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    Ad Reinhardt: Sacred and ProfaneAuthor(s): Sam HunterSource: Record of the Art Museum, Princeton University, Vol. 50, No. 2 (1991), pp. 26-38Published by: Princeton University Art MuseumStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3774721.

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    A d Reinhardt S a c r e d n d P r o f a n eSAM HUNTER

    Art is too serious to be taken seriously.Action painting speaks louder than voids.The New York School is a nice place to visit but I wouldn't wantto live there. A cleaner New York School is up to you.Ad Reinhardt,unpublished notes, Archives of American ArtThe idea of an icon is to do a pictureover and over again, to loseoneself in a few simple ideasjust to get that rightness ... nocomposition and color and expression, but invisibility. Mondriandid this;he made icons, not murals. In the original icons, thefigures werejust formulas, not everyday people. That idea camewith the Renaissance. Islamic art is not religious and it's toofanatic and obsessive to be decoration. It is a composite art, an artfrom art. In abstractartyou deal with problems of art.Ad Reinhardt,in conversation with Irving Sandler,1957-58The one work for a fine artistnow, the one thing in painting todo, is to repeatthe one-size canvas-the single-scheme, onecolour-monochrome, one linear-division in each direction, onerhythm, one working everything into one overall uniformity andnon-irregularity.Ad Reinhardt, "Art-as-Art," Art InternationalDecember I962)

    The Art Museum has had the good fortune to acquireone of Ad Reinhardt's representative, but also distinctlyvisible, and thus happily "readable," all black trisectedsquare paintings, conceived and executed in the artist'scanonical five-foot square pictorial format (fig. I). Unti-tled, 1960 is a relatively early exercise in the demandingpainting series so solemnly (and with some consciousintellectual contrariety) introduced in New York byReinhardt around 1954. This important, defining paint-ing phase represented both a culmination of an intellec-tual process and a quietist, philosophical rebuke directedat the unduly hectic, untidy, and for Reinhardt, certainlyshallow Action Painting, which he so often publicly de-rided and which had then reached a peak of popularityunder the leadership of Jackson Pollock, Willem deKooning, Franz Kline, and other "gestural" abstraction-ists of the New York School.

    Reinhardt continued to make monochromatic all blackpaintings on this model with an almost ritual repetitive-ness and obsession, each successive work rigorously puristand only subtly differentiated from the last, until his deaththirteen years later. He enjoyed his maverick status asthe "black monk" of the New York School (fig. 2), much

    Figure2. The original "Irascibles"photograph by Nina Leenappeared n Life magazine (Life magazine ? Time WarnerInc.).Ad Reinhardt'sversion grayedout all the competition but lefthimself in full tonal contrast. Artists from left, rear:Willem deKooning, Adolph Gottlieb, Ad Reinhardt,Hedda Sterne;nextrow, RichardPousette-Dart, William Baziotes, Jimmy Ernst(with bow tie), Jackson Pollock (in stripedjacket), James Brooks,Clyfford Still (leaningon knee), Robert Motherwell, BradleyWalkerTomlin; in foreground, Theodoros Stamos (on bench),Barnett Newman (on stool), Mark Rothko (with glasses).

    ashe relishedthe fact thathis ratheresoteric andseverelyreductionist rt,with itsacknowledged piritual ffiliationsin Eastern art and thought, generally proved irritatingand perplexingto the more empiricalAbstractExpres-sionists and their partisancritics.Eventually,Reinhardt'sreductionism,both as an aes-thetic and a process, would prove to be a major trendwithin the New YorkSchool, anda predictionof, if nota direct influence upon, the dominant Minimalist stylesof the I960s with their austere geometries and impas-sive, mechanically rendered or produced forms. Just be-fore his untimely death in 1967, at the age of fifty-three,Reinhardt was much heartened by the support his blackpaintings elicited among the new generation of radicallyobjectivist painters and sculptors, and neophyte concep-tualists, among these, Donald Judd, Carl Andre, BriceMarden, Joseph Kosuth, and Frank Stella. Stella was anearly collector of his black paintings and lent two im-

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

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    Figure3. The BlackSquareRoom. Reinhardtetrospective,heJewishMuseum,New York,I966-67.(photo:ArtResource,N. Y.)

