Ad and Artists
Reinhardt and Artist Writers
Ad Reinhardt’s paintings have been generally understood to be aligned with modernist purification. His thought, however, as revealed through his writing, was significantly more expansive than his paintings appeared. Interestingly, Reinhardt was an art-as-art painter, using his writing to distinguish his position on abstraction, defining it in a stream of refusals and juxtapositions.
We now accept that artists can be fluent in a multiplicity of disciplines, but Reinhardt as an artist-writer-cartoonist-photographer-student of art history-hybrid was advanced for his time. There are contemporary artists, some abstract painters, who are established as serious writers. Some that come to mind are Nora Griffin, Peter Halley, Christopher K. Ho, Loren Munk, Seth Price, and Stephen Westfall. Moreover, I recently visited Amy Sillman’s retrospective at the ICA Boston. Towards the end of the retrospective is a display case with several drawings chiding artworld opening reception phrases and lists of philosophers helpful for artist practices, as well as several Xerox fanzines Sillman made (a couple even quote Reinhardt and one reproduced How to Look at Modern Art in America). While many of the paintings could have been done anytime in the past 50 – 100 years (abstractions often resembling Matisse or Diebenkorn), the voice in her writing was contemporary, giving the work new context and vitality.
Why is Reinhardt’s writing so important in understanding Reinhardt’s paintings? The writing anchors the work in a network of the artist’s ideas and thoughts, as well as those particular moments and within a continuum of art history with which he was continually engaged. Curiously, as much as Reinhardt argued for a morphological history of objects, his writing expands (rather than contracts) his paintings into a nexus of activities, inquiries, and philosophies. It is time to see Reinhardt’s activities as a whole rather than just the paintings dissociated from his other activities, which has largely been the case.
Contributor
Greg LindquistGREG LINDQUIST is an artist, writer and editor of the Art Books in Review section of the Brooklyn Rail. He is currently a resident at the Marie Walsh Sharpe artist residency.
RECOMMENDED ARTICLES

AD REINHARDT: Blue Paintings
By Eleanor RayOCT 2017 | ArtSeen
Ad Reinhardt is known as an artist of extremes. While committed to abstract painting that became infamous for its austerity, he also had an expansive curiosity about art and the world. He was a vocal critic of the art market and his peers, as well as a proselytizer of art and architecture from disparate regions and periods, which he obsessively photographed for slide lectures.
AD REINHARDT: Blue Paintings
By Nathlie ProvostyOCT 2017 | ArtSeen
1943, the year Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin met in Tehran to discuss their war strategy, Ad Reinhardt made a deep blue and green oil painting that is the earliest work in this Zwirner Gallery exhibition.

AD REINHARDT: Blue Paintings
By Alex BaconOCT 2017 | ArtSeen
This presentation at David Zwirner Gallery is the largest exhibition of Ad Reinhardt’s blue paintings ever assembled, and the first dedicated to them since a seminal 1965 show at the Stable Gallery.

Somewhere Some Pictures Sometimes
By Jan AvgikosNOV 2017 | ArtSeen
A funny coincidence happened on my way to see Cheyney Thompson’s exhibition of new Quantity Paintings, entitled Somewhere Some Pictures Sometimes. First I stopped in at David Zwirner’s to see all the blue paintings that Ad Reinhardt ever painted.