Abstraction and Aura

When did the desire to paint the last painting begin? By the time of Ad Reinhardt and his series of Ultimate Paintings, he could already be said to be following a well-established modernist tradition. What did arrive with Ad Reinhardt, however, was a rather intriguing coupling of the very old with the very new. In the attempt to escape from what he saw as the limitations of an avant-garde position, Reinhardt was drawn back to quite distant and, for the time, rather obscure religious texts that formed part of a mystical tradition that found illumination through the celebration of all things "oxymoronic." In his notes on his final series of "ultimate" or "black" paintings, Reinhardt quotes under the category of "mystical ascent," "‘the divine dark'—‘luminous darkness.'" ¹ To serve as a kind of summation of his artistic career Reinhardt also offers this quotation from Nicholas of Cusa: "How needful it is to enter into the darkness and to admit the coincidence of opposites—to seek the truth where impossibility meets us." ² In this article I consider what coincidence of opposites it was that was sought in modernist painting, what kind of impossibility it was that modernist painting entered into when it sought the exalted domain of a "luminous darkness."

How to account, then, for this modernist attraction to the seeing of one thing in its exact opposite? Perhaps in the writing of the history of modernist painting too much attention has been given to the abstract. Maybe abstraction was never really the intention. It was not abstraction itself that was seen as the end. In Reinhardt's late paintings, however black they become, however minimal or monochrome, a trace of the figurative is still always to be found. That is not to say that the paintings were completed in an attempt to erase the figure by means of the abstract. To understand why the figure appears, perhaps there is another strategy, one that finds its analogy in the impossibility faced by the mystic in his attempt to figure God. The impassioned language of contradiction found an echo for Reinhardt, I would claim, in his efforts to approach the paradox of attempting to produce the figurative from the abstract. How could a figure emerge from that which is its negation—the abstract? This was a recurring question for Reinhardt and, I would suggest, for modernist painting in general.

Although there is probably no origin to this question, one of the more dramatic instances of its occurrence, and one that certainly left its mark on subsequent painting, was posed by the late work of Jackson Pollock. According to Michael Fried's analysis of these works, Pollock achieved the formal innovation in his "all-over" drip paintings of releasing line "from the job of describing contours and bounding shapes." ³ In the works between 1947 and 1950, line, Fried says, was "purged of its figurative character." Fried therefore argued that in Pollock's paintings line and color "could be made, for the first time in Western painting, to function as wholly autonomous pictorial elements." Although this in itself is extraordinary, it was not Pollock's ultimate goal. While much attention has been given to Fried's commentary on the line in Pollock, it has tended to draw attention away from how Fried's analysis of line is directed toward illustrating "the virtually self-contradictory character of Pollock's formal ambitions at this time." Within the most abstract of paintings, Pollock was, in fact, as Fried writes, casting "about for some way to do what seems, on the face of it, impossible: to achieve figuration within the stylistic context of his all-over, optical style." ⁴ Thus, to again make the connection here with the question that will continue to be posed after Pollock: How could the figurative emerge from that which is the negation of the figurative, how could a figure arise from the very condition to which it is supposed to be...