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

    other things, produced a "picture story" in Life maga-zine, much to Reinhardt's bemusement, he was preoc-cupied by the sense of neglect, as he watched the careersof artists like de Kooning, Kline, and other highly visi-ble Action painters prosper. Although he remained un-compromising in his rejection of popular culture, hebrooded on his failure to be appreciated by his own gen-eration of the New York School. His late-in-life promi-nence followed by the posthumous appeal to the younger

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    generation of the extreme form of nonobjectivity of hisall black paintings underscore his self-image as a prophetunheeded in his own land. With the other so-called colorfield painters of his epoch, Clyfford Still, Mark Rothko,and Barnett Newman, he shared certain aesthetic ideasas well as a rather grandiose rhetoric and a profoundsense of social alienation. In the end Reinhardt proposedthe most extreme rejection of mainline, gestural AbstractExpressionism-which he had, curiously enough, em-braced briefly but with some enthusiasm and obviouslyadaptive facility in the I940s.While his final phase of art, like that of his fellowcolor field painters, was too restrictive and self-containedto be properly described as sublimist, he strongly ob-jected to the notion of art as expressionist autobiogra-phy. In his frequent and invariably caustic critiques ofthe art of his time, and in his satirical cartoons on the artworld, he repeatedly ridiculed Harold Rosenberg's fa-mous phrase and concept that the canvas had become an"arena"in which the artist must "act"2 to define him- orherself, and lay bare the human psyche. In so doing,Reinhardt flatly rejected expressionist brushwork, colortexture, space, and movement. He also repudiated chance,accident, and spontaneity in art, in favor of ritual andrepetition. For the freewheeling rank- and-file de Kooningfollowers of post-World-War-IIAmerican art, Reinhardt'sproject of a tabula rasa and the unglamorous disciplineand intellectual control it entailed seemed to violate theirfree expressiveness and sense of existential engagementwith the art process. As Action Painting reached its cli-mactic moment around 1950, Reinhardt immersed him-self in Eastern art and cultural studies and begun toformulate ever more concisely his unusually single-minded and highly personal artistic model. It was someten years in the making, roughly between I950 and 1960,beginning with the abandonment of his virtuoso surfacemarkings in the Abstract Expressionist spirit, and con-cluding with his probing reexamination of the underly-ing geometric and coloristic structure of his art.At New York University's Institute of Fine Arts, asearly as I944 and then again after the war, Reinhardt stud-ied oriental art history with Alfred Salmony. He alsoattended D. T. Suzuki's seminars in Zen Buddhism at

    Columbia University in the early I95os before they be-came fashionable among the New York avant-garde. Hesaid he was attracted to Zen because "it goes over andover something until it disappears."3 In the forties andfifties he read widely and independently in Eastern art,philosophy, and religion, and in later years he regularlytook trips to China, Japan, and Southeast Asia, wherehe haunted the museums and temples of the region, re-turning with, literally, thousands of slides of artifacts.These he later projected for the classes in oriental arthistory he taught for so many years as a tenured mem-ber of the art department at Brooklyn College.

    Figure 4. Ad Reinhardt,A Portend f the Artistasa YhungMandala,newspaper collage on paper,66.5 x 48.6 cm. Originally pub-lished in ArtNews (May Ig50). (photo: Al Mozell, courtesy ofthe PaceGallery)

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    Quite as important in his artistic development as hispassion for the Orient and Asian art forms was his polit-ical warfare with much of the rest of the art world. InI950 he published his first polemical "art-world cartoon"in trans/formations,o be followed periodically by a num-ber of other hectoring, instructional graphics lampooningthe contemporary art scene, usually to be found in ArtNews (fig. 4). He also kept himself in moral and intellec-tual condition, as it were, by publicly airing his ideolog-ical differences with his fellow color field painters, whorepresented an important counterforce to Action Paint-ing in the fertile Abstract Expressionist episode. Thereis abundant evidence in the exasperated and also movingletters this group of artists left to posterity with theirestate papers at the Archives of American Art, and inthe recently published collection of Barnett Newman'spapers, that their bitter struggle for recognition took itscorrosive toll of both their self-regard and regard foreach other. The combination of a messianic vision withthe experience of rejection, and even ostracism, at leastas they construed their sense of isolation, left them allwith a bad case of frayed nerves and suspicions of themotives of even their closest artist friends.

