MUENCHEN, GERMANY.- From September 15, 2006 through January 14, 2007 Haus der Kunst - Muenchen will show the exhibition "Black Paintings". The Emergence of the Black Series - At the end of the 1940s, artists of the New York School – Robert Rauschenberg, Ad Reinhardt, Mark Rothko, Frank Stella and Barnett Newman – concerned themselves intensively with the color black. An astonishingly high number of nearly monochrome black painting series were generated and they will be shown together for the first time
in the exhibition Black Paintings.

In 1951, Robert Rauschenberg (b. 1925) was the first to begin a series with black paintings, which in 1954 led him to his Combine-Paintings. Five years later, 1956, Ad Reinhardt (1913-1967) decided to only paint black works. In 1960 he even restricted himself to a particular format and internal structure; until his death in 1967, he was to produce only square black paintings with a cross structure. Between 1958 and 1960, Frank Stella (b. 1936) created 24 black paintings. He did this, similarly to Rauschenberg, at the beginning of his career.

From 1957, Mark Rothko (1903-1970) darkened his color palette until he arrived at his Black form paintings in 1964. These black paintings were mostly site-specific and reached their climax in the works, which he had started to work on in 1964 for the chapel in Houston.

Barnett Newman's Influence - Barnett Newman never painted a complete series, but created six black paintings within a relatively short time (1949-1954). His painting Abraham, which he already painted in 1949, could therefore be considered a prelude to the black series later produced by the New York School. Already in 1963, the art critic Harold Rosenberg described Barnett Newman’s influence with the words: "Newman closed the door, Rothko pulled down the shades, and Reinhardt put out the light." The New York gallery Betty Parsons exhibited Abraham in 1950. Besides Barnett Newman, Parsons also represented Ad Reinhardt and Mark Rothko, and organized Robert Rauschenberg’s first solo exhibition in 1951. One has to assume that all three artists knew Newman’s early black painting, particularly, since all of the black series originated in the years between 1951 and 1965.

Questioning of the Self and Reorientation - The exhibition’s underlying questions are: What significance do the black paintings have in the context of the artist’s whole oeuvre? What interplay is there between the artist’s personality, the intellectual contents that concern him, and the artistic phase in which he found himself when he was painting black works? The exhibition would like to assert that the black paintings stand for breakthroughs and transitions in the artists’ oeuvres. It even wants to lead (or seduce) one to the conclusion that the black paintings could be read as a kind of self-portrait.

That the black series of these four artists mark, enable or thematize a transition or rather a transformation, is perhaps also the most interesting parallel that can be drawn between them. The black paintings had a clarifying function – for Rothko they were a climax that he downright aspired to, and for Reinhardt they became the building blocks of his great Manifesto of Refusal. In his painting Abraham, Newman defines himself as an artist. In this, his decisive year, it serves him to question himself, to become aware and to look at existence. In his black paintings, Newman defines his creative space, the black chaos from which new forms can evolve that are free from any tradition.

In their black paintings, Ad Reinhardt and Mark Rothko, the fathers of the American avant-garde, persistently and consequently pursue the development of their language to a state of maturity – both to a certain extent excessively: one in his degree of objectivity, the other in his degree of tragedy. Rothko’s black stands for emptiness and nothingness that throw existential questions and experiences back to the viewer; Reinhardt’s black stands for refusal, for invisibility, colorlessness and stoicism.

Robert Rauschenberg and Frank Stella, the young ‘freedom fighters’, use black in order to obliterate the traces of tradition and of their own conditioning, and to invent their own basic vocabulary; one imports the world of the everyday into his vocabulary, the other the world of the ambiguous and the absurd.

In the case of Rauschenberg and Stella, black stands for self-restraint to a quasi nothing that serves them as a point of departure in their search for themselves. For Rauschenberg black also means a not knowing of how he could proceed artistically, for Stella, however, it suggests a certain absurdity or rather a lack of place and timelessness. Barnett Newman’s black on the other hand is an expression of an attitude of having turned in on himself: rather than searching for inspiration in the world outside, he is looking to his own intuition. Therefore, unlike other artists’, his black paintings should not be seen as signs of transition, but rather as the essence of his creativity. For Newman black is the highest expression of the sublime.

Black as an Expression of Transition and Change - The color black seems to always be connected to the process of transformation. In an allusion to alchemy as a means, it can be interpreted as the crossing of frontiers – as a crossing over from the visible to the invisible, from the material to the spiritual, from the conscious to the subconscious. That particularly black paintings should be expressive of transition could be explained with them possessing nocturnal characteristics. In mysticism, mythology, art and literature, the night stands for transition. ‘Seeing’ in darkness effects an altered state of perception. The longer one spends time in darkness, the more one engages with it, the clearer the environment’s contours become. The process of seeing moves into the center – a conscious and perhaps more precise seeing occurs. Or one goes beyond the wish to want to recognize the environment. It is then that the night enables this special quality of a ‘not seeing (anything)’ that creates the conditions for a ‘not knowing’ to emerge. And this ‘not knowing’ as a form of purification is in turn the precondition for transition. "Shut your eyes and see", James Joyce writes in the first chapter of Ulysses.

To look at a black painting with open eyes is comparable to seeing in the night. The artist, who decides on black, demands the kind of sight that has become accustomed to the dark: the gaze meets black and is confronted with a ‘not being able to see (anything)’. This assumed ‘not being able to see (anything)’ causes a ‘being able to see things differently’, a differentiated seeing: for instance, the recognition of nuances in structure and colour. The exacerbated sight heightens the concentration on the visible and invisible, maybe even on the essence of things and one’s own self. This is true initially for the viewer of the work, although on an existential level it could also apply to the artist.

The Exhibition - The presentation of these black paintings in Haus der Kunst provides the unique opportunity to discover the differences and similarities of these works, which were produced in a post-war New York. The exhibition reveals the radicality of these artistic positions and which go hand in hand with a similar atmosphere of transition in other artistic genres such as theatre, music or literature. This new self-conception was the trigger for a fundamental new positioning in art that would be formative for the whole of the 20th century.