On Two Paintings by Barnett Newman*

YVE-ALAIN BOIS

The two texts that follow are part of a project that some might consider an impossible challenge—that of writing an independent essay, not your usual catalog entry, on every single painting by Barnett Newman. This self-imposed challenge—much more exacting than I expected at ﬁrst—is not as absurd as it may seem. Newman’s oeuvre may be extraordinarily small by twentieth-century standards—he painted only 120 works on canvas and his overall output, all media included, consists of fewer than 300 works—but this restraint was intentional. This last point was often stressed by his widow, Annalee Newman, during the multiple conversations I had with her throughout the second half of the 1990s. Whenever the issue of the exceptionally poor productivity of Newman would come up—when she was making comparisons between his career and that of his fellow abstract expressionists or when she was protesting, still vehemently so long after the fact, against Clement Greenberg’s pestering request that “Barney” churn out more canvases—Annalee would always insist that her husband hated redundancy, that he wanted above all to avoid repeating himself and that each painting had to be for him like a person, a unicum. My long familiarity with the art of Piet Mondrian, on which I spent a considerable amount of time and energy, taught me that nothing better enhances the perception of differences than having to deal with a deliberately reduced pictorial vocabulary. But Mondrian’s program was teleological (each of his canvases was conceived as a sublation of the preceding one), and within this evolutionary framework his serial practice, though less pervasive or consistent than one tends to think, had almost a pedagogical, demonstrative function. Newman was fundamentally opposed to all forms of teleological thinking. (Darwin, Hegel, and Marx were anathema to him.) In fact, his intuitive distrust of any kind of utopia helped him keep Mondrian safely at bay

* The essays on Abraham and Galaxy are copyrighted by The Barnett Newman Foundation, 2004, and are printed here by permission of The Barnett Newman Foundation. Every quotation that is not referenced is from a document kept in the archives of The Barnett Newman Foundation. My work was made possible by the Foundation. Thanks to its continuing support I was able to explore its vast archives and to see every single painting made by Newman. Within the Foundation two people in particular were essential to my task: Heidi Colsman-Freyberger, researcher at the Foundation, who guided me through the mountain of documents and never failed to answer my innumerable queries; and Carol Mancusi-Ungaro, conservator at the Whitney Museum of American Art and director of the Center for Technical Studies of Modern Art at Harvard University. Whenever possible, Carol and I have examined Newman’s canvases together; all discussions of Newman’s processes (far more diverse and signiﬁcant than one tends to imagine) result from our dialogue. Finally, I greatly beneﬁted from the patient and sharp editorial advice of Harry Cooper and Paul Galvez.

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from an early age on—even if he realized only late in life that such had been the chief motive of his wariness of the Dutch artist. His attitude with regard to series was more complex. He did toy twice with the serial habits of his contemporaries, once in Stations of the Cross, a group of fourteen works of the same size painted over the course of eight years (1958–66), and the second time in direct response to Mondrian, with the four Who Is Afraid of Red, Yellow and Blue canvases (1966–70). But he was a phenomenologist, obsessed with the “hic et nunc” and with identity and plenitude, not with variables within a set of structural oppositions. In some sense, one could say that his tenta- tive involvement with seriality was intended as a stealth attack against it. At some point between the furious debate engaged in the press about the Stations at the occasion of their exhibition at the Guggenheim in 1966, and his engagement with the Who Is Afraid paintings, which lasted until his death, Newman jotted down this thought: “Serial painting is a story, a narrative sequence, without a subject and without any events—as much a story as any illustration, but illustrating only itself. A narrative structure that is mute and because it is mute it is an orna- mental art not much different than basket-weaving.” “Each painting to me, [each] new painting, is as if I had never painted before,” Newman declared one day to Emile de Antonio, adding: “It’s of no real interest to me personally to go into the studio, say tomorrow, and knock out another Newman, I might as well make shoes. And in that sense, I’m no better off than any young painter today going into his studio and starting on the blank canvas. I do have the weight of my work on top of me, so I’m in a worse position than a young painter in that I have to some extent to force myself to begin anew.” This very pointedly encapsulates Newman’s dilemma: refusing the serial attitude that he deemed “formalist” (“basket-weaving”), striving to begin each time anew (and many writers, myself included, have stressed the importance of a thematics of origin in his work), he was all the more crushed under the weight of his own work. This may explain why his production was small. The less he painted, the more pregnant was his existing work, and—such is the dialectic of rarefaction—the less he could add to his corpus. Not only did every work count, but each new one was adding to the pres- sure. Newman’s ethical abhorrence of pleonasm had produced this paradox: wanting to think of each of his paintings as singular, he could not but conclude that this singular identity was dif- ferential. A work could only be unique if it were radically different from any other in the corpus. The “wholeness” to which he aspired in his paintings was strictly antithetic to the decomposition into discrete units and the combinatory procedures that constitute the core of structuralist activity, and in many ways his aesthetics could be termed radically anti-structural. Yet he is perhaps the only painter of this century who thought of his pictorial corpus as a structural totality. My contention is that Newman’s pictorial oeuvre should be considered as something like a deck of cards. (I am only speaking here of his post–Onement I production, for the eleven canvases that precede this inaugural work, a limited corpus in itself, partake of a different conception of art.) In such a deck, each card has a distinct role to play while forming speciﬁc links with various other cards—the King of Hearts is directly connected to all the cards of the same color though perhaps more closely to the ﬁgures (Jack, Queen), as well as to the three other kings: such is my working model. Newman might not be the only artist for whom such a model proves valid, but, thanks to his limited corpus, he might be the only one for whom it can be tested. I promised to myself—and to Annalee Newman—that I would try doing so. Those two entries—neither the longest nor the shortest—provide an example of the manner in which I attend to this task.

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YVE-ALAIN BOIS

Newman considered Abraham one of his most significant works. Included in his first solo show at Betty Parsons in 1950, the painting was absent from his 1958 (Bennington College) and 1959 (French & Co.) exhibitions only because it was then touring Europe for the landmark 1958–59 traveling exhibition, The New American Painting, organized by the Museum of Modern Art, New York.1 In fact, in the note where Newman jotted down his choice of four works for that exhibition, Abraham figures at the top of the list, followed by Horizon Light, Adam, and Concord, which will all be included. Further proof of the importance of this canvas for the artist is given by his selecting it, together with Onement III and Vir Heroicus Sublimis, for the exhibition American Paintings 1945–1957. Organized by Stanton L. Catlin at the Minneapolis Institute of Art (June 18–September 1, 1957), this show marks both the first serious recognition of Newman’s art by an American museum and the artist’s reentry into the public arena.2 In short, Newman deemed Abraham a chief ambassador of his art. After more than a year of travel when it was exhibited in Basel, Milan, Madrid, Berlin, Amsterdam, Brussels, Paris, and London (it was used for the invitation in England, to Newman’s delight), the painting landed in New York for the final venue

1. There is no 1950 installation shot showing Abraham, but at Lawrence Alloway’s request while he was writing a long review of Newman’s exhibition at Knoedler in 1969 (published as “Notes on Barnett Newman,” in Art International 13, no. 6 [Summer 1969], pp. 35–39), Newman provided him with a sketch outlining the ground plan of the installation of his two shows at Betty Parsons in 1950 and 1951—on which Abraham is marked as being next to Concord (which is ﬂanked on the other side by Tundra, as known from a Hans Namuth photograph). Not only did Alloway mention the inclusion of Abraham in his article, but Barbara Reise did the same shortly afterward in an essay whose manuscript had been scrutinized by Newman for possible mistakes. (See “The Stance of Barnett Newman,” Studio International 179, no. 919 [February 1970], p. 52.) Finally, in his November 4, 1967, letter to Tom Hess, quoted below, Newman did not attempt to correct Hess’s assertion that Abraham had been included in the 1950 exhibition. 2. With the exception of his loan of Horizon Light to Ten Years, an exhibition celebrating the tenth anniversary of the Betty Parsons Gallery in December 1955–January 1956, Newman had not exhibited his work since his solo show of 1951. The 1957 Minneapolis exhibition, whose subtitle was “A selection of 146 pictures representing outstanding achievement or promise by American artists of the postwar era,” is the ﬁrst to treat him on equal footing with Pollock and other artists of his generation. The only two museum shows in which he had participated so far were routine annual exhibitions, whose selection was far from carrying the same weight (at the Art Institute of Chicago in 1947, and at the Walker Art Center—already in Minneapolis!—in 1950).

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Barnett Newman. Abraham. 1949. All images © The Barnett Newman Foundation.

