How to Look at Art Comic Ad Reinhardt Modern Art
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☛ Arts and Architecture, "How to Await. A sixth and a summation of a serial on modern fine art", Ad Reinhardt, January 1947, pp. 20-27.
In this 1947 issue of Arts and Architecture, six instalments of the satirical cartoons series "How to Look" by American artist Ad Reinhardt (1913-1967) are reproduced: "How to Await" (p. 22), "How to Wait at Infinite (p. 23), "Hey, Await at The Fact" (p. 24), "How to Look at Things Through a Wine-Glass" (p. 25), "How to Look at More than than Meets the Centre" (p. 26), and "How to Await at an Artist" (p. 27). Those were originally function of a larger collection first published in the daily paper PM during the previous year (1946). A catalogue produced in 1980 by the Whitney Museum of American Art about the works of Reinhardt in its permanent drove provides a ameliorate understanding of the story backside those drawings:
From the late 1930s through the early on 1940s, Reinhardt had supported himself by assisting industrial designers (amid others, Russell Wright) and as an illustrator (his controversial cartoon of a effigy with a visible belly button made for Ruth Bridegroom'south Races of Mankind, helped resolve this now-dated effect). This training and feel were put to service in his showtime cartoon-illustration, produced for PM, a brusk-lived, leftist-oriented, New York afternoon paper. For a little under a year, beginning in belatedly January 1946, i of Reinhardt'due south cartoons appeared every few weeks in PM'south Sunday magazine section. They were information-filled parodies on the "How to" serial: "How to Look at an Artist," "How to Expect at Space," How to look at Things through a Wine-Glass," "How to Look at More Meets the Eye," and eighteen other multi-image and text sheets. The general purpose of the series was to satirize "Bauhaus, surrealist and expressionist pretentions to meaning." (Art every bit Fine art, Viking Press, 1975, p. 15). The final drawing in the PM group, "How to Look at a Spiral," never ran. The management seems to have realized that Reinhardt was mocking them too; he was fired. How to Wait at a Spiral and A Page of Jokes, a catch bag of humor in the vein of the "How to" series, survive and are in the Museum's collection only because they never go to press; the other PM cartoons be equally photograph reproduction from surviving copies of the news newspaper. (Ad Reinhardt, a concentration of works from the permanent drove of the Whitney Museum of American Art., Whitney Museum of American Fine art, 1980, p. 21)
Some cartoons were reproduced in various publication over the years, sometimes with updates by the creative person. For case "How To Expect At Modern Art In America" ran in ARTNews in 1961, for the fifteen anniversary of the kickoff publication (copies are available at the Smithsonian Annal of America Art website).
In 1975, a selection of 23 cartoons from the original serial was assembled in a booklet annotated by the critic Thomas Hess: The Art Comics and Satires of Advertisement Reinhardt (Kunsthalle Düsseldorf, Marlborough Roma, 1975). In a piece he wrote for The New York Times in 2003, art critic Richard B. Woodward borrows from Hess notes in order to provide Ad Reinhardt's cartoons with additional historical context, and explains how the series was extended after 1946:
The critic Thomas Hess wrote in a booklet for the 1975 edition that Reinhardt's lampoons are ''like precious containers of the air of New York, 1946-61.'' They are besides similar core samples from the artist'southward encephalon, revealing a side of his personality not apparent in his canvases. Using cutouts from 19th-century illustrated books and periodicals, as well every bit line drawings and manus-drawn dialogue balloons, he concocted a style in which the surrealism of J. J. Grandville and Max Ernst was inflected with a tough Queens accent. As jabbering, pugilistic and outright funny as his abstruse paintings are serene and self-independent, the cartoons tin be enjoyed both as pointed social commentary and as autobiography.
