02 art in america after ww ii (elizabeth kuebler-wolf's conflicted copy 2016-09-07)
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After WWII, New York became the new center of the art world as many European artists fled from the war and Hitler. This led to the emergence of Abstract Expressionism, also known as the New York School, in the late 1940s and 1950s. The movement had two main divisions - gestural abstraction as seen in the works of Pollock and de Kooning who dripped and flung paint onto large canvases, and color-field painting exemplified by Newman and Rothko who used large fields of color. Pollock's iconic drip paintings from this period, such as Lavender Mist and Autumn Rhythm, came to define the abstract expressionist style.
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02 art in america after ww ii (elizabeth kuebler-wolf's conflicted copy 2016-09-07)
- 1. Post-war Art in America
- 2. After WWII • “The American Century” – Postwar economic boom – Victory and rebuilding Europe & Japan • New York as new center of art world – European artists had fled from war & Hitler – Economic center of the world – “How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art” – Serge Gilbault’s history of Abstract Expressionism
- 3. Abstract Expressionism • AKA The New York School, AbEx, The American School, Action Painting • 2 main divisions: – Gestural Abstraction (Pollock, de Kooning) – Color-field painting (Newman, Rothko) • The gendered world of 1950’s painting in New York
- 5. • Pollock, Male and Female, 1943
- 6. Joan Miro, Carnival of Harlequin, 1924
- 7. • Pollock, Moon Woman Cuts the Circle, 1943
- 8. • Full Fathom Five, 1947
- 11. • From Namuth documentary on Autumn Rhythm
- 12. Pollock, Autumn Rhythm, 1950
- 14. • Side view of a Pollock ptg
- 15. • Closeups of Autumn Rhythm
- 19. Died. Jackson Pollock, 44, bearded shock trooper of modern painting, who spread his canvases on the floor, dribbled paint, sand and broken glass on them, smeared and scratched them, named them with numbers...; at the wheel of his convertible in a side road crack-up near East Hampton, N.Y. --Time Magazine August 20, 1956
- 21. • Mark Rothko, No. 10,1950. Oil on canvas, 229.2 x 146.4 cm (90 1/4 x 57 5/8),
- 22. • Mark Rothko, Untitled [Blue, Green, and Brown],1952 (alternativel y dated to 1951),
- 23. • Mark Rothko, Orange and Tan,1954
- 24. • Mark Rothko, Untitled [Seagram Mural],c. 1958
- 25. • Rothko Room (7 paintings for the Seagram Building in New York)1958-1959
Editor's Notes
- The first public exhibitions of work by the ``New York School'' of artists-- who were to become known as Abstract Expressionists-- were held in the mid '40s. Like many other modern movements, Abstract Expressionism does not describe any one particular style, but rather a general attitude; not all the work was abstract, nor was it all expressive. What these artists did have in common were morally loaded themes, often heavyweight and tragic, on a grand scale. In contrast to the themes of social realism and regional life that characterized American art of previous decades, these artists valued, above all, individuality and spontaneous improvisation. They felt ill at ease with conventional subjects and styles, neither of which could adequately convey their new vision. In fact, style as such almost ceased to exist with the Abstract Expressionists, and they drew their inspiration from all directions. The painters who came to be called ``Abstract Expressionists'' shared a similarity of outlook rather than of style-- an outlook characterized by a spirit of revolt and a belief in freedom of expression. The main exponents of the genre were Pollock, de Kooning, and Rothko, but other artists included Guston, Kline, Newman and Still. The term Abstract Expressionism was first used by Robert Coates in the March issue of the New Yorker in 1936. The movement was hugely successful, partly due to the efforts of the critics Harold Rosenberg and Clement Greenberg who also originated the terms Action Painting and American Style. In 1950, twenty-eight of the most prominent artists in the United States signed an open letter to the president of the Metropolitan Museum of Art protesting a juried exhibition intended to increase the museum's collection of contemporary art. The letter accused director Francis Henry Taylor and curator Robert Beverly of loading the jury with critics hostile to "advanced art," particularly Abstract Expressionism. Nina Leen brought fourteen of the signatories together for a photograph that came to be dubbed The Irascibles.
