Being and Somethingness: Barnett Newman: Here

Princeton University Press.

“Here. A place in the world. Proof that one exists. Barnett Newman spent a lifetime searching for confirmation of a simple idea.”

Amy Newman

For many decades as an art historian I have often remarked to those who would listen that what matters most about visual art and art history is not exactly what you’re looking at in front of you. Puzzled expressions often ensue. I frequently share the observation that there’s more to fine art than meets the eye, and that what matters is what’s behind your eyes, not what’s in front of them. In other words, how much you know about what you’re seeing, in the sense not of privileged knowledge but rather of the kind of basic information that can be accessed by anyone who is curious about what’s going on in the world of contemporary art, that quantum which can alter your perception forever. By anyone who can, that is, suspend immediate snap value judgments and pursue any credible art text in any reasonable library. And if my audience were still listening, I would proceed to further clarify this perspective: the image is in front of us but the imagination is in our minds, lurking behind our visual apparatus, just waiting to be fully engaged in a deeply personal and, for lack of a better term, existential revelation.

Such a revelation can come in many shapes and sizes, in a variety of styles and concomitant traditions, each with its own set of codes and ciphers, but with one singular aspect in common: transformation. Barnett Newman: Here, Amy Newman’s important new book from Princeton University Press, is the biography of one individual artist who holds a special place in art history, but it is also the biography of an era, the late modernist era, and a city, New York, which was for a long time an incubator of innovation for the exploration and delivery of radically new images. It is also the biography of the condition of transformation itself, and the crucial role that paint can play in its transmission. Amy Newman, while not related to the titanic Barnett, has something of a similarly towering pedigree of her own, which makes her the ideal candidate for providing more than enough information to help the average viewer begin to appreciate the purpose, motives and strategies of abstract expressionism. She is an art historian and journalist, and the author of a superb book examining the tectonic influence of a hugely impactful art magazine, Challenging Art: Artforum 1962-1974, as well as the co-editor (with Irving Sandler) of Defining Modern Art: Selected Writings of Alfred Barr.

In Here, she has drawn on previously unpublished sources gleaned from full open access to Barnett’s Newman’s archives. Her accessible style and voluminous background succeed in presenting us with a full-blooded portrait of an art-world maverick whose works are among the most enduring and compelling of the 20th century and whose influence and cultural vibe continue to be deeply felt in our flickering digital day. Now, naturally viewers/readers don’t have to like or love these strikingly original paintings, which are the at the cutting edge of the abstract experiment in the middle of the last century; however, after reading this book they will understand it enough to avoid dismissing it. That’s because the undeniable authenticity, passion and commitment of Newman and his circle of fellow postwar American painters will, I can almost guarantee it, instill a modicum of respect and wonderment in their assessment of just what these guys, and more than a few intrepid women as well, were up to. From the cave wall to the computer screen, the evolution of images, and especially the art of painting, has been a vertiginous ride, but, as the author reveals, the core content of human nature being explored remains almost the same, regardless of how the style may have changed. The key themes of self/nature/society/spirituality remain essential, and the key formats of portrait/still life/landscape/abstraction have now entered a rarefied conceptual realm with no limits to freedom of expression.

Newman and one of his "zip" paintings in his studio, 1952. (Photo: Hans Namuth.)

Of course, the public audience for cultural artifacts is still often valiantly trying to catch up to all these heady developments, and it can sometimes be puzzling for the uninitiated to comprehend how and why bold experimenters like Jackson Pollock or Newman are still inherently studying the natural world and our place in it in a way that shares much in common with Vermeer or Rembrandt. (“I am nature,” Pollock once infamously quipped in response to a critic’s question about why he had abandoned painting pictures of nature.) Which is precisely where Here comes into play with such emphatic historical value. She positions Barnett Newman as one of the pivotal founders of the abstract expressionist movement, parallel with other looming luminaries such as Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Clyfford Still, Mark Rothko, and most crucially perhaps, Newman’s arch-rival/nemesis Ad Reinhardt (whose revolutionary black paintings fought a shadow-boxing match with Newman’s own dramatic experiments in red and blue).

Newman's Voice of Fire, 1967.

