Ad Reinhardt's Black Paintings

I watched a documentary on Thomas Merton this weekend, as I have been thinking about him quite a bit this week after recently discussing his life and writings with an old friend of mine. Merton was an inspiration for me when I was in graduate school many years ago. His retreat from society in the 1930's to cloistered life at a Trappist monastery fascinated me, as did his dedication to prayer, surrendering his will and what he called "false ego" to God, and finding a new freedom in serving others. He was a Catholic writer and peace activist, and later expanded his theological writings to include a "demand of all humanity by God", including those outside the Christian world. Either God has all of us, or none of us. These convictions became the foundation for my own structures of belief that I had started to build for myself at the time, and which continue to stay with me today.

Merton was a close friend of Ad Reinhardt, the abstract painter who was well regarded for his "black paintings" of the 1960s. The artist also referred to them as his "ultimate paintings" because he felt he had taken his craft to the extreme and final end of abstraction, eliminating virtually all color and form. I first saw one of these works at the Berkeley Art Museum in 2001, during a visit there with my graduate professor, the late Doug Adams, who passionately described the friendship between the two men and the admiration Merton had for these paintings.

Here are two good examples, the second of which belongs to the permanent collection at the Tate Modern in London. As their curatorial notes indicate, this painting has an underlying grid of different colored squares divided by a green central horizontal band. Seen from top left, the squares are: red, blue, red, red, blue, red. Each of these colours was mixed with black paint to give a matte surface quality. But there is no mention of what Adams pointed out to me and my fellow classmates that afternoon in Berkeley, which is that there is also a square and symmetrical cross in the layers beneath the colors, which emerges slowly and quietly as the viewer allows. Perhaps it is that element - the cross - that drew Merton's attention. It certainly does for me.

Abstract Painting, 1960-65
Oil on canvas
60 x 60 in.

Abstract Painting No. 5, 1962
Oil on canvas
1524 x 1524 mm