Ad Reinhardt’s “Black” Paintings
By education and inclination, Ad Reinhardt (1913–1967) was a politically engaged artist. His gifts suited him well for producing cartoons and collages in left-wing publications. But could he integrate his abstract, avant-garde painting with his activism? The solution came largely through his reading...
| Main Author: | |
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| Format: | Electronic Article |
| Language: | English |
| Check availability: | HBZ Gateway |
| Journals Online & Print: | Drawer...
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| Fernleihe: | Fernleihe für die Fachinformationsdienste |
| Published: |
Brill
2015
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| In: |
Religion and the arts
Year: 2015, Volume: 19, Issue: 3, Pages: 214-229 |
| Further subjects: | B
Ad Reinhardt
Thomas Merton
“black” painting
negation theology
socially-engaged artist
slowness
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| Online Access: |
Volltext (Verlag) |
| Summary: | By education and inclination, Ad Reinhardt (1913–1967) was a politically engaged artist. His gifts suited him well for producing cartoons and collages in left-wing publications. But could he integrate his abstract, avant-garde painting with his activism? The solution came largely through his readings and lifelong friendship with Trappist monk Thomas Merton. Reinhardt’s famous “black” paintings embody negation theology—defining the deity by what it is not. Further, because these paintings require several minutes of intense looking simply to grasp, they exemplify what I call “slow art,” which recreates in a secular idiom the conditions for rumination common to spiritual practices. To jettison the ecclesiastical was not, for Reinhardt, to abandon the spiritual: Merton described his own “black” painting as “a very ‘holy’ picture … an ‘image’ without features to accustom the mind … to the night of prayer and … set aside trivial and useless images that wander into prayer and spoil it.” |
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| ISSN: | 1568-5292 |
| Contains: | In: Religion and the arts
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| Persistent identifiers: | DOI: 10.1163/15685292-01903002 |