Date: 30-11-1999
Owning Institution:
Publication: Sunday Telegraph Features      
Subject:   19th Century  20th Century  

Barnett Newman painted big pictures and made correspondingly large claims about them. In the early 1960s, when quizzed by a sceptical interviewer about the significance of his art – large paintings formed from panoramic fields of ravishingly pure colour bisected by one or more tremulous, vertical stripes – Newman responded that if critics and others “could read it properly it would mean the end of all state capitalism and totalitarianism”. By the artist’s own extreme criteria, it seems unlikely that the daunting voids of his painting will ever be fully understood. But a new exhibition at Tate Modern – the largest yet dedicated to Newman’s painting – offers audiences in this country a rare opportunity to try their own hand at “reading” the work of this solemn, unashamedly portentous but powerfully original American painter.

Few artists have taken themselves more seriously than Barnett Newman. Born in 1905, the son of first-generation Jewish immigrants from Poland, he set about the task of creating his own artistic identity with unshakeable doggedness. He was not alone, among the painters of post-war New York, in holding the view that the modern artist should act the part of latterday priest or prophet; but he gave voice to it more stridently than any of his contemporaries. Newman expressed a dawning sense of self-confidence and mission among the avant-garde American painters of his time, a shared conviction that the baton of responsibility for the creation of high and serious art had finally been passed from the old world to the new. European art, he argued, had played itself out in a decadent quest for mere beauty. “I believe that here in America,” he wrote, “some of us, free from the weight of European culture, are finding the answer, by completely denying the problem of beauty and where to find it… We are freeing ourselves of the impediments of memory, association, nostalgia, legend, myth, or what have you, that have been the devices of Western European painting.”

Newman backed up his bold words with paintings equally bold in their rejection of all the traditional “devices” of representational art. Bright assertive planes of densely material colour formed an arena for the brandishing of a defiantly simple gesture: the painting of what he came to call his “zip”, that wavering band or stripe of paint that was the basic expressive unit of his art.  The more effusive and adulatory of Newman’s critical supporters likened this stark division of the painted canvas to God’s division of light from darkness, thus creating a smokescreen of metaphysical significance around his works: a foggy aura of  prophecy and revelation which enhanced his reputation but failed to shed much light on his work and the intentions behind it.

A lifelong anarchist, Newman (“Barney” to his friends) seems occasionally to have enjoyed contributing to the obfuscation of his purposes. He specialised in gnomic remarks, commenting for example that it was the primary function of art to express man’s “relation to the Absolute”, while Absolutely refusing to clarify what he might mean by it. His slipperiness extended to his dress sense, so that while most of his contemporaries cultivated a roughshod, bohemian look, Newman wore suits of a nineteenth-century formality and cut, affected a monocle and cultivated a moustache which – according to one European journalist who met him in the mid-Fifties – gave him a startling resemblance to Emperor Fransz Joseph of Prussia.

Art historians have bracketed Newman as an Abstract Expressionist, although he himself did his best to reject the label, having a pronounced distrust of such inevitably clumsy aesthetic categories. It stuck, none the less, and nowadays he is usually classed as one of the three leading painters of that amorphous and ill-defined school, the other two being Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko. Of the triumvirate, Newman remains probably the least well known member, certainly outside America. This is partly because, thanks to a strong tendency to self-doubt, he painted very few pictures during the course of his life (only about 120, all told, of which some two thirds are included in the Tate exhibition). Until he was forty years old he destroyed all his own work, finding it inadequate or derivative. During his consequently truncated maturity, which lasted approximately twenty years, ending with his death from heart failure in 1968, Newman was prone to creative blocks which rendered him incapable of painting for up to two years at a stretch.

Like most self-conscious revolutionaries, he oversimplified his relationship to the  past that he was anxious to supersede. He was a more assiduous student of European painting than some of his pronouncements might suggest. He profited from the fact that New York, during the 1930s and 1940s – the decades during which he ruminated most, and produced least – was probably the best place in the world to see modern European art. He was impressed by the abstractions of Joan Miro and Wassily Kandinsky but above all by those of Piet Mondrian, who had moved to New York during the Second World War and whose moral and technical example proved to be vital to Newman’s development. Mondrian’s gridded abstractions, those bright geometric dreams of a perfected world, showed Newman that a non-representational language of art could be used to convey the highest of aspirations; while Mondrian’s use of masking tape to create the sharp-edged lines that divided up his compositions gave Newman the germ of his technique, furnishing him with the basis for what would become his own customary procedure. It seems revealing that in later life Newman was scathingly dismissive of Mondrian’s work, as if to deny an influence so strong that he felt embarrassed by it.

He need not have worried about his own originality, however. A painting by Newman could indeed (albeit crudely) be described as a pared-down Mondrian, redone without the horizontal lines; but despite the slight formal resemblance, the effects of Newman’s work, and the intentions behind it, are very different. While the purity of Mondrian’s art stamps him as an idealist, Newman’s seems less utopian and more emotionally raw, more nakedly human in emphasis. His stripes or “zips” are not geometrical devices, in the sense that their function is not to create on canvas the visual equivalents to an ineffable harmony. They are isolated, uneven in contour and often richly handled, having the character (being in this sense like the shapes traced in oriental calligraphy) of a series of exquisitely pondered moves or gestures painstakingly preserved. The edges of Newman’s “zips” often bleed or blur into the fields of colour that they abut, and it seems that he certainly wanted his audience to notice these seismographic irregularities of touch. At the second exhibition of his work, at the Betty Parsons Gallery in New York, Newman posted a sign up on the wall: “There is a tendency to look at large pictures from a distance. The large pictures in this exhibition are intended to be seen from a short distance.”

“One is in the presence of a kind of presence: oneself”. That was Newman remarking, with his characteristically enigmatic terseness, on the effect that he wished his pictures to produce. He seems to have meant that in so simply embodying himself, in the minimally reduced repetitive gesture of his “zips”, he wanted to furnish his audience with an art that both mirrored and intensified their own sense of their humanity. Newman explained the generally large scale of his pictures in similarly intriguing terms, implying that he wanted to create not images that people could look at, so much as “spaces” which they could inhabit and in which their own physicality, their own vulnerability, would be brought home with renewed emphasis. He wanted to paint pictures, he said, that would make people standing in front of them feel as suddenly aware of their own body and its scale as people do in vast open places – on empty plains or tundras, or on the open sea. (This was another reason for people to stand up close to the pictures: proximity to a Newman enhances its scale, making it larger than the sphere of vision, helping it to become an enveloping experience, rather than an image to decipher.) His own, answering presence was to be there in the form of the trembling, wavering line that became his surrogate signature. He seems to have thought of his pictures as arenas where a form of recognition was to take place.

Newman wrote admiringly of so-called “primitive” art and seems to have sought to incarnate, in his own work, its perceived simplicity and universality of appeal. The ambition to create an art which might embody some archetypal “humanness” was at least partly inspired by his knowledge of the horrors of the Second World War, Newman intimated in his later years. Being a Polish Jew by origin, he was aware earlier than many other Americans of the astonishing scale and brutality of the mass murder of European jewry. His pictures were among other things a sustained act of defiance, each one meant to celebrate as well as reincarnate the fragile, infinitely variable texture of human lives.