- Universal themes, subconcious, sexuality, jungian stuff. His own turn towards analysis. Jackson Pollock Jackson Pollock was born in Cody, Wyoming. Throughout his childhood, his family lived on a succession of truck farms in Arizona and southern California. When he was sixteen, Pollock first studied art at Manual Arts High School in Los Angeles, where he met Philip Guston and Reuben Kadish, two friends who later became artists. Jackson Pollock: He began to study painting in 1929 at the Art Students' League, New York, under the Regionalist painter Thomas Hart Benton. During the 1930s he worked in the manner of the Regionalists, being influenced also by the Mexican muralist painters (Orozco, Rivera, Siqueiros) and by certain aspects of Surrealism. From 1938 to 1942 he worked for the Federal Art Project. His brothers Charles and Sande, with whom he shared living quarters at 46 East 8th Street in Manhattan, encouraged him to seek treatment, including psychoanalysis. Although therapy was not successful in curbing Pollock's drinking or relieving his depression, it introduced him to Jungian concepts that validated the subjective, symbolic direction his art was taking. In late 1941, Sande wrote to Charles, who had left New York, that if Jackson could "hold himself together his work will become of real significance. His painting is abstract, intense, evocative in quality."
- Jungian Symbolism, elemental sexuality, native american imagery and color scheme. This painting is based on a North American Indian myth. It connects the moon with the feminine and shows the creative, slashing power of the female psyche. It is not easy to say what we are actually looking at: a face rises before us, vibrant with power, though perhaps the image does not benefit from labored explanations. If we can respond to this art at a fairly primitive level, then we can also respond to a great abstract work such as Lavender Mist. If we cannot, at least we can appreciate the fusion of colors and the Expressionist feeling of urgency that is communicated has been suggested that Pollock was influenced by Native American sand paintings, made by trickling thin lines of colored sand onto a horizontal surface. It was not until 1947 that Pollock began his ``action'' paintings, influenced by Surrealist ideas of ``psychic automatism'' (direct expression of the unconscious). Pollock would fix his canvas to the floor and drip paint from a can using a variety of objects to manipulate the paint.
- ackson Pollock. (American, 1912-1956). Full Fathom Five. 1947. Oil on canvas with nails, tacks, buttons, key, coins, cigarettes, matches, etc., 50 7/8 x 30 1/8" (129.2 x 76.5 cm). Gift of Peggy Guggenheim. Full Fathom Five is one of Pollock's first "drip" paintings. While its top layers consist of poured lines of black and shiny silver house paint, a large part of the paint's crust was applied by brush and palette knife; the result is a labyrinthine web that reveals an instantaneous unity between multiple crisscrossing and planar forms with no contours. An assortment of detritus, from cigarette butts to coins and a key, are enfolded by the paint. Though many of these items are obscured, they contribute to the painting's dense surface and churning sensation. The title, suggested by Pollock's neighbor, quotes from Shakespeare's The Tempest, wherein Ariel describes a death by shipwreck: "Full fathom five thy father lies / Of his bones are coral made / Those are pearls that were his eyes."
- Pollock was the first ``all-over'' painter, pouring paint rather than using brushes and a palette, and abandoning all conventions of a central motif. He danced in semi-ecstasy over canvases spread across the floor, lost in his patternings, dripping and dribbling with total control. He said: ``The painting has a life of its own. I try to let it come through.'' He painted no image, just ``action'', though ``action painting'' seems an inadequate term for the finished result of his creative process. Lavender Mist is 3 m long (nearly 10 ft), a vast expanse on a heroic scale. It is alive with colored scribble, spattered lines moving this way and that, now thickening, now trailing off to a slender skein. The eye is kept continually eager, not allowed to rest on any particular area. Pollock has put his hands into paint and placed them at the top right-- an instinctive gesture eerily reminiscent of cave painters who did the same. The overall tone is a pale lavender, maide airy and active. At the time Pollock was heiled as the greatest American painter, but there are already those who feel his work is not holding up in every respect.
