Viewing page 6 of 11

This transcription has been completed. Contact us with corrections.

to make a gallery tour of twenty works in two minutes and then go on to other activities. After a few minutes in the warm darkness of Reinhardt's paintings, one begins to find a precise, symmetrical, geometric order. The banded cruciform geometry is delineated by a variety of close-valued dark colors which includes reds, blues, browns and purples. The paintings may not use any black, but for convenience it is perhaps easiest to call the darkest color in each work "black." 

Reinhardt makes a number of points with his great dark paintings. He rejects the whole question of communication, placing any responsibility for understanding upon the viewer. He says of his work that he hasn't anything to say that will help. With these paintings one is forced to make an effort in order to be able to see them at all. Reinhardt has thus obtained a mighty advantage over his fellow artist, whose art gives the illusion of being totally revealed by a single glance across a room. The subtle yet certain and classic distribution of his forms and low valued colors create images of great simplicity and calm. Control and order are the key-notes of his work. He speaks with the admiration of the oriental artists who were "sage-scholar-hermit-gentlemen-aloof contemplatives," devoted to works "which are complete, self-contained, absolute, rational, perfect, serene, silent, monumental and universal."

When described as a classic artist, Reinhardt questions the spirit in which the term is used. He is forced to ask "With whom am I grouped?" He would then require that classicism be defined to include "fine art, purified of all other-than-art meanings." For this artist, art is a sum of renunciations. He has abandoned color, line, asymmetry, texture, self-expression, composition, structure, subject matter, spontaneity, practicality and any degree of utility. It is through renunciations that he has arrived at an art of rationality, "vacant and spiritual, empty and marvelous," entirely divorced from human content, timeless in the absolute.

Every artist cannot be expected to subscribe to Mr. Reinhardt's criteria. In this period the idea of a Platonic "divine madness" of the artist and poet is subscribed to unwittingly by a great many. Metaphysics and poetry are equated with art content too often. Against this background Reinhardt's creations execute a stately dance of great formality. The extremely stable and "knowable" planes can often perform after-image acrobatics. This is both contradictory and somehow perfectly in keeping with the artist's idea of control and discipline and his determination never to take up the brush without knowing how he is to execute his plan. 

When accused of being cold, inhuman, monotonous, meaningless, contentless, dull and puritan, Reinhardt only smiles his agreement. Those words are wholly slanderous to a person rooted in our time and in its values. Why should art be warm, human, varied, filled with content, meaningful, active? Is art truly related to life? Reinhardt would argue against such a conclusion. He would claim that art builds only on art and that life is life and art is art. This is the basis upon which he claims that "Art has only its own formal problems and attentions," and "art is separate from everything else, is related to nothing, and so is one thing only, only itself." 

-Gerald Nordland
FRONTIER

[[image]]
POLLOCK 1948
MODERN MASTER PAINTINGS
Paul Kantor Gallery
348 North Camden Drive Beverly Hills, Calif.

[[image]]
DWAN GALLERY
Rauschenberg
March 4 - 31
1091 BROXTON AVE. Westwood Village GR. 8-5298
canonico
Through March 15, 1962

SILVAN SIMONE GALLERY
11579 Olympic Boulevard - West Los Angeles 64 - GR 7-2416