I can wash my hands in the bathroom and come here.
And if I were to just gently touch the surface of this painting,
I would leave a saturated black spot.
Because this paint film is so thirsty, if you will, it's so dry.
Because he's essentially painting with pure pigment.
He's leached out all that medium, that Reinhardt's paint surface would absorb
even that residual bit of finger grease that I have and would leave a black
glossy spot which would totally disrupt the all over effect of this surface.
In addition, it would proudly announce exactly where that pictorial surface is,
which of course would run totally counter to
these kind of field affects that Reinhardt is working with, these zones of color.
That slowly advance and recede either into or away from your viewing space.
Again, the function of our old friend Hans Hofmann and push and
pull which of course is a function of color temperature.
Reinhardt has now just brought that down to its slowest and
most subtlest variation so that in fact to be able to see this painting as it were.
Without the aid of these strong raking light images,
to see what I'm talking about requires time,
it requires patience, it requires an investment in this painting itself.
I can tell you on most days,
people walk by this painting they glance at it the same way that you might glance
at a painting as you're walking through a huge museum like MoMA.
Or if you�re at the Louvre, an amazing museum,
you're walking by masterpieces left and right,
perhaps you don't even notice because you're trying to find the Mona Lisa.
Well the same thing happens in this museum all the time.
Reinhardt knew it would in fact in many museums where you see these Black paintings.
And the vast majority of people don't see the composition of this painting,
to see it requires an investment and for Reinhardt this carried moral implications.
The purity of art is something that you had to
almost expunge everything else out of your life to really get to for Reinhardt.
In a way, he's lifted this basketball hoop so high, but
if he can get there, the dunk is amazing.
Most people can't get there.
Most people don't have time to invest, to be able to get there but if you do.
If your able to you know cut out all those distractions that of course every
museum-goer is subject to text messages in your cell phone,
kid crashing into you all this commotion around.
Only if you're able to get rid of all of that do you even
have a chance of really seeing how this painting is meant.
To work and how it can function in a very experiential way.
Which is to say that Reinhardt has raised the bar very very high.
So high in fact that almost no one gets the chance to have that experience.
Here we are in an empty gallery, well lucky me, I can have that experience now.
But even you, looking through the camera here, can't.
And if you hear someone quietly cackling in the background, well, that's probably
Ad Reinhardt, because he loved the fact that you couldn't reproduce his paintings.
Even when people tried to write articles about Reinhardt, and
by the '60s, he was relatively well-known,
when people tried to take photographs of his paintings in a way that would
carry the composition in a legible way in print it was always a failure.
By the way the reason that you're struggling with that right now
is in a way intentional.
Reinhardt didn't want the commercial aspect
of photography to have any relationship to his painting.
He wanted to make a paint, so
exquisitely only about painting what paint can do when it meets the eye.
That a camera becomes almost useless,
including this video camera through which you're looking as we speak right now.
Shifting gears to look at the frame for a moment, you'll notice that, again,
this is an artist's frame very much like the previous Reinhardt.
We looked at, so that even art handlers hanging this painting,
holding it on the edges, well guess what?
You have iterations and iterations and iterations of fingerprints and
handprints all over the face, certainly the sides of the painting, and
probably the face of the painting as well.
So by handling the frame with hopefully gloves, white gloves, cotton gloves,
Reinhardt knew that he could avoid some of those damages with his own frame.
However, the frame also functions aesthetically.
It's a very matte paint, not quite as matte as the painting itself.
But Reinhardt has essentially made a transition from the blackness,
the darkness, the deepness of the painting and the whiteness of the wall
via this frame, which is really nothing spectacular to look at.
But again, he's made a neutral barrier around this painting.
So that your eye is not so
distracted by that harsh whiteness of the wall which would of course
impede your rods and cones from adjusting to the darkness of the painting.
So, in other words, an artist's frame, a frame that was conceived of very
specifically for the painting that it becomes attached to, and
by the way it's one of the reasons why this frame remains on this painting today.
Where so many other frames have been swapped out and
replaced with frames of, the flavor of the month, if you will.