- On the floor I am more at ease, I feel nearer, more a part of the painting, since this way I can walk around in it, work from the four sides and be literally `in' the painting. -- Jackson Pollock, 1947.
- By the mid 1940s he was painting in a completely abstract manner, and the `drip and splash' style for which he is best known emerged with some abruptness in 1947. Instead of using the traditional easel he affixed his canvas to the floor or the wall and poured and dripped his paint from a can; instead of using brushes he manipulated it with `sticks, trowels or knives' (to use his own words), sometimes obtaining a heavy impasto by an admixture of `sand, broken glass or other foreign matter'. This manner of Action painting had in common with Surrealist theories of automatism that it was supposed by artists and critics alike to result in a direct expression or revelation of the unconscious moods of the artist. His work came to the attention of Peggy Guggenheim, whose gallery, Art of This Century, showed the most challenging new work by American and European abstractionists and Surrealists. Guggenheim became Pollock's dealer and patron, introducing his work to the small but avid audience for vanguard painting. In 1930, at age eighteen, Pollock moved from Los Angeles to New York City, settling in Greenwich Village. He immediately enrolled at the Art Students League, where he studied drawing and painting for five semesters with the American Regionalist painter Thomas Hart Benton, who soon became his mentor and friend. In 1936 Pollock joined the Mexican muralist David Alfaro Siqueiros's Experimental Workshop, in New York, where he became aware of unorthodox mediums and techniques that he later adapted in his large drip paintings. In the late 1930s Pollock worked for the Easel Division of the Federal Art Project of the Works Progress Administration. From 1942, when he had his first one-person exhibition at Peggy Guggenheim's Art of This Century gallery in New York, until his death in an automobile crash at age forty-four in 1956, Pollock's volatile art and personality made him a dominant figure in the art world and the press. In 1947–48 he devised a radically new innovation: using pour and drip techniques that rely on a linear structure, he created canvases and works on paper that redefined the categories of painting and drawing. Referring to his 1951 exhibition at the Betty Parsons Gallery, fellow Abstract Expressionist painter Lee Krasner, who was Pollock's wife, noted that his work "seemed like monumental drawing, or maybe painting with the immediacy of drawing — some new category." Pollock's poured paintings are as visually potent today as they were in the 1950s, when they first shocked the art world. Their appearance virtually shifted the focus of avant-garde art from Paris to New York, and their influence on the development of Abstract Expressionism — and on subsequent painting both in America and abroad — was enormous. To many, the large eloquent canvases of 1950 are Pollock's greatest achievements. "Autumn Rhythm," painted in October of that year, exemplifies the extraordinary balance between accident and control that Pollock maintained over his technique. The words "poured" and "dripped," commonly used to describe his unorthodox creative process, which involved painting on unstretched canvas laid flat on the floor, hardly suggest the diversity of the artist's movements (flicking, splattering, and dribbling) or the lyrical, often spritual, compositions they produced. In "Autumn Rhythm," as in many of his paintings, Pollock first created a complex linear skeleton using black paint. For this initial layer the paint was diluted, so that it soaked into the length of unprimed canvas, thereby inextricably joining image and support. Over this black framework Pollock wove an intricate web of white, brown, and turquoise lines, which produce the contrary visual rhythms and sensations: light and dark, thick and thin, heavy and buoyant, straight and curved, horizontal and vertical. Textural passages that contribute to the painting's complexity — such as the pooled swirls where two colors meet and the wrinkled skins formed by the build-up of paint — are barely visible in the initial confusion of overlapping lines. Although Pollock's imagery is nonrepresentational, "Autumn Rhythm" is evocative of nature, not only in its title but also in its coloring, horizontal orientation, and sense of ground and space. 207 inches Size matters: a total environment. Spontaneity was a critical element. But lack of premeditation should not be confused with ceding control; as Pollock stated, "I can control the flow of paint: there is no accident." , "I'm very representational some of the time, and a little all of the time. But when you're working out of your unconscious, figures are bound to emerge. … Painting is a state of being. … Painting is self-discovery. Every good artist paints what he is." Spontaneity was a critical element. But lack of premeditation should not be confused with ceding control; as Pollock stated, "I can control the flow of paint: there is no accident."