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of The New American Painting, which opened on May 28, 1959, at MoMA. Shortly after hanging Abraham on the wall, Alfred Barr acquired it for the museum’s collection.3 Following the sale of Day Before One, to the Kunstmuseum in Basel a few months before, this was the second purchase of a Newman painting by a museum. While the artist must have felt vindicated, he remained extremely protective regarding the pedigree of this canvas; he was particularly concerned that its place in history, notably its impact on artists of his own generation, be properly acknowledged. His pervasive anxiety over the issue of Abraham’s “priority” is documented in numerous declarations that give us some hint as to what the painting meant for him. Newman’s quasi-obsession about the inaugural character of Abraham was undoubtedly exacerbated by the conflict with his once-good friend Ad Reinhardt, with whom he had not been on speaking terms since October 1954. The quixotic lawsuit that Newman attempted to file against Reinhardt at that time, to the great surprise of the latter, need not be addressed in detail, but it should be noted that this sad affair occurred soon after Reinhardt painted his first “black” canvases—for plagiarism subsequently became a frequent charge raised by Newman against his fellow artists.4 His sensitivity in this matter is obvious when one compares his

3. The payment of $3,000 was sent by the museum to Newman on June 30, 1959. Another payment of $1,500 would be made four months later to Betty Parsons for her commission. In a typed sheet listing Newman’s “paintings sold from 1951 to 1959,” probably written for the beneﬁt of Tom Hess while he was working on his 1971 monograph on the artist, Annalee Newman noted that Newman “insisted that Betty Parsons receive [a] $1,500 commission because she had been asked to act as intermediary in the sale.” On the draft manuscript of this sheet, this last sentence is crossed out in favor of another one, which was not retained in the end: “ . . . because they asked her to tell Barnett Newman they wanted to buy the painting.” MoMA’s purchase of Abraham had been in the works for some time, resulting from a visit made by Alfred Barr to Newman’s studio, where he was brought by Ben Heller in 1958 during the preparation of The New American Painting exhibition. Even though Barr was not an enthusiast of Newman’s work (and was basically forced by Heller to include him in the show), the idea that the museum would eventually acquire the painting seems to have struck early in the painter’s mind. In a letter dated February 5, 1958, concerning the probable costs of the restoration of the works damaged in Minneapolis, and their depreciation, Annalee Newman writes to William F. Smith, of the General Adjustment Bureau (New York): “The black picture, Abraham, is wanted by a museum.” The purchase would probably not have happened without Heller’s relentless campaigning and, given its dependence on his extraordinary collection, the necessity for the museum of remaining in his good graces. On this issue, see Lynn Zelevansky, “Dorothy Miller’s ‘Americans,’ 1942–63,” Studies in Modern Art 4 (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1994), pp. 86–87 and n. 209–12. After he had purchased it for the museum, Barr seems to have remained rather indifferent to Abraham. Even though scores of mediocre contemporary works are reproduced in the issue of the Museum of Modern Art Bulletin reporting the acquisitions made during 1959, Abraham is not (vol. 27, nos. 3 and 4, 1960). On Heller’s input with regard to the 1958–59 traveling show (whose title was changed from the initial Abstract Expressionism in America in order to accommodate the inclusion of Newman, whom Barr did not deem an “expressionist”), see Ann Temkin, “Barnett Newman on Exhibition,” in Barnett Newman, ed. Temkin (Philadelphia: Philadelphia Museum of Art, 2002), p. 57. 4. On this aspect of Newman’s character, see Michael Leja, “Barnett Newman’s Solo Tango,” Critical Inquiry 21 (Spring 1995), pp. 556–80. Newman’s lawsuit against Reinhardt was prompted by the publication of “The Artists in Search of an Academy” in the summer 1954 issue of the College Art Journal, a satire against the art world where

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contrasting reactions to two obituaries published at Reinhardt’s death. Infuriated by Barbara Rose’s article in Vogue on November 1, 1966, he wrote her a vitriolic letter (which he neglected to send, as was frequently the case):5 That you chose to write on Reinhardt is your affair but to have discussed Reinhardt in a whole article without mentioning my black painting, Abraham, the ﬁrst and still the only black painting in history[!] There is a difference between a black with pigment that is black and an arrange- ment of pinkish, bluish “blacks” which end up in grays. It is, in my opinion, a failure of critical perception. . . . He never would have painted the black paintings if he had not seen my black painting but he has succeeded in reducing painting into arithmetic so that anyone who sees the painting, walks up to it, counts the nine squares and thinks he has seen it.6 The tone of the letter he wrote to Tom Hess after reading his editorial-obituary published in ArtNews (October 1967) is very different—for Hess, by that time a Newman devotee, had addressed Reinhardt’s debt head on: The issue of Ad’s originality as an artist has been raised a number of times. It is a difﬁcult one because the New York artists were so close a

Newman is put in the same category as many artists engaged in the type of geometric abstraction he always attacked, that of “the artist-professor and traveling design salesman, the Art Digest philosopher- poet and Bauhaus exerciser, the avant-garde huckster-handicraftsman and educational shopkeeper, the holy explainer-entertainer-in-residence.” Annalee Newman remarked: “I think the whole thing is horrendous, but what he resented the most, I think, was that he was grouped with Albers, Bolotowsky, Diller.” Interview with Dodie Kazanjian, transcript, p. 42. As Tom Hess notes, “Reinhardt never mentioned Newman’s name in print afterward, but he couldn’t resist a few needles and jabs which, typically, he knew only Newman would understand.” Thus the ﬁrst sentence in the long quotation Reinhardt offered to Lucy Lippard for the very beginning of her essay in the catalog of his retrospective at the Jewish Museum in 1966 was a loose paraphrase of a passage in Newman’s foreword to The Ideographic Picture, the show he had organized in 1947 at the Betty Parsons Gallery and in which Reinhardt had participated. According to Hess, “Reinhardt knew that lift- ing his quote would irritate Newman”—all the more since plagiarism was ostensibly at stake. See Thomas B. Hess, The Art Comics and Satires of Ad Reinhardt (Düsseldorf: Kunsthalle Düsseldorf and Malborough Gallery, 1975), pp. 50–51, n. 9. It did, as is attested by Newman’s correspondence with Sam Hunter, then director of the Jewish Museum. Note that Newman did not seem to mind Reinhardt’s antics before their fall 1954 fallout. For example, he did not protest Reinhardt’s cartoon Foundingfathersholiday, published in April 1954, where his name appears twice. (First, in a mock advertisement for a series of boxing matches: “NewmanvsBeelzebuth,” i.e., “supermanvsdemigod,” and in a fan-shaped series of genealogies: “Neolithic to Newman,” an expression Reinhardt had already used in a friendly letter to Newman in July 1950.) 5. See also a similarly unsent letter to Dore Ashton, quoted below in note 29, with regard to a “big black painting” by Clyfford Still and its indebtedness to Abraham. 6. Newman was named twice in Rose’s article, and his work (as well as Rothko’s) was compared to Reinhardt’s for its use of an “abstract atmospheric space” (as opposed to the “extremely shallow space of late Cubism and Constructivism”) and for its deductive structure (the fact that the three painters “deduce the composition from the rectangular shape of the canvas”). But Newman’s and Rothko’s color was opposed to Reinhardt’s blacks, and no mention of Newman’s use of symmetry was made.

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group that the question of who did what first often is lost in a tangle of later claims. It seems certain that he got the ideas of blackness and symmetry from Barnett Newman, whose first show, which included an all-black painting, he helped to hang at Betty Parsons in 1950.7 Newman’s response, on November 4, 1967: What a great surprise to see your editorial—which I greatly appreciate. I also want to thank you for straightening out the facts in connection with my black painting although it is unfortunate it had to be in Reinhardt’s obituary. Now that there is all this rewriting of history, the facts are most important. But Reinhardt was only the tip of the iceberg, and the whole of Western production had to be called to the witness stand with regard to blackness. Ten years before Hess’s memorial tribute to Reinhardt, in a letter written on November 22, 1957, Newman gently chided Ethel Schwabacher for having muddled the matter in her monograph on Arshile Gorky (it is to be noted that Abraham had just come back from Minneapolis, where it had been vandalized, and was thus very much on the painter’s mind): The whole question of Gorky’s black paintings is debatable, since they are really “black and white” paintings. However, in regard even to the black and white paintings, I recall mentioning to you that when you discussed American painters besides Gorky who were involved in this problem you left out the considerable and significant work of both Jackson Pollock, who had a complete one-man show of black paintings at Betty’s that make up some of his best work. And you also left out the work of a guy named Barnett Newman whose Black on Black made quite a stir in 1949–50. Not to mention Picasso’s Guernica. Actually I think it is inaccurate to talk of Gorky’s and the others’ “black” paintings when they are really black and white. Such a general term must also include Velasquez’s black and brown pictures as black too. The historical fact is that the first all-black painting that included no white and no other color besides black was done in 1949 by me.8

7. Several artists of the Betty Parsons stable claim or are said to have helped Newman hang his ﬁrst show, Tony Smith among them. There is no evidence, other than the fact that Newman did not correct Hess on his matter, that Reinhardt actually contributed to the installation. By contrast, Annalee Newman repeatedly told me that Rothko helped on this occasion, and he is the only artist whom she ever mentioned in this role. 8. Schwabacher had alluded to “the black version of the Garden in Sochi” (see Jim Jordan and Robert Goldwater, The Paintings of Arshile Gorky: A Critical Catalogue [New York: New York University Press, 1982], no. 253) as “probably the earliest example of a predominantly black painting (where black was used as a color) in Gorky’s work, or in the work of any American painter,” adding this parenthesis: “Highly interesting black paintings were to be done in the late forties and early ﬁfties by Willem de Kooning, Franz Kline, Robert Motherwell, Clyfford Still and other painters of the modern movement” (Ethel K. Schwabacher, Arshile Gorky [New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 1957], p. 68).

