On Art

...Art for Reinhardt had to be a monastic activity, uncontaminated by vanity or commercial ambition, and he concluded that the academy was its proper home (he himself taught for most of his career...

...He insisted that however closely others followed his prescription, their work would always be theirs, and his uniquely his...

...Now, with the publication of Art as Art: The Writing of Ad Reinhardt, edited by Barbara Rose (Viking $14.95), the mystery begins to clear...

...Comparatively small and done with a brush, they lacked even the blank hostility of minimalism...

...Reinhardt claimed his manically negative views were forced upon him by the existing situation, and given those feisty old days, that is understandable...

...Try as he would to regain his supremacy, the artist was outstripped by films and magazines, and "framed picture-making became a lean and mean business...

...I can't see how this applies, since the church's stricture against the use of effigies in worship had no effect on secular art...

...His late canvases for some reason aroused the ire of defacers, but they were not outrageous for their time...

...Written in 1943, this lecture knocks off some 500 years of esthetic toil in a couple of pages without so much as mentioning a name...

...Yet when this was eventually achieved, he had little to say about it...

...In his sarcasm, puns, pseudo-phi-listine banter, and paranoid alertness to phoniness, Reinhardt was an old-style American, cut from the same mold as Stuart Davis...

...For modernism, its ambitions fully realized, has degenerated into a grotesque makework activity subsidized by conglomerates as well as the government and is seemingly of little interest to anyone except its practitioners, teachers, critics, and dealers...

...Fitting punishments to crimes, Reinhardt demolishes all impulses other than his own, but ends this particular diatribe in a spurt of self-mockery: "It is not right for an artist who knows what's right and especially who is without sin, not to tell artists who don't know what's right, what not to do, and not cast the first stone...

...The influences of stars like Picasso and Matisse have been virtually extinguished by those of their fellow artists whose works were less compelling than the ideas behind them —the Constructivists, and names like Kandinsky, Duchamp and Ernst come to mind...

...The one work for the fine artist," goes a version of his law, "the one painting, is the painting of the one-size canvas—the single scheme, one formal device, one-color monochrome working everything into one dissolution and one indivisibility, each painting into one overall uniformity and non-irregularity...

...The broadsides in this book against individualism are splendid, but they are undermined by the writer claiming immunity for his own self-expression...

...This involved little ideological shifting on his part...

...And like Davis, he was a profoundly serious man, capable of writing beautifully, particularly about one of his abiding inspirations, Far Eastern painting and sculpture...

...De Kooning, Gottlieb, Pollock, Rothko, and Still he listed as typical of "the cafe-and-club primitive, the neo-Zen bohemian, the Vogue magazine cold-water-flat-fauve and Harper's Bazaar bum, the Eighth Street existentialist and Easthampton esthete...

...Examining the philosophy of artfor-art's sake, so long taken for granted, the painter pushed it to its logical conclusion, contending that art should be about nothing but itself...

...On the contrary, they seemed rather meek...

...Significantly, I think, the second half of the century has also seen modernism's theorists gain the upper hand almost completely...

...That it has scaled even greater heights since is what makes his fury so exhilarating and fresh to read, but I fear it is also the reason for his relative obscurity...

...Reinhardt, incidentally, was very aware of himself in relation to history...

...Beginning at the time when "a painting was a 'picture' made by an artist who was considered a special human being," he observed that what the artist "did and said by himself, alone, like a good Protestant, was important, and he signed his work...

...and artists "who think that art is not a hothouse product but an outhouse product" should be sentenced to "hard labor in the field...

...While this was not a new idea, it took on violent connotations as he applied it to 20th-century vanguardism, most of which he considered no more than an appendage of 19th-century romanticism...

...Though very much a presence on the pre- and postwar scenes, he was something of an outsider, habitually against what, at any given moment, everyone else was for...

...Thus in the 19th century he first experimented with "spectrum-colored light," then he went on to paint "funny-looking people and wild, childish scenes subconscious ideas and space-time symbols" as he recorded "his personal maladjustment to life and people...

...To him the historic move from Social Realism to Abstract Expressionism was of negligible importance...

...the two were merely sentimental evasions of the one right mode, opened decades before by geometric abstraction...

...Strange then that the late Ad Reinhardt does not enjoy greater prestige, since he was nothing if not a man of ideas, rivaling his contemporary, Barnett Newman, in both contentiousness and enigmatic output...

...But Protestant he undoubtedly was—in the very egocentricity of his attacks on egocentricity, his all-around spleen, his passion for simplicity and, above all, in his wise-ass style of questioning majority thinking...

...If a room full of Reinhardts is boring, one on its own, or surrounded by expressionist clamor, is a serene and quite rewarding experience...

...After all, he does say that artists who write, " 'art is voyaging into the night, one knows not where, on an unknown vessel,' should be put in irons and chained to galley oars...

...in a slightly jocose chronology compiled at the end of his life, he noted he was born in the year of the Armory Show and of Malevich's first abstraction...

...To go for the very jugular of modernism is not, as they say, cool...

...One can only speculate on whether Reinhardt was happy to see so many of his ideas accepted...

...On the pretext of determining who were the real artists among them, Reinhardt dispatched painters of all shapes and sizes: Milton Avery and Edward Hopper were lumped with Reginald Marsh and Isabel Bishop, as a form of insult...

...Barbara Rose believes Reinhardt was affected by the "iconoclasm" of Protestantism, his background having been Lutheran...

...Especially because Reinhardt is not really up to the rigors of philosophical argument, it would have been better if he had just shut up and painted...

...After linking up the invention of perspective with the boom in geographical exploration, Reinhardt goes on to show how the arrival of the printing press and the camera affected the artist, who could now "continue producing pretentious pictures only by exerting a tremendous amount of wit...

...Appallingly facetious at times, he could nevertheless be very amusing and, on occasion, acute...

...A typical series of injunctions, it is too copious to be quoted in full, but readers may rest assured that he thought of everything...

...Moreover, if his dogmatism appears to be the whining of a poor loser, he was unusual in painting what he preached, rather than the other way around...

...When he was not attacking his colleagues he was laying down rules for attaining true, disinterested art...

...However, the even larger coincidence implied by his birth date, December 25, he left unmarked...

...If the academy had all but completed its hammerlock on art by the time he died, though, the cult of selfhood was continuing undiminished...

...A photograph of the 'death struggle' of dead stone in the love grip of living tree trunk makes one of the most erotic and indecent pictures in the history of photography...

...Much was made of their being all black and featureless, yet they are actually more of a dark charcoal color and the plaid-like divisions in them are quite visible on close scrutiny...

...Hardly anyone escaped his lash, and he was particularly brutal to the people of his day...

...Under the heading of "artist professor and traveling design salesman holy-roller explainer-entertainer-in-residence," such disparate personalities as Albers, Newman and Motherwell got theirs...

...Indeed, he dismissed everyone but himself...

...Here he is on Angkor Wat: "No other place on this planet has assembled so much art overgrown with so much underbrush, so much classical form suffocated by so much romantic matter...

...Still, like Tom Wolfe, Reinhardt enchants more than he repels...

...Reinhardt, only 54 at the time of his death in 1967, was one of the generation of artists who came to maturity in the '30s and, after World War II, made up the New York School...

...To these biblical commands he added, as if it were necessary, prohibitions: "No lines or imaginings, no shapes or composings or representings, no visions or sensations no pleasures or pains " and so on...

...One short "history" of art included here provides an example...

...The Renaissance individual, the important unit of society, had replaced the medieval artist who had been an anonymous and collective worker...

...In fact, he refused to commit himself on the subject of younger artists, beyond implying approval of Pop (naturally...