TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/071591/0715400.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 5.7 KB | 118 lines

                                                                                ART, Page 64

Approaching Absolute Zero


Ad Reinhardt, gadfly and hater of bogus mysticism, reduced
painting to the pure power of austerity

By ROBERT HUGHES


    We are saturated in reproductions of works of art. Hence
the more art books and magazines we thumb through, the less
likely we are to see an original fresh, for the first time:
reproduction precedes the work as the radar blip announces the
incoming plane, removing its element of surprise. No well-known
artist has ever been able to circumvent this; only obscure ones
don't have the problem, and wish they did.

    During the 1950s, the American Ad Reinhardt dissolved the
problem by painting pictures so dark, so apparently monochrome,
that they could not be mechanically reproduced -- images that
come out on a glossy page as trite-looking black squares.
Reinhardt's series of "black" paintings, completed between 1954
and his death in 1967, are among the few works produced by an
American that make sense only in themselves and are utterly
meaningless in their clones. Collectively they are a superb
vindication of art's right to be experienced at first hand. And
they have not been seen together in the U.S. for 20 years. This
fact alone makes this summer's Reinhardt retrospective at
Manhattan's Museum of Modern Art, jointly organized with the
Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles (where it will be seen
from October), an event.

    Reinhardt was a great purist; he was also the chief gadfly
and moralist of New York art in the time of its first big
flowering, the '40s and '50s. Which does not imply that other
artists in the New York School lacked probity; only that
Reinhardt made such a fierce point of showing where he thought
art could go wrong, become soft, betray its essence. He was a
fine aphoristic preacher, irresistibly quotable, and a deadly
parodist. He listed the technical skills of the modern American
artist as "brushworking, panhandling, backscratching,
palette-knifing, waxing, buncombing, texturing, wheedling,
tooling, sponging . . . subliming, shpritzing, soft-soaping .
. ."

    He hated the bogus mysticism that clung to interpretations
of American art in the '50s -- the cult of the heroic
personality, of expressive blood and guts, of the Artist as
Fate-Defying Existentialist. "My painting represents the victory
of the forces of light and peace over the powers of darkness and
evil," Picasso had pompously announced in 1957. Well, fine,
wrote Reinhardt, but "my painting represents the victory of the
forces of darkness and peace over the powers of light and evil."
How he would have loathed the market-and-genius cultism of the
'80s! He defined art -- his own and others' -- by negations. He
took to an extreme the sphinx's riddle of early Modernism, the
question that leads an artist along the edge of the drop where
the aesthetic impulse no longer has a toehold in common
experience: How much can I jettison before this painting, this
sculpture, ceases to be painting or sculpture, before its
essence is lost along with its attributes?

    The desire to get art down to its ultimate components and
endow it with the communicative power of total austerity is very
much a 20th century one. It begins with Mondrian's grids and
Malevich's black square, sheds its mysticism in America and
re-emerges as factual, what-you-see-is-what-you-get Minimalism.
Reinwork was part of this process: he cleared the way for
Minimalism without being at all interested in its factuality.

    Reinhardt was never a figurative painter; all his
surviving work is abstract, Cubist-based at first with elements
of collage. In the '40s it passed through a phase of "all-over"
painting, then to loose, gridlike structures such as the lovely
Red, Green, Blue and Orange, circa 1948, whose patches of blue
and green seem to twinkle optically like the dispersed crosses
that stand in for light on the sea in an early Mondrian.
Eventually he settled on a symmetrical, predetermined array of
blocks of one highly saturated color: first red (in 1952), then
blue (in 1953) and finally black. Compared with what was going
on in other American studios, Reinhardt's red and blue paintings
looked utterly impersonal -- no freehand drawing, no textures,
no "interesting" design, just the single, hieratic array,
motionless and ineloquent. No American artist has ever put the
claims of what he called "art-as-art" -- free from any trace of
social or therapeutic agenda -- more categorically than
Reinhardt.

    The summing up of this is in the "black" paintings, which
can absorb any amount of staring although they look utterly
empty when you first see them, the pictorial equivalent of
absolute zero. As William Rubin says in the catalog preface,
"The visitor who `does' the Ad Reinhardt retrospective at three
miles an hour will literally not see it." Gradually your eyes
adjust, as to a dark room, and a form does appear: the simplest
of shapes in the final square canvases, a cross that divides the
surface into nine equal subsquares. Within the black there are
the finest, barely perceptible shifts of color, a disappearing
gleam of red or bronze, a nuance so faint and fugitive that you
wonder whether you are imagining it.

    Perception? Illusion? Trick of sensory deprivation? It is
impossible to know, but to pursue this infinitesimal trace of
light, to stabilize it and recall it, is the discipline the
painting compels. It is the ghost of the luminosity of
Reinhardt's early work, the breath of his conception of the
Ideal. It is also deeply romantic. One is either repelled or
fascinated by it; there is no middle ground. Reinhardt's
reductions, one realizes, were not those of a minimalist.