrote Pierre Restany, ‘is the answer to the eternal question of “the color” in

paintings.’7 The same may be said of the 60 × 60-inch square ‘black’ paintings of Reinhardt of 1960 to 1967, although the response is posed in the negative. In one sense the possibilities for monochrome painting during the mid-1960s were sustained through the bias for object-like work or a devotion to process; anything so long as it could be uncoupled from the pictorial or the picture-like. Klein’s richly material monochromes, with their rounded corners and uneven surface, fulfilled this requirement for some critics. Reinhardt’s ‘black’ paintings, presented in shadow boxes and apparently devoid of internal complexity to the impatient eye, also seemed to constitute a space between painting and shallow relief sculpture or, better, architecture. More recently, remarks on Reinhardt’s paintings by artist-commentators point to the ‘pictorial’ pleasures of the ‘black’ paintings, however ‘virtual’ such pleasures may be. Whatever positive outcomes for artists may result from the fruitful misreading of Reinhardt’s practices, we may ask what is at stake if we continue to take at face value the ‘purist’, ‘transcendent’, ‘rejective’ and allegedly monkish-quality of Reinhardt’s paintings? To what extent will some readings simply ‘fail’ because we have been unable or unwilling to penetrate the disguises and masks generated by the artist himself? We know, for example, that the ‘black’ paintings are notoriously difficult to reproduce photographically. We also know that Reinhardt delighted in that fact and commented frequently on their un-reproducibility as though it were a virtue of some consequence. What conclusion, if any, may be drawn from this? To put it bluntly, is there a political lesson to be extracted from the level of un-reproducibility of Reinhardt’s work? Might we assume provisionally that ‘un-reproducibility’ is a marker for withdrawal? If so, would we be correct to assume further that aesthetic withdrawal – or the wilful cultivation of difficulty – is equivalent to a statement of political intent? Reinhardt remarked that his act of ‘making a painting that can’t be seen may be like making a work too large to move in and out of places’. In other words, by grounding a work one fixes it to a place or a staging/scene; this determines a specific orientation or attitude on the part of the spectator, while denying its portability and ease of circulation. Reinhardt visited scores of artistic sites and museums during the course of his overseas travels; there is something of the zealous pilgrim in his attitude towards the experience

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of viewing art and architecture first hand – something made clear, in my view, by the way his slide-shows at The Club undermined the plausibility of experiencing art through reproduction (while paradoxically demonstrating the power of photography to build archives and structure/mediate visuality). He was not about to lay all his cards on the table, but imagined that an ‘invisible painting’ that tested the commitment of the public to art ‘would be a good purpose’.8 Rose, rather less cautious, confidently asserted that the ‘ethical content of the black paintings is manifest in their patent inaccessibility’.9 Short of fetishizing painting or image-making, it is difficult to see how ‘ethical content’ can be ascribed to an object, rather than a set of human actions. How would we read that ‘ethical content’ if we placed the ‘black’ paintings alongside the art comics, or Reinhardt’s explicitly political illustrations? What, in fact, is being resisted by the artist here, and how? To what extent can we be certain that Reinhardt’s painterly practice alone, from 1960 onwards, was intended to be a project of resistance at all? On what basis might we distinguish fruitful from fraudulent interpretations of his late work? Are the paintings themselves vivid enough to sustain such a reading? Here, the necessity to examine all aspects of Reinhardt’s practice – including his political work and his aesthetic commentary – becomes apparent. As far as some artists of the 1960s are concerned, the durable legacy of Reinhardt is his defensive posture.10 But what values did this attitude seek to uphold? Surely, this is the point where generations should and must part company and the limits of generalization of Reinhardt’s practice must be acknowledged and valued. The modernist project had a real hold on Reinhardt and he did not take it lightly. At the same time, he maintained a highly ambivalent attitude towards it. His scepticism had to be suppressed and channelled, lest the artist be unmasked as a fraud. Gravitas was part of the game; it had to be if painting was to maintain any credibility at all in the face of the capitalist spectacle of culture. Reinhardt managed to navigate this arduous path through the liberal use of sarcasm, satire and wit. The comic, though, was always ready to break through the surface and, for some, throw the entire project into disrepute. Reinhardt, in fact, betrayed a deep-seated ambivalence towards the broader significance of autonomy in art: he seemed to be willing to concede uncertainty about art’s potential, in

and of itself, to deliver the goods. Knowing that for Reinhardt the autonomy of art held out a very different sort of promise in the 1960s than it did during the 1940s only makes matters more interesting. Today one is inclined to view any talk of autonomy of art with suspicion, as something shameful or pathological. Not so, perhaps, during the early years of the 1950s, when an Adornoesque defence of art’s autonomy could and did mean something more. Reinhardt could have certainly been talking about himself when he described the post-historic artist as one who was ‘aware of himself as artist, aware of art-as-art’. Such self-consciousness found general agreement among the artists of the 1960s with whom Reinhardt was acquainted, including Donald Judd, Agnes Martin, Frank Stella, Carl Andre, Sol LeWitt and Joseph Kosuth. In this spirit, Terry Atkinson pairs Reinhardt with Judd, both of whom build through their writings on art ‘a critical theory of their respective practices . . . something like what we might call a paradigm of consciousness, or more specifically, a paradigm of intentionality’.11 Unlike these younger artists, though, Reinhardt quite deliberately indexed his particular contribution to art to a canon of modernist pioneers that included, among others, Cézanne, Malevich and Mondrian. For Reinhardt, the post-historic artist was the artist whose omnibus vision of art history – Western and otherwise – enabled him to absorb and understand the lessons of art more completely; in short, to become an artist most mindful of what is – and is not – art. ‘Timeless art’ is the term Reinhardt uses to assert the totalizing, universal, potential of abstract art. It is also a means with which to resist the contemporary fascination with the ‘new’, to ensure that the artist retains control of his work outside the pull of the market and its managers. Artists of the 1960s, whose credibility was dependent upon the performance of an unequivocal estrangement towards late modernist art – and we see this particularly pronounced in the postures adopted during the late 1960s by those associated with Conceptual art and its promotion – took Reinhardt’s vision as a warrant for something like the practice of ‘meta art’. The conflation of these two senses of ‘post-historical’ or ‘timeless’ art served to advance the more grandiose claims of Conceptual art as the next revolution in art, yet also obscured the subtle and contingent nature of Reinhardt’s insight. For many artists it was enough to adopt what they saw as Reinhardt’s most enduring lesson:

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his critical attitude and iconoclasm. Kosuth, for example, considered Reinhardt’s paintings to be a ‘kind of passage’ that justified the embrace of a teleological view of art. A painting produced by Kosuth prior to his emergence as a Conceptual artist restates Reinhardt’s discovery of geometry as a substitute for composition. ‘His contradictions’, wrote Kosuth in 1980, ‘were the contradictions of Modernism being made visible to itself. After Reinhardt, the tradition of painting seemed to be in the process of completion, while the tradition of art, now unfettered, had to be redefined.’12 Andre appreciated Reinhardt’s self-managed project of constituting the proper conditions for the production, viewing and interpretation of art. By doing so, Andre constitutes the notion of a generic art, the proper, ‘postmedium’ endeavour of the contemporary artist. ‘Now artists must do the culture as well as the art. That is how we have become politicized.’13 The issue of Reinhardt’s influence is further complicated when one tries to frame Reinhardt’s ‘black’ paintings of 1960 to 1966 in terms of Minimalism’s obsession with seriality. Reinhardt was certainly aware of the role that repetition played in his work. He had grasped and internalized this organizational concept and was especially sensitive to how his usage of repetition differed from that of, say, Albers or Mondrian. Reinhardt never seemed to abandon himself completely to the Minimalist version of seriality. Consider, for example, a collection of small coloured sketches gathered together and mounted on a board around 1966. The arrangement of roughly 100 delicate sketches in coloured pencil and india ink on paper and tracing vellum shows Reinhardt exploring variations of the symmetrical schema and possible arrangements of colour. There are numerous examples of stacked squares forming tall, thin designs and many plans that recall the more complex geometric structure of Reinhardt’s large-scale red monochrome canvases of the early 1950s. It has not been established if this anomalous drawing was done after the fact, as a kind of plan for the Jewish Museum retrospective of 1966, or represented a group of sketches for future works. Reinhardt, in fact, denied ever producing sketches for his mature work. Whatever the status of this singularly curious sketch, there is no sense that these variations on a theme will begin to crowd in on us, like the mad permutations of Sol LeWitt’s ‘Open Cube’ series. To cite another example, one sequence in particular in Reinhardt’s 1966 portfolio of silkscreen prints demonstrates how the

implied grid of his cruciform-like schemata can be deconstructed at will.14 A sort of ‘sport’ in the ensemble, print number five in the portfolio has been divided into a 5 × 8 grid whose elongated format measures 25.4 × 40.6 cm (10 × 16 in). Two brighter, narrow blue, vertical bands dominate the print, in a manner reminiscent of the late paintings of Burgoyne Diller. The ‘ground’ is broken up with greyred and a fairly light grey. As we scan the entire suite of ten prints, we note that the sequence comes to rest, somewhat predictably, in the realm of the dark, matt, black square. Yet, Reinhardt’s diversion, possibly in hommage to his underrated, late colleague, represents a celebration of a very different use to which geometry in art might be put. Finally, when the ‘black’ paintings of 1962 to 1966 are viewed in concentration (a rare situation that has been realized all too infrequently in a handful of posthumous exhibitions) it becomes apparent that each ‘black’ painting is unique in terms of the internal distribution of hue and the pace and intensity with which the optical effects emerge. The aspects of Reinhardt’s painterly practice that unquestionably set him apart from his New York School peers – and transformed the artist into a most attractive precursor of Minimal and Conceptual art – are the aesthetic and the discursive. Yet there is no inevitability to the link between his work and that of younger artists of the 1960s. Reinhardt’s ‘black’ paintings did not mark the end of painting as an art, although they were happily taken as such by some younger artists. One of the earliest attempts to locate Reinhardt’s painting outside the realm of Abstract Expressionism and to place it at the head of successive late modernist practices comes from Harold Rosenberg, a defender of gestural painting and an inconstant admirer of the artist. Rosenberg called Reinhardt the ‘intellectual pivot of the new art’.15 It was a backhanded compliment based on the insight that the less internal complexity there is in a work of art, the more likely the critic is to project a meaning onto that blank canvas. The fear was that the critic’s text would ultimately overwrite the art and that ‘seeing’ art would be replaced by ‘reading’ art. (It is a fear that still haunts some critics and curators today and sustains the conservative attitude that the work of art must be allowed to ‘speak for itself ’.) Worse, according to Rosenberg, would be the situation in which the work of art existed solely as a pretext for writing.

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The critical writing that had insistently, though not necessarily more coherently or persuasively, argued for a link between Reinhardt’s ‘black’ paintings and Minimal art emerges from other quarters. Both Rose and Lippard were convinced of the ability of the new, Minimalist art to stand shoulder to shoulder with critical commentary. Lippard carried this optimism forward to include the emerging Conceptual art of the mid- to late 1960s as well, which she famously embedded in an account of the ‘dematerialization’ of the art object. (‘Dematerialization’ was a phrase that Reinhardt had used while speculating on the nature of his late paintings.) Younger critics and artists in New York did not universally hold Rosenberg’s opinion that language, in the form of art criticism, was profoundly inimical to art. On the contrary, young artists considered Lippard’s and others’ commentary to be a vital and intelligent contribution to their project.16 Some Minimal and Conceptual artists of the 1960s were convinced that critical commentary – whether in the form of the artist’s writings or informed criticism – was, in one way or another, integral to the production of the work of art. Reinhardt’s relevance to artists of the mid-1960s was presented in a widely cited article by Barbara Rose, ‘abc Art’, in which he was positioned among an assortment of painters, sculptors, dancers, performance artists and musicians commonly grouped under the rubric Minimal art.17 Because Rose’s essay owes a substantial intellectual debt to Richard Wollheim’s prior analysis of Minimal art, it is worth considering the latter’s arguments in some detail. For Wollheim, Minimal art signified the historical tendency within twentieth-century artistic practice to accept as art a ‘class of objects that, though disparate in many ways – in looks, in intention, in moral impact’, possess a ‘minimal art-content’. In other words, there was not much to ‘see’ in such objects, and this lack of vividness or detail unsettles habits of aesthetic appreciation that are dependent upon pictorial detail or significant painterly incident. Wollheim described the aesthetic characteristics of this impulse, which he claimed had emerged around the first decade of the century and continued to appear in various guises throughout the intervening five decades, as ‘undifferentiated’ to an ‘extreme degree . . . or else the differentiation that they do exhibit, which may in some cases be very considerable, comes not from the artist but from a non-artistic source, like nature or the factory’. The examples Wollheim cites include certain combines of Robert Rauschenberg, the ‘non-assisted’

readymades of Marcel Duchamp and ‘canvases’ of Reinhardt. For Wollheim, the pertinence of Reinhardt’s painting rests on its ability to ‘exhibit to an ultimate degree’ the result of a kind of process of work characterized by the ‘partial obliteration or simplifying of a more complex image that enjoyed some kind of shadowy preexistence’. ‘Within these canvases’, Wollheim wrote, ‘the work of destruction has been ruthlessly complete, and any image has been so thoroughly dismantled that no pentimenti any longer remain’.18 Wollheim aimed to legitimate Reinhardt’s ‘black’ paintings of the 1960s as an art worthy of attention by annexing them to a modernist tradition of artistic production that displayed ‘minimal artcontent’. This tradition, in turn, could be construed as generative in so far as it had a coherent history through which one could sensibly frame incidents of extreme reduction in art. Rose’s approach, less analytical and more in the spirit of the popularizing curator, also framed Reinhardt’s achievements in terms of an art-historical trend. In her text, however, Reinhardt’s artistic achievements and reputation served mainly to validate and promote the work of a younger generation of artists, work that she took to be far more discontinuous with the history of modernism than Wollheim would have allowed. For Rose, the importance of Reinhardt to the younger generation of New York artists was found in the reductive form taken by his paintings, which were subsequently construed by artists as discursive works that addressed the issue of the relationship of the spectator to art and as objects of ethical or political resistance directed mainly against the decadence of the New York School. That an encounter between a spectator and a work of art may be theorized as dialogical or conversational has been a significant aspect of the discourse of art since the 1960s. An exchange between Andre and Jeanne Siegel captures something of the political resonance of this position as it was articulated in 1970: Jeanne Siegel: In a way you remind me of Ad Reinhardt – a certain dualism perhaps. In his paintings there was the same pervasive interest in juxtaposing rectangular forms and he too was politically involved although he made a cause célèbre out of keeping it out of his art. Do you feel any affinity to him? Carl Andre: Well, I lived with a Reinhardt painting in 1960. Frank Stella bought or traded one of the black paintings from

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Ad and it was in my apartment when I was living on Grand Street. Reinhardt was quite an influence; I think it was through his painting that the idea of the spectators doing artwork in order to recover the nature of the painting came about, because with a Reinhardt even I today have to work to see it, which I’ve found is very rewarding . . . I will perhaps betray his memory to say that I didn’t keep the rigidity that he did.19

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Andre’s admission that ‘it was while trying to see Ad’s black paintings that I fully realized that it requires work to see any work of art’20 is couched in his own totalizing view of the ‘art world’, which asserted that anyone who makes a contribution to art is considered to be an ‘artworker’.21 Because Reinhardt’s paintings require the spectator to work to ‘recover the nature of painting’, they are immediately differentiated from art associated with the late modernist ethos of immediacy and taste. According to one commentator, ‘Andre transformed Reinhardt’s idea, making sculptures that are difficult to see not because they are almost imperceptible, but because they do not announce themselves as art’.22 Reinhardt’s paintings raise an interesting notion of work, since what is called for is intense concentration, which may be defined negatively as the state of ‘not-doing’ this or that other action. Sol LeWitt is another artist whose relationship to Reinhardt demands scrutiny. LeWitt’s statements on Conceptual art, for example, are said to owe a debt to Reinhardt’s literary style.23 There is also LeWitt’s use of the cube, which is reminiscent of Reinhardt’s adoption of the square as an immutable format for his painting. ‘The reason I used the cube’, said LeWitt, ‘was that it’s really a pretty uninteresting form. It doesn’t have any action involved in it – it has complete stasis – and therefore it’s the kind of thing that can be easily manipulated.’ The emphasis LeWitt places on the role of the schema in the generation of his works is also telling:‘Well, I think that basically what my art is about is not making choices. It’s in making an initial choice of, say, a system, and letting the system do the work’. At the same time, LeWitt distances himself from Reinhardt by making it clear that one needs to think about the mechanism of influence or affinity in this context in other terms. ‘I have to make a decision on color,’ LeWitt announces, declaring that he had decided on ‘white because it was the least color I could think of. The other possibility would be black. But black is so positive and it has other meanings.’ Whereas Reinhardt presented his

practice as the culmination of the history of painting – metaphorically, art in general – LeWitt shared something of the teleological concerns voiced at the time by Atkinson and Kosuth: I think that to pick up the paraphernalia of painting today is an anachronism . . . I don’t think any painting can really be done. The only possible exception would be something like Frank Stella doing the shaped canvas. But that already came to be thought of as object, rather than as painting . . . Bob Ryman – he’s the only painter today who, I think, really is involved with the idea of painting as it can be done today.24 139

Reinhardt’s value as a resource for younger artists could only be assured if the artist’s theory and practice were divided, implying that the practice of painting emerged as a central focus for Reinhardt simply because of his historical position. To return to Conceptual art, this is precisely where the argument of Reinhardt’s importance begins to take shape. Its most vigorous and vocal proponent has been Joseph Kosuth, whose 1969 three-part polemic ‘Art after Philosophy’ is filled with citations and references to Reinhardt. Several years earlier, in 1966, while a student at the School of Visual Art, New York, Kosuth co-authored with Christine Kozlov a term paper with the ponderous title ‘Ad Reinhardt: Evolution into Darkness – the Art of an Informal Formalist; Negativity, Purity, and the Clearness of Ambiguity’. The following year Kosuth, Kozlov and Michael Rinaldi founded the Lannis Gallery (later to be renamed The Museum of Normal Art), where a version of Reinhardt’s ‘art-as-art’ dictum greeted the gallery visitor. When painting was ascendant during the late 1970s and early 1980s, Kosuth chose to defend the purity of Conceptual art against Neo-Expressionist painting by citing the importance of Reinhardt’s practice to his own development.25 This was not seen by Kosuth as contradictory, since his invocation of Reinhardt was consistent with his belief that ‘the reason why different artists from the past are “brought alive” again is because some aspect of their work becomes “usable” by living artists’.26 Abstract art, Reinhardt was fond of saying, is not a representation of anything, yet is still meaningful art. It is ‘art as art’. He also asserted that abstract art was the logical and historical culmination of art making. ‘Art-as-art is art’ may be translated as ‘abstract art is

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art about art.’ In other words, ‘art as art’ is what Kosuth and other Conceptual artists recognized as meta-art. Yet ‘art-as-art’ could equally be a denial of second-order, or meta-, art. And abstract art could just as well be an art that concerns itself with showing itself as abstract, as a phenomenological coming-to-presence. Hence the intriguing ambiguity of the term ‘art-as-art’, which opens up the possibility of divergent interpretations, one of which would be nonConceptual.27 In cognitive psychology, the capacity of human beings to represent representations is, so far as we know, unique to our species. As Harry Holtzman used to quip to his freshman art students, ‘a dog knows that he’s a dog; but he doesn’t know that he knows he’s a dog.’28 Representing representations is what meta-languages do. It is one cognitive tool that enables us to argue about whether a state of affairs is true or false. In Reinhardt’s worldview, ‘art-as-art is art’ is equivalent to stating ‘art-as-art’ is true. Kosuth took Reinhardt’s catch-phrase – ‘art-as-art is art’ – and rendered it in the jargon of the analytical philosophy of language to formulate his signature ‘art as idea as idea’. At the same time, Kosuth laid claim controversially to having invented the first true art practice about art. Not every artist associated with Conceptual art was interested in using art in a way that celebrated the logical positivist assumptions held dear by A. J. Ayer and other analytic philosophers of language. Considering Kosuth’s early works comprising an object, a photographic representation of an object and a dictionary definition of an object (the last element being simply the ‘representation of a representation’ in language), one can readily appreciate the syntax of the work, which is that of an analytical statement that is a tautology. Kosuth was demonstrating that the object, the photograph and the textual definition were merely saying the same thing. Unless one is a Neo-Platonist, there is no reason to privilege ‘idea’ over object or representation. Reinhardt was unwilling to make the leap from painting (object-making) to language (a system of sign-making presumably capable of functioning as a meta-language for object-making). Kosuth and others, of course, did. By nominating Reinhardt as his artistic father figure, Kosuth imparted the aura of historical inevitability on such a shift in artistic practice. Other artists associated with Conceptual art found Reinhardt’s example to be tremendously supportive of their concern to engage

critically the conditions of production and dissemination of art. A statement published by Reinhardt in 1963 seems to have prefigured the public domain works of Lawrence Weiner: This painting is my painting if I paint it. This painting is your painting if you paint it.29 Here is Weiner, in mid-1969, discussing his relationship to form and content in art, using the example of an early ‘removal’ work: The idea of a removal and an intrusion is much more exciting to me than the physical thing itself . . . The idea of making art out of a hole is exciting. But the hole is never terribly exciting. The same thing as a canvas. You know, Reinhardt spent his life trying to prove that. The idea of a Reinhardt is always more exciting than a Reinhardt.30 In Seth Siegelaub’s catalogue ‘exhibition’ of 1969, Weiner published the following statement along with a selection of works, including ‘A 2 in. wide 1 in. deep trench cut out across a standard one car driveway’ and ‘Two minutes of spray paint directly upon the floor from a standard aerosol spray can’: 1. The artist may construct the piece. 2. The piece may be fabricated. 3. The piece need not be built. Each being equal and consistent with the intent of the artist, the decision as to condition rests with the receiver upon the occasion of the receivership.31 Apparently, Weiner has always been reluctant to acknowledge more than a passing interest in Reinhardt.32 Yet, in the case of Weiner’s ‘removals’ and his public domain statement that holds out the possibility of sharing the creative privilege of the artist, there is a clear sense that Reinhardt’s virtually featureless ‘black’ paintings coupled with his polemical writings provided a fertile platform from which artists could launch a range of projects that encompass objects and processes relatively undifferentiated from those encountered in everyday life. Reinhardt’s complex practice provided some artists with a warrant for exaggerating the role of language in

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art and for the exploration of means to diminish radically the importance of the object in art. This exaggeration of what might be called the ‘Reinhardt effect’ deflected, rather than developed, the line of enquiry initiated by Reinhardt. When ‘the object is stripped down to the extent of Ad Reinhardt’s paintings, and when the statements present the cryptic fascination of Ad Reinhardt’s copious writings, it is understandable if the attention of his audience should waiver between the two’.33 When Mel Ramsden was a young art student in Australia in 1964, the artist Roger Cutforth sent him a letter describing Reinhardt’s work, then on view in London. For Ramsden, nineteen years of age at the time, the discovery of Reinhardt was a revelation: Cutforth told me that his paintings were almost impossible to see, that they had to be roped off and that if you ‘saw’ the Reinhardts the rest of the show ceased to exist. This made a big impression on me, especially doing work that made other artists’ work disappear. I think the thing about him is first of all the dogma that continued the history of dogma in abstract painting (from Malevich, etc.) and second and above all the continuation of the virtuality of painting in newly problematic circumstances – i.e., the circumstances of the insolent literalism of Minimalism. To make the virtual (the hard to see cross) and the literal (the painting support) newly problematical was one immense virtue I saw in Reinhardt even though these may not have been his intentions at all. It held out the promise of the virtual and the representational in the face of the literal – as it was in the mid 60s.34 Ramsden did not actually view a Reinhardt painting until 1967. Not surprisingly, works produced by Ramsden in New York – such as Guaranteed Painting (1967), the series Secret Painting (1967–8) and earlier works, like Two Black Squares (Paradoxes of the Absolute Zero) (1966) – were based on the central proposition of the black monochrome. These works, which used text to undermine their apparent status as monochrome paintings, were intellectual cousins to works being produced in Britain by Terry Atkinson and Michael Baldwin that toyed with the idea of negation, meaning and reference. According to Ramsden,

one of the reasons Reinhardt was such a figure for certain people in the 60s and during a time when the most progressive work was three dimensional was that his paintings, whilst all-over literal objects, had a virtual dimension. The fact that the virtual dimension was almost invisible made it more powerfully virtual. It was a way to go on without surrendering to literality.35 Reinhardt’s virtuality remained couched in language: ‘“the virtual” in these works was provided by language, by captions . . . From New York School to Conceptual Art’.36 In an exhibition curated in 1993 titled Looking at Seeing and Reading, Ian Burn devoted considerable attention to a discussion of Reinhardt’s notion of self-conscious looking or, in the parlance of postmodernism, the ‘narrativization of one’s gaze’.37 Burn’s return to art-making during the late 1980s after a hiatus of working within the Australian labour movement was sustained initially by the problem of trying to articulate the very self-consciousness involved in literally paying attention to that at which you are looking. According to Burn, Reinhardt and Jasper Johns gave impetus to the idea of producing an art that addressed vision in a self-reflexive manner: What do I see when red, yellow and blue have been over-painted to secrete their color under washes of matte black paint (Reinhardt)? The colors in Reinhardt’s paintings are always in process of becoming visible, their visibility endlessly postponed, guaranteeing the possibility of seeing an importance equivalent to any actual seeing. The temporality of reception ‘folds’ time back on the viewer.38 Such extravagant aesthetic effects are not to be left to their own devices for long. Burn, following the Marxist philosopher Theodor Adorno, concurred with the position that an artist’s decision to produce art which ‘refuses to signify’ – or withholds or withdraws ‘content’ – is inevitably an act of resistance to something. Mostly, since the mid-century, it has been resistance formed in the context of a burgeoning commercialization and institutionalism of art. In those circumstances, the ‘refusal to signify’ was often a strategy of aesthetic protest that

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went hand-in-hand with other forms of protest. The writings (‘dogma’) and cartoons produced by Reinhardt were a more literal protest complementing the ‘protest’ of his paintings and, as such, were integral to his art.39

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History really does have a hold on us here. In one sense, negation may have been the only way to go on. But Burn did miss a subtle point in his rush to embrace Reinhardt as a fellow artist-activist. By the late 1960s Reinhardt was already labouring under the dispiriting possibility that the full import of his painterly practice was beyond the scope of the contemporary art audience. A tiny utopian urge remained – a desire that would be sublimated and expressed in Reinhardt’s thought as the anxiety that an adequate spectator to match the difficulty of the ‘black’ paintings had yet to come into being. The notion of a critical art may also be construed as being based in or around the perceptual frame supplied by painting. Indeed, this approach has been at the heart of the Art & Language group’s concerns since the early 1990s. Through their practice, the theorization of representation that was only implicit in Burn’s meditation on seeing and reading moved rapidly to the fore. Once again, the dominant role played by language is asserted, leading Art & Language to claim that ‘while art is not simply a bunch of objects under some description, it is definitely not a mere mode of attention. It may be better to say that it is a bunch of things in a wide sense under a set of descriptions. These descriptions are often conflicted.’40 When it comes to the monochrome or the near-monochrome, Art & Language has attempted to recover something of the tensions inherent in Reinhardt’s ‘black’ paintings: to talk of a blank painting is not simply to conceive of an empty canvas. On the contrary, the typical ‘blank’ painting is a canvas made apparently blank – or apparently almost blank – through the application of paint. Among the better-known artists who have produced such things are Kasimir Malevich, Alexander Rodchenko, Robert Rauschenberg, Yves Klein, Piero Manzoni, Ad Reinhardt, Robert Ryman, and Gerhard Richter. The surface of an almost blank painting may be – has been – black or white or grey. Its texture may vary – has varied – from the dense and detailed to the smooth and even. It is not possible that this

surface should exclude all possibility of figuration or association. But it may resist being cited in support of any specific identification or association that it might be supposed to carry.41 The monochrome, then, is not necessarily a sign in waiting, but a sign for blankness that had to be ‘painted out’ (that is, made into a monochrome) before it could be declared ‘blank’ and ‘not-blank’. Speaking of Klein’s monochromes, Charles Harrison asserts that the ‘interest lies largely in the imaginative confrontation its achieved presence avails with the theoretical conditions of its conception, since once conceived, a painting of this kind can notionally be executed without further critical reflection or reconsideration. It is a near neighbor to the ready-made.’42 To younger artists of the 1960s, like Stella, Andre, Judd or Kosuth, Reinhardt’s near-black canvases did not appear at all painterly. They seemed ‘manufactured’ without necessarily being ‘mechanical’. While not identical to the readymade of Duchamp – Reinhardt’s nemesis – they were something other than paintings. Reinhardt painted geometric abstractions that were difficult to see, though not quite invisible once seen. ‘This is always the end of art’, Reinhardt concluded, ironically. ‘When somebody says, “Well, where do you go from here or where do you go from here?” I say, “Well, where do you want to go?” There’s no place to go.’43 The answer to Reinhardt’s question, according to one commentator, is to ‘revise the understanding of the larger game at issue’.44 The ‘game’, as it were, was open to divergent interpretations by artists eager to test their own notions of how to go on in the wake of the momentous shifts in art of the 1960s. In the work of Adrian Piper – from the permutation studies of 1968 to the so-called ‘object catalysis and political self-awareness’ projects of 1975 to 1982 – one can detect the ethical rigour and sustained self-consciousness that form Reinhardt’s legacy, as endorsed by Lippard. ‘My Art Education’, written by Piper in mid-1968 while a student at the School of Visual Arts, contains the sole reference to Reinhardt in her entire corpus of published writings. It is a youthful piece of writing, selfconscious and self-absorbed, that aims to build a more permeably bounded artistic practice. For Piper, the most resonant contemporary trends in art in the late 1960s were those that presented ‘a whole world of formal-intuitive understanding’. The artists she mentions in this regard are Andre, LeWitt and Reinhardt. Of the three, LeWitt

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is clearly the most resonant figure for Piper, providing her with a vivid sense of critical power enabled by a broad artistic vision. Above all, LeWitt’s example demonstrates the feasibility of an art-aboutart through a combination of object production and writings on art. Piper, like Kosuth, vigorously exploited the potential of meta-art and singled out Reinhardt as an artist she now disagrees with ‘ideologically’ but nevertheless admires.45 In contrast to interpretations of Reinhardt’s legacy voiced by artists, there appeared to be a need to present accounts that preserved the integrity of the artist’s practice by foregrounding Reinhardt’s intentions. This sentiment was expressed most strongly by those who had maintained a long-standing personal relationship with Reinhardt, such as Martin James (art historian, colleague at Brooklyn College and travel partner), Lippard (Reinhardt’s most insightful champion from the mid-1960s to the 1980s), Dale McConathy (associated with Betty Parsons Gallery and an intelligent chronicler of Reinhardt’s complexity) and Thomas Hess (esteemed editor of Art News, patron and commentator on Reinhardt’s art cartoons of the 1950s and sometime nemesis).46 Yet, so long as artists, critics and curators remain content to take Reinhardt at his word, the generativeness of the artist’s vision of artistic practice will be concealed by a façade of single-mindedness and high modern seriousness. Misreading has its place; if only to establish a new space for practice. While it may appear to be unavoidable, misreading can be perverted and lose its potential for liberation. Without anti-conservative interpretations, we will miss the brilliance of Reinhardt’s humour, as Mel Ramsden rightly notes. ‘I think he must have known his paintings were funny. And his work is surrounded by laughter but he had to keep control of this: he had to be the only one laughing; no laughing out of place.’47 The dream of a totalizing practice – a dream of complete control and freedom that seems to me to have been the point of Reinhardt’s versatility – was at heart a comedy if not a cruel joke. By the end of the 1960s not many artists who had been touched by Reinhardt during that decade were still laughing.48

trailer Speaking of Reinhardt’s late paintings, the critic Dore Ashton observed that

the ‘black’ is rarely dead black. It has a filmy intonation that ranges from blue-black to ochre-black. The horizontal sections are, except in about two instances, visible thanks to variations in value. In some paintings, there are tones of purple, blue, redbrown, which must be read both in terms of value and chroma . . . A viewer cannot use the same time scale in a Reinhardt as he can in a Kelly, for instance. The low values demand adjustment, and color reveals itself only after contemplation . . . The practical intellect has no function in the apprehension of these paintings.’49 For some of Reinhardt’s very last works the subtle, stunning perceptual impact aptly described by Ashton remains frustratingly unrecoverable. By 1967 Reinhardt had come to discover the limit of the darkening of the ‘black’ painting; effects that were especially vivid and clearly controlled in works dating from 1964 gave way to canvases so dark as to appear to be uninflected monochromes. It is likely that Reinhardt learned this gradually through the experience of restoring, by literally repainting, previously damaged work. Coupled with Reinhardt’s desire to discover how dark a ‘black’ painting could be before it ‘failed’, the process of restoration resulted paradoxically in the darkest works of the series of paintings initiated in 1960. Other factors may have been responsible for some of these very dark paintings, such as Reinhardt’s inability fully to predict how dark the canvas would be once the painting had dried. Presumably, once Reinhardt had achieved a new threshold of ‘invisibility’, he would have continued to reproduce versions of that exemplar according to his established technique. Eventually he would have reached an impasse in the project of ‘black’ painting. Ironically, it would have been the intrinsic limitations of our native perceptual system, rather than a lack of imagination, that would have forced Reinhardt to conclude that he had exhausted this series of work. There is some evidence to suggest that Reinhardt had begun to face this issue and to consider other means to continue his practice as an artist outside painting. These deliberations may have been hastened by the state of his health in 1967 and the prospect of uninterrupted studio time and travel, thanks to the award of a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship scheduled to commence in September 1967. Prior to Reinhardt’s death at the end of August

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1967, Lippard claims that just days before this date, the artist was on the verge of turning his attention away from painting and towards film, a medium that would have been ideal for the continued exploration of colour light effects through time.50 Reinhardt speculated about the possibility of making a film that would be constructed of a succession of monochrome frames, as a means to reproduce the emergent, animated colour light of his paintings.51 From Reinhardt’s point of view, getting involved with film at this stage in his career would have been a way to validate his long-standing interest in a highly popular medium. As early as 1943 Reinhardt had expressed the belief that ‘the best and most effective pictures can be found in magazines and movies’ and had urged, with some sarcasm no doubt, artists concerned with communicating to a larger public to find employment in ‘masspublishing’ or the ‘picture industry’. During his wartime service in the us Navy, he had proposed to deliver a series of lectures on film to his fellow servicemen in the photography unit to which he had been assigned. Reinhardt’s view of contemporary visual culture placed cinema at its heart; films, he wrote, are ‘incomparably greater than all previous picture arts thrown together’.52 Yet Reinhardt was also mindful of the conflict between his love of the purely visual and the ‘tendencies of a medium that is not only visual but dramatic’. Film, for Reinhardt, would have to be reformed to suit his purpose. It needed, first of all, to be purged of narrative; the ‘image as image’ would have to carry the dramatic force as a spectacle to be experienced. ‘Nothing in the film’, wrote Reinhardt, should be ‘allowed to speak for or to the audience.’ The relevance of the spectator’s ‘feeling’ must be denied and his responses must be ‘blocked’.53 In this manner Reinhardt – the devotee of cinema – rehearsed his terrorization of the mechanism of symbolic meaning using what was arguably the modern era’s most spectacular and influential medium of communication and entertainment.

