Here to there and back - Barnett Newman retrospective

ArtForum, March, 2002 by Yve-Alain Boise

AS THE PHILADELPHIA MUSEUM OF ART'S RETROSPECTIVE "BARNETT NEWMAN" GOES ON VIEW THIS MONTH, ART HISTORIAN AND ARTFORUM CONTRIBUTING EDITOR YVE-ALAIN BOIS EXAMINES THE LEGACY OF AN ARTIST WHOSE OEUVRE HE CONSIDERS THE MOST DIFFICULT OF THE LAST CENTURY.

As the first US retrospective of Barnett Newman's work in thirty years goes on view at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, let us hope that this vastly underappreciated artist will at last get his due. By this I mean not only that he will be recognized, along with Pollock, as one of the two most important painters of the postwar period, but that his work will be better understood by those who profess to like it.

Newman's early reception was disastrous. The reviews of his first two shows (at Betty Parsons in 1950 and 1951) were asinine--especially in journals supposedly supporting the avant-garde, like Art News. There the writer was Thomas Hess (who would change his mind a decade later and become one of Newman's most vocal partisans). Read him on Be I, Newman's largest and starkest canvas from 1949, a vertical rectangle of deep red electrified by a thin white line running down its center: "It is quite like what happens to a hen when its beak is put on the ground and a chalk line [is] drawn away from it on the floor." Newman expected such philistinism from the press, but the cold shower he got at his Parsons shows from his fellow Abstract Expressionists (for whom he had been a sort of benevolent impresario and public spokesman throughout the '40s) left him with the feeling that the world out there was at best impervious to his art if not downright hostile. This accounts in part for his guns-ready attitude toward the pe ttiness of the art world (many of his voluminous "letters to the editor" remain masterpieces of the sarcastic genre); but it also explains his unfailing generosity toward younger artists and, more important, his inveterate perfectionism.

Throughout his life, Newman destroyed much of what he made: A work had to wholly satisfy him or it was banished, especially after he had completed what he often called his "first" painting, Onement I, 1948. This was how he managed to withstand the harsh treatment he received. He had to be confident in his own greatness; his confidence was his armor. When he finally received a measure of the attention he deserved, he was often urged by supporters (Greenberg, for example) to produce more work. He politely responded that he did not care for redundancies. Though Newman's oeuvre looms large, it is quantitatively minute: At last count I tallied 122 paintings (II predating Onement I, all of which are in the show, incidentally), 88 drawings (more than half pre-Onement I), 41 prints, 6 sculptures (7 if one distinguishes the 1950 plaster version of Here I from the 1962 bronze), I multiple (silk screen on Plexiglas), and I architectural model. That's all. In the current context of market-driven overproduction, one can o nly admire such restraint.

It took a lot of guts, and Newman was called a dilettante as a result (by Dore Ashton, as late as 1966). He was literally boycotted by critics, colleagues, collectors, and museums for the first half of his mature career (that is, until his watershed exhibition at French & Co. in March 1959, his third one-man show in New York). (1) Then the general indifference was suddenly replaced by a split attitude: A small but steadily growing minority headed by young artists looked at his work in awe while most critics remained hostile. As difficult as it is to imagine today, the majority of the reviews of the "Stations of the Cross" exhibition at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (1966) were highly negative. And Newman's fifth New York show, at Knoedler in 1969, did not fare much better--just one year before his death! (Artforum's was not the nastiest review, but it was nasty enough.)

All this hurt, to be sure. But what was worse, perhaps, was the incomprehension of sympathizers. That Dore Ashton thought Newman was a geometric painter and compared him to Victor Vasarely was to be expected--after all, she was straightforward in her antipathy to his work. But given everything Newman had written to combat such blind misconceptions, he was understandably wounded when admirers professed similar opinions. The letter he sent to John Gordon, curator at the Whitney Museum of American Art, who in 1962 wanted to include him in an exhibition on geometric abstraction, is a case in point. He thanked Gordon for his interest ("You are the only one at the Whitney, in the many years I have been on the scene, who has ever offered me an invitation to show, and it has not been easy for me to refuse you") but affirmed the radical alterity of his work with regard to the tradition of "geometric abstract art," whatever this meant at the time: "What is involved here are two separate realms." (The silly idea of Newm an as a geometric painter refused to go away. Exactly a quarter of a century later, in 1987, his widow, Annalee Newman, would send a copy of this same letter in response to a loan request for a similar show organized by the AlbrightKnox Museum.) If the foregoing label was bad enough, what about Newman as proto-Minimalist? Newman was fond of his admirers among the Minimalist generation, particularly Frank Stella, Donald Judd, and Dan Flavin--he even gave a speech at the opening of Flavin's famous 1969 exhibition in Ottawa. He disliked, however, being presented as their guru or as a "cog in a formalist machine," as he angrily wrote to poor Walter Hopps, who was organizing the 1965 Sao Paulo Bienal (to which Newman was invited hors concours with six younger artists). Perhaps the most lethal label is Newman as Conceptual artist, for it prevented people from paying attention to the extraordinarily varied quality of his touch, to the wide range of his pictorial effects. Sadly, it also provided a good excuse for wha t can only be described as a criminal lack of care for his canvases-Mondrian's work dramatically suffered from a similar misconception: Why worry about painterly qualities if everything is just cosa mentale? Newman's paintings almost invariably came back damaged from exhibitions and have been frequent victims of outright vandalism-perhaps more so than those of any other artist in this century. What's more, they have not always been afforded the best treatment by restorers. This is changing, at last. (2) In all of these cases, Newman protested without end against the mislabeling to which his art was constantly subjected. He continued to say "not there-here," a phrase he used for the title of a 1962 canvas.