A severe defence of abstract painting sits beside satire and art-world cartoons in Ad Reinhardt’s writings. Art-as-Art collects essays, statements and interviews in which he argues for art stripped of narrative, utility and entertainment, a position closely connected with his late black paintings. His famous art-world cartoons use diagrams, mock genealogies and comic labels to attack fashion, institutions and muddled theories of modern art. Reinhardt’s prose can be aphoristic, combative and deliberately absolute, so it works less like a textbook than a record of an artist defining what painting should exclude. The most useful neighbouring categories are Abstract Expressionism, modernist criticism, artists’ writings and twentieth-century debates about purity, formalism and the boundaries between art and popular culture. Read more Less
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