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The fact that Tom Hess would appropriate this argument almost verbatim (including the mention of Guernica) in his 1971 monograph on Newman—or that in his 1964 television interview with Newman, Frank O’Hara would add Goya to the roster of names (“Even the black Goyas aren’t all black” )—attests to the artist’s fixation: he obviously ranted about it with his critic-friends.9 A further indication of Newman’s entrenched concern is provided by his attitude when he belatedly discovered the so-called Black on Black painting by Alexandr Rodchenko in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art, dating from 1918. According to Hess, “Newman was surprised when a friend, in the middle of the 1960s, told him about the existence of the Rodchenko; he had never heard about it. (When, finally, he did take a look at it, he decided that it was really ‘brown.’)”10 Hess’s claim that the Rodchenko painting was rarely shown and thus largely ignored since it had been acquired by the museum (in 1936) is perfectly exact, but it is Newman’s defense that is of interest here, for it repeats his point against Reinhardt’s colored “grays”—and indeed one would be hard put to see Rodchenko’s black, brown, and white canvas as being in any way “black on black.”11 Yet Newman did investigate further, just to make sure: on December 26, 1965, he made a little sketch, from memory, of Rodchenko’s 1918 Composition no. 64 (84), also entitled Black on Black (and this time justifiably so), as reproduced in Camilla Gray’s inaugural The Russian Experiment in Art, published in 1962.12 In other words, Newman did not treat the threat represented by Rodchenko’s putative precedence lightly. Nor did he forget Malevich, whose 1918 White on White (also in MoMA’s collection) he most certainly knew, and to whom Rodchenko’s series of “black on

Newman had been very supportive to Schwabacher while she was writing this book, and he would defend it despite his frustration at having been slighted (he simultaneously wrote to Lloyd Goodrich, for example, to praise the Whitney Museum for having undertaken its publication, and he would advise Schwabacher about whom to send review copies to). Others were less enthusiastic about this monograph, for example Stuart Davis, who trashed its sentimentality in the Saturday Review (December 28, 1957, pp. 16–17). 9. The interview was telecast on WNDT-TV (Newark) on December 8, 1964, as part of the series Art New York. A transcript of the interview is in the archives of The Barnett Newman Foundation. 10. Thomas B. Hess, Barnett Newman (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1971), pp. 59–60. Hereafter cited as Hess 1971, Barnett Newman. 11. According to the ﬁles of MoMA’s registrar, during Newman’s lifetime the Rodchenko painting was shown twice in a temporary exhibition (New Acquisitions and Extended Loans: Cubist and Abstract Art, March 25–May 3, 1942, and Twenty-ﬁfth Anniversary Exhibition: Painting, October 19, 1954–January 23, 1955) and permanently installed from May 27, 1964, to May 11, 1969. In all three cases Malevich’s White on White was also hung nearby. Had Newman seen the 1942 and 1955 exhibitions, it is unlikely that he would have particularly zeroed-in on the painting, for the very reason he gives (the painting is not black on black). That his interest should have been kindled by the remark of a friend is entirely in character. Pace Hess, however, the same argument cannot be made with regard to Malevich’s 1918 White on White, which was shown at MoMA practically without interruption from 1945 on, and is far more truthful to its title than the Rodchenko. My thanks to Claire Henry for providing me with this information. 12. Three things indicate that Newman did not have the book at hand when he made the sketch: the drawing is inaccurate (notably, it omits the large circle “behind” the spindle/eye shapes); the title of the book is wrongly stated; and the name of the publisher is followed by a question mark. The Rodchenko painting sketched by Newman had already been reproduced in Alfred Barr’s Cubism and

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black” paintings had been a response.13 In the brief statement published in the catalog of The New American Painting, Newman only mentions Malevich in passing, among other artists who have fallen in the “geometric trap” from which he claims to have escaped (SWI, p. 179),14 but he is much more explicit in the litany he had initially conceived as a preface and discarded at the eleventh hour: “My work, they say, is more advanced than Malevich’s, when what they really mean is that I have reduced Malevich to yet another color scheme, so that his white on white is just another syntactical device no more signiﬁ- cant than black on white” (SWI, p. 180). Some relief concerning the disconcerting potential precedence of the Russian avant-garde came (or rather should have come) from Alfred Barr himself. In the brief note of July 14, 1959, in which Newman thanks Barr for payment for Abraham, he writes: “I was very much interested Newman. Sketch after Rodchenko. in the newspaper reports of your talks in Russia, 1965. particularly the business with the ‘black square.’ I hope that I will some day have the opportunity to know what was said.” What he was referring to is a short article published in the New York Times three days before about a slide lecture Barr had just given in Moscow at the invitation of the Soviet Society for Cultural Relations, in conjunction with the exhibition American Painting and Sculpture, which was soon to open in the Russian capital.15 During his two-hour talk Barr showed some 150 slides (plus excerpts of films of Calder and Pollock at work), concentrating “on contemporary abstractionists, expressionists, and experimentalist techniques.” When Barr was ﬁnished, reports the Times, his position was attacked by A. Zamoshkin, then director of the Pushkin

Abstract Art (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1936), p. 125, but long before the issue of blackness had any relevance to him. 13. The white on white invitation to Newman’s second solo show at Betty Parsons in 1951, which included his two large white-on-white canvases, The Voice and The Name II, was already perceived by Hess at the time as an allusion to Malevich. See Hess, Barnett Newman (New York: Walker and Company, 1969), where the author recalls his thoughts upon receiving this card (p. 43). Hereafter cited as Hess 1969, Barnett Newman. 14. SWI (hereafter cited in the text) is an abbreviation for Barnett Newman, Selected Writings and Interviews, ed. John O’Neill (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1990). 15. Newman was not included in the exhibition (which went from the twenties—Thomas Hart Benton, John Sloan, Walter Kuhn, Charles Sheeler, etc.—to abstract expressionism), and he was not even mentioned in the catalog essay by Lloyd Goodrich. By contrast, Gorky, Tobey, Pollock, Rothko, Motherwell, de Kooning, Baziotes, and Marca-Relli were presented as “leading ﬁgures” of the new movement. The show ran from July 25 to September 5, 1959. A copy of the catalog, and several press clippings, ﬁgure among Newman’s papers.

