June 19, 2005
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ART WARS:
Darkness Visible“No light, but rather darkness visible
Serv’d only to discover sights of woe”
– John Milton, Paradise Lost,
Book I, lines 63-64
A famed vulgarizer, Martin Gardner,
summarizes the art of Ad Reinhardt(Adolph Dietrich Friedrich Reinhardt,
Dec. 24, 1913 – Aug. 30, 1967):“Ed Rinehart [sic] made a fortune painting canvases that were just
one solid color. He had his black period
in which the canvas was totally black.
And then he had a blue period
in which he was painting the canvas blue.
He was exhibited in top shows in New York,
and his pictures wound up in museums.I did a column in Scientific American
on minimal art, and I reproduced one of
Ed Rinehart’s black paintings.
Of course,
it was just a solid square of pure black.
The publisher insisted on getting permission
from the gallery to reproduce it.”Fade to Black
“…that
ineffable constellation of talents that makes the player of rank: a
gift for conceiving abstract schematic possibilities; a sense of
mathematical poetry in the light of which the infinite chaos of
probability and permutation is crystallized under the pressure of
intense concentration into geometric blossoms; the ruthless focus of
force on the subtlest weakness of an opponent.”– Trevanian, Shibumi
“‘Haven’t there been splendidly elegant colors in Japan since ancient times?’
‘Even black has various subtle shades,’ Sosuke nodded.”
– Yasunari Kawabata, The Old Capital
An Ad Reinhardt painting
described in the entry of
noon, November 9, 2004
is illustrated below.
Ad Reinhardt,
Abstract Painting, 1960-66.
Oil on canvas, 60 x 60 inches.
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum
The viewer may need to tilt
the screen to see that this
painting is not uniformly black,
but is instead a picture of a
Greek cross, as described below.“The grid is a staircase
to the Universal…. We could think about Ad Reinhardt, who, despite his repeated insistence
that ‘Art is art,’ ended up by painting a series of… nine-square grids in
which the motif that inescapably emerges is
a Greek cross.
Greek Cross
There is no
painter in the West
who can be unaware of the symbolic power
of the cruciform
shape and the Pandora’s box of spiritual reference
that is opened once one uses
it.”– Rosalind Krauss,
Meyer Schapiro Professor
of Modern
Art and Theory
at Columbia University
(Ph.D., Harvard U., 1969),
in “Grids”
In memory of(Sept. 19, 1911 – June 19, 1993)
