Ad Reinhardt
Ad Reinhardt
Adolph Frederick Reinhardtwas an abstract painter active in New York beginning in the 1930s and continuing through the 1960s. He was a member of the American Abstract Artists and was a part of the movement centered on the Betty Parsons Gallery that became known as abstract expressionism. He was also a founding member of the Artist's Club. He wrote and lectured extensively on art and was a major influence on conceptual art, minimal art and monochrome painting. Most famous for...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionPainter
Date of Birth24 December 1913
CountryUnited States of America
I got out of Columbia and then into the American Abstract Artist group, which had almost all the abstract artists in the coutry in it, about 40 or 50.
The artist as businessman is uglier than the businessman as artist.
I taught a lot of art history, especially Chinese, Japanese, and Indian. But the painting classes came back. The nudes came back. Not so much the still lifes. So now our department is the worst department, partly because it has the worst facilities.
The artist should once and forever emancipate himself from the bondage of appearance.
We all name ourselves. We call ourselves artists. Nobody asks us. Nobody says you are or you aren't.
Now almost every artist outside of New York is connected with some school or some museum school, and even in New York the majority are. That's an interesting fact when you take the idea of making money, making a living selling paintings. Only a dozen or two painters do that.
The job at Brooklyn is interesting because Brooklyn reflects what happened to university art departments everywhere. It might be the worst department now, and yet at one point it was the best in the country.
Art is not the spiritual side of business.
I like the idea of the museum world and the university-academic situation where artists talk to each other or where artists or art students study with artists.
The one object of fifty years of abstract art is to present art-as-art and as nothing else, to make it into the one thing it is only, separating and defining it more and more, making it purer and emptier, more absolute and more exclusive - non-objective, non-representational, non-figurative, non-imagist, non-expressionist, non-subjective. the only and one way to say what abstract art or art-as-art is, is to say what it is not.
Painting cannot be the only activity of a mature artist.
Only a bad artist thinks he has a good idea. A good artist does not need anything.
An artist who dedicates his life to art, burdens his art with his life, and his life with his art.
Art is too serious to be taken seriously.