    Given the radical simplicity and unprecedented for-mal character of their work, the color field group, evenmore than the gestural abstractionists, found their integ-rity and authenticity questioned constantly by a power-ful, unsympathetic artpress and a museum establishmentwhose bias against avant-garde art can scarcely be imag-ined today when art novelties have become the style offashion and dominate the marketplace. In their differentways, Still, Rothko, Newman, and Reinhardt seemed topossess the most vulnerable and aggrieved egos amongthe Abstract Expressionists, and in time they were con-sumed by their own rivalries and conflicting claims ofartistic priorities. At one point, Newman sued Reinhardtand the College Art Association for statements Rein-hardt published in a scathing satirical article in the ArtJournal4assailing the corruption of the art world. New-man could not forgive Reinhardt for contemptuouslydubbing him "a traveling salesman of ideas," therebysuggesting he was not only ideologically suspect, butprobably not to be taken seriously as a practicing artist.

    The suit came to trial, but the bewildered judge dismissedit when he discovered, among other fascinating bits ofbiographical trivia, that Newman had a history of liti-gation and writing crank letters to public officials, andhad once run for mayor of the City of New York on ananarchist ticket.

    While Still was not a direct artistic influence on Rein-hardt, who abhorred his tundralike fields of tarry,knife-applied pigment, he did represent something of a rolemodel. Still was recognized as an important leader andoppositional spokesman for the entire group of colorfield artists, who admired his uncompromising moralstance, prophetic posturing in public, and cultural ex-tremism. In the late forties Still was influential in gettingfirst Rothko and then Reinhardt teaching assignments inthe summers of 1949 and I950 at the California Schoolof Fine Arts in San Francisco where New York colorfield painting anomalously had its genesis.Like the pioneers of the American West, whence hecame, Still revered the individual struggling in solitary,courageous effort to attain an absolute vision all his own.In rhetoric almost as molten as his abstract imagery, Stillwrote of the artist as something of a Nietzschian heroseeking epic self-realization in metaphors of the sublime:"It was ajourney that one must make, walking straightand alone.... Until one had crossed the darkened andwasted valleys and come at last into clear air and couldstand on a high and limitless plain. Imagination, no longerfettered by the law of fear, became as one with Vision.And the Act, intrinsic and absolute, was its meaning,and the bearer of its passion."5If Still can be judged the most romantic of the colorfield painters, then his polar opposite in the group wouldhave to be the equally absolutist but utterly rationalisticReinhardt. Originally Reinhardt hadjoined the AbstractExpressionists after Cubist and Constructivist abstrac-tion had gone dead for him and become little more thanwhat Still had described it to be: a mechanical picture-making technique. Perhaps owing to his Cubist back-ground (fig. 5), Reinhardt succumbed only briefly togesturalism. By I952 he was painting brilliant, opticallyactive, if more geometrically ordered, virtually mono-chromatic color paintings in red and blue closely related

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    to the work of Rothko, Still, and Newman. Then, in aprogressive distillation of form, and a rigorously intel-lectualized process of elimination, he reduced color, draw-ing, and, of course, imagery until he had refined his artto its very essence. He was left with a luminescent rec-tangle, hand-painted in a single color and in the flattestway possible, but with enough differentiation in toneand texture to disclose a hard-edged internal structureof plane geometry.There was perhaps an unconscious irony in these firstsingle-color paintings in red and blue, and in the all blackpaintings that followed, however. Not only do the squaresinto which Reinhardt subdivided the field come togetheras a barely visible cruciform configuration, but the ex-quisitely subtle variations by which this shape is revealedrequires such close, concentrated looking that viewersmay find themselves slipping into a trancelike state. More-over, at the same time that Reinhardt repudiated every-thing supernaturalin artas incidental and distracting meta-physical baggage, his uncompromising quest for an artof absolute purity tended to elevate the nonobjective,totally self-referential painting to the status of a holyobject. In fact, it was patently most difficult to impartspiritual values to abstract art since the twentieth cen-tury had converted abstraction into a purely formal, ma-terial, external enterprise. Yet Reinhardt did find supportfor a spiritual readingof his intention when he made agift of a small, all black paintingto the Trappistmonkand poet Thomas Merton, who was a Columbia Uni-versity classmate and remaineda lifelong friend. Signi-ficantly,Merton thanked Reinhardt or his generosityinthisway:"It s a most recollected mallpainting.It thinksthat only one thing is necessary and this is true, but thisone thing is by no means apparent to one who will nottake the trouble to look. It is a most religious, devoutand latreutic [conducive to worship] small painting .... "6For all his antiromantic ulminations and bias againstthegesturalAbstractExpressionists,Reinhardtmayhavehad more affinitieswith the mysticalKasimir Malevichthan he would have cared to admit, in content as wellas in the formof the RussianSuprematist's adicallynon-objective, cruciform pictures. Like Malevich, the firstnonobjective Western painter who espoused a geometric

