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‘Ad Reinhardt: “Art Is Art and
Everything Else Is Everything Else”’,
Fundación Juan March, Madrid, 15
October 2021 – 16 January 2022.
Ad Reinhardt’s retrospective exhibition at the Juan
March Foundation in Madrid, Art Is Art and Everything
Else Is Everything Else, brings together a good representa-
tion of his work, divided into two sections distinguish-
able for the objects on display. The first section, Art is
Art, exhibits a carefully curated collection of forty-seven
paintings by Reinhardt, showing the artist’s evolution
from his first cubist-influenced works until his re-
nowned Black Paintings of the 1960s. The second sec-
tion, Everything Else is Everything Else, displays seventy-one
drawings, books and magazine illustrations, and various
graphic material created for different occasions. The
exhibition presents the work of an artist who regarded
the two sides of his work as neatly separated; the first
dedicated to art, while the second was about something
else. The curators1 have managed to show both together
but carefully detached. They give importance to the
graphic work, worthy of being exhibited and known,
while maintaining a distinction that the artist and the
theory of modern art considered fundamental.
The differences between Reinhardt’s graphic works
and paintings are so great that it is unnecessary to point
them out. The two activities serve distinct purposes
and are practised in very different ways.2 The relevant
1 Lynn Zelevansky, Manuel Fontán del Junco and María Toledo
Gutiérrez. See Fontán del Junco and Toledo Gutiérrez (2021) for
the exhibition catalogue.
2 Reinhardt’s graphic work has been exposed beside his paintings on
other occasions. The catalogue of the exhibition Ad Reinhardt at David
Zwirner, New York, contains a Robert Storr’s study of art comics.
See Storr (2013).
British Journal of Aesthetics pp. 493–496
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distinction between painting, and cartooning and il-
lustration was, for Reinhardt, that which distinguishes
art from not art; art being conceived as a disinterested
activity in the most radical sense. Not that cartoons
or posters lack aesthetic interest, but for him, they
were mainly instrumental. He illustrated books and
magazines and designed advertisements as a way of
earning a living. And he used cartoons and posters as
means to convey his ideas on art, politics or culture.
But unlike illustration and cartooning, painting as a
visual art form was for Reinhardt the most convenient
way to explore complete non-instrumentality.
Reinhardt’s graphic work is interesting from many
points of view, as historical documents, aesthetically
or as products of an original mind. But what seems
more fundamental is the contribution they make to
a comprehensive understanding of the painting. An
important part of the drawings are comics on art,
devoted to the humorous explanation and support of
modern art and abstraction. Moreover, the expres-
sion of his political ideas is also of interest for the un-
derstanding of the artistic work.
From his years as a student at high school and
university, Reinhardt produced numerous polit-
ical cartoons: against World War II, or capitalism,
caricatures of Hitler, Franco or Mussolini, or prop-
aganda illustrations for journals such as Soviet Russia
Today. In spite of it, although he was a committed
leftist, he never considered art to be political or ide-
ological. He did not share the avant-garde idea that
artistic autonomy is social autonomy. The main rev-
olutionary point of the classical avant-garde—which
was the union of art and life, and the collaboration of
abstract artists and workers for the emancipation of
humanity—was alien to his thinking. Moreover, he
insists again and again on the great divide between
art and life: ‘The only thing that can be said about
art and life is that art is art and life is life, that art is
494 | REVIEWS
not life and life is not art’ (Reinhardt, in Rose, 1991,
p. 114). However, there is an important connection
between his artistic purism and politics, revealed in
his critique of art institutions and the commodifica-
tion of art.
His series How to look at in P.M. journal evidences
Reinhardt’s support for contemporary abstract art
and the historical conception that underpins it. The
autonomous and non-instrumental character of art
leads to abstraction, and only abstraction guarantees
it. What is more, he claims that abstraction saves
contemporary art from all kinds of threats; among
them, banality, prejudice, drink, corruption, busi-
ness, money-grubbing were mentioned in different
cartoons. In particular, Reinhardt’s critique of ab-
stract expressionism concerned the claim to make
the viewer see something beyond the surface of the
painting. Not just because that makes art dependent
on something external, or because it was a metaphys-
ical imposture, but because it was a means of making
art more marketable and money-making. Reinhardt’s
severe and permanent critique of art institutions—
the market, museums and the artists themselves—
stands out. In other words, his graphic work points
to the political character of pure abstract painting as
a strong resistance against the commodification of
contemporary art.
Against Greenberg’s conception of modern
art history as a linear narrative from Manet to
Pollock, Reinhardt considered abstract expres-
sionism a misguided path to abstraction and au-
tonomy. A  geometric abstract painter from the
beginning, he considered himself in the line of the
classical avant-garde, inclined to cubism and su-
prematism, but clearly opposed to surrealism. He
was on Malevich’s side, not Duchamp’s. For him,
surrealism and its American heir, abstract expres-
sionism, were bastions of representation and ex-
pression—that is, of meaning and impurity. Except
for the first paintings of the thirties, which included
collages and illusionistic elements, from the forties
onwards, his paintings are always radically anti-
representational and, more relevantly in the histor-
ical context, anti-expressionist.
