Abstraction, Assemblage, and the Orientalist Gaze: Ad Reinhardt and Khmer Sculpture

In the catalogue for the exhibition Khmer Sculpture, held at the Asia House Gallery in New York in 1961, American artist Ad Reinhardt published the essay ‘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 appeared a decade earlier, in 1951, written by the American diplomat Lawrence Palmer Briggs. Reinhardt himself traveled to Cambodia in 1958, producing notes and photographs that later informed his teaching on the classical 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 criticized 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 synthesized and to how they operated in his paintings. This attempt to articulate the ancient in the modern is paralleled by Reinhardt’s writing itself, which uses the language of post-War Western 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 Asian art historical discourse.

This talk retraces Reinhardt’s project, situating it both within the artist’s adaptation of Asian aesthetics into his own artistic system and within the growing interest in Cambodian culture in the US at the time. In doing so, Reinhardt’s engagement with Cambodia will be read as part of a broader history of the politics of American philanthropy and of its gaze towards the Southeast Asian nation, outlining the potential of mainland Southeast Asian epistemologies for critically addressing Reinhardt and the modernist paradigm.