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

    style, Reinhardt felt that meaning lay somewhere beyondreason and beyond the mind. Both artists invented forthemselves a suprarational process by which connectionscould be made transcending the laws and limits of theeveryday world. In one of the more intriguing articlesrecently published on Reinhardt,7 Naomi Vine made thepoint that he consciously sought a repeatable spiritual,yet not explicitly religious, experience in his highly ra-tionalized,mandalalikeblackpaintings.Although Rein-hardt called his black paintings "art-as-art,"insisting upontheir separation from life, his thesis did not exclude spir-itual implications.In his more private writings and ruminations, Vinepointed out, Reinhardt associated his black paintings withreferences to "Oriental and Occidental mysticism thatrelatereligious concepts to darkness,geometric shapes

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    Figure 6. Ad Reinhardt inhis Manhattanloft, July1966. Life magazine? Time WarnerInc.(photo: John Loengard)

    andcruciformmagery,"whichwere, nfact,theformalcharacteristicsf his allblackpaintings.Theyearhe diedhe seemed o wish to give further redence o hisspiri-tualintentions,when he wrote:"I have been calledaProtestant, uritan,Byzantinist, mandarin, godlessmystic,a blackmonk,aZen-Buddhist,n conoclast, nAhab. I suppose here'sa reason ormakinga religiousanalogy.Maybe hat's hebestanalogy oday."8YetReinhardt'seligiositywasopen oquestion, ouldonlypersistas a partial nthusiasm, ndmayevenhavebeensomethingof a charade, onstantly abotagedbythe freeplayof his innateskepticism.He conductedlife andprofessionalareerull of contradictions,orhewas by turnsan ambivalently topicanddisillusionedsocialreformer,with a profoundmistrustof anytran-scendentalisteliefsystems.Atheart,herepudiatedhe

    content of works of art with overt religious meanings,feelingthatthey falsified the aestheticobject by prevent-ing it from functioning as an end in itself. To succumbto religious or mystical faith actuallyundercut the fullpower and essentialpurpose of Reinhardt'sstrategy ofnegativity. For Reinhardt t was the religion of art, I'artpour 'art,or what HenryJamescalled the "sacredoffice"of art, that drove and valorized his creativeproject.He conceivedhis all blackpaintings,datingfrom 1960especially,as anegativestatement n the serviceof aposi-tive cause:artistic reedom. The less apainting conveyed(the more rigorously its formal components were re-stricted),thegreater atitude n retinalresponse t allowedthe viewer. The less a painting contained, the more itconveyed. The reductionof artto its pureformal char-acteristicswas, for Reinhardt,a statement of absolute

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    principle made in negative terms-negative in the sensenot of denying any of the purposes of art, but of radi-cally expunging all the accrued social, psychological, andiconographic values from painting.Reinhardt produced the grayed yet luminous, noctur-nal appearance of his paintings by draining most of theoil from the pigment. This dry, almost chalky surface isreminiscent to some extent of essence,a similar kind ofpigment used by Edgar Degas and Edouard Vuillard,which so much resembled pastel. The resulting sublimi-nal effects of a kind of dim, matte radiance with a cruci-form afterimage were achieved by painting the surfacein successive thin turpentine washes (fig. 6), first withred, then green, and finally blue pigment, building upthese fragile layers into a composite "black" chroma thatreads first as opacity and then as a softened plane ofgrayish black light. The viewer is gradually engaged bythe formulaic process and the tempo of experiencing thework, getting accustomed to its particular "light," as ifin a darkened room to which our eyes slowly adjust.Lippard remarked that the viewer must learn to bridgethe gap between uneasy "confrontation and delectation. "9The ambiguity of the object and the interplay betweenimpressions of illusive depth and flat opacity are ren-dered even more complex by the matte black shadowbox in which the canvas is set. This framing device rep-resents yet another in a series of stunning redundanciesthat may well defeat the casual viewer's best intentionsto penetrate the work's manifold mysteries. It is intended,Lippard noted, "for protection though it also adds an-other degree of aloofness."'IThe element of duration-the enforced acclimatiza-tion of eye and mind to the faintest imaginable colorcontrasts that operate slowly in real time-and the exis-tence of perceptual problems tend to activate Reinhardt'sshifting formal configurations within a symmetrical butopen-ended system. Reinhardt created, finally, only anambiguous order despite his stated absolutist views. Evenhis highly controlled, single-minded art-as-art synthesiscould not purge itself of a residual element of uncer-tainty regarding the viewer's presence and responses-theindeterminate human factor. The optical dynamics ofhis severe cruciform configurations link the work to sen-

