Ad Reinhardt: Painter-as-Writer

Abstract

Unlike his paintings, Ad Reinhardt’s writings remain unstudied and largely unpublished. Scholars have approached his literary output as a subsidiary product, accepting at face value his insistence on the separation of art and life (and, by implication, art and writing). Even those who acknowledge the significance of the painter’s texts do so mainly because of the texts’ informational content (autobiographical, historical, theoretical, and philosophical). No scholar to date has methodically studied them as works of literary art, which they clearly are, especially when looked at as analogues to Reinhardt’s paintings, particularly those in his black square series. The essay investigates the interplay of Reinhardt’s visual sensibility and verbal dexterity and draws parallels between his permutational purgative methods employed in painting and the meticulous verbal procedures applied in crafting his texts on art. Experimenting with inflection and forms, Reinhardt challenged and subverted conventions and establ...