8 Political Art and Political Power

scepticism For over thirty years I was never sure about what protest art did exactly.1

During a discussion on social protest art broadcast in 1967 over New York City’s independent radio station wbai, Reinhardt conceded that public media such as ‘murals or public statements, signs and parades, political cartoons in newspapers, and now things that happen on tv’ might have some political utility. Even so, he remained unconvinced as to whether the same might be said of ‘protest images’ of the sort advocated at the time by his co-panellists, the painter Leon Golub and Mark Morell, an artist who used the American flag in his work. For Reinhardt, the issue of what might be called ‘political art’ was best framed as ‘an advertising or communications problem’ rather than one relevant to ‘the fine arts’.2 Reinhardt attacked Golub vehemently for his use of so-called ‘protest’ imagery and for the extravagant claims being voiced in the name of art, political agency and expression. The protest images of the 1960s that exercised Reinhardt were produced largely independently of a political party, by artists who were emotionally motivated and involved with the single issue of the Vietnam War. Moreover, these images and works of art were distributed or promoted unconventionally by artists working outside the mainstream channels of public media address. This strong, self-organizing component is, of course, partially the point of activist art, and one that Reinhardt did not appreciate. He considered that this kind of activity was dangerously naive: As an artist you can only reach those people who are willing to meet you more than half way. At least that’s the fine artist’s

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problem now. Another kind of artist who has techniques of communication or who wants to affect people like an advertising artist or a poster artist or somebody who wants to get a strong reaction, that’s even another matter.3

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Reinhardt’s views rehearsed the position he had held since the early 1940s. While the logic of that position seemed secure, it was tempered by a profound scepticism over the course of the conduct of opposition to the war in South-east Asia. ‘Even now,’ Reinhardt asserted, ‘we have a problem of what to do against the war. It doesn’t matter what you do, nothing seems to be very effective.’4 This attitude would have been read by his co-panellists as an unwelcome, unproductive expression of defeatism, since they believed that art was a valuable tool of communication with which to build political solidarity and to inspire resistance against American imperialism. Nevertheless, Reinhardt continued to draw a sharp distinction between political messages directed at a mass audience through the mass media and images of art that could only reach a relatively small cross-section of the population. He was a seasoned political activist and agitator who kept his hand in leftwing political activities and spoke from a position of authority. During the 1960s most of Reinhardt’s political commitments were tied to coalitions that grew up around the most prominent causes of the time, such as Civil Rights, the anti-war movement and nuclear disarmament.5 Reinhardt was a frequent speaker on panels and radio broadcasts as the anti-war movement gathered momentum; he was also connected to local reformist political struggles, such as artists’ loft housing in lower Manhattan,6 and even proposed revisions to the General Business Law governing the artist–dealer relationship.7 At the same time, Reinhardt was still obviously concerned about the fbi, which continued its covert surveillance of him. Reinhardt was potentially vulnerable and his anxiety was sometimes expressed in quite hilarious ways, such as the series of homilies he composed in the name of a fictional New York School artist, one ‘C. Dooley’. Dooley, in fact, was connected to the New York State Commission on Boxing and had announced that fbi checks would now be made on managers and their fighters. This policy, which was instituted mainly to harass Muhammad Ali and his manager at the time, Herbert Muhammad (the son of Elijah Muhammad, of the

Nation of Islam), triggered Reinhardt’s ire. The newspaper clipping that reported this development is found among the artist’s papers; one circled sentence makes reference to the new fbi checks.8 Evidently inspired by Dooley’s colloquialisms, Reinhardt had draughted a number of aphorisms mixing political allusion with elliptical references to artists and critics of his generation: The way I look at it is if art is life and life is art, is the artist a hard liver or a soft lifer and if me and you don’t live it up these days, who is, – right? The way I look at it is if the cold war has warmed up and the [black]lists have stopped ‘sweating out’ the hot critic who was ‘sweating out’ the artists who were ‘sweating out’ Cubism, why should me and you get steamed up, – right?’9 The way I look at it is there are two struggling artists in every struggling artist and one of them is a little whore in danger of becoming a big hero and the other a bad conscience in danger of becoming an old maid and losing the business, so if me and you don’t watch out for the guilt about not feeling guilty about one’s guilt, who is, – right?10 At the intersection of art practice and political activism during the 1960s lay a fundamental confusion that was reflected in the variety of descriptions of ‘politicized’ art and effective social engagement voiced by artists. ‘The artists’ first reaction at this time’, wrote Therese Schwartz, ‘was to use their art to draw attention to their protest . . . the California Peace Tower of 1966 used art in this fashion’.11 Some artists associated with Minimalism endorsed the view that art, being a creative activity, was self-evidently in opposition to the militaristic and conformist values of contemporary society. Others, particularly those who had emerged from an earlier, social realist position, agonized over the proper medium for the production of social protest imagery. Jack Levine, for example, expressed the desire to engage in social protest through painting, yet recognized that it was, in his words, ‘a very cumbersome operation’ incapable of reacting ‘with the urgency the situation needs’.12 Reinhardt’s pragmatic stance on politics cut deep and was out of step with a liberal notion of politicized art; some of his remarks on racial stereotyping would certainly strike us as offensive:

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The Social Realists in the 1930s . . . became artist war correspondents for Life magazine in the early forties and then you never heard of them again. Who remains? Evergood? Shahn became a poster artist. I remember in the cio in the early organizing stages, Ben Shahn made some posters for the newspaper and the posters came in and they were done by Ben Shahn, that made them culture, you see, he was a fine artist. Then the cio Committee was bothered because these faces [on Shahn’s posters], they said, looked foreign and ratty, these union people he represented. So they asked me. What could I say? They looked ratty and foreign. In a union recruiting drive you can’t recruit on the basis of posters like that.13 The notion of public protest was foremost in the minds of those artists who had organized anti-war protest activities: from the initial newspaper ad placed in the New York Times in 1965, to the California Peace Tower a year later and the ‘Angry Arts Week’ in New York in 1967.14 Coalition-based engagements in the public sphere raised general questions about the nature and function of art in contemporary society and the necessity for collective organization. These were questions that artist-activists, familiar mainly with a studio-based culture, were simply not prepared to respond to with a great deal of authority or sophistication. Because artist activism during the mid- to late 1960s was almost entirely coalition-based, there was little likelihood that such questions would be resolved in any but the most general terms. As the artist protest movement gained visibility and support, the broadly anti-capitalist sentiments voiced by some Minimal artists began to seem reactionary. To some artist-activists, the so-called ‘cool art’ in the ascendancy between 1965 and 1968 seemed dangerously socially disengaged. Nevertheless, artists who were early anti-war campaigners, such as Donald Judd, pointed out that the conditions of art – the scarcity of jobs and lofts, the corruption of the market and the subordination of the artist to the dealer-gallery-museum-collector system were the most prevalent complaints – could not be revealed effectively by an abstract art. The liberal coalition politics of the 1960s enabled artists to pursue their social engagement in a number of ways, most of which recalled the tactics applied by artists of the 1930s and ’40s, such as protest exhibitions, auctions, poster production and published signed statements. But the risk was that artists would remain

isolated from other protest groups and unconnected to larger political issues and other class constituencies. Little wonder that Reinhardt, schooled politically in the razor-sharp polemics and doctrinal strife of the Communist movement of an earlier era, with its ties to labour and its internationalist outlook, sounded a despairing note in his radio debate with Golub.

the artist as citizen The artist is responsible for his history and his nature. His history is part of his nature. His nature as artist is part of his art-history.15 153

In 1961, towards the end of a heated discussion with the painter Milton Resnick at The Club, Reinhardt speculated on what corruption might actually mean for artists. His reply was quite direct: ‘work that’s too available, too loose, too open, too poetic’. We may imagine Reinhardt clearly holding in his mind the image of Abstract Expressionist painting, with its drips, slashes, spills and brushstrokes forming the bases for all manner of interpretive fantasies. Surely this would exemplify an art that ‘permits too many people to project their own ideas in it’. Further on in the discussion Reinhardt hit his stride, stating that: it’s a little unfair to call a dealer corrupt in a situation in which he functions effectively. It’s the artist that permits or allows it. If the corruption is not in the using and the exploitation and the accommodation and in the availability and in the openness and looseness, then I’d like to know where it is? This is in the artist, in his actions and in his work. Reinhardt continued to probe, returning repeatedly to the original question of the evening, ‘how can the structure or the system or the establishment be attacked?’16 Reinhardt implied that this was possible only if the artist refused to participate.17 There were a number of organized political responses by artists and critics of the 1960s flowing from Reinhardt’s reflections on that question. Surely the most important was articulated by Lucy Lippard and some members of the Art Workers Coalition (awc). The period between 1966 and 1981 marked an impressive surge in Lippard’s practical political commitments, both within and outside

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the community of artists. It was during this time that she began to emerge as one of the leading advocates for the politicization of artists and what would eventually come to be known as activistart.18 By the close of the 1960s she was convinced that artists must break out of their political and social isolation.19 There can be little doubt that Lippard’s relationship with Reinhardt had a profound effect on her understanding of the role of artists and art with respect to the protest movements of the late 1960s. Her participation during the same period in artist-led protest events strained her initial account of Reinhardt, which stressed his role as a politically engaged citizen who also happened to be an artist. A statement written by Lippard in collaboration with the painter Robert Huot and anti-war activist Ron Wolin to accompany a benefit exhibition on behalf of the Student Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam reflected the belief, prevalent at the time among some artists, that social criticism could be read through works of art that bore no explicit political message. Such works were imagined to have illuminated, by virtue of the conditions of their fabrication and the demands made by them upon the gallery spectator, the ideological differences between the culture of the artist and the values of a repressive society waging war overseas.20 Lippard lionized Reinhardt as an artist-citizen who, she asserted, separated his art from his political activism on the basis of this understanding. The practical separation of political action and, for want of a better term, cultural politics provided Lippard with a powerful rationalization for the parameters of implied political dissent sketched out by some Minimal artists during the late 1960s. Throughout her writings of this period, Lippard repeatedly equated concerns that had motivated artists to engage in political protest during the 1960s and Reinhardt’s own ethical posture and long-standing personal history of political commitment. For Lippard, Reinhardt’s influence lay at the heart of the awc’s vision: The ‘growing ethical and political concern’ manifested over the last few years in the art world is not new. The writings and published discussion of the Abstract Expressionist generation, to say nothing of the 1930s, are full of references to morality, with the artist (or at least art) seen as the ultimate good . . . Ad Reinhardt, a case in point, called himself ‘the last artist on the

picket line’, but just as he may have been the last of his generation, he was joined by the first of the current generation in peace marches, endorsements of candidates, fund raising, etc.21 Let us consider the contemporary relevance of Reinhardt’s position. It is worth bearing in mind that Reinhardt’s language of morality was philosophically sophisticated and deeply wedded to Neo-Platonism. By the early 1970s Lippard began to question the adequacy of the implicit political significance of Minimal art with its subtext of ethical fabrication that placed the artist’s sovereignty at the centre of the action. Her optimism for the existence of an ideologically subversive art briefly found its object in a Left variant of Conceptual art. By her own reckoning, this hope also proved to be unfounded.22 Eventually Lippard reversed her earlier position on the relative autonomy of art and politics, noting that the notion of ‘political art’ was still relatively undeveloped in terms of contemporary social and cultural conditions.23 After more than a decade of political activism, it must have seemed altogether fitting to Lippard to open her long-delayed monograph on Reinhardt with a biographical aside emphasizing the artist’s upbringing in a socialist, working-class household.24 Reinhardt’s position on the relationship between an artist’s biography and his mature artwork was widely known, so it comes as no surprise to learn that he had actively discouraged Lippard in her attempts to detail particulars about his life that were not deemed to be directly related to his development as a painter.25 Reinhardt’s resistance presumably accounted for Lippard’s portrayal of him as a free-wheeling advocate of the Left, an individual who ‘represented the rare example of an abstract artist concerned with the external circumstances affecting his art, as well as with its internal relations’ and who ‘continued to contribute to endless benefit art auctions, to sign petitions, to march and demonstrate for civil rights, civil liberties, and political candidates supporting these issues’.26 Lippard’s single reference to Reinhardt’s relationship to Communism and the Communist movement of the 1930s is a vague remark that confuses the issue by introducing the artist’s alleged early affinity with ‘art-as-art’ and his ‘dislike of pictorial art’, Dada and Surrealism. In a passage typical of her treatment of this theme, Lippard suggested that Reinhardt’s admission that ‘[t]he Communist issue was very important in the thirties’ related solely

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to the antagonism or ‘tension between the abstract painters and the Surrealists’ during that period.27 She concluded, quite erroneously, that Reinhardt’s ‘own interest in Marxism was intellectual rather than actively political’.28 In a series of draft notes composed in 1966 and intended for a publication entitled Art-as-Art, Reinhardt sketched out a programme that aimed to integrate aesthetics, ethics and the monochrome. Reinhardt’s literalism and polemical separation of art and life found a home with those for whom the principled practice of art represented a cogent form of resistance to the cultural madness that gave rise to the American misadventure in South-east Asia. Like Mikhail Bahktin’s exhortation to Russian artists during the period of War Communism in the 1920s to remember the place of answerability and blame, the awc – echoing Reinhardt – reflected on the relationship between art, money, celebrity and morality.29 Reinhardt’s name, invoked repeatedly by Lippard and others in the course of discussions at awc meetings, was used to justify the claim that political resistance meant first and foremost a denial of the ‘unexacting’, vulgar concerns of mainstream culture; that is, a culture based on the ferocious consumption of mass-produced goods and the commodification of art. For many artists this position was a good deal less than they had hoped for. Their voice, which emerged from the awc’s forums and assumed a provisional unity where none clearly existed, was far louder and more strident than that of the Minimalists, whose romantic version of the ethics of the workshop was destined to leave art out of a public avowal of resistance altogether. This second tendency, advanced by artists like Leon Golub, longed to make of art a kind of political agency; at least they imagined that the times demanded that artists forge their images into something called ‘activist art’. Reinhardt’s solution to the tension between art and politics was to stake out a position of political realism, one that entailed the separation of the political man and the aesthetic man while asserting the ethical conduct of art. While art for Reinhardt meant the most complete realization of his near-black monochromes, his assault on the misuse of art was intended to address the loss of freedom of the artist fully to exercise and develop his aesthetic judgement.30 His sense of artistic freedom presupposed the general condition of unfreedom in capitalist society. It was not a plea for what some

social philosophers have identified as the norm of capitalist social life: the condition of possessive individualism. If the model of the artist-activist was unconvincing to Reinhardt as a feasible solution to the ‘insecurity’ experienced by the contemporary artist, then perhaps, controversially, religion would prove a more congenial support than politics. For Reinhardt, art’s difference was bound up with religion in one sense: the space of ‘art-as-art’ is analogous to the function of the sacred in the context of a secular society. This was no reactionary religious idyll on Reinhardt’s part, but an attempt to take seriously the lack of an adequate language capable of describing the tasks of an art that imagined itself to be capable of sustaining a critical relationship to its conditions of production. During the 1960s Reinhardt remained open to dialogue with radical Catholics and continued to participate, along with Robert Motherwell, in the business of the Foundation for Art, Religion and Culture. Reinhardt must have believed that the form and tenor of the discourse of the sacred could be shorn of its spiritual content and provide a model for a new ethical space for contemporary art. Reinhardt disparaged what he called the ‘cult of art’. Any suggestion that the category of the spiritual in art might play a significant role in the remaking of modern art remained for him an anathema. The spiritual in art was viewed to be yet another blow to the integrity of abstraction, yet another mystification of art. Reinhardt’s project of integration demanded that art and political activism were to function as complimentary parts of a whole way of life. Within that whole Reinhardt recognized the importance of what he termed his ‘separate selves’. This is the most significant difference between Reinhardt’s sense of multiple roles and the identity relativism advanced by some postmodern theorists. Reinhardt privileged the art of abstraction, which he interpreted as a kind of visual logic, a form that could reflect the implicit order of a future society. He also held fast to an ideological position that demanded of the artist a clear understanding of the conditions of art’s production in the context of a wider community of artists. Yet, when Reinhardt spoke of politics during the 1960s, he never failed to express the opinion that the conditions of debate and community had changed for the worse for artists since the 1930s. This attitude acknowledged the damage that had been sustained by the Left during the Cold War, leaving one with the sense that important

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elements of Reinhardt’s cultural project – namely, the integrative ‘glue’ supplied by the Popular Front, the cpusa and vital links to a dissident labour movement – were now missing entirely.

art and resistance ‘If I do mark a canvas I cannot be doing something else. If I do not mark a canvas, that is how it is.’31

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Reinhardt’s last major public talk was delivered on 21 July 1967 at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture.32 It is a genuinely humorous and moving meditation on the world in which the artist had laboured for the past thirty years. Peter Agostini – an acquaintance of Reinhardt’s since 1942 – introduced the evening lecture.33 In his remarks, Agostini spoke of the cartoons the artist had drawn for pm and cited, in closing, a hilarious bit of sarcasm attributed to Robert Motherwell who ironically endorsed the infallibility of Reinhardt in artistic matters. It was Reinhardt, of course, who had earlier fed this anecdote to Agostini, who was simply reduced to playing the straight man. Reinhardt immediately picked up the ball, speculating publicly on why Motherwell had always been so wrong and what the significance of those errors might be. The question of the moral position of the artist happened to be a recurrent theme at The Club that led to numerous arguments between Reinhardt and painters such as Philip Guston, Franz Kline and Jack Tworkov. According to Reinhardt, his fellow painters had firmly resisted the idea that artists – being only human – should be judged by such harsh standards. Artists, they argued, needed to guard their human frailty in order to inform their work, to maintain the relevance of their work towards the human condition. During the course of Reinhardt’s Skowhegan lecture – virtually a performance of the artist’s ‘art-as-art dogma’ worthy of any Greenwich Village stand-up comic – it emerged that what was wrong was that artists too readily accepted the roles that they were given. Reinhardt begged us to understand this and not to get distracted by appeals to human nature. Artists, he asserted, needed to consider seriously their responsibilities not only as producers of art but also as producers of the conditions of learning and debate that enable and sustain the making of art.

Reinhardt rarely shunned publicity and rarely avoided taking polemical stands. He was not, however, a demagogue; which is why he disliked the idea of lecturing to a gathering. To Reinhardt, the circumstances of a lecture suggested that something entertaining was being presented or, at the very least, that the artist actually had something to say. Reinhardt’s preference for a more informal, conversational setting was a demand for a far more discursive encounter, one that mirrored the typical gathering of artists in bars, diners and at The Club and admitted the possibility of conversation and contribution from all. Further on in his talk, Reinhardt elaborated on this issue of the artist talking to a public or addressing himself to a public, labelling it a romantic idea. In its place Reinhardt proposed something more closely aligned to the Academy. Reinhardt’s re-description of the Academy as a foil to the media-drenched forum in which art was forced to announce its importance and hawk its wares was well known to his peers. Instead of the artist as public entertainer, Reinhardt advanced the notion of students bearing witness to artists arguing among themselves. In a radio interview broadcast about one month prior to his Skowhegan talk, Reinhardt explained to art critic Jeanne Siegel what he meant by the phrase ‘artists among artists’, which was the title of one of two lectures he delivered on the occasion of his 1966 Jewish Museum survey exhibition. According to Reinhardt, the phrase refers to ‘artists in a classic or academic situation in which they related to each other, come from each other and talk to each other rather than the more romantic idea in which the artists talk to a public or become celebrities’. Earlier, Reinhardt had reiterated his belief that in order to survive in our time, art needed to be understood as ‘abstract, timeless and meaningless’ or comparable to a foreign language or science.34 Artists in discussion exemplified the conduct of professionals; ostensibly, students were to learn through this example. Reinhardt maintained ironically that the artist had nothing to say, to students or a lay audience. In fact, art and artists do have a great deal to show, but Reinhardt pointed out that most artists allow their work to be misused by the custodians of art and business alike. Throughout Reinhardt’s writings, the same phrase or term may be qualified under different descriptions and therefore carry two, possibly opposing, meanings. For example, while there may be nothing of interest for an artist to say as a human being, a sophisticated

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primitive, or a Dostoyevskian idiot – the last being one of Reinhardt’s pet insults – there is a great deal that an artist might say as an artist. This is what Reinhardt means when he cautions that he has nothing to say in a relative sense, since he is averse to presenting his art as a species of personal opinion, as being in any sense privileged by virtue of his status as an artist, or as being attached to a particular time and place. Reinhardt’s perspective is of the artist as a producer, with an obligation to be self-organized and serious. Art discourse – the talk of artists to artists, critics, curators and the like – is of most consequence when it originates from reflections on the actual state of affairs of the professional environment and the issues that emerge from the making of art and an historical understanding of art. Talk about the history and conditions of artistic practice is foregrounded here, rather than the private affairs of artists, art lovers or marketplace gossip. Reinhardt remained anxious about the threat presented to his art by the burgeoning art world of the late 1960s. It was also evident to Reinhardt that attacks on his more celebrated peers would not have a negative impact on their careers. Reinhardt knew that the critical remarks he had directed towards Motherwell, De Kooning, Rothko and Newman did nothing to burst their bubble.35 While worries about the vulnerability of art were hardly new to Reinhardt, he came to believe that the increase in the sheer size and reach of the enterprise of contemporary art during the 1960s, coupled with its tolerance of a variety of practices, would encourage a superficial reading of his critical stance as being merely one style among many. Ironically, it was the condition of plurality brought about by an increase in the scale of artistic production in New York that helped to contribute to Reinhardt’s reception during the mid- to late 1960s. But just as Reinhardt was beginning to find a home in one or two quarters of the New York art milieu and achieve something other than notoriety, he was beset by uncertainty and insecurity. Reinhardt’s awareness that his new status was in part due to the intercession of a younger generation of artists, critics and curators, rather than through the defeat of his old enemies by astute criticism, complicated matters. At the very least, this turn of events brought into question the nature and role of Reinhardt’s determinate negation as a model for critical dialogue in art. While we should not underestimate the effect that Reinhardt’s inclusion in Dorothy Miller’s exhibition Americans 1963 had on his public profile

– to many, this was the long-awaited validation by the Museum of Modern Art of Reinhardt’s credibility as an artist working in opposition to Abstract Expressionism – it is difficult to deny the positive effect that young artists, critics and curators had had on the reversal of the artist’s fortunes between 1963 and 1967.36 It is not surprising, then, to find that Reinhardt was circumspect and reserved when the subject of younger artists was raised. With few exceptions – Andy Warhol is the most significant – Reinhardt avoided publicly criticizing the younger generation; he wished to allow a degree of freedom that was, presumably, denied him.37 Reinhardt was frank throughout his talk about his particular generational position and perspective but also somewhat disingenuous about his lack of having anything to say to younger painters. When pressed to comment on Minimal art – in particular, its reliance on critical commentary as a framing device – Reinhardt cited the poetry of Carl Andre approvingly. Reinhardt did so because Andre’s poetry was literally a list of words that treated words like so much matter.38 Coming at a moment when Minimal art was in a preeminent position in New York and Conceptual artists were beginning to make their presence felt, this remark would have been resonant to some young artists in that audience. An oblique reference in Reinhardt’s Skowhegan talk to Conceptual art – to the best of my knowledge, one of the few public statements made by the artist on such work – presents it as an artistic practice of pure description and devoid of meaningful content. By suggesting meaninglessness as the mediator that opens up Minimal and Conceptual art to critical enquiry, Reinhardt invites some Minimal and Conceptual artists to join him in what might be judged a singular department of the Imaginary Museum: the Department of Negativity. Reinhardt’s very invitation is offered negatively, on the basis of a shared set of what the artist called ‘non-qualities’.39 Without reference to causality or influence, this invitation ensured that Reinhardt’s position in the history of modern art is neither relinquished nor aggrandized; neither is the historical situation of Reinhardt’s preferred emerging artists compromised or displaced. What does reveal itself is the possibility of the ascendancy of an art of ‘good purpose’, an art that challenges the public’s resolve.40 After all, ‘when fine art means something else – such as making a living – then it isn’t fine art anymore’.41

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9 Reinhardt’s Difficult Freedom

The painting leaves the studio as a purist, abstract, non-objective object of art.1 Some viewers of Reinhardt’s ‘black’ paintings were inclined to touch the dark, chalky surface as if gauging the ‘depth’ of the virtual space that presented itself. This innocent pawing frequently ruined them. The experience of looking at a ‘black’ painting is so disconcerting as to tempt one to reach out and try to ‘touch’ the void. The ‘black’ paintings tease apart our experience of visual perception with such vigour as to force us back onto the haptic – the sense considered by cognitive psychologists to be the most primitive in terms of our ‘apprehension’ of space. Dissatisfied with the use of velvet ropes as a barrier to discourage viewers from approaching too close to a painting, Reinhardt designed and employed a system of low ramps, first used for his 1963 exhibition at Dwan Gallery in Los Angeles. The ramps were white, wedge-shaped structures positioned at floor level and directly underneath each work. A perimeter, so to speak, had already been established through the device of the shadow box construction that Reinhardt had made an integral part of his paintings since the early 1950s. In a 1947 example, possibly his earliest use of the frame to establish a distance between painting and environment and painting and viewer, the framing is highly exaggerated, virtually imprisoning the painting in its surround. The ramps Reinhardt employed in the early 1960s were far less aggressive, jutting out about three feet from the wall on which the painting was hung, reinforcing the state of majestic isolation already established by the shadow box. According to Reinhardt, the idea of the ramp was

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partly ‘protection’, separation from the viewer, not only ‘aesthetic’ distance, a psychological ‘textural’ area or moat, to try to make the room as quiet and non-distracting as possible (tassels and ropes are going to make a lot of noise . . .), to make the ‘presentation’ as formal as it is possible to make (the opposite of all pop, op, ob, informal, informel, tachist action, expressionist art, to leave no questions or doubts about ‘art’ with a capital ‘a’ being presented here, no brillo-boxes or nudes), extremely pretentious, no vulgarity, you know, absolutely absolute, no monkey-business or monkeying around.2 164

With all this furniture in tow, Reinhardt’s ‘black’ paintings are no longer discrete objects; rather they are components in a kind of installation designed to drive a wedge between the (ordinarily) seamless experience of the reception, perception and interpretation of sense stimuli. Reinhardt’s intention, however, was simply to keep over-eager spectators at bay, while reminding them that they were present in a gallery of art. There was supposed to be nothing to do but pay attention to the paintings. At some point between our initial, somewhat quizzical encounter with a ‘black’ painting as a uniform monochrome and our subsequent perception of it as a visually active grid, we realize we have little else but time. By fragmenting the unified process of the visual perception of a painting through the agency of time, Reinhardt advanced a powerful refutation of the aesthetic value in art of immediacy or presentness. While our encounter with some images in art and in the media may indeed be consummated in an instant, Reinhardt’s ‘black’ paintings take time to be ‘seen’. The encounter is a reciprocal affair. The time the paintings demand from us is returned in the form of a tranche of time, one of the essential gifts of art. According to Reinhardt, this is the consequent quality of an abstract art; the quality that distinguishes it from everything else, especially the world of exhausted images. Reinhardt’s interest in the viewing subject is summed up in his description of the ‘black’ paintings as ‘squares of time, colorless intersection [between] memory, forgetfulness; signals from the void, grid-lines between future [and] past’.3 One does not need to purify painting for it to function like Mallarmé’s blank sheet of paper. The painting meaning nothing could mean that it is all in the doing. Likewise, the ‘universal’ quality of abstraction could simply mean that everyone will have access to the same perceptual

experience. And that experience will be so noteworthy – so extreme and so clear – as to break the beholder’s fascination with image-based subject matter. Reinhardt understood that imagery haunted abstract art; this is why he felt the necessity to be so extreme in his renunciation of images. Without imagery it is difficult to conceive of content. Difficult, but not impossible. Reinhardt’s extremism on this score left him little room to manoeuvre: he attached his work to a theory of meaning without reference and trusted that the absence of imagery was enough to prove his point. The point is to make a sign that seems meaningless until it is coupled with its viewing subject. In dialogue with the spectator, Reinhardt’s ‘black’ paintings bloom. In the Roman legion the standard-bearer for the corps – the caretaker of the signum (standard) – was called the signifer. The disposition of the signum and signifer in the heat of battle was crucial, since the signum was the central point of reference around which to re-group and renew the campaign. For many artists, this play between what the ‘black’ paintings show and what they might ‘mean’ has proved to be the key that unlocks their significance. The paintings instruct, so to speak, how one might converse through art with the viewing subject. In Reinhardt’s words, these paintings aspired to be ‘icons without iconography, image, symbol, sign of art’.4 The ‘black’ paintings would open up a space, so Reinhardt thought, between sign and signifier. But the ‘black’ paintings and Reinhardt’s meditations on them can also be taken, in the first instance, as tools to be employed for the ethically indispensable purpose of self-reflection and self-criticism. Reinhardt’s practice of the early 1950s was intent on overturning his deeply held beliefs of the 1940s about the task of abstract art, of how the social dimension of abstract art could be made manifest in a non-trivial way. ‘Because [an abstract painting] is universal, unhistorical, and independent of everyday existence’, wrote Reinhardt in 1943, ‘doesn’t mean it doesn’t have any meaning.’5 A decade later, Reinhardt extolled the virtues of meaninglessness in art, behaving as though the moment had passed for abstract art to assert its potentially liberating universal meaning. Of course, Reinhardt was setting out an elaborate pun on the term ‘meaning’. He led us to believe that all that really mattered now was that meaninglessness in art could be pursued for its own sake. This turned out to be only half true. Throughout the 1960s Reinhardt remained nostalgic for struggle, community and

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integration. When beholder and ‘black’ painting convene, a moment of integration ensues. A moral stance is announced – and a timely one, at that – nicely complementing the view on art and morality that Susan Sontag articulated in the early 1960s. Reinhardt’s notion of the moral content of abstract art was part of a framework that constituted a particular kind of artist, one whose morality is expressed negatively by his refusal ‘to do any number of things that he thinks are immoral’.6 (Can we imagine an opposing moment arising from the experience? A moment, one might add, that risks being mistaken for a founding moment of mass subjectivity; for that is what one conceivably faces when all the strictures on interpretation proposed by Reinhardt are adhered to.) Sontag, who shared a podium with Reinhardt at a public seminar on art held at Bucknell University in 1966, approached the same question from the other side, from the position of spectatorship: But if we understand morality in the singular, as a generic decision on the part of consciousness, then it appears that our response to art is ‘moral’ insofar as it is, precisely, the enlivening of our sensibility and consciousness. For it is sensibility that nourishes our capacity for moral choice, and prompts our readiness to act, assuming that we do choose, which is a prerequisite for calling an act moral, and are not just obeying blindly and unreflectively obeying. Art performs this ‘moral’ task because the qualities which are intrinsic to the aesthetic experience (disinterestedness, contemplativeness, attentiveness, the awakening of the feelings) and to the aesthetic object (grace, intelligence, expressiveness, energy, sensuousness) are also fundamental constituents of a moral response to life.7 For Reinhardt, this scene of moral engagement must be revisited over and over again. Disinterestedness, as Reinhardt knew, could never be an assumed or fixed capacity of the spectator in capitalist society. Disinterestedness was a hard-won quality of mind that was attained through discipline or ritual practice – a practice of repetition that is a distant cousin of the radical heart of twentieth-century capitalism’s technical philosophy of mass production. ‘Are you still saying the one thing you say needs to be said over and over again and that this thing is the only thing for an artist to say?’, Reinhardt asked himself in the auto-interview titled ‘Reinhardt Paints a

Picture’. ‘“Yes,” he replied.’8 Reinhardt believed that we could not only learn a moral lesson by attending to art, but most importantly through making art. He suspected that disinterestedness would be easily confused with boredom and was perhaps the first artist of the post-war period to use dullness as a foil to the vertiginous spectacle of change in contemporary art and cyclical fashion and obsolescence in commonplace consumer culture. Despite his constant disparagement of humanism, the ‘black’ paintings presuppose Reinhardt-the-man in more than one sense; as objects, they mimicked the span of Reinhardt’s outstretched arms and were fashioned as such so that they might be transported around the studio with ease. Sometime later, Reinhardt-the-everyman emerged when the artist had finally defined an audience for the paintings that transcended the charmed circle of artists and critics. This expansive gesture was not taken lightly or devoid of obligations. The ‘black’ paintings, Reinhardt was fond of reminding us, are your paintings if and only if you want them to be. Another proviso attached to Reinhardt’s renaming of the ‘black’ paintings, jotted down by the artist in anticipation of his 1966 retrospective, couched the dream of an appreciative and deserving public in terms of their occupation in the future of some as yet undefined subject position. The ‘black’ paintings, Reinhardt speculated, not without some melancholy, belonged ‘to a civilization more delicate and subtle than any we know’.9 Eliding all the ‘separate selves’ of Reinhardt’s life-world, Thomas Merton was perhaps the most privileged of those in the artist’s circle to provide us with a picture of Reinhardt as an integral subject. In the end Merton’s dear friend was simply a concatenation of apparently contradictory, separate ‘selves’; he called Reinhardt ‘oldlutheranreinhardtcommiepaintblack’.10 It is a fitting epitaph, an appropriately Joycean portmanteau. Inspired by Finnegan’s Wake, it is well-matched by the wordplay evident in all of Reinhardt’s most memorable art cartoons from which the artist and his Columbia circle drew intellectual sustenance and, crucially, derived so much pleasure. More than an affectionate, sentimental farewell, Merton’s epithet exemplifies the unstable and, at times, largely unusable recipe for what I imagine to have been Reinhardt’s difficult freedom. These aspects of Reinhardt’s life – his ethical foundations, his political partisanship and his commitment to abstract art – remained vivid to his long-standing friends while, more often than

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not, they appeared opaque and contradictory to the rest of the world. While most of the world was content to view Reinhardt’s last seven years of artistic practice as rejective, stripped down to a bare minimum, his closest friends must have surely thought otherwise. At the very least, they saw Reinhardt as a dynamic individual involved in a rich succession of projects, some of which overlapped and some of which took a very long time indeed to emerge and to come to fruition. Above all, they saw the ‘black’ paintings as profoundly rooted in everything Reinhardt had done as a painter since the 1940s. In retrospect, Reinhardt reflected repeatedly on his being-inmodernity as a laminated totality of separable projects constructed and managed by his ‘separate selves’. This was as much ‘fullness’ as an integrated human being of our time could realistically expect to achieve. According to Robert Lax, about one week before his death, Reinhardt, ‘looking thin, but ok’, told his old college friend Edward Rice that ‘he had painted one painting; now he wanted to make one movie and write one book’.11 Paradoxically, it was the very system that Reinhardt raged against that allowed him to condense decades of practice into a token reduction and repetition with the name ‘one painting’. In the summer of 1967 he looked forward to the opportunity to do likewise to cinema and his continually revised art-as-art dogma. Voiced in a spirit memorializing Reinhardt’s self-defining purpose, the extravagant tag oldlutheranreinhardtcommiepaintblack remains an appropriately temporalizing index of an artistic project that will, like some fabulously encrusted reef, continue to aggregate over time and snag the unwary: namely, those who would separate aesthetic value from history.