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Museum: “The exhibit of abstract art is interesting because it shows sterility of technique,” declared Zamoshkin. “It has transcribed a full circle. More than thirty years ago the Russian artist Malevich painted a famous black square. Now abstractionists, after two generations, have not advanced beyond that point.” Barr’s rejoinder is remarkable: “Sometimes it is said that art travels in a circle, but every generation must paint its own way. It is not satisfied with the black square which Malevich did. Each generation must paint its own black square.”16 But with regard to Abraham, however, Newman was not fundamentally appeased by Barr’s astute and profound retort. Before turning to the various claims made by the artist in his statements about or around the painting, it is worth wondering if his lifelong preoccupation with its historic status is not directly connected to its signification—if the very issue of “firstness,” in other words, is not part and parcel of the canvas’s meaning. A title functions for Newman as a metaphor giving a clue to “the emotional content or the emotional complex that [he] was in when [he] was doing the painting” (SWI, p. 305). Though one cannot dismiss the possibility that the artist became obsessed with the priority of Abraham long after having painted it—but neither can one date its titling with any precision, as it was shown for the first time under this title at the 1957 Minneapolis exhibition—priority seems indeed to have been for Newman one of the main semantic attributes of this canvas. Speaking to O’Hara about its title, for example, he declared: “It tries to evoke the meaning of the work and that I would call it Abraham because of what I thought was its tragic honesty of the first black painting.” Abraham is probably the first painting to which Newman gave a title that is a proper name. And Abraham, the biblical man, is a quintessential first, a point of origin almost equal to Adam—as Newman will stress himself in his 1966 text on Stations of the Cross: “Why forsake me? To what purpose? Why?. . . This question that has no answer has been with us so long—since Jesus—since Abraham—since Adam—the original question” (SWI, p. 188). Furthermore, this usual connection between the two biblical characters might have played a role in Newman’s decision to send both Adam and Abraham to MoMA’s 1958–59 traveling exhibition. (Let us note in passing that Newman reverses the usual typology when he relates Abraham to Jesus, whose calvary is traditionally compared to Isaac’s: Abraham is precisely the one who was not forsaken. But Newman’s somewhat uncommon [existential, not allegorical] reading is consistent with his secularization of Jesus’s passion: like Christ, Abraham is a “knight of faith” who believes in the word of God and risks all in His name.)17

16. “U.S. Abstract Art Arouses Russians,” New York Times, June 11, 1959. To Newman’s request for the full text of the conference, Barr replied on September 11, 1959: “The Moscow lectures were given from the briefest notes, plus a great many slides, so that I had no text. Otherwise I would be very pleased to send you a copy.” 17. Answering my query about this issue, Professor Jean-Daniel Causse (Faculté de théologie protes- tante, Montpellier) conﬁrms that the usual link is between Isaac and Jesus (interpretation of the sacriﬁce of Isaac through the notion of a God who gives his son’s life for the salvation of mankind), and he adds: It is quite possible that Newman’s Jewish origin kept him away from this interpretation. But it is even more possible that Kierkegaard’s interpretation functioned here as model,

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Abraham is the ﬁrst patriarch (and the ﬁrst proselyte), the one who made a Covenant with God—who promised him in turn a miraculous son (in his old age, from his unfertile wife), and through him a multitudinous seed, equal in number to the stars of the heaven. (Among the paintings dating from 1949, Covenant and The Promise are obviously linked in theme to Abraham, but one can also add Galaxy to this

Newman. Above: Covenant. 1949. Left: The Promise. 1949.

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semantic chain.) Abraham is the progenitor of the vast portion of humanity that follows any of the three monotheist religions, the “father of all believers.” He is the first man to have argued with God, and to have won his legal battle, even if, in the end, God had it His way.18 Finally and perhaps more importantly, the Talmudic tradition, of which Newman was well aware, depicts him as the first iconoclast, who destroys the idols shaped by his own father.19 None of this, of course, is as important in the myth of Abraham as the story of the sacrifice, or rather the nonsacrifice, of Isaac, which historically legitimated the end of ritual human sacrifices. But there seems to be a link in Newman’s mind

even unconsciously. For Kierkegaard does not mention either the parallel between Isaac and Jesus, and thus departs from the classic sacrificial reading. This is because he has to posit Abraham as a unique and incomprehensible figure, and not make him enter into a theological logic. . . . Even if Kierkegaard does not explicitly state it, the link for him is rather that proposed by Newman: Abraham/Jesus. What’s important for his Abraham is that he is left with the question as question, with the why? This question cannot be shared, is not transmissible, and it reduces him to silence (Abraham would provoke horror if he spoke). In such a line of thought, Abraham and Jesus are two singular figures understood not from the point of view of God’s project, but from that of Man—of a questioning Man; they are two distinct figures of a relationship to the absolute, that is, in Kierkegaard’s words, to the credo quia absurdum. The problem of sacrifice is replaced by that of faith as a question in the face of the absurd. Perhaps then the Adam/Abraham/Jesus link is there to mark the inaugural character of the question each time: each time the question is raised anew. The question is asked as if for the first time and thus it founds a solitude, an impossible sharing of the why? [Letter to the author]

See also Causse, “Eloge de l’avant-dernier,” Études théologiques et religieuses 75, no. 2 (2000), pp. 251–60. The relation between Abraham and Jesus, though again not explicitly stated, was also implied by no less than Calvin (whose sermons, incidentally, speak of the sacrifice of Abraham, thus insisting at the outset on the patriarch’s existential drama). On this issue, and its importance for the Reformation in Geneva in the sixteenth century, see Hubert Bost, “La mise en scène genevoise d’Abraham sacrifiant,” Études théologiques et religieuses 76, no. 4 (2001), pp. 543–61. 18. The battle in question is for the sparing of Sodom: Abraham, through a succession of legal steps that might have greatly amused Newman, leads God to promise that He will not destroy Sodom if ten innocent men can be found in the city (Genesis 18:23–32). On this issue, see Anson Laytner, Arguing with God: A Jewish Tradition (Northvale, N.J.: Jason Aronson Inc., 1990), pp. 3–7, 45–48. 19. Newman possessed several Talmudic compilations, but even if he had not consulted them he would most probably have remembered the story of Abraham’s iconoclastic gesture, commonly taught in Hebrew school (which he attended in his youth). Louis Ginzberg gives several versions of the story in the section dedicated to Abraham in his classic The Legends of the Jews, trans. Henrietta Szold, vol. 1, 1909 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), pp. 195–198, 213–217. In all of them Abraham destroys the idols that his father worships, but in the version entitled “The Iconoclast” it is specified that his father was their creator. Newman owned the posthumous one-volume condensation of Ginzberg’s hefty seven-volume opus. Entitled The Legends of the Bible (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1956), it only gives one version of the iconoclastic story (“The Preacher of the True Faith,” pp. 92–94). By contrast, the cabbalistic text quoted by Hess (Hess 1971, Barnett Newman, p. 61) in order to present Abraham as the “first man to create” and “the godlike artist,” is utterly arcane (even though Hess’s source, Gershom Scholem’s On the Kabbalah and Its Symbolism [(New York: Schocken Books, 1965), p. 61], figures as well in Newman’s library). Not only could Newman not have known the text in question when he painted (or even baptized) Abraham, for Scholem’s study appeared in English only in 1965, but this text concerns a legend according to which Abraham was able to create “golems,” slaves of clay, at will—a fact that Hess edits out, quite manipulatively. Given Newman’s utmost rejection of represen- tation in “The Sublime Is Now” (1948) and in other essays of the same period, it is hard to believe that an “image-maker” Abraham would have much interested him, as Hess knew very well.

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between his experience of “firstness” when painting Abraham and that of Abraham climbing the mountain: that link is fear. In order to explore such a connection, it is necessary to collate two pieces of textual evidence: the first is the annotated list of titles published by Hess in his 1969 monograph, loosely based on his conversations with Newman, and the second is an unpublished interview with K. Osis, dating from July or August 1963. After having recalled the “considerable influence” Abraham would have had on Reinhardt, Hess notes: “It was named in honor of [Newman’s] father, who recently had died, and concerns the idea of ‘the father as a tragic figure,’ with, in the back of his mind, probably Kierkegaard’s celebration of ‘father Abraham’ setting off on his mule to sacrifice Isaac: the image of the highest—inconceivably high—form of faith.”20 The biographical anecdote, often repeated in the literature, should not be overtaxed (all the more since Newman rarely lost any opportunity to deprecate this kind of “folklore”), but the stumbling rhythm of his conversation whenever this subject was broached would tend to indicate, despite his disclaimer, that mourning his own father was much on his mind when he painted Abraham. Hear him speak to O’Hara during their 1964 television interview: I thought that the appropriate title was Abraham. In the sense that I thought the Abraham painting was a tragic painting and to my mind the tragic figure in life is the father. Even though my father’s name was Abraham I don’t . . . I thought in relation to the notion of the father the most tragic of all persons. Certainly it’s not the mother or the son . . . to me it’s the father. I thought that the word Abraham of the title Abraham would indicate that it wasn’t just black on black . . . It was more than black on black. Yes. That I was not involved . . . To me the leverage is white on white which is different from Rembrandt’s black on white as far as that goes.21 Much more important in Hess’s annotation, however, is the reference to Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling, a book that figured in Newman’s library. Even if the edition owned by Newman dates from 1954, one should not conclude that he did not read the text before then. (He would often buy books secondhand long after having read the copy in his local branch of the New York Public Library.) On the other hand, it is only in the early fifties that Kierkegaard’s currency rose abruptly among the generation of Abstract Expressionist artists. Following Harold Rosenberg’s invo- cation of the Danish philosopher in his famous 1952 article, “The American Action Painters,” Robert Motherwell began to mention him regularly in 1954, and Fear and

20. Hess 1969, Barnett Newman, p. 55. 21. All ellipses are silences and non-sequiturs in Newman’s speech. The reference to Rembrandt obviously concerns the Dutch artist’s prints, but one wonders if Newman’s competitive remark was not unconsciously prompted by the 1636 version of Abraham’s Sacrifice in the Munich Alte Pinakothek, where Abraham looks absolutely terriﬁed. The later print on the same topic (dated 1655), not particularly remarkable for its use of chiaroscuro, is much less dramatic. My thanks to Herb Kessler for this reference.

