AFTER THE DRIPS
by Jerry Saltz
The history of modernism reads like an esthetic Book of the Dead. At the first glimmering of photography, painter
Paul Delaroche fretted, “From today, painting is dead.” In 1912,
Marcel ÂDuchamp mused, “Painting is washed up.”
Aleksandr Rodchenko pronounced his 1921 monochromes “the end of painting.” Critic Harold Rosenberg was fond of a line, popular among the Ab-Ex crowd, declaring that the painting of “
Newman had closed the door,
Rothko had pulled down the shades and Reinhardt had turned out the lights.” And
ReinÂhardt himself once said, “I am merely making the last painting which anyone can make.”
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