appendix: guide to visual resources

This section is intended to aid the reader to locate works and reproductions of works by Ad Reinhardt that are mentioned in this text. Issues of the principal publications to which Reinhardt contributed illustrations and cartoons between 1930 and 1966 are often difficult to locate or consult in their original format. Many are available on microfilm at national or municipal collections – such as The British Library or The New York Public Library – or the libraries of larger universities. Specialist research libraries – such as The Reference Center for Marxist Studies, New York, ny; the Tamiment Library, New York University, New York, ny; or the Karl Marx Library, London – hold copies or microfilm of publications such as Art Front, Soviet Russia Today, The National Guardian and New Masses. Copies of Listen magazine – for which Reinhardt produced some of his first cartoon collés – may be found at The New York Public Library Performing Arts Collection at Lincoln Center, New York. For examples of Ad Reinhardt’s graphic design, cartooning and illustration from about 1930 through the late 1940s that are mentioned in this book, the reader is advised to consult the author’s PhD thesis,‘Corrected Chronology: Ad Reinhardt and the American Communist Movement, 1936–1950’ (University College London, 1996), which also contains a complete inventory of Reinhardt’s work published in New Masses. Additional sources of Reinhardt’s political cartoons are: Annette Cox, Art-as-Politics: The Abstract Expressionist Avant-Garde and Society (Ann Arbor, mi, 1982); Steven Heller and Ralph Shikes, The Art of Satire: Painters as Caricaturists from Delacroix to Picasso (New York, 1984); Thomas Hess, The Art Comics and Satires of Ad Reinhardt (Düsseldorf and Rome, 1975); Lucy R. Lippard, Ad Reinhardt (New York, 1981); and Joseph North, ed., New Masses: An Anthology of the Rebel Thirties (New York, 1969). Reinhardt’s well-known art comics published in the magazine section of the celebrated New York evening newspaper, pm (1946–7); the leading art magazine in New York of the 1950s, Art News (1952–61); and Harry Holtzman’s transdisciplinary journal, transformations: arts, communication, environment (1950–52) are reproduced in full in Hess, The Art Comics and Satires of Ad Reinhardt. Selected examples may also be found in Lippard, Ad Reinhardt, and catalogues of the most recent retrospective surveys of the artist; namely, Ad Reinhardt (Stuttgart: Staatsgalerie, 1985) and Ad Reinhardt (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1991). The original artwork for many of Reinhardt’s art comics is in the permanent collection of The Whitney Museum of American Art. The Ad Reinhardt Papers, held by the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, dc, are the best overall source for ephemera, draft manuscripts, published writings, daybooks and informal drawings by the artist. The

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original papers may be viewed in Washington, dc, but the entire collection is also available on microfilm at the regional centres of the Archives of American Art or through inter-library loan. The Columbiana Collection, housed at the Avery Library, Columbia University, New York, holds complete runs of The Columbia Jester and other campus publications to which Reinhardt contributed. One may also view a selection of Reinhardt’s illustrations in the Walter Wittman Collection of Ad Reinhardt Drawings, The Museum of Modern Art Library, New York. Holdings of paintings, collages and prints by Reinhardt may be found in the permanent collections of The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum of Art, New York; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; The Brooklyn Museum of Art, New York; Albright-Knox Gallery, Buffalo, ny; The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, mo; National Gallery of Art, Washington, dc; The Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, dc; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; The Art Institute of Chicago; Lannan Foundation, Los Angeles; The Montclair Art Museum, New Jersey; The Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh; Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Providence, ri; Tate Modern, London; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Staatsgalerie, Stuttgart; The Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond; Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, ct; Tufts University Art Gallery, Boston; and The Art Gallery of New South Wales, Australia. Anyone who has ever compared a museum postcard to the actual work of art depicted understands the fiction that is photographic reproduction. While no photographic image can hope to do justice to the native qualities of a painting, photography and full-colour reproduction is particularly brutal in its betrayal of the matte surfaces and subtle hues found in the paintings of Reinhardt. This deficiency is even more pronounced in reproductions of Reinhardt’s ‘black’ paintings; works dependent for their visibility on specific conditions of lighting and concentration. The photoreproduction of a ‘black’ painting by Reinhardt aims to make the cruciform motif and the full chromatic range of the work visible simultaneously. In fact, this is virtually an impossible task, for to do so the photographer and the printer must conspire to create something like a simulation of the actual painting. The painting must be reproduced so that all the tones are visible at once and at the same level of saturation; a situation that simply does not conform to the experience of viewing a ‘black’ painting for an extended period of time. A photograph can capture the structure of a Reinhardt, less the absolute tonalities, but not at all the evocative, flickering colour that is experienced when a ‘black’ painting is viewed face to face, under optimal illumination. Even Reinhardt’s earlier works of the 1930s and ’40s suffer from the limits of photographic reproduction, as the subtle nuances of colour and texture that are their hallmark are invariably destroyed as they are subjected to the process of colour separation, the limitations of printer’s inks and the inappropriate reflective qualities of coated paper stock. While there is no substitute for viewing the actual work of art, this may not be a realistic option for some readers, who will be compelled to fall back on the photographic reproduction. In this case, reproductions have their place; they remain a valuable study aid for all but the most radically dark of Reinhardt’s ‘black’ paintings. The most comprehensive collections of reproductions of Reinhardt’s paintings and installation views of exhibitions, from the mid-1930s to 1966, are found in Lippard, Ad Reinhardt. The exhibition catalogue of Reinhardt’s first museum survey – Ad Reinhardt: Paintings (New York: Jewish Museum, 1966), text by Lucy Lippard, with a preface by Sam Hunter – has few colour reproductions and is difficult to find outside specialist art libraries or rare art bookshops; it is, nevertheless, a valuable resource

owing to its unique selection of reproductions of early works. Exhibition catalogues produced by the Centre national d’art contemporain (1973), Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York (1980),Whitney Museum of American Art (1981), The Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, dc (1984), Staatsgalerie, Stuttgart (1985) and especially the Museum of Modern Art, New York (1991) will provide the reader with illustrations covering every major phase in Reinhardt’s development. Installation views of Reinhardt’s exhibitions are to be found mainly in articles and reviews published in art magazines and the daily press, as well as the personal papers of the artist, his gallerist – Betty Parsons – and in the archives of museums that have mounted exhibitions of Reinhardt’s work. The Bard College Center for Curatorial Studies: The Places with a Past archive contains materials related to the exhibition program of Virginia Dwan; Priscilla Colt’s ‘Notes on Ad Reinhardt’, Art International 8 (October 1964), pp. 32–4, is illustrated with a particularly informative installation view of Reinhardt’s 1963 exhibition at Dwan Gallery, Los Angeles; and Lippard, Ad Reinhardt, has excellent installation views of Reinhardt’s exhibitions at Betty Parsons Gallery, New York and the artist’s 1966 survey exhibition at the Jewish Museum, New York. Unfortunately, some of the specialist libraries, collections and archives mentioned above are accessible only to those engaged in scholarly research. (Exceptions include public libraries, of course, and the excellent Tamiment Library collection, which is housed within the Bobst Library at New York University.) However, such restrictions should not present an insurmountable obstacle to the lay reader intent on retrieving images of Reinhardt’s work. In this regard, the Internet is increasingly becoming an indispensible tool for research and retrieval of images in art. The reader is advised in the first instance to consult websites of museums holding Reinhardt’s work. Many of these institutions host websites that contain reproductions of selected works of their collection, often accompanied by an explanatory text and an artist’s biography. The websites and catalogues produced by commercial galleries are also useful and generally reliable sources of information, although one occasionally finds catalogue essays repeating the inaccuracies of earlier, flawed studies on Reinhardt. Still, commercial galleries remain an important source of information on Reinhardt’s work because they often deal with lesser-known examples of the artist’s body of work and take pains to produce good quality reproductions. The usual caveat about ‘unofficial’ websites applies. Such sites, while greatly enthusiastic about Reinhardt and refreshingly informal, tend to propagate unreliable information and contain obvious examples of misattribution. The work of Ad Reinhardt is represented by PaceWildenstein Gallery, New York, which manages an archive of high-quality reproductions of the artist’s paintings. Catalogues published by PaceWildenstein Gallery and Marlborough Gallery on the occasion of exhibitions of Reinhardt’s paintings are also valuable documents that survey a wide range of work; in particular, paintings produced between the late 1940s and the early 1950s. The reader may also wish to consult the websites of other commercial galleries that deal in the work of Reinhardt and his contemporaries, such as Barbara Mathes Gallery, New York, and Galerie Aurel Scheibler, Berlin. The above remarks have centered on the works of Reinhardt, but the basic principles may be applied to sourcing images of any of the artists mentioned in this volume. Please consult the bibliography and reference notes for monographs and exhibition catalogues that illustrate the work of Stuart Davis, William Gropper, Burgoyne Diller, Carl Holty, members of the American Abstract Artists group, Mark Rothko, Barnett Newman, Bridget Riley, Donald Judd, Sol LeWitt, Joseph Kosuth, Mel Ramsden, Adrian Piper and other artists mentioned in this volume.

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references

introduction: ‘starting over at the beginning’ 172

1 Ad Reinhardt, unpublished lecture, 1943, in Art-as-Art: The Selected Writings of Ad Reinhardt, ed. Barbara Rose (New York, 1975), p. 49. 2 Ad Reinhardt, ‘Academy’, undated notes, Ad Reinhardt Papers, 1930–1967, roll n69/100, frame 234, in the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, dc. 3 Ad Reinhardt, statement in exhibition catalogue, Betty Parsons Gallery, New York, 31 October–9 November 1949, n. p. 4 Ad Reinhardt, ‘Abstract Art Refuses’, in Contemporary American Painting (Urbana, il, 1952); reprinted in Art-as-Art, ed. Rose, pp. 50–51. 5 Briony Fer, correspondence with the author, 21 December 1996. 6 Ad Reinhardt, ‘Reinhardt Paints a Picture’, Art News (March 1965), pp. 39–41, 66; and Ad Reinhardt, ‘Five Stages of Reinhardt’s Timeless Stylistic Art-Historical Cycle’, c. 1965, Ad Reinhardt Papers, roll n69/100, frame 90. 7 Correspondence, Thomas Merton to Ad Reinhardt, 12 January 1964, in Barbara Rose Papers, box 1, folder 5, Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles. 8 Ibid. 9 Ad Reinhardt, ‘Art’, c. 1966, Ad Reinhardt Papers, roll n69/103, frame 261. 10 Ibid.

1 ‘every person is a special kind of artist’ 1 Ad Reinhardt, ‘Paintings and Pictures’ [1943], in Art-as-Art: The Selected Writings of Ad Reinhardt, ed. Barbara Rose (New York, 1975), p. 119. 2 Ethel Kramer, correspondence with the author, 29 October 1986; and Ad Reinhardt Papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, dc, roll n/69-100, frame 166. 3 Ad Reinhardt Papers, roll n/69-100, frame 115. 4 For this last location, Reinhardt completed a mural designed by the British artist Charles Martin, also a cartoonist for New Masses. See Ad Reinhardt Papers, roll n/69-100, frame 162; and John P. Lewis, ‘Letters from the Editor: Meet Our Collager’, pm (26 October 1943), in Ad Reinhardt Papers, roll n/69-104, frame 15. 5 From November 1940 to September 1941 Reinhardt was the art director for Listen, a small-circulation magazine of recorded music reviews. Some of the artist’s most innovative graphic design can be found on the covers

6 7

8 9 10 11

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13 14 15

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of this magazine. Even after Reinhardt had ceased working for Listen, his earlier cover designs were occasionally reprinted between May 1944 and June 1946. Ad Reinhardt Papers, roll n/69-100, frame 161. Cipe Pineles, New York, to Ad Reinhardt, New York, 29 February 1944, in Ad Reinhardt Papers, roll n/69-100, frame 255; and Volta Torrey, ‘How to Have a Voice in Your Government’, Glamour (August 1944), in Ad Reinhardt Papers, roll n/69-104, frame 585. Ad Reinhardt Papers, roll n/69-104, frames 601–2. Ad Reinhardt File, fbi, 100-49569-4 (31 March 1955), 2. Ad Reinhardt, New York, to Lt McPeak, New York, 4 January 1945, in Ad Reinhardt Papers, roll n/69-100, frame 261. Frank Young, Technique of Advertising Layout (New York, 1935), p. 26. Aside from his likely role in the organization of the Book and Magazine Guild in 1936, from 1937 to 1943 Reinhardt was more or less continuously associated with the United Office and Professional Workers of America (uopwa), a cio-affiliate that sought to represent commercial and fine artists, among other skilled, white-collar professionals. Ad Reinhardt Papers, roll n/69-99, frames 100, 109, 112, 114, 116 and 118. From 1938 to 1943, Reinhardt was a member of the United American Artists, Local 60 of the uopwa – the union that represented artists employed by the Federal Art Project. As a pm staff artist and occasional reporter on contemporary art, Reinhardt joined the American Newspaper Guild in 1943 and was unit chairman for the shop. Reinhardt retained his membership in the Guild until late 1947. A short time later, his employment at pm was terminated under circumstances that remain unclear, but which may have been connected to his political organizing. Reinhardt was warned by the business manager of pm of irregularities in his time-keeping; but the artist maintained that he was fired, along with others, because of a labour dispute. See Ad Reinhardt Papers, roll n/69-100, frame 272. Reinhardt attended Columbia College at Columbia University in New York City for four years and graduated in 1935 with a Bachelor of Arts degree. Reinhardt’s first cartoon for The Columbia Jester appeared in the issue of November 1931; by January 1932 he was designing colour covers for the magazine. Illustrations by Reinhardt continued to be reprinted in issues of the magazine until 1937. He was significantly involved in the production of The Columbia Jester and served as editor for a brief time in 1935. Between 1932 and 1935 Reinhardt contributed 240 illustrations to the magazine, including more than 120 originals and scores of adaptations of earlier work that had been published in Castles, the Newtown High School yearbook of 1931. Thomas Merton, The Seven Storey Mountain (New York, 1948), p. 154. Thomas Hess, The Art Comics and Satires of Ad Reinhardt (Rome, 1975), p. 15. See cover illustrations of The Columbia Jester, February 1935 and Spring 1935; Hess, The Art Comics and Satires of Ad Reinhardt, p. 15; and Lucy Lippard, Ad Reinhardt (New York, 1981), p. 11. Harvey Klehr and John Earl Haynes, The American Communist Movement: Storming Heaven Itself (New York, 1992), p. 79. This term would be discontinued, for obvious reasons, during the Popular Front period. For a discussion of the Party’s relationship to the Roosevelt administration, see Anders Stephanson, ‘The cpusa Conception of the Rooseveltian State,

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1933–1939’, Radical History Review, xxiv (Fall 1980), pp. 161–76. 17 James Beck, ‘Ad Reinhardt in Retrospect’, Arts Magazine, liv (June 1980), p. 150. 18 See Frank O’Hara, Robert Motherwell, exh. cat., Museum of Modern Art, New York (1965); Barbara Haskell, Burgoyne Diller, exh. cat., Whitney Museum of American Art New York (1990); and James E. B. Breslin, Mark Rothko: A Biography (Chicago, 1993), pp. 46–54. Reinhardt recalled meeting Motherwell in 1946 at the instigation of his first wife, Pat Decker; see Ad Reinhardt Papers, n/69-99, frame 16. 19 James Wechsler, The Age of Suspicion (New York, 1985), p. 20. 20 Hess, The Art Comics and Satires of Ad Reinhardt, p. 14. 21 Ibid. 22 Beck, ‘Ad Reinhardt in Retrospect’, p. 150. 23 El Lissitsky and Ilya Ehrenburg, ‘Statement by the Editors of Veshch’, in The Tradition of Constructivism, ed. Stephen Bann (London, 1974), p. 63. 24 Ad Reinhardt, ‘Painting and Pictures’, in Art-as-Art, ed. Rose, pp. 119–20. 25 For a discussion of this exhibition, see Mary Ann Staniszewki, The Power of Display: A History of Exhibition Installations at the Museum of Modern Art (Cambridge, ma, 1998), pp. 194–6. 26 Le Corbusier’s famous couplet that closes the chapter ‘Architecture or Revolution’ reads: ‘Architecture or Revolution. Revolution can be avoided.’ Le Corbusier, Towards a New Architecture, trans. Frederick Etchells (London, 1946), pp. 250–69. 27 Ad Reinhardt, ‘Neo-Surrealists Take Over a Gallery’, pm (11 March 1947), p. 10. 28 Ad Reinhardt Papers and Hans Namuth, correspondence with the author, 1986. 29 This theme is superbly articulated in Michael Denning, The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture in the Twentieth Century (New York, 1997). 30 The seventh congress of Communist International (Comintern) began on 25 July 1935 and concluded on 20 August 1935. All citations of the Resolution of the Seventh Comintern Congress of August 1935 are from Jane Degras, ed., The Communist International, 1919–1943: Documents: Volume 2, 1929–1943 (London, 1971), pp. 353–78; and Georgi Dmitrov, The United Front: The Struggle Against Fascism and War (London, 1938), pp. 109–10, cited in Andrew Hemingway, Artists on the Left: American Artists and the Communist Movement, 1926–1956 (New Haven, ct, 2002), p. 103. For an account of this period in the history of the American Communist movement, see Fraser M. Ottanelli, The Communist Party of the United States: From the Depression to World War ii (New Brunswick, nj, 1991). For the most comprehensive discussion to date of the People’s Front and its relation to visual art in the United States, see Hemingway, Artists on the Left, Part ii: ‘The Popular Front and the Transition to “People’s Art”, pp. 101–88. For an illuminating analysis on art and politics during this period that draws a distinction between ‘cultural politics’ (‘the politics of allegiances and affiliations’) and ‘aesthetic ideologies’ (‘the politics of form’), see Michael Denning, The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture in the Twentieth Century (London, 1996), Part ii: ‘Anatomy of the Cultural Front’, pp. 51–160. Denning’s arguments draw attention to the subtleties required of any historical account of the conjunction of political allegiances and abstract art during the period of the

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Popular Front (1935–9); they certainly have a bearing on my account of Reinhardt’s tensed, early relationship with the Communist movement. See New Masses (16 April 1946), p. 8. Reinhardt, ‘Paintings and Pictures’, in Art-as-Art, ed. Rose, p. 119. These pronouncements were typical of the visionary statements voiced by artists and professionals throughout the Modernist Left in anticipation of a sweeping post-war renewal of American society along more equitable social and economic grounds. Ibid. For a discussion of the significance for some New York artists of the 1940s and ’50s of a universal response to art, see Ann Eden Gibson, Abstract Expressionism: Other Politics (New Haven, ct, 1997). Reinhardt, ‘Paintings and Pictures’, in Ad Reinhardt Papers (a draft of this text is reprinted in Art-as-Art, ed. Rose, p. 120); and Ad Reinhardt, ‘The Fine Artist and the War Effort’, unpublished notes (c. 1943), in Ad Reinhardt Papers, reprinted in Art-as-Art, ed. Rose, p. 173. Alexander Alberro and Patricia Norvell, eds, Recording Conceptual Art: Early Interviews with Barry, Huebler, Kaltenbach, LeWitt, Morris, Oppenheim, Siegelaub, Smithson, Weiner by Patricia Norvell (Berkeley, ca, 2001), p. 109. See Michael Corris, ‘The Difficult Freedom of Ad Reinhardt’, in Art Has No History! Critical Essays on Contemporary Art, ed. John Roberts (London, 1994), pp. 63–110. Many other figures of the 1930s and ’40s alongside whom Reinhardt had worked as a political cartoonist – William Gropper and Rockwell Kent spring to mind – were equally gifted polymaths. Few, however, shared Reinhardt’s enthusiasm for abstract art or matched his talent for satire. According to Joseph Kosuth, the extraordinary versatility of Reinhardt was a tremendous influence on the way he shaped his own career. But where Reinhardt’s versatility acknowledges the practical differences of these roles and therefore maintains strict epistemological divisions between them, Kosuth’s version is more compact and self-contained. In the most recent retrospective survey of the artist, mounted in 1991 in New York, the extra-artistic items that were such a prominent feature of Reinhardt’s working life were explicitly marginalized, leaving the viewer to confront nothing but Reinhardt the painter. See Michael Corris, ‘Review: Ad Reinhardt Retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art, New York’, Artforum (November 1991), pp. 130–31. The starkness of the exhibition design was commented on by David Anfam, who remarked: ‘Everything superfluous, shoddy, or even distracting has been eliminated – not to mention the picture labels themselves, which were kept together in group captions near the start of each gallery.’ ‘Ad Reinhardt. New York’, Burlington Magazine, cxxxiii/1062 (September 1991), p. 641. The exhibition was a literal interpretation of a literalist; a triumph of the museum over history. Who’s Who in American Art (New York, 1948), p. 382. Ad Reinhardt, ‘Reinhardt’, Arts & Architecture (January 1947), p. 20.

2 cartoons and communists 1 The Columbia Jester (October 1933), p. 19. 2 For an account of Isotype, see Ellen Lupton, ‘Reading Isotype’, in Design

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Discourse: History/Theory/Criticism, ed. Victor Margolin (Chicago, 1989), pp. 145–56, and Peter Galison, ‘Aufbau/Bauhaus: Logical Positivism and Architectural Modernism’, Critical Inquiry, xvi/4 (Summer 1990), pp. 709–52. See Debra Bricker Balken and Robert S. Lubar, The Park Avenue Cubists: Gallatin, Morris, Frelinghuysen and Shaw (Aldershot, 2003). Gallatin was a noted collector of modern art and an early patron of Reinhardt. The pomposity and incongruity of an artist in a suit and tie would become even more ironic for Reinhardt in 1950, when he and a group of fellowartists donned coat and tie to affect a look of gravity and respectability, as Barnett Newman had advised them, in preparation for their Life magazine photo-shoot as the ‘Irascibles’. See Bradford R. Collins, ‘Life Magazine and the Abstract Expressionists, 1948–51: A Historiographic Study of a Late Bohemian Enterprise’, Art Bulletin, lxxiii/2 (June 1991), pp. 282–308. Terry Smith argues that ‘a new imagery of modernity evolved during the massive shift from entrepreneurial to monopoly capitalism’. While insisting on the complex relationships between the ‘visual regime of early twentieth-century modernity’ and ‘the social change of which it is a constituent part’, Smith identifies what he terms the fundamental iconography of the modern era as six images that ‘constantly occur, separately or in couplets: industry and workers, cities and crowds, products and consumers’. See Terry Smith, Making the Modern: Industry, Art and Design in America (Chicago, 1993), p. 7. Ad Reinhardt, ‘Editaurus’, The Columbia Jester (February 1935), cited in Peter Frank, ‘Ad Reinhardt ’35’, Columbia College Today, viii/2 (Spring– Summer 1981), p. 38. Ad Reinhardt, ‘The Fine Artist and the War Effort’ [c. 1943], in Art-as-Art: The Selected Writings of Ad Reinhardt, ed. Barbara Rose (New York, 1975), p. 174. Reinhardt’s comments were written with the Victory Workshop in mind; for an account of this organization, see Andrew Hemingway, Artists on the Left: American Artists and the Communist Movement, 1926–1956 (New Haven, ct, 2002), pp. 194–5. Reinhardt, ‘Abstraction vs. Illustration’, in Art-as-Art, ed. Rose, p. 49. See also Ad Reinhardt Papers, in the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, dc, roll n/69-103, frame 354. Meyer Schapiro, ‘Public Use of Art’, Art Front, ii (November 1936), pp. 4–6. For discussions on the importance of this text, see Helen A. Harrison, ‘Subway Art and the Public Use of Arts Committee’, Archives of American Art Journal, xxi/1 (1981), pp. 3–12; Andrew Hemingway, ‘Meyer Schapiro and Marxism in the 1930s’, Oxford Art Journal, xvii/1 (1994), pp. 18–19; and Patricia Hills, ‘1936: Meyer Schapiro, Art Front, and the Popular Front’, Oxford Art Journal, xvii/1 (1994), pp. 35–7. How Schapiro’s text related to broader initiatives of the Artists’ Union is discussed in Hemingway, Artists on the Left, pp. 130–32. In his ‘Chronology’, Reinhardt acknowledges Schapiro as a political mentor; see Lucy Lippard, Ad Reinhardt (New York, 1981), p. 198. Recalling Schapiro’s talk at the Artists’ Union on the ‘public use of art’, Robert Cronbach notes that a ‘very valid point [was made] that if we wanted the [fap] to continue – and all the artists certainly did – we had to find more direct uses for the work we produced, not just wait for some accident or benefactor to find it. So, some time in the weeks following that, the Public Use of Art Committee [puac] was set up’; interview

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with Helen A. Harrison, 26 February 1976, cited in Harrison, ‘Subway Art and the Public Use of Arts Committee’, p. 3. According to Harrison, the name was changed to the Public Use of Arts Committee ‘in order to make the multivalent nature of the organization more evident’. The formation of the group was publicized by Clarence Weinstock; see ‘Public Art in Practice’, Art Front, ii/11 (December 1936), pp. 8–10. Despite the enthusiasm with which the Union embraced Schapiro’s ideas, he reports that he was attacked in a resolution ‘passed at a meeting of the Union denouncing [him] for having signed a protest against the Moscow trials and calling on [him] to withdraw from the protest committee’. Thereafter, Schapiro claimed: ‘I was not informed of the activities of the puac.’ Dr Meyer Schapiro to Helen A. Harrison, 30 October 1976, cited in Harrison, ‘Subway Art and the Public Use of Arts’, p. 11, note 10. Hemingway, ‘Meyer Schapiro and Marxism in the 1930s’, p. 18. Hills, ‘1936: Meyer Schapiro, Art Front, and the Popular Front’, p. 39. Gerald Monroe, ‘Artist as Militant Trade Union Workers during the Great Depression’, Archives of American Art Journal, xiv/1 (1974), p. 8. Ibid., p. 8. Boris Gorelik, ‘The Artist Begins to Fight!’, Art Front (January 1937), p. 4. Schapiro, ‘Public Use of Art’, p. 4. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Hills, ‘1936: Meyer Schapiro, Art Front, and the Popular Front’, p. 37. Reinhardt, ‘Paintings and Pictures’, [1943] reprinted in Art-as-Art, ed. Rose, p. 120. Schapiro, ‘Public Use of Art’, p. 4. This dovetails nicely with John Dewey’s observation that ‘the arts which today have most vitality for the average person are things he does not take to be arts: for instance, the movie, jazzed music, the comic strip, and, too frequently, newspapers’ accounts of love nests, murders, and exploits of bandits’. See John Dewey, Art as Experience (New York, 1958), chapter 1, passim. Portions of Schapiro’s discussion in ‘Public Use of Art’ seem to presuppose Dewey’s notions of the structure of aesthetic experience as active, pragmatic and democratic. But Schapiro adds the important proviso that class prejudices intervene in the idealized encounter between spectator and aesthetic object as outlined by Dewey. In Dewey’s account, ‘the esthetic emotion’ is not distinctive, but a universal feature of life; nevertheless, it is most highly concentrated in works of art. Thus, every being is open to the experience of art. Furthermore, the appreciation and production of art, as well as the sense of well-being derived from such an experience, ought to be figured as part of the lived experience of all rather than the exclusive property of a leisured class. This argument is the basis for Dewey’s recommendation that art activities ought to be introduced universally into educational curricula. Since Schapiro read and commented on two chapters of Art as Experience prior to its publication, he would have had ample opportunity to discuss these ideas with Dewey; see Art as Experience, p. vii. Dewey’s influence also extended to the wpa; Holger Cahill, National Director of the wpa/fap (1935–43), enthusiastically endorsed the philosopher’s ideas as having been ‘translated rather freely into the common sense of the American people’.

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Cahill repeatedly mobilizes Dewey’s concepts in defence of the Project; see ‘American Resources in the Arts’, reprinted in Art for the Millions: Essays from the 1930s by Artists and Administrators of the wpa Federal Art Project, ed. Francis V. O’Connor (Greenwich, ct, 1973), pp. 33–44. For an interpretation of Dewey’s aesthetic thought of the 1930s that suggests that Art as Experience was not incidental to the politics that occupied him at the time, see Robert B. Westbrook, John Dewey and American Democracy (Ithaca, ny, 1991), pp. 390–402. Reinhardt’s relationship to Dewey is more problematic. The latter’s concern with aesthetic experience as integral, unitary and consummatory may be noted in Reinhardt’s writings of the late 1940s. This was a focus that became more pronounced by the 1960s as the force of the ‘esthetic emotion’ was prised by the artist from its original programme of social reconstruction. Nevertheless, these ideas need not have found their way into Reinhardt’s practice solely through one route. Arguments resonant with Dewey’s are also encountered in the theoretical writings of Davis, Léger and Greene. Reinhardt probably encountered Dewey’s positions through Schapiro or the lectures of Irwin Edman, a former student of Dewey’s at Columbia around 1915, who, along with Dr A. C. Barnes, Sidney Hook and Schapiro, read and criticized drafts of Art as Experience. A political animus had developed between Reinhardt and Dewey, as demonstrated by Reinhardt’s full-page cartoon ‘The Greatest Show on Earth: Red-Baiting Circus’, New Masses (12 April 1938), p. 10. Schapiro, ‘Public Use of Art’, p. 4 Reflecting on this period in 1960, Reinhardt wrote: ‘In the thirties, it was wrong for artists to think that a good social idea would correct bad art or that a good social conscience would fix up a bad artistic conscience. It was wrong for artists to claim that their work could educate the public politically or that their work would beautify public buildings.’ See Ad Reinhardt, ‘On Art and Morality’ [1960], reprinted in Art-as-Art, ed. Rose, p. 152. ‘The attempts to integrate individual aesthetic expression socially and democratically by means of emphasis on specific subject matter and technique is … not only unsuccessful but very confusing to the public.’ Reinhardt, ‘The Fine Artist and the War Effort’, p. 175. On the issue of State support for the arts, see ‘Culture Enlists in the Future’, New Masses (2 January 1945), p. 24; Isidor Schneider, ‘With Culture for All’, New Masses (22 June 1943), pp. 27–9; Harlow Shapley, ‘The Arts and s-380’, New Masses (25 September 1945), pp. 7–8; and Samuel Sillen, ‘What Plans for the Arts?’, New Masses (28 December 1943), pp. 24–5. Editors during the period 1936–45 included James Dugan, Barbara Giles, Crockett Johnson [David Liesk], Joshua Kunitz, Ruth McKenney, A. B. Magil, Joseph North, Samuel Sillen and Joseph Starobin. Magil took up the post of executive editor in 1946 and presided over the demise of the magazine in January 1948; thereafter, it continued under the new consolidated title Masses & Mainstream. For an account of New Masses, see Daniel Aaron, Writers on the Left (New York, 1961); Joseph Freeman, An American Testament: A Narrative of Rebels and Romantics (New York, 1936), chapter 6; and Joseph North, ed., New Masses: An Anthology of the Rebel Thirties (New York, 1969), pp. 21–36. Between December 1937 and the end of February 1940, three out of four of all the works of graphic art that Reinhardt published in New Masses were credited under his own name. In 1940 we find substantially fewer items

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credited under Reinhardt’s name (just twenty, in fact) and a corresponding increase in the artist’s reliance on pseudonyms, such as ‘Frederick’ (shorthand for ‘Darryl Frederick’), ‘Rodney’ and ‘Roderick’ (an amalgam of ‘Rodney’ and ‘Frederick’, but also possibly a literary reference to Edgar Allan Poe’s character Roderick Usher). Reinhardt’s re-employment by the Federal Art Project (fap) in January 1940 may have been a decisive factor for the artist and serves to explain the relative dearth of political illustrations credited under his true name in New Masses that year. Considering the harassment by the fbi and the Federal Art Project of suspected Communists as well as the illegality of additional paid employment, Reinhardt would have certainly been eager to conceal the fact of his association with New Masses. In 1941 the pattern of disguised identity continued with the introduction of the alias ‘Rodney Frederick’. That year Reinhardt plunged deeper into anonymity: nearly half of his published works, mostly maps detailing the German military campaigns in the Soviet Union, remained unsigned and uncredited. Three illustrations that do carry the artist’s given name are reprints of images dating from the late 1930s – the ‘open’ or Popular Front period of Reinhardt’s involvement with New Masses. For an inventory of Reinhardt’s production for New Masses, see Michael Corris, ‘Corrected Chronology: Ad Reinhardt and the American Communist Movement, 1936–1950’, phd thesis, University College, London, 1996, pp. 380–420. On the absence of a Party aesthetic, see Lawrence Schwartz, Marxism and Culture: The cpusa and Aesthetics in the 1930s (Port Washington, ny, 1980), chapter 5. Schwartz instances the fractured nature of New Masses’ editorial policy to argue that the Party liquidated revolutionary politics and class struggle during the Popular Front. For a more recent and comprehensive account of the relationship among artists, New Masses and the cpusa, see Hemingway, Artists on the Left, especially Part ii. Until 1938 (quite late in the day for the Popular Front) the cpusa had ‘passed no resolution on the question of work with intellectuals, and the Central Committee issued no report directly on this matter’. See Schwartz, Marxism and Culture, p. 60. Paul Buhle, Marxism in the United States: Remapping the History of the American Left (London, 1987), p. 179. Freeman, An American Testament, pp. 381–2. More than a dozen of New Masses’ artists, including Abe Ajay, Darryl Frederick [Ad Reinhardt], William Gropper, Theodore Scheel and Anton Refregier, participated in an exhibition of editorial art organized by the New York Public Library in 1937. The display, titled ‘Spot Use of Drawings’, presented a survey of the use of incidental and decorative illustrations by some 35 illustrators, with examples culled from the pages of the New Yorker, Esquire, Harper’s Bazaar and New Masses. Many of the contributors to New Masses at the time were in fact established commercial artists with an impressive client base that extended well beyond the borders of the Communist anti-fascist movement. See ‘Between Ourselves’, New Masses (9 March 1937), p. 2. See Adam Lapin, ‘Middle Classes – Left or Right?’, New Masses (10 August 1937), pp. 6–7. Buhle, Marxism in the United States, p. 174. Ibid., p. 178. Buhle argues that popular creative artists and writers had a far better chance to project their work towards the working class because ‘few guidelines already existed on the left or elsewhere for popular art.

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That very absence provided breathing space for the cultural innovator.’ Buhle also notes the sophistication with which New Masses covered cultural forms considered to be ‘beneath the contempt of serious art critics’: pulp magazines, teenage musical culture and Hollywood films. For an opposing view that claims that there was a ‘persistent absence in Marxist writing between the wars’ of popular culture, see Eric Homberger, American Writers and Radical Politics, 1900–1939: Equivocal Commitments (New York, 1986), pp. 125–40. Milton Brown, interview with author, 17 September 1985. Reinhardt noted his acquaintance with Ajay, Mischa Richter and the British artist Charles Martin, all of whom contributed to New Masses; see Ad Reinhardt Papers, roll n/69-99, frame 92. ‘Between Ourselves’, New Masses (22 September 1936), p. 2. See New Masses (26 December 1939), p. 18. Abe Ajay, interview with the author. Mischa Richter, who referred to Reinhardt as art director for New Masses during the early 1940s, confirmed this. Mischa Richter, telephone conversation with the author, 10 September 1985. According to Abe Magil, most of the artists who contributed to New Masses donated their work; Reinhardt would have made about $25 per week as an art editor during the 1930s. Reinhardt’s marriage in 1940 to Mary Elizabeth DeArmand (‘Pat’) Decker prompted a rise in salary to $30. Salaries, however, were often not paid on time because of the chronic financial problems faced by the magazine. Reinhardt’s aggressive pursuit of freelance work throughout the 1940s may be explained, in part, by the added financial burden caused by the presence of his stepson, George. Abe Magil, interview with the author, 30 April 1985. Harold Rosenberg, ‘The Wit of William Gropper’, Art Front (March 1936), pp. 7–8. Reinhardt, ‘Paintings and Pictures’, in Art-as-Art, ed. Rose, pp. 119–20. The extensive coverage received by Gropper is an index of the esteem in which he was held by New Masses; see Isabel Cooper, ‘Bill Gropper’s Show’, New Masses (4 March 1941), pp. 25–7; James Dugan, ‘Bill Gropper, People’s Artist’, New Masses (20 February 1940), pp. 28–30; ‘Gropper’s Harvest’, New Masses (5 March 1940), pp. 30–31; and ‘Gropper Versus the Axis’, New Masses (4 November 1941), p. 26. Gropper’s work for the Communist movement significantly pre-dated that of Reinhardt’s, and his association with the cpusa was far more visible. Along with Fred Ellis, Michael Gold, Joshua Kunitz, A. B. Magil and Harry A. Putnam, Gropper was one of the American delegates to the second congress of the International Union of Revolutionary Writers (iurw), the so-called Kharkov Convention. In 1944 Refregier, Evergood and Gropper were denied permission to travel to North Africa to record war scenes, because of their political association with the cpusa. See Philip Evergood, ‘William Gropper’, New Masses (29 February 1944), pp. 26–7. In 1953 Gropper was blacklisted after having appeared before Senator McCarthy’s committee. See Gardner Rea, cartoon, New Masses (25 May 1937), p. 5; Abe Ajay, cartoon, New Masses (23 February 1937), p. 13. For a discussion of the cartoons of the New Yorker, see James Dugan, ‘Old Lady From Dubuque’, New Masses (12 December 1939), p. 28. See Darryl Frederick [Ad Reinhardt], editorial illustration, New Masses (23 February 1937), p. 11.

