America Is Hard to See

May 1–Sept 27, 2015

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White Target

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By the mid-1950s, Abstract Expressionism, the dominant artistic movement in the United States, was seen by some to have developed into a mannered style of showy brushwork. The pressing question for a younger generation was how to escape the shadow of painters such as Willem de Kooning and Franz Kline. “Whenever painting gets complicated, like Abstract Expressionism, or Surrealism,” Frank Stella said in 1964, “there’s going to be someone who’s not painting complicated paintings, someone who’s trying to simplify.”

For the painters whose work is on view in this chapter, this simplification involved rejecting traditional modes of composition in which an artist balances various shapes, colors, or textures. “In the newer American painting we strive to get the thing in the middle, and symmetrical,” Stella went on to explain. “The balance factor isn’t important. We’re not trying to jockey everything around.” Their approach involved a heightened focus on the basic geometry and physical elements of a painting, starting with the canvas itself. Most of the works in this chapter are divided evenly down or across the middle, like Agnes Martin’s This Rain, or organized around a central point as in the case of Jasper Johns’s White Target, which is based on the transportation of a preexisting image rather than a subjective “jockeying” of parts. In Die Fahne Hoch!, Stella’s stripes are determined by the width of the stretcher, demonstrating the painting’s own material logic, while Ad Reinhardt’s black painting appears monochromatic at first glance but slowly reveals its structured grid of squares. In contrast with Abstract Expressionism’s layers and fervid splatters, the space and brushwork in these paintings is mostly flat, the emotional temperature stark and reserved. Yet in questioning an artist’s subjective powers of expression and invention, they suggested a path both bold and new.

Below is a selection of works from this chapter.

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AD REINHARDT (1913-1967), ABSTRACT PAINTING, 1960-66

Ad Reinhardt, Abstract Painting, 1960–66

In America Is Hard to See

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Ad Reinhardt, Abstract Painting, 1960–66

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Narrator: At first glance, this painting by Ad Reinhardt looks like a field of solid black. On closer inspection, you can see that there are subtle variations of tone. After 1953, Reinhardt made only black canvases. His simple, meditative works are the antithesis of the action paintings of the Abstract Expressionists like Jackson Pollock. 

Contemporary artist Byron Kim talks about Reinhardt’s work:

Byron Kim: Often I’m surprised and overwhelmed by how beautiful they are. . . And I love Reinhardt’s black paintings more probably than any other artwork that I’ve come across. I think he meant them to be contentless. So he really wanted them to be nothing. So what happens when, you know, nobody wants to accept that something is about nothing, or that art is only about art. So once you say that, then people inevitably start to relate these paintings to something, or try to make them metaphysical, try to relate them to something outside of the painting somehow. You don’t know what you’re looking at. And so they don’t look like anything.

The thing that makes Reinhardt interesting to me is that he was deadly serious and it was all a big joke at the same time. But you know, you don’t get the humor in the black paintings. But to me, they’re really funny because they’re exactly that kind of humor, that kind of deadpan humor, that’s not knee-slapping humor, but because it isn’t, it’s sort of more funny to me. I’m laughing inside my brain.

At first glance, Ad Reinhardt’s Abstract Painting presents a matte black surface. On closer inspection, however, an underlying three-by-three grid structure and fluctuations in color value emerge from the nearly undifferentiated field. Reinhardt focused exclusively on black-square paintings like this one in the last ten years of his life, subtly varying the sheen and undertones of each blacksquare. In these works, including Abstract Painting, he aimed to achieve what he described as “a pure, abstract, non-objective, timeless, spaceless, changeless, relationless, disinterested painting—an object that is self-conscious (no unconsciousness), ideal, transcendent, aware of no thing but art.”

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