- Machismo image From this psychological perspective, de Kooning and all female artists faced a challenge when attempting to gain entry into this male enclave, because to fit in meant having to drink heavily, smoke, swear a lot, act tough, make wise cracks, employ sexual innuendo, and speak in the language of the working class. Passlof remembers it this way: "It was a very macho world. They put on airs you know. Every other word was 'fuck' and 'shit' and I came from that generation, so I picked it up. It was part of a masculine expression..." (Interview with the author). The artist Dorothy Dehner commented upon the airs that the male artists put on: "There had never been a great American art before. In fact art had always been regarded as somewhat sissified in this country. By God, these men were not going to be sissies" (Rubenstein, 268-269). The painter Grace Hartigan confirms Dehner's perspective and adds: Oh, these poor guys didn't know what a man artist was, there was no image for an American artist..., that was a sissy thing to do. So, their only image, the poor pitiful things, was the West, you know being cowboys and workmen, so they all dressed in dungarees and tried to look very masculine and not look sensitive and sissyish. ...those men had the shakiest identity of maleness you'd ever seen. Bill [de Kooning] didn't have that because in Europe it's respected to be an artist, so he had pride (Interview with the author).
- Willem De Kooning (1904-1997): dutch; comes to America as a stowaway at age 22 in 1926. In October 1935, De Kooning began to work on the WPA (Works Progress Administration) Federal Art Project, and he won the Logan Medal of the arts while working together with Colombian Santiago Martínez Delgado. They were employed by this work-relief program until July 1937, when they resigned because of their alien status. This period of about two years provided the artist, who had been supporting himself during the early Depression by commercial jobs, with his first opportunity to devote full time to creative work. He worked on both the easel-painting and mural divisions of the project (the several murals he designed were never executed). In 1938, probably under the influence of Gorky, De Kooning embarked on a series of male figures, including Two Men Standing, Man, and Seated Figure (Classic Male), while simultaneously embarking on a more purist series of lyrically colored abstractions, such as Pink Landscape and Elegy. As his work progressed, the heightened colors and elegant lines of the abstractions began to creep into the more figurative works, and the coincidence of figures and abstractions continued well into the 1940s. This period includes the representational but somewhat geometricized Woman and Standing Man, along with numerous untitled abstractions whose biomorphic forms increasingly suggest the presence of figures. By about 1945 the two tendencies seemed to fuse perfectly in Pink Angels. In 1946, too poor to buy artists' pigments, he turned to black and white household enamels to paint a series of large abstractions; of these works, Light in August (c. 1946) and Black Friday (1948) are essentially black with white elements, whereas Zurich (1947) and Mailbox (1947/48) are white with black. Developing out of these works in the period after his first show were complex, agitated abstractions such as Asheville (1948/49), Attic (1949), and Excavation (1950; Art Institute of Chicago), which reintroduced color and seem to sum up with taut decisiveness the problems of free-associative composition he had struggled with for many years. De Kooning had painted women regularly in the early 1940s and again from 1947 to 1949. The biomorphic shapes of his early abstractions can be interpreted as female symbols. But it was not until 1950 that he began to explore the subject of women exclusively. In the summer of that year he began Woman I (located at the Museum of Modern Art, New York City), which went through innumerable metamorphoses before it was finished in 1952.
