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

Jackson Pollock

The chief aspect of the life and career of Jackson Pollock that has always fascinated me was his self-destructiveness. He struggled for years to achieve success and fame, and when he received it, following the period in which his "drip paintings" took the world by storm and landed him the cover of Life Magazine (1949), he abruptly abandoned the style altogether. He simply stopped making them. When he returned to work a few years following the magazine article, the color in his compositions was gone, as well as the all-over dripped lines of paint. Instead, he painted in black, some abstract compositions, but mostly figurative works that recalled some of his earliest pieces.Why would he have seemingly turned on himself and his success, at the peak of his fame? Why would he have abandoned the technique of drip painting that he had literally invented, and which had changed the course of modern art history?

The answer baffles me, and probably most others, as none of us will not ever be fully aware of an artist's intentions or process.

But yet I deeply appreciate the inner struggles that Pollock must have experienced, which ultimately prevented him from fully embracing the path of long term success and longevity his life might had taken. It would have been "easy" for him to continue his drip paintings, work with a commercial gallery in New York City, and make an absolute fortune along the way, enjoying every single moment that was given him. But he wasn't an easy man. And that's the very reason why his work was so brilliant, so groundbreaking, and so spectacular to absorb in person.

So the answers are in the paintings themselves. Here are my favorites, of which, among his non-drip paintings, Guardians of the Secret at SFMOMA tops the list.

Guardians of the Secret, 1943
Oil on canvas
48 3/8 x 75 3/8 in.

One: Number 31, 1950
Oil and enamel on canvas
8' 10 x 17' 5 5/8 in.

Number 1 (Lavender Mist), 1950
Oil, enamel, & aluminum on canvas
87 x 118 in.

Laurie Simmons: In and Around the House

It has been a year since my last entry, and I thought that writing about Laurie Simmons would be the perfect place to begin. Simmons was one of the first women photographers in the 1970s, creating work during a decade in which photography was still becoming accepted as a viable medium for art making. "In and Around the House", her seminal work from 1976-1978, is a series of photographs that depict scenes from the interior spaces of a dollhouse. These scenes are nostalgic and traditional, and what you might expect to find within its walls. However, on closer look, some of these scenes and in particular, the placement of the miniaturized dolls, are unexpected. One critic describes them to be "about the time of memory, and about those emotions which are fundamentally temporal: longing, nostalgia, presentiment, anxiety, expectation, dread." Simmons describes her pictures of the doll (which she named Jane, after her friend, the painter Jane Kaplowitz) as looking "empty and desolate. I felt that their mood counterbalanced the cuteness of the doll, and I surprised myself by finding them acceptable."

These two images are among my favorite from the series. In the first, Jane is seated on the floor, in between the chair in which she ought to be comfortably reclined, and the television opposite it. Instead, she has been displaced from her chair and positioned to face the viewer. It is a confrontational image, and one that calls into question the entire arrangement and its underlying meaning.

The same kind of displacement can apply to the second image, which depicts a messy kitchen either before or after a meal has been prepared. The clock reads a few minutes after 6:00, so most likely it is dinner time. It is filled with suggestions of a meal, and the hint of family, but there is none. Instead, it is empty and uncomfortable to view with every detail, including the arrangement of the chairs, in which a third (positioned between the table and the kitchen counter) has either fallen down or been knocked over. It is eerie, and the events either before or after this moment is left to the imagination of the viewer.

This series of photographs was most recently exhibited at Carolina Nitsch Project Room in New York in June 2008. Simmons lives and works in New York City and is represented by Sperone Westwater.

Woman/Interior IV, 1976
Black and white photograph
5 1/4 x 8 inches
Edition of 10

Empty Kitchen, 1976
Black and white photograph
5 1/4 x 8 inches
Edition of 10