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Trembling became one of Mark Rothko’s regular bedside books in 1955.22 One should not overestimate Newman’s interest in Kierkegaard, whom he never mentioned in his writings or interviews, but given that the titling of Abraham cannot be dated with any certainty and, as mentioned above, could have happened long after the painting was finished, it is more than plausible that it occurred after Newman had gained cognizance of Fear and Trembling’s content. In any event, it is undoubtedly to the context of a widespread enthusiasm for Kierkegaard that Barr referred when he began his preface for the catalog of the 1958–59 MoMA traveling show with these words: “Of the seventeen painters in this exhibition, none speaks for the others any more than he paints for the others. In principle their individualism is as uncompromising as that of the religion of Kierkegaard whom they honor.” And it is in this context, too, that one should put these strikingly halting remarks made by Newman to Osis, as if he was reliving his experience: I had the desire to make that central thing black and the rest of the painting was black. Well, I was in the state of terror because what would happen—I never had black on black. . . . The terror of it was intense. As a matter of fact, it took me, you might say, weeks to arrive at the point where I finally did it. I tried to do everything else except the black. I tried to make it, you know, I would leave it white. It looked all right; I thought maybe, you know, make it blue, make it. . . . But I couldn’t, I had to make it black. That as I recall was a moment of high feeling for me which was almost obsessive as I could not leave it; I could not do it. I could not do it. I could not do it. I could do it. I felt, well, you know, black. I’ll just ruin the canvas; it’s good and expensive. And this is a long time ago; it was in 1949. And it was to a certain extent involved in the beginning of my new life, so to speak. Well, I finally made it black. And that moment was almost, I don’t know, it would be wrong to say that it was violent. At the same time I think that every stroke one makes is violent because once you make it, it’s there and you’ve got to handle it. Later in the same interview, Newman would return to Abraham, which he compares to the audacity of early Cubist collages. (He also remarks, not so accurately, that in some of Picasso and Braque’s first Cubist drawings, “the line is like the hand was almost

22. See Robert Motherwell, “The Painter and the Audience” (1954), reprinted in Motherwell, Collected Writings, ed. Stephanie Terenzio (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), p. 107, and James E. B. Breslin, Mark Rothko: A Biography (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), pp. 392–33. As Nancy Jachec states, the cult of Kierkegaard, brought about by existentialism, was very popular among New York intellectuals in the immediate postwar period—Harold Rosenberg in particular. (See Jachec, The Philosophy and Politics of Abstract Expressionism 1940–1960 [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000], p. 99.) However, one has to note that artists have been slow in catching up. True, as early as 1945 Arshile Gorky borrowed the title of one of Kierkegaard’s most famous books for one of his paintings, Diary of a Seducer, but this gesture remained an exception for several years. Furthermore, as reported by Julien Levy, this title was suggested by Max Ernst (as others were by André Breton)—quite possibly without Gorky even being aware of the Danish philosopher. See Jordan and Goldwater, The Paintings of Arshile Gorky, no. 300.

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trembling.”) He then adds: “Like this black painting, I worked with [a] certain kind of tension which was bold and also afraid, so that this is what I suppose involves a sense of terror. . . . It’s more than anxiety. I was nervous because it’s so bold. It’s like something I’ve never seen or done. At the same time, I mean where do I get the nerve, you know, what’s going to happen?” In short, Newman’s agony is to be taken seriously, and it indeed explains in great part his fixation on anteriority. He was alone when he painted Abraham, and courageous, too, in surmounting his fear. Having a whole string of predecessors would take this “emotional content” away from the painting; it would empty it. He was alone, like Abraham during the interminable three and a half days of his journey with Isaac to the sacrificial site on the mountain, without anyone to whom he could confide his unprecedented ordeal—an immense solitude that Kierkegaard under- scores throughout his book.23 Newman was trembling in front of the unknown. Though Abraham radically opens many different avenues in Newman’s oeuvre, it is obviously the issue of “black on black” in painting that he found the most daunt- ing. It should be noted that he never repeated the gesture in paint, only in his prints (Cantos IV in 1963 and various states of Notes IX through XII in 1968). In a way, the Osis interview both confirms and denies Brenda Richardson’s connection of the painting to a drawing such as Untitled (The Name), dated by Newman himself from 1949.24 That is, it confirms that in a first state, and for a long time, Abraham must have looked rather similar to this drawing (the most important difference being that the composition of Abraham is based on a division of the painting’s width into sixths while that of the drawing is based on a division into fourths). But it also tells us that everything changed when the white column was blackened, that in its final form we are dealing with an altogether different order of things—that there is as much

23. One of Kierkegaard’s most important points is the uniqueness of Abraham’s plight; he is asked by God to perform an “absurd murder” that nothing can ethically justify. Kierkegaard contrasts Abraham with another biblical character, Jephthah, or with Brutus (Junius) and Agamemnon, who all had to sacrifice their child(ren) in order to ensure a military victory. See Fear and Trembling, trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983), pp. 57–61 and passim. It is interesting to note at this point, in view of Newman’s interpretation of Abraham as a tragic figure, that it runs directly counter to Nicolas Calas’s position in “The Essence of Tragedy,” an essay published in The Tiger’s Eye 3 in March 1948 (the same issue in which Newman’s “The Object and the Image” was published as a shorter substitute for “The New Sense of Fate,” which was judged too long by the editors). Both Calas’s and Newman’s discarded essay address the nature of Greek tragedy, and there are many similarities as well as differences in their analyses, but the relevant point here is that for Calas, neither Abraham nor Jesus is a tragic hero, while Agamemnon is: “To serve, but to serve reluctantly, that is to say without being able to change resistance into will, was the role the Greeks attributed to Agamemnon. To become a hero and to lead the Greeks to Troy, Agamemnon had to make the sacrifice of offering his daughter to the gods. But he did so under compulsion. Religion, through the example of Jesus, was to teach that sacrifice could be accepted voluntarily. Jesus internalized sacrifice and metamorphosed it into abnegation, while Abraham only internalized necessity and transformed it into servitude. Midway between Agamemnon and Jesus stood Socrates, who avoided sacrifice by committing suicide, thus escaping tragedy. Socrates refused to perish as a tragic hero must do, a victim of injustice, but died as a stoic who, unto the last, succeeds in retaining his freedom of action” (pp. 113–14). 24. Brenda Richardson, Barnett Newman: The Complete Drawings, 1944–1969 (Baltimore: Baltimore Museum of Art, 1979), p. 146. The drawing in question is now in the collection of the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.

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Newman. Untitled (The Name). 1949.

difference between the two states of the painting, say, as between Abraham’s willing- ness to sacrifice Isaac and Agamemnon’s to sacrifice Iphigenia, to use Kierkegaard’s example. (See note 23.) Given that Newman always insisted that his drawings are in no way sketches for his paintings, it is not surprising that, unlike his abstract expressionist colleagues, he resisted the appeal of black and white in painting. (Before Stations of the Cross from 1958 on, the only two canvases to be considered are Onement IV in 1949 and Prometheus Bound in 1952, neither of which could simply be called, stricto sensu, black and white.)25 There is no easier way to clearly demarcate two realms than to avoid any possible overlap: black and white for drawing (and he stuck to this prescription from 1948 on), and color for painting. With Abraham, Newman took the risk of disobeying his own simple rule—that is, he did a painting without chroma.26 And he succeeded at that, since no one ever thought of this canvas in graphic terms. His claim that, unlike Reinhardt’s, Abraham’s blacks are entirely pure is not con- firmed by the physical analysis of the paint, but this hardly means that he was being disingenuous, for black colors offered by paint manufacturers were sometimes mix-

25. The dark lateral planes of Onement IV are of a very dark, slightly bluish gray, and the fuzzy border between the white and the black planes in Prometheus Bound is bluish. (This irregular band is due to the fact that white paint was applied over the black coat while it was not yet dry and caught some of its pigment.) 26. Or, like Matisse (though he never mentioned him on that score), he considered black to be a color: note that in his letter to Schwabacher he characterizes Abraham as “the ﬁrst all-black painting that included no white and no other color besides black.”

