The Barney Newman Story
"His work is still too much: too big, too ambitious, too risky, too unreasonable."
by John Perreault
The disquieting and thus the mostimportant aspect of Barnett Newman's major paintings is that they are embarrassing. They force we sophisticates to stutter and stammer or take refuge in silence. Their in-your-face use of scale induces awe or fear---well, at least, a kind of nervousness. What am I supposed to be looking at? Why am I so acutely aware of my looking, and, ugh, my own body?
Enough time has passed since the 1971 MOMA Newman retrospective to allow and in fact require a second look. A new retrospective curated by Ann Temkin is at the Philadelphia Museum of Art until July 7, after which it travels to the Tate. It is a must for anyone interested in painting, anyone interested in art.
At this point in time, there have been bigger paintings and paintings much neater. But, when you look at Uriel of 1955 (eight feet high and a mere 18 feet wide) you understand all at once what Newman meant when he said he was dealing with scale not size, place not space, paintings not pictures. One vertical stripe is nearly robin's egg blue. But let’s call it a zip, which later became the artist’s preferred term, apparently to distinguish himself from and deny paternity of the neatly painted stripes the proliferated in the Hard Edge '60s. In relation to the enormous field of the same color, this zip is exactly where it needs to be, separated by two black zips, or on top of one wider zip, the same but not the same. And then there's the two casual slivers of white paint to the left and right of the three or possibly two, prime zips. There is no system, and in this painting at least, no "hidden square." And certainly no Golden Section. The placement of the fields and the dividing up of the expanse of canvas into zones is achieved by sheer nerve. After the fact, no matter how a-rational, the painting seems self-evident or, to use a '60s word, apodictic. "Uriel" is there, not as décor, but as a fact of nature: light but not light, color but not color, space but not space.
And now for the Barney Newman made-for. We skip the Great Depression. Except for Barney running for mayor of New York in 1933 on a pro-art, pro-outdoor café platform, it’s all too depressing. We skip Barney taking charge of his father's suit factory to prevent bankruptcy. Not visual enough.
But then three years after World War II, on his birthday, he makes what he considers to be his first real painting now called Onement. He is 43.
His first show at the Betty Parsons Gallery in 1951 is a failure; his second show in 1952 is an even bigger failure. He stops painting for three years. Paints Uriel. Than stops again. Only in 1963 when a retrospective at the new Bennington College Art Gallery moves to French and Company under Clement Greenberg's "advisorship" does he get some belated recognition.
He is friends with Pollock with Rothko and on good terms with de Kooning but he usually wears a suit and tie, has a neatly trimmed moustache and carries a monocle because he is always loosing his reading glasses. Dapper but not a dandy.
But there’s more.
His wife Annalee supports him for 17 years teaching high school stenography! He visits and loves Ohio earth mounds in 1949! As an amateur ornithologists he seriously proposes birds should be classified by the complexity of their songs! At a conference he attacks philosopher Susanne Langer to her face with remarks that later become “Aesthetics is for the artist as ornithology is for the birds”! He says he would rather visit the Canadian tundra than Paris! At one point the Newmans are so poor they have to move to Brooklyn Heights! After his heart attack Annalee routinely lugs him up the stairs to the studio so he can paint! Doesn’t have his first solo museum show until he’s 61 when critic Lawrence Alloway inserts Stations of the Cross into the Guggenheim! After ten years without a one-man show his 1969 exhibition at Knoedler is a success! Andy Warhol is quoted as saying that Barney goes to more parties than he does. The opening is a benefit for the Frank O'Hara Foundation and the poets are all there!
No, no matter how hard I try the Barney Newman Story is an unlikely Hollywood or HBO offering. Late-starter makes good is not an option. You can't make a painting about laying down a strip of masking tape or watching big expanses of paint slowly dry. He didn't cut off his ear. He didn't die in a car crash. The successful attack upon European modernism, i.e. Cubism, and the easel painting is where the drama is. Newman really believed that being an artist was the most important thing that anyone could be. That was what sustained him; that was why he was and still is an example for other artists. You can't make a movie about commitment and talent. The paintings are already that movie.
Was he really the grandfather of the reductive canvas, the shaped canvas, and may the muses help us, Color Field painting? Enough cant has passed under the bridge to allow a less market-driven perception of Newman's achievement. Newman was a generous, friendly guy, and so he did little to stem the art world perception that his work was the precedent for both Hard Edge and Post-Painterly Abstraction and nothing but. It was the usually unstated "nothing but" that was the killer. His paintings did get neater and more "out-of-the-tube" and in the '60s he seems to have stopped talking about the sublime. Furthermore, art took a left turn or some would say a U-turn in the '60s. If he had lived beyond 1970, it is doubtful he would have become more political than his 1968 barbed wire "Lace Curtain for Mayor Daley."
