Ad Reinhardt Quotes

“Art is Art. Everything else is everything else.”

— Ad Reinhardt

“Art is too serious to be taken seriously.”

— Ad Reinhardt

“The job at Brooklyn is interesting because Brooklyn reflects what happened to university art departments everywhere. It might be the worst department now, and yet at one point it was the best in the country.”

— Ad Reinhardt

“Now almost every artist outside of New York is connected with some school or some museum school, and even in New York the majority are. That's an interesting fact when you take the idea of making money, making a living selling paintings. Only a dozen or two painters do that.”

— Ad Reinhardt

“Only a bad artist thinks he has a good idea. A good artist does not need anything.”

— Ad Reinhardt

I tried to oppose the academic to the marketplace.

— Ad Reinhardt

“I taught a lot of art history, especially Chinese, Japanese, and Indian. But the painting classes came back. The nudes came back. Not so much the still lifes. So now our department is the worst department, partly because it has the worst facilities.”

— Ad Reinhardt

Sculpture is something you bump into when you back up to look at a painting.

— Ad Reinhardt

If some student came up and wanted to know where to study painting, you'd want to suggest someplace, but there's no place. I wouldn't know where to send a student to study.

— Ad Reinhardt

“The more an artist works the more there is to do.”

— Ad Reinhardt

“The ugliest spectacle is that of artists selling themselves. Art as a commodity is an ugly idea ... The artist as businessman is uglier than the businessman as artist.”

— Ad Reinhardt

“As an artist I would like to eliminate the symbolic pretty much, for black is interesting not as a color but as a non-color and as the absence of color.”

— Ad Reinhardt

An artist who dedicates his life to art, burdens his art with his life, and his life with his art.

— Ad Reinhardt

“It is not right for painters to think that painting is like prostitution, that 'first you do it for love, then you do it for others, and finally you do it for money.”

— Ad Reinhardt

Painting cannot be the only activity of a mature artist.

— Ad Reinhardt

“The only way to say what abstract is, is to say what it is not.”

— Ad Reinhardt

“I like the idea of the museum world and the university-academic situation where artists talk to each other or where artists or art students study with artists.”

— Ad Reinhardt

“Art is not the spiritual side of business.”

— Ad Reinhardt

“My paintings are the last paintings one can make.”

— Ad Reinhardt

The eye is a menace to clear sight.

— Ad Reinhardt

“The artist should once and forever emancipate himself from the bondage of appearance.”

— Ad Reinhardt

The one object of fifty years of abstract art is to present art-as-art and as nothing else, to make it into the one thing it is only, separating and defining it more and more, making it purer and emptier, more absolute and more exclusive - non-objective, non-representational, non-figurative, non-imagist, non-expressionist, non-subjective. the only and one way to say what abstract art or art-as-art is, is to say what it is not.

— Ad Reinhardt

“I want to emphasize the idea of black as intellectuality and conventionality.”

— Ad Reinhardt

“We all name ourselves. We call ourselves artists. Nobody asks us. Nobody says you are or you aren't.”

— Ad Reinhardt

“My painting represents the victory of the forces of darkness and peace over the powers of light and evil.”

— Ad Reinhardt

“As for a picture, if it isn't worth a thousand words, the hell with it.”

— Ad Reinhardt