5 lines of words on art: Statement (1955), (a few examples from the text)1. Art is art, everything else is everything else.9. Painting as "not as a likeness of anything on earth."22. The most common mean to the most uncommon end.25. The most universal path to the most unique. And vice-versa.Reinhardt claimed his work was about painting and only painting. It is possible that this was his reaction to all the negative events going on in the world. His concentration on the painting as a painting and the painter was absent of politics and technology. Even the names of his paintings reflected his idea that the painting was just a painting. It seems appropriate that he would choose to paint this way in this time. He chooses to ignore the worlds happening and dig deeper into the meaning of painting itself. Reinhardt wanted his paintings to not reflect its surroundings: "a pure abstract, non-objective, timeless, spaceless, changeless, relationless, disinterested painting- an object that is self conscious (no unconsciousness) ideal, transcendent, aware of nothing but art." Reinhardt would continuously work on a painting, forever restoring it in the same manner he painted. The paintings were returned to his studio and restored to the way they where when they left. Reinhardt's paintings are "non-entertainment, not for commerce or mass-art publics, non-expressionist, not for oneself."Ad Reinhardt: Abstract Painting 1960-1965: Research"Ad Reinhardt's black paintings are often initially greeted with hostility by viewers. The balanced geometric divisions, often in the shape of a cruciform, and the subtle variations in form are at first impossible to discern. These inert black squares have the quality of an Egyptian mirror that forces one's image back to oneself. The black paintings seem then truly to achieve Reinhardt's goal to push painting beyond its thinkable, seeable, feelable limits, to a highly physical and psychological condition (Abstraction: ...
