Ad Reinhardt quotes

Ad Reinhardt was an American abstract painter, best known for his "black paintings" and his role in the development of minimal art. His work explored the boundaries between painting and pure abstraction, influencing generations of artists. He is remembered as a pioneer in both abstract expressionism and conceptual art. Here are 30 of his quotes:

The one thing to say about art and life is that art is art and life is life, that art is not life and life is not art. A 'slice-of-life' art is no better or worse than a 'slice-of-art' life. Fine art is not a 'means of making a living' or a 'way of living a life', and a artist who dedicates his life to his art or his art to his life burdens his art with his life and his life with his art. Art that is a matter of life and death is neither fine nor free.

Ad Reinhardt

The one question, the one principle, the one crisis in art of the twentieth century centers in the uncompromising 'purity' of art, and in the consciousness that art comes from art only, not from anything else.

Ad Reinhardt

vagueness is a 'romantic' value.. ..an emphasis on geometry is an emphasis on the 'known', on order and knowledge.

Ad Reinhardt

Who said last, 'A cleaner New York-school is Up To You?

Ad Reinhardt

Study the old masters. Look at nature. Watch out for armpits'. [in 1956, Reinhardt is quoting Paul Cézanne here freely].

Ad Reinhardt

What greater challenge today.. ..to disorder and insensitivity; what greater propaganda for integration than this emotionally intense, dramatic division of space? [quote in 1943, discussing the art of Piet Mondrian ].

Ad Reinhardt

Art is art. Everything else is everything else.

Ad Reinhardt

Art is too serious to be taken seriously.

Ad Reinhardt

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.

Ad Reinhardt

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.

Ad Reinhardt

The artists is responsible for his history and his nature, his history is part of his nature.

Ad Reinhardt

The one standard in art is oneness and fineness, rightness and purity, abstractness and evanescence. The one thing to say about art is, its breathlessness, lifelessness, deathlessness, contentlessness, formlessness, spacelessness, and timelessness. This is always the end of art.

Ad Reinhardt

My painting represents the victory of the forces of darkness and peace over the powers of light and evil. [1957, reacting on a remark of Picasso ].

Ad Reinhardt

The one thing to say about art is that it is one thing. Art is art-as-art and everything else is everything else. Art as art is nothing but art. Art is not what is not art.

Ad Reinhardt

There is nothing there. What you see is not what you see. What you see is nothing. Nothing but shapes, lines, colors. What you see is whats in your mind. What you see is something somebody told you to look for. Look out for anything you see! Watch it! Watch out! Take care! Don't leap before you look out.

Ad Reinhardt

And today many artists like myself refuse to be involved in some ideas. In painting – for me – no fooling-the-eye, no window-hole-in-the wall, no illusions, no representations, no associations, no distortions, no paint-caricaturing, no dream pictures of dripping, no delirium trimmings, no sadism or slashing, no therapy, no kicking-the-effigy, no clowning, no acrobatics, no heroics, no self-pity, no guilt.... no abstraction of everything, no nonsense, no involvements, no confusing painting with everything that is no painting.

Ad Reinhardt

It's been said many times in world art writing that one can find some of painting's meaning by looking not only at what painters do, but what they refuse to do.

Ad Reinhardt

An abstract painting will react to you if you react to it. You get from it what you bring to it. It will meet you half way but no further. It is alive if you are. It represents something and so do you. YOU, SIR, ARE A SPACE, TOO.

Ad Reinhardt

The one place for art-as-art is the museum of fine art. The reason of the museum or fine art is the preservation of ancient and modern art that cannot be made again and that does not have to be done again. A museum of fine art should exclude everything but fine art, and be separate of museums of ethnology, geology, archaeology, history.. .Any disturbance of a true museum's soundlessness, timelessness, airlessness, and lifelessness is a disrespect.

Ad Reinhardt

The art of 'figuring' or 'picturing' is not a fine art. An artist who is lobbying as a 'creature of circumstances' or log rolling as a 'victim of fate' is not a fine master artist. No one ever forces an artist to be pure.

Ad Reinhardt

The one art that is abstract and pure enough to have the one problem and possibility, in our time and timelessness, of the 'one single grand original problem' is pure abstract painting. Abstract painting is not just another school or movement or style but the first truly unmannered and untrammeled and un-entangled, styleless, universal painting. No other art or painting is detached or empty or immaterial enough.

Ad Reinhardt

Only a bad artist thinks he has a good idea. A good artist does not need anything.

Ad Reinhardt