“A pure, abstract, non-objective, t.mes less, spaceless, changeless, reactionless, disinterested painting—an object that is self-conscious (no unconsciousness), ideal, transcendent, aware of no thing but art.”
Captivating in its monumental verticality and alluring presence, Abstract Painting stands within Ad Reinhardt’s most iconic body of work as a majestic altarpiece to abstraction. A totemic embodiment of Reinhardt’s groundbreaking oeuvre, the present work is distinguished by its double crossbeam form and compelling scale. Reinhardt painted only black-on-black works between 1953, the year he renounced color, until his passing in 1967. Today, his Black Paintings are unequivocally regarded as his most revered body of work. Abstract Painting belongs to a limited body of paintings that Reinhardt produced in this vertical format, many of which are held in museum collects ions, such as The Menil collects ion, Houston, the Brooklyn Museum, The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City and the Museum of Modern Art, New York. Although Reinhardt repudiates any human sent.mes nt, the vertical format of the canvas and its remarkable scale relate to the viewer on a one-to-one basis, creating an almost spiritual resonance. Abstract Painting is further distinguished by its provenance and exhibition history, having been included in the first major museum retrospective devoted to the artist at the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles from 1991 to 1992, alongside many other major exhibitions.
A majestic altarpiece of pure optical brilliance, Untitled harnesses the most fundamental of pictorial means; as Reinhardt explained, "the content is not in a subject matter or story, but in the actual painting activity." (The artist quoted in: Barbara Rose, ed., Art-as-Art: The Selected Writings of Ad Reinhardt, New York, 1975, p. 49) Reinhardt locates his practice within the procedure and context of its making, encouraging the viewer to question the work's production and the act of painting itself within their viewership. The present work is distinguished by its inclusion of two of Reinhardt's trademark symMetricas l, crossbeam devices each formed by shades black tinted with red, green, and blue, which possess a compelling grid-like depth. Never entirely monochromatic, Reinhardt's Black Paintings consist of careful arrangements of varying tonalities, captivating in their subtlety, which are meticulously applied in thin incremental layers of hues overlaid with matte black.
Profoundly committed to the purity and autonomy of art, Reinhardt sought to eliminate any traces of visual labor through a paradoxically laborious and meticulous layering of paint. Deliberately effecting a matte finish, Reinhardt drained the oil from his pigments so that light would be absorbed rather than transmitted. Nothing could be reflected within the painting’s surface, intentionally creating a hermetic world framed within the painting; he saw the matte black itself as a point of abstraction, consuming light, other shapes, and color. Freed from any intimation of content, Reinhardt reveled in the potentiality of artistic production in its most essential form.
“The one object of fifty years of abstract art is to present art-as-art and as nothing else, to make it into the one thing it is only, separating and defining it more and more, making it purer and emptier, more absolute and exclusive – non-objective, non-representational, non-figurative, non-imagist, non-expressionist, non-subjective. The only and one way to say what abstract art or art-as-art is, is to say what it is not.”
As the artist’s most renowned and radical body of work, Reinhardt’s Black Paintings, which he called his ‘Ultimate Paintings,’ marked the culmination of the artist’s conceptual project and his final motif. Reinhardt’s vast expanse of luscious matte-black appears deceptively uniform at first glance; the exquisite subtilities, while visible to the eye, prove impossible to achieve in reproduction. This was in part Reinhardt’s goal, he believed the only viable experience of art was to contemplate paintings in the flesh. Upon sustained viewing of the present work, the underlying geometric structure and tonal nuances of reds, blues, and green within the black become apparent, revealing each cross beam. One of the most influential advocates for the purity of abstraction, Reinhardt felt that art should be devoid of narrative and understood, purely and primarily, as an artistic object. Unrivaled in their aesthetic effect and intention within the canon of Twentieth Century painting, Reinhardt came to view these works as the pinnacle of abstract painting, to which there was no further extreme. Within this body of work, which cemented Reinhardt as one of progenitors of Minimalism, the artist sought to synthesize, summarize, and distill all previous advances in the history of paintings into its purest form. Bewildering in their captivating intensity, Reinhardt’s Black Paintings became the artist’s crowning achievement, as he described: “I am merely making the last painting which anyone can make.” (The artist quoted in: “Ad Reinhardt,” LIFE, 3 February 1967, p. 50)
“I once organized a talk on black, and I started with black as a symbol, black as a color, and the connotations of black in our culture where our whole system is imposed on us in terms of darkness, lightness, blackness, whiteness. Goodness and badness are associated with black. As an artist and painter I would eliminate the symbolic pretty much, for black is interesting not as a color but as a non-color and as the absence of color. I’d like then to talk about black in art – monochrome, monotone, and the art of painting verses the art of color.”
A pristine test.mes nt to the power of pure, unmediated color and form, Ad Reinhardt’s Abstract Painting from 1959 is a masterwork from the legendary artist’s seminal series. The present work stands as the ultimate embodiment of Ad Reinhardt’s unwavering commitment to and rigorous examination of the most fundamental elements of painting itself. Author Alan Watts aptly likened the experience of viewing Reinhardt’s Black Paintings to a form of meditation saying “What is form that is emptiness, what is emptiness that is form… To study a black painting by Ad Reinhardt, involves a process similar to Zen meditation - a deceptively similar affair that consists only in watching everything that is happening, including your own thoughts and your breathing. Granting one’s vision sufficient t.mes to perceive the resonant hues and shapes in a painting by Reinhardt is equivalent to the assumption of a meditative position. Then the painting seems to yield its essence all at once.” (Alan Watts, The Spiritual in Art, Abstract Painting, 1890-1985, p. 51) Arresting in its visual intensity, the present work is a profound exemplar of Reinhardt’s monochromatic abstractions.