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tures of colored pigments—something of which Newman would not have necessarily been aware, as a mixture would not have been identified as such at that time.27 What he knew, and decided to work with, is that the two black paints he used were very different in value and in sheen. He had already explored these differences in Onement II, where they bring to a whisper whatever little chromatic opposition is left in this tone- on-tone canvas, but now they were geared to replacing the play of chroma altogether. Shortly before alluding to Malevich, in the discarded litany written for the catalog of the 1958–59 traveling exhibition mentioned above, Newman writes: “My work, they claim, is based on nonvalue painting, when what they mean is that I depend specifically on the most subtle set of values and that value to me is of the utmost importance” (SWI, p. 180). This is undoubtedly a jab at Clement Greenberg, whose famous essay published in 1955, “American Type Painting,” had profoundly irritated Newman even though it contains the first serious piece of criticism ever devoted to his art.28 We have here a perfect case of misunderstanding.29 Greenberg had written that for Newman “the color is to function as hue and nothing else, and contrasts are to be

27. According to Chris McGlinchey, in the conservation lab of the Museum of Modern Art, the central “zip” is pure black, but the color of the lateral fields is a mixture of red, blue, and possibly a little green. My thanks to Mr. McGlinchey for this information, as well as to Jay Krueger, in the conservation lab of the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., for his precision concerning black paints offered by manufacturers. 28. Clement Greenberg, “American-Type Painting,” reprinted in Clement Greenberg: The Collected Essays and Criticism, vol. 3, Affirmation and Refusals, 1950–1956, ed. John O’Brian (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986). The relevant passages are pp. 227–33. 29. This is the occasion to provide some context for Newman’s polemic with Greenberg. In his letter to the critic, dated August 9, 1955 (published in SWI, pp. 202–04), Newman heavily protests against three points made in the article: that he invented the term “buckeye” and applied it to Clyfford Still in his conversations with Greenberg (Greenberg does not specifically say that Newman used the term with regard to Still, but Newman feels, not unreasonably so, that he implied it); that he “soaks his pigment into the canvas, getting a dyer’s effect” like Rothko; and that his mature style is indebted to Still’s work (especially with regard to close color value relationships). Curiously, it is the first point that gets the longest rebuttal. Newman explains that when he used the term it was in a pub, after Greenberg had asked why the works on the wall were failures. “You then wanted my technical definition of the term and I obliged.” He then goes on to say that he did not invent the term, claiming that it goes back for several centuries and that “other painters like Hogarth and Eakins have used it” (which, incidentally, does not seem to be the case—in fact, Newman might indeed be the first to have used this term in relation to painting, as it appears in the famous June 13, 1943 “Letter to the New York Times” signed by Adolph Gottlieb and Mark Rothko though it was mostly penned by him); and moreover, that he never thought of this term in conjunction with Still, and that “although ‘buckeye’ may be nonvalue painting, it does not make all nonvalue painting ‘buckeye.’ Huckleberries are berries but not all the berries are huckleberries” (SWI, p. 203). Newman wrote several drafts of this letter, some of them intended as a letter to the editor and not as a private letter to Greenberg. None of them, unfortunately, is very explicit with regard to his own definition of “buckeye” (which he does not give in the letter to Greenberg, probably because he did not want to be quoted on that). Here is the best clarification: “Mr. G. then asked what makes a buckeye. I then explained that although each object is accurately painted, the buckeye painter is unable to relate the color of paint [crossed out: in relation] as it refers to the object painted [crossed out: in terms] without any destruction of color value as if the color itself relates to other colors as they relate to the other object in the picture. That the painter understood one technical relation instead of three relations.” Greenberg’s own wording is a little more precise, though clearly indebted to Newman—after providing a kind of historical pedigree for the practice of “buckeye painting” (going back to Old Crome and the Barbizon School), he notes: “Its practitioners can draw with a certain

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sought with the least possible help of differences in value, saturation, or warmth.” But this followed a long development in Greenberg’s essay where Newman’s art was directly related to the diminution of value contrasts in late Monet. For Greenberg at that time, Monet’s “close-value paintings” (in which he even sees a “suppression of value”) represented a radical break in the history of Western painting, a break even more radical than Cubism, deemed conservative “in its resumption of Cézanne’s effort to save the convention of dark and light.” Resenting the fact that at several points of the essay Greenberg had made him a pupil of Clyfford Still, Newman over- looked the fact that the critic was in agreement with him with regard to his own subtle use of close values—as opposed to the other abstract expressionists’s recourse to black and white, which Greenberg characterized as “an effort to preserve by extreme measures a technical resource [chiaroscuro] whose capacity to yield

amount of academic correctness, but their command of shading, and of dark and light values in general, is not sufficient to control their color—either because they are simply inept in this department, or because they are naively intent on a more vivid naturalism of color than the studio-born principles of value contrast will allow” (“American Type-Painting,” p. 230). Interestingly, Still also focused on this passage in his own letter of protest to Greenberg, dated April 12, 1955: “Would it be asking too much to request that before you take farther into your confidence, in regard to me, any of the men who has presumed to educate you or speak for me or my work, you check their evidence, definitions, analyses, or terminology, especially where equivocal idioms are used, with me?—in person.” What follows, rather typical of Still’s emerging paranoia, is a process of intention against the artists of the Parsons Gallery [read: Newman] and their “devices and leeching ambitions.” On April 15, 1955, Greenberg replied to Still, noting that Newman was also upset about the piece (obviously Newman talked with Greenberg about it long before he sent his letter): “But let me tell you . . . that, before I finished the article, neither he nor anyone else tried to ‘educate’ me about your art beyond the point of saying that they liked it or didn’t like it.” (And Greenberg lists Newman, Pollock, Rothko, and Ossorio among Still’s admirers). “Of course, we’re all open to suggestion, unconsciously, but as I’ve said, I can remember no one’s having characterized your work in other than qualitative terms to me before I sent the article to press. Barney was the first one I heard name a certain kind of painting as buckeye, but he did not apply the term to yours. When I, some time later, told Barney that I thought there was a relation between buckeye and your painting, or rather some aspects of it, he protested vehemently and said your stuff was too good for that. And when I went on to characterize you as the finest Whitmanesque artist I knew of, he was willing to agree with me to the extent that I meant it as a compliment—which I did in large part, more than I myself realized. In any case Barney has always praised you and stood up for you, and done it more steadfastly than most people do for artists they admire. Nothing he has ever said to me about you could be construed as indicating the slightest jealousy. I wish I myself had a defender like him. Incidentally, I began admir- ing the late Monet before I heard from Barney that he did, and when I related Monet to the Still ‘school’ it was without prompting from him.” Three days later, Still replied to Greenberg: “Newman assured me that he used the term ‘buckeye’ in describing a painting on the wall of a restaurant, and did not apply the epithet to my work. I saw no reason to disbelieve him then, or now” (Archives of American Art, reel 7O–7R). There is no trace of a letter from Newman to Still between April 15 and 18, but Still alluded to the affair in a letter to Newman dated April 20: “I am having some trouble subordinating the reaction to Greenberg’s article. Maybe it will pass with time.” Despite the fact that their relationship had cooled off a bit, Newman and Still were still in fairly good terms at this point (and Greenberg’s letter testifies to Newman’s support of Still). The friendship came abruptly to an end when Still, who had promised to be a witness in the lawsuit brought against Reinhardt by Newman, changed his mind at the last moment (note from Still to Newman, dated February 16, 1956). The issue of “blackness” loomed large in all these quarrels. A few years later, irritated by Dore Ashton’s review of a Still exhibition, Newman wrote a letter to the critic (which he never sent) protesting against her praise of a recent “big black painting which is a takeoff on [his own] black on black and big ones” (dated November 23, 1959).

