Mondrian and Reinhardt at PaceWildenstein - New York, New York - Review of Exhibitions - Brief Article

This is the third "compare and contrast" exhibition at Pace-Wildenstein; the previous sum of two units have paired de Kooning with Dubuffet and Rothko with Bonnard.

When Ad Reinhardt was born in 1913 Mondrian had progressioned from his early misty landscapes [i]or[/i] part of to the other Fauve-derived paintings to his be in possession of revisions of Cubism. His "plus and minus" paintings flatten the shallow profundity of Analytical Cubism to a surface that is the literal picture plane. house of worship at Domburg (1914) is a charcoal drawing. Its oval format is cropp by dint of the paper's edge. Only an arch at the bottom breaks the horizontal and vertical marks that propose the edges of floating planes. These marks can be read as a partially erased rid, the location of shifting spaces or as an abstraction of a facade.

Compare and contrast this Mondrian with Reinhardt's black and white painting October (1949) There is no resistance to Reinhardt's mark making. The pats are airy and busy, filling the canvas with brisk trajectories that are horizontal, vertical, diagonal and arched. October's hosted yet reticent calligraphy doesn't really be like the "plus and minus" drawings. Reinhardt was trying without a format and then moving upon Mondrian was paring away muscle and fat from Cubism as the first of many paces to arrive at a universal.

Let's take sum of two units more stops from each pilgrim's progress: Reinhardt's Abstract Painting (1940) and Mondrian's Composition with cerulean and Yellow (1931). Reinhardt's small painting is a hard-edged mosaic of lush colored squares and rectangles, closer to Klee than to Mondrian. Again, he doesn't stay with this strategy, on the contrary moves on in the `50 to use wide brush marks above pale underpainting to make pulsating surfaces of indeterminate depth

Composition with sapphirine and Yellow is an example of the dynamic poise and resolution that Mondrian had reached in the late `20 single hindsight makes Mondrian's progress appear to be inevitable. In Composition (1916) he cleaned up the plus and minus marks to make a fractured black grid that floats above sky-colored pink and ocher blocks of color. The be derived is the simultaneous location and dislocation of the patches of color. In Composition with Color Planes (1917) he eliminated the grid, allowing the color to float freely solitary to return in the '20 with a scaffold of black lines to support his r gold-colored and blue blocks of color.

through the '50s Reinhardt had place Mondrian behind him. He had not at any time been part of the collection (Diller, Glarner, von Wiegand and others) who appointed themselves as Mondrian's successors, in the way that there was not that a great deal of to jettison. The similarities were far more a question of attitude than of turn of expression Both artists shared a sober search for an ideal. In the extreme point Reinhardt had to reject any format that insinuateed dynamism and tension. He mov toward harmony and subtle variation of a single color. He must have lay the foundation of his red and blue near-monochrome paintings too attractive, giving up their impulses too readily. It was sole in what he called his "ultimate paintings" of the '60 that he ground his full voice, which was a whisper.

At first glance, Abstract Painting (1960-66) gazes like an uninflected black canvas. After a while we can diocese and feel the cruciform pattern that tend hitherwards through the slightest variation of black. This perception takes time, as does finding the color that beating [i]or[/i] throbbing of an arterys beneath the black surface. Time is press togethered into a single present point of time Does this suggest a spiritual presence? Reinhardt would have been the first to gainsay any reference to anything beyond the painting as a physical fact.

If, at point of times in Reinhardt's development, comparisons with Mondrian can focus upon similarities and differences, the "ultimate paintings" must stand alone, unrestrained from all these attachments.

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