For Reinhardt, the mysticism of art-as-art--art [as] supreme affirmation of self-sufficiency, separateness (from objects and their representation; presumably that was perfection)--purged the mysticism of the unconscious, as it can be called:  the romantic obsession with the hidden, chaos, regressive, base, unsublimated, guilt, origin, latent force, prime matter, penitence. Black can and has symbolized them, as Reinhardt noted, but when it appears as pure negative presence--its presence not as a living color (Matisse) or existential symbol (Kandinsky) but as a purely aesthetic phenomenon concentrating attentiveness--it loses all symbolic import.  Blacks’ getting rid of and dematerializing power, as Reinhardt called it, created a sense of non-being that was the dark of absolute freedom.  Thus pure black is perfection, self-sufficiency, and absolute freedom for Reinhardt:  pure black is the essence of art.

Where do Karen Gunderson’s black paintings stand in this debate?  Why are they such a remarkable achievement, art historically and aesthetically? Most crucially, they reveal the inner light within blackness, thus reconciling the irreconcilable.  They make it clear that while one may escape color, as Reinhardt thought, one can never escape light, as he seemed to realize.  He quotes Hokusai’s distinction between a black which is old and a black which is fresh. Fresh black involves an admixture of white while old black involves an admixture of blue, that is, color.  Interestingly enough, for Reinhardt sculpture is white, suggesting that there is no escaping a sculptural effect when one adds white to black.  That is, blackness, however flatly painted, stands out in subliminal relief because of the light in it, reminding one of Clement Greenberg’s observation that the Old Masters used gradations of light and dark to model figures, giving them a sculptural resonance.  Gunderson’s achievement--her brilliance--is to reconcile the Old Master use of chiaroscuro to shape figures with Reinhardt’s conception of black as the ultimate medium of art. Her work has the richness and complexity of Old Master painting and the purist ambition of modernist painting.  She brings out the inevitable light hidden in black, bringing to fruition Reinhardt’s suppressed intuition that pure black is a fiction--that there is no such thing as art that is completely self-sufficient, perfect, separate from life, that is, absolutely free of objects (if only in the form of collective memories), as Reinhardt wanted it to be.