Page 41 - Studio International - December 1967

cally, of a system which insists on seeking self-gratifica- demands an especially contemplative kind of sustained
tion by settling for the softest of options when confronted attention. There is the danger now, with his early death,
by an object that does not reach out at once with a that over-eager attempts to stress the supposed prophetic
friendly and reassuring embrace. nature of his work, or exaggerated claims for its gran-
Reinhardt's work is not reassuring, nor, on the con- deur, will blur the edges of his contribution and the rare
trary, is it intended to be challenging. It has a taciturn, quality of his engagement as an artist, which derived as
non-declamatory presence which, operating within the much from his human presence as from the work which
limits of a fairly narrow frame of aesthetic reference, survives him.

Above Ad Reinhardt on his art Brussels World Fair. I guess I was 45 then. I think the
Oil on canvas, 1940 United States decided that 45 was not a bad age for a top
40 x 32 in.
The following passages have been edited from an limit. You were old if you were over it, young under it. I
unpublished recording of a talk given by Ad heard that this was a way of making sure that there was
Above right
Reinhardt at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in an exhibition that did not have any members of the
Abstract painting 1945
London on May 28,1964. The title of the talk was Communist Party in it. Anyone under 45 at that time,
'Art as Art Dogma'. someone figured out, couldn't have been a member of the
Party....
Well, I've been an abstract artist now for about thirty
years and I think of myself, I guess, as a child of abstract
art. I think the history of abstract art is about the same
age as I am. I was born in the year 1913, which was a
I got out of school in the middle Thirties and right on to kind of a climax, not only of Cubism but the certain kind
W.P.A., which was the government-sponsored project of painting Mondrian was doing. There was the Armory
for paupers in the late Thirties. I was involved with a show, and Clive Bell published his book called Art, and
group of abstract painters, maybe forty or fifty, and that it's roughly my point of view. So I'm not going to say
was almost all the abstract painters there were in America anything new or radical about it. I was also born on
at the time. It included all the refugees like Mondrian, Christmas Eve—I don't know how to make use of that
and Leger, who was there too, and so on, and I exhibited gag.... Anyway, in the late Thirties I was involved with
with them and I felt like an Old Master then. I was just a certain kind of geometry, hard-edge, post-Cubist
out of school and I wasn't called a young painter until abstract painting, and I guess in the Forties I got rid of
the Brussels World Fair, because then I was grouped with that.... Other things: in '45 I got involved with the
seventeen young painters who were exhibiting in the Betty Parsons Gallery—that's '35 I got out of school, '45
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