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On Two Paintings by Barnett Newman*

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On Two Paintings by Barnett Newman* 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 can- vases—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 fundamen- tally 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. OCTOBER 108, Spring 2004, pp. 3–27. © 2004 The Barnett Newman Foundation. Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/016228704774115690 by guest on 02 October 2021 4 OCTOBER 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 per- haps 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 can- vases 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. Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/016228704774115690 by guest on 02 October 2021 Abraham 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 fig- ures 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).
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