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convincing form and unity is nearing exhaustion.”30 Newman chose to ignore, furthermore, that Greenberg’s take on the late works of Monet (as opposed to the early ones) was very similar to his own. (Much later, in 1968, praising Uccello’s Battle in the Louvre, Newman would exclaim: “Fantastic. Absolute totality. One image. I suppose this is so because the light is even from corner to corner. No spotlights— Courbet and Pissarro are like that. Monet, for instance, was always spotlighting theatrically, except in his late work. Hence his popularity” [SWI, p. 292].)31 The closeness of value had several functions in Abraham. One of them was to help the compositional structure of the painting sustain the battle it was waging against the traditional ﬁgure/ground opposition. In forcing us to be attentive so that we come gradually to perceive the blacker zip emerge from the surrounding ﬁeld, the closeness of value undermines spatial/geometric relations and leads us to have an experience of time. (It is thus not by chance that the painting is contemporaneous with Newman’s life-changing visit to the Indian mounds in Ohio, after which he declared: “The concern with space bores me. I insist on my experience of sensations in time—not the sense of time but the physical sensation of time” [SWI, p. 175].) Newman would have been perfectly right in pointing to his anteriority to Reinhardt on that score, since the latter’s supposedly black “Ultimate” paintings all perform a similar transformation of the spatial art of painting into a temporal form, with very similar means (the one difference being that Reinhardt admits no sheen whatsoever).32 But Newman could have invoked

30. Neither Greenberg nor Newman would change their attitude on this issue. In a essay published in 1962, “After Abstract Expressionism,” Greenberg tried to be clearer when he wrote that Newman’s work “has to be uniform in hue, with only the subtlest variations of value or any at all,” but he repeated that Still had been the initiator on that score (in Greenberg, The Collected Essays and Criticism, vol. 4, Modernism with a Vengeance, 1957–1969, ed. John O’Brian, p. 131). Newman’s retort was immediate, and particularly interesting in this context in that it refers both to Abraham and to Clyfford Still. In a public lecture at Hunter College, on November 16, 1962, he declared: “He [Greenberg] raises certain issues with my work which I thought I might mention here. Because I feel that it involved errors. Not only in relation to his failure to take, to get involved in the concept which he raises, but also in relation to other matters. The impression, for example, that my work is based on a non-value set of factors, I ﬁnd absolutely . . . insulting. Because the actual fact is, if you look at my work, that the whole thing depends, to a great extent, on value. That is, the painting that I have in the museum that is black on black, cannot be construed as one color on top of another color, it’s all black but there are two blacks there, at least. The paintings that I have in which red dominates move in relation to a depiction of values that are more than just subtle, they are real. And this is one of the problems that interests me. So for him to raise the issue that they exist on a non-value basis . . . I think it’s true, for example, that Still discovered, or uses color in a non-value basis in order to destroy color. Actually, that can be argued, too. In some of Still’s work, for example, where he has red on black, that’s a deﬁnite value contrast. Or he has black on yellow, that’s a contrast of value. Also, in handling paint, there’s no such thing as a ‘red.’ There’s a light cadmium, a medium cadmium, and a deep cadmium. Those are not different hues, those are different values. Just as in blue there are a variety of blues that are different not only in hue but are different in value” (transcript courtesy of Melissa Ho, p. 4). 31. Newman’s interest in Monet is well known. (See notably his letter to the president of the Museum of Modern Art on the occasion of the purchase of Poplars at Giverny in 1953 [SWI, pp. 38–40].) His enthusiasm for the anarchist Pissarro, by contrast, is much less publicized even though Annalee Newman often alluded to it. 32. On this temporal aspect of the close-value color relationship in Reinhardt’s “black” paintings, see my essay, “The Limit of Almost,” in Ad Reinhardt (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1991), p. 28.

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Reinhardt as well for the thin, light halo that ﬂeetingly appears on each side of the darker zip. Although this halo might not be entirely an optical effect, since what seems to be glue residue is added to the fray,33 it is for the most part the product of an illusion that occurs each time clearly delimited planes of similar hue but of different values are juxtaposed.34 The optical effect of a halo is extremely volatile—it is an apparition whose evanescence is crucial if the goal is to give the beholder an actual sensation of time. One has to be patient to perceive it; in a sense one has to have faith, one must be expectant—it requires one’s sustained presence, and this presence is based on faith, like that of Abraham answering God’s call by declaring “Here I am.”35 But the fragile halo needs to be protected, as the slightest alteration in its conditions of visibility (alteration of the picture’s surface, harsh light, etc.) would annul its possibility. It is for this reason that Newman was extremely wary of any interference, of anything that might disturb the delicate interaction between the two blacks of Abraham. In a letter to Barr, for example, commenting on his visit to the exhibition The New American Painting, Newman writes: I noticed that the black frame on Adam had been removed, which I think is right. Although I was one of the ﬁrst to reject the use of frames, I do

33. In the present state of the painting, which has undergone several conservation treatments, it seems that the lighter line edging the black zip has a material existence—though this is by no means obvious, even under a microscope. (The difficulty in asserting what one actually sees is compounded by the coat of wax that was applied over the paint layer by a conservator.) But the distinctive behavior of this line with regard to the layer of wax—it is the only matte element of the painting, thus the only place to which the wax did not adhere (or where it sunk in)—would tend to indicate that if a different matter explains the difference of brightness, this extraneous matter is not paint itself but possibly tape residue (glue), as in the case of Ulysses, where it is far more conspicuous. This matter seems to be deposited (below the wax) on top on the paint surface, as is usual with any glue residue in Newman’s paintings, but its location on the canvas does not match what we know from the Osis interview (i.e., that the central zip came last): it is “inside” the central zip, as if this zip had been painted before the lighter field, which is not the case. Of course Newman could have decided, after having painted the zip, to add another layer of paint to the lateral areas (he then would have needed to put tape on the top of the zip), but the paint left on the tacking edge discredits this possibility (see n. 40 below). As in most of his paintings, the zip area was masked by tape while the rest of the canvas was covered with paint, then after the tape[s] covering the zip area had been removed, other tapes were applied over the paint on each side of the unpainted zip (“outside” it), and the zip was finally painted. It seems thus that the glue residue, which might not have been immediately perceptible—it might have yellowed in time—was left during one or the other of the conservation treatments. From the discussion that follows, it should be apparent that any addition of a third color would have been thought very disruptive by Newman. The surprising difficulty one has in pinning things down here, even with the support of the best technology, probably comes from the fact that we are confronting both an optical halo (“outside” the zip) and a material residue (“inside” it). 34. This effect was already discussed by Michel-Eugène Chevreul, who actually makes the demon- stration with grays, in his 1839 De la loi du contraste simultané des couleurs, which would have a huge suc- cess among painters. It was discussed again in Interaction of Color by Josef Albers (1963), a painter in whom Newman did not have the slightest interest (see above, n. 34, Annalee Newman’s remark), but whom Reinhardt admired and befriended. 35. Kierkegaard abundantly glossed this passage of Genesis (22:1); see Fear and Trembling, pp. 21, 239–40. As far as I know, David Anfam is the first to have noticed it. See Anfam, “Philadelphia and London: Barnett Newman,” The Burlington Magazine (September 2002), p. 584.

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not ﬁnd the frames on Concord and Horizon Light too objectionable, although I think they are unnecessary. However, the use of a frame on Abraham I think is wrong, since it brings a third black element into the painting, with I did not intend. Since painting it in 1949, I have always been careful to show it unframed. May I ask that you judge it for yourself?36 The absence of signature partakes of a similar concern. Newman did not wish, in principle, to leave his paintings unsigned, but as late as November 1968 he would remark on the fact that he had still not found a way to sign Abraham or Onement II.37 Let us now examine the issue of brilliance. In front of the current state of the painting, whose surface has been buried under a thick coat of glistening wax applied by a conservator, one can hardly imagine what the original experience— described by Hess among others—of a stark opposition between a shiny central zip and a matte ﬁeld would have been like.38 But several photographs taken in Newman’s studio might give us some idea. The fact that most show the painting obliquely—in raking light, revealing how thick the original stretcher was—might be attributed to Newman’s urging. Whatever the case, the photographs enact the kind of value reversal that Newman had already explored in End of Silence, in that

36. In his answer dated September 11, 1959, Barr explains his delay in replying by the fact that he wanted to consult Dorothy Miller and had to wait for her return. Miller agrees that Newman’s paintings (as well as Still’s and Rothko’s) should be exhibited without frames, but that “it is necessary, however, when they are not on view to have some simple stripping for handling purposes.” Barr adds: “Dorothy explains to me that the frame was left on Abraham entirely through oversight.” A similar oversight occurred again, it seems: on August 20, 1973, Cora Rosewear, from MoMA’s Painting and Sculpture Department, requested that the painting be unframed, noting that it would have to be done “first thing in the morning” as it was “on view in the galleries.” Though this is a less pressing issue, Newman’s reluctance at having a “third black element” brought into the painting raises the question of the masking tape on the edge. We know from the March 12, 1958, conservation proposal written by Jean Volkmer (of the Museum of Modern Art), who was in charge of preparing Newman’s paintings for their 1958–59 tour, that the present black tape is not original—it replaced a “drafting tape along the edges of the stretcher,” which was removed by Volkmer, as per her proposal. Was this drafting tape brown, as usual? The photographs of the original state of Abraham tend to indicate that it was not black. Newman’s anxiety over the fate of his paintings once they had left his studio is legendary, but it seems to have been particularly acute with regard to Abraham. It is perhaps not by chance that he chose this painting to illustrate his response to a questionnaire about exhibition conditions, which reads as follows: “I can only say, in reply to the question, what are the ideal museum conditions for the presen- tation of my work, that it is my hope that whether it be a museum, a gallery or a private collection that my work be shown, as closely as possible, the way it looks in my studio where it was created” (Arts Yearbook 9 [1967], p. 90). 37. Notes by Henry Geldzahler from an interview with Newman about Concord, dated November 26, 1968. Concord file at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. 38. See Hess 1971, Barnett Newman, p. 59. One of the conservators who had to treat Abraham after it came back from the 1957 show in Minneapolis, Jean Volkmer (from MoMA), also specifically spoke of the “sensitive mat surface” of the field (on each side of the “zip”), where the vandal’s damage had occurred (letter to Newman dated March 12, 1958). Hess implicitly attributes the difference in sheen between the two blacks to a difference of medium; he was right, except that it is the central zip that is in acrylic (magna), while the lateral areas are in oil.

