Page 40 - Studio International - December 1967

Ad Reinhardt

'You can only make absolute statements negatively'

An appreciation by Robyn Denny

'This notion that I don't like babies . .'
Ad Reinhardt was described as the conscience of
American art. He called himself the child of abstract art.
Between the conscience and the child was a highly
idiosyncratic creative personality whose scepticism and
candour, combined with a kind of bright-eyed and rueful
disbelief in the inherited structure of his own creative
environment—about which he was both erudite and
vocal—gave his role in modern art a very special kind of
importance. He was both iconoclast and idealist, sup-
porting the long tradition of what he called negative
theology, who believed in the possibility of achieving not
a communication in art, but a communion, through the
formulation of whole series of negative and tangential
propositions which together disclose a positive and abso-
lute commitment to an ideal, total and uncompromising.
It would be wrong to interpret his attitude, as some
critics have done, as pessimistic or self-destructive.
Reinhardt's reference to the Ultimate Painting was not
so much a value judgement as a state of being, exclusive,
personal, a comment for which the work itself was not
intended to be a commentary. Reinhardt's paintings
were not a dark mirror to some supposed interior mor-
bidity, a 'cry of despair disguised as a utopian mani-
festo' as one critic described them. Nor again were they
diagrams of ideas loaded with references through their
tone or their colour or weight or scale or their blandness
to a visual or psychological situation in the natural
(human) world. They are not exercises in autobio-
graphy, or self-expression played down. Reinhardt said
that 'there is this notion that I don't like babies or
women or people or something because I don't have
titles or don't relate my work . . .', but he strenuously
rejected the idea of abstract art being an art of allusion
with formal or verbal clues to help the spectator on his
way. Reinhardt wanted his work to read like 'a clearly
defined object, independent and separate from all other
objects and circumstances whose meaning is not detach-
able or translatable', but he was often the victim, ironi-

Ad Reinhardt in his New York studio, where he collapsed and
died on August 30 this year. Born in 1913, Reinhardt was both
painter and scholar and was professor of 'Modern Art and
Asiatic Art' at Brooklyn College.