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In the early 1950s Pollock created a series of works that relied almost entirely on black, often pouring globs of thick enamel paint onto the canvas. The paintings were a reaction against his earlier, more colorful abstracts. Seemingly stung by some critics’ claims that these earlier pictures were merely decorative, Pollock set out to produce determinedly difficult works: This would disabuse “the kids who think it’s simple to splash a Pollock out,” he explained in a 1951 letter.
This stance was shared by Ad Reinhardt, who produced a series of all-black paintings that were first exhibited in 1963. One, called Abstract Painting, is a huge black square composed of nine smaller squares, each of subtly different blacks: The squares at the corners have a red tinge, while the others have a hint of blue or green. Reinhardt described it as “a free, unmanipulated, unmanipulatable, useless, unmarketable, irreducible, unphotographable, unreproducible, inexplicable icon.”
Pollock’s and Reinhardt’s rejection of the usual literal forms of representational painting was, in a sense, strengthened by the rejection of color itself. Black enabled a pure abstraction, and amplified the turning away from the aesthetic values of the Renaissance and Enlightenment that had been displaced by the same industrial technologies creating the new pigments of the modern era.
[more...]
This stance was shared by Ad Reinhardt, who produced a series of all-black paintings that were first exhibited in 1963. One, called Abstract Painting, is a huge black square composed of nine smaller squares, each of subtly different blacks: The squares at the corners have a red tinge, while the others have a hint of blue or green. Reinhardt described it as “a free, unmanipulated, unmanipulatable, useless, unmarketable, irreducible, unphotographable, unreproducible, inexplicable icon.”
Pollock’s and Reinhardt’s rejection of the usual literal forms of representational painting was, in a sense, strengthened by the rejection of color itself. Black enabled a pure abstraction, and amplified the turning away from the aesthetic values of the Renaissance and Enlightenment that had been displaced by the same industrial technologies creating the new pigments of the modern era.
[more...]
