Sundays With Updike: "Gradations of Black"

Ad Reinhardt’s Abstract Painting 33 (1963), Frank Stella’s Die Fahne Hoch (1959), Mark Rothko’s Four Darks in Red (1958), Clyfford Still’s Untitled (1958), and Franz Klein’s Mahoning (1956) are five of the twentieth century’s purest abstract paintings, so opaque they seem to defy interpretation. Enter John Updike. He delighted in teasing meaning from abstraction. In his great 24-line poem “Gradations of Black” (The New Yorker, August 13, 1984), he visits the “third floor, Whitney Museum,” views these five famous abstracts, and ingeniously finds semblances in each of them.

Ad Reinhardt, Abstract Painting 33 (1963)

He says, “Ad Reinhardt’s black, in ‘Abstract Painting 33,’ / seems atmosphere, leading the eye into / that darkness where, self-awakened, we / grope for the bathroom switch; no light goes on, / but we come to see that the corners of his square / black canvas are squares slightly, slightly brown.”

Frank Stella, Die Fahne Hoch (1959)

He compares Stella’s striped, gray-on-black, “lustrous and granular” Die Fahne Hoch to “the shiny hide / of some hairless, geometrical reptile.”

Mark Rothko, Four Darks in Red (1958)

Regarding Rothko’s Four Darks in Red, he says it “holds grief; small lakes of sheen reflect the light, / and the eye, seeking to sink, is rebuffed / by a much-worked dullness, the patina of a rag / that oily Vulcan uses, wiping up.”

Clyfford Still, Untitled (1958)

He says that Still, in his Untitled, “has laid on black in flakes of hardening tar, / a dragon’s scales so slick this viewer’s head / is mirrored, a murky helmet, as he stands / waiting for the flame-shaped passion to clear.”

Franz Kline, Mahoning (1956)

And on Franz Kline’s Mahoning, he observes its “barred radiance; now each / black gobby girder has yielded cracks to time / and lets leak through the dead white underneath.”

That “barred radiance” is very fine, as is “small lakes of sheen reflect the light.” “Gradations of Black” is an imaginative poetical performance, unfolding a sequence of inspired interpretations in which black abstraction yields vivid representational significance.

Credit: The above photograph of John Updike is by Brigitte Lacombe.