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Barnett Newman Central Metaphysical Issues of Human Existence Trinity University Digital Commons @ Trinity Art and Art History Faculty Research Art and Art History Department 2014 Barnett ewN man Michael Schreyach Trinity University, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: http://digitalcommons.trinity.edu/art_faculty Part of the History of Art, Architecture, and Archaeology Commons Repository Citation Michael Schreyach, "Barnett eN wman," The Encyclopedia of Aesthetics, 2nd ed. 6 vols. (Oxford University Press, 2014), 4: 496-499. This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Art and Art History Department at Digital Commons @ Trinity. It has been accepted for inclusion in Art and Art History Faculty Research by an authorized administrator of Digital Commons @ Trinity. For more information, please contact [email protected]. 496 NEWMAN, BARNETT Krieger, Murray. The NewApologists for Poetry. Minneapolis: University intentions-claimed that to understand one of his paintings of Minnesota Press, 1956. properly wou1d mean "the end of all state capitalism and to­ Lentricchia, Frank. After the New Criticism. Chicago: University of Chi­ talitarianism." Somewhere in between the two quotes­ cago Press, 1980. Levinson, Marjorie. "What Is the New Formalism?" PMLA 122.1 between the insistence on the art's autonomy and the respon­ (2007): 558-569. sive viewership it aims to solicit-lies Newman's truth. Pickering, Edward D. ''The Roots of New Criticism." Southern Literary Newman was philosophically minded-:-he majored in Journal 41 (Fall2008) : 93-108. philosophy at the City College of NewYork (1923-1927)­ Ransom, John Crowe. "Criticism as Pure Speculation." In The Intent of but he wasn't a professional philosopher. Unlike other art­ the Critic, edited by Donald A. Stauffer, pp. 91-124. Princeton, N.J.: ists in his cohort who were reticent to speak about issues of Princeton University Press, 1941. Ransom, John Growe. The New Criticism. Norfolk, Conn.: New Direc­ aesthetics (at least in public), Newman broadcast his views tions, 1941. to anyone who would read or listen. Essays, articles, inter­ Richards, I. A. Principles of Literary Critidsm. London: Harcourt, Brace, views, lectures, reviews, political pamphlets, private cor­ 1976. First published 1924. respondence, letters to the editor: he issued them all. The Spingarn, Joel. The New Critidsm. New York: Columbia University wide range of Newman's erudite writing (stylistically levied Press, 1911. Spurlin, William ]., and Michael Fischer, eds. The New Critidsm and by his earnest tone and brilliant humor) poses certain diffi­ Contemporary Literary Theory: Connections and Continuities. New cu1ties to synopsis. Each essay, like each of his paintings, York: Garland, 1995. is an abundant world. Rather than singling out his more Tate, Allen. Essays of Four Decades. Chicago: Swallow, 1968. famous statements and trying to key them to select paint­ Warren, Robert Penn. "Pure and Impure Poetry." In Critiques and ings, this introduction proceeds in sections matched to certain Essays in Critidsm, 1920-1948, edited by Robert W. Stallman, pp. 85-104. NewYork: Ronald, 1949. recurrent motifs of Newman's thought and practice, including We llek, Rene. A History of Modern Critidsm. Vol. 6,American Critidsm isolation an:d tragedy; individualism and the self; autonomy 1900-1950. New Haven, Conn.:Yale University Press, 1986. and relationship; and politics. Grasping these structural Wimsatt, W. K., ed. Explication as Critidsm. New York: Columbia Uni­ themes will provide the reader with a framework for better as­ versity Press, 1963. sessing the relationship of Newman's ideas to his art. Wimsatt, William K., and Monroe C. Beardsley. "The Mfective Fal­ lacy." In The �rbal Icon: Studies in the Meaning of Poetry, by W. K. Isolation and Tragedy. Many of Newman's writings the­ Wimsatt, pp. 21-39. Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1954. matize his dissatisfaction with what he took to be a retrograde Wimsatt, William K., and Monroe C. Beardsley. "The Intentional Fal­ historical and cu1tural situation. His 1947 article "The First lacy." In The �rbal Icon: Studies in the Meaning of Poetry, by W. K. Man Was an Artist" employs the imagery of an atomic blast to Wimsatt, pp. 3-18. Lexington: Universitrof Kentucky Press, 1954. figure the destructive tendencies of recent science: "In the last JEANNINE JoHNSON sixty years, we have seen mushroom a vast cloud of 'sciences' in the fields of cu1ture, history, philosophy, psychology, eco­ nomics, politics, aesthetics,in an ambitiousattempt to claim the nonmaterial world" (Newman, 1990, pp. 156-157). Newman railed against the dominion of a positivist mentality that quanti­ NEWMAN, BARNETT (1905-1970), American artist. fied all human experience but was incapable of addressing the Revealing his characteristically incisive wit, Barnett Newman central metaphysical issues of human existence. But the critic often quipped, "Aesthetics is to artists what ornithology is to was too astutesimply