47 See Ad Reinhardt, cover illustration, New Masses (15 November 1938). 48 Joshua Kunitz, ‘The Moscow Trial’, New Masses (15 March 1938), pp. 3–5. Reinhardt’s illustration is prominently positioned at the head of the article. 49 J. R. Lane, Stuart Davis: Art and Art Theory (Brooklyn, ny, 1978), p. 12. A reproduction of Davis’s ‘Multiple Views’ may be found in Lowery Stokes Sims, ed., Stuart Davis: American Painter (New York, 1991). Compare this painting and Reinhardt’s use of this formal device with Gropper’s cartoon, ‘New York City – Boon Doggling’, New Masses (16 April 1935). p. 7. 50 See Ad Reinhardt, cartoon, New Masses (12 April 1938), p. 10. 51 In contrast, the radical cartoonist Art Young reckoned the following sources to be influential: Punch of the 1840s, Rodin, Doré, Arthur Rackham, Callot, Daumier, Gavarni, John Leech, Rowlandson, Gillray, George Cruikshank, Thomas Nast and Joseph Keppler, founder of the American humour magazine Puck; see Art Young, ‘From Art Young’s Notebook’, New Masses (11 April 1939), pp. 10–13. The artist-activist William Gropper, who had studied with George Bellows and Robert Henri, expressed his admiration for the work of Rembrandt, Breughel, Bosch, Hokusai, Daumier, Goya, Géricault and Cézanne; see August L. Freundlich, William Gropper: Retrospective (Coral Gables, fl, 1968), pp. 12–16. 52 Reinhardt’s acknowledgement took the form of a mention in his widely cited Chronology of 1966. The entry reads: ‘1944 – Is first artist to use Collage in daily newspaper (after Max Ernst)’; see Reinhardt, Chronology, in Lucy Lippard, Ad Reinhardt: Paintings, exh. cat., Jewish Museum, New York (23 November 1966–15 January 1967), p. 34. For a discussion of the significance of this technique and its relationship to Reinhardt’s radical rejection of drawing and gesture in his late paintings, see David Batchelor, ‘Abstract Art Refuses: Notes on LeWitt and Reinhardt’, Artscribe International, 79 (January–February 1990), pp. 62–7. For readings of the papier collé that opposes the iconic to the semiotic, see Rosalind E. Krauss, The Picasso Papers (Cambridge, ma, 1999), pp. 25–85, and Patricia Leighten, Re-Ordering the Universe: Picasso and Anarchism, 1897–1914 (Princeton, nj, 1989). 53 Ad Reinhardt, untitled, undated notes, in Ad Reinhardt Papers, roll n/69103, frame 226. 54 Balcomb Greene also worked in this manner during the mid- to late 1930s; see Thomas Tritschler, ‘The American Abstract Artists, 1937–1941’, phd thesis, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, 1974, pp. 50–51. 55 Lippard, Ad Reinhardt, p. 30. 56 Ibid., p. 31. 57 Reinhardt, ‘Reinhardt,’ p. 20. For examples of Reinhardt’s collages, see the exhibition catalogue, Ad Reinhardt (New York, 1991), and Lippard, Ad Reinhardt. Compare these to Reinhardt’s ‘Abstract Painting’ (1940) and ‘Abstract Painting’ (1941), reproduced in Lippard, Ad Reinhardt, pp. 33 and 38. 58 A detailed discussion and examples of Reinhardt’s use of Ben Day screens is found in Michael Corris, ‘The Difficult Freedom of Ad Reinhardt’, in Art Has No History! Critical Essays on Contemporary Art, ed. John Roberts (London, 1994), pp. 94–7. At least one other contributor took up the use of these materials; see a cover illustration by Charles Keller, New Masses (29 October 1946), p. 1. 59 See Hananiah Harari, ‘On Safari with Harari: Key Provisions of Taft-Hartley Law,’ cartoon, New Masses (8 July 1947), p. 10. After the demise of New

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Masses, Harari continued to publish this feature in Masses and Mainstream; see, for example, ‘On Safari with Harari’, Masses and Mainstream (July 1949), p. 32, and Masses and Mainstream (August 1949), p. 24. Yve-Alain Bois, ‘The Limit of the Almost’, in Ad Reinhardt, exh. cat., Museum of Modern Art (New York, 1991), pp. 19–20. See Lippard’s discussion of these issues, Ad Reinhardt, p. 20. Martin James, ‘Today’s Artists: Reinhardt’, Portfolio and Art News Annual, no. 3 (1960), p. 52. Lippard, Ad Reinhardt, p. 39. Ad Reinhardt file, us Department of Justice, 100-49569-10, p. 3. See, for example, Ad Reinhardt, ‘Art is Art’, American Dialog, i/1 (July–August 1964), pp. 17–18. The editor of American Dialog was Joseph North; sponsors listed on the masthead include the Party members and supporters Alvah Bessie, Philip Evergood, Hugo Gellert, Michael Gold, Robert Gwathmey, Anton Refregier and Paul Robeson. I am indebted to Andrew Hemingway for this reference. On American Dialog, see North, ‘Prologue’, in New Masses: An Anthology of the Rebel Thirties, p. 35. The historian Alan Wald has written of the many subtleties that surrounded membership in the cpusa, ‘such as the evidence that artistic autonomy often survived official membership’ and that some writers in the broader Communist ‘movement’ beyond the Party might have had opportunist reasons for staying at arm’s length; see Alan Wald, Writing from the Left: New Essays on Radical Culture and Politics, The Haymarket Series, ed. Mike Davis and Michael Sprinker (London, 1994), pp. 73–7. I wish to thank David Craven for making these documents, obtained under a Freedom of Information Act request, available to me. For a discussion of these reports, see Craven, ‘New Documents: The Unpublished fbi files on Ad Reinhardt, Mark Rothko, and Adolph Gottlieb’, in American Abstract Expressionism, ed. David Thistlewood, Tate Gallery Liverpool Critical Forum, 1 (Liverpool, 1991), pp. 41–52; an expanded discussion of this topic is found in David Craven, Abstract Expressionism as Cultural Critique: Dissent during the McCarthy Period (Cambridge, 1999), pp. 79–104. Cited in Philip J. Jaffe, The Rise and Fall of American Communism (New York, 1975), p. 43. The Party’s official historians summarized the polemics of this period in retrospect: ‘the war that has broken out in Europe is the Second Imperialist War. The ruling capitalist and landlord classes of all the belligerent countries are equally guilty for this war. This war, therefore, cannot be supported by the workers. It is not a war against fascism, not a war to protect small nations from aggression, not a war with any character of a just war, not a war that workers can or should support. It is a war between rival imperialisms for world domination.’ William Z. Foster, History of the Communist Party of the United States (New York, 1968), p. 387. Earl Browder, The Second Imperialist War (New York, 1940), p. 289. Ibid., p. 298. See the following cartoons by Reinhardt in New Masses: 20 February 1940, p. 10; 14 January 1941, p. 6; 25 February 1941, p. 9; 15 April 1941, p. 15; and 20 May 1941, p. 11. The Smith Act of 1940, as Foster unironically notes, prohibits teaching and advocating the overthrow of the us government by force and violence; it was the same law that effectively hobbled the cpusa during the late 1940s. See Joseph R. Starobin, American Communism in Crisis, 1943–1957 (Cambridge, ma, 1972), p. 196.

71 Jaffe, The Rise and Fall of American Communism, pp. 48–50. 72 Unsigned editorial, ‘1942: Crucial War Year’, New Masses (13 January 1942), p. 18. 73 Fraser M. Ottanelli, The Communist Party of the United States: From the Depression to World War Two (New Brunswick, nj, 1991), pp. 198–9; see also Starobin, American Communism in Crisis, p. 32; Harvey Klehr and John Earl Haynes, The American Communist Movement: Storming Heaven Itself (New York, 1992), p. 94; and Mark Naison, Communists in Harlem during the Depression (New York, 1984), chapter 12. 74 Peter L. Steinberg, The Great ‘Red Menace’: United States Prosecution of American Communists, 1947–1952 (Westport, ct, 1984), p. 11. Ad Reinhardt file, us Department of Justice, 100-49569-1 (16 October 1941), pp. 1–3. The fbi recruited hundreds of informants within the cpusa in the 1940s and continued to recruit more even as the Party diminished in size during the 1950s; see Klehr and Haynes, The American Communist Movement, pp. 129–30. 75 Ad Reinhardt file, us Department of Justice, 100-49569-3 (5 January 1955), p. 4. 76 ‘At the New York Public Library, 42nd and Fifth Avenue, the writer [field agent] checked all issues of the New Masses from December 24, 1940, to July 8, 1941, and located the following sketches designated by the symbol “r” which appeared to be similar to subject’s [Reinhardt’s] symbol on his drawings in the wpa publications: Date of Issue Page Matter of Sketch 12/31/40 21 Soldier 1/21/41 26 Lion 4/29/41 8 Electric Power Station Terminal 6/24/41 13 Soldier with rifle, gas mask, helmet, etc. 7/1/41 31 Seashore Scene 7/8/41 31 Seashore Scene’ See Ad Reinhardt file, us Department of Justice, 100-49569-1 (16 October 1941), p. 5. 77 Abe Ajay, interview with the author. 78 Reinhardt claimed he was fired from the fap in 1941; see the artist’s ‘Chronology’, in Lippard, Ad Reinhardt: Paintings, p. 32. 79 Ad Reinhardt file, 16 October 1941, p. 5. 80 The absence of Reinhardt’s name from the electoral register of the cpusa proves nothing. For a discussion of the voting habits of Party members and supporters during the 1936 and 1940 Presidential election, see Ottanelli, The Communist Party of the United States, pp. 180–81. 81 ‘Among the most aggressively punitive agencies was the State Department’s Passport Division. A person hardly known to the public at large ran it as her own bailiwick. Frances Knight did not account to anyone in deciding who could leave the country and who not.’ See Albert Fried, McCarthyism: The Great American Red Scare. A Documentary History (Oxford, 1997), p. 117. 82 Ad Reinhardt file, us Department of Justice, 100-49569-10, p. 3. The catalogue of the Jefferson School of Social Science, according to a fbi memorandum dated 17 October 1946, lists Reinhardt as an Instructor for the ‘Creative Cartoon Workshop (335)’. Reinhardt’s friend – Norman Lewis – also taught at the school. 83 Abe Magil, interview with the author.

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84 During the 1940s Ajay was as committed an activist as Reinhardt, drawing political cartoons for the National Guardian and pm, and illustrating pamphlets for the New York chapter of the American Newspaper Guild (ang); see, for example, Alexander Crosby and Abe Ajay, Our Frugal Bosses (New York, 1947). 85 Cartoons that were published under this pseudonym include ‘Senator Barkley says we needn’t worry about convoys’, New Masses (15 April 1941), p. 12; ‘Any old medals for sale?’, New Masses (30 December 1941), p. 13; and ‘Poison Peddlers: Five Drawings by A. Jamison’, New Masses (16 November 1938), p. 31. 86 Ajay, interview with the author. The Jefferson School was founded by the cpusa in 1943 and was ‘intended primarily for outreach rather than . . . to train Party cadres or to recruit members’; see Marv Gettleman, ‘Jefferson School of Social Science’, in Encyclopedia of the American Left, ed. Mari Jo Buhle, Paul Buhle and Dan Georgakas (Urbana, il, 1990), pp. 389–90; and us Subversive Activities Control Board, Herbert Brownell, Jr, Attorney General of the United States, petitioner v. Jefferson School of Social Science, docket no. 107-53 (Washington, dc, 1954). 87 Ajay, interview with the author. 88 Ajay, interview with the author. The ‘wine glass’ theory features prominently in George L. K. Morris’s ‘On the Mechanics of Abstract Painting’, Partisan Review, 7 (September–October 1941), pp. 403–17. 89 Mike Gold, ‘Change the World: Stepping on the Corns of the Abstract Artists Brings Vigorous Rejoinders’, The Daily Worker (1943), in Ad Reinhardt File, archives of the Jewish Museum, New York. 90 The cio-pac was ‘a powerful electoral machine that worked with the Democratic Party’ and welcomed the participation of Communist activists during the mid-1940s; see Klehr and Haynes, The American Communist Movement, pp. 98–9. Its activities were widely reported in 1944 because of its demonstrated power in Congressional elections and the concern that Roosevelt might not be re-elected without a large turnout of voters. ‘The history of three Roosevelt victories has been: the more voters at the polls, the bigger Mr Roosevelt’s success. The pac aims to get them there’; see The Nation (12 June 1944), p. 31. This article reproduces illustrations by Reinhardt and Ajay for the cio-pac pamphlet number 2 – ‘Organizing Your Community: Every Worker a Voter’. A selection of Reinhardt’s 1944 cio-pac illustrations from voter registration drive literature and The Guild Reporter (the official weekly newsletter of the American Newspaper Guild) may be found in New Masses; see Joseph North, ‘Labor Crusades for ’44’, New Masses (25 April 1944), pp. 3–6. 91 ‘Between Ourselves’, New Masses (26 March 1946), p. 2; and New Masses (4 December 1945), p. 31. 92 Charles Keller, interview with the author, 27 August 1985. 93 Abe Magil, interview with the author. 94 Ad Reinhardt file, us Department of Justice, 100-49569 (12 May 1958), pp. 1–2. 95 Lippard, Ad Reinhardt, p. 23. In private, Reinhardt was somewhat more candid. In a conversation with Irving Sandler that took place on 15 October 1958 in the artist’s studio, Reinhardt said that ‘the Communist issue was very complicated and very important’. Irving Sandler papers, box 27, folder 4, Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles. In a talk at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London on 28 May 1964, Reinhardt

publicly ridiculed the us government’s assumption that only artists of a certain age would be untainted by any association with the Communist movement: ‘I wasn’t called a young painter until the Brussels World Fair, because then I was grouped with seventeen young painters who were exhibiting in the Brussels World Fair. I guess I was 45 then. I think the United States decided that 45 was not a bad age for a top limit. You were old if you were over it, young under it. I heard that this was a way of making sure that there was an exhibition that did not have any members of the Communist Party in it. Anyone under 45 at that time, someone figured out, couldn’t have been a member of the Party.’ Ad Reinhardt, ‘Art as Art Dogma’, transcript edited by Robyn Denny, published in Studio International, 174 (December 1967), p. 265.

3 ‘painting-reason’ and ‘picture-purpose’ 1 Rosalind Bengelsdorf, ‘The New Realism’ [1938], reprinted in American Abstract Artists, Three Yearbooks: 1938, 1939, 1946 (New York, 1969), p. 22. See also Susan C. Larsen, ‘The American Abstract Artists Group: A History and Evaluation of its Impact upon American Art’, phd thesis, Northwestern University, 1974, p. 558. 2 A salient ideological feature of this milieu – in reality it was a rich social landscape of temporary political and artistic coalitions, underpinned by more stable circles sustained by social ties and long-standing aesthetic affinities – was its commitment to build institutions that encouraged and sustained the collective reflection by artists on the role of art in a capitalist society in crisis. Reinhardt laboured to actualize this ideal of a co-operative form of social and artistic order, a sociality that would be based on the principle of mutual education rather than market-driven competition. Reinhardt did so largely through his extensive participation in artists’ groups and through his consistent and relatively long-standing support throughout the 1940s for the political policies of the cpusa. 3 The broad outlines of a Modernist Left in the us in synchrony with the artistic advances of the European and Soviet avant-garde can be traced back as early as the 1920s. Louis Lozowick, a Russian-American artist who achieved prominence during the 1920s and ’30s through a practice largely connected to the cpusa, exemplifies the artist eager to pledge common cause with radical, left-wing politics and artistic practices derived from several of the most important post-Cubist art movements in Europe. On account of a period of expatriation between 1920 and 1923, Lozowick became exceptionally well informed about European modernism and acquired first-hand knowledge of the work of the leading figures of Constructivism, Suprematism and De Stijl. Lozowick spent the early 1920s in Paris, Berlin and Moscow, where he made the acquaintance of artists such as Fernand Léger, Theo Van Doesburg, László MoholgyNagy, Naum Gabo, Ivan Puni, David Shterenberg and El Lissitzky. During his stay in Berlin in 1922 Lozowick exhibited with the Novembergruppe; as a result of a series of visits to the Soviet Union between 1922 and the early 1930s, he established a link with key figures of the avant-garde in art, theatre and film. Throughout the 1930s, Lozowick followed the works of artists and critics such as Vladimir Tatlin, Kasimir Malevich, Sergei Eisenstein, Vsevelod Meyerhold, Liubov Popova, Alexandre Rodchenko

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and Osip Brik. Moreover, his visits to Russia over the course of nearly a decade enabled him to witness the effect of shifting cultural and political priorities on the fortunes of the Soviet avant-garde. In 1925 Lozowick’s work on the developing artistic tendencies in the ussr was published jointly by the Société Anonyme and the Museum of Modern Art under the title Modern Russian Art; it was an influential book that served for many American artists as an introduction to Constructivism and Suprematism. Yet by 1926 Lozowick had already begun to turn his attention towards the newly emerging phenomenon of ‘proletarian art’ in the Soviet Union. Four years later, Voices of October: Art and Literature in Soviet Russia (co-authored by Joseph Freeman, Joshua Kunitz and Lozowick) was published. For a discussion of Lozowick’s political and artistic activities during this period, see Virginia H. Marquardt, ‘Louis Lozowick: Development from Machine Aesthetic to Social Realism, 1922–1936’, phd thesis, University of Delaware, 1983; Louis Lozowick Papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, dc, reels d254, d254a, and 1333–1337, and Virginia Hagelstein Marquardt, ed., Survivor from a Dead Age: The Memoirs of Louis Lozowick (Washington, dc, 1996). For an account of the division between Marxists within the Popular Front during the 1930s, see Judy Kutulas, The Long War: The Intellectual People’s Front and Anti-Stalinism, 1930–1940 (Durham, nc, 1995). Stuart Davis, ‘Abstract Painting Today’ [second draft, 14 November 1939], reprinted in Francis V. O’Connor, ed., Art for the Millions: Essays from the 1930s by Artists and Administrators of the wpa Federal Art Project (Greenwich, ct, 1973), p. 125. See also Stuart Davis, ‘What About Modern Art and Democracy?’, Harper’s Magazine (December 1943), pp. 16–23, which refutes the charge that modern art is inevitably a cultural form removed from the concerns of the everyday. See, for example, Jonathan Harris, ‘Modernism and Culture in the usa, 1930–1960’, in Paul Wood, Francis Frascina, Jonathan Harris and Charles Harrison, Modernism in Dispute: Art since the Forties, Modern Art: Practices and Debates (New Haven, ct, and London, 1993), p. 35, and John R. Lane, ‘The Meanings of Abstraction’, in Abstract Painting and Sculpture in America, 1927–1944, ed. John R. Lane and S. C. Larsen (New York, 1983), p. 13. See, for example, Reinhardt, ‘The Fine Artist and the War Effort’, reprinted in Art-as-Art: The Selected Writings of Ad Reinhardt, ed. Barbara Rose (New York, 1975), p. 173. Stuart Davis, ‘Why an Artists’ Congress?’, First American Artists’ Congress, New York City [1936], reprinted in Artists against War and Fascism: Papers of the First American Artists’ Congress, ed. Matthew Baigell and Julia Williams (New Brunswick, nj, 1985), p. 65. Referring to those who had helped to found the Artists’ Union, Davis remarks that they are artists who ‘at last discovered that, like other workers, they could only protect their basic interests through powerful organizations’. For an account of the Artists’ Union, see the series of seminal articles by Gerald Monroe: ‘Art Front’, Archives of American Art Journal, xiii/3 (1973), pp 13–19; ‘Artists as Militant Trade Union Workers during the Great Depression’, Archives of American Art Journal, xiv/1 (1974), pp. 7–10; ‘The ’30s: Art, Ideology and the wpa’, Art in America, lxii (November–December 1975), pp. 64–7; and ‘Artists on the Barricades:

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The Militant Artists Union Treats with the New Deal’, Archives of American Art Journal, xviii/3 (1978), pp. 20–23. Stuart Davis, ‘American Artists and Spain’, Art Front, 3 (October 1937), p. 11. Meyer Schapiro, ‘The Patrons of Revolutionary Art: Review of Portrait of Mexico by Diego Rivera and Bertram D. Wolfe’, Marxist Quarterly, i/3 (October–December 1937), p. 464. Ad Reinhardt, ‘Abstraction vs. Illustration’, unpublished lecture, 1943, in Ad Reinhardt Papers, in the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, dc, roll n/69-104, frame 16; reprinted in Art-asArt, ed. Rose, pp. 47–50. Ibid., p. 49. Ibid., p. 49. Ad Reinhardt Papers, roll n/69-104, frame 16. Ad Reinhardt Papers, reprinted in Art-as-Art, ed. Rose, p. 47. See, for example, Reinhardt’s references to dialectics in his paper, ‘The Spiral Form in Modern Architecture’ (1946), p. 6, Ad Reinhardt Papers. On page 93 of Reinhardt’s copy of Mikhail Lifshitz’s The Philosophy of Art of Karl Marx (Critics Group Series, no. 7, 1938), the artist underlined the following passage: ‘In a communist society, there are no painters, but at most men who, among other things, also paint.’ Die deutsche Ideologie was available in full in English translation in the us at least as early as 1939; for an advertisement for this and other Marxist classics, see New Masses (21 November 1939), p. 21. Reinhardt’s library also contained a copy of a popular anthology of remarks by Marx and Engels on literature and art published in 1947 by International Publishers. Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, The German Ideology (New York, 1973), p. 109. Reinhardt, ‘Paintings and Pictures’, in Art-as-Art, ed. Rose, pp. 119–20. Untitled, undated note, c. 1940s, Ad Reinhardt Papers, roll n/69-103, frame 355. George L. K. Morris, ‘Art Chronicle: Interview with Jean Hélion’, Partisan Review, 5 [n.d.], p. 13. Reinhardt, ‘Abstraction vs. Illustration’, p. 47. Andrew Hemingway, ‘Fictional Unities: “Antifascism” and “Antifascist Art” in 30s America’, Oxford Art Journal, xiv/1 (1991), p. 110. Evidence of Reinhardt’s intervention in the controversy between art and politics is provided by a number of drafts for lectures and unpublished writings. These texts, mostly untitled, date from the late 1930s and early 1940s (i.e. after the military entry of the us into World War ii but before his induction into the Navy in early 1944). During this period, the cpusa experienced an increase in membership and prestige, a fact of not inconsiderable significance to an adequate reading of these texts. Reinhardt’s texts of the late 1940s show that he believed it possible to create a favourable climate towards non-figurative art within this political field. All these texts may be found in draft form in the Ad Reinhardt Papers; versions are reprinted in Art-as-Art, ed. Rose, but the dating of excerpts is unreliable and many of the texts are abridged. For the complete draft of ‘The Fine Artist and the War Effort’, see Reinhardt, untitled, undated notes, c. 1942, Ad Reinhardt Papers, roll n/69-103, frames 419–421. See Ad Reinhardt, Interview with Virginia P. Rembert, 15 March 1967, in Virginia P. Rembert, ‘Mondrian, America, and American Painting’, phd

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thesis, Columbia University, 1970, p. 323. 26 Untitled, undated manuscript, Ad Reinhardt Papers, roll n/69-103, frame 420. 27 Maude Riley, ‘Reinhardt’, Art Digest (15 February 1944), p. 20. Riley – who fails to make a distinction between collage and papier collé – wrote that Mondrian admired one work ‘made of strips of deep-dyed papers which suggest window frames in their arrangement; neon lights in their color’. In the artist’s papers one finds a playful work by Ray Johnson, constructed years later and suggestively titled ‘Cool Age’. It was made by taping two small squares of a printer’s matching standard colour over the central body of text of a photocopy of Riley’s 1944 review. See Ad Reinhardt Papers, n/69-103, clippings and articles (frames 562–733). 28 Ad Reinhardt, ‘Abstraction vs. Illustration’, reprinted in Art-as-Art, ed. Rose, p. 49. 29 See Lucy Lippard, Ad Reinhardt (New York, 1981), colour plate 5, p. 37. 30 Ibid., p. 39. In his discussion of Willem de Kooning’s employment of a similar strategy, David Anfam writes: ‘Whatever the standpoint on de Kooning’s practice and iconography from Judgement day [1946] onwards, it must recognise a visual arena in which laceration reigns: expressively in the razor-sharp edges of the interlocked shards of the abstractions of the late-1940s; metaphorically in the collage process whereby de Kooning assembled them – and subsequently Woman I – from torn and cut fragments serving as templates that were attached to the surface and then either removed or overpainted; and manually, in the paper scraps that are brutally pinned to the surface of Collage (1950; private collection, New York) with thumbnails.’ See David Anfam, ‘De Kooning, Bosch and Bruegel: Some Fundamental Themes’, Burlington Magazine, cxlv/1207 (October 2003), p. 711. 31 Ad Reinhardt, [dialogue for a proposed cartoon], untitled, undated notes, c. 1966, Ad Reinhardt Papers, n/69-101, frame 685. 32 Nancy Flagg, ‘Reinhardt Revisiting,’ Art International, xxii/2 (February 1978), p. 54. These works were exhibited at the Betty Parsons Gallery (New York) in 1949 and included in a group exhibition at Arthur Tooth and Sons (London) in 1961, and ‘Ad Reinhardt, 1945–1957’ at Pace Gallery (New York), 11 December 1981–9 January 1982. Illustrating this memoir are charming sketches by Reinhardt of Gibney and the numerous cats kept at Henley Cay. Reinhardt, travelling with his daughter Anna, visited Flagg and Gibney on one further occasion in March 1966. In his journal, Gibney described Reinhardt as ‘festooned with cameras like a cartoon tourist’. Flagg remarked that Reinhardt was in high spirits, in anticipation of his forthcoming retrospective at the Jewish Museum. In a letter to Gibney and Flagg accompanying Reinhardt’s photographs of them and their house, Hawksnest, the artist wrote of his plans to visit Japan, Tibet, China, Nepal and Afghanistan in the summer or autumn of 1967, and joked about retiring in 1968.

4 the intellectual gift of the post-historic artist 1 Ad Reinhardt, ‘Art-as-Art Dogma, part 5’, included in Ad Reinhardt, ‘Reinhardt Paints a Picture’, Art News (March 1965), p. 66. 2 Ibid. Reinhardt repeats the phrase in ‘Art in Art is Art-as-Art (Art-as-Art

Dogma, Part iii)’, Lugano Review, 5–6 (1966), p. 85. 3 ‘Beauty, a harmony, rhythm, proportion, a relation between variety and unity is simplicity latent in the infinitely complex, the potential complexity of that which is simple, eluding, though not defying analysis, augmenting beauty, itself, clear, cold abstract, metaphysical, pleasurable like the mysterious delights of multiple meanings, like a box within a box, within a box, endlessly.’ Ad Reinhardt, ‘The First Aesthetician’, 1933, p. 2, in Ad Reinhardt Papers, in the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, dc, n/69-102, frame 247. 4 Ad Reinhardt: A Selection from 1937–1952, exh. cat., Marlborough Gallery, New York (2–23 March 1974), p. 7. 5 Edward Corbett (1919–1971) joined the cpusa in New York around 1944 or 1945, and the Artists League of America in 1946. In New York Corbett became acquainted with Jack Levine and Reinhardt, both of whom were active in Party cultural and political affairs. Corbett worked in Taos, New Mexico, from 1951 to 1952, and Reinhardt visited him there in 1952. They remained in contact throughout Reinhardt’s life. In 1950, through the recommendations of Clyfford Still and Mark Rothko, Reinhardt was contracted to teach a ‘course in painting for advanced students and artists’ and to deliver ‘a series of lectures on the social, economic and philosophical problems facing the modern artist’ at the csfa, where Corbett was working at the time. Reinhardt’s teaching commenced on 3 July 1950 and continued for six weeks. For an account of Reinhardt in San Francisco, see Susan Landauer, The San Francisco School of Abstract Expressionism (Berkeley, ca, 1996), pp. 101–2.m 6 In a letter to his dealer, Betty Parsons, Rauschenberg described his white monochromes as being as ‘white as one God’ and ‘dealing with the suspense, excitement and body of an organic silence’. Correspondence, Robert Rauschenberg to Betty Parsons, 18 October 1951. For a survey of black paintings by Rauschenberg, Reinhardt, Rothko and Stella, see Stephanie Rosenthal, ed., Black Paintings (Munich, 2006), pp. 23–33. David Sylvester noted that ‘black was a sacred color for the Abstract Expressionists: it was their lapis lazuli; they made a mystique of it, partly perhaps because of its austerity, partly perhaps because there was something splendidly macho in being able to produce a good strong black.’ David Sylvester, ‘Newman-ii’, cited in Rosenthal, Black Paintings, p. 13. 7 This is the title of a cartoon by Reinhardt. See Ad Reinhardt, ‘How to Look at Modern Art in America: Fifteen Years Later’, Art News (Summer 1961), pp. 36–7. 8 For a discussion of Reinhardt’s rejection of drawing, see David Batchelor, ‘Abstract Art Refuses: Notes on LeWitt and Reinhardt’, Artscribe International, 79 (January–February 1990), pp. 62–7. 9 ‘How to Look at Modern Art in America’, pm (2 June 1946) and ‘1961 Fifteen Years Later: How to Look at Modern Art in America’, Art News (Summer 1961) are reproduced in Ad Reinhardt (New York, 1991), pp. 110–11. Reinhardt knew Selden Rodman as a poet-activist of the late 1930s, one of many who had published agitprop poetry in New Masses at the time of the Popular Front. Rodman distanced himself from the Communist movement after 1939, but continued to maintain a life-long interest in art and literature, having amassed an important collection of contemporary Haitian painting. In 1961 he published a series of interviews and statements by artists titled Conversations with Artists (New York, 1961);

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Reinhardt’s statement is found on pp. 98–9. Jubilee was an illustrated magazine founded in 1953 by Edward Rice, a graduate of Columbia in 1940. Reinhardt’s cartoon collé was published in the January 1961 issue, p. 48. As a testament to the durability of friendships forged at Columbia, Robert Lax (alongside Rice, a member of the Jester staff that also included Thomas Merton) became a ‘roving editor’ of Jubilee during the late 1950s. Subtitled ‘a magazine for the Church and Her people’, Rice conceived of Jubilee as a ‘Catholic magazine with a pictorial format and a commitment to the Church’s social teachings.’ (Edward Rice, ‘Starting a Magazine: A Guide for the Courageous – The Short Happy Life of Jubilee’, The Merton Seasonal, Spring 1999, cited in Mary Cummings, ‘Edward Rice ’40: Travelling on Unbeaten Paths’, Columbia College Today, May 2001). The magazine’s wide-ranging editorial content and liberal attitude proved to be its undoing. Rice’s editorial remit was to cover issues such as apartheid, drug addiction, liturgical art and non-Western societies. When Rice began to cover such controversial topics as birth control, divorce and remarriage he was attacked by the New York archdiocese. Rice was forced to sell Jubilee in 1967, as parish outlets for the sale of the magazine were withdrawn and subscriptions plummeted. It ceased publication soon afterwards. Apparently Jubilee was considered by some to be a Catholic alternative to the beat generation. Jack Kerouac, whose problematic relationship to his Catholicism is well known, was a visitor to the magazine’s editorial offices on Park Avenue South and even submitted some religious poetry to the publication. While not a Catholic himself, during the 1960s Reinhardt became increasingly enmeshed in a network of liberalizing, outspoken and radical Catholics. The group included Lax (a convert to Catholicism from Judaism in 1943), Ned O’Gorman (an anti-war and community activist of the 1960s associated with the Catholic Workers) and most notably Thomas Merton, another convert to Catholicism in 1941, whose intellectual reputation during the second half of the 1960s was based partly on his project to reconcile Christian doctrine with Marxist calls for social justice. Reinhardt depended upon this circle of friends for support for his own project of articulating a conception of aesthetic experience that was unworldly yet not ‘other worldly’. See Martin James, ‘Today’s Artists: Reinhardt’, Portfolio and Art News Annual, no. 3 (1960), pp. 48–63. Reinhardt was fascinated by the notion that there is an ‘internal destiny of artistic forms’, where the existence of ‘laws of cyclical development seem to impose themselves on artistic forms’ and where ‘history, vision evolve in an almost predestined sequence of styles’. Ad Reinhardt, ‘Cycles, Styles’, miscellaneous art history notes, undated, in Ad Reinhardt Papers. Irving Sandler, notes from conversation with Ad Reinhardt, 15 October 1958, in Irving Sandler Papers, J. P. Getty Research Institute, box 27, folder 4. Correspondence Betty Parsons to Ad Reinhardt, 5 October 1961, in Ad Reinhardt Papers, n/69-101, frame 728. Ibid. On Reinhardt’s relationship with Clert, see Sanda Miller, ‘An American in Paris: Ad Reinhardt’s Letters (1960–66) to his Dealer Iris Clert’, Burlington Magazine, cxlv/1207 (October 2003), pp. 716–20. I am indebted to Sarah Wilson for bringing this to my attention. The sales records for Reinhardt’s exhibitions at Betty Parsons Gallery may be found in the Betty Parsons Papers, Archives of American Art,

Smithsonian Institution, Washington, dc, reel 4126. 16 See Irving Sandler and Philip Pavia, eds, ‘The Philadelphia Panel’, It Is (Spring 1960), p. 36. 17 Ad Reinhardt, ‘Art vs. History’, Art News (January 1966), reprinted in Art-as-Art: The Selected Writings of Ad Reinhardt, ed. Barbara Rose (New York, 1975), pp. 224–7. The pretext for this article is a review of George Kubler’s The Shape of Time, which Reinhardt had been aware of since its publication in 1962. 18 André Malraux, Museum without Walls, trans. Stuart Gilbert and Francis Price (New York, 1967), p. 148. This is the English translation of the 1965 Gallimard edition of Le Musée imaginaire revised for the series Idées/Arts. Le Musée imaginaire was first published by Skira in French in 1947 and appeared in English translation in 1949 as Museum without Walls (volume xxiv of the Bollingen Foundation series published by Pantheon Books, New York). The French version of the 1947 text – volume one of the threevolume work, La Psychologie de l’art – later became part one of Les Voix de silence, published by Gallimard in 1951. Reinhardt cites Malraux’s ideas in undated notes that I place around the late 1940s, although he was aware of Malraux’s ideas from late 1938. Reinhardt’s connection to French artistic and intellectual currents was forged early on, beginning with his interest during the 1930s in figures such as Le Corbusier, Picasso, Braque, Léger and Hélion. This interest continued, as demonstrated by the inclusion of modern French painting in the publication Modern Artists in America (New York, 1951), which Reinhardt co-edited with Robert Motherwell and Bernard Karpel. Motherwell, of course, was a well-known Francophile. 19 André Malraux, Museum without Walls, p. 12. See William Righter, The Rhetorical Hero: An Essay on the Aesthetics of André Malraux (New York, 1964), especially chapter 2, ‘In the Musée de l’Homme,’ pp. 33–67, and Jean-François Lyotard, Signed, Malraux (Minneapolis, mn, 1999), p. 304. Righter notes that the ‘techniques of reproduction that have made the Imaginary Museum possible have had other effects, as far reaching with respect to works of art as that of universal distribution. For one thing, reproduction allows the free mixing of the most disparate genres. The album aligns the fresco with the canvas, enamels with tapestries, miniatures with public monuments. And this latter implies not only the mixing of genres, but an alteration of scale, where the levelling effect of the album’s page may act either as the bed of Prokruste-s on which all works are tortured into an arbitrary size, or more imaginatively, as the means of subordinating size to the more purely formal qualities of a work. Finally, and perhaps most significant of all, the camera’s eye selects and isolates detail. All of the devices of the photographer’s craft: focus and framing, light and shadow – are at the service of a selective process that may entirely alter the visual impression that we have of a work of art’ (pp. 35–6). Lyotard builds on this insight, asserting that the ‘beginning of The Voices of Silence is devoted to photography’s effect on our perception of works. Photography, an art of reproduction? No more than film is. Cutting, framing, the close-up (the “detail”), lighting, color, elliptical editing – the camera enjoys and plays with the same creative means as the motion picture camera’ (p. 304). 20 My interest in Malraux is necessarily limited to the role of his thought in shaping Reinhardt’s relationship to the discipline of art history and the