But times have changed. At this point, having lived through the death of painting at least three times over, what once might have looked like pomposity in Newman's big ones, now looks like grandeur and hope. What idiots saw as emptiness now looks like majesty or Nothingness. To see MOMA's "Vir Heroicus Sublimis", not only in the context of "Uriel" and "Anna's Light" and other megapaintings, but also in the same breath as the 1948 breakthrough painting called "Onement", the objectlike narrow stripe paintings, and the amazingly still controversial "Stations of the Cross" is to see it anew.
Don't get me wrong I too have a taste for the tasteful and the pragmatic, but we now want more again, no matter how scary or embarrassing. A taste for what I would call plain painting is too often like loving Shaker furniture without understanding that it was generated from a context of the supposed female incarnation of Christ, sexual abstinence, and a whole lot of shaking, rattling and speaking in tongues.
For plain painting only good taste is required, but not with Newman. His work is still too much: too big, too ambitious, too risky, too unreasonable. In short, embarrassing. Even within his painfully produced small ouevre of only 120 or so paintings (half of which are miraculously in the Philadelphia retrospective), failure lurks around every zip.
Most embarrassing of all is that we can't get very far without using the word sublime and we can’t use that word without some reference to spirituality. Newman was good at memorable phrases. "An artist paints so that he will have something to look at," he once wrote, following it with "at times he must write so that he will also have something to read." He had a talent for polemics. One of his best essays is the 1948 "The Sublime Is Now" in which he takes pains to separate the sublime from the beautiful.
Apparently Newman was brought up in a context of cultured Jewish agnosticism. In spite of his fondness for Spinoza he became an Anarchist with a capital A; as a young man he taught himself Yiddish in order to read New York’s only anarchist newspaper. During the Great Depression he refused to take WPA money on anarchist principles, thus inadvertently preventing himself from getting a leg-up, like de Kooning, Pollock, Kline and Neel, on post-War art. Unrepentant, in the '60s he contributed an introduction to Prince Peter Kropotkin’s Memoirs of a Revolutonist.
As far as I know he was not particularly religious---though the synagogue he designed in 1963 should someday be built, with its zigzag windows and what appears to be a conjunction of the Torah and, yes, baseball. If Tom Hess was right in his 1970 catalogue essay this is Newman's most overt reference to the Kabbalah, that summit of Jewish mysticism. Although, unlike Mondrian and Kandinsky before him—and Pollock in his youth---Newman had no flirtation with Theosophy or any other "religion," his work proves you don't have to be religious to be spiritual. His paintings are suffused with spirituality. There is in the best of them a sense of uncanny timelessness and lift, of exaltation.
I don't think we have to worry very much if Newman was as inspired by the Kabbalah as Thomas Hess posits in his 1971 catalogue essay. There is no doubt that Hess himself was inspired. And it is fun to see him nearly go over the edge. At the time this seemed a little shocking and arbitrary. Now that Madonna studies the Kabbalah it just seems normal. The two books by Gershom Scholem that Hess found in Newman's library might indeed have been enough proof. Hess, however, admitted in a footnote that "The linguistic exercises of Jewish mysticism are so vast that they can easily embrace any corpus of work, especially abstract painting, which lends itself easily to interpretations with numbers…I have restricted myself to following leads into Jewish mysticism which were given overtly by the artist himself." The titles "White Fire" and "Black Fire" are Kabbalistic terms. On the other hand, we might also say that "Be I" and "Be II" were inspired by Islam. Even though Newman did not give titles to many of his earlier paintings until the began to sell in the '60s, naming his works became important to him: "I try in my titles anyway to evoke the meaning that the painting had when I was painting it." Obviously titles such as "Abraham", "Jericho", "Covenant", and "White Fire" cannot be dismissed as arbitrary ways of keeping track of merchandise. It is difficult to remember such things, but some painters were actually literate way back then. You might not have read The Zohar—one of the books in Newman's library---but you certainly would have taken a look at Kierkegaard and probably Suzuki.
If the truth be known, abstract painting seems to have come to a bad end, with, to be sure, underground pockets here and there. Has the abstract painting that began with Malevitch and Mondrian and then became something even more daring with Pollock, Newman, and Rothko simply run out of steam? Were the old guys, save Newman, who were quite nasty about Pop really so angry because they had once been hungry and/or because they saw the handwriting on the wall?
The world changed and art became entertainment, investment, philosophy. It stopped being a religion. It is hard to package the transcendent or the tragic. People don't want to have dinner parties in a room with the sublime. Those few critics self-entrusted with maintaining the flame, either got lazy or were so compromised by art market shares they lost all clout. Or perhaps the art world speed-up no longer allowed enough time for an artist to develop. The old guys had suffered through the Great Depression, did not have solo shows until they were in their forties. But perhaps there is something else. It could be that the achievements of that first generation are impossible to top... But did they really solve all the problems of abstract painting for all time?
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Barnett Newman: "Onement I," 1948. MOMA, N.Y.
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