Postmortem on an Ad Reinhardt Painting

Ad Reinhardt in his New York Studio in the 1960s. The artist worked flat, brushing and rebrushing the surface to remove all traces of the stroke. Image courtesy of the Guggenheim Museum

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Ad Reinhardt was a New York painter of the mid-20th Century (born 1913; died 1967), who started as an abstract expressionist and ended up a minimalist. In a slow progression away from color and image, he distilled his work to a series of black paintings. On the face of it, they are pictures of nothing, these big black canvases. Viewed close up and in person, they reward the serious viewer with subtle geometries, squares and rectangles, in a range of velvety black hues from red to green. Read more here.

Abstract Painting, 1960-1966, oil on canvas, 60 x 60 inches. It’s impossible to appreciate the subtleties of a Reinhardt painting on line or in print. Still, look carefully and you can see a nine-block cross and nuances in black from red to green. Image courtesy of the Guggenheim Museum

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A New Gig

Past, Present, Future, a retrospective of Anish Kapoor's work at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, up through September 7. This is the topic of my first post for ARTtistics

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Today I begin a new gig as contributor to a new blog, ARTtistics. My fellow bloggers on the site are Lenny Campello and Bill Gusky, both known for their wide-ranging interests and good writing. We three have been given a mandate to write about whatever want. How cool is that? Lenny, based in the D.C. area, and Bill, in Connecticut, have been at it for the past month already.

ARTtistics is sponsored by the art moving and storage company, Mind’s Eye. I admit, I had some initial doubts—I don’t want to compromise my writing—but I appreciate that an art-related business is interested in sponsoring art writing. It’s a nice switch from companies that make money from the art community but never give back. And the freedom to write about what interests me is, well, just like blogging on my own blog, which will continue here as usual.

I will contribute two posts a month to ARTtistics, and I already have ideas lined up through the end of the year. By the way, see that little blue-barred widget on the sidebar, right? It's an index to current ARTtistics article. Use it to see what's there, and just click to access the post.

OK, that's it for the hard sell. Now on to the story, a teaser of which is below:

A Tale of Two Cities: Anish Kapoor in Boston and New York

Overview #2: The distortion of perception is a Kapoor hallmark, and part of the pleasure of viewing his work. The man in the picture is Nicholas Baume, curator of the exhibition and chief curator of the ICA. Both images are from a slideshow on the New York Times website

Although you’ll know a Kapoor sculpture when you see it, describing one does not come close to reflecting what Kapoor sculpture is. A sculpture by Anish Kapoor is monumental, yet it pulls you in close. It defines and reflects space; yet it suggests the topography and orifices of the body. It’s concave; it’s convex. It’s hard and smooth; it’s soft and powdery; it's shiny, translucent, opaque, gooey. The materialty of the forms defines both what’s there and what’s not. Like the blind men describing an elephant by touch, Kapoor’s sculpture is all those things. And more. And less. Read more here

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