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practice of amateur photography. Readers interested in the life and career of Malraux may wish to consult two recent biographical studies, both of which are highly critical of this mercurial figure: Olivier Todd, André Malraux: une vie (Paris, 2001), and Curtis Cate, André Malraux: A Biography (London, 1995). For a brief but useful introduction to Malraux’s thought, see Geoffrey T. Harris, André Malraux: A Reassessment (London, 1996). André Malraux, The Voices of Silence, trans. Stuart Gilbert (London, 1954) p. 66, cited in Lyotard, Signed, Malraux, p. 305. The use of the image of the tree as a visual metaphor for the genealogy of modern art was a device, familiar from the late 1930s, that Reinhardt made his own. A widely circulated illustration by the Mexican illustrator and artist Miguel Covarrubias (1904–1957), produced originally for the magazine Vanity Fair, is the acknowledged source for Reinhardt’s various permutations of the genealogical tree motif. Reinhardt adapted this device and refined it through his collage technique for use, in the first instance, in a 1946 ‘art comic’ for pm (see Ad Reinhardt, ‘How to Look at Modern Art in American’, pm, 2 June 1946). The tree reappeared in 1950 in Harry Holtzman’s new journal, trans/formation: arts, communication, environment, a publication that aimed to affirm that ‘art, science, technology are interacting components of the total human enterprise’ and to ‘provide authentic glimpses into the emerging forms of the “now”’. See Ad Reinhardt, ‘Museum Landscape’, trans/formation: arts, communication, environment, i/1 (1950), pp. 30–31. See M. Merleau-Ponty, ‘Le Language indirect et les voix du Silence’, Les Temps modernes (June–July 1952), and two articles by Ernst Gombrich: ‘Malraux and the Crisis of Expressionism’, Burlington Magazine (December 1954), and ‘Malraux’s Philosophy of Art in Historical Perspective’, in Malraux: Life and Work, ed. M. de Courcel (London, 1976). See Harris, André Malraux: A Reassessment. Unsigned article, ‘Mr. Pure’, New York Times (13 November 1966). Ad Reinhardt Papers, n/69-103. Reinhardt presented slide show evenings at The Club on a number of occasions. These generally began at 10 p.m. and were based on photographs he shot during his many overseas trips. One such presentation, in two parts, focused on the art and architecture of the Muslim world and India (10 October 1958 and 23 January 1959); see Ad Reinhardt Papers, n/69-104, and Thomas Kellein, ‘Reinhardt’s World in Color Slides as a Non-Happening’, in Ad Reinhardt (Stuttgart, 1985), pp. 61–71. Ad Reinhardt, ‘The Moral Content of Abstract Art’, 1959, eventually published in Journal of Art (June–July–August 1991), p. 27. Ad Reinhardt, untitled, undated note, in Art-as-Art, ed. Rose, p. 190. See James Breslin, ‘The Houston Chapel’, Mark Rothko: A Biography (Chicago, 1993), chapter 16, and Anna C. Chave, Mark Rothko: Subjects in Abstraction (New Haven, ct, 1989), pp. 194–7. Reinhardt, ‘The Moral Content of Abstract Art’, p. 27. Merton’s youthful experiences as a Communist at Columbia (another bond he shared with Reinhardt) are recounted in chapter 4, ‘The Children in the Market Place’, of his bestselling autobiography The Seven Storey Mountain (New York, 1948), pp. 131–68. Merton described his approach to radical politics in terms of a moral conversion. It was apologetically dubbed ‘a lesser evil’, not the ‘right conversion’, no doubt in deference to

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his religious conversion and ordination in 1941. From a literary point of view, the use of religious metaphor to frame secular and non-secular affinities serves only to dramatize and heighten the personal and moral triumph of his second, ‘true’ and ‘right’ conversion. Correspondence, Thomas Merton to Ad Reinhardt, 3 July 1956, p. 2; see Ad Reinhardt Papers, n/69-101, frame 691. Thomas Merton, cited in Joseph Masheck, ‘Five Unpublished Letters from Ad Reinhardt to Thomas Merton and Two in Return’, Artforum, xvii/4 (December 1978), p. 24. Thomas Merton, The Journals of Thomas Merton, vol. iii: A Search for Solitude: Pursuing the Monk’s True Vocation, 1953–1960, ed. Lawrence S. Cunningham (San Francisco, 1996), pp. 139–40; cited in Paul J. Spaeth, ‘The Road to Simplicity Followed by Merton’s Friends: Ad Reinhardt and Robert Lax’, Merton Annual, 13 (2000), p. 250. See Kieran Kavanaugh, ed., John of the Cross: Selected Writings (New York, 1987). Juan de Yepes (1542–1591), a friar of the Carmelite order, lived and worked in Spain. The four major works comprising John’s doctrine of spiritual enlightenment – ‘The Ascent of Mount Carmel’ (conceived as a commentary on his inspirational poem of 1578–9, ‘The Dark Night’), ‘The Dark Night’, ‘The Spiritual Canticle’ and ‘The Living Flame of Love’ – were composed in Grenada between 1582 and 1587. In ‘The Ascent of Mount Carmel’, a spiritual handbook for divine union, John wrote of faith as ‘the dark night through which a soul journeys toward that divine light of perfect union with God’. The ‘dark night of the soul’ is John’s metaphor signifying a ‘denudation of the soul’s appetites and gratifications’ (ibid., p. 64). His devotional poem ‘The Dark Night’ ends with the realization that the ‘perfect union with God’ transpires ‘in a place where no one appeared’ (p. 57). Peter C. King, Dark Night Spirituality: Thomas Merton, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Etty Hillesum (London, 1995), p. 6. ‘The years of Merton’s most intense commitment to the issues of war, racism and the nuclear question also marked an episode in his personal life which called into question the validity of his monastic vocation’ (p. 17). This period of doubt coincided with Merton’s emotional involvement, over a period of two years, with a young nurse, Margie Smith. Thomas Merton, New Seeds of Contemplation (Tunbridge Wells, 1962), p. 179. Thomas Merton, Contemplative Prayer (London, 1973). Ibid., p. 102. Ibid., p. 104. Ibid, p. 105. Ibid, p. 114. Merton travelled to Bangkok in December 1968 to deliver a paper at an international conference of Benedictines interested in revitalizing the monastic tradition and establishing a foothold in Asia. Merton’s paper, which was delivered on 10 December, was titled ‘Marxism and Monastic Perspectives’. That afternoon Merton was found dead in his room, apparently the victim of an accidental electrocution. Merton’s intention had been to open up a dialogue, using ideas derived from Herbert Marcuse and Eric Fromm, between Marxists and the Church. Merton had argued that Marxist and monks both regarded the claims of the world as fraudulent. Despite their differences, Merton persisted in his attempt to find

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common cause between these traditionally antagonistic groups, arguing that ‘the world refusal of the monk is in view of his desire for change.’ At one point Merton likened Marx’s and Engels’s description of Communist society found in the Communist Manifesto – from each according to his ability, to each according to his need – to the social ideals of a monastic community. Merton’s reasoning depended upon generalities like levels of commitment, the will to transform the world and the subjectively painful process of what he called ‘inner change’. These arguments, while reflecting what seems to have been an astonishing degree of political naïveté on the part of Merton, were meant to be provocative and represented a clear challenge to American aggression in South-east Asia. They were also part of Merton’s belief in the need to develop a more expansive monastic culture, where the acquisition of knowledge of Zen, Sufism, Hinduism and, as is apparent from his last public talk, the humanist strands of Marxism, would be taken seriously. Thomas Merton, The Journals of Thomas Merton, vol. i: Run to the Mountain: The Story of a Vocation, 1939–1945, ed. Patrick Hart (San Francisco, 1995), p. 128; cited in Spaeth, ‘The Road to Simplicity Followed by Merton’s Friends’, p. 251. See Joseph Masheck, ‘Five Unpublished Letters from Ad Reinhardt to Thomas Merton and Two in Return’, reprinted in Joseph Masheck, Historical Present: Essays of the 1970s, Contemporary American Art Critics, no. 3 (Ann Arbor, mi, 1984); Naomi Vine, ‘The Total Dark Sublime: An Interpretive Analysis of the Late Black Paintings of Ad Reinhardt – 1960–67’, phd thesis, University of Chicago, 1989; Naomi Vine, ‘Mandala and Cross’, Art in America (November 1991), pp. 124–33; and Spaeth, ‘The Road to Simplicity Followed by Merton’s Friends’, pp. 245–56. May Fuller, ed., ‘An Ad Reinhardt Monologue’, Artforum (October 1970), p. 37. Ad Reinhardt, [Creation as Content], unpublished, undated notes, reprinted in Art-as-Art, ed. Rose, p. 192. Ad Reinhardt [Imageless Icons], unpublished, undated notes, reprinted in Art-as-Art, ed. Rose, p. 109. Reinhardt, [Creation as Content], p. 193. Thomas Merton, Zen and the Birds of Appetite (New York, 1968), p. 140. Ad Reinhardt, ‘Art in Art is Art-as-Art’ (Art-as-Art Dogma, Part iii), in Gyorgy Kepes, Sign, Image, Symbol (Cambridge, ma, 1966). For an earlier version of this text, see ‘Reinhardt Paints a Picture’, Art News (March 1965), pp. 39–41, 66. Reinhardt, ‘Art vs. History’, p. 62. It is not clear when Reinhardt first encountered Kubler’s work, although it is likely that the artist discussed his ideas in graduate seminars on Asian art while a visiting professor at Hunter College, New York. Reinhardt introduced Kubler’s works to the artist Robert Morris, who was enrolled at Hunter College as a graduate student in art history and studied with Reinhardt between 1961 and 1965. There are references to Kubler in Morris’s Master’s dissertation, a re-evaluation of the work of Constantin Brancusi, and in the first part of the artist’s widely read series of essays ‘Notes on Sculpture’, published in Artforum (February 1966) in the wake of Reinhardt’s lively review. ‘Now then, as far as the work of art is concerned, the only interest that

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any work of art has is the fact that it’s art. And in the history of objects, George Kubler, in The Shape of Time, has said that . . . it’s a fairly interesting little book, and it’s certainly a book that one ought to get past . . . the work of art is a problem as art only and not as any kind of human document. So then you have art-as-art, the art object as an art object, all the time, all through time, simultaneously.’ Ad Reinhardt, public lecture, Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Skowhegan, me, 21 July 1967, Library, Museum of Modern Art, New York. For an excellent critical account of the philosophical development of art history in nineteenthcentury Germany, see Michael Podro, The Critical Historians of Art (London, 1991). Of particular relevance is Podro’s discussion of those philsophers of art, such as Karl Schnaase, who argued in opposition to Hegel for a culturally autonomous notion of art. Reinhardt’s parody of periodization based on style was taken from a textbook on Renaissance art by the historian Wylie Sypher. By recasting artistic production in terms of stylistic cycles of development, Reinhardt’s joke obscured the probing, often uncertain, nature of his own work of the 1940s. At the heart of Reinhardt’s humour lay a real anxiety about how meaning is established, maintained and transmitted through the institutional setting of contemporary art. Having already excluded symbolic meaning, Reinhardt turned to the development of art’s formal aspects. His adoption of the archaic language of academic art history was certainly intended to intensify the difference between his aesthetic position and that of the majority of his contemporaries in New York. See George Kubler, The Shape of Time (New Haven, ct, 1962). Reinhardt, ‘Art vs. History’, p. 226. Ibid. Kubler, The Shape of Time, p. vii. That is, ‘the idea of a linked succession of prime works with replications, all being distributed in time as recognizably early and late versions of the same kind of action’. Ibid., p. 130.T

5 ‘an invasion of the ultimate’ 1 Arthur W. Biddle, interview with Robert Lax, 19 May 1992. 2 Ad Reinhardt, ‘How to Look at Art Talk’, pm (9 June 1946), p. m6, and ‘How to Look at Iconography’, pm (20 October 1946), p. m9. All Reinhardt’s art comics – including works published in pm, trans/formations, Art d’aujourd’hui, Art News and Jubilee – are reproduced in Gudrin Inbodin and Thomas Kellein, Ad Reinhardt (Stuttgart, 1985), pp. 88–128. 3 Biddle, interview with Lax. 4 Ad Reinhardt, ‘Ad Reinhardt: Three Statements’, Artforum (March 1966), p. 35. 5 The encounter between spectator and painting has been described in this way in relation to works by Mark Rothko and Barnett Newman, both of whom played a considerable role in Reinhardt’s artistic life from the late 1940s to the mid-1950s. See Charles Harrison, Conceptual Art and Painting: Further Essays on Art and Language (Cambridge, ma, 2001). 6 Ad Reinhardt, notes on ‘Art-as-Art’, c. 1966, Ad Reinhardt Papers, the Archives of the Smithsonian Institution, Washington, dc, n/69-103, frames 243–289.

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7 This is a rare description by Reinhardt of the proper experience of the ‘black’ paintings; see Reinhardt, notes on Art-as-Art, c. 1966. 8 In a postcard to Edward Corbett, Reinhardt wrote: ‘I got this one speech, say it over and over, nobody listens, no complaints.’ Correspondence, Ad Reinhardt to Edward Corbett, April 1964, Edward and Rosamund Corbett Papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, dc. 9 Ad Reinhardt, ‘Art-as-Art’, Art International (December 1962), p. 37. 10 See Lucy R. Lippard, Ad Reinhardt (New York, 1981), pp. 150–52. 11 Reinhardt, ‘Art-as-Art’, p. 37; and Ad Reinhardt, [Three statements], Pax, 18 (1962), n.p. 12 Ad Reinhardt, ‘Autocritique de Reinhardt’, Iris-Time (Paris, 1963), p. 1. 13 Priscilla Colt, ‘Notes on Reinhardt’, Art International (October 1964), p. 33. 14 Ibid., p. 34. 15 Ad Reinhardt, ‘The Black-Square Painting Shows, 1963, 1964, 1965’, in ‘Ad Reinhardt: Three Statements’, pp. 34–5. 16 Ibid. 17 The most significant of these are ‘The Artist in Search of an Academy, Part i (1953), ‘The Artist in Search of an Academy, Part ii: Who are the Artists?’ (1954), ‘Twelve Rules for a New Academy’ (1957) and ‘Is There a New Academy?’ (1959). The last was written in response to a question posed by the editor of Art News. 18 Ad Reinhardt, panel discussion with Milton Resnick, printed in Scrap (New York), 20 January 1961. 19 Ad Reinhardt, ‘The Artist in Search of an Academy, Part i’, College Art Journal (Spring 1953), reprinted in Art-as-Art: The Selected Writings of Ad Reinhardt, ed. Barbara Rose (New York, 1975), p. 199. 20 Correspondence, Philip Leider to Ad Reinhardt, 23 December 1965, 13 January 1966 and 19 January 1966; in Ad Reinhardt Papers. 21 Donald Judd to Ad Reinhardt, correspondence, 19 November 1962, in Ad Reinhardt Papers, n/69-100, frame 634; Robert Morris to Ad Reinhardt, correspondence, 25 March 1963, in Ad Reinhardt Papers, n/69-100, frame 684. 22 Ad Reinhardt, ‘Black as Symbol and Concept’, Artscanada (October 1967), pp. 4–19. 23 Ad Reinhardt, ‘The Artist in Search of a Code of Ethics’, in Art-as-Art, ed. Rose, p. 160. According to Rose, Reinhardt dedicated this text – first delivered at the College Art Association annual convention in New York on 28 January 1960 and later read at The Club on April Fools’ Day of that year – to the ‘eighteen irascible artists of 1950, who have successfully adjusted themselves to their non-environment’. 24 In response to a standard request by the Museum of Modern Art in 1963 for information on a recently acquired ‘black’ painting, Reinhardt supplied an exuberant sentence of Joycean proportions that began with the assertion that his works were ‘the most extreme, ultimate, climactic reaction to, and negation of, the (Cubist, Mondrian, Malevich, Albers, Diller) tradition of abstract art’. Abridged statement by Reinhardt reprinted as ‘On the Black Paintings’ in Art-as-Art, ed. Rose, p. 161; the original may be found in the artist’s papers. 25 The manuscript may be found in Ad Reinhardt Papers, n/69-101, frame 216. 26 ‘Painting has been the freest and purest fine art in this century, and our purest aesthetic statements have been in modern painting. I guess, then,

it would be up to me to make the most extreme aesthetic position clearer’; Ad Reinhardt, ‘Aesthetic Responsibility’ [1962], reprinted in Art-as-Art, ed. Rose, p. 164. 27 ‘Corruption in art cycles moves forward always in the name of life, fate, nature, humanity, animality, society, cosmic anxiety . . . The reform movement and atonement occurs always as a return to the strong neo-classic virtues of detachment, honesty, rationality, clarity, coldness, emptiness, sterility, formalism, intellectuality, idealism, meaninglessness, and contentlessness.’ Reinhardt, ‘The Artist in Search of a Code of Ethics’, in Art-asArt, ed. Rose, p. 161.

6 ‘every dogma has its day’ 1 Ad Reinhardt, ‘39 Art Planks: Programs for “Program” Painting (Art-asArt Dogma, Part vii)’, Art Voices (Spring 1963); reprinted in Art-as-Art: The Selected Writings of Ad Reinhardt, ed. Barbara Rose (New York, 1975), p. 70. 2 Correspondence, Robert Morris to Ad Reinhardt, 19 August 1964. In general, Reinhardt seemed to ignore Clement Greenberg. A rare mention by Reinhardt of Greenberg is found in the artist’s papers, probably dating from the mid-1960s. Among a number of satirical titles for college art history courses, one reads ‘Rise and Fall of C. Greenberg’. Other titles include ‘Abstraction in, from, for, out of nature’ and a ‘History of Art History, Fake Histories, and the Uses of Religion, God in Art’. The university art curriculum and its devices were forms that Reinhardt used to satirize Greenberg and curators and institutions that had excluded the artist during the 1950s and ’60s from the canon of Abstract Expressionism. A mock exam question accompanying one fictional syllabus reads: ‘Name 3 old and 3 new patriarchs of the New American Painting. List 4 Deans and 6 fathers of modern American art. Who is the mother of abstract art in America? The young talent and the dirty old men. Name (list) 12 young talents and 6 dirty old men in Action Painting.’ Another question asks students to ‘Explain what is meant by: dry Cubism has been sweated out, the ice is broken, a nice breakthrough . . . Chagallerie.’ See Ad Reinhardt Papers, in the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, dc. 3 Greenberg had made three trips to Great Britain between 1959 and 1965; the last was related to his role as chair of the jury for the John Moores Liverpool Exhibition. For an account of the role played by American art and culture on the development of visual art in Britain during the postwar period, see John A. Walker, Cultural Offensive: America’s Impact on British Art since 1945 (London, 1998), especially chapters 4 and 5. Walker recounts the American experiences of artists such as Anthony Caro, Robyn Denny, Patrick Heron, John Latham, John Hoyland, Bridget Riley and Victor Burgin, some of whom had direct contact with Reinhardt. For an account of Greenberg’s trips to Britain, see Florence Rubenfeld, Clement Greenberg: A Life (New York, 1998), chapters 13–15, passim. 4 The New American Painting toured eight nations worldwide. In Britain (the final destination in Europe) the exhibition was supported by the Arts Council of Great Britain and achieved record attendance figures at its venue, the Tate Gallery, London (24 February–23 March 1959). See

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Helen M. Franc, ‘The Early Years of the International Program and Council’, in The Museum of Modern Art at Mid-Century: At Home and Abroad, ed. John Elderfield, Studies in Modern Art, 4 (New York, 1994), p. 137, and Lynn Zelevansky, ‘Dorothy Miller’s “Americans”, 1942–63’, ibid., pp. 86–9. For a recent study on American international exhibitions of the 1950s, see Nancy Jachec, The Philosophy and Politics of Abstract Expressionism, 1940–1960 (Cambridge, 2000). ‘Art: Mark Rothko’, The Spectator (7 March 1970), p. 314, cited in James E. B. Breslin, Mark Rothko: A Biography (Chicago, 1993), p. 412. Breslin recounts Rothko’s concern to control strictly the conditions of the viewing of his paintings; in all cases, Rothko wished them to be exhibited under illumination that reproduced the lighting conditions at the time of their making. Both Rothko and Reinhardt were prone to paint in the late afternoon, under natural light and to contemplate the response of the painting – its ability to generate light – in twilight conditions. Ad Reinhardt Papers, n/69-103, frame 289. Breslin, Mark Rothko, p. 529. Lawrence Alloway, Six American Abstract Painters, exh. cat., Arthur Tooth and Sons Ltd (London, 1961), n.p. Ibid., n. p., and Michael Fried, ‘New York Letter’, Art International (Summer 1964). Fried’s acceptance of Reinhardt’s paintings reveals that his interest at the time in optical effects, in contrast to Alloway, was confined to those effects that exhibited a relatively low level of intensity. Alloway and Fried are describing different tokens of the same type of phenomenon. David Sylvester, ‘Blackish’, New Statesman (12 June 1964), p. 924. Alloway, Six American Abstract Painters, n.p. For example, Ellsworth Kelly’s works, which included Slip (1959), Fork Left (1959), and Brooklyn Bridge (1958). The titles alone suggest a distinctly different arena within which the ‘common subject’ that Alloway sought to identify might be constituted. See John Roberts, The Impossible Document: Photography and Conceptual Art, exh. cat., CameraWork (London, 1996), p. 41, and Walker, Cultural Offensive, chapters 3 and 7. Robyn Denny, ‘An Appreciation’, Studio International, 174 (December 1967), pp. 264–5.m See, for instance, David Thompson, ‘Americans in London’, in Ad Reinhardt Papers, n/69-104, frame 392. See Astrid Bowron, ‘Gustav Metzger’, in Kerry Brougher and Astrid Bowron, eds, Gustav Metzger (Oxford, 1998), pp. 20–79. Ad Reinhardt, ’39 Art Planks’, reprinted in Art-as-Art, ed. Rose, pp. 69–70. Ad Reinhardt, ‘Dark’, unpublished, undated notes, c. 1966, reprinted in Art-as-Art, ed. Rose, p. 91. Ian Hamilton Finlay to Ad Reinhardt, 24 July 1964, Ad Reinhardt Papers, n/69-101, frame 594. ‘I have not seen any originals because I have a nervous trouble (panics) which stops me going to galleries. (Not that there are any around here), and before that I was too totally poor to go to them (door-keepers). But I think reproductions are not too bad anyway – not as bad as people make out, if you look at them sensibly.’ Ian Hamilton Finlay to Robert Lax, 3 July 1964, Ad Reinhardt Papers, n/69-101, frame 593. ‘I’m amazed that you know Ad Reinhardt’, Finlay wrote to Lax. ‘I only discovered his paintings this year and am very keen

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on them – wrote a long letter about him just the other day. And I was thinking of asking him if he’d do a whole poth number, filling it any way he wants. This was before I knew you knew him. So I’m thinking it more than ever . . . Robert, could you tell me where to write him and if you are writing him could you sort of introduce me, as it were? Please.’ Ian Hamilton Finlay to Ad Reinhardt, 24 July 1964. Bridget Riley, correspondence with the author, 16 September 2002. Riley found Reinhardt to be ‘a natural and charismatic teacher’ who would show her slides taken on his travels, ‘particularly those in the East and Far East’. Riley also provides a charming description of Reinhardt’s studio on Broadway, located near the site of the Washington Square Park campus of New York University: the entry hall was ‘flanked by two long racks of paintings on the left and right leaving a narrow passage down the centre which opened out at the end in front of a big window’. The working area contained ‘only a table and a few chairs. We would drink Scotch and talk about art and painting.’o Correspondence, Bridget Riley to Ad Reinhardt, 17 September 1965, n.p. Lynne Cooke, ‘Reconnaissance’, in Bridget Riley, exh. cat., dia Art Center (New York, 2002). Bridget Riley, ‘Perception is the Medium’, Art News, lxiv/6 (October 1965), pp. 32–3, 66, reprinted in The Eye’s Mind: Bridget Riley Collected Writings (London, 1999). A brief account of Riley’s impressions of New York and American culture may be found in Walker, Cultural Offensive, pp. 218–22. In the manuscript, Riley addressed the most serious of these misreadings, which are worth citing in full. Riley noted that (1) she had ‘never studied “optics”’; (2) identified herself as a radical empiricist who held the belief that ‘perception is the medium through which states of being are directly experienced’; (3) denied any ‘literary impulse’ or ‘illustrative intention’ to the work, stating that ‘the marks on the canvas are the sole and essential aspects in a series of relationships which form the structure of the painting’; (4) suggested that her ‘paintings have some affinity with “happenings”’ in so far as they should impart to the spectator a ‘sense of recognition . . . so that the spectator experiences at one and the same time something known and something unknown’; (5) the paintings depend on a number of polarities for their effect, such as ‘static and active’, ‘fast and slow’, that ‘echo in the depths of our psychic being’ and ‘parallel the basis of our emotional structure’ (this reveals that Riley is hardly a naive empiricist, even if she was not conscious of that fact at the time); (6) the trompe-l’oeil and perspectival effects of the paintings are fortuitous and bear no intended relation to our experience of the environment; (7) that her body of work is by no means ‘a celebration of the marriage of art and science’; and (8) that ‘a painter’s intentions may be of interest but in the last analyses those intentions are irrelevant [emphasis Riley]. Stance alone will never make a work of art. Ultimately the degree of visual sensibility is the vital agent in transforming a concept into the indefinable experience which is presented by a work of art.’ Draft manuscript of ‘Perception is the Medium’, Bridget Riley to Ad Reinhardt, 17 September 1965, pp. 2–5. For recent considerations of Riley’s work, see Frances Follin, Embodied Visions: Bridget Riley, Op Art and the Sixties (London 2004), and Pamela M. Lee, Chronophobia: On Time in the Art of the 1960s (Cambridge, ma, 2004), chapter 3. Fairfield Porter, ‘Clement Greenberg on “American-type” Painting: A Letter

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to the “Partisan Review”’ [1955], reprinted in Fairfield Porter: Art in its Own Terms, ed. Rackstraw Downes (New York, 1979), p. 234. William C. Seitz, The Responsive Eye, exh. cat., Museum of Modern Art (New York, 1965), p. 16. Richard Shiff, ‘Bridget Riley: The Edge of Animation’, in Bridget Riley, exh. cat., Tate Britain (London, 2003), pp. 81–91. Seitz, The Responsive Eye, p. 7. Shiff, ‘Bridget Riley’, p. 82. Thomas Crow, The Rise of the Sixties: American and European Art in the Era of Dissent, 1955–69 (London, 1996), p. 113. See also Caroline A. Jones, Eyesight Alone: Clement Greenberg’s Modernism and the Bureaucratization of the Senses (Chicago, il, 2005). Regrettably, Jones’s book – an exhaustive account of Greenberg’s theories and their profound links to American visual culture – came to my attention too late to consider in any depth in relation to my discussion of Reinhardt and Op art. Bruce Glaser, ‘An Interview with Ad Reinhardt’, Art International, x/10 (20 December 1966), p. 21. E. C. Goossen, Ellsworth Kelly, exh. cat., Museum of Modern Art (New York, 1973), p. 49. Kelly also exhibited at Betty Parsons Gallery in spring 1956 and autumn 1957. In 1952, two years before his return to the us, Kelly had produced a study for a hinged construction titled Folding Painting. In its closed position the construction consisted of a left-hand black square and a right-hand white square. Upon opening Folding Painting, a red square and a blue square flanking two yellow squares are revealed. The plan for Folding Painting was apparently inspired by the structure of Grünewald’s Isenheim altarpiece (1515), a fact that Kelly made no attempt to hide. The critic E. C. Goossen argued that many of Kelly’s paintings were highly schematic renderings of architectural details (windows and the views they frame are especially favoured subjects of transformation) or the play of light and shadow across an object. ‘The formalities of geometry and its abstractness are of no consequence to him either at the inception of an idea or in the final result.’ Kelly’s composite grid paintings and spectrum panels were part of a body of work that included duochromes and monochromes that alluded to the built environment of the city or some seemingly inconsequential, fleeting moment of distorted reflection. See Goossen, Ellsworth Kelly, p. 21. Virginia Dwan and Robert Smithson conceived the exhibition Ten. Soon thereafter, Reinhardt took an active part in its organization, suggesting the inclusion of Agnes Martin and Robert Morris. According to Dwan, ‘Ad Reinhardt was a significant influence on me and on my direction with the gallery, even though he may have been unaware of it. It was he that alerted me to Agnes Martin some years before the Ten show’ (Virginia Dwan, correspondence with the author, 16 September 2002). Along with Carl Andre, Morris and Smithson were part of group of young artists headquartered at Max’s Kansas City, a bar, restaurant and performance space on Park Avenue South at 17th Street in Manhattan (Virginia Dwan interviews, 18 April and 2 May 1984, transcript, p. 17, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, dc). Other artists exhibiting in Ten (several of whom were known to Reinhardt) included Dan Flavin, Michael Steiner, Jo Baer, Sol LeWitt and Donald Judd (Dwan interview, 18 April 18 and 2 May 1984, transcript, p. 17).

37 Dwan Gallery, New York, 4–29 October 1966. Dwan published a catalogue that included two installation views and one page each for illustrations of work by Carl Andre, Jo Baer, Dan Flavin, Donald Judd, Sol LeWitt, Agnes Martin, Robert Morris, Ad Reinhardt, Robert Smithson and Michael Steiner. A second version of Ten in which the same artists were represented, for the most part by different works, was mounted in Dwan’s Los Angeles gallery (2–27 May 1967). Reinhardt was represented in the first version of Ten by Ultimate Painting #39 (60 × 60 in, oil on canvas), on loan from the Betty Parsons Gallery. Reinhardt was represented in the second exhibition by Ultimate Painting #6, 1960 (60 × 60 in, oil on canvas). 38 James Meyer, correspondence with the author, 12 August 2003. 39 Correspondence, Virginia Dwan to John Canaday, 13 October 1966, Dwan Gallery Archives, New York. 40 Annette Michelson, ‘10 × 10: “concrete reasonableness”’, Artforum (January 1967), p. 31. 41 Nancy Holt, ed., The Writings of Robert Smithson (New York, 1979), p. 210. 42 Correspondence, Virginia Dwan to John Canaday. 43 See, for example, Sibyl Moholy-Nagy’s retort to Reinhardt’s article ‘The Artist in Search of an Academy, Part ii: Who Are the Artists?’ in ‘Reply to Ad Reinhardt’, College Art Journal, xiv (Fall 1954), pp. 60–61. A far more sympathetic – if not affectionate – take on Reinhardt’s alleged transgressions may be found in Abe Ajay, ‘The Prize: An Exchange of Letters Between Ajay and Reinhardt’, Art in America, 6 (November–December 1971), pp. 106–9. 44 Lucy R. Lippard, ‘After a Fashion –The Group Show’, Hudson Review (Winter 1966–7), pp. 620, 622, 623 and 626. 45 Ad Reinhardt: ‘I once said that I wouldn’t say anything about artists younger than myself . . . What has bothered me is that the older painters who preceded me made troubles for me that they shouldn’t have. Now I don’t want to make any troubles for the young artists, but leave them free.’ Bruce Glaser: ‘In any case, some of them have been stressing qualities or characteristics in their paintings that have been present in your work. For example, repetitiousness, symmetry – qualities that you have referred to before.’ Reinhardt: ‘They are not really qualities, they are non-qualities.’ See Bruce Glaser, ‘An Interview with Ad Reinhardt’, Art International, x/10 (20 December 1966), pp. 18–21. 46 Ad Reinhardt, ‘Black as Symbol and Concept’, Artscanada (October 1967), pp. 4–19; excerpt reprinted in Art-as-Art, ed. Rose, p. 87. 47 Ad Reinhardt, [Notes on the Black Paintings], unpublished, undated notes, reprinted in Art-as-Art, ed. Rose, p. 104. 48 Ibid. 49 Breslin, Mark Rothko, pp. 415–17. 50 Ad Reinhardt to Betty Parsons, September 1961, cited in Lippard, Ad Reinhardt, p. 127. 51 Lucy R. Lippard, Ad Reinhardt (New York, 1981), p. 127. 52 Lucy Lippard, Ad Reinhardt: Paintings, exh. cat., Jewish Museum, New York (23 November 1966–15 January 1967), p. 6. Sam Hunter had known Reinhardt during the early 1960s, when he organized an exhibition of contemporary art for the New York Pavilion of the New York World’s Fair, 1964. In a letter to Hunter, Reinhardt expressed concern that ‘a great many places don’t know who I am, and people are sticking me in “new talent” shows because the Museum of Modern Art and you, and then others who

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used you as authorities, have left me out of your documentation, on an international scale. What is all this “making and breaking” and “moving and shaking” you’re all up to?’ Reinhardt continued, writing that Hunter ‘had every right to swallow any Greenberg-Newman-line, hook, line and sinker, but don’t I have a right to be equally shown, seen, heard?’ Correspondence, Ad Reinhardt to Sam Hunter, January 1962, in Ad Reinhardt Papers, n/69-101, frame 660.a ‘Chronology by Ad Reinhardt,’ in Lippard, Ad Reinhardt: Paintings, p. 36. In fact, 126 works were exhibited and listed in the checklist for the exhibition. Ad Reinhardt Papers, n/69-100, frame 90. Robert M. Coates, ‘Rejections,’ New Yorker (10 December 1966), p. 176. Ibid. Hilton Kramer, ‘Ad Reinhardt’s Black Humor’, New York Times (27 November 1966), section d, p. 17. The Jewish Museum exhibition was confirmed in spring 1965 (correspondence, Sam Hunter to Ad Reinhardt, 1 April 1965, in Ad Reinhardt Papers, n/69-101, frame 661). As late as March 1966 Hunter was still trying to firm up plans with European curators in Stockholm (Moderna Museet), Paris (‘I also plan to try the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris in offering the show, for that seems to me the most sympathetic institution there for your work – although I suppose they may confuse it with Yves Klein’s’), Amsterdam (Stedelijk Museum) and with Thomas Colt, Jr, of the Dayton Art Institute, Dayton, oh. Correspondence, Sam Hunter to Ad Reinhardt, 13 April 1966, in Ad Reinhardt Papers, n/69-101, frame 665. Colt, in concert with his wife Priscilla – one of the more astute commentators on Reinhardt’s work of the 1960s – had talked to Hunter in December 1965 about mounting an exhibition of the artist’s work. Correspondence, Thomas C. Colt, Jr, to Ad Reinhardt, 6 January 1966, in Ad Reinhardt Papers, n/69-101, frame 662. Colt was particularly disappointed with Hunter’s performance and level of communication on this matter and objected strenuously to the terms of the loan set out by the Jewish Museum: ‘We are not without experience in organizing shows and a cost of $6,000 for a reduced version of your exhibition seems to me to be absurd. Maybe Ad will someday permit us to organize our own exhibition of his work.’ Correspondence, Thomas C. Colt, Jr, to Sam Hunter, 19 April 1966, in Ad Reinhardt Papers, n/69-101, frame 667. The failure to tour the exhibition remained a great source of disappointment for Reinhardt. The key works by Lippard on Reinhardt are ‘New York Letter,’ Art International, ix/4 (May 1965), pp. 52–3; Lippard, Ad Reinhardt: Paintings; ‘Ad Reinhardt: One Art’, Art in America, lxii (September–October 1974), pp. 65–75, and ‘Ad Reinhardt: One Work’, Art in America lxii (November– December 1974), pp. 95–101. Lippard also used the occasion of the Jewish Museum’s successive mounting of retrospectives of Reinhardt and Yves Klein as a pretext to summarize her thoughts on monochrome painting; see Lucy Lippard, ‘The Silent Art’, Art in America (January 1967), pp. 58–63. Lippard, Ad Reinhardt, p. 191. Lucy Lippard, interview with the author, 1 December 1985. Lippard, Ad Reinhardt, p. 193. Frank Stella, ‘Statement’, Artscanada (October 1967), p. 19. Sidney Tillim, ‘What Happened to Geometry?’, Arts Magazine (June 1959), p. 43. Lippard, Ad Reinhardt: Paintings, p. 25.