    sation, and to the act of perception as well as to theviewer's state of self-awareness. To study a black paint-ing by Reinhardt, in fact, involves a process similar toZen meditation-a deceptively simple affair that "con-sists only in watching everything that is happening, in-cluding your own thoughts and breathing."" In eithermode, art-as-art or art as individual awareness, the allblack paintings step outside the boundaries of classicaldefinitions of self-containment and confront us more dy-namically as a moment in a process of consciousness.

    Despite his aloof intentions and verbal strictures ofthe self-indulgent emotionalism of the Action painters,Reinhardt nonetheless associated himself with their workand ideology to some degree. His delicate modulationsof color and tone at the far end of the dark value scale,close to invisibility, and his narrow specialization of pic-torial means can be interpreted as a form of risk andbrinksmanship, no matter how premeditated or concep-tual his approach appears to be. He also never abandonedthe handmade painting or the artist's "touch" in favor ofthe kind of mechanical means that subsequently domi-nated Minimalist productions. It is said that Reinhardtonce considered having a studio assistant execute one ofhis all black paintings, but he decided against the idea astoo impersonal and inauthentic.12His resolute oppositional stance, abhorrence of facileexpressionist abstraction, and the relish he took in test-ing his audience's commitment to contemporary art bypushing his own painting to its outermost limits all heldout a special appeal for a new generation of Minimalistsworking in three dimensions and for the nascent con-ceptualists. There is some question whether Jasper Johns,who has so often been cited, or Reinhardt, who has not,was the more important influence around I959 on theyouthful Frank Stella, just two years out of PrincetonUniversity and already embarked on his first major se-ries of radical black-stripe paintings. In any event, Stellawas quick to express his appreciation of Reinhardt's con-tribution to American art upon his death: "[Ad] can'tplay the game anymore, but nobody can get around thepaintings anymore either. If you don't know what theyare about, you don't know what painting is about,"'3 hewrote.

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    Figure 7. Frank Stella, Die Fahne Hoch, I959, black enamel oncanvas, 3II.0 x I86.8 cm. Collection of the Whitney Museum ofAmerican Art. Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Eugene M. Schwartz andpurchase,with funds from the John I.H. Baur PurchaseFund;the Charles and Anita Blatt Fund;Peter M. Brandt;B.H. Friedman;the Gilman Foundation, Inc.; Susan Morse Hilles; the LauderFoundation; Frances and Sydney Lewis; the Albert A. List Fund;Philip Morris Incorporated;SandraPayson;Mr. and Mrs. AlbrechtSaalfield;Mrs. Percy Uris; WarnerCommunications Inc. and theNational Endowment for the Arts 75.22.

    In his notes for one of his best-known symmetrical,cross-shaped black-stripe paintings of I959, Die FahneHoch ("The Flag on High") (fig. 7), Stella remarked thatit provided him with "the final solution"'4 for that par-ticular series, before its possibilities were exhausted, andhe felt compelled to shift his attention to the next group-type of shaped canvases. While the formal connectionbetween Stella's first mature painting series and Rein-hardt's work may not be direct or conclusive, there arein Stella's early phase of nonobjectivism, with its delib-erate formal monotony, exclusion of color, and strictgeometric order, decided affinities with many of Rein-hardt's concerns. At least by implication these includethe challenge of obliterating traditional abstract form andpushing art toward a point of perceptual, if not mate-rial, extinction. For Reinhardt this kind of end-of-the-line purity and reductiveness also meant consciouslyattempting to make the "ultimate" painting. Reinhardt,in fact, jokingly entitled a number of his late all blackpaintings in the I96os Ultimate Paintings, and then, indeliberateself-mockery, added sequential numbers to theirtitles, as he resumed this occasional series from time totime. Reinhardt was, of course, consummately awareof the dangers of bogging down in an "ultimate" cul-de-sac, as the logical consequence of his intransigent puristposition. Once painting could be stripped of all elementssuperfluous to its essential structure, it stood reduced toits final statement.