You lot need Hess'south annotations to get all the inside jokes, references to galleries long gone and to critics and artists obscured by history. But in the work for PM, Reinhardt was asked to explain the principles of the art he skilful to a mass audience. This was a time, just after World State of war Ii, when New York's fine art institutions were truly conservative and not pushovers for the latest trends. Reinhardt has a fine time deriding museums, critics and a public that believed everything in a moving-picture show had to stand for something real. One of his recurring panels shows a stick effigy pointing at a canvas of crisscrossed lines and request, ''What does this represent?'' The indignant painting, having grown eyes, a mouth, arms and legs, punches him in the jaw and answers with an fifty-fifty more aggressively New York question, ''What do yous represent?''
By the fifty'south, Reinhardt'southward colleagues were better established, and so he trained his guns on outposts that supported them, including the Museum of Modern Art. In his ''Museum Racing Form,'' a 12-panel work that he did in 1951 for the brusk-lived magazine ''Trans/formation,'' he handicaps the artists for the coming flavor and pairs them with their advocates. Cloudless Greenberg, James Johnson Sweeney and Alfred Barr pick Jackson Pollock, while Hess has his money on Willem de Kooning. He fills a final panel, ''From the Horse'south Mouth,'' with a serial of dialogue balloons. (The New York Times: "Advertizing Reinhardt, Newspaper Cartoonist: The Abstract Double Agent", Dec. 21, 2013)
The most complete collection of Reinhardt's cartoons was but produced recently. To marking the 100th anniversary of Reinhard's nascency, an exhibition was held at the David Zwirmer art gallery, in New York, from Nov vii to December 18, 2013 (read a review of the exhibition at The New York Times: "An Abstractionism Shaped by Wounded Ethics" by Hollad Cotter, November. 21, 2013). For the occasion, David Zwirmer published Advert Reinhardt: How to Look: Art Comics, a comprehensive catalogue of Reinhardt's cartoon piece of work. The catalogue includes essays past the curator of the exhibition, Robert Storr.
The gallery additionaly produced a video of curator Robert Storr giving a guided tour of the exhibition. The thirty-min video titled "Curator Robert Storr on Advertising Reinhardt at David Zwirner, New York" was recorded on November ix, 2013. Information technology is embedded below as well (the artist Chuck Close is nowadays in the crowd).
[UPDATE–Baronial 8, 2014]. At his blog 10 O'Clock Dot, Max Tohline pointed out how Reinhard's cartoon "How to Await at Things through a Wine-Glass" (from July seven, 1946) was redesigned by Edward R. Tufte as part of his volume Visual Explanations (1997). Here's how Tufte describes his approach towards Reinhard's work:
Multiples organize their images by means of a diverseness of devices: grids, compartments, phone call-outs, narrative sequence, overlap (opaque or transparent), and integration of multiple elments into a common field. Such organizational apparatus should be visually minimal; better to use the space for information. Advertizement Reinhardt's multiple in a higher place ["How to Look at Things through a Wine-Glass"], a witty introductory tour of modern artists, compares 12 versions of a wine glass. Each intriguing and smartly annotated image is surrounded by a noisy edge, administrative bloat that consumes an amazing 42% of infinite in each framed rectangle. Information technology resemble all likewise many estimator displays, where a cramped window showing the user'southward piece of work is framed past a bureaucratic debris of scroll bars, buttons, titles, icons, and over-produced drawings. Above, my redesign strips away all the frame (for the edge of each motion-picture show defines itself well plenty) and also adds each artist'due south typical palette of colors to the original stylized sketches.
In a paragraph accompanying his illustrated history of 20th-century art, Advertisement Reinhardt wrote what is probably the single all-time sentence e'er written near the point of images for information design: "As for a moving picture, if it isn't worth a thousand words, the hell with it." (Cheshire: Graphics Printing, 1997, pp. 118-119)
- Past Philippe Theophanidis
- on Baronial 7, 2014
- ― Published in Art, Communication
- Tagged: cartoon, establishment, modernism, Reinhardt, satire
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Source: https://aphelis.net/how-look-reinhardt/
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