to oppose science and art. Newman, ever birds." He meant that the activity of artists, like the behavior adept at beating the opposition on its home turf, took the posi­ of birds, was not bound by any external system devised to tion that scientists had simply misunderstood the role of sci­ explain or categorizeit. Just as ornithology has no bearing on ence. Setting himself the task of winning true science back a bird's life, aesthetics-insofar as it is treated as a science­ from the number crunchers, he accused them of abdicating is irrelevant to an artist's creative work. Newman rejected their responsibilities by forgetting the proper nature of their the idea that theoretical aesthetics, if narrowly construed as activity, which was to discover not just facts, but the truth of an investigation of the ru1es that supposedly govern art or as human being. Scientific method, he argued, misleadingly identi­ an inquiry into what constitutes the essence of beauty, could fied truthwith proof. This was a distortion of genuine scientific provide a guide for original content. inquiry-which Newman aligned with creative artistic in­ And it was indeed the problem of art's content-its most quiry-and the relentlessness with which his cu1ture pursued authentic subject matter-that preoccupied Newman. What the former and thus magnified the distortion constituted more would that content be, and what would it mean? The infa­ than just professional failure. It amounted to a moral weakness mous answer Newman gave to the critic Harold Rosenberg's that prevented the cu1ture from confronting its tragic state in challenge for the painter to explain his works is second in its the proper terms. But poetry and art, Newman thought, could frequency of citation only to his wisecrack about ornithology. express the metaphysical truth of the historical moment, and The context of the exchange was a social gathering in 1948. hold meaning for the future. He prized art over the limited Newman-displaying the seriousness, even radicalism, of his instrumentalism of his contemporary world. Humanity's NEWMAN, BARNETT 497 truest act was above all else aesthetic-� poetic outcry of"awe serted in "The Sublime Is Now" (1948), were freeing them­ and anger ... before the void" rather than "a request for a selves of the "impediments" of European art· in order to drink of water" (p. 158). produce "self-evident [images] of revelation, real and con­ Born in 1905, Newman was twenty-four when the 1929 crete" (p. 173). This reality, generated by the artist's "meta­ stock market crash bankrupted his father's thriving clothing physical act," would respond to, without imagining away, the company. In the 1930s, he experienced the Depression and conditions of isolation and despair experienced by him and witnessed the rise of fascism in Europe. In the 1940s, he his peers (p. 164). It would thus provide for art an appropri­ lived through a world war, learned about the atrocities of the ately "tragic subject matter" (p. 165). As he argued in the Holocaust, and was distressed by the unprecedented de­ unpublished"The New Sense of Fate" (1948), modern man structive powers of the atomic bomb. And in the 1950s, he was "by his acts or lack of action" as open to the conse­ observed the consolidation of a postwar consensus cul­ quences of an intimate, all-pervading fate as was the hero of ture-fueled by an aggressive McCarthyism-that seemed a Greek tragedy (p. 169). as effective in the United States as dictatorship was in the Individualism and the Self. The metaphysical act was Soviet Union in extinguishing Leftist hopes of meaningful, individual. It also carried political and existential meaning. collective social action. Newman interpreted the historical In Fred Orton's view, Harold Rosenberg believed that the situation in moral terms. In a 1970 interview with the di­ artist, finding the canvas "an arena in which to act," could rector Emile de Antonio, he put it this way: maintain, on an individual level, the revolutionary political · ideals that recently had failed on a larger, mass scale. For About twenty-five years ago [in 1945] for me painting was dead. Painting was dead in the sense that the situation, the world situation, Rosenberg, their struggleto create credible art was authentic was such that the whole enterprise as it was being practiced by because it was "associated with risk and will." While political myself and by my friends and colleagues seemed to be a dead enter­ action was forestalled, the studio harbored agency. In action prise... What it meant for me was that I had to start from scratch as painting, the critic asserted, the ''artist's struggle for identity if painting didn't exist. .. What [was I] going to paint? The old stuff took hold of the crisis" of depersonalization withincapitalist was out. It was no longer meaningful. These things were no longer relevant in a moral crisis, which is hard to explain to those who didn't society. Individual action, in the form of what Rosenberg live through those early years.
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