Ad Reinhardt Quotes
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Art is too serious to be taken seriously.
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If some student came up and wanted to know where to study painting, you'd want to suggest someplace, but there's no place. I wouldn't know where to send a student to study.
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I taught a lot of art history, especially Chinese, Japanese, and Indian. But the painting classes came back. The nudes came back. Not so much the still lifes. So now our department is the worst department, partly because it has the worst facilities.
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Sculpture is something you bump into when you back up to look at a painting.
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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.
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I tried to oppose the academic to the marketplace.
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Who said last, 'A cleaner New York-school is Up To You?'
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The artists is responsible for his history and his nature, his history is part of his nature.
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Only a bad artist thinks he has a good idea. A good artist does not need anything.
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Art is Art. Everything else is everything else.
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Voyaging into the night, one knows exactly where, on a known vessel, an absolute harmony with the elements of the unreal. 1959, reacting on a remark of Robert Motherwell
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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.
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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.
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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.
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'Study the old masters. Look at nature. Watch out for armpits'. in 1956, Reinhardt is quoting Paul Cézanne here freely
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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
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vagueness is a 'romantic' value.. ..an emphasis on geometry is an emphasis on the 'known', on order and knowledge.
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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.
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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
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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.
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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.