TRACES: Barnett Newman

Today is the occasion to bear in mind the painter and theorist Barnett Newman (29/1/1905-4/7/1970), he is variously named as a member of one of several groups, schools, or artistic styles. Frequently considered an Abstract Expressionist, Newman has also been referred to as a Color Field painter, a Formalist, and even a proto-Minimalist. But the artist himself “largely objected to being looped in with any established group or identifiable style of painting”. This column is a tribute to artists, living or dead, who have left their mark in Contemporary Art. Through documents or interviews, starting with: moments and memories, we reveal out from the past-unknown sides of big personalities, who left their indelible traces in time and history…

By Efi Michalarou

Barnett Newman was born in New York City to Jewish parents who had arrived in the city five years earlier, from Poland. Raised in Manhattan and the Bronx, he took drawing classes at the Art Students League while still at high school, an activity he maintained for the next 4 years while studying for a philosophy degree from the City College of New York. After graduating, Newman worked in his father’s clothing business. In addition, during 1929-30, he again trained at the Art Students League. During his time there, he made friends with Adolph Gottlieb, who introduced him to other New York painters and gallery owners. However, he and his parents suffered severe financial hardship during the Depression, a situation aggravated by his refusal to join the Federal Art Project, which he saw as a form of welfare. Instead, he earned extra money by teaching art in various high schools. In 1936, he married Annalee Greenhouse. Around 1940, he abandoned painting to concentrate on studying ornithology and art history. He also wrote art reviews, and helped to organize exhibitions for several galleries including the Betty Parsons gallery. Then in 1944 Newman returned to painting, after first destroying most of his previous work, and over the next 5 years evolved his signature style of Colour Field Painting: a style in line with his view that, in an age of moral uncertainty and physical insecurity, the only rightful subject matter for an artist was the “sublime”. This concept of an absolute standard of excellence, or creative “grandeur”, would inspire him for most of his career. It also prompted the British art critic David Sylvester to write about the “cosmic grandeur” of Newman and the “cosmic pathos” of Mark Rothko. In 1946, the Betty Parsons Gallery began representing him. In 1947 he curated an exhibition for the gallery, entitled “The Ideographic Picture”, which showed paintings by Mark Rothko, Still, and Hans Hofmann. In this and other activities, Newman was searching for an art form which was more eternal than something taken from nature, which might date or deteriorate. The following year he wrote a major article on Colour Field Painting, called “The Sublime is Now” (1948). In the same year he produced “Onement I”, a dark red-ish canvas bisected top to bottom by a single stripe of light red. These stripes (Newman called them zips) became a regular feature of his work. He used these zips as a device, along with his uniquely large fields of rich colour, to help him “connect” with the viewer, and vice versa. Other similar works included “Be I” and “Covenant” . In addition, he wrote articles propagating his philosophical views on contemporary aesthetics for several publications, including “Tiger’s Eye”, where he was a deputy editor. In this way, he gradually built up a reputation as a rather controversial spokesman for avant-garde art. He also joined Baziotes, Rothko, Motherwell and the sculptor David Hare in founding the Subjects of the Art School, an educational project aimed at promoting modern art, which unfortunately collapsed within 12 months. His new pictures were first exhibited to the public at the Betty Parsons Gallery, in 1950, and triggered a mainly negative reaction. One painting was even defaced. A second one-man show at the same venue followed in 1951, with similar results. Disillusioned, Newman quit the gallery scene, and for the next 3 years, his work was not exhibited anywhere. He continued working, however, although his peculiar style tended to isolate him somewhat from the mainstream gesturalism of his colleagues. In 1956 he stopped painting, and in 1957 suffered a heart attack. Amazingly, he bounced back. Against a background of changing orthodoxy in contemporary abstract art, he began work on a series of 14 black and white pictures, “The Stations of the Cross” (1958-66) – which many consider to be his greatest achievement. Subtitled “Why have you forsaken me?”, Christ’s words on the Cross, the series is seen by some as a reference to the victims of the Holocaust. In 1959, the influential art critic Clement Greenberg organized a solo exhibition for him at French & Company, a show which proved instrumental in helping to rehabilitate Newman as a major contributor to abstract expressionism. During the 1960s, Newman began exploring lithographs, as in his “18 Cantos” (1963–64), and sculpture. The latter featured a series of large steel sculptures with slender shafts recalling the zips of his paintings. His best known sculptural work is probably “Broken Obelisk” (1963-69), an upside-down obelisk whose point balances on the apex of a pyramid. From the early 1960s onwards, his work began gradually to be represented in several important exhibitions of abstract expressionist painting, although he was particularly sensitive about the correct meaning given to his work, an attribute which caused him to decline an offer to participate in the 1962 exhibition on Geometric Abstraction at Whitney Museum of American Art. In 1966, the Samuel R Guggenheim Museum gave Newman his first major museum exhibition, showcasing his “Stations of the Cross”. He followed this with a number of exceptionally large paintings characterized by vibrant pure colors, such as his series “Who’s Afraid of Red, Yellow and Blue” (1966-68) and “Anna’s Light” (1968). He even explored the shaped canvas genre, painting a number of triangular canvases. On 4/7/1970, Newman died of a heart attack in New York.