66 Ibid., p. 11. 67 Ibid. 68 See Reinhardt’s remarks in Bruce Glaser, ‘An Interview with Ad Reinhardt’, Art International, x/10 (20 December 1966); reprinted in Artas-Art, ed. Rose, p. 21. 69 See George Kubler’s discussion of ‘the anatomy of routine’ in The Shape of Time (New Haven, ct, 1962), pp. 72–3. 70 Brian O’Doherty, ‘Anti-Matter’, Art and Artists (January 1967), p. 42. 71 The mechanical techniques that gave rise to Reinhardt’s ‘black’ paintings and are evident across his artistic practice, along with the way Reinhardt chose to describe the routinized fabrication of the ‘black’ paintings, suggest that the modernist dialectic between ‘high’ and ‘low’ as theorized by Thomas Crow is relevant to a broader and more complex understanding of Reinhardt. This might also explain Reinhardt’s antipathy towards Warhol; both were, in their different ways, avatars of the mechanical in art. See Thomas Crow, ‘Modernism and Mass Culture’, in Modernism and Modernity, ed. Benjamin Buchloh (Halifax, ns, 1983), pp. 245–6.

7 reinhardt and the art of the sixties 1 Bruce Glaser, ‘An Interview with Ad Reinhardt’, Art International (Winter 1966–7), reprinted in Art-as-Art: The Selected Writings of Ad Reinhardt, ed. Barbara Rose (New York, 1975), p. 22. 2 Ad Reinhardt, ‘Art vs History’, Art News (January 1966), p. 62. 3 Following his death in 1967, Reinhardt’s work was included in a number of international survey exhibitions, most of which, like Documenta (1967, 1972 and 1977) and Contemporanea (1973), displayed the artist’s paintings in the company of works by Buren, Marden, Ryman, Stella, Kelly, Martin and Newman. See Achille Bonito Oliva, ‘Contemporary Arts, 1973–1955’, in Contemporanea, exh. cat., Parcheggio di Villa Borghese (Rome, 1973), pp. 25–33. Other exhibitions contextualized different aspects of Reinhardt’s practice in order to articulate the artist’s relationship to, say, art-activism and Conceptual art. Reinhardt was represented in at least two of the series of Language exhibitions organized by Dwan Gallery, New York. Reinhardt’s silkscreened postcard, No War (1966), produced in the context of the anti-Vietnam War movement of the mid-1960s, was included in both Language iii (1969) and Language iv (1970), alongside work by, among others, Joseph Kosuth, Sol LeWitt, Hanne Darboven, Robert Smithson and Adrian Piper. 4 The reception of Reinhardt’s work by young artists of the 1960s was undoubtedly shaped by the artist’s own complex interleaving of painterly practice and rhetorical excess. What is of interest is the way the ‘black’ paintings, the ‘art-as-art’ dogma and the art cartoons conspired to provide for some artists a compelling model of artistic practice. Citing Reinhardt’s versatility in this way, however, does not guarantee an adequate understanding of the artist’s ‘total signifying activity’. Knowing what we now do about the political dimensions of Reinhardt’s early career, one should not be too quick to impose order on Reinhardt’s multiplicity of practices. 5 Frances Colpitt, Minimal Art: The Critical Perspective (Seattle, wa, 1993), p. 67.

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6 Barbara Rose, ‘The Black Paintings’, in Ad Reinhardt: Black Paintings, 1951–1967, exh. cat., Marlborough Gallery (New York, 1970), p. 17. Rose claims breathlessly that Reinhardt’s goal was ‘nothing less than the ultimate synthesis of the traditional polarities of Western painting, a single summary statement which would subsume all previous forms, styles and techniques of painting’ (p. 16). 7 Pierre Restany, in Yves Klein: le monochrome, exh. cat., Leo Castelli Gallery (New York, 1961), n.p. 8 Glaser, ‘An Interview with Ad Reinhardt’, reprinted in Art-as-Art, ed. Rose, p. 23. 9 Rose, ‘The Black Paintings’, p. 20. 10 Reinhardt recognized this attitude in another marginalized figure, the British poet and illustrator William Blake, whom he cited repeatedly in his daybook: ‘Reynolds & Gainsborough Blotted & Blurred one against the other & Divided all the English World between them. Fuseli, Indignant, almost hid himself. I am hid.’ William Blake, ‘Annotations to Sir Joshua Reynolds’s Discourses’, 1808, in Ad Reinhardt Papers, the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, dc, n/69-103, frame 363. 11 Terry Atkinson; see ‘Passage i: Reinhardt–Kosuth’, unpublished conference paper, London, January 1994, p. 5. 12 Joseph Kosuth, ‘On Ad Reinhardt’, in Joseph Kosuth: Art after Philosophy and After: Collected Writings, 1966–1990, ed. Gabriele Guercio (Cambridge, ma, 1991), p. 192. This view of early Conceptual art as an avant-garde practice engaged in the redefinition of art is shared by Terry Atkinson; see ‘Passage i: Reinhardt–Kosuth’, pp. 1–3. 13 Jeanne Siegel, ‘Carl Andre: Artworker’, Studio International (November 1970), p. 179. 14 Ad Reinhardt, 10 Screenprints, 1966. The portfolio was produced by IvesSillman, Inc., New Haven, ct, printed by Sirocco Screenprints, Inc., in an edition of 250 and realized under the direction of Sam Wagstaff, Jr, Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, ct. 15 Harold Rosenberg, ‘Black and Pistachio’ [1963], in The Anxious Object (Chicago, il, 1964), p. 52. 16 See, for example, the comment by Lawrence Weiner in Recording Conceptual Art: Early Interviews with Barry, Huebler, Kaltenbach, LeWitt, Morris, Oppenheim, Siegelaub, Smithson, Weiner by Patricia Norvell, ed. Alexander Alberro and Patricia Norvell (Berkeley, ca, 2001), p. 109. 17 Barbara Rose, ‘abc Art’, Art in America (October–November, 1965); reprinted in Minimal Art: A Critical Anthology, ed. Gregory Battcock (New York, 1968), p. 277. 18 Richard Wollheim, ‘Minimal Art’, Arts Magazine (January 1965), pp. 26, 32. 19 Siegel, ‘Carl Andre: Artworker’, p. 179. 20 Cited in Lynn Zelevansky, ‘Ad Reinhardt and the Younger Artists of the 1960s’, in American Art of the 1960s, ed. John Elderfield, Studies in Modern Art, 1 (New York, 1991), p. 26. 21 Siegel, ‘Carl Andre: Artworker’, p. 175. 22 Zelevansky, ‘Ad Reinhardt and the Younger Artists of the 1960s’, p. 26. 23 The affinity between LeWitt’s ‘Sentences on Conceptual Art’ and Reinhardt’s ‘Twelve Rules for a New Academy’ has been noted; see Zelevansky, ‘Ad Reinhardt and the Younger Artists of the 1960s’, p. 27, and Lawrence Alloway, ‘Sol LeWitt, Modules, Walls, Books’, Artforum (April

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1975), p. 40. For a revealing discussion of the motivation behind LeWitt’s writings on Conceptual art, see Andrew Wilson, ‘Sol LeWitt Interviewed’, Art Monthly (1993), pp. 3–9 LeWitt made these statements in mid-1969; see Recording Conceptual Art, ed. Alberro and Norvell, pp. 114–15. ‘The “device” of the phrase [‘Art as Idea as Idea’] is a reference to Ad Reinhardt, an early hero of mine. But the point is very much mine.’ Joseph Kosuth, ‘On Ad Reinhardt,’ in Art after Philosophy and After, ed. Guercio, p. 192. Kosuth’s definitive statement on this relationship remains his curatorial project Symptoms of Interference, Conditions of Possibility: Ad Reinhardt, Joseph Kosuth and Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Camden Art Centre, London (7 January–6 March 1994). A later response by Kosuth challenging Yve-Alain Bois’s reading of Reinhardt in ‘The Limit of the Almost’, the catalogue essay accompanying the Museum of Modern Art’s 1991 retrospective survey of Reinhardt, is found in ‘Les Limites du regard: voir et lire Ad Reinhardt’, Art Press, xvii (1996), pp. 170–74. This text is based on a conference paper delivered by Kosuth in February 1995 at the College Art Association convention session ‘Artist and History’, organized by Luis Camnitzer. For critical responses to Kosuth’s relationship to Reinhardt, see Nancy Spector, ‘Negativity, Purity and the Clearness of Ambiguity: Ad Reinhardt, Joseph Kosuth and Felix Gonzalez-Torres’, in Symptoms of Interference, Conditions of Possibility, pp. 3–20; Zelevansky, ‘Ad Reinhardt and the Younger Artists of the 1960s’, pp. 16–31; and Michael Corris, ‘Ad Reinhardt: Invisible College of Conceptual Art?’, Flash Art (October 1994), pp. 49–52. Joseph Kosuth, ‘Art after Philosophy’, reprinted in Art after Philosophy and After, ed. Guercio, p. 19. I am indebted to Michael Newman for this point. Holtzman proselytized tirelessly for General Semantics, a kind of intellectual self-help programme that synthesized linguistics, philosophy, anthropology and psychology. It was invented by Alfred Korzybski and popularized through his book, Science and Sanity: An Introduction to Non-Aristotelian Systems and General Semantics (New York, 1933), and by the American philosopher S. I. Hayakawa in Language in Thought and Action (New York, 1949). Ad Reinhardt, ‘Abstract Painting, Sixty by Sixty Inches Square, 1960’ (1963); reprinted in Art-as-Art, ed. Rose, p. 84. Alberro and Norvell, eds, Recording Conceptual Art, p. 109. 5–31 January, 1969, catalogue of works by Barry, Huebler, Kosuth and Weiner (New York, 1969). See Eric Cameron, ‘Lawrence Weiner: The Books’, Studio International, 187 (January 1974), pp. 2–7. Ibid., p. 3. Mel Ramsden, correspondence with the author, 6 February 1994. Mel Ramsden, correspondence with the author. Ibid. For an account of what it is ‘to imagine a painting painted under the spell of Ad Reinhardt’, see Michael Baldwin, Charles Harrison and Mel Ramsden, Art & Language in Practice, i: Illustrated Handbook (Barcelona, 1993), pp. 217–19. Ian Burn, Looking at Seeing & Reading, exh. cat., Ivan Dougherty Gallery (Sydney, 1993), n. p. The phrase is taken from Yve-Alain Bois’s essay on Reinhardt, ‘The Limit of the Almost’, from which Burn draws heavily for

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his analysis. See Ad Reinhardt, exh. cat., Museum of Modern Art, New York (1991). Burn, Looking at Seeing & Reading, n. p. Burn’s description of Reinhardt’s studio technique for the production of ‘black’ paintings is not, to the best of my knowledge, accurate. Ibid. Burn even contended that the withdrawal of content in this sense was the ‘symbolic equivalent’ of a withdrawal of labour, a position made literal by Gustav Metzger’s advocacy of an ‘art strike’. Reinhardt himself had proposed an artists’ strike; he announced it in a graphic based on a 1961 newspaper front page calling for a city-wide rent strike in New York. Burn evidently used this as the basis for one of his own works of the late 1960s. (I am indebted to Ann Stephen for this reference.) Michael Baldwin and Mel Ramsden, correspondence with the author, 21 August 2002. Charles Harrison, Conceptual Art and Painting: Further Essays on Art & Language (Cambridge, ma, 2001), p. 143. Ibid. Ad Reinhardt, ‘Art as Art Dogma’, talk at ica, London, 1964; reprinted in Studio International, 17 (December 1967), p. 264. Harrison, Conceptual Art and Painting, p. 147. Adrian Piper, ‘My Art Education’, in Out of Order, Out of Sight, i: Selected Writings in Meta-Art, 1968–1992 (London, 1996), pp. 3–7. Ian Burn is another artist greatly admired by Piper and similarly described in terms of wide artistic and political interests. See Adrian Piper, ‘Ian Burn’s Conceptualism’, Art in America (December 1997), pp. 72–9, 106. Martin James joined the faculty in 1950 and accompanied Reinhardt on his first trip to Europe. James related how Reinhardt would select postcards of artworks at the start of a museum visit, then search for the works in the collection; Martin James, interview with the author, 9 March 2002. See Martin James, ‘Today’s Artists: Reinhardt’, Portfolio and Art News Annual, no. 3 (1960), pp. 48–63; Lucy Lippard, Ad Reinhardt (New York, 1981); Dale McConathy, ‘Ad Reinhardt: He Loved to Confuse and Confound’, Art News (April 1980), pp. 56–9; and Thomas Hess, The Art Comics and Satires of Ad Reinhardt, exh. cat., Kunsthalle, Düsseldorf, and Marlborough Gallery (Rome, 1975). Mel Ramsden, correspondence with the author, 6 February 1994. Among all the admirers of Reinhardt of the 1960s, Robert Smithson was one of the few to take his comic nature seriously. This is apparent in Smithson’s zany article, ‘A Museum of Language in the Vicinity of Art’ (1968). There, Smithson calls Reinhardt’s Chronology of 1966 ‘a register of laughter without motive, as well as being a history of non-sense . . . its order appears to be born of a doleful tedium that originates in the unfathomable ground of farce. Here is a negative knowledge that enshrouds itself in the remote regions of that intricate language – the joke’ (p. 21). Reinhardt’s most complex art cartoon, ‘A Portend of the Artist as a Yhung Mandala’, ironically subtitled ‘Joke by Ad Reinhardt’ (1955–6), was the object of Smithson’s analysis and led him into a state of ‘vertigo’ (p. 27). See also Pamela M. Lee, Chronophobia: On Time and Art of the 1960s (Cambridge, ma, 2004), chapter 4. Dore Ashton, ‘Art: Notes on Ad Reinhardt’s Exhibition’, Arts and Architecture, 83 (January 1967), pp. 4–5. ‘At the very end of his life, however, the involvement [with the ultimate

painting] was decreasing and the climax, or immolation point, may have been imminent. For the first time he had begun to feel that he had mastered his intentions, that he had discovered how, in fact, to make one black painting over and over . . . he spoke of leaving painting for film, which had always fascinated him.’ Lippard, Ad Reinhardt, p. 154. 51 ‘Movie-slides? From slides? Film-strip from slides?’, Ad Reinhardt, untitled, undated notes, c. 1966, Ad Reinhardt Papers, n/69-100, frame 685. 52 Ad Reinhardt, ‘Abstraction vs. Illustration’, unpublished lecture, 1943. 53 Ad Reinhardt, untitled, undated notes, Ad Reinhardt Papers, n/69-100, frame 346.

8 political art and political power 1 Ad Reinhardt, cited in Jeanne Siegel, Artwords: Discourse on the 60s and 70s (New York, 1992), p. 105. Reinhardt’s remark was made during a panel discussion with the artists Leon Golub, Allan D’Arcangelo and Mark Morrel; all were participants in the Angry Arts Against the War in Vietnam protest event of early 1967. (Golub, Rudolf Baranik, May Stevens, Dore Ashton, Max Kozloff and Barbara Rose initiated Angry Arts Week and the Collage of Indignation in late January 1967. The Collage of Indignation was installed at the Loeb Student Center, New York University, off Washington Square Park, Greenwich Village.) The discussion was moderated by Siegel and broadcast on 10 August 1967 on wbai, New York. For an account of the activities of artist protest groups against the war in South-east Asia, see Therese Schwartz, ‘The Politicization of the Avant-Garde, Part i’, Art in America (November–December, 1971), pp. 96–105, and Francis Frascina, Art, Politics and Dissent: Aspects of the Art Left in Sixties America (Manchester, 1999), chapter 3, pp. 108–59. 2 Siegel, Artwords, p. 105. During this discussion, Reinhardt argued vehemently against Golub’s interpretation of Picasso’s Guernica, which he likened to a cartoon. Reinhardt also attacked Ben Shahn’s series on Sacco and Vanzetti in this manner, calling it a ‘mockery of that event’ and looking ‘like a couple of dumb cartoons’. Consistent with his belief in the inability of art to function effectively as media, Reinhardt asserted that the mural ‘doesn’t tell you anything about the Spanish War and it doesn’t say anything about war’. 3 Ad Reinhardt, cited in Jeanne Siegel, Artwords, p. 112. In 1966 Reinhardt, along with Golub and others, helped raise funds for the Artists and Writers Protest Committee. 4 Ad Reinhardt, cited in Jeanne Siegel, Artwords, p. 109. 5 Reinhardt participated in the March on Washington for Jobs & Freedom, 28 August 1963; he was a supporter of the World Campaign for the Release of South African Political Prisoners; a sustaining associate of core, 1963–4; donated paintings for auction on behalf of the Stars for Freedom organization, Los Angeles, 1964; was a member of Artists and Writers Dissent, 1965; the Fifth Avenue Vietnam Peace Parade Committee, 1966; a supporter of Dissent, Irving Howe’s quarterly of socialist opinion, 1964–6; and served on the executive committee of artists for the National Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy, 1965. He also donated paintings for auction to support the Bertrand Russell Peace Foundation, which was established in late September 1963 in order to carry forward work for peace, human rights and social

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justice. It also sponsored the International War Crimes Tribunal, which convened on 13 November 1966 to consider reports on the commission of acts of aggression by allied forces operating in South-east Asia (the us, Australia, New Zealand and South Korea), particularly the use by the us troops of experimental weapons or weapons forbidden by the laws of war, such as napalm, chemical agents and gas. Reinhardt took part in a panel discussion on ‘The Problem of Artists’ Housing’ (13 February 1964) to address the issue of diminishing studio space in New York with representatives from the Architectural League of New York, the Artist Tenant Association, the New York Senate and the Metropolitan Council on Housing, a long-standing tenant advocacy group; correspondence, Robert W. Sowers to Ad Reinhardt, 30 January 1964. Correspondence, Joseph Rothman, Special Assistant Attorney General, State of New York to Ad Reinhardt, 25 January 1966. This request prompted the following reply from Reinhardt: ‘Thank you for inviting me to attend your meeting representatives of the French art community. I expect to attend and would like to introduce these questions. Are the “fine arts”, also defined as “free”, “liberal”, “useless” arts, and opposed in definition to “commercial”, “industrial”, “applied”, “useful”, “practical” arts, a clear and distinct trade, business or profession? If there is now an Art Dealers Association, why is there not an Art Producers Association, or an Artists Union or an Artists Equity, to bargain individually or collectively? Does a contemporary Fine Artist have properly, anything to protect, copyright, exploit? Such as a “style”, “quality”, “personality”, “signature”, “career”, etc. What kind of a “commodity” or “product” is a contemporary “work of fine art”? Isn’t it noteworthy that almost every prominent modern fine artist has come to public attention and recognition as a result of long years of public ridicule?’ [Correspondence, Ad Reinhardt to Joseph Rothman, 12 February 1966]. Several years later, the awc published a broadside that raised questions that were directed to the conditions of production of art, but with far less irony and penetration: ‘Why do artists allow themselves to be manipulated?’, ‘Who is the artist’s public?’, ‘Is being in galleries enough for an artist?’, ‘Art collectors collecting art or collecting commodities?’, ‘Are artists in galleries making art or commodities?’ and ‘Should art be free? Can artists be free?’ See Art Workers Coalition, ‘Does Money Manipulate Art?’, June 1969. Under the heading ‘Gov.’ in an unfinished outline for a book, Reinhardt engaged in a bit of black humour when he jokingly advocated a McCarrenWalter-type act to ensure the ‘registration of art-critics as artists’-agents’, and proposed that the ‘Government to “police” art world, keep it clean, clean it up’ through the means of a ‘Fed. Bureau of Art investigation’ and ‘grand jury panels’. Ad Reinhardt, ‘Art-as-Art’ notes, c. 1966, Ad Reinhardt Papers, in the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, dc, n/69-103, frames 243–289. This is an unmistakable reference to Clement Greenberg’s observation about Pollock’s relationship to Picasso. Ad Reinhardt, ‘Sayings of C. Dooley, New York School American, As Reported by A. Reinhardt’, Ad Reinhardt Papers, n/69-103, frame 296, n.d. Schwartz, ‘The Politicization of the Avant-Garde’, p. 98. The artists Irving

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Petlin, Judy Chicago and Lloyd Hamrol organized the California Peace Tower; Mark di Suvero designed the structure. Reinhardt contributed a small ‘black’ painting to the Peace Tower, which displayed the work of more than 400 artists, including Elaine de Kooning, Philip Evergood, Golub, Balcomb Greene, Philip Guston, Robert Gwathmey, Don Judd, Alice Neal, Moses Soyer, Hedda Sterne and Robert Motherwell. Schwartz, ‘The Politicization of the Avant-Garde’, p. 98. Levine and Reinhardt had been acquainted since the 1940s and both shared the experience of working with the Communist movement. For a recent account of Levine’s art and political work, see Andrew Hemingway, Artists on the Left: American Artists and the Communist Movement, 1926–1956 (New Haven, ct, 2002), passim. Ad Reinhardt, cited in Siegel, Artwords, p. 119. The full-page advertisement, headlined ‘End Your Silence’, was organized by Rudolf Baranik and published in the New York Times (27 June 1965). See Schwartz, ‘The Politicization of the Avant-Garde’, p. 97.E Ad Reinhardt, notes for ‘Art-as-Art’, c. 1966, Ad Reinhardt Papers, n/69-103. ‘Resnick/Reinhardt Attack: 1961’, Scrap (20 January 1961), n.p. ‘I think we’ve witnessed in the last decade the artist moving around from gallery to gallery until you get to the right gallery or – well, that kind of opportunism isn’t any different than what goes on in jobs in advertising and anywhere else. It’s hard to criticize anybody for making his way; however if this business of being on the make all the time – of trying to get in on it – well, it may be an illusion. It may be tragic if you really desire that and don’t get it. It makes for martyrs and for some kinds of heroes too in this society. I don’t know what the answer is. I haven’t said one thing about what anybody should do. I’m trying to find out why things aren’t very good for a fine artist.’ ‘Panels: Milton Resnick and Ad Reinhardt, “Attack”: 1961’, in Out of the Picture – Milton Resnick and the New York School, ed. Geoffrey Dorfman (New York, 2003), pp. 252–3. An account of the protest activities engaged in by artists during this period – including Reinhardt – may be found in Therese Schwartz, ‘The Politicization of the Avant-Garde’, pp. 96–105; Amy Schlegel, ‘My Lai: “We Lie, They Die.” Or, a Small History of an “Atrocious” Photograph’, Third Text, 31 (Summer 1995), pp. 47–66; and Frascina, Art, Politics and Dissent. For an account of the awc, including the Coalition’s revised ‘Statement of Demands’, see Lucy R. Lippard, ‘The Art Workers’ Coalition’, Studio International (November 1970), reprinted in Idea Art: A Critical Anthology, ed. Gregory Battcock (New York, 1973), pp. 102–15. For a critique of the separation of art and politics as advocated by the awc, see Mel Ramsden, ‘On Practice’, The Fox, 1 (April 1975), pp. 66–83. Lucy R. Lippard, Get The Message? A Decade of Art for Social Change (New York, 1984), pp. 2–3. This text provides a detailed account of Lippard’s embrace of the artist-activist model, whereby ‘artists can also make art directly involved in social change’. Ibid., p. 2. Artists selected for the exhibition included Carl Andre, Jo Baer, Dan Flavin, Donald Judd, Sol LeWitt, Robert Mangold, Doug Ohlson and Robert Ryman. Lucy R. Lippard, ‘The Dilemma’, Arts Magazine (November 1970), reprinted in Lippard, Get The Message?, pp. 5, 8. Ibid., p. 92. See also Lucy Lippard, Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object (New York, 1973), p. 263.

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23 Lucy R. Lippard, ‘Art’, Village Voice (6 June 1982), p. 82. 24 Lucy R. Lippard, Ad Reinhardt (New York, 1981), p. 9. For an account of German-American political radicalism during the early twentieth century, see Stan Nadel, ‘The German Immigrant Left in the United States’, in The Immigrant Left in the United States, ed. Paul Buhle and Dan Georgakas (Albany, ny, 1996), pp. 45–76. 25 Lippard, interview with the author. 26 Lippard, Ad Reinhardt, p. 129. 27 Ibid., p. 23. 28 Ibid., p. 25. 29 ‘The poet must remember that it is his poetry which bears the guilt for the vulgar prose of life, whereas the man of everyday life ought to know that the fruitlessness of art is due to his willingness to be unexacting and to the unseriousness of the concerns of his life. The individual must become answerable through and through: all of his constituent moments must not only fit next to each other in the temporal sequence of his life, but must also interpenetrate each other in the unity of guilt and answerability.’ Mikhail Bahktin, cited in T. J. Clark, Farewell to an Idea: Episodes from a History of Modernism (New Haven, ct, 1999), p. 262. 30 Ad Reinhardt Papers, undated note, n/69-104, frame 205. 31 Ad Reinhardt, ‘Something Else as Painting’, unpublished, undated notes, Ad Reinhardt Papers, roll 69/104, frame 150. 32 Ad Reinhardt delivered a talk to artists and students at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture on 21 July 1967 as part of a regular summer lecture series. Reinhardt’s lecture is available as a digitized recording and transcript, which may be consulted at the library of the Museum of Modern Art, New York. The artists Willard W. Cummings (1915–1975), Sidney Simon (1917–1997), Henry Varnum Poor (1888–1971) and Charles Cutler (1914–1970) founded the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in south central Maine in 1946. Ben Shahn and Bernarda Shahn were also involved with the school during its early years. It remains a prestigious summer retreat for young artists, attracting students mainly between university and graduate school. During the late 1960s, the school offered a range of traditional fine art workshops, covering painting, life drawing, printmaking, welding, carving and fresco. It was the discourse of the visiting artist programme – known for inviting a mix of the august, the underrecognized and the emerging representatives of the New York art scene – that earned Skowhegan its distinction among the crop of residential summer programmes for artists. The faculty for the July–August 1967 session included Peter Agostini, Lennart Anderson, Robert Birmelim, Sidney Hurwitz, Walter Murch and Philip Pearlstein (a colleague of Reinhardt’s at Brooklyn College and responsible for Reinhardt’s invitation to speak that summer). John Cage, Merce Cunningham, Alex Katz, William King, Louise Nevelson, Tony Smith (a long-time friend of Reinhardt’s) and Reuben Tam were among the visiting artists that season. 33 At the time, Betty Parsons had managed the exhibition programme at the bookshop; along with her work at Mortimer Brandt Gallery, that job served as preparation for the opening in 1946 of her own commercial gallery at 11 East 57th Street. 34 Jeanne Siegel, ‘Ad Reinhardt: Art as Art’, in Artwords: Discourse on the 60s and 70s (New York, 1992), p. 23; Bruce Glaser, ‘An Interview with Ad Reinhardt’, Art International, x/10 (20 December 1966), p. 20.

35 Reinhardt’s unpublished notes on some of his New York School colleagues are, as one would expect, even more frank. Writing about Newman’s lawsuit against him, Reinhardt wrote that he had ‘sued in order to rehabilitate his ridiculous painting career’. See untitled, undated notes, Ad Reinhardt Papers, roll 69/104, frame 363. 36 See Lynn Zelevansky, ‘Dorothy Miller’s “Americans”, 1942–1963’, in The Museum of Modern Art at Mid-Century: At Home and Abroad, ed. John Elderfield (New York, 1994), p. 83. Two of the most important figures in this regard are Lippard – author of some of the most important reviews of Reinhardt’s late work and the 1966 retrospective catalogue essay – and Samuel Wagstaff, Jr, – curator at the Wadsworth Atheneum and the first to set Reinhardt’s work in context with Minimal art. 37 ‘Andy Warhol . . . [h]e has become the most famous. He’s a household word. He ran together all the desires of artists to become celebrities, to make money, to have a good time, all the surrealist ideas.’ Ad Reinhardt, interview with Mary Fuller, 27 April 1966, published in Artforum (October 1970) and reprinted as ‘Monologue’, in Art-as-Art: The Selected Writings of Ad Reinhardt, ed. Barbara Rose (New York, 1975), p. 27. 38 ‘Andre recently said to us that while poetry is often considered to be prose put through the filter of music, he considers his poems to be words put through the filter of abstraction’. See press release, ‘Carl Andre: Early works on paper, 1958–1966’, 16 March–9 June 2007, Andrea Rosen Gallery, New York. 39 See Glaser, ‘An Interview with Ad Reinhardt’, p. 21. 40 Ibid. Here is the exchange: Glaser: ‘The term “resistant” has been used among the younger artists for several years now. . . . Barbara Rose has suggested that the idea of such work is to test the commitment of the public. Was this ever your intention in making your “invisible” paintings?’ Reinhardt: That would be a good purpose, I suppose. Artists have had so much success with their schmaltz and corn that it’s great to see these young artists without that.’ 41 Matt Mitchell, ‘Fine Art Has Its Own Meaning’, The Register-Guard (Eugene, or, 1963), in Ad Reinhardt Papers.

9 reinhardt’s difficult freedom 1 Ad Reinhardt, ‘Autocritique de Reinhardt’, Iris-Time (10 June 1963), n.p. Reinhardt dates this statement to 1960. 2 Correspondence, Ad Reinhardt to Jock Truman, July 1965, p. 3, Ad Reinhardt Papers, in the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, dc. See also Ad Reinhardt, ‘Ad Reinhardt: Three Statements’, Artforum (March 1966), p. 35. 3 Ad Reinhardt, notes for ‘Art-as-Art’, c. 1966, Ad Reinhardt Papers. 4 Ad Reinhardt, undated, unpublished notes, Ad Reinhardt Papers. 5 Ad Reinhardt, ‘Abstraction vs. Illustration’, unpublished lecture, c. 1943, in Art-as-Art: The Selected Writings of Ad Reinhardt, ed. Barbara Rose (New York, 1975), p. 47. 6 Ad Reinhardt, ‘The Moral Content of Abstract Art’, unpublished text adapted from a lecture delivered at the Dayton Art Institute, 29 September 1959, in Journal of Art (June–July–August 1991), p. 27, with an

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introduction by Barbara Rose. 7 Susan Sontag, ‘On Style’, in Against Interpretation (New York, 1964), p. 25. 8 Ad Reinhardt, ‘Reinhardt Paints a Picture’, Art News (March 1965), p. 66. The ‘artist paints a picture’ format was a standard feature in Art News for years. Eight years earlier, Elaine de Kooning had satirized Reinhardt’s practice in ‘Pure Paints a Picture’, Art News (Summer 1957), pp. 57, 86–7. The magazine never published a ‘straight’ feature on Reinhardt’s studio practice. 9 This citation is one of two quotations appended by Reinhardt to an early draft of a satirical self-periodization. Ad Reinhardt, unpublished notes, 1965, reprinted as ‘Five Stages of Reinhardt’s Timeless Stylistic Art-historical Cycle’, in Rose, ed., Art-as-Art, p. 10. 10 Thomas Merton to Robert Lax, 5 September 1967, in Arthur W. Biddle, ed., When Prophecy Still Had a Voice: The Letters of Thomas Merton and Robert Lax (Lexington, ky, 2001), p. 369. 11 Robert Lax to Thomas Merton, 13 September 1967, in ibid., p. 370.

bibliography

archives and special collections Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, dc (papers and transcripts of interviews relating to Peter Agostini, American Abstract Artists group, Edward and Rosamund Corbett, Martin Diamond, Peter Fingesten, Marjorie Grimm, Thomas Hess, Charles Keller, Rockwell Kent, Louis Lozowick, Betty Parsons Gallery, Patricia Passloff, Philip Pavia, Irene Rice Pereira, Robert Rauschenberg, Ad Reinhardt, Judson Smith, Joseph Solman and Hugh Stix) The Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, ny Columbiana Collection, Columbia University, New York Virginia Dwan Gallery Archives J. P. Getty Research Library, Los Angeles, ca [papers of Barbara Rose and Irving Sandler] Library of the Museum of Modern Art, New York Reference Center for Marxist Studies, New York Tamiment Library, New York University, New York us Department of Justice. Federal Bureau of Investigation. 1941–1966. Adolph Reinhardt File 100-49569 The Walter Wittman Collection of Ad Reinhardt Drawings, The Museum of Modern Art, New York Library of the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York

selected articles, essays and other writings by ad d. f. reinhardt ‘How Modern is the Museum of Modern Art?’, American Abstract Artists, 15 April 1940 ‘The Art Critics – ! How Do They Serve the Public? What Do They Say? How Much Do They Know? Let’s Look at the Record!’ American Abstract Artists, June 1940 ‘Organizing Your Community: Every Worker a Voter’, cio Political Action Committee, 1944 ‘About Artists by Artists: Pissarro, Davis, Albright, Hondius, Tromka reviewed by Moses Soyer, Ad Reinhardt, Philip Evergood, Sol Wilson, Philip Resiman’, New Masses (27 November 1945), pp. 14–15 ‘Of All the Consequences of War, Except Human Slaughter, Inflation Is the Most Destructive’, cio Political Action Committee, 1946 ‘Reinhardt’, Arts & Architecture (January 1947), pp. 20–27

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Preface, Paintings by Ralph Fasanella, exh. cat., aca Gallery, New York (15–27 September 1947) Reinhardt, Ad, and Bill Levner, Is It True What They Say About Cohen?, American Jewish Labor Council, August 1948 Réalités nouvelles, 4 (1950), cover [statement] The New Decade: 35 American Painters and Sculptors, exh. cat., Whitney Museum of American Art (New York, 1955), pp. 72–3 [statement] ‘Twelve Rules for a New Academy’, Art News, lvi/3 (May 1957), pp. 37–8, 56 ‘44 Titles for Artists under 45’, It Is, 1 (Spring 1958), pp. 22–3 ‘25 Lines of Words on Art’, It Is, 1 (Spring 1958), p. 42 ‘A Contribution to a Journal of Some Future Art Historian’, It Is, 2 (Autumn 1958), pp. 76–8 ‘Seven Quotes’, It Is, 4 (Autumn 1959), p. 25 ‘The Moral Content of Abstract Art’, lecture delivered at the Dayton Art Institute, 29 September 1959; reprinted in Journal of Art (June–July–August 1991), p. 27 ‘A Pictorial Review of Selden Rodman’s The Insiders’, Jubilee, 8 (January 1961), p. 48 ‘Art-as-Art’, Art International, vi/10 (20 December 1962), pp. 36–7 ‘Art is Art’, American Dialog, i/1 (July–August 1964), pp. 17–18 ‘Reinhardt Paints a Picture’, Art News (March 1965), pp. 39–41, 66 ‘Art vs. History’, Art News (January 1966), pp. 19, 61–2 Untitled lecture, Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Skowhegan, me, 21 July 1967 [audiotape recording] ‘Ad Reinhardt on his Art’, Studio International, 174 (December 1967), pp. 265–9

selected one-person exhibition catalogues Lippard, Lucy, Ad Reinhardt: Paintings, Jewish Museum, New York (23 November 1966–15 January 1967); preface by Sam Hunter Rose, Barbara, and Harvard H. Arnason, Ad Reinhardt: Black Paintings 1951–1967, Marlborough Gallery, New York (March 1970) McConathy, Dale, Ad Reinhardt: A Selection from 1937–1952, Marlborough Gallery, New York (2–23 March 1974) Hess, Thomas B., The Art Comics and Satires of Ad Reinhardt, Kunsthalle, Düsseldorf; Marlborough Gallery, Rome (1975) Schjeldahl, Peter, Ad Reinhardt: Art Comics and Satires, Truman Gallery, New York (2–30 October 1976) Rowell, Margit, Ad Reinhardt and Color, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York (1980) Inboden, Gudrun, and Thomas Kellein, Ad Reinhardt, Staatsgalerie, Stuttgart (13 April–2 June 1985) Bois, Yve-Alain, Ad Reinhardt, Museum of Modern Art, New York (30 May–2 September 1991)

newspapers and periodicals (combined references) Art Front, 1934–7; Daily Worker, 1935–47; Dialectics, 1937–9; The Guild Reporter, 1938–53; The Columbia Jester (Columbia University), 1932–7; It Is, 1958–65; Jubilee, 1958–62; Listen, 1941–4; Masses & Mainstream, 1948–52; New

Masses, 1935–48; pm, 1940–48; p.o.t.h. [Poor. Old. Tired. Horse], ed. Ian Hamilton Finlay, 1962–7; Soviet Russia Today, 1936–8 and 1947; and trans/formation: arts, communication, environment, ed. Harry Holtzman and Martin James, 1950–52.

interviews by the author Abe Ajay, artist; Dore Ashton, art critic; Milton Brown, art historian; Charles Carpenter, Sr, collector; Hananiah Harari, artist; Harry Holtzman, artist; Martin James, art historian; Charles Keller, artist; Ruth Krauss, author; Lucy R. Lippard, art critic; Abe Magil, journalist; Betty Millard, journalist; Mischa Richter, artist; and Meyer Schapiro, art historian.