    Reinhardt was also aware of the perils of mysticism inart, which like reductivist painting threatened to under-mine the artistic enterprise, or even throw it into Dada-ist disarray. Susan Sontag eloquently formulated someof the dangers and the paradox inherent in the negativestrategy for both the mystic and the modern artist, whosedilemmas are curiously similar. She wrote: "As the ac-tivity of the mystic must end in a via negativa, a theologyof God's silence, a craving for the cloud of unknowing-ness beyond knowledge and for the silence beyond speech,so must art tend toward anti-art, the elimination of the'subject' (the 'object,' 'the image'), the substitution ofchance for intention, and the pursuit of silence .... There-fore, art becomes estimated something to be overthrown.A new element enters the art-work and becomes consti-

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    earlier work crowded into much smaller gallery spaceson the third floor. Aside from Life magazine's sizeablepicture spread and a favorable story on the show, it en-countered a great deal of resistance, antagonism, andeven outright hatredin the artworld, which truly shockedReinhardt. The world, it seemed, was still not ready forhim.'7

    Despite their marked shift in tone from antipathy andalienation to a somewhat strained sense of camaraderie,both letters seem quite touching today. At a time whenthe word avant-gardes equated with an extravagant andoften facile success, these and many similar, painfullyaggrieved letters found in the artist's archives remind usof the psychic wounds Reinhardt endured for his difficultart and long years of neglect and isolation.

    NOTESI. Lucy R. Lippard, Ad Reinhardt New York, 1981).2. Harold Rosenberg, "The American Action Painters." The Tradition fthe New (New York, 1961)."At a certain moment the canvas began to

    appearto one American painter after another as an arenain which toact-rather than as a space in which to reproduce, re-design, analyzeor 'express' an object, actualor imagined" (p. 25). "A painting that isan act is inseparable from the biography of the artist" (p. 27).3. Ad Reinhardt, in conversation with Irving Sandler, 1957-58; cited inLippard, Ad Reinhardt,166.4. Ad Reinhardt, "PartII:Who Are the Artists," CollegeArtJournal13,

    no. 4 (I954), 3I4-I5.5. Cited in Irving Sandler, The Triumphof AmericanPainting:A Historyof Abstract Expressionisn (New York, 1970), I70.6. Cited in Naomi Vine, "Mandalaand Cross," Art in America 9, no. II(1991): 128.7. Vine, "Mandala and Cross," I24-33.8. Ibid., p. 126.9. Lippard, Ad Reinhardt,146.Io. Ibid., 144.II. MauriceTuchman et al., The Spiritualn Art: Abstract ainting 890-1985(Los Angeles and New York, 1986), 5I.12. Vine, "Mandala and Cross," 130.13. Quoted in Lippard, Ad Reinhardt, I6.14. Quoted in ibid., 192.

    15. SusanSontag, "The Aesthetics of Silence." Styles of RadicalWill NewYork, 1969), 4, 5.16. PrimaryStructureswas the title of the first comprehensive survey ofMinimalist sculpture organized in 1966 at the Jewish Museum, NewYork, by Kynaston McShine, then staff curator. Lippard, however,can claim priority for the rubric, which appearedearlier in her writ-ings in reference to the new sculpture.17. In a generous eight-page word and picture story, Life magazine artreporter and critic David Bourdon wrote: "Todaya young generationof artists, attuned to Reinhardt'spaintings and ideas, has brought in amajor new style, reducing form and color to a drastic minimum.Called 'Minimal Art,' it generally consists of little more than plainboxes or a few stripes on canvas. The success of these blank, inex-pressive works has given Reinhardt new prominence as the prophetof Minimal Art. This winter he was given a huge retrospective showat New York'sJewish Museum and became what he wryly calls a'howling success.' " (David Bourdon, "Master of the Minimal," Life62, no. 5 1967): 45.

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

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