During the thirties, Reinhardt produced paintings
influenced by the classical avant-garde. Echoes
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of Picasso and cubism, Mondrian and plasticism
are perceptible, along with collages and surrealist
compositions (in the style of Miró). But at the end
of the decade, there is an important shift towards
bright and colourful geometric paintings. The works
then showed a preference for almost symmetrical
structures of rectangular figures. But the most
striking feature is, above all, the sense of chromatic
variation, which contrasts sharply with the mono-
chrome paintings of the fifties, which would make
him famous.
During the 1940s, Reinhardt worked in ver-
tical formats and all-over compositions. Contrasting
colours are still present, but the tones become darker
and the chromatic composition tends towards a single
tonality. In the 1950s, monochrome characterizes
Reinhardt’s style. Variations of red and blue predom-
inate in vertical formats with structures of brick-like
elements. Reinhardt’s procedure consists in applying
different shades of the same hue to the elements of
the structure without overlapping pigments. In his
red paintings, a grid of rectangles in vermillion, ma-
genta and orange give strength to the whole, while
the blue works juxtapose different shades of blue
towards violet, green or grey. The variation between
the elements is subtle and always seeks to create an
all-over effect.
It is customary to consider Reinhardt’s works from
the perspective of the black monochromes produced
from 1953 onwards, after having darkened the blue
monochromes. The black paintings are thought
of as the logical last step towards pure painting. In
1923, Tarabukin had written ‘From the Easel to the
Machine’, referring to Rodchenko’s Pure Red (1921)
as the last picture. For Tarabukin, such monochrome
represented the end of easel painting since ‘when the
painter really wanted to get rid of representation, he
did so only at the cost of destroying the painting and
only at the cost of destroying himself as a painter’
(Tarabukin, 1982, p. 139). Reinhardt’s last works are
again interpreted as the end of painting. The series
of more than fifty 60 x 60” black canvases marks the

beginning of minimal art—and its rejection of illu-
sionism—and conceptual art—and its rejection of
the perceptual nature of art.
Ad Reinhardt shared a radically anti-expressionist
sensibility3 with minimal and conceptual artists, who
rejected the metaphysical ambitions and gestural style
of American abstract expressionism. Anti-illusionism
was a common goal. Within the group of abstract anti-
expressionists, artists grouped under the label of sys-
temic painting were closer to Reinhardt’s mature style.
For them, even hierarchical composition ran the risk of
producing illusion or meaning. Besides, they saw ab-
stract expressionist theories about self-expression, the
absolute or sublimity as a justification for the commodifi-
cation of art. Now, although Reinhardt joined the heter-
ogeneous group of American artists opposed to abstract
expressionism that, along with the rise of performance,
happening and installation, were changing the artistic
landscape forever, unlike all of them, Reinhardt’s con-
ception of art remained fundamentally modern.
The colour black was a decisive resource used pro-
fusely by expressionism, and Reinhardt also made
use of it. For instance, in Black and White (1950), he
renounced the strong expressive use of black for grief
and sorrow, present in Motherwell’s Elegies for the
Spanish Republic (1948–67), and the dramatic gestures
of Kline’s work. But the expressiveness comes from
the strain between the geometric composition and
the black and grey brushstrokes. In fact, the tension
between geometry and gesture expresses Reinhardt’s
struggle for a style of his own.
In 1966, the exhibition Ad Reinhardt: Paintings at
the Jewish Museum displayed the black paintings side
by side against the white walls of the gallery, suggesting
their perception not as independent works of art, but as
elements of a series in which they derive meaning. As
a single minimalist work, displayed as identical black
elements with a minimal inner structure, they can be
taken as mere objects, not as paintings. Moreover, the
square black objects hung on the walls of the white
cube of the gallery could also induce their perception
3 Rose, B. ‘I prefer to confine myself mostly to describing the new
sensibility’, ‘ABC Art’, in Gregory Battock (1995, p. 282).
REVIEWS | 495
as elements of an installation, the new artistic genre
they helped bring into being. As installations, they
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generated a space and atmosphere in which the viewer
was immersed. The Juan March exhibition shows three
of the latest black square paintings in a cubic space that
simulates the spatial setting of the historic exhibition.
However, the historicist perspective—according
to which, the black paintings are the beginning of a
new post-pictorial era—stands in the way of a more
adequate interpretation. In the light of Reinhardt’s
writings, the black canvases may be viewed as
‘anti-anti-art, non-non-art, non-expressionist, non-
objective, non-subjective … non-dramatic … non-
decorative … non-colourist’ (Rose, 1991, p. 42). The
artist sought maximum abstraction, not to the elimi-
nation, but the creation of pure art. He tried to create
self-contained works, not black objects on white walls.