Considering his mammoth influence and stature (mostly in the eyes of other painters, critics and curators), by comparison to that other art giant Picasso’s thousands of works, Newman’s own output was relatively modest (though their maker was not in the least modest): only 188 paintings, 6 sculptures and 83 drawings, a restrained body of work almost at par with the Dutch master Vermeer. Yet he is still regarded, as the author’s exhaustive epic life story makes abundantly clear, as the most important artist to emerge after the Second World War. Her narrative also shares, in an intimate insider’s voice, how this charismatic New Yorker defied the enshrined rules of his era and created a visual art that approached the sublime. He started painting late in life, after first immersing himself in the urban cultural fabric of New York, which he considered to be a living artwork in its own right. He was an active anarchist and a crusader for the civil service, ran against La Guardia for mayor, worked as a teacher, wrote poetry, art criticism and manifestos (many, many manifestos), produced political plays, and actively promoted other artists – all long before painting his own mature works in his mid-forties.

Newman hit the art ground running, despite having ignored the tenets of arts education, training, apprenticeship and even a natural facility for making. Instead he possessed what the author rightly identifies as a “galvanizing intellect and a conviction that aesthetic expression is an ecstatic declaration of existence and an assertion of human dignity.” Curious readers who are patient enough to examine the conscience of the man behind these extravagantly large-scale yet minimal visual statements will come away with a deep respect for the humanity, emotional intensity and artistic integrity of this ultra-individualist American. Such readers, whether or not they personally enjoy his huge vistas, will definitely admire his guts and may even have a sudden understanding of the true meaning of that old chestnut: American exceptionalism. He was the virtual embodiment of that notion. As a good example: when he produced his first “zip” painting, a single narrow vertical panel existing solo down the expanse of canvas as his disposal (shown in the Namuth studio portrait above), he turned it to face the wall and stopped working on anything else long enough to try and understand the gesture he had just made. Afterwards, he destroyed all the work he had created before that singular revelatory moment.

The artist’s own take on what led him to his momentous aesthetic discovery was revealing in the rawest and most unadorned manner: 

You must realize that twenty years ago we felt the moral crisis of a world in shambles, a world devastated by a great depression and a fierce world war, and it was impossible at that time to still paint the kind of paintings we were doing—flowers, reclining nudes, people playing the cello. And I would say that for some of us this was also a moral crisis in terms of what to paint. So we actually began, so to speak, from scratch, as if painting were not only dead but had never even existed.

It wasn’t only that the paintings that he and his fellow abstract expressionists desired to make – had to make, in fact – were hyper-modernist; they were actually already transcending what modernism had first launched as its ethos in the first decades of the century. This was abstraction abstracted even from modernism itself, reveling in flatness, solitary surface, pure unadorned colour, monumental scale and physical presence but also, equally as important, they dealt with something even more profound: absence. They were existential statements of consciousness divorced from storytelling. They themselves were the fabula.

Newman's sculpture Here I, 1950.

As always, context is everything. But not just the context provided so amply by the author for situating Newman’s work within the advanced painting traditions of the 40’s and 50’s in New York (which is more than enough to elicit an appropriate amount of fresh tolerance for Barnett’s dedication to the craft of being Barnett) but also the cultural context of the era in general. In other words, the best way of appreciating Newman’s abstraction, apart from attempting to appreciate his peers’ works alongside him, is to consider his monumental yet austere works alongside other works of the era outside the visual art field. For example, if while looking closely at Here I or Voice of Fire, the reader also looked at, listened to or read works made by artists in other media which essentially said the same thing, but in the language of their own medium. That’s the way to find a strategy for penetrating Newman’s paintings: by stealthily developing a degree of acceptance for works that are not paintings but which inherently express the same deep feelings.

