NUMBER 107
AD REINHARDT, 1950
From across the room, it looks like someone primed the canvas and went to lunch. It's 1950, and New York painters are making a lot of noise. Pollock is flinging paint. De Kooning is beating the hell out of the canvas. Every brushstroke wants you to know who put it there. And Reinhardt paints white. Not one white. White over off-white, in short horizontal strokes stacked like brickwork. Nearly seven feet tall and barely three feet wide. A white column keeping very quiet and making you come to it. Here's what the calm hides. The guy was funny. Professionally funny. In 1946, Reinhardt drew cartoons about modern art for a New York newspaper called PM. In one of his best-known ones, a man points at an abstract painting, sneers, and asks, "What does this represent?" The painting grows arms, points back, and yells, "What do you represent?" That's Reinhardt in one gag. The painting doesn't owe you a picture. You owe it some attention. Four years later, he makes the same joke without the punch line. Nothing happens from across the room. Then you move closer. Rows appear. Whites separate. The surface starts shifting a little at a time. Everybody else was trying to knock you backward. Reinhardt made you lean forward. Then he kept going. Red paintings. Blue paintings. Then, around 1960, the black ones. Five feet square. A cross buried inside several blacks so close together your eyes need time to sort them out. He called them the last paintings anyone could make. When MoMA showed them, at least one member canceled in protest. A black square got somebody to quit the museum.