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correspondence with the author Abe Ajay, artist; Herbert Aptheker, historian; Dore Ashton, art critic; Lloyd Brown, journalist; Francis Decker, Sr, attorney and family friend; Virginia Dwan, gallerist; Serge Guilbaut, art historian; Jacob Kainen, artist; Dorothy Koppelman, artist and gallerist; Ethel Kramer, high school classmate; Abe Magil, journalist; Bridget Riley, artist; Joseph Solman, artist; Paul J. Spaeth, historian; Selina Trieff and Yvonne Thomas, artist.

select bibliography Aaron, Daniel, Writers on the Left (New York, 1961) Ajay, Abe, ‘The Prize: An Exchange of Letters between Ajay and Reinhardt’, Art in America, 6 (November–December 1971), pp. 106–9 Ajay, A., et al., Twelve Cartoons Defending the wpa by American Art Congress Members (New York, 1939) Alberro, Alex, and Patricia Norvell, eds, Recording Conceptual Art (Berkeley, ca, 2001) American Abstract Artists, Three Yearbooks: 1938, 1939, 1946 (New York, 1969) American Artists’ Congress, First American Artists’ Congress (New York, 1936) Arnault, Charles, ‘Painting and Dialectics’, New Masses (14 August 1945), pp. 28–30 ‘The Artist as Reporter’, Bulletin of the Museum of Modern Art, vii/1 (April 1940), p. 6 Ashton, Dore, ‘Art: Notes on Ad Reinhardt’s Exhibition’, Arts and Architecture, 83 (January 1967), pp. 4–5 ——, The New York School: A Cultural Reckoning (New York, 1973) Auping, Michael, Abstraction, Geometry, Painting (Buffalo, ny, 1989) Baigell, Matthew, ‘American Painting: On Space and Time in the Early 1960s’, Art Journal, xxvii/4 (Summer 1969), pp. 368–74 ——, and Julia Williams, eds, Artists Against War and Fascism: Papers of the First American Artists’ Congress (New Brunswick, nj, 1985) Batchelor, David, ‘Abstract Art Refuses: Notes on LeWitt and Reinhardt’, Artscribe International, 79 (January–February 1990), pp. 62–7 Battcock, Gregory, ed., Minimal Art: A Critical Anthology (New York, 1968)

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——, Idea Art (New York, 1973) ——, The New Art (New York, 1973) Bearor, Karen A., Irene Rice Pereira: Her Paintings and Philosophy, American Studies Series, ed. William H. Goetzmann (Austin, tx, 1993) Beck, James, ‘Ad Reinhardt in Retrospect’, Arts Magazine, liv (June 1980), pp. 148–50 Belfrage, Cedric, The American Inquisition, 1945–1960 (Indianapolis, 1973) ——, and James Aronson, Something to Guard: The Stormy Life of the National Guardian, 1948–1967 (New York, 1978) Belknap, Michael, Cold War Political Justice: The Smith Act, the Communist Party and American Civil Liberties (Westport, ct, 1977) Benedict, Ruth, and Gene Weltfish, The Races of Mankind (New York, 1944) Biddle, Arthur W., ed., When Prophecy Still Had a Voice: The Letters of Thomas Merton and Robert Lax (Lexington, ky, 2001) Blotkamp, Carel, Mondrian: The Art of Destruction (London, 1994) Bogart, Michele H., Artists, Advertising and the Border of Art (Chicago, 1995) Bohan, Ruth L., The Société Anonyme’s Brooklyn Exhibition: Katherine Dreier and Modernism in America (Ann Arbor, mi, 1982) Bois, Yve-Alain, Painting as Model (Cambridge, ma, 1990) Breslin, James E. B., Mark Rothko: A Biography (Chicago, 1993) Brougher, Kerry, and Astrid Bowron, eds, Gustav Metzger (Oxford, 1999) Browder, Earl, The Second Imperialist War (New York, 1940) Brown, Milton W., Social Art in America, 1930–1945 (New York, 1981) Buhle, Paul, Marxism in the United States: Remapping the History of the American Left (London, 1987) ——, and Dan Georgakas, eds, The Immigrant Left in the United States (Albany, ny, 1996) Burger, William Thor, ‘The Whitney Disaster’, Masses & Mainstream (March 1950), pp. 89–92 Burn, Ian, Looking at Seeing and Reading (Sydney, 1993) Caffrey, Margaret M., Ruth Benedict: Stranger in this Land (Austin, tx, 1989) Carter, Adam B., ‘A Look at Frasconi, Hofmann, Reinhardt and other Shows’, Daily Worker (28 November 1947), p. 13 Caute, David. The Great Fear: The Anti-Communist Purge under Truman and Eisenhower (New York, 1978) ——, The Fellow Travellers: Intellectual Friends of Communism (New Haven, ct, 1988) Chandler, John N., ‘Colors of Monochrome: An Introduction to the Seduction of Reduction’, Artscanada xxvii (October 1971), pp. 18–31 Cheetham, Mark A., The Rhetoric of Purity (Cambridge, 1991) Clark, Carroll S., and Elizabeth Sur, eds, Jan Matulka, 1890–1972 (Washington, dc, 1980) Clark, T. J., ‘Clement Greenberg’s Theory of Art’, Critical Inquiry, 9 (1982), pp. 139–56 ——, Farewell to an Idea: Episodes from a History of Modernism (New Haven, ct, 1999) Cohen, Robert, When the Old Left Was Young: Student Radicals and America’s First Mass Student Movement, 1929–1941 (Oxford, 1993) Collins, Bradford R., ‘Life Magazine and the Abstract Expressionists, 1948–51: A Historiographic Study of a Late Bohemian Enterprise’, Art Bulletin, lxxiii/2 (June 1991), pp. 283–308 Colpitt, Frances, Minimal Art: The Critical Perspective (Seattle, wa, 1993)

Colt, Priscilla, ‘Notes on Ad Reinhardt’, Art International, 8 (October 1964), pp. 32–4 Cooney, Terry A., The Rise of the New York Intellectuals: ‘Partisan Review’ and its Circle (Madison, wi, 1986) Corn, Wanda, The Great American Thing: Modern Art and National Identity, 1915–35 (London, 1999) Corris, Michael, ‘Ad Reinhardt at The Museum of Modern Art’, Artforum (November 1991), pp. 130–31 ——, ‘Ad Reinhardt: Invisible College of Conceptual Art?’, Flash Art (October 1994), pp. 49–52 ——, ‘The Difficult Freedom of Ad Reinhardt’, in Art Has No History! Critical Essays on Contemporary Art, ed. John Roberts (London, 1994), pp. 63–110 Cox, Annette, Art-as-Politics: The Abstract Expressionist Avant-Garde and Society (Ann Arbor, mi, 1982) Crane, Diana, The Transformation of the Avant-Garde: The New York Art World, 1940–1985 (Berkeley, ca, 1987) Craven, David, Myth-Making in the McCarthy Period: Abstract Expressionist Painting from the United States (Liverpool, 1992) ——, Abstract Expressionism as Cultural Critique: Dissent during the McCarthy Period (Cambridge, 1999) Crow, Thomas, The Rise of the Sixties: American and European Art in the Era of Dissent, 1955–69 (London, 1996) D’Alessandro, Stephanie, ‘“Abstract Painting, 1960–1965”, 1960–1965’, Museum Studies, xxv/1 (1999), pp. 22–3. de Antonio, Emile, and Mary Lampson, Painters Painting: The New York Art Scene, 1940–1970 (New York, 1972) [videotape] de Francia, Peter, Fernand Léger (New Haven, ct, 1983) Denning, Michael, The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture in the Twentieth Century (New York, 1997) Dennis, Peggy, The Autobiography of an American Communist: A Personal View of Political Life, 1925–1975 (Westport, ct, 1977) Denny, Robyn, ‘Ad Reinhardt: An Appreciation’, Studio International, 174 (December 1967), pp. 264–5 Dewey, John, Art as Experience (New York, 1958) Diggins, John P., The Rise and Fall of the American Left (New York, 1992) Dorfman, Geoffrey, ed., Out of the Picture: Milton Resnick and the New York School (New York, 2003) Downes, Rackstraw, ed., Fairfield Porter: Art in its Own Terms (New York, 1979) Draper, Theodore, The Roots of American Communism (New York, 1957) ——, American Communism and Soviet Russia (New York, 1960) Egbert, Donald Drew, Socialism and American Art in the Light of European Utopianism, Marxism and Anarchism (Princeton, nj, 1967) Emanuel, J., ‘Retrospective at the Jewish Museum’, Artscanada, xxiv (January 1967), p. 7 Epstein, Helen, ‘Meyer Schapiro: A Passion to Know and Make Known’, Art News, lxxxii/5 (May 1983), pp. 80–85; lxxxii/6 (Summer 1983), pp. 84–9 Fariello, Griffin, Red Scare: Memories of the American Inquisition: An Oral History (New York, 1995) Farrow, Clare, ed., A. Reinhardt, J. Kosuth, F. Gonzalez-Torres: Symptoms of Interference, Conditions of Possibility (London, 1994) Filreis, Alan, Modernism from Right to Left (Cambridge, 1994) Finegold, Kenneth, and Theda Skocpol, State and Party in America’s New Deal

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(Madison, wi, 1995) Finkelstein, Sidney, Art and Society (New York, 1947) ——, ‘Abstract Art Today: Doodles, Dollars and Death’, Masses & Mainstream, v/2 (September 1952), pp. 22–31 Firestone, Evan R., ‘James Joyce and the First Generation New York School’, Arts Magazine, 56 (June 1982), pp. 116–21 Flagg, Nancy, ‘Reinhardt Revisiting’, Art International, xxii/2 (February 1978), pp. 54–7 Flamm, Irving, ‘The usa and ussr can and must get along’, Soviet Russia Today (February 1947), pp. 10–11 Follin, Frances, Embodied Visions: Bridget Riley, Op Art and the Sixties (London, 2004) Foster, William Z., History of the Communist Party of the United States (New York, 1952) Francis, Richard, and Sophia Shaw, eds, Negotiating Rapture (Chicago, 1996) Frank, Peter, ‘Ad Reinhardt ’35’, Columbia College Today, viii/2 (Spring–Summer 1981), pp. 37–9, 69–70 Frascina, Francis, Art, Politics and Dissent: Aspects of the Art Left in Sixties America (Manchester, 1999) Freeman, Joseph, An American Testament: A Narrative of Rebels and Romantics (New York, 1936) ——, Joshua Kunitz and Louis Lozowick, Voices of October: Art and Literature in Soviet Russia (New York, 1930) Freundlich, August L., William Gropper: Retrospective (Coral Gables, fl, 1968) Fried, Albert, McCarthyism: The Great American Red Scare: A Documentary History (Oxford, 1997) Fried, Richard M., Nightmare in Red: The McCarthy Era in Perspective (Oxford, 1990) Fuller, Mary, ‘An Ad Reinhardt Monologue’, Artforum (October 1970), pp. 36–41 Gallati, Barbara Dayer, The Williamsburg Murals: A Rediscovery. Five Monumental Works from the 1930s by Ilya Bolotowsky, Balcomb Greene, Paul Kelpe, and Albert Swinden (Brooklyn, ny, n. d.) Geldzhaler, Henry, New York Painting and Sculpture, 1940–1970 (New York, 1970) Gibson, Ann Eden, ‘Theory Undeclared: Avant-Garde Magazines as a Guide to Abstract Expressionist Images and Ideas’, phd thesis, University of Delaware, 1984 ——, Abstract Expressionism: Other Politics (New Haven, ct, 1997) Gill, Anton, Peggy Guggenheim: The Life of an Art Addict (New York, 2002) Glaser, Bruce, ‘An Interview with Ad Reinhardt’, Art International, x/10 (20 December 1966), pp. 18–21 Gordon, John, Geometric Abstraction in America (New York, 1962) Green, Christopher, Léger and the Avant-Garde (New Haven, ct, 1976) ——, Cubism and its Enemies: Modern Movements and Reaction in French Art, 1916–1928 (New Haven, ct, 1987) Greene, Balcomb, ‘The Function of Léger’, Art Front, 9 (January 1936), pp. 8–9 ——, ‘Abstract Art at the Modern Museum’, Art Front, ii/5 (April 1936), pp. 5–8 Gruen, John, The Party’s Over Now: Reminiscences of the 1950s (New York, 1972) Guilbaut, Serge, How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art: Abstract Expressionism, Freedom and the Cold War (Chicago, 1983) ——, ed., Reconstructing Modernism: Art in New York, Paris, and Montreal, 1945–1964 (Cambridge, ma, 1990)

Harari, Hananiah, ‘Who Killed the Home Planning Project?’, Art Front (December 1937), pp. 13–15 ——, ‘On Safari with Harari’, New Masses (15 April 1947), pp. 16–17; New Masses (10 June 1947), p. 12; New Masses (1 July 1947), p. 13; New Masses (8 July 1947), p. 10; New Masses (16 September 1947), p. 14; Masses and Mainstream (July 1949), p. 32; Masses and Mainstream (August 1949), p. 24; and Masses and Mainstream (June 1950), p. 64 ——, ‘wpa-aaa’, autograph manuscript (December 1987) Harris, Geoffrey T., André Malraux: A Reassessment (Basingstoke, 1996) Harrison, Charles, Essays on Art & Language (Oxford, 1991) ——, Conceptual Art and Painting: Further Essays on Art & Language (Cambridge, ma, 2001) Harrison, Helen A., ed., Dawn of a New Day: The New York World’s Fair, 1939–40 (New York, 1980) ——, ‘Subway Art and the Public Use of Arts Committee’, Archives of American Art Journal, xxi/1 (1981), pp. 3–12 Haskell, Barbara, Burgoyne Diller (New York, 1990) Healey, Dorothy, and Maurice Isserman, Dorothy Healey Remembers: A Life in the American Communist Party (New York, 1990) Heller, Steven, and Ralph Shikes, The Art of Satire: Painters as Caricaturists from Delacroix to Picasso (New York, 1984) Hemingway, Andrew, ‘Fictional Unities: “Antifascism” and “Antifascist Art” in 30s America’, Oxford Art Journal, xiv/1 (1991), pp. 107–17 ——, ‘Meyer Schapiro and Marxism in the 1930s’, Oxford Art Journal, xvii/1 (1994), pp. 13–29 ——, Artists on the Left: American Artists and the Communist Movement, 1926–1956 (New Haven, ct, 2002) Hess, Thomas B., ‘Reinhardt’, Art News, xlviii/7 (November 1949), p. 50 ——, Abstract Painting: Background and American Phase (New York, 1951) ——, ‘Reinhardt: The Position and Perils of Purity’, Art News (December 1953), pp. 26–7, 59 ——, ‘The Art Comics of Ad Reinhardt’, Artforum (April 1974), pp. 45–51 Highmore, Ben, ‘Paint it Black: Ad Reinhardt’s Paradoxical Avant-Gardism’, in Avant-garde/Neo- Avant-garde, ed. Dietrich Scheunemann (Amsterdam, 2005) Hills, Patricia, ‘1936: Meyer Schapiro, Art Front, and the Popular Front’, Oxford Art Journal, xvii/1 (1994), pp. 30–41 Hinds, Lynn Boyd, and Theodore Otto Windt, Jr, The Cold War as Rhetoric: The Beginnings, 1945–1950 (New York, 1991) Hitchcock, Henry-Russell, and Johnson, Philip, eds, The International Style (New York, 1932) Hobbs, Robert Carleton, and Gail Levin, Abstract Expressionism: The Formative Years (Ithaca, ny, 1978) Hochfield, Sylvia, ‘Museum Grateful for “Dead” Painting’, Art News, c/6 (June 2001), p. 53 Holty, Carl Robert, ‘Mondrian in New York: A Memoir’, Arts, xxxi/10 (1957), pp. 17–21 ——, ‘The Mechanics of Creativity of a Painter: A Memoir’, Leonardo, 1 (1968), pp. 243–52 Holtzman, Harry, and Martin S. James, eds, The New Art – The New Life: The Collected Writings of Piet Mondrian (London, 1987) Homberger, Eric, American Writers and Radical Politics, 1900–1939: Equivocal

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Kutler, Stanley I., The American Inquisition: Justice and Injustice in the Cold War (New York, 1982) Kutulas, Judy, The Long War: The Intellectual People’s Front and Anti-Stalinism, 1930–1940 (Durham, nc, 1995) Lamont, Corliss, ‘When Liberals See Red’, Soviet Russia Today (March 1947), pp. 13–14 Lane, J. R., Stuart Davis: Art and Art Theory (Brooklyn, ny, 1978) ——, and S. C. Larsen, eds, Abstract Painting and Sculpture in America, 1927–1944 (New York, 1983) Larsen, Susan C., ‘The American Abstract Artists Group: A History and Evaluation of its Impact upon American Art’, phd thesis, Northwestern University, 1974 ——, ‘The American Abstract Artists: A Documentary History, 1936–1941’, Archives of American Art Journal, xiv/1 (1974), pp. 2–7 Leab, Daniel J., A Union of Individuals: The Formation of the American Newspaper Guild, 1933–1936 (New York, 1970) Lee, Pamela M., Chronophobia: On Time and Art of the 1960s (Cambridge, ma, 2004) Léger, Fernand, ‘The New Realism’, Art Front (December 1935), p. 10 ——, ‘The New Realism Goes on’, Art Front (February 1937), pp. 7–8 ——, Functions of Painting, ed. and intro. Edward F. Fry, preface George L. K. Morris (London, 1973) Leja, Michael, Reframing Abstract Expressionism: Subjectivity and Painting in the 1940s (New Haven, ct, 1993) Lippard, Lucy R., ‘New York Letter’, Art International (May 1965), pp. 52–3 ——, ‘Ad Reinhardt, 1913–1967’, Art International, xi/8 (20 October 1967), p. 19 ——, Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object (New York, 1973) ——, ‘Ad Reinhardt: One Art’, Art in America, lxii (September–October 1974), pp. 65–75 ——, ‘Ad Reinhardt: One Work’, Art in America, lxii (November–December 1974), pp. 95–101 ——, Ad Reinhardt (New York, 1981) ——, ‘Art’, Village Voice (6 June 1982), p. 82 ——, Get the Message? A Decade of Art for Social Change (New York, 1984) ——, and John N. Chandler, ‘The Dematerialization of Art’, Art International (February 1968), pp. 31–6 Lyotard, Jean-François, Signed, Malraux (Minneapolis, 1999) Malraux, André, The Voices of Silence, trans. Stuart Gilbert (London, 1954) Marchand, Roland, Advertising the American Dream: Making Way for Modernity, 1920–1940 (Berkeley, ca, 1985) Margolin, Victor, ed., Design Discourse: History/Theory/Criticism (Chicago, 1989) Marquardt, Virginia C., ‘Louis Lozowick: Development from Machine Aesthetic to Social Realism’, phd thesis, University of Maryland, 1983 ——, ‘The American Artists School: Radical Heritage and Social Content Art’, Archives of American Art Journal, xxvi/4 (1986), pp 17–23 ——, ‘Art on the Political Front in America: From The Liberator to Art Front’, Art Journal (Spring 1993), pp. 72–81 Marx, Karl, and Frederick Engels, The German Ideology, ed. and intro. R. Pascal (New York, 1947) Masheck, Joseph, Historical Present: Essays of the 1970s, Contemporary American Art Critics, 3 (Ann Arbor, mi, 1984)

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Matthews, Jane De Hart, ‘Arts and the People: The New Deal Quest for a Cultural Democracy’, Journal of American History, lxii (September 1975), pp. 316–39 ——, ‘Art and Politics in Cold War America’, American Historical Review, 81 (October 1976), pp. 762–87 McConathy, Dale, ‘Ad Reinhardt: He Loved to Confuse and Confound’, Art News (April 1980), pp. 56–9 McCoy, Garnett, ‘Elizabeth McCausland, Critic and Idealist’, Archives of American Art Journal, vi/2 (1966), pp. 16–20 McCullough, David, Truman (New York, 1993) McDonald, William F., Federal Relief Administration and the Arts: The Origins and Administrative History of the Arts Projects of the Works Progress Administration (Columbus, oh, 1969) McKenney, Ruth, Industrial Valley (New York, 1939) McKinzie, Richard D., The New Deal for Artists (Princeton, nj, 1975) McShine, Kynaston, ‘More than Black’, Arts Magazine, 41 (December 1966), pp. 44–50 Mecklenburg, Virginia M., The Patricia and Phillip Frost Collection of American Abstraction (Washington, dc, 1989) Meggs, Philip B., A History of Graphic Design (New York, 1983) Mellor, David, Robyn Denny (London, 2002) Merton, Thomas, The Seven Storey Mountain (New York, 1948) Meyer, James, Minimalism: Art and Polemics in the Sixties (New Haven, ct, 2001) Miller, Sanda, ‘An American in Paris: Ad Reinhardt’s Letters (1960–66) to his Dealer Iris Clert’, Burlington Magazine, cxlv/1207 (October 2003), pp. 716–20 Modell, Judith, Ruth Benedict: Patterns of a Life (Philadelphia, 1983) Mondrian, Piet, ‘Home–Street–City’, trans/formation: arts, communication, environment, i/1 (1950), pp. 44–7 Monroe, Gerald M., ‘Art Front’, Archives of American Art Journal, xiii/3 (1973), pp. 13–19 ——, ‘Artists as Militant Trade Union Workers during the Great Depression’, Archives of American Art Journal, xiv/1 (1974), pp. 7–10 ——, ‘The American Artists Congress and the Invasion of Finland’, Archives of American Art Journal, xv/1 (1975), pp. 14–20 ——, ‘The ’30s: Art, Ideology and the wpa’, Art in America, lxiii (November–December 1975), pp. 64–7 ——, ‘Artists on the Barricades: The Militant Artists Union Treats with the New Deal’, Archives of American Art Journal, xviii/3 (1978), pp. 20–23 Morris, George L. K., ‘Art Chronicle: Interview with Jean Hélion’, Partisan Review, 5 (April 1938), pp. 33–40 ——, ‘Art Chronicle: American Artists’ Congress: Third Annual Exhibition, New York; and American Abstract Artists: Third Annual Exhibition, New York’, Partisan Review, vi (Spring 1939), pp. 62–4 ——, ‘Art Chronicle: Recent Tendencies in Europe’, Partisan Review, vi (Fall 1939), pp. 31–3 ——, ‘The Museum of Modern Art (as Surveyed from the Avant-Garde)’, Partisan Review, vii (May–June 1940), pp. 200–3 ——, ‘On the Mechanics of Abstract Painting’, Partisan Review, vii (September–October 1941), pp. 403–17 Morrisey, Will, Reflections on Malraux: Cultural Founding (Lanham, md, 1984)

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Ramsden, Mel, ‘On Practice’, The Fox, 1 (April 1975), pp. 66–83 Reed, Judith Kaye, ‘Abstracts by Reinhardt’, Art Digest, xxii (1 December 1947), pp. 22–3 ——, ‘Without Subjects’, Art Digest, xxiv (1 November 1949), p. 26 Rembert, Virginia P., ‘Mondrian, America, and American Painting’, phd thesis, Columbia University, 1970 Righter, William, The Rhetorical Hero: An Essay on the Aesthetics of André Malraux (New York, 1964) Riley, Maude, ‘Reinhardt’, Art Digest (1 December 1944), p. 31 Ritchie, Andrew Carnduff, Abstract Painting and Sculpture in America (New York, 1951) Robson, Deirdre, ‘The Avant-Garde and the On-Guard: Some Influences on the Potential Market for the First Generation Abstract Expressionists in the 1940s and Early 1950s’, Art Journal, xlvii/3 (Fall 1988), pp. 215–21 Rose, Barbara, ‘abc Art’, Art in America, liii/5 (October–November 1965), pp. 65–70 ——, ‘The Value of Didactic Art’, Artforum (April 1967), pp. 32–6 ——, American Art since 1900 (New York, 1967) ——, ed., Art-as-Art: The Selected Writings of Ad Reinhardt (New York, 1975) Rosenberg, Harold, ‘The Wit of William Gropper’, Art Front (March 1936), pp. 7–8 ——, ‘The Art World: Purifying Art’, New Yorker (23 February 1976), pp. 94–8 Rosenstein, Harris, ‘Black Pastures’, Art News, 65 (November 1966), pp. 33–5 Rosenthal, Stephanie, Black Paintings: Robert Rauschenberg, Ad Reinhardt, Mark Rothko and Frank Stella (Munich, 2006) Ross, Clifford, Abstract Expressionism: Creators and Critics (New York, 1990) Rosswurm, Steve, ed., The cio’s Left-Led Unions (New Brunswick, nj, 1992) Russell, Bertrand, The Autobiography of Bertrand Russell, iii: 1944–1967 (London, 1969) Ryan, Alan, Bertrand Russell: A Political Life (Oxford, 1993) Samson, Gloria G., ‘Toward a New Social Order. The American Fund for Public Service: Clearinghouse for Radicalism in the 1920s’, phd thesis, University of Rochester, 1987 Sandler, Irving, ed., ‘Discussion: Is There a New Academy? Part i’, Art News, lviii (June 1959), pp. 34–6 ——, ‘The Club: How the Artists of the New York School Found their First Audience – Themselves’, Artforum, iv (September 1965), pp. 27–30 ——, ‘Reinhardt: The Purist Backlash’, Artforum, v (December 1966), pp. 40–46 ——, The Triumph of American Painting: A History of Abstract Expressionism (New York, 1970) ——, ‘When moma Met the Avant-Garde’, Art News, lxxviii (October 1979), pp. 115–18 ——, A Sweeper-Upper after Artists: A Memoir (New York, 2003) ——, and Philip Pavia, eds, ‘The Philadelphia Panel’, It Is (Spring 1960), pp. 34–8 Savinel, Christine, ‘Ad Reinhardt: la valeur du detachment’, Cahiers Musée du National d’Art Moderne, 49 (Autumn 1994), pp. 58–79 Schapiro, David, Social Realism: Art as a Weapon, Critical Studies in American Art Series (New York, 1973) Schapiro, Meyer, ‘Public Use of Art’, Art Front (November 1936), pp. 4–6 ——, ‘Bertram D. Wolfe’, Marxist Quarterly, i/3 (October–December 1937), pp. 462–6 ——, Mondrian: On the Humanity of Abstract Painting (New York, 1995)

Schlegel, Amy, ‘My Lai: “We Lie, They Die.” Or, a Small History of an “Atrocious” Photograph’, Third Text, 31 (Summer 1995), pp. 47–66 Schlesinger, Arthur M., Jr, The Vital Center: The Politics of Freedom (Boston, ma, 1949) Schrecker, Ellen W., No Ivory Tower: McCarthyism and the Universities (Oxford, 1986) ——, Many Are the Crimes: McCarthyism in America (New York, 1998) Schwartz, Lawrence H., Marxism and Culture: The cpusa and Aesthetics in the 1930s (Port Washington, ny, 1980) Schwartz, Therese, ‘The Politicization of the Avant-Garde’, Art in America (November–December 1971), pp. 96–105 Schwerin, Alan, ed., Bertrand Russell on Nuclear War, Peace and Language: Critical and Historical Essays (Westport, ct, 2002) Seeley, Evelyn, ‘Race Relations Pamphlet at Centers’, pm (13 January 1944), p. 10 Seghers, Anna, ‘The Tasks of Art’, New Masses (19 December 1944), pp. 9–11 Seitz, William C., The Responsive Eye (New York, 1965) Seldes, Lee, The Legacy of Mark Rothko (New York, 1978) Seuphor, Michael, and John Elderfield, Geometric Abstraction, 1926–1942 (Dallas, tx, 1972) Shannon, David A., The Decline of American Communism: A History of the Communist Party of the United States since 1945 (Chatham, nj, 1959) Shiff, Richard, ‘Bridget Riley: The Edge of Animation’, in Bridget Riley (London, 2003), pp. 81–91 Siegel, Jeanne, Artwords: Discourse on the 60s and 70s (New York, 1992) Sillen, Samuel, ‘Which Way Left-Wing Literature? Art and Politics’, Daily Worker (12 February 1946), p. 7 ——, ‘Which Way Left-Wing Literature? Art as a Weapon’, Daily Worker (13 February 1946), p. 6 ——, ‘Which Way Left-Wing Literature? Ideology and Art’, Daily Worker (14 February 1946), p. 6 ——, ‘Which Way Left-Wing Literature? The Path before Us’, Daily Worker (15 February 1946), p. 7 ——, ‘Spectators or Creators?’, Daily Worker (16 February 1946), p. 6 Sims, Lowery Stokes, et al., Stuart Davis: American Painter (New York, 1991) Six American Abstract Painters, essay by Lawrence Alloway (London, 1961) Skocpol, Theda, ‘Political Response to Capitalist Crisis: Neo-Marxist Theories of the State and the Case of the New Deal’, Politics & Society, x/2 (1980), pp. 155–201 Slobodkina, Esphyr, American Abstract Artists: Its Publications, Catalogues and Membership (Great Neck, ny, 1979) Smith, Richard, ‘Paint it Black’, Artweek, 22 (14 November 1991), p. 1 Smith, Terry, Making the Modern: Industry, Art and Design in America (Chicago, 1993) Solman, Joseph, ‘A Look at Abstract Art’, New Masses (3 December 1946), pp. 25–6 ——, ‘Art’, New Masses (1 April 1947), pp. 30–31 ——, ‘Art’, New Masses (8 April 1947), pp. 30–31 ——, ‘Art: Totem and Tattoo’, Masses & Mainstream (March 1948), pp. 86–8 ——, ‘Art: Life’s Mad-Hatters’, Masses & Mainstream (December 1948), pp. 81–4 Spaeth, Paul J., Robert Lax: Journal e/Tagebuch e (Hollywood Journal) (Zürich, 1996)

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——, ‘The Road to Simplicity Followed by Merton’s Friends: Ad Reinhardt and Robert Lax’, The Merton Annual, 13 (2000), pp. 245–56 Staniszewski, Mary Anne, The Power of Display: A History of Exhibition Installations at the Museum of Modern Art (Cambridge, ma, 1998) Starobin, Joseph R., ‘The United Sates Arts Projects’, New Masses (16 May 1939), pp. 12–14 ——, American Communism in Crisis, 1943–1957 (Cambridge, ma, 1972) Steinberg, Peter L., The Great ‘Red Menace’: United States Prosecution of American Communists, 1947–1952 (Westport, ct, 1984) Stella, Frank, ‘Statement’, Artscanada (October 1967), p. 19 Stephanson, Anders, ‘The cpusa Conception of the Rooseveltian State, 1933–1939’, Radical History Review, 24 (Fall 1980), pp. 161–76 Summers, Marion [Milton Brown], ‘Art Today: Social Art Must Breathe the Air of the Common Man’, The Worker (7 April 1946), p. 14 ——, ‘Art Today: The Social Artist Can Move Only into the Workers’ Orbit’, The Worker (14 April 1946), p. 14 ——, ‘Art Today: Lessons in Utter Confusion’, The Worker (19 May 1946), p. 14 ——, ‘Abstract Art: Highway or Dead End?’, Daily Worker (12 June 1946), p. 14 ——, ‘Art Today: Two Abstractionists and a Painter of Decay’, Daily Worker (1 November 1946), p. 14 ——, ‘Abstract Art and Bourgeois Culture’, Daily Worker (2 January 1947), p. 11 Sylvester, David, ‘Blackish’, New Statesman (12 June 1964), p. 924 ——, About Modern Art: Critical Essays, 1948–1996 (London, 2002) Temkin, Ann, ed., Barnett Newman (Philadelphia, pa, 2002) Terenzio, Stephanie, ed., The Collected Writings of Robert Motherwell (Berkeley, ca, 1999) Thistlewood, David, ed., American Abstract Expressionism, Tate Gallery Liverpool Critical Forum, 1 (Liverpool, 1993) Thompson, Bradbury, The Art of Graphic Design (New Haven, ct, 1988) Tiles, J. E., Dewey, The Arguments of the Philosophers, ed. Ted Honderich (London, 1990) Tillim, Sydney, ‘What Happened to Geometry?’, Arts Magazine (June 1959), pp. 38–44 Tritschler, Thomas, ‘The American Abstract Artists, 1937–1941’, phd thesis, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, 1974 ——, American Abstract Artists (Albuquerque, nm, 1977) Troy, Nancy J., Mondrian and Neo-Plasticism in America (New Haven, ct, 1979) Van Wagner, Judy Collischan, ‘The Abstractionists and the Critics, 1936–39’, in American Abstract Artists: Fiftieth Anniversary Celebration (Long Island, ny, 1986) Vine, Naomi, ‘The Total Dark Sublime: An Interpretive Analysis of the Late Black Paintings of Ad Reinhardt, 1960–1967’, phd thesis, University of Chicago, 1989 von Blum, Paul, The Critical Vision: A History of Social and Political Art in the United States (Boston, ma, 1982) Wald, Alan M., The New York Intellectuals: The Rise and Decline of the AntiStalinist Left from the 1930s to the 1980s (Chapel Hill, nc, 1987) ——, Writing from the Left: New Essays on Radical Culture and Politics, The Haymarket Series, ed. Mike Davis and Michael Sprinker (London, 1994) Walker, John A., Cultural Offensive: America’s Impact on British Arts since 1945 (London, 1998) Waltzer, Kenneth, ‘The Party and the Polling Place: American Communism

and the American Labor Party in the 1930s’, Radical History Review, 23 (Spring 1980), pp. 104–29 Wechsler, James, Revolt on Campus (New York, 1935) ——, The Age of Suspicion (New York, 1985) Westbrook, Robert B., John Dewey and American Democracy (Ithaca, ny, 1991) Westgeest, Helen, Zen in the Fifties: Interaction in Art between East and West (Amstelveen, 1996) Whitfield, Stephen J., The Culture of the Cold War (Baltimore, md, 1991) Wiegand, Charmion von, ‘Chirico and Picasso’, New Masses (12 January 1937), pp. 6–7 ——, ‘The Meaning of Mondrian’, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 2 (Fall 1943), pp. 62–70 Wilkin, Karen, ‘Ad Reinhardt at moma’, New Criterion, 10 (September 1991), pp. 117–23 Wollheim, Richard, ‘Minimal Art’, Arts Magazine (January 1965), pp. 26–32 Young, M. S., ‘Exhibition at the Jewish Museum’, Apollo, lxxxiii (March 1967), p. 229 Zelevansky, Lynn, ‘Ad Reinhardt and the Younger Artists of the 1960s’, in American Art of the 1960s, ed. John Elderfield, Studies in Modern Art, 1 (New York, 1991), pp. 16–31 ——, ‘Dorothy Miller’s Americans’, in The Museum of Modern Art at Mid-Century: At Home and Abroad, ed. John Szarkowski, Studies in Modern Art, 4 (New York, 1994), pp. 56–107

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1907

Frank Reinhardt, the artist’s father, emigrates from East Prussia (now Lithuania) to United States.

