Here to there and back - Barnett Newman retrospective

ArtForum, March, 2002 by Yve-Alain Boise

Many elaborate filial relations will be lost on us. The exhibition is rather deficient in works from the early '60s, so a whole group of paintings directly related by their titles (including Tertia, Triad, and The Three) is represented only by the Day-Glo-orange fire of The Third. But at least we will be able to observe many subtle color variations from one canvas to the next (is the bright red-orange/reddish-maroon chord Newman favored in 1948-49 always the same? and what about his inimitable deep blues?) and ponder the infinite diversity of Newman's blacks, sometimes within the same work, as in the spectacular Black Fire 1, 1961, an aspect that will finally be noticed if the fourteen Stations of the Cross are hung in the painting's vicinity. We will also reflect on the pattern of Newman's use of color throughout his career. Until 1955 it was mainly tonal, Newman juxtaposing various shades of the same hue or of hues coming from the same region of the spectrum. From 1958 to 1966 he worked mainly in black and white. In the end his work became fiercely nominalist--his colors became spectral, fully saturated, unambiguous, and easy to name, as if taken from a color chart--after he decided to break what he called Mondrian's mortgage (in this he was encouraged by the example of younger artists; in fact, at one point he considered dedicating Who's Afraid of Red, Yellow, and Blue x to Jasper Johns). We'll be startled by the range of formats, and we'll have enough ammunition to realize that, given the radical economy of Newman's pictorial world, every single detail counts--that, as he continually pointed out, there is no void in his work.

The problem is, this is only one part of the job we'll have to perform if we want to avenge Newman of past injustices--and put to shame those who still dismiss the work today (the most vocal being Hilton Kramer and Robert Hughes). The rest of our task is even more difficult--appropriately enough, since in my opinion Newman himself is the most difficult artist I can name. We will have to reflect on the signification of this art--to think about what his fascination with inaugural moments, in particular the Book of Genesis, entailed, or about his numerous declarations concerning presence and his wish to give the beholder "a sense of place."

All these thematic complexes (creation, presence, sense of place) are interrelated and enhanced in every canvas, albeit differently each time. Perhaps the most telling case remains Onement 1, which looks so similar to Moment, painted two years before. Both small canvases consist of a vertical rectangular field divided symmetrically by a central vertical element--but a gulf separates the two works. A hint is given by the respective "grounds." While the field of Onement 1 is painted as evenly as can be, in Moment we are confronted with a differentiated field that functions as an indeterminate background and is pushed still farther back in space by the band--the band is not yet a zip; it still functions as a repoussoir. As Newman would later say of this work and the few other paintings of the period that remain, it gives a "sense of atmospheric background," of something that can be thought of as "natural atmosphere." As a result, what he procured was an image, something that was not congruent with but applied to its field and thus could pretend to extend beyond its limits--something that had no adherence to its support (conceived as a neutral receptacle) and could have been worked out previously in a sketch (as indeed it was). Or, to put it otherwise, Moment, a pre-Onement 1 work like Gea, Genesis--The Break, The Word 1, and The Command, contained an ideograph, a visual symbol of the idea of Creation, the original division of light and dark. By contrast Onement x is, in itself, an ideograph of Creation. (One has only to recall that Gea had figured in the show titled "The Ideographic Picture," curated by Newman in January 1947 to measure the distance he had traveled since then in his understanding of the concept of the ideograph.) Onement, an archaic English word from which atonement derives, means "the fact of being made into one": The painting does not represent wholeness but declares it in uniting the field and the zip into a single entity. In other words, the field asserts itself as such through its stark symmetr ical division by the zip.