- De Kooning, Excavation, 1950 (AIC)
- The hulking, wild–eyed subject draws upon an amalgam of female archetypes, from Paleolithic fertility goddesses to contemporary pin–up girls. Her threatening stare and ferocious grin are heightened by de Kooning's aggressive brushwork and frantic paint application. Combining voluptuousness and menace, Woman, I reflects the age–old cultural ambivalence between reverence for and fear of the power of the feminine Took over a year to complete it. pinup. Reversing traditional female representations, which he summarized as "the idol, the Venus, the nude," de Kooning paints a woman with gigantic eyes, massive breasts, and a toothy grin. Her body is outlined in thick and thin black lines, which continue in loops and streaks and drips, taking on an independent life of their own. Abrupt, angular strokes of orange, blue, yellow, and green pile up in multiple directions as layers of color are applied, scraped away, and restored. When de Kooning painted Woman, I, artists and critics championing abstraction had declared the human figure obsolete in painting. Instead of abandoning the figure, however, de Kooning readdressed this age-old subject through the sweeping brushwork of Abstract Expressionism, the prevailing contemporary style. Does the woman partake of the brushwork's energy to confront us aggressively? Or is she herself under attack, nearly obliterated by the welter of violent marks? Perhaps something of both; and, in either case, she remains powerful and intimidating.
- De Kooning “Painting isn’t just the visual thing that reaches your retina—it’s what is behind it and in it. I’m not interested in ‘abstracting’ or taking things out or reducing painting to design, form, line and color. I paint this way because I can keep putting more and more things in it—drama, anger, pain, love, a figure, a horse, my ideas about space. Through your [the viewer’s] eyes it again becomes an emotion or an idea. It doesn’t matter if it’s different from mine as long as it comes from the painting which has its own integrity and intensity.” Willem de Kooning interviewed in The New York Times, Jan. 21, 1951. During this period he also created other paintings of women. These works were shown at the Sidney Janis Gallery in 1953 and caused a sensation, chiefly because they were figurative when most of his fellow Abstract Expressionists were painting abstractly and because of their blatant technique and imagery. The appearance of aggressive brushwork and the use of high-key colors combine to reveal a woman all too congruent with some of modern man's most widely held sexual fears. The toothy snarls, overripe, pendulous breasts, vacuous eyes, and blasted extremities imaged the darkest Freudian insights. Some of these paintings also seemed to hearken back to early Mesopotamian / Akkadian works, with the large, almost "all-seeing" eyes.
- De Kooning’s abstract Women series also came at a time when pop culture portrayed images of women unrealistically: from making their bodies conform to hour-glass shapes in tight-fighting girdles to wearing high heels while cooking and cleaning. In the 1950s, women were rarely assumed to have a productive role in the economy. They were, however, taken seriously as consumers. Ads of the time urged them to aspire to the role of a competent wife, thrilled to keep a smooth-running household using all the latest gadgets, while remaining a glamour girl, always sexy and perfectly made up. “The two big steps that women must take are to help their husband decide where they are going and use their pretty heads to help get them there,” wrote Mrs. Dale Carnegie in the April 1955, Better Homes and Gardens. As Barbie dolls made their debut in 1959, many teenage girls looked to challenge these established roles.
- Rothko largely abandoned conventional titles in 1947, sometimes resorting to numbers or colors in order to distinguish one work from another. The artist also now resisted explaining the meaning of his work. "Silence is so accurate," he said, fearing that words would only paralyze the viewer's mind and imagination. One of the preeminent artists of his generation, Mark Rothko is closely identified with the New York School, a circle of painters that emerged during the 1940s as a new collective voice in American art. During a career that spanned five decades, he created a new and impassioned form of abstract painting. Rothko's work is characterized by rigorous attention to formal elements such as color, shape, balance, depth, composition, and scale; yet, he refused to consider his paintings solely in these terms. He explained: It is a widely accepted notion among painters that it does not matter what one paints as long as it is well painted. This is the essence of academicism. There is no such thing as good painting about nothing.
