Ad Reinhardt, 1913-1967
Dithering in the inchoates, the usual Friday tenor. Akin to relief (tempered by laziness, bucked up by incipience). One thinks a fierce solitary spell is in the offing, pure thinking. (Never the case.) Read Susan Howe’s early essay “The End of Art” (1974)—Ad Reinhardt, Robert Lax, Ian Hamilton Finlay. Longings for classical purity. Quotes, with a few tiny inaccuracies, lines out of Ian Hamilton Finlay’s 1963 letter to French poet Pierre Garnier:
I should say—however hard I would find it to justify this in theory—that ‘concrete’ by its very limitations offers a tangible image of goodness and sanity; it is very far from the now-fashionable poetry of anguish and doubt. . . . It is a model, of order, even if set in a space which is full of doubt.To proceed contra man’s onerous capability of “being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason”: that’s one way to read that. Earlier in the letter, Finlay writes:
I approve of Malevich’s statement, ‘Man distinguished himself as a thinking being and removed himself from the perfection of God’s creation. Having left the non-thinking state, he strives by means of his perfected objects, to be again embodied in the perfection of absolute, non-thinking life . . .’ That is, this seems to me, to describe, approximately, my own need to make poems . . . though I don’t know what is meant by ‘God.’To reach a perfect dumb adequacy, a God-placid stasis: that’s one way to read that. Ad Reinhardt, out of “Art-as-Art,” a 1962 statement reprinted (it, too, with variants, here corrected) in the initial issue of Thomas Merton’s Monks Pond:
The one work for a fine artist, the one painting, is the painting of the one-size canvas—the single scheme, one formal device, one color-monochrome, one linear division in each direction, one symmetry, one texture, one free-hand-brushing, one rhythm, one working everything into one dissolution and one indivisibility, each painting into one overall uniformity and non-irregularity. No lines or imaginings, no shapes or composings or representings, no visions or sensations or impulses, no symbols or signs or impastos, no decoratings or colorings or picturings, no pleasures or pains, no accidents or ready-mades, no things, no ideas, no relations, no attributes, no qualities—nothing that is not of the essence. Everything into irreducibility, unreproducibility, imperceptibility. Nothing “usable,” “manipulatable,” “salable,” “dealable,” “collectible,” “graspable.” No art as a commodity or a jobbery. Art is not the spiritual side of business.Thus an untitled 1967 work by Robert Lax, in homage to Ad Reinhardt, Lax’s (and Merton’s) longstanding friend:
Eschewing, somewhat, Reinhardt’s insistent monochromy. Howe quotes Lax out of a 1975 letter, formally mimicking its own content:black
black
black
black
blue
blue
blue
black
black
black
black
blue
blue
blue
i like white space &Some of Lax’s work pre-dates Reinhardt’s “single scheme, one formal device” pronunciamiento. See the 1961 (printed in 1964):
i like to see a verticle
column centered
sometimes verticality helps in
another way
image follows image
as frame follows frame
on a film
verticality helps the
poet withold his
image until
(through earlier
images) the
mind is prepared
for it.
Out of a 1963 letter (one of countless Merton and Lax exchanged—most full of Joycean Finnegansesqueries—collected in When Prophecy Still Had a Voice: The Letters of Thomas Merton and Robert Lax). Merton is referring to the printing of Lax’s book, possibly Black & White (a long poem that appeared in 1966 in the Lugano Review). Merton:river
river
river
river
river
river
river
river
river
river
river
river
Like they can’t take two picas of black white black white and leave the rest. Its got to be all or nothing and by all I mean the whole book, the whole book is one poem, and I think it is to modern poetry as is Ad Reinhardt the Sufi to modern painting. It is just like Ad Reinhardt and Ad Reinhardt is just like it, and the book is so good that the typewriter ribbon gets darker with enthusiasm. You are right about small black poems and not resigning from the race (who has to? who bothers to resign?)*(Merton’s percipience—“the public that pays only for a good hoax and nothing else”—still too obviously pertinent today.) Howe quotes a “note in Ad Reinhardt’s daybook”: “How needful it is to enter into the darkness and to admit the coincidence of opposites, to seek the truth where impossibility meets us.” Nicholas of Cusa, sounding rather Keatsian. Endless wobble between clarity (the longing of Reinhardt’s black paintings) and the endless penetralium, its itchy languor, its irrevocable summons.
Let us for the moment set the reader of your book who will not play all or nothing and will not attend to every bit of black white etc. For him there is no nothing, there is nothing there, set him aside, resign from his race, stop the train and let him off. And keep on with the black white, every pica is necessary. It is good sometimes that the bird wants to fly over the valley, but the constant black white that is like Reinhardt, and underneath this book is the real poem which is not to be spoken, the guys who do not go all the way to the real poem better stop the train and get off, and they already have, they were never on the train in the first place.
If anybody comes up to you and say what does it mean what is it for black white stop the train and drop him off or remind him he is not on the train. These poems are the only ones really easy to understand that have ever been written, and other poems that seem easy are a big fraud, taking away the customer’s money for an illusion, whereas your poems are very easy to understand they mean exactly what they say, black white, blackblackblack, etc, what is simpler than that, what the idiots want anyway, you should draw them a damn blueprint of blackblackblack? Already you see the mystifications involved in such a program my dear Buster. You are the only poet today who is not imposing in the public a very great hoax. However the great question of the public that pays only for a good hoax and nothing else, this I leave to other considerations at another time and by somebody other than myself.
* Lax had written (2 November 1963):. . . i am delighted with the following news: that you are in favor of small black poems, small black calligraphies, small black musical compositions and immobile small black dances.
i, too, am in favor of all of these, and have of recent months become so generally small & black myself that it is useless for me to apply for abrogation from the whites. how come you want to get out of the race (they would snigger) you was never in it. you was never in it. you’re not so white yourself (is all i could ever reply) you’re not so white yourself, you red baboons.
Formal purity in monochromy thus sundered: to repeat “black / black / black / black” in 1963 in the United States hardly a means to reach “imperceptibility.”
i, too, am in favor of all of these, and have of recent months become so generally small & black myself that it is useless for me to apply for abrogation from the whites. how come you want to get out of the race (they would snigger) you was never in it. you was never in it. you’re not so white yourself (is all i could ever reply) you’re not so white yourself, you red baboons.