As per: a reading of Jean Paul Sartre’s groundbreaking philosophical works, Being and Nothingness (1943) and No Exit (1948); viewing Alberto Giacometti’s 1948 sculptures Standing Woman or Walking Man; reading Samuel Beckett’s trilogy of novels Molloy, Malone Dies and The Unnamable (1953); listening to the skeletal Morton Feldman musical composition Last Pieces (1959); or hearing the radical jazz improvisations of Thelonious Monk and John Coltrane that same year. Suddenly, all of these experiences come into a startlingly shared focus. As in: ‘Now I get it. I’m not sure I like it exactly, but it might grow on me, and now I see and hear and understand what they were trying to tell me.’ And Newman’s biographer ably clarifies the vivid presence of the avuncular painter who was universally addressed as Barney by both friends (there were plenty) and foes (there were even more of those) in the seismic shifts of mid-20th-century art so effectively referenced by art historian Meyer Shapiro:

The familiar Barnett Newman, the artist of “Spiritual Grandeur,” was not created suddenly out of whole cloth in 1948. He was in no sense a fraud, nothing significant is exactly untrue, and he was by no means cynical about his art or the mid-20th-century notion of art’s high purpose. On the contrary, so confirmed was he that art conceiving and making was nearly sacramental, that he was virtually paralyzed by the calling. And yet, he was certain he had been ‘called’ and spent over half his adult life consciously incubating, celebrating, preparing himself for the act. While he was producing the art that he felt was necessary, he also created a creator that he believed was worthy of that art: a thoughtful, savvy, and disciplined unity in the service of his vision. He may have had the not entirely rare qualities of grandiosity and narcissism, but he imagined them into a cohesive vision of art and an artist that seemed to be exactly what his culture called for.

Ms. Newman generously gives us what she calls “the story of the man’s life.” And it’s not the story of a figure inhabiting the rarefied ether of art-historical Valhalla, but of a vivid human being with a ravenous appetite for experience and agency, embedded in a specific time and place in the world. The art he created, one of categorical contradiction, was not the antithesis of the life he lived but a response to it: a kind of intense reduction, a concentration that compacted and consumed the multifariousness of that life into a statement of presence: ‘something, where if you stand in front of it, you know you’re there.’” This last expression by the painter aligns with my own observation that he was what I often think of as a "balsamic reduction" of himself: the distilled end result of all the ingredients that went into making him a great artist. By the time Barnett Newman passed away at the age of 65 in 1970, the era we now identify as the postmodern was about to begin. But again, it was Newman, in his voluminous epistles to the baffled, who explained himself in plain terms that omitted any fancy criticality or hifalutin tone:

Some twenty years ago in a gathering of some sort I was asked what my painting really means in terms of society, in terms of the world, our world. And my answer was that if my work was properly understood it would be about the end of state capitalism and totalitarianism. Because to the extent that my painting was not an arrangement of objects or spaces, or graphic elements, but was instead an open painting, I believe that my work, in terms of its social impact, does denote the possibility of an open society.

How I wish that the many folks who are puzzled by Newman and his work, who then enthusiastically rush to express disdain or dismissal, had been able to read something like that first. If only they had done so before, for instance, viewing a then new acquisition, Voice of Fire (1967), that the National Gallery of Art in Ottawa was proudly unveiling after purchasing it for $1.8 million in 1989, nearly twenty years after his demise. It’s a staggering masterpiece, a visionary nearly eighteen-foot-tall monolith celebrating what the artist called being there, now estimated to have a market value of $60 million+. Better still, just read Amy Newman’s stellar new biography of this determined and diligent master of his own domain. It’s all right there.

– Donald Brackett is a Vancouver-based popular culture journalist and curator who writes about music, art and films. He has been the Executive Director of both the Professional Art Dealers Association of Canada and The Ontario Association of Art Galleries. He is the author of the recent book Back to Black: Amy Winehouse’s Only Masterpiece (Backbeat Books, 2016). In addition to numerous essays, articles and radio broadcasts, he is also the author of two books on creative collaboration in pop music: Fleetwood Mac: 40 Years of Creative Chaos, 2007, and Dark Mirror: The Pathology of the Singer-Songwriter, 2008, as well as the biographies Long Slow Train: The Soul Music of Sharon Jones and The Dap-Kings, 2018, and Tumult!: The Incredible Life and Music of Tina Turner, 2020, and a book on the life and art of the enigmatic Yoko Ono, Yoko Ono: An Artful Life, released in April 2022. His latest work is a book on family relative Charles Brackett's films made with his partner Billy Wilder, Double Solitaire: The Films of Charles Brackett and Billy Wilder, published in January 2024.