THE ART CRITICS — !
How Do They Serve the Public? What Do They Say?
How Much Do They Know? Let’s Look at the Record!
Ad Reinhardt, American Abstract Artists
Ad [Adolph Dietrich Friedrich] Reinhardt, American Abstract Artists: THE ART CRITICS — ! [How Do They Serve the Public? What Do They Say? How Much Do They Know? Let’s Look at the Record!]. New York: American Abstract Artists, June 1940. First edition. 8vo. Stapled self wrappers. 12 pp. Cover typographic composition and layout by Ad Reinhardt. Small closed tear to top edge. Staple bleeding in gutters. A very good or better copy. Rare.
5.5 x 8.375 stapled booklet with 12 pages of excerpts from New York newspapers and art publications showing misstatements and contradictions of art critics with commentary by the American Abstract Artists. Brochure designed by Ad Reinhard, and distributed at American Abstract Artists Fourth Annual Exhibition, American Fine Arts Galleries, New York, June 5 – 16, 1940.
American Abstract Artists was founded in 1936 in New York City, at a time when abstract art was met with strong critical resistance. During the 1930s and early 1940s, AAA provided exhibition opportunities when few existed. Its publishing, panels and lectures provided a forum for discussion and gave abstract art theoretical support in the United States. AAA was a predecessor to the New York School and Abstract Expressionism, and contributed to the development and acceptance of abstract art in the United States. American Abstract Artists is one of the few artists’ organizations to survive from the Great Depression and continue into the 21st century.
From the booklet:
There can be no question that the American Abstract Artists maintains itself as the most authoritative group of its kind in the United States. Since 1936, the members of this group have carried the heaviest part of the burden of education and promotion of the creative effort which it represents in this country. We have seen, to our regret, not only the initiative of the Museum of Modern Art, the most influential institution of its kind, decay, but we have also witnessed political intrigue to prevent abstract artists from executing work in public buildings.
It has also been extremely obvious that a systematic campaign against the most advanced efforts in modern art, and against art in particular, is being waged by the greater part of our press.
It is indeed a mockery that these professional amateurs, the critics, should even write of Seurat, Cézanne, Van Gogh, Matisse, Picasso, Kandinsky, Mondrian, at all. With Little or no compunction and with the most blatant complacency, these gentlemen of the press have often confronted us with their piquant discussions concerning the sanity of the most significant artists of our time.. With the utmost condescension, an already confused public is being treated to such barefaced and shameless affronteries as a so-called regional esthetic, among other things. Most encouraged of all, recently, is the barren negativism expressed by our professional primitives and provincialists.
These typically flagrant expressions of a total lack of any conception of the form problem and the vital significance of its continued development, betray at the same time the failure of these self-appointed administrators of American art and traditions to accept their cultural responsibility. It is perfectly apparent that the task of objectively reporting creative accomplishment, effort and experiment has been peremptorily obscured by endless and unsubstantiated personal opinions. These facts are further proved by their super-annuated platitudes concerning ecclecticism. It makes evident that their inability to differentiate between one abstract and another is simply an inability to experience form in terms of plastic, spatial unity. Unless the forms are based upon the arbitrary shapes of heads, trees, turnips, etcetera, the experience seems not to exist at all for these gentlemen and they are left quite speechless so far as any constructive or analytical conceptions are concerned.
This speechlessness has become part of their obvious and systematic evasion. Since they possess the force of control over the art pages, it has been extremely easy for them, in a line or two of opinionated gestures and bromides, to dispense casually with some of the most significant movements and efforts of individual artists: or tucked away into some corner, an assistant is given the opportunity to reflect his mediocre prejudice. All this under the sugar-coated protection of such titles as “all the news that’s fit to print,” etc.
It should be clearly understood that we do not attempt to place the artist above criticism. The point is that any expression of mere personal opinion and prejudice, either for or against, has no place and right to existence on the pages of art criticism unless substantiated by an authentic conception of form relationships.
Fortunately, and despite this adverse press, mere negation has not sufficed. The death warrant has not been signed and infinitum; actually, artists and public are experiencing a growing interest in abstract art. The critics understand very well that the public has an extraordinary respect for the printed word, especially when it is coupled with the dignity of a famous publication. It is their method to presume that there is little or no question to their influence or authority.
Ad [Adolph Dietrich Friedrich] Reinhardt (American, 1913 – 1967) was an American painter and writer. He was renowned for his work as an abstract painter and for his influence on Minimalism; he also wrote and lectured throughout his life, using these forms to deal with matters he felt were best left out of painting. He set his date of birth in the context of a personal, cultural and political chronology, describing it as having taken place nine months after the Armory Show had ended, on the eve of Europe’s entry into World War I and during the year in which Kazimir Malevich painted the first geometric abstract painting.
