Approaching Absolute Zero

By ROBERT HUGHES

We are saturated in reproductions of works of art. Hence the more art books and magazines we thumb through, the less likely we are to see an original fresh, for the first time: reproduction precedes the work as the radar blip announces the incoming plane, removing its element of surprise. No well-known artist has ever been able to circumvent this; only obscure ones don't have the problem, and wish they did.

During the 1950s, the American Ad Reinhardt dissolved the problem by painting pictures so dark, so apparently monochrome, that they could not be mechanically reproduced -- images that come out on a glossy page as trite- looking black squares. Reinhardt's series of "black" paintings, completed between 1954 and his death in 1967, are among the few works produced by an American that make sense only in themselves and are utterly meaningless in their clones. Collectively they are a superb vindication of art's right to be experienced at first hand. And they have not been seen together in the U.S. for 20 years. This fact alone makes this summer's Reinhardt retrospective at Manhattan's Museum of Modern Art, jointly organized with the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles (where it will be seen from October), an event.

Reinhardt was a great purist; he was also the chief gadfly and moralist of New York art in the time of its first big flowering, the '40s and '50s. Which does not imply that other artists in the New York School lacked probity; only that Reinhardt made such a fierce point of showing where he thought art could go wrong, become soft, betray its essence. He was a fine aphoristic preacher, irresistibly quotable, and a deadly parodist. He listed the technical skills of the modern American artist as "brushworking, panhandling, backscratching, palette-knifing, waxing, buncombing, texturing, wheedling, tooling, sponging . . . subliming, shpritzing, soft-soaping . . ."

He hated the bogus mysticism that clung to interpretations of American art in the '50s -- the cult of the heroic personality, of expressive blood and guts, of the Artist as Fate-Defying Existentialist. "My painting represents the victory of the forces of light and peace over the powers of darkness and evil," Picasso had pompously announced in 1957. Well, fine, wrote Reinhardt, but "my painting represents the victory of the forces of darkness and peace over the powers of light and evil." How he would have loathed the market-and- genius cultism of the '80s! He defined art -- his own and others' -- by negations. He took to an extreme the sphinx's riddle of early Modernism, the question that leads an artist along the edge of the drop where the aesthetic impulse no longer has a toehold in common experience: How much can I jettison before this painting, this sculpture, ceases to be painting or sculpture, before its essence is lost along with its attributes?

The desire to get art down to its ultimate components and endow it with the communicative power of total austerity is very much a 20th century one. It begins with Mondrian's grids and Malevich's black square, sheds its mysticism in America and re-emerges as factual, what-you-see-is-what-you-get Minimalism. Reinhardt's work was part of this process: he cleared the way for Minimalism without being at all interested in its factuality.

Reinhardt was never a figurative painter; all his surviving work is abstract, Cubist-based at first with elements of collage. In the '40s it passed through a phase of "all-over" painting, then to loose, gridlike structures such as the lovely Red, Green, Blue and Orange, circa 1948, whose patches of blue and green seem to twinkle optically like the dispersed crosses that stand in for light on the sea in an early Mondrian. Eventually he settled on a symmetrical, predetermined array of blocks of one highly saturated color: first red (in 1952), then blue (in 1953) and finally black. Compared with what was going on in other American studios, Reinhardt's red and blue paintings looked utterly impersonal -- no freehand drawing, no textures, no "interesting" design, just the single, hieratic array, motionless and ineloquent. No American artist has ever put the claims of what he called "art-as-art" -- free from any trace of social or therapeutic agenda -- more categorically than Reinhardt.

The summing up of this is in the "black" paintings, which can absorb any amount of staring although they look utterly empty when you first see them, the pictorial equivalent of absolute zero. As William Rubin says in the catalog preface, "The visitor who 'does' the Ad Reinhardt retrospective at three miles an hour will literally not see it." Gradually your eyes adjust, as to a dark room, and a form does appear: the simplest of shapes in the final square canvases, a cross that divides the surface into nine equal subsquares. Within the black there are the finest, barely perceptible shifts of color, a disappearing gleam of red or bronze, a nuance so faint and fugitive that you wonder whether you are imagining it.

Perception? Illusion? Trick of sensory deprivation? It is impossible to know, but to pursue this infinitesimal trace of light, to stabilize it and recall it, is the discipline the painting compels. It is the ghost of the luminosity of Reinhardt's early work, the breath of his conception of the Ideal. It is also deeply romantic. One is either repelled or fascinated by it; there is no middle ground. Reinhardt's reductions, one realizes, were not those of a minimalist.