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ART

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Newsweek--Robert R. McElroy
Reinhardt and black paintings: Sizeless, formless, colorless, spaceless, timeless—truth and beauty

The Black Monk

"Art," says Ad Reinhardt, the dogmatic, idealistic, puritanical, puristic, mystifying, mystical, rebellious, aging enfant terrible of abstractionism, "can only be defined as exclusive, negative, absolute, and timeless. It is not practical, useful, related, applicable, or subservient to anything else. The next revolution in art will see the disappearance of personal art dealing, private collecting, and individual artist-enterprising."

But the revolution is not yet. This week, the 51-year-old Reinhardt is having simultaneous one-man shows at three top Manhattan galleries: at the Betty Parsons, which is showing six of his all-black paintings; at the Graham, where thirteen all-reds are on display; and at the Stable, where the menu is a dozen or more all-blues. What's more, the coup was effected by Reinhardt himself, for it was he who suggested and then organized the shows. And his paintings are very much for sale, at prices ranging from $1,500 to $12,000. Such apparent contradictions have led Ralph Colin, administrative vice president of The Art Dealers' Association of America, vice president of New York's Museum of Modern Art, and an important collector, to dub Reinhardt an out-and-out "faker."

No Jokes: The three shows prove otherwise. Reinhardt's blue, red, and black paintings at first tend to look like jokes played with one single, solid color. But before the viewer can shrug his shoulders and walk away, something stops him. He becomes mesmerized, sensing there is more to come. Gradually, subtly varying hues in rectangular or square shapes emerge from the monochrome and begin to play with, and against, each other. What seemed an inert mass is transformed into light, and these "quietist paintings," as Reinhardt calls them, become alive. They are not mere retinal experiments, as is much of op art. Reinhardt's icons remain ambiguous; they invite, even demand, interpretation—and active participation.

Reinhardt rejects such explanations. He prefers to describe his work, such as the "Abstract Painting" purchased by the Museum of Modern Art, thus: "A pure, abstract, non-objective, timeless, spaceless, changeless, relationless, disinterested painting—an object that is self-conscious (no unconsciousness), ideal, transcendent, aware of no thing but art (absolutely no anti-art)." Extreme? "I claim the most extreme esthetic decision," he says. "I am the most negative, expressionless, the least op, least pop, least national, least social."

Born in Buffalo in 1913 ("the year of the New York Armory Show," he notes proudly), Reinhardt likes to say that he is "almost as old as abstract art." He attended Columbia College, where art historian Meyer Schapiro made him aware of art's purely plastic issues, joined the American Abstract Artists, picketed the Museum of Modern Art for its predilection for "Renaissance art," and painted Stuart Davis-like abstractions.

No Wiggle: He was a non-realist from the start. "When I was in college," he says, "Ben Shahn was the big name. He thought he was a champion of the oppressed because he painted people with slitty eyes." By the early '40s, Reinhardt was eliminating "impurities": shapes, colors, forms, and even--a special object of his hatred--"the wiggly line."

That line for Reinhardt means sloppy emotionalism, and he never liked the flamboyant "therapeutic self-flagellation" of abstract expressionism. Instead he continued to "eliminate." By 1948 he was down to muted-color, asymmetrical walls of paint, with neither texture nor depth. His lifelong dealer, Betty Parsons, could sell only a few, to "high-level collectors." "People," she says, "used to walk into the gallery, look right past his squares of color, and say: 'So where are the pictures?'"

But Reinhardt gradually won a reputation as one of the generation's foremost abstractionists. He himself was not satisfied with his pictures. "They were too pretty, too impure," he says. "So I symmetrized the shape and monochromized the color, and [by 1951] I did blue and red. Then I moved to the ultimate--black--and black is no color. Now I have reached the non-emotive, non-anecdotal, purely esthetic non-objective object, the absolute. I cannot conceive of going back."

Lampoons: Reinhardt, the master of inscrutability, is also a brilliant polemicist and ferociously inventive cartoonist. He achieved an entirely separate fame during the '40s with his madly exfoliating cartoons for the New York newspaper PM, in which he lampooned the involuted universe of modern art. "I was satirizing the explanations of art." he says ironically, "and still many people--including Sinclair Lewis--thanked me for making art clear to them."

Despite his mystical, Zen-like approach to art (he has been called "the black monk" and teaches Oriental art history at Hunter College), Reinhardt insists he is a realist. He looks like one--short, solid, balding, his nose dented like a retired pug. His pictures beneath their meditative calm have aggressive force. "In one museum they roped my stuff off because my paintings were 'dangerous'--like dynamite on a construction site." He rejects all emotive explanations of his work, yet was delighted when "I saw a couple of nuns ecstatic when they thought one of my black paintings was a cross."

Convinced that he has already painted the "ultimate" picture, Reinhardt nevertheless continues to "eliminate." But the real explanation of the man--and the work--does slip out. Once, for example, he banished white as "antiseptic and not artistic." Then he added that white was "hardly the medium for expressing truth and beauty."

90   Newsweek, March 15, 1965