Ad Reinhardt: Mystic or Materialist, Priest or Proletarian?

Abstract

Ad Reinhardt remains an active problem, as recent developments in his scholarship shed new light on earlier perplexities in his reception. Specifically the leftist materialist reading of Reinhardt's “difficult” black square paintings (1960–67) as engaged in modernist negation needs to be pressed further. The series should be taken as an object lesson in Marxist dialectics where the play and reversal of the categories of alienated versus free activity in labor and work, identity versus nonidentity in the social object as exchange-value or use-value, and art versus life within bourgeois aesthetics ultimately aim at a critical, materialist demystification of art.