1909

Olga Reinhardt, the artist’s mother, emigrates from Germany to United States.

1913

Adolph Dietrich Friedrich Reinhardt born, 24 December, in Buffalo, New York; family moves to Chicago, then settles permanently in New York.

1915

Birth of brother, Edward.

1919–28 Attends Public School No. 88, Ridgewood, Queens. 1928–31 Attends Newtown High School, Elmhurst, Queens, where he excels academically and artistically; elected president of his class; member of Arista, a national student honour society; illustrates school yearbook and draws comic strips; winner of city-wide award for cartooning; holds various summer jobs as commercial illustrator with New York advertising agencies and publishers. 1931

Declines scholarships from Pratt Institute, Brooklyn, New York, and Middlebury College, Vermont, but accepts offer from Columbia College, Columbia University, New York, where he initially intends to study literature.

1932–5

Studies with, among others, Mark van Doren, Irwin Edman and Meyer Schapiro; joins campus anti-war group, National Student League; draws illustrations for Columbia Review and The Columbia Jester; becomes editor-in-chief briefly of Jester; after graduation forms friendships with Thomas Merton and Robert Lax; begins painting studies at Columbia Teachers College.

1936–7

Studies painting with Karl Anderson and John Martin at the National Academy of Design, New York, and painting and drawing with Carl Holty, Francis Criss and Anton Refregier at the American Artists School; meets Abe Ajay, Balcomb Greene, Stuart Davis and Harry Holtzman; works with typographic consultant Robert Josephy designing book

jackets and industrial designer Russell Wright designing educational displays for the forthcoming New York World’s Fair (1939–40); draws illustrations for New Masses (1936) and Soviet Russia Today (1937) under pseudonym ‘Darryl Frederick’, first of several adopted by the artist during the 1930s and ’40s; assists Crockett Johnson (David Liesk) in redesign of New Masses; joins Artists’ Union and, at invitation of Holty, the newly formed American Abstract Artists (aaa); hired by Burgoyne Diller to work on Federal Art project (easel division; resigns, 1941); participates in the organization of the Book and Magazine Guild. 1938

First group exhibition with aaa.

1939

Exhibits eight paintings at the New York World’s Fair; demonstrates collage technique at lectures organized by Harry Holtzman; creates illustrations and charts for Ruth McKenney’s study of Midwest labour, Industrial Valley; Molotov–Ribbentrop pact signed (August); Germany invades Poland (September).

1940

Exhibits at American Artists’ Congress (aac); begins series of collages based on magazine photographs and reproductions of art; coauthors with Harry Holtzman critiques of contemporary art criticism and the reception of abstract art by the Museum of Modern Art, New York; organizes aaa demonstration against Museum of Modern Art; fbi begins covert investigation of Reinhardt’s political activities (July); marries Mary Elizabeth DeArmand (‘Pat’) Decker.

1941

Participates in Moscow Art Festival, sponsored by Baltic Cultural Council. Designs mural, with British artist Charles Martin, for Newspaper Guild Club; close friend Thomas Merton converts to Catholicism and is ordained; us enters World War ii.

1942

Begins work for newspaper, pm; shares loft on East 9th Street, Manhattan, with painters George McNeil and Harry Bowden; joins Artists League of America (ala) and United American Artists (uaa); continues to produce illustrations and design for print on a freelance basis for commercial clients; publishes a series of anti-fascist cartoon collés attacking Hitler, Mussolini and Hirohito in New Masses.

1943

Exhibits work at Peggy Guggenheim’s gallery, ‘Art of This Century’, New York, and Columbia Teachers College; joins American Newspaper Guild.

1944

One-person exhibition of paintings at Artists Gallery; exhibits antifascist cartoon collés at Columbia Teachers College; inducted into the us Navy; controversial illustrations for Public Affairs Committee pamphlet, The Races of Mankind, published; along with Abe Ajay provides illustrations for voter registration pamphlet and other publicity on behalf of the Congress of Industrial Organizations-Political Action Committee (cio-pac).

1945

Serves as photographer’s mate and is stationed on Pacific coast, but does not see active duty; end of World War ii.

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1946

Honourably discharged from San Diego Naval Hospital (March); begins celebrated ‘How to Look’ cartoon series in pm, which garner national attention in Newsweek and are attacked by Daily Worker; Pat Decker introduces artist to Robert Motherwell; one-person exhibition at Art School Gallery, Brooklyn Museum (April); fired from pm over labour dispute; first one-person exhibition at Betty Parsons Gallery, New York (exhibits there in 1947, 1948, 1949, 1951, 1952, 1953, 1955, 1956, 1959, 1960 and 1965); with funding from the gi Bill, begins the study of Asian art history under Alfred Salmony at Institute of Fine Arts, New York University; meets painter Edward Corbett; publishes final illustrations in New Masses.

1947

Exhibits in Ideographic Picture exhibition curated by Barnet Newman at Betty Parsons Gallery; State Department cancels us–ussr friendship exhibition of art that included work by Reinhardt; draws illustration for anti-red-baiting article in Soviet Russia Today; hired by Brooklyn College as Assistant Professor of Design; final exhibition with the aaa group.

1948

A founder member of the Artists Club; speaks at forum on modern art at Museum of Modern Art, New York; separates from Pat Decker; exhibition, Ad Reinhardt, Betty Parsons Gallery, New York, 18 October– 6 November.

1949

Proposes a ‘free-standing partition painting’; draws illustrations for National Guardian attacking us policy towards Communist China; with Robert Lax, visits Nancy Flagg and Robert Gibney in the us Virgin Islands, where he paints watercolours and waits for a divorce; exhibits in Intrasubjectives at Samuel Kootz Gallery, New York.

1950

Published ‘art cartoon’ in Harry Holtzman’s eclectic journal, trans/formation; takes part in Studio 35 symposiums and protests with ‘Irascibles’ against Metropolitan Museum of Art’s position on avant-garde art; at the instigation of Mark Rothko and Clyfford Still, invited to teach at summer school at California School of Fine Art, San Francisco.

1951

With Robert Motherwell and Bernard Karpel (librarian of Museum of Modern Art, New York) edits Modern Artists in America; exhibits in Abstract Painting and Sculpture in America at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and in the Ninth Street Exhibition; produces first trisected geometric paintings; delivers lecture, ‘Abstract Art and Social Realism’; teaches at the University of Wyoming, Laramie, during summer.

1952

Participates in second artist boycott of Metropolitan Museum of Art; publishes art cartoon in Art News; exhibits in American Vanguard Art for Paris, Galerie de France, Paris, organized by Sidney Janis and Contemporary Religious Art and Architecture, Union Theological Seminary, New York; contributes to panels at Artists Club on ‘Expressionism’, ‘Abstract-Expressionism’ and ‘Purists’ Idea’; travels to Europe for the first time with art historian Martin James; invited by

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Josef Albers to serve as visiting critic at Yale School of Fine Arts (1952–3). 1953

The Whitney Museum of American Art acquires ‘No. 18’ (1950); abandons ‘bright-colored paintings; gives up principles of asymmetry and irregularity’; sabbatical from Brooklyn College; travels to Spain, Greece, Amsterdam, London, Paris, Glasgow, Rome, Munich, Nuremberg; marries painter Rita Ziprowski; publishes ‘Artist in Search of An Academy’, part i (Spring).

1954

Birth of daughter, Anna; mentions, among others, Barnett Newman in his text, ‘Artist in Search of An Academy’ part ii: Who are the Artists?’ (Summer); subsequently sued for libel by Newman for $100,000 damages; case dismissed (1956); publishes article on Chinese literati landscape painting in Art News.

1955

Exhibits in The New Decade, Whitney Museum of American Art; exhibits ‘black’ paintings at Betty Parsons Gallery.

1956

Exhibits in Abstract/Concrete at Terrain Gallery; publishes ‘A Portend of the Artist as a Jung Mandala’ in Art News (May).

1957

Publishes ‘Twelve Rules for a New Academy’, Art News (May).

1958

Exhibits at us Pavilion at Brussels World’s Fair; travels to India, Japan, Iran, Iraq, Egypt; projects 2,000 slides at the Artists Club, in a presentation titled ‘An Evening of Slides: The Moslem World and India’ (Part i, 10 October; Part ii, 23 January 1959); publishes in Philip Pavia’s magazine, It Is.

1959

Sends a small ‘black’ painting to Thomas Merton at Trappist monastery near Lexington, Kentucky; begins part-time teaching at Hunter College, New York; rejected for Guggenheim Fellowship; delivers talk ‘The Moral Content of Abstract Art’ at Dayton Art Institute (September).

1960

Mounts 25 Years of Abstract Painting at Betty Parsons Gallery and Section ii Gallery (17 October–5 November); begins to concentrate almost exclusively on producing ‘black’, trisected, 60 × 60 inch square canvases; one-person exhibition at Galerie Iris Clert, Paris; travels in Europe; Frank Stella purchases a ‘black’ painting; publishes in Thomas Merton’s little journal Pax.

1961

Travels to Turkey, Syria, Jordan; exhibits at Städtische Museum, Leverkusen (Reinhardt, Lo Savio, Verheyen, 27 January–19 March); Arthur Tooth and Sons Gallery, London (February); debates with Milton Resnick about art, abstract painting and morality at The Club; refuses to participate in São Paulo Bienal, organized by the Museum of Modern Art. Publishes cartoon collé in Jubilee (January); last collage carton published in Art News (Summer); continues to write on Asian art.

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1962

Travels to the Yucatan in Mexico; protests about Geometric Abstraction in America at the Whitney Museum; selected by Sam Hunter to exhibit at Seattle World’s Fair; one-person exhibition at Virginia Dwan Gallery, Los Angeles. Collector Charles Carpenter, Jr, proposes a plan for an ‘Ad Reinhardt Museum’; delivers talk, ‘Who is responsible for ugliness?’, at first Conference on Aesthetic Responsibility, American Institute of Architects (April).

1963

Exhibits in Dorothy Miller’s Americans 1963 at the Museum of Modern Art, New York; paintings have to be roped off from public; second one-person exhibition at Galerie Iris Clert, Paris; teaches at University of Oregon, Eugene; receives $1,000 prize for a ‘black’ painting exhibited in the 66th Annual American Exhibition at the Art Institute of Chicago, but returns it discreetly some time later; promoted to Professor at Brooklyn College; Vice-chairman for Student NonViolent Coordinating Committee; the Museum of Modern Art purchases its first ‘black’ painting; works in Civil Rights Movement and participates in ‘March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom’; second one-person exhibition at Virginia Dwan Gallery, Los Angeles.

1964

One-person exhibition and lecture on ‘art-as-art dogma’ (May) at Institute for Contemporary Arts (ica), London; three paintings exhibited at Tate Gallery, London, are damaged; active in Artists’ Tenants Association, New York; visits Thomas Merton at Trappist monastery; publishes ‘art-as-art dogma’ in various art magazines, including Joseph North’s American Dialog (July–August) and Art International.

1965

Mounts simultaneous three-gallery exhibition at Betty Parsons Gallery (‘black’), Stable Gallery (blue) and Graham Gallery (red) of geometric paintings, 1951–65; included in The Responsive Eye, the Museum of Modern Art, New York; meets British painter Bridget Riley; exhibits in The New York School, Los Angeles County Museum, and The Inner and the Outer Space, Moderna Museet, Stockholm; publishes ‘auto-interview’ ‘Reinhardt Paints a Picture’, Art News (March); signs Artist Protest against Vietnam War and is active in peace movement.

1966

Publishes review of George Kubler’s The Shape of Time (January); travels to Tokyo for American Painting, 1945–1965, organized by the Museum of Modern Art, New York; contributes statement to Gustav Metzger’s ‘Destruction in Art Symposium’, London; participates in California Peace Tower and New York Artists and Writers Protest Committee; publishes project with Bridget Riley in Poor. Old. Tired. Horse; ‘art-as-art dogma’ republished in Gregory Battcock’s The New Art; publishes statements in Artforum (March); exhibits in Ten at Virginia Dwan Gallery, New York (October); mounts retrospective exhibition of 126 paintings at the Jewish Museum, New York (November), with catalogue essay by Lucy R. Lippard; publishes serigraphic print of postcard, No War, and a portfolio of geometric abstractions, Ad Reinhardt: 10 Screenprints.

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1967

Awarded Guggenheim Fellowship in painting; is hospitalized for heart problems; travels to Rome by boat to recuperate; delivers last public lecture at Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Maine, in July; travels in New England and visits Montreal and Quebec; attends workshop, The Institute for Teachers of Art (Belmont, Maryland); dies in studio, 30 August.

1969

Bulk of the artistic state (180 works) sold to Marlborough Gallery, New York; included in exhibition Language iii, Virginia Dwan Gallery, New York.

1970

Included in New York Painting and Sculpture, 1940–1970, organized by Henry Geldzahler, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, and Language iv, Virginia Dwan Gallery, alongside work of Joseph Kosuth, Sol LeWitt, Hanne Darboven, Robert Smithson and Adrian Piper. Ad Reinhardt: Black Paintings 1951–1967, Marlborough Gallery, New York, March.

1972

Ad Reinhardt, Städtisches Kunsthalle, Düsseldorf, 15 September– 15 October. Ad Reinhardt, Stëdelijk van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, 15 December–28 January 1973.

1973

Ad Reinhardt, Kunsthaus, Zürich, 11 February–18 March. Retrospective organized by Alfred Pacquement, Galeries Nationales du Grand Palais, Paris, 22 May–2 July. Ad Reinhardt, Museum des 20 Jahrhunderts, Vienna, 18 July– 22 September.

1974

Ad Reinhardt: A Selection from 1937 to 1952, Marlborough Gallery, New York, 2–23 March, and Marlborough Galerie ag, Zurich, December 1974–January 1975.

1975

Publication of survey of art cartoons and comics (text by Thomas Hess) accompanies exhibition at Kunsthalle, Düsseldorf, and Marlborough Gallery, Rome; selected writings on art, edited by Barbara Rose, published.

1976

Ad Reinhardt, The Pace Gallery, New York, 2–30 October. Ad Reinhardt: Art Comics and Satires, Truman Gallery, New York, 2–30 October.

1978

Included in Abstract Expressionism: The Formative Years, organized by Robert C. Hobbs and Gail Levin (touring exhibition).

1980

Ad Reinhardt and Color, organized by Margit Rowell, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum of Art, New York.

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1981

Publication after a delay of more than ten years of Lucy R. Lippard’s monograph Ad Reinhardt.

1985

Retrospective organized by Thomas Kellein, Staatsgalerie Stuttgart (April).

1990

Ad Reinhardt: Gouaches, Bonnafantenmuseum, Maastricht, the Netherlands, 20 September–30 November.

1991

Retrospective organized by William Rubin, the Museum of Modern Art, New York, 30 May–2 September 1991, and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, 13 October 1991–5 January 1992.

1997

Mondrian/Reinhardt: Influence and Affinity, PaceWildenstein Gallery, New York, 24 October–13 December.

1999

Ad Reinhardt: Early Works, Marlborough Gallery, New York, 16 February–13 March.

2004

Reinhardt and Contemporaries, 1940–1950, Barbara Mathes Gallery, New York, 17 October 2004–17 January 2005.

2005

Included in Logical Conclusions: 40 Years of Rule-based Art, PaceWildenstein Gallery, New York, 18 February–26 March.

2006

Included in Black Paintings, Haus der Kunst, Munich, 15 September 2006–14 January 2007.

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Ad Reinhardt, Galerie Aurel Scheibler, Berlin, 1 July–8 September.

acknowledgements

I wish to thank the following colleagues, institutions and friends for their critical comments and support, without which this monograph would not have been possible: Michael Newman and Lynne Cooke (Itineraries series editors), Abe Ajay (deceased), Herbert Aptheker (deceased), Dore Ashton, Terry Atkinson, Michael Baldwin, Lloyd Brown, Ute Meta Bauer (mit), William Chambers iii, Frances Colpitt (Texas Christian University), Columbiana Collection (Columbia University, New York), David Craven, Anita Duquette (Whitney Museum of American Art, New York), Virginia Dwan, Ann Edmunds (Oxford Brookes University, retired), Rosa Esman, Angharad Evans (University of Wales, Newport), Briony Fer (University College, London), Nicole Fugmann, Duncan Ganley (The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston), Mary Garrard, Birte Gräper, Christopher Green (Courtauld Institute of Art, London), Hananiah Harari (deceased), Jennifer Harris (Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago), Alexander Hattwig (Aurel Scheibler Gallery, Berlin), Andrew Hemingway (University College, London), Robert C. Hobbs (Virginia Commonwealth University), Nancy Holt, Wendy Hurlock-Baker (the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, dc), Chrissie Iles (Whitney Museum of American Art), Martin James, Ruth Janson, Paul Jaskot (DePaul University), Cornelia Kubler Kavanagh, Ellsworth Kelly, Dorothy Koppelman, Anne Kovach (Dwan Gallery Archive, New York), Ethel Kramer, Ruth Krauss, Susan Leonard (Bard College, Center for Curatorial Studies: The Places with a Past archive), Lucy R. Lippard, Anne McCormick (Merton Legacy Trust), Abe Magil (deceased), Barbara Mathes Gallery (New York), Joan Meisel, the Museum of Modern Art Library (New York), Robert Nickas, Fred Orton (Leeds University), Clive Phillpot, Mel Ramsden, the Reference Center for Marxist Studies (New York), Mischa Richter (deceased), Bridget Riley, John Roberts (University of Wolverhampton), Georges Roque, Carol Rusk (Whitney Museum of American Art), Aurel Scheibler, Karsten Schubert, Tracey Schuster (Special Collections and Visual Resources Reference, Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles), Richard Shiff (University of Texas at Austin), Paul Spaeth (St Bonaventura), the Tamiment Library (New York University), Yvonne Thomas, Barbara Treitel (The Jewish Museum, New York), Naomi Vine (deceased), Joy Weiner (Archives of American Art), Lawrence Weiner, Susan Wheeler, Sarah Wilson (Courtauld Institute of Art, London), Jules J. Weisler, Marlene Weisler and Paul Wood (Open University, Milton Keynes). The author would also like to acknowledge the financial support provided by a caa Publication Grant from the College Art Association, a small research grant from the British Academy and a research grant from the Swann Foundation for Cartoon and Caricature.

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Finally, I am indebted to Michael Leaman, Vivian Constantinopoulos, Harry Gilonis, Martha Jay and Robert Williams of Reaktion Books Ltd for their unstinting support of this book and their skill in helping to realize its publication.

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index

Cartoons, paintings and writings are by Reinhardt unless otherwise indicated 25 Years of Abstract Painting (exhibition, 1960) 79–80 aaa (American Abstract Artists) 11, 34, 48, 61, 62 aac (American Artists’ Congress) 59, 61, 65 abstract art and artists 12–13, 14, 24, 34, 61–5, 66 and ‘art-as-art’ 139–40 and black paintings 96–104, 164–6 democratization of 26, 67–8 and meaning of colour 75 ‘Abstract Art Refuses’ 12–13, 119 Abstract Collage (1940) (painting) 69 Abstract Expressionism 87, 93, 100, 101, 116, 128, 153 Abstract No. 1 (1948) (painting) 71 Academy 159 Action Painting 109 activists (artist-activism) 26, 149–50, 152–8 Agostini, Peter 158 Ajay, Abe 11, 23, 44, 46, 55–6, 57–8 Albers, Josef, Homage to the Square 76 Alloway, Lawrence 109–10, 122 American Abstract Artists (aaa) 11, 34, 48, 61, 62 American Artists’ Congress (aac) 59, 61, 65

Americans 1963 (exhibition) 160–61 Andre, Carl 29, 119, 120, 134, 137–8, 161 applied/fine art dichotomy 12, 20, 30–31, 47–52, 66, 149–50 architecture, modernist 25–6 Art & Language group 144–5 ‘art of the Adamantine path’ 90 Art aujourd’hui (magazine) 84 art cartoons see cartoons Art Front (journal) 37, 61 art history 85–6, 91–3, 133 art market 15, 96, 101–2, 103–06, 156 Art News (magazine) 78, 83, 114, 118 Art Workers Coalition (awc) 153, 154–5, 156 ‘Art-as-Art’ 99, 112, 156 art-as-art dogma 9, 29, 75, 78–9, 79–80, 93 and black paintings 96–7, 99–100 origins of 47–52 Artforum (magazine) 101, 102 ‘The Artist in Search of An Academy, part 1’ 101–2 artist-activists 26, 149–50, 152–8 artists depicted in ‘Hack’ 34–5 socio-political role of 28–9, 153–60 Artists’ Union 37, 39, 59, 61, 65 Ashton, Dore 146–7 Atkinson, Terry 133, 139, 142 audience see spectator

auto-destructive art 112 ‘Autocritique de Reinhardt’ 99–100 autonomy, artistic 132–33, 155 awc (Art Workers Coalition) 153, 154–5, 156 Baer, Jo 127 Balla, Giacomo, Dynamism of a Dog on a Leash 39 Barraud, Francis, Master’s Voice 42 Barzun, Jacques 25 Battcock, Gregory 104, 130 Beck, James 24 Bell, Clive 66 Ben Day screens 49, 50 Bengelsdorf, Rosalind 61, 62 Betty Parsons Gallery 79, 104 black paintings 13–14, 75–77, 78, 87–8, 89–90, 93 and art as commodity 102 and Conceptualism 144–45 exhibitions of and critical responses to 107–12, 116–17, 119–23, 125–8 the late paintings 146–8 and Minimalism 131–9, 141–3 schema and meaning of 16–17, 96–104 titles of individual works see paintings viewing and protection of 163–5 Black Quadruptych (1966) (painting) 76 Blue Abstract (1947) (painting) 71

237

Blue, No. 1-1960 (painting) 81 Brett, Guy 112 ‘brick’ paintings 72, 73 Brisley, Stuart 111 Browder, Earl 53, 54 Brown, Milton 43 Burn, Ian 143–44

238

Canaday, John 106, 121 cartoon colléé 47–8 cartoons and cartooning 11, 21–2, 33–6 and painting 14, 30–31, 126 teaching and theory 57–8 techniques 47–52 titles by Reinhardt, Four Moods of Der Fuehrer 50 The Greatest Show on Earth 47 ‘Hack’ 33–36, 40 Horse and Rider on the Eastern Front 50 ‘How to Look’ series 14, 78, 82–3, 85, 95–6 ‘Idle Hands’ 53–4 ‘Naked-Mind’s-Eyeto-Eye-WitnessReport’ 85 ‘Portend of the Artist as a Jhung Mandala’ 78 ‘You’re a menace to civilization’ 40 Cassirer, Ernst 93 Chinese art 72 Christian mysticism 16, 87–9 Clark, T. J. 120 class, social 22–3, 33, 34–6, 37–9, 40, 41 Coates, Robert M. 125 Cold War 15, 27–28 collage 48–49, 51–52, 68–70, 78 collage cartoons, ‘How to Look’ series 14, 78, 82–3, 85, 95–6 colour 71–2, 73, 75–6, 116, 130–31 Colt, Priscilla 100 Columbia Jester, The see Jester Columbia University 19, 21, 23–4 commercial art 19–21 commodification, of art 15, 96, 101–2, 103–6, 156

Communism 26–8, 39, 42, 63–4, 155–6 see also artist-activists; cpusa; Marxism; Popular Front Conceptual art 29–30, 133–4, 136, 138–41, 161 Corbett, Edward 76–7 cpusa 21–2, 26–7, 42, 63, 64, 67, 158 Reinhardt’s membership of 52–9 see also artist-activists; Communism; Marxism; Popular Front Criss, Francis 48 cross (or cruciform) format 78, 97, 98 Crow, Thomas 117 Cubism 21, 22, 33, 44–6 Dadaism 47–48 Dark Painting, No. 1-1956 (painting) 81 Davis, Stuart 45, 47, 61, 63–4, 64–5 democratization of art 26, 67–8 Denny, Robyn 111–12 ‘Destruction in Art Symposium’ (dias) 112 Diller, Burgoyne 23, 24, 135 Dmitrov, Georgi 26–7 Dooley, C. (pseudonym used by Reinhardt) 150–51 Duchamp, Marcel 102, 130 Dwan, Virginia 119, 121 Ernst, Max 47–8 exhibitions 107–12 Americans 1963 160–61 at Jewish Museum (1966) 121, 124–6 Ten (1966) 119–22 The Responsive Eye (1965) 114–15, 116 25 Years of Abstract Painting (1960) 79–81 fap (Federal Art Project) 24, 36–8, 41, 55–6, 62 farc (Foundation for Art, Religion and Culture) 87, 157 fbi 52–3, 55, 150–51 Federal Art Project (fap) 24, 36–8, 41, 55–56, 62 film (cinematic) 148 ‘Fine Artists and the War Effort, The’ 36

fine/applied art dichotomy 12, 20, 30–31, 47–52, 66, 149–50 Finlay, Ian Hamilton 112–13, 114 Flagg, Nancy 71 Foundation for Art, Religion and Culture (farc) 87, 157 Four Moods of Der Fuehrer (cartoon) 50 Frederick, Darryl and Rodney (pseudonyms used by Reinhardt) 39, 42, 55–6 Fried, Michael 109–10, 117–18 Fry, Roger 66 Gallatin, A. E. 34 geometric formats 72, 73, 76, 96–8, 134–5, 138 grid or cruciform 14, 51, 78, 164 Glamour (magazine) 20 Gold, Mike 58 Golub, Leon 149, 156 Gombrich, Ernst 85 graphic design 19–21 The Greatest Show on Earth (cartoon) 47 Greenberg, Clement 107, 109, 111, 130 Greene, Balcomb 24, 61 Greene, Gertrude 61 grid format 14, 51, 78, 97, 135, 164 Gropper, William 44–5, 45–6 ‘Hack’ (cartoon) 33–6, 40 Harari, Hananiah 50, 61 ‘hard-edge’ paintings 108–9 Harrison, Charles 145 Héélion, Jean 67 Hess, Thomas 21, 22, 23, 106, 114, 146 Hills, Patricia 39 history of art 85–6, 91–3, 133 Holty, Carl 48 Hoover, J. Edgar 55 Horse and Rider on the Eastern Front (cartoon) 50 ‘How to Look’ series (cartoons) 14, 78, 82–3, 85, 95–6 Hoyland, John 107 Hunter, Sam 126

‘Idle Hands’ (cartoon) 53–4 interior design 25–6 Iris-Time (newsletter) 99 irony 93 Isotype 33 It Is (magazine) 81 James, Martin 51, 79, 146 Jamison, A. (pseudonym used by Reinhardt) 57 Jester (student magazine) 21, 22, 33, 36 Jewish Museum 121 Jewish Museum (exhibition, 1966) 121, 124–6 Johns, Jaspar 143 Johnson, Crockett (pen name of David Leisk) 43, 57 Johnson, Hugh S. 42 Jubilee (magazine) 78 Judd, Donald 103, 120, 133, 152 Keller, Charles 58 Kelly, Elsworth 105, 115, 118, 119 Kent, Rockwell 43, 64 King, Peter C. 88 Klein, Yves 130–31, 145 Kosuth, Joseph 29, 130, 134, 139, 140 Kozlov, Christine 29, 139 Kramer, Hilton 126 Krauss, Ruth, A Good Man and His Wife (illus by Reinhardt) 44 Kubler, George, The Shape of Time 73, 80, 91–3, 129 language 29, 140, 144–5 Latham, John 107, 111, 112 Lax, Robert 71, 95, 96, 113, 168 layout techniques 47–8, 68–70 Leider, Philip 102 Leisk, David 43–4 Levine, Jack 151 LeWitt, Sol 120–21, 138–9, 146 Liberman, Alexander 109, 115 Lippard, Lucy 51, 122–3, 126–8, 136, 145, 146, 153–6 Lozowick, Louis 61, 63 McConathy, Dale 146 Magil, Abe 44, 64

Malraux, Andréé 47, 80, 83–6 The Voices of Silence 85, 86 Martin, Agnes 105, 119, 121 Marx, Karl and Fredrick Engels, The German Ideology 67 Marxism 61, 63, 66–7, 106 mass media 40–41, 43, 66, 148, 150 Matulka, Jan 61 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 85 Merton, Thomas 16, 87–90, 91, 96, 99, 167 meta-art 140, 146 metaphor 85 Metzger, Gustav 111, 112 Meyer, James 120 Michelson, Annette 104, 120 Miller, Dorothy 107, 160 Minimalism 29, 120–21, 127, 129–39, 161 and political activism 151, 155 Modernist Left 27, 61–5 Mondrian, Piet 14, 25, 50, 51, 133 monochromes 73, 75–8, 116, 130–31, 144–5 morality artists’ moral position 158–60 moral content of abstract art 166–8 Morris, L. K. 34 Morris, Robert 29, 103, 105, 107, 127 Motherwell, Robert 86, 87, 157, 158 Mumford, Lewis 25 Mural Project (fap) 37, 38 muséée imaginaire 80, 83–6 mysticism 16, 87–91 ‘Naked-Mind’s-Eye-toEye-Witness-Report’ (cartoon) 85 negation 30, 61–2, 93, 97, 142–4, 161 Neurath, Otto 33 New Masses (journal) 11, 39–40, 41–7, 53–4, 55–8 Harari’s work in 50 New York School 102–3 Newman, Barnett 86, 130 non-figurative art 61–5 see also abstract art

North, Joseph 58, 64 Number 11 (1949) (painting) 72 October 1949 (painting) 72, 73 O’Doherty, Brian 127–8 ‘On Safari with Harari’ (Harari) (cartoon-strip) 50 Op Art 116–17, 118 Ottanelli, Fraser 55 painting and paintings see also black paintings and art cartoons 14, 30–31, 126 early work 25–6 and religion 78, 86–91 techniques 16, 48–9, 51–2, 69, 70–73, 98–100, 110 works by Reinhardt, Abstract Collage (1940) 69 Abstract No. 1 (1948) 71 Black Quadruptych (1966) 76 Blue Abstract (1947) 71 Blue, No. 1-1960 81 Dark Painting, No. 11956 81 Number 11 (1949) 72 October 1949 72, 73 Persian Rug series 51 Red, Green, Blue and Orange (1948) 71 Red Painting (1950) 71 Red Painting (1952) 76 Red Painting Number 7 (1952) 115, 116 Untitled (1943) 71–72 Untitled (1949) 71 Untitled (Blue Hook Series 1938) 45 Untitled (New York World’s Fair c. 1939) 45 ‘painting reason’, and ‘picture purpose’ 41, 65–8, 95 papier colléé 69–70 ‘Park Avenue Cubists’ 34 Parsons, Betty 80–81, 109 ‘paste up’ techniques 47–8, 68–70 Pavia, Philip 81 Pereira, Irene Rice 61 Persian Rug series (painting) 51

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photo-collages 69–70 photographs/photography 26, 83–6 photomechanical resources 48–9 ‘picture purpose’, and ‘painting reason’ 41, 65–8, 95 Piper, Adrian 145–6 pm (newspaper) 19, 50, 57, 95, 158 polemical writings see Reinhardt political engagement 7–8, 24–28, 39–40, 41, 61–65, 105, 151, 153–58 art and power 149–61 see also artist-activists; cartoons; Communism; cpusa; Marxism; Popular Front Poor. Old. Tired. Horse. (p.o.t.h.) (journal) 113, 114 Pop Art 128 Popular Front 26–7, 43, 52, 63–4, 158 ‘Portend of the Artist as a Jhung Mandala’ (cartoon) 78 Porter, Fairfield 116 post-historical art 133–4 post-painterly abstraction 127 p.o.t.h. see Poor. Old. Tired. Horse. Poussin, Nicolas 82–3 pseudonyms 27, 39, 42, 55–6, 57, 150–51 public art 36–41 ramps 163–4 Ramsden, Mel 142–3, 146 Rauschenberg, Robert 77, 144 Rea, Gardner 46 Red, Green, Blue and Orange (1948) (painting) 71 Red Painting (1950) (painting) 71 Red Painting (1952) (painting) 76 Red Painting Number 7 (1952) (painting) 115, 116 Refregier, Anton 43 Reinhardt, Ad biography of 155 pseudonyms 27, 39, 42, 55–6, 57, 150–51 writings 15, 29

‘Abstract Art Refuses’ 12–13, 119 ‘Art-as-Art’ 99, 112, 156 ‘The Artist in Search of An Academy, part 1’ 101–2 ‘Autocritique de Reinhardt’ 99–100 ‘The Fine Artists and the War Effort’ 36 ‘Timeless Stylistic Art Historical Cycles’ 73 ‘Twelve Rules for a New Academy’ 102 religion, and art 78, 86–91, 157 ‘removal’ work 141 Resnick, Milton 153 Responsive Eye, The (exhibition, 1965) 114–15, 116 Restany, Pierre 130–31 Riley, Bridget 105, 111, 113–15, 117–18 Robertson, Bryan 108 Rodman, Selden, The Insiders 78 Roosevelt government 37, 39, 53, 54 Rose, Barbara 104, 130, 132, 136, 137 Rosenberg, Harold 44, 90, 122, 135–6 Rothko, Mark 23, 86, 108, 123–4, 127, 160 Rubens, Peter Paul 83 Schapiro, Meyer 24, 61, 65 ‘Public use of Art’ 36–9, 40–41 Schiff, Richard 117 Schwartz, Therese 151 Schwitters, Kurt 83 Seitz, William 114, 115–17 ‘separate selves’ 13, 30, 157, 167–8 seriality 134 Shahn, Ben 152 Siegel, Jeanne 137, 159 sign painter 34, 35 signum and signifier 165 Smith, David 61, 107 Smith, Leon Polk 109, 115 Smithson, Robert 29, 120–21 social contexts of illustrative work 21–4 of political engagement 24–8, 39–40, 41, 61–5, 105, 151, 153–8 see also cartoons Sontag, Susan 166

Sparks (Macy’s in-house magazine) 45 spectator 109–10, 117–18, 130, 131–2, 137–8, 143–4 and ‘black paintings’ 96, 128, 163–6 St John of the Cross 87, 88, 89 Starobin, Joseph 57, 64 Stella, Frank 122, 127, 133, 139 Surrealism 47–8 Sylvester, David 110, 112 Ten (exhibition, 1966) 119–22 ‘Timeless Stylistic Art Historical Cycles’ 73 ‘Twelve Rules for a New Academy’ 102 Untitled (1943) (painting) 71–2 Untitled (1949) (painting) 71 Untitled (Blue Hook Series 1938) (painting) 45 Untitled (New York World’s Fair c. 1939) (painting) 45 versatility 30, 66–67 viewer see spectator Warhol, Andy 86, 102, 105, 161 watercolours 71 Wechsler, James 23 Weiner, Lawrence 29–30, 141 Wiegand, Charmion von 61 ‘wine glass theory’ 58 Wollheim, Richard 130, 136–7 women artists 62 working class, artist’s relation to 37–9, 40, 41 World War ii period 53–58 wpa Federal Art Project 36–8, 41, 55–6, 62 Wright, Russell 19 ‘You’re a menace to civilization’ (cartoon) 40 Zen Buddhism 16, 87, 88, 91, 97