- By 1950 Rothko had reduced the number of floating rectangles to two, three, or four and aligned them vertically against a colored ground, arriving at his signature style.
- In these paintings, color and structure are inseparable: the forms themselves consist of color alone, and their translucency establishes a layered depth that complements and vastly enriches the vertical architecture of the composition. Variations in saturation and tone as well as hue evoke an elusive yet almost palpable realm of shallow space. Color, structure, and space combine to create a unique presence. In this respect, Rothko stated that the large scale of these canvases was intended to contain or envelop the viewer--not to be "grandiose," but "intimate and human."
- Mark Rothko, Orange and Tan,1954 By 1949 Rothko had introduced a compositional format that he would continue to develop throughout his career. Comprised of several vertically aligned rectangular forms set within a colored field, Rothko's "image" lent itself to a remarkable diversity of appearances. In these works, large scale, open structure and thin layers of color combine to convey the impression of a shallow pictorial space. Color, for which Rothko's work is perhaps most celebrated, here attains an unprecedented luminosity. His classic paintings of the 1950s are characterized by expanding dimensions and an increasingly simplified use of form, brilliant hues, and broad, thin washes of color. In his large floating rectangles of color, which seem to engulf the spectator, he explored with a rare mastery of nuance the expressive potential of color contrasts and modulations.
- Rothko's work began to darken dramatically during the late 1950s. This development is related to his work on a mural commission for the Four Seasons restaurant, located in the Seagram Building in New York City. Here Rothko turned to a palette of red, maroon, brown, and black. The artist eventually withdrew from this project, due to misgivings about the restaurant as a proper setting for his work. He had, however, already produced a number of studies and finished canvases, two of which are included in the present installation. In the Seagram panels, Rothko changed his motif from a closed to an open form, suggesting a threshold or portal. This element may have been related to the architectural setting for which these works were intended
- Rothko Room (7 paintings for the Seagram Building in New York)1958-1959Rothko wanted his paintings to be placed in such a way that the viewer would feel surrounded and engulfed by the special space the paintings created
- Rothko committed suicide by slashing his wrists at the age of 66, in 1970 at the very peak of his career. Some things that may have led to the artist's death were: his long, hard struggle as an artist, the break-up of his marriage, and the deterioration of his health. He had been troubled with paranoia for most of his life and by the time of his death he had alienated most of his friends and family. He hated Pop Art, which was becoming a dominant art form in the 1960's, because he saw it as a betrayal of the spiritual values the Abstract Expressionists held dear, and he wondered whether his work was really understood. Rothko's last major commission was for a church in Houston. He painted fourteen large paintings in somber dark hues. The Rothko Chapel contains only his paintings, wood benches, and candelabra. It opened a year after his death, and is considered by many to be a masterpiece of 20th century art
- Newman proclaimed Onement, I to be his artistic breakthrough, giving the work an importance belied by its modest size. This is the first time the artist used a vertical band to define the spatial structure of his work. This band, later dubbed a "zip," became Newman's signature mark. The artist applied the light cadmium red zip atop a strip of masking tape with a palette knife. This thick, irregular band on the smooth field of Indian Red simultaneously divides and unites the composition. Oil on canvas and oil on masking tape on canvas, 27 1/4 x 16 1/4" Barnett Newman: 1905- Parents are Jewish immigrants who arrived in New York City from Lomza, Russian Poland, in 1900 During the fall of his senior year, Newman attends drawing classes six days a week with Duncan Smith at the Art Students League, 215 West Fifty-seventh Street. His much-labored-over drawing of the Belvedere torso is chosen for an exhibition of the best student work. Through the Art Students League, Newman meets Adolph Gottlieb. Only two years older than Newman, Gottlieb is already pursuing the life of an artist, having dropped out of high school in 1921 to study art and hobo his way across Europe. philosophy major at CCNY “There is no such thing as good painting about nothing. We assert that the subject is crucial and only that subject-matter is valid which is tragic and timeless.” 1948: In response to the question “What is sublime in art?” Newman writes: “I believe that here in America, some of us, free from the weight of European culture, are finding the answer, by completely denying that art has any concern with the problem of beauty and where to find it.” His family in Europe, and his wife’s family, have been decimated by the Holocaust.
