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14/9/2006

Black painting

Haus der Kunst, Munich

"Black was a sacred color for the Abstract Expressionists, it was their lapis lazuli; they made a mystique of it, partly perhaps because of its austerity, partly perhaps because there was something splendidly macho in being able to produce a good strong black." (David Sylvester)

The Artistic Climate in New York

With Abstract Expressionism, a painting style developed in America following World War Two that enabled artists to emancipate themselves from the seemingly paralyzing weight of European tradition. New York was the center of this young American art. A sense of a new dawn breaking and general openness prevailed there, concentrated in the city's Greenwich Village. Artists such as Arshile Gorky, Willem de Kooning, Robert Motherwell and Jackson Pollock, together with Barnett Newman, Ad Reinhardt, Mark Rothko and others, made up the first generation of the New York School. Different galleries served as their meeting places, such as those run by Betty Parsons, Samuel Kootz, Charles Egan and Sidney Janis, as well as clubs like the Eighth Street Club or Artists' Club.

New York now competed with Paris, until then the undisputed center of the European Modern, for the dominant position in the art world. Ad Reinhardt remembered: "I don’t know what the other people's stories about the Forties and Fifties are like, but this whole thing with success began back then. Several of my students, at least, eagerly pounced on the story that Paris was dead and that New York was the center of the art world."

It was particularly this first generation of the New York School that was open to mystical, occult and spiritual thought and to the concept of the sublime. Barnett Newman used the term in his text, "The Sublime Is Now" from 1948, and this concept was also of import to Mark Rothko. The concept of the sublime was based on the search for truth and reality. The intention of confronting the viewer with this was expressed by predominately large format works and an almost monochromatic and dark color palette.

The Emergence of the Black Series

At the end of the 1940s, artists of the New York School - Robert Rauschenberg, Ad Reinhardt, Mark Rothko, Frank Stella and Barnett Newman - concerned themselves intensively with the color black. An astonishingly high number of nearly monochrome black painting series were generated and they will be shown together for the first time
in the exhibition Black Paintings.

In 1951, Robert Rauschenberg (b. 1925) was the first to begin a series with black paintings, which in 1954 led him to his Combine-Paintings. Five years later, 1956, Ad Reinhardt (1913-1967) decided to only paint black works. In 1960 he even restricted himself to a particular format and internal structure; until his death in 1967, he was to produce only square black paintings with a cross structure. Between 1958 and 1960, Frank Stella (b. 1936) created 24 black paintings. He did this, similarly to Rauschenberg, at the beginning of his career.

From 1957, Mark Rothko (1903-1970) darkened his color palette until he arrived at his Black form paintings in 1964. These black paintings were mostly site-specific and reached their climax in the works, which he had started to work on in 1964 for the Rothko Chapel in Houston.


Self-Questioning and Reorientation

The exhibition's underlying questions are: What significance do the black paintings have in the context of the artist's whole oeuvre? What interplay is there between the artist's personality, the intellectual contents that concern him, and the artistic phase in which he found himself when he was painting black works? The exhibition would like to assert that the black paintings stand for breakthroughs and transitions in the artists' oeuvres. It even wants to lead (or seduce) one to the conclusion that the black paintings could be read as a kind of self-portrait.

That the black series of these four artists mark, enable or thematise a transition or rather a transformation, is perhaps also the most interesting parallel that can be drawn between them. The black paintings had a clarifying function - for Rothko they were a climax that he downright aspired to, and for Reinhardt they became the building blocks of his great Manifesto of Refusal.

In their black paintings, Ad Reinhardt and Mark Rothko, the fathers of the American avant-garde, persistently and consequently pursue the development of their language to a state of maturity - both to a certain extent excessively: one in his degree of objectivity, the other in his degree of tragedy. Rothko's black stands for emptiness and nothingness that throw existential questions and experiences back to the viewer; Reinhardt's black stands for refusal, for invisibility, colorlessness and stoicism.

Robert Rauschenberg and Frank Stella, the young 'freedom fighters', use black in order to obliterate the traces of tradition and of their own conditioning, and to invent their own basic vocabulary; one imports the world of the everyday into his vocabulary, the other the world of the ambiguous and the absurd.

In the case of Rauschenberg and Stella, black stands for self-restraint to a quasi nothing that serves them as a point of departure in their search for themselves. For Rauschenberg black also means a not knowing of how he could proceed artistically, for Stella, however, it suggests a certain absurdity or rather a lack of place and timelessness.

Black as an Expression of Transition and Change

The color black seems to always be connected to the process of transformation. In an allusion to alchemy as a means, it can be interpreted as the crossing of frontiers - as a crossing over from the visible to the invisible, from the material to the spiritual, from the conscious to the subconscious. That particularly black paintings should be expressive of transition could be explained with them possessing nocturnal characteristics. In mysticism, mythology, art and literature, the night stands for transition. 'Seeing' in darkness effects an altered state of perception. The longer one spends time in darkness, the more one engages with it, the clearer the environment's contours become. The process of seeing moves into the centre - a conscious and perhaps more precise seeing occurs. Or one goes beyond the wish to want to recognise the environment. It is then that the night enables this special quality of a 'not seeing (anything)' that creates the conditions for a 'not knowing' to emerge. And this 'not knowing' as a form of purification is in turn the precondition for transition. "Shut your eyes and see", James Joyce writes in the first chapter of Ulysses.

To look at a black painting with open eyes is comparable to seeing in the night. The artist, who decides on black, demands the kind of sight that has become accustomed to the dark: the gaze meets black and is confronted with a 'not being able to see (anything)'. This assumed 'not being able to see (anything)' causes a ‘being able to see things differently', a differentiated seeing: for instance, the recognition of nuances in structure and color. The exacerbated sight heightens the concentration on the visible and invisible, maybe even on the essence of things and one's own self. This is true initially for the viewer of the work, although on an existential level it could also apply to the artist.

The Exhibition

The presentation of these black paintings in Haus der Kunst provides the unique opportunity to discover the differences and similarities of these works, which were produced in a post-war New York. The exhibition reveals the radicality of these artistic positions and which go hand in hand with a similar atmosphere of transition in other artistic genres such as theatre, music or literature. This new self-conception was the trigger for a fundamental new positioning in art that would be formative for the whole of
the 20th century. In light of abstract expressionism's historical development, the impression is formed that American artists, particularly between 1950 and 1965, were carried by the idea to break away from the forming influence of the European tradition and to establish a new avant-garde centre in New York - next to Paris. With this as a backdrop, the black paintings appear much like an expression of a collective striving for artistic self-assertion.

Kindly supported by Dr. Karl Wamsler Foundation

Image: Frank Stella, Tuxedo Junction, 1960. Collection Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, The Netherlands (c) VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2006, enamel on canvas 309,9 x 185,1 cm

Haus der Kunst
Prinzregentenstrasse 1 D 80538 Munchen

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