Murray Guy is please to announce a special performance on Saturday evening, December 17, presented by the artist Pierre Leguillon in conjunction with the art historian and curator Ute Meta Bauer.  For this event, Non-Happening after Ad Reinhardt, Leguillon will introduce and present 400-500 slides that were used in performance lectures by the New York abstract painter Ad Reinhardt, to be followed by a discussion with Bauer.

Ad Reinhardt (1913–1967) is best known for his black monochromes, or ‘ultimate paintings’, to which he devoted himself during the 1960s.   Also well known are the satirical comic strips and illustrations he made for Art News magazine and the leftwing newspaper PM.  However, little is documented about the artist’s archive of 10,000 photographic slides, held by the Ad Reinhardt Foundation in New York and rarely seen.

From eyewitness accounts it has been established that Reinhardt’s slide shows consisted of a rapid succession of details of art, decorative art and architecture, photographed during his many travels abroad. Constructing a formal analysis of artistic creation over centuries, they seemed to follow George Kubler’s hypothesis in The Shape of Time: Remarks on the History of Things that there is no progress in art.   By framing his shots so as to reveal hidden or overlooked aspects of cultural artefacts, Reinhardt offered a global ‘reading’ of the history of art, anticipating today’s algorithmic image search engines.

The event in New York with Uta Meta Bauer follows previous presentations at Raven Row, London (with Seth Siegelaub), La Maison Rouge, Paris (with Barbara Rose), and the Kadist Foundation, San Francisco (with Peter Selz.)  The discussion here in New York will consider the fact that  Reinhardt’s slides, beyond their author’s acknowledged role as a leading proponent of Abstract Expressionism and a precursor of Minimal Art, can be seen as a missing link in a history that leads from Aby Warburg’s Mnemosyne Atlas (1924–1929) to similar archival endeavours by Charles Eames, Sol LeWitt and Gerhard Richter.