Reinhardt studied (1931 – 1935) literature and then art history under Meyer Schapiro (b. 1904) at Columbia University, where he gained a broad-based arts education; also under Schapiro’s influence he became involved in what were then considered radical campus politics. Reinhardt was editor of the humorous campus publication Jester, for which he created covers in a flattened Cubist style.
Reinhardt’s decision to be an artist was strengthened by his years at Columbia, but his practical training as a painter came primarily after graduation, first at the National Academy of Design and, from 1936 to 1937, at the American Artists’ School on 14th Street. There he was affected by the alternatives proposed by the painters who ran the school, Francis Criss (b. 1901) and Carl Holty (1900 – 1973), to the then dominant Social Realism: Criss favoured asymmetrical geometry in his urban landscapes; Holty flattened and divided figures and objects into complex and broad shapes of solid colour. Reinhardt became a member in 1937 of the American Abstract Artists (AAA), of which Holty was chairman; Reinhardt also became affiliated to the Artists’ Union and the American Artists’ Congress, through both of which he met Stuart Davis, who became a great inspiration to him. Reinhardt thus allied himself with the forward-thinking American artistic–political groups of the late 1930s.
From 1936 to 1941 Reinhardt was among the relatively few abstract artists employed in the Easel Division of the Works Progress Administration’s Federal Art Project (WPA/FAP). His numerous paintings that resulted consisted of collage-based, solid-toned, linear, interlocking, geometric forms, such as Abstract Painting in which his circular and rectilinear shapes were composed as variations on small, cut-paper collages. Reinhardt seemed to have reached immediate artistic maturity. During the early 1940s his original Cubist-derived geometry grew in complexity, as organic and gestural markings gradually replaced precise, hard-edged forms. Though the foundation of his art was collage, as the decade progressed his paintings and drawings were characterized by an embellished linear activity comparable to the incipient Abstract Expressionism of some of his colleagues. Reinhardt’s work was included in The Ideographic Picture, the group exhibition organized in 1947 by Barnett Newman at the Betty Parsons Gallery in New York; among others taking part were Newman himself, Hans Hofmann and Theodoros Stamos. Apart from a year’s interruption for military service from 1944 to 1945, throughout the 1940s Reinhardt’s art focused progressively on a gestural and linear abstraction related to Abstract Expressionism.
When Reinhardt’s funding from the WPA/FAP came to an end in 1941 he began a period of commercial and industrial jobs and freelance graphic work. He was associated with the vanguard PM newspaper as an artist–reporter from 1942 to 1947, producing memorably incisive cartoons. His earliest solo shows occurred in 1943 and 1944 and recognition quickly followed. In 1944 his work was first acquired by a public collection, A. E. Gallatin’s Museum of Living Art (this collection was donated to the Philadelphia Museum of Art in 1946). Reinhardt joined the Betty Parsons Gallery in 1946, where he remained throughout his life. In 1947 he took up a post at Brooklyn College, teaching art history.
There are definite links between Reinhardt’s work and that of the Abstract Expressionists, particularly with Barnett Newman and Mark Rothko. Reinhardt’s abhorrence, however, of the biomorphism, emotionalism and cult of individuality favoured by the Abstract Expressionists led him to produce geometric paintings dominated by grid structures and by variations of a single colour, signalling a break with them. Curved forms were eliminated in favour of horizontal and vertical brick-like strokes of paint. Ragged, sinuous edges were purged. His new perception of the work of Piet Mondrian and his personal contact with Josef Albers, with whom he taught in the Yale University Art Department from 1952 to 1953, were catalysts for this return to the geometric. The solid symmetrical blocks of colours characteristic of his late paintings appeared by 1952. These rectilinearly and then squarely structured monochrome paintings were first painted in shades of blue or red and culminated in Reinhardt’s final black series, for example Abstract Painting, Black. With these ‘ultimate’ paintings, Reinhardt merged his art and his aesthetics, concentrating the viewer’s attention on gradations of colour of such subtlety that they were nearly impossible to see. Reinhardt’s early identification with the New York School was challenged by his more potent role as the precursor of Minimalism and conceptual art of the 1960s and 1970s. His reductive paintings, buttressed by some of his most complex prose, insisted on the primacy of direct observation unattended by literary or naturalistic association. These dark and seemingly invisible works were composed in nine-part, Greek cross blocks. Reinhardt pursued this form exclusively until his death.
In closing let us state that we realize we are in no sense alone. Not only painters an sculptors in our particular traditions, but artists generally, including musicians, writers, and architects are challenged by the deplorable level of American criticism. If any one is to raise this it must be those most directly concerned—the artists themselves.