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Newman in his studio, ca. 1950.

the darker area appears brighter as soon as specular light (due to lateral lighting or an oblique point of view) comes into play. The extent of this effect is measured by a review of the 1959 show at MoMA in Time magazine, where the painting was described as a “vertical white line on a towering black canvas”—a clear indication that the writer had not bothered standing directly in front of the painting and had only glanced at it obliquely and from afar.39 The difference in sheen (and its destabilizing inversion of value relations) is one of the aspects of Abraham that demarcates it most from the “black” paintings Reinhardt would start making some five years later. Fearing any interference from the phenomenal, literal space in the perception of the work—or, as he would say, any interaction between “art and life”—Reinhardt would seek a superlative matte- ness that would prevent any possible light reflection. To this effect, he would drastically gray-out the paint of his canvases by diluting the oil medium with vast quantities of thinner, which accounts for their extreme fragility. It is worth noting, however, that the absence of gloss in the lateral areas of Abraham (which, for brevity’s sake, I call “the field”) was obtained by roughly the same means that

39. Newman immediately dispatched one of his famous “letters to the editor,” of course: “The white stripe is a deep black black [sic]. This painting, Abraham, was painted by me in 1949 and is the ﬁrst all black, black-on-black painting that was ever painted. What’s the matter? Is it that your writer cannot tell the difference between black and white or is it, God forbid, that he is ‘anti-black’?” (Letter wrongly dated June 25, 1969.)

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Reinhardt would later adopt (and with the same consequences with regard to the fragility of the surface): many layers of a very liquid paint, containing an unusually high proportion of solvent, were applied to a canvas resting flat on a table.40 Newman had always been extremely worried about sending his pictures into the world (alas, for good reason), and later in life he would often ship them with specific instructions about the special care that they required. To my knowledge, this happened first with the lot he sent to Minneapolis in August 1957—Onement III, Vir Heroicus Sublimis, and Abraham. In his letter to Stanton Catlin, he apolo- gized for being so fussy, adding: “The surfaces of my pictures are such that even a scratch can destroy the picture effect, whereas [in] those pictures with many forms and colors, a scratch only affects the specific area around it.”41 When he found out, upon its return from Minneapolis on September 27, that Abraham had been vandalized (six fingerprints of green paint), he was devastated. The blow was complete when he discovered on November 10 that Vir Heroicus Sublimis had been similarly damaged. (The major heart attack that he suffered a few weeks later might not be unrelated.) While Newman’s own claims about the painting all revolve around the priority of its being black on black, he never spoke of the extraordinary compositional innovation of this canvas which, true to its title, had many offspring in his subse- quent oeuvre. It is quite possible that, in accordance with Hess’s account and contrary to what I previously thought,42 By Twos preceded Abraham; we do know from the Osis interview that the latter painting was very slow in its making. Both canvases make the same move with regard to symmetry (side-stepping it without altogether discarding it), since in both cases one linear element is congruent with the central axis (the right edge of the zip in Abraham, the left light blue zip in By Twos), and both paintings are governed by a modular division of their width into sixths.43 But in Abraham the axial displacement is of far greater consequence than in the narrower blue and brownish-black painting in that it is combined with the transformation of a zip into a plane, a transformation that eliminates any possible

40. There are abundant drips everywhere on the four sides of the wide tacking edge (as well as signs that Newman has used an airbrush) except in the two areas prolonging the zip, at top and bottom. This last feature confirms that the zip was painted last, and it invalidates the hypothesis that a supple- mentary coat of paint was applied on the surrounding field after the zip was painted. It should be noted here that the tacking edge is exceptionally wide, at this early stage of Newman’s career (canvas was expensive), because the painting was re-stretched before it went on its 1958–59 tour (on a much thinner stretcher than the original). 41. Letter dated August 28, 1957. 42. See “Perceiving Newman,” in Bois, Painting as Model (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1990), p. 204. 43. The exact measurement of the width division is 11 1/8 + 6 + 17 1/2 inches (total of 34 5/8 inches), which means that the 6-inch zip is wider than one-sixth of the overall width and that its right edge is a bit off the axis of symmetry. However, not much can be concluded from that, as the canvas was restretched. It is quite possible that the zip has always been a bit wider than a sixth, but it is less likely that the very small displacement from the axis of symmetry (less than half an inch) is original. In any case the perceived dimensions, as opposed to the actual ones, are what counts here, and we have no difficulty whatsoever in seeing both the module and the symmetry. One does not usually look at a work of art with a ruler in hand.

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reading of any area as interstitial. In other words, while the area separating the two zips can still be seen in By Twos as an interval (though much less than in Concord, where it is definitively read as a portion of an atmospheric ground), the fact that the shining black band of Abraham is not delimited by lighter “zips” but has become a wide zip itself prevents us from even entertaining such a possibility.44 Newman would often insist, later on, that his zips are not lines but color planes (see, for example, the discarded text for the 1958–59 traveling show: “My work, they say, is involved in line, when it is obvious that there are no lines” [SWI, p. 180]), and that the zip and its surrounding field are not different in nature but in extension (an ontological identity that Newman often inscribed in the very process of painting: rather than painting his zips on the color field, more often than not he painted them last and directly on the white priming of the canvas which was reserved for this purpose). In Abraham, this breakdown of the traditional opposition between line and

44. The fact is that the three dark planes in By Twos are all of a different hue: while the wider left area is black, in the central area a similar coat of black has been entirely covered by many layers of dark brown paint; in the right area, the brown paint has been applied much less heavily and the dark coat shows through. This division of the “ﬁeld” into several distinct zones, obviously directed at avoiding the constitution of a uniﬁed background (and the attendant spatial illusion), seems to suggest that By Twos is posterior to Concord.

Newman. Left: By Twos. 1949. Right: Concord. 1949.

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color, or between line and plane, is accentuated by the modular division mentioned above, which in turn helps undo the perceptual dichotomy of figure and ground: the shiny black zip just fills one module, the plane at its left fills two, the one at its right fills three. (Strictly speaking, the painting is not black on black at all, but “black next to black.”) But the certainty of our perception—which depends upon a clear recognition of the figure/ground hierarchy—is also assaulted by other means. As plane, a vertical zip has two vertical edges, a fact that is emphasized in Abraham by the very width of the zip, but Newman makes it difficult for us to read these two edges as equivalent (and thus to obtain an immediate, synthetic mental image of the zip as a geometric figure, as a timeless gestalt). Positioning one edge on the axis of symmetry and the other not, Newman deliberately gives them a different weight without tilting anything in space. (He would pursue this type of disequilibrium by other means in both Covenant and The Promise, as well as in Galaxy, in which symmetry is completely abandoned. It is hardly by chance that, as noted above, the titles of these canvases are semantically linked.) The fleeting apparition of a halo on each side of the zip further teases our perceptual capacity: we never manage to take in everything simultaneously and the only certitude we are ever able to grasp in front of such a vacillating image is, when we step back, the lateral expanse of the whole canvas and its more-than-human height. Such a feat, which requires the suppression of insterstitial space (and thus of any atmospheric illusion of depth), had already been achieved, of course, in the symmetrical canvases of the Onement series, but now Newman is experimenting with a laterality that is not deductive, that is not a property of the field as such, and this is a much more complex affair.45 Abraham, more than any other previous work by Newman—and he will draw a lot from it—catches us in the process of perceiving and of realizing that the yardstick of scale, by which we measure our own spatial relation to the objects we behold, is what gives us above all a sense of being here, not there, to paraphrase one of his titles.

45. Abraham, in a sense, is the ﬁrst major step, after Newman’s investigation of symmetry, in his quest for laterality. Interestingly, the biblical source from which derives the title of another landmark in this quest, Cathedra, stages another “Here I am” in reply to God’s call (that of Isaiah in Isaiah 6:9).

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