Artists on Artists | Art Spiegelman on the Varied Craft of Ad Reinhardt
© 2013 Estate of Ad Reinhardt/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York; courtesy David Zwirner, New York/LondonAn illustration by Ad Reinhardt from the leftist newspaper PM, circa 1943-1947.
It’s been a banner year for the cartoonist Art Spiegelman, regarded by many as the father of the contemporary graphic novel. Long revered for “Maus,” his Pulitzer Prize-winning concentration camp epic (published in two parts in 1986 and 1991), the artist’s work is broader than many realize, as his retrospective at the Jewish Museum in New York (through March 23, 2014) reveals. The show, which has already appeared in Europe and Canada, includes Spiegelman’s early Wacky Pack and Garbage Pail Kids sketches, and closes with more recent projects, like a performance he choreographed and designed with the dance troupe Pilobolus and a colored-glass window representing an art student’s life that he made for his alma mater, the High School of Art & Design in New York. In October, Spiegelman published his monograph, “Co-Mix” (Drawn & Quarterly), and premiered his hybrid slide-show-talk-concert “Wordless!,” which focuses on the woodcut novels of early-20th-century artists like Lynd Ward, at the Sydney Opera House. It runs for one night at the Brooklyn Academy of Music on Jan. 18.
One artist who fascinates Spiegelman is the rigorous abstractionist Ad Reinhardt. Renowned for his all-black paintings, he had a simultaneous career as a cartoonist. An exhibition exhibition at David Zwirner gallery in Chelsea through Dec. 18, which celebrates what would have been his 100th birthday, uses his paintings, photographs and cartoons to showcase his multiple talents. Early in his career, Reinhardt worked as a graphic designer and political satirist. In 1946, with modern art growing in popularity, he created a cartoon series called “How to Look,” a collection of cleareyed (and hilarious) analyses of subjects like Cubism, Surrealism and abstraction. Made with collaged engravings, encyclopedia pages and newspaper ads, as well as pen, ink, pencil and brushes, they start out suggesting educational comics, becoming increasingly sophisticated over the years.
Here, Spiegelman on Reinhardt:
“Reinhardt is a riddle. I first saw his work in the early 1960s when I was in high school. We were a short walk from the MoMA. My tastes were incredibly provincial — Magritte and Dali were easier to look at than abstract postwar American painting. I was far more interested in obscure comics than in the rarefied conversation that was still going on among the Abstract Expressionists. But at some point, a friend pointed out Reinhardt, saying, ‘Just stop and look at it — it’s not black.’ If you look at these long enough for the blacks to become more liminal, then something happens. As I was recently told, they can function like mandalas, opening up areas that can take you out of yourself.
“Since my old LSD days, I’m just not very open to that. I’m interested in words and pictures. But in 1976, when Reinhardt had a show of these ‘How to Look’ pages at a New York gallery, I realized he was deeply engaged as a cartoonist. It was a revelation to find out that he was a great manipulator of words and pictures before he went over to the, um, dark side.
“Seeing this stuff again, it’s fascinating to find how little the cartoons are in person, and how jewel-like in their making. Because of their size, they seem quite humble. And while the ideas move from box to box, the visuals are collages of his modernist cartooning with old wood engravings. He used the Surrealism that he mocked in his text to invent a new form of comics as essays. When I walked into the gallery I realized how constructed these works are, how much attention it took to make them. This was a fully realized enterprise by somebody who really knew his business. You could see the loving craftwork. Reinhardt was making this art for reproduction, and when you see someone putting white paint on either side of a line to make it crisper, you know it’s somebody who really cares about that line.”
