'Beat' to Beatific: Joseph Masheck Discusses the Influence of Thomas Merton on the Art of Ad Reinhardt‪.‬

From the mid-1930s as students, onwards, the painter Ad Reinhardt and the monk, writer and peacenik Thomas Merton were close friends. The slightly older Reinhardt was a politically attuned modernist with a charismatic teacher; and I am led on by a sense of both men as both contemplative and active, and of the Columbia context in the 1930s. The question concerns a major abstract painter's influence on a priest; and abstract art has, like religion, lost cultural ground in the past generation. So let us recall that it was engendered a century ago by a Russian Orthodox painter in Germany, Kandinsky; a Polish Catholic painter in Russia, Malevich; and a Dutch Reformed painter, Mondrian, who would die in New York, where all three influenced art after World War II.