Before he established himself as one of the most revered abstract
painters in America, artist and writer Ad Reinhardt made a living by
drawing cartoons. During the 1930s and ’40s, his humourous and
frequently satirical drawings appeared regularly in print for a variety
of clients ranging from the Brooklyn Dodgers to Glamour magazine. More
often, they appeared in the pages of the communist-party affiliated
newspaper
New Masses, where they were mobilized in support of the American anti-war and labour movements.
‘Ad Reinhardt: Art vs. History’ featured approximately 300 of
Reinhardt’s original illustrations, collages and cartoons. These
included the well-known ‘How to Look’ (1946) series of playful
educational strips published in the leftist newspaper
PM, which sought to introduce the general public to the basics of modern art, and abstract painting in particular. In
How to Look at a Cubist Painting
(1946), for instance, a viewer’s incredulous query (‘What does this
represent?’) is met with the anthropomorphized painting shouting back:
‘What do you represent?’ This exhibition, which took its title from one
of Reinhardt’s essays for
ArtNews, marked the first time these
works have been shown in Europe, introducing a lesser-known aspect of
the artist’s visual production at a moment when discussions on political
satire, and cartooning especially, have a particular urgency.
In the few cases when Reinhardt’s drawings have been shown
previously, it was largely to illustrate what his paintings were not – a
practice in line with the distinctions that the artist upheld between
pictures (representations) and paintings (line, shape and colour). But,
in 1949, Reinhardt remarked of his painting and cartooning:
‘Contradictory as though these roles may seem, they can be viewed as
aspects of a unified stance.’ Although much of the work in ‘Art vs.
History’ was made long before the ‘black’ paintings that gained him
notoriety, and seems to contradict the strategies of negation and
refusal with which he is so strongly associated, for the most part the
show left speculation aside regarding how Reinhardt’s freelance
commercial work informed the development of his painterly practice.
Instead, the show presented his cartoons, illustrations and collages
as art works in their own right. In the process, it rendered Reinhardt
as idealistic and crestfallen by turns, yet steadfastly committed to his
beliefs in internationalism and equality, as well as to the politics of
looking. Smaller works – including spot illustrations and single-panel
cartoons – revealed Reinhardt’s virtuosity as a visual communicator and
are infused with a lightness nearly unthinkable within the frame of
abstract expressionism, much less organized labour. One untitled
illustration dated 1943–47 depicted an ‘unorganized employee’ riding a
snail on his way to ‘better conditions’. Other works demonstrated the
painter’s disdain for social realism, as well as his indebtedness to
Russian constructivism, cubism, dada and surrealism. Often ironic and
witty, when taken as a whole these works nonetheless registered deep
tensions within Reinhardt’s visual practice, as well as his negotiation
of concerns surrounding distribution, media and the integration of art
and everyday life. It was evident in the collage, too, where
photographic material was abstracted into geometrical compositions that
he later used in his paintings. Here, it wasn’t purity at stake in
modernism but hybridization and complexity.
As Michael Corris noted in his 2008 book on the artist, ‘radical
politics, architecture, graphic design, mass media and abstract art:
these are the terms of reference that organize and contextualize
Reinhardt’s full creative practice’. From this perspective, Reinhardt’s
interdisciplinary output also recalls Karl Marx’s oft-cited statement
that in communist society, ‘nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity
but each can become accomplished in any branch he [sic] wishes.’ If
today the divisions of labour within the arts are increasingly blurred,
and every artist can make claims to being a writer, a designer, an
editor, a critic and a curator, then it owes less to practices of
cooperation and solidarity than to ragged individualism and economic
precarity. What do
you represent?
