Ad Reinhardt at The Museum of Modern Art Archives, New York, 1 June 1991 – 2 September 1991

Discovered text (extract):

[Sunday 19 January 2014]

There is just one artist always,

There is just one artist-as-artist in the artist, just one artist in the artist-as-artist.

…

There is just one thing to be said, one thing not to be said.

– Ad Reinhardt: ‘There is just one painting (Art-as-Art Dogma, Part XII)’, Artforum, March 1966

[Saturday 27 June 2020]

Think I am realising that (for me) there have only ever been three painters, and that these three painters established the territory I wanted to work in:

Braque / touch and the ‘particular’ (‘didactic’, as de Francia said)

Leger / scale and the ‘general’ or ‘universal’ (‘classical’, as de Francia said)

Reinhardt / “Only blankness, complete awareness, distinterestedness; the “artist-as-artist” only, of one and rational mind, “vacant and spiritual, empty and marvelous,” in symmetries and regularities only; the changeless “human content,” the timeless “supreme principle,” the ageless “universal formula” of art, nothing else.” (as Reinhardt did say in ‘Timeless in Asia’, Art News, January 1960).

Yes, particularly that last bit:

1. the changeless “human content”

2. the timeless “supreme principle”

3. the ageless “universal formula” of art, nothing else.

So, yes…

Reinhardt / the changeless / the timeless / the ageless.

or

Reinhardt / “human content” / “supreme principle” / “universal formula” of art, nothing else. In short, Reinhardt fucks with time while the other two “farm space” (to quote Gampopa).

David Patten: Notes on Ad Reinhardt’s unpublished and undated texts

Links: 

AD REINHARDT: [ONENESS] 2013/2014

AD REINHARDT: [ONE] 2014

AD REINHARDT: [IMAGELESS ICONS] 2014

PDF: Reinhardt | Monotonous & Ugly Spaces

PDF: Ad Reinhardt | 27.06.2020 (RESTRICTED TEXT)

PDF: Georgetown University Library Special Collections (RESTRICTED TEXT)

PDF: Ad Reinhardt | Repetition 2015

PDF: Ad Reinhardt | Prophetic Voices 2016

PDF: Ad Reinhardt | WORLD? v7 Summary Refs 2017

PDF: Ad Reinhardt | To Be Part Of Things… 2020

“Ad Reinhardt’s Chronology (Ad Reinhardt—Paintings by Lucy R. Lippard) is somber substitute for a loss of confidence in wisdom—it is a register of laughter without motive, as well as being a history of non-sense. Behind the “facts” of his life run the ludicrous events of hazard and destruction. A series of fixed incidents in the dumps of time. “1936 Civil War in Spain.” “1961 Bay of Pigs fiasco.” “1964 China explodes atomic bomb.” Along with the inchoate, calamitous remains of those dead headlines, runs a dry humor that breaks into hilarious personal memories. Everything in this Chronology is transparent and intangible, and moves from semblance to semblance, in order to disclose the final nullity. “1966 One hundred twenty paintings at Jewish Museum.” Reinhardt’s Chronology follows a chain of non-happenings—its order appears to be born of a doleful tedium that originates in the unfathomable ground of farce. This dualistic history records itself on the tautologies of the private and the public. Here is a negative knowledge that enshrouds itself in the remote regions of that intricate language—the joke.”

– Robert Smithson: ‘Collected Writings’, 1996, p81

[23.09.2022]

New York City, Day #6 | Judd 101 Spring Street & Reinhardt 732 Broadway West 8th Street

Judd writes, “In Reinhardt’s paintings, just back from the plane of the canvas, there is a flat plane and this seems in turn indefinitely deep.”

Judd installed another painting by Reinhardt, Abstract Painting, Red, 1952, on the second floor of 101 Spring Street.

Judd met Reinhardt for the first time in the early 1960s, when Judd was living at 53 East 19th Street. “I used to meet—just in the same building, going to get the Sunday New York Times on a Saturday night, it probably happened three or four times, you’d run into Ad Reinhardt, who usually didn’t want to talk either, but he always wanted to talk in the cold, for a half an hour, on the street corner. I never went to his house, but he lived nearby, somewhat.” 

Ad Reinhardt (1913-1967)

Abstract Painting, Red, 1952

Oil on canvas

63 × 43 inches (160 × 109.2 cm)

According to Reinhardt’s self-referential “Five Stages of Reinhardt’s Timeless Stylistic Art-Historical Cycle,” this painting may fall in the fourth stage, which the artist described as “early-classical hieratical red, blue, black monochrome square-cross-beam form symmetries of the fifties.”

https://juddfoundation.org/…/abstract-painting-red-1952/

“In 1966 one hundred and twenty paintings by Reinhardt were shown at the Jewish Museum for longer than usual. These probably will never be assembled again and if assembled will not be the same, since almost all have been damaged and extensively restored. In 1966 these paintings should have been hung and never moved again. Reinhardt died the next year.”

– Donald Judd: ‘On Installation’, 1982

https://www.artnews.com/…/donald-judd-moma…/amp