Ad Reinhardt.
Conner, Jill
Woodward Gallery | New York, New York
When Frances Stonor Saunders's book The Cultural Cold War: The
CIA and the World of Arts and Letters had its U.S. release in 2000, the
declared link between the CIA-funded Congress for Cultural Freedom and
certain abstract expressionist artists and critics, notably Clement
Greenberg, sent art historians scrambling to revisit this pivotal moment
in American cultural preeminence. But attributing the rise of Ab-Ex to
prominence from 1950-67 to the direct influence of covert state
sponsorship has proved a hard nut to swallow, especially as many of the
movement's peculiarities and successes can be explained by
conservative forces already long in place. Ad Reinhardt, in particular,
used to say, "Art is art. Everything else is everything else."
However, what makes Reinhardt's still relatively minor position in
the modernist canon particularly revealing of these forces is how his
strong ties to the American Communist movement has been consistently
repressed, relegating his populist and humorous works even more to the
sidelines. A recent biography by ex-Art & Language member Michael
Corris, Ad Reinhardt (Reaktion Books, 2008), has identified the
provenance of this early work as the chill factory of the Cold War. Now
there appears "Ad Reinhardt: In the Minds of Me" at Woodward
Gallery (through December 27, 2008), which presents 92 of the
artist's drawings, collages, postcards, found objects, and letters
addressed to Olga Sheirr, his clandestine mistress of over twenty years.
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
Opening with two primal, triangular drawings from 1946, Symmetrical
Male Figure and Symmetrical Male Figure (Woman in a Man's Soul),
this collection of letters and ephemera sent to his former student, Olga
Sheirr, from 1946 to 1966 finds classical love and raw in their unique,
highly secret relationship. In a letter to Sheirr dated 1955, for
instance, the artist wrote in his typical calligraphic style:
"Upsadaisy this insane out of my mind if you're in my mind and
I lose my mind do I lose you." Direct communication, in this case,
is passed over for something that sounds more like the cut-up techniques
of William Burroughs, even though five years would elapse before Brion
Gyson first introduced the writer to them at the Beat Hotel in Paris.
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
Yet the most important Reinhardts in Sheirr's possession are
photographic reproductions, such as those showing the faded pages of
short stories by Delmore Schwartz ("Successful Love," 1961)
and Italo Calvino ("The Universal Point," 1965). Discussing
galaxies, overpopulation and universal cohabitation, Calvino's
essay goes on to say, "we got along so well together, so well, that
something out of the ordinary was bound to happen.... And instantly we
all thought of the space that could have been occupied by those round
arms of hers moving like a rolling pin." The additional collages
and articles torn from other sources further reveal Reinhardt's
uncanny interest in the clandestine.
Among the artist's beautiful stick figures are two pieces from
1946 called Symmetrical Two Travelers (1946), the only difference
between them being their size and signature. The smaller of the two,
signed "Albert Radoczy" (one of the artist's known
pseudonyms but which may have been the name of one of Reinhardt's
contemporaries), is placed very near the highlight of this
exhibition--several glass cases at the back of the gallery in which
postcards of Oriental and Renaissance nudes, even a Matisse reclining
figure, are on display. It seems that much of the passion expressed in
Reinhardt's letters paralleled his increasing interest in Eastern
erotic literature and imagery. In an envelope sent with a copy of Gore
Vidal's "On Pornography" (1966), Reinhardt included his
own hand-written poem.
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
Strangely, the figure "X" played a major but subversive
role throughout Reinhardt's life. Corris demonstrates that the
artist's early career was spent drawing cartoons for two Communist
magazines, New Masses and Soviet Russia Today, which endorsed the
struggles of the labor movement in the U.S. Although he created over 400
caricatures for leftist consumption, Reinhardt used pseudonyms like
"Darryl Frederick," "Roderick" and
"Rodney" to disguise his real identity.
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
The legacy of Reinhardt's understandable though highly
symptomatic refusal to reveal himself in his true light has continued
down to the present day, most recently in the publication of
Corris's controversial book. While scrupulously researched, it
features no images since the Ad Reinhardt Foundation refused to give the
author permission to reprint the artist's cartoons. But less
censorship would appear to attend this exhibition of love letters, which
toured last spring to the Pollock-Krasner House in Long Island and
elsewhere. Although Adolph Fredrick Reinhardt championed his own
"ultimate" form of abstraction at influential schools like
Brooklyn College, Yale University and the California School of Fine Arts
in San Francisco, we are at last beginning to discover that only a
conspiracy theory of sublimation could fathom the covert operations
underlying both his private life and those famous monochromes composed
of black and nearly black shades.
