Ad Reinhardt, Khmer Sculpture, and American Support to Cambodian Arts

In the catalogue for the exhibition Khmer Sculpture, held at the Asia House Gallery in New York in 1961, Ad Reinhardt published an essay titled ‘An Assemblage of Comments on the Mystery and Clarity of Khmer Art’. Best known for his Black Paintings and for articulating the hard-line modernist position of ‘Art as Art,’ Reinhardt’s interest in the ‘Art of the Orient’ or ‘Art of Asia’ – the title of his classes at Hunter College – remains little known. The first book in English on the Khmer arts of the Angkorian period had appeared a decade earlier, written by the American diplomat Lawrence Palmer Briggs in 1951. Reinhardt himself travelled to Cambodia in 1958, producing notes and photographs that later informed his teaching on the ancient arts of East and Southeast Asia. His 1961 essay thus stands as one of the earliest contributions to US scholarship on the subject. While the essay was criticised by specialists in Southeast Asian art history and archaeology, Reinhardt’s engagement with Asian aesthetic thought and art has generally been read positively by commentators on his work, often in relation to how these ideas were synthesised and to how they operated in his paintings. This attempt to articulate the ancient into the modern is paralleled with Reinhardt’s writing itself which uses the language of post-War art criticism and theory to engage with Khmer sculpture, making ‘An Assemblage of Comments on the Mystery and Clarity of Khmer Art’ an oddity within Cambodian art historical discourse.

Based on recent, ongoing research in the Rockefeller Archive Center and in Ad Reinhardt’s personal papers, this presentation retraces the genesis of Reinhardt’s project, situating it both within the artist’s adaption of Asian aesthetics into his own artistic system and within the growing interest for Cambodian culture in the US at the time. By so doing, I will also read Reinhardt’s engagement with Cambodia as part of a broader history of American philanthropy and its gaze towards the Southeast Asian nation, addressing some of its political implications.