Not Ultimate Enough: Ad Reinhardt's Great Refusal
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When Ad Reinhardt declared his black paintings 'the last paintings one can make,' he made a claim both prophetic and flawed. Prophetic, because his Ultimate Paintings achieved a purity that seemed to resolve debates on abstraction. Flawed, because 'Ultimate' overreached, claiming a universal culmination across the full range of visual conventions—Realism, Abstraction, Decoration, and Symbolism. In reality, Reinhardt delivered not a truly ultimate conclusion but the appearance of one—a mausoleum disguised as a manifesto.
This essay traces how Reinhardt’s claim to ultimacy restricts artistic vision, championing purist singularity at the expense of traditions he once mastered and might have integrated. In contrast, LG Williams’ So-Cal Midrise Paintings (2010–2016) embody an inclusive synthesis, forging a new model for the 'ultimate' painting—one built on breadth rather than refusal. The following sections outline this evolution, from the integrative tradition through Reinhardt’s reductive manifesto to Williams’ broad resolution.
In reality, Reinhardt delivered not a truly ultimate conclusion but the appearance of one…
A Tradition Betrayed: The Grand Style and Its Aftermath
The idea of artistic 'ultimacy' has roots in the grand tradition of painting. Sir Joshua Reynolds’ Discourses on Art (1769–1790) called for synthesizing all artistic conventions to achieve universal dignity. Raphael’s School of Athens (1509–1511) embodied this, blending philosophy, architecture, and portraiture, while Thomas Couture's Romans During the Decadence (1847) extended the tradition as one of its last monumental syntheses before modernism fractured the field.
Reinhardt’s 'Ultimate' points to tradition but ignores its aim to unite. Reynolds valued new ideas, composition, and richness; Reinhardt set these aside. Williams doesn’t just bring back the tradition—he makes it bigger and bolder. By joining different styles, he brings back monumentality. Allan Bloom said, “The refinement of the mind’s eye... is impossible without the assistance of art in the grand style.” Williams takes up that challenge, recapturing the wide vision once owned by Raphael and Reynolds—a vision now rebuilt piece by piece. Williams’ Midrise paintings show the world and give us ways to see it.
Reinhardt's Aesthetic Extremism
Reinhardt's Ultimate Paintings—five-foot-square black canvases with faint cross grids—show his belief that 'the one object of fifty years of abstract art is to present art-as-art and as nothing else.' These works remove color, texture, movement, and story to find a 'timeless' core, summed up in his 12 Rules for Pure Art: 'No texture,' 'No colors,' 'No movement,' 'No object, no subject, no matter.' This strict style profoundly shaped Minimalism and Conceptual art, influencing artists like Frank Stella and Robert Mangold, who echoed Reinhardt’s drive for purity.
Exhibitions from 1963 to 1965 at MoMA, Galerie Iris Clert, and the Betty Parsons Gallery imposed strict rules, including roped-off rooms, controlled lighting, and no-touch policies. Their matte surfaces resisted photography. Reinhardt’s purity led to a $100,000 lawsuit from Barnett Newman and strained relations with peers like de Kooning. Critics such as Harold Rosenberg praised their finality, writing, “Reinhardt turned out the lights.”
Reinhardt’s paintings are rigorously abstract, but not universally applicable. While their cruciform grids reference Byzantine icons he admired, stripped of content, they become hollow rituals—forms without revelation. His focus on purity narrows his scope; in contrast, Williams reintegrates figuration, symbolism, and decoration into an open visual language.
Yet this limitation was not inevitable. The tragedy—and the opportunity—lies in what Reinhardt deliberately abandoned. Archival evidence reveals the fuller scope of his unrealized potential.
The Art He Refused to Make
Archival material shows what Reinhardt deliberately set aside. He produced thousands of cartoons and illustrations for diverse outlets, inventing collage-cartoons—an innovation for newspapers. His How to Look at Art series, read by hundreds of thousands, blended wit and pedagogy to clarify abstraction.
He also maintained a vast personal archive, a visual atlas of illustrations, clippings, and photos. His slide library covered Asian calligraphy, African masks, and medieval mosaics, inspirations that rarely surfaced in his black paintings.
His political cartoons show skill in drawing people and telling stories. His commercial art demonstrates that he has mastered the visual language for the public. He taught using this work, but rejected its range, standing by his rule: 'the more stuff in [art], the worse it is.'
This deliberate incompleteness created a vacuum in the art world—a space where synthesis remained possible but unexplored. Reinhardt's refusal defined the limits of abstraction; Williams accepts that challenge and dissolves the boundary entirely, reclaiming the integrative potential Reinhardt abandoned.
Williams' Grand Synthesis: Atlas and Abundance
Reinhardt's refusal made art's scope smaller, creating an opening for a more expansive vision. LG Williams filled this gap not with simple opposition to minimalism, but with systematic complexity. Williams' six-year Midrise project trades purity for fullness, negation for synthesis. Like Warburg’s Mnemosyne Atlas, Benjamin’s Arcades Project, and Richter’s ongoing photo archive, Williams builds meaning through systematic accumulation. But where these predecessors created research tools, Williams transforms the atlas concept into finished art—combining fragments into one clear system of meaning that functions both as archive and aesthetic object.
While Reinhardt looked to Byzantium—flattened space, spiritual austerity, and cruciform structure—and then stripped away everything but the structure itself, Williams' teaching led him elsewhere. Where Reinhardt found in Byzantine art a model for reduction, Williams discovered in Asian traditions a precedent for layered complexity. Decades at UC Davis, USC, and CCA exposed him to diverse visual traditions. He viewed Chinese literati painting with the legendary C.C. Wang at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. He attended lectures by James Cahill at UC Berkeley. He spent two years in Tokyo and Kyoto as an art critic for the Tokyo Weekender, Japan’s largest English-language weekly.
These experiences shaped his understanding of visual time, negative space, and pictorial logic. For Williams, Xerox is not mere reproduction but resonance. Flowing blacks mimic ink; tonal gradations evoke the feel of handscrolls. Reinhardt studied Asian aesthetics but silenced them. Reactivated through Xerox, the motifs become layered, referential, alive.
Who could have predicted that the luminous afterlife—and future—of literati painting would emerge not in Beijing or Tokyo, but on the xeroxed walls of a cardboard shelter off Zuma Beach? Someone should inform the senior curators at the National Palace Museum in Taipei and the Tokyo National Museum. Williams’s Midrises could hold their own beside Guo Xi’s Early Spring (1072) or Hasegawa Tōhaku’s Pine Trees (c. 1595)—and point the way forward for both Eastern and Western artistic tradition... Read The Full Essay Here
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LG Williams is a Los Angeles–based artist who has held positions including Endowed University Instructor at the Academy of Art University, Robert Hughes Distinguished Visual Artist-in-Residence at The Lodge in Hollywood, California, and Emmy Hennings Distinguished Professor at D(D).DDDD University. Williams has exhibited his work in various national and international venues, including the Internet Pavilion of La Biennale di Venezia. His art has been featured in prominent publications such as Artforum, The New York Times, Times Literary Supplement, The Guardian, Japan Times, Los Angeles Times, La Stampa, Bookforum, Purple Diary, Mousse Magazine, and The Brooklyn Rail, among others.
More information can be found at: w w w . l g w i l l i a m s . c o m