Vol. 31 No. 4 1964

540

MAX KOZLOFF

kind of heroic rhetoric. Newman's stance, I think, can now

seen

as isolated from Rothko's and StilI's, an attack against, rather than

affirmation of, abstract art's potentialities. To illustrate, one needn't

go further than the way he composes. Frequently the artist will

place, far out or down towards a margin, a thin band or trimming;

on a vast field, he might

said to split a hair. Pleasureless concentra–

tion on pure color, supremely illogical asymmetries of composition,

rendered on a scale which the artist has allowed to be called "sublime"–

these are trademarks of Newman's which have become extremely

prophetic.

he is so useful to young artists, it may be because his

work is so absolutist and yet so incomplete.

How Newman actually came to posit an art on such paradoxes

is not very clear. Ad Reinhardt's origins, in contrast, are quite obvious.

So too, is his relevance to contemporary abstraction. Now in his early

fifties, Reinhardt has long been speaking in the accents of mainline

European purism (deriving most saliently from the Bauhaus), which

he has nevertheless managed to clothe in the austere guise of a pioneer

American vanguardist. As a polemicist, Reinhardt persistently inveighs

against practically every quality that promotes distinction and lends

interest to the bringing together of visual form-value contrast, tactile

change, spatial dynamics, and so on. But all this negativism has merely

been a screen for the far less vocal protection of Reinhardt's own sense

of art-manifested most typically in picture facades that seem to

purvey one unitary sensation, such as of black. Only upon the most

minute scrutiny, then, does one discover that this darkness yields seg–

mental surface sheens of copper blue, green or purple. What is dis–

turbing in Reinhardt, whether conscious on his part or not, is the

dissolution of an already faintly perceived grid-like stability into the

invisible. Insistently provoking the spectator to discover almost inde–

cipherable changes (not even so much of hue as of light refraction

or mineral content), he dilutes the nascent discovery in such a way

that one is always finding a relationship only to be on the verge of

losing it. Furthermore, it is not possible to tell whether Reinhardt is

motivated by some pristine conservationism or a hostility whose over–

tones are by no means "pure." Oertainly whatever visual play is emitted

from the penumbral regions of one of his canvases comes to have an

explicitly optical, rather than sensuous, value. And here, I think, in the

implicitly mechanistic ambiance of Reinhardt, and in the specific

discomfort and incredulity which he provokes, many younger abstrac–

tionists have assigned themselves a territory in which to move around.

Somewhere along these lines indeed, several tendencies can