The Brooklyn Rail

In a 1962 interview with Irving Sandler in the New York Post, Ad Reinhardt declared that, “Art is one thing only—itself. There are no two ways about it.” The artist’s vehement disinterest in “any combining, mixing, adding, adulterating, diluting, exploiting, vulgarizing or popularizing of abstract art” has since taken on legendary status as a kind of “contraceptual”¹ capability that remains difficult to summarize to this day, and hence offers an imminently renewable void for successive generations of artists and art historians to plumb. This most recent collation of the artist’s works at Zwirner surveys his late involvement in printmaking, and its attendant processes, and so offers some clues as to the artist’s image development placing technical emphasis on art-in-the-making, prior to its precipitation down to “art-as-art.” By featuring Reinhardt’s processes more transparently, the curator, Jeffrey Weiss, takes the artist back to a kind of immediate basics of his own, one in which the work of art history’s “black monk” (Harold Rosenberg’s jibing nickname for Reinhardt) might be seen anew, through a somewhat loosened attitude of the tautological stolidity and rhetorical denial that the artist so famously fostered.

Reinhardt produced the portfolio, titled 10 Screenprints—commissioned by Sam Wagstaff for the Wadsworth Atheneum in 1966—the same year as his retrospective at The Jewish Museum, organized by Sam Hunter. Reinhardt’s prior work with silkscreen was a single print in 1964, and then later a suite in 1967. Reinhardt was painstaking in the processes he used for his “black paintings” in which a nine-square grid of extremely closely valued and darkly undersaturated hues strain one’s perceptual capabilities. He’d distill his oil paints progressively, to the point that they had almost no medium, in order to achieve the absolutely matte surface he demanded of these works. So the delegation of such fine increments of edge condition to a master printer presented both a technical challenge but also an experiment in impersonality that likely piqued Reinhardt’s disinterested sensibility. In this ensemble, Weiss juxtaposes studies for the prints which are more gestural and often surrounded by the artist’s fingerprints and other incidental marginalia, as in Untitled, (maquette for Number 6 from 10 Screenprints) (c. 1966) where a deep green crossbar is undergird by light and dark ultramarine blue squares. It’s surrounded by marks obviously made in process including a color bar study in its lower left margin. Here one witnesses the artist’s visual processes out loud. The most extraordinary example of such blatant “working out” in the show is Untitled (maquette for Number 7 from 10 Screenprints) (c. 1966) in which a columnar version of Reinhardt’s typically square format is vigorously painted over the schematic lines set up to order its vertical progression of deep blue and black squares. Since the finished prints (like the artist’s paintings) are so dependent upon a seamless maintenance of a barely-there edge condition between each of their differently-hued sections, the freshness of these studies points up the artist’s typically extreme sublation of his painterly instincts. The show features one exception to Reinhardt’s strict regime in the form of Blue, Red, Green (1952), an oil on canvas work which seems to have been over-painted at some point in a more improvisatory manner. It is surrounded by a shadowbox-type frame that Reinhardt favored (often fabricating them himself) and also a messy marginal residue of the overpainting process. One is left to conjecture whether the artist kept the painting on hand in the studio as a test case after its former life as a finished work. It certainly isn’t consistent with the bulk of his austere later works, though it obliquely references the tendency of Piet Mondrian (a lodestar for Reinhardt) to repaint his works after they were ostensibly released into the world. Another instance in which the artist’s hand is a bit more obvious is found in Abstract Painting (1955), a casein on illustration board composition in which the fusion of tones usually evident in Reinhart’s paintings is slightly prevented by the resistance of the milk-based medium to such smooth transitions. It’s painted in a dry wash of incremental brushstrokes that intimately animates its surface.

By including such works in the show, Weiss tempts the viewer to ponder what was lost or gained in the artist’s ascetic denial of gesture, but Reinhardt’s vehement refusal of Abstract Expressionist excess wasn’t really a strategic withdrawal. His studies of Asian art reinforced his intuition that, “The forms of art are always preformed and premeditated. The creative process in art is always an academic routine and sacred procedure … Only in this way is there no grasping or clinging to anything. Only a standard form can be imageless, only a stereotyped image can be formless, only a formularized art can be formulaless.”² As such his astringent “art-as-art” stance can be directly connected to the way in which Confucianism and Daoism intermingle to form a combination of social ethics and spiritual meaning. And Reinhardt attended lectures on Zen Buddhism by D.T. Suzuki while at Columbia University. He was always closer to an orange than a black monk, despite his preferred palette. The show also includes unpainted maquettes for the print series which come as close to drawings one might get from this artist. One in particular, Untitled n.d., is a collage of three pieces of paper overlaid in a lattice form with ink highlights. The yellowing of its support and its white foreground suggests a Robert Ryman composition. We might thus imagine that subsequent approaches to understated gesture, by Ryman and others to succeed the Abstract Expressionist generation, must in the end amount to a rational regression from Reinhardt’s impossible to follow, absolute painting.