Barnett Newman.pdf

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 Ž rst—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 signi Ž cant than one tends to imagine) result from our dialogue. Finally, I greatly bene Ž ted 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 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 speci Ž c 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 Ž gures (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.

Abraham

YVE-ALAIN BOIS

Newman considered Abraham one of his most signi Ž cant works. Included in his

Ž rst 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 Ž g-

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 Ž rst 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 Ž nal 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 � anked 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 Ž rst 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.

Abraham

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 histor y, not ably it s impact on art ist s of his own generat ion, be properly

acknowledged. His pervasive anxiety over the issue of Abraham’ s “pr iority” is

documented in numerous declarations that give us some hint as to what the paint-

ing meant for him.

Newman’s quasi-obsession about the inaugural character of Abraham was

undoubtedly exacerbated by the con � ict with his once-good friend Ad Reinhardt,

with whom he had not been on speaking terms since October 1954. The quixotic law-

suit that Newman attempted to Ž le 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 Ž rst “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 bene Ž t 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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