Page 57 - Studio International - February 1967

Ad Reinhardt
Left
34 1947
Oil on canvas
40x 32 in.
Below
75 1953
Oil on canvas (blue)
50x 25 in.

harder to believe in. Reinhardt himself is given to progressive simplification. The steps are clearly But there is scarcely a pure black in Reinhardt's
voluminous commentary and it is common to find traceable. From the oblique angle and occasionally enormous oeuvre of the past ten:years. In addition,
young painters reciting his theorems by heart. rounded forms he moved to right angles and purely the shades of plum, olive, rust and ochre in his
The exhibition concentrated, understandably, on rectilinear forms. From contrasting colour he nine forms are clear to the most rude vision.
Reinhardt's so-called black paintings, presenting moved to restricted colour, often arrayed in tonal Since Reinhardt's is a pure and classical vision
several enormous rooms of them. But the organizers sequences from dark to light. From elaborate inter- of painting as the manipulation of values, and
thoughtfully provided a few early examples of his locking rectangular composition he moved to since he has added not a unique concept to painting,
work, enabling viewers to see the consistency and simple rectangular composition. but unique paintings, I find it hard to swallow
divergences in his artistic evolution. They even What he did not do, in my opinion, was to much of the talk around his work. To my eye, he is
added a few of his famous cartoons, pointing out succumb to his own intellectualizing rhetoric. He not a painter typical of the 1960's, but a painter of
that, in keeping with his philosophy, he doesn't never successfully abolished image; symbol still a certain temperament that has always existed in
`draw' them, but compiles them from printed lurks in the wings; composition is a necessity; the history of painting. (That he is first and fore-
materials in the Max Ernst tradition. colour remains, and the divisions in the painting most a painterly painter must be recognized by any
What the survey of earlier work showed is that, inevitably create space. attentive viewer: each form, no matter how nearly
except for a few wavering moments in the mid- Almost all of the 'black' paintings—uniformly invisible, eventually reveals itself to the eye as
1940's, when a quasi-organic imagery threatened 5 ft x 5 ft—are conventionally dependent on con- painted with a brush, with definite edges articulated
to emerge from underneath the painted surface, trasting hues and the effects of outside light. in the matière itself.)
Reinhardt has faithfully adhered to the traditions Moreover, despite the uniform composing—tri- There remains the problem of the painting as
of the twentieth-century abstract art. That means sected vertical and trisected horizontal—each object. Reinhardt would like us to believe that he is
that when he began in the late 1930's, he began as a painting by its painted nature reads differently. fashioning objects with no other meaning than
student of French abstraction—the between-the- That nature is arrived at by means of colour. themselves as objects. Yet the objects he offers are
wars variety which stressed wide, bright colour Without the vastly subtle gradations in the blacks illusionary. They have varied pictorial spaces, no
schemes and fundamentally geometric form. themselves, a Reinhardt might conceivably be matter how close the values. They are virtual
In keeping with the tradition, Reinhardt sought seen as a 'concept', as so many would like to see it. presences in spite of their frames. And the virtual