The surface is an intense solid colour, almost black,
which demands the viewer’s attention. As soon as she
concentrates on the object, a Greek cross divides the
square. In the minimal composition, only the hori-
zontal stripe on the vertical marks a slight difference
in brightness and the different tones emerging from
the canvas. And then, the spectator perceives bluish,
violet, brownish shades emerging from the black.
Black paintings are neither black nor monochrome.
Reinhardt painted these square near-black canvases
by hand. He added green, blue or red to the black
to achieve different tones, and, with turpentine, he
removed the oil from the pigment to achieve a matte
finish. Finally, he applied the paint carefully with a
brush so that no personal marks of the action could
be detected. In that manner, he avoided brushstroke
as a central expressive resource, and also as a mark of
pictorial self-referentiality.
Contrary to the idea that monochrome painting
is literal, objectual and close to conceptual art,
Reinhardt’s paintings remain purely visual. The local,
non-atmospheric character of the colour creates the
anti-illusionistic experience of a concrete painting. Its
value lies in the intense and deep experience of colour,
of beautiful expanses of intense darkness in shades of
blue, purple, green. As Frank Stella famously said:
‘what you see is what you see’, and the merit of the
496 | REVIEWS
artist is ‘to make something worth looking at’ (Stella,
cited in Battock, 1995, p. 158).4
References
Battock, G. (1995). Minimal art: a critical anthology. Berkeley,
CA: University of California Press.
Fontán del Junco, M. and Toledo Gutiérrez, M. (eds) (2021).
Ad Reinhardt. ‘Art is art… and everything else is everything else’.
Madrid: Fundación Juan March.
Rose, B. (1991). Art as art: the selected writings of Ad Reinhardt.
Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
Storr, R. (2013). How to look: Ad Reinhardt art comics. New York:
David Zwirner Books.
Tarabukin, N. (1923). ‘From the easel to the machine’ in
Frascine, F. and Harrison, A. (eds) Modern Art and Modernism:
A critical anthology. London: Harper & Row, 1982, pp.
135–142.
Francisca Pérez-Carreño
University of Murcia, Spain
fpc@um.es
https://doi.org/10.1093/aesthj/ayac006
Choreography Invisible: The Disappearing
Work of Dance
ANNA PAKES
OUP. 2020. PP. 376. £81.00 (HBK).
It is rare for a new offering in philosophical aesthetics
to merit the honorific ‘instant classic’. Anna Pakes’
tour de force Choreography invisible: the disappearing
work of dance, however, deserves this encomium in
virtue of its content and the fact that it has already
achieved the status of required reading in dance phi-
losophy. Its arguments are lucid and rich, its writing
engaging and elegant, and its approach unequivo-
cally unique. The monograph—which focuses on the
4 Work on this paper is part of the project “Normative aspects
of aesthetic appreciation”, supported by the Agencia Estatal de
Investigación (PID2019-106351GB-100).
question, ‘What kind of thing is a work of dance art?’
and offers a novel answer to it through the lens of
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analytic philosophy—is significant for three reasons.
First, Choreography invisible is a genuinely interdis-
ciplinary work in which Pakes utilizes her expertise
in dance theory and praxis to frame her philosoph-
ical proposals. One third of the book is an assiduous
re-reading of dance history from the early court dances
of the fifteenth century to the conceptual danceworks
of the twenty-first in which Pakes traces the elusive
and ‘intrinsically wriggly’ (4) concept of ‘the work’
in dance art contexts. She concludes that the work-
concept to which contemporary philosophers appeal
in discussions about the performing arts—according
to which works are entities that are uniquely authored,
relatively stable, and typically repeatable over swathes
of time and by different casts—emerges fully only in
the twentieth century danceworld, in which it remains
contentious. Hence, the standard philosophical picture
of the performable work does not fit well with many
dance art practices. This result puts pressure on cer-
tain philosophical approaches to dancework ontology
and theories of identity (such as Platonism or move-
ment structuralism), and encourages dance scholars to
reconsider several deeply entrenched myths about the
artform’s history.
Second, Pakes utilizes her acumen as a dance
insider to frame and buttress her theoretical
recommendations with vivid descriptions of many
different dance creations, eschewing explicitly (in
Chapter Eight) the common practice of appealing to
a classic stalking horse such as Swan Lake to do duty as
a ‘placeholder’ for a majority of danceworks in theo-
retical contexts. She thereby introduces philosophers
of art to dance creations with which they might not
otherwise have been familiar, while cajoling those
who philosophize publicly about dance to select
their examples with appropriate sensitivity to con-
temporary practice and dance history. As a bonus,
the word-pictures Pakes creates to elucidate sev-
eral works to which she refers repeatedly—such as
Rosemary Butcher’s Hidden Voices and Maguy Marin’s
Umwelt—rival those of the best professional critics.