Ad Reinhardt famous quotes

07-12-2025

Art is art. Everything else is everything else.
-- Ad Reinhardt

#Art #Art Is
The more an artist works the more there is to do.
-- Ad Reinhardt

#Artist
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

#Art #Business #Ideas
Art is not the spiritual side of business.
-- Ad Reinhardt

#Spiritual #Art #Business
Art is too serious to be taken seriously.
-- Ad Reinhardt

#Art #Taken #Serious
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

#Artist #Color #Interesting
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

#Thinking #Firsts #Painting
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

#Country #Art #Jobs
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

#Art #Class #Chinese
The artist as businessman is uglier than the businessman as artist.
-- Ad Reinhardt

#Artist #Businessman
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

#New York #School #Artist
An artist who dedicates his life to art, burdens his art with his life, and his life with his art.
-- Ad Reinhardt

#Art #Artist #Burden
The only way to say what abstract is, is to say what it is not.
-- Ad Reinhardt

#Way #Abstract
My paintings are the last paintings one can make.
-- Ad Reinhardt

#Lasts #Painting
I tried to oppose the academic to the marketplace.
-- Ad Reinhardt

#Opposites #Academic #Marketplace
I want to emphasize the idea of black as intellectuality and conventionality.
-- Ad Reinhardt

#Ideas #Black #Want
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

#Want #Students #Study
As for a picture, if it isn't worth a thousand words, the hell with it.
-- Ad Reinhardt

#Design #Hell #Software
My painting represents the victory of the forces of darkness and peace over the powers of light and evil.
-- Ad Reinhardt

#Light #Evil #Darkness
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

#Art #Years #Fifty
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 #Museums #Ideas
There is a black which is old and a black which is fresh. Lustrous black and dull black, black in sunlight and black in shadow.
-- Ad Reinhardt

#Black #Shadow #Dull
We all name ourselves. We call ourselves artists. Nobody asks us. Nobody says you are or you aren't.
-- Ad Reinhardt

#Artist #Names
Only a bad artist thinks he has a good idea. A good artist does not need anything.
-- Ad Reinhardt

#Artist #Thinking #Ideas
Painting cannot be the only activity of a mature artist.
-- Ad Reinhardt

#Artist #Painting #Mature

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