- So what does "onement" mean? My own sense is that it means the condition of being one, as in the incantation "God is one." It refers, one might say, to the oneness of God. And this might help us better understand the difference between a picture and a painting. Since Newman thinks of himself and Michelangelo as concerned with the same kinds of problems, consider the Sistine ceiling, where Michelangelo produces a number of pictures of God. Great as these are, they are constrained by the limitation that pictures can show only what is visible, and decisions have to be made regarding what God looks like. How would one picture the fact that God is one? Since Onement 1 is not a picture, it does not inherit the limitations inherent in picturing It is about something that can be said but cannot be shown, at least not pictorially. Abstract painting is not without content. Rather, it enables the presentation of content without pictorial limits That is why, from the beginning, abstraction was believed by its inventors to be invested with a spiritual reality.
- “Vir Heroicus Sulbimus (Man, Heroic and Sublime) One thing that I am involved in about painting is that the painting should give a man a sense of place: that he knows he's there, so he's aware of himself. In that sense he related to me when I made the painting because in that sense I was there. Standing in front of my paintings you had a sense of your own scale. The onlooker in front of my painting knows that he's there. To me, the sense of place not only has a mystery but has that sense of metaphysical fact.” Newman may appear to concentrate on shape and color, but he insisted that his canvases were charged with symbolic meaning. Like Piet Mondrian and Kazimir Malevich before him, he believed in the spiritual content of abstract art. The very title of this painting—in English, "Man, heroic and sublime"—points to aspirations of transcendence. Abstract Expressionism is often called "action painting," but Newman was one of the several Abstract Expressionists who eliminated signs of the action of the painter's hand, preferring to work with broad, even expanses of deep color. Vir Heroicus Sublimis is large enough so that when the viewer stands close to it, as Newman intended, it creates an engulfing environment—a vast red field, broken by five thin vertical stripes. Newman admired Alberto Giacometti's bone-thin sculptures of the human figure, and his stripes, or "zips," as he called them, may be seen as symbolizing figures against a void. Here they vary in width, color, and firmness of edge: the white zip at center left, for example, looks almost like the gap between separate planes, while the maroon zip to its right seems to recede slightly into the red. These subtly differentiated verticals create a division of the canvas that is surprisingly complex, and asymmetrical; right in the middle of the picture, however, they set off a perfect square. 1950 Thomas Hess in ARTnews writes: “Newman is out to shock, but he is not out to shock the bourgeoisie—that has been done. He likes to shock other artists.” Newman is so offended by an article published in the summer issue of the College Art Journal that he sues its author, the artist Ad Reinhardt, for libel. The article, “The Artist in Search of an Academy, Part Two: Who Are the Artists?” proposed “four general categories of artist-types,” classing Newman as an “artist-professor and traveling-design-salesman, . . . avant-garde-huckster-handicraftsman, . . . [and] holy-roller-explainer-entertainer-in-residence.” Newman’s suit is eventually dismissed in February 1956, after two days of hearings before a judge and jury. 1957 Newman is included in American Painting 1945-1957 at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts in June. His troubles with critics continue. Reviewing the show for the New Republic, Frank Getlein writes that “the most asinine thing on board is Barnett Newman’s ‘Vir Heroicus Sublimis’ in the Design Division. Eight feet high, ‘Vir’ is damn near 18 feet across and is painted a flat red.” In a letter to the editor, Newman replies: “It was unnecessary for Mr. Getlein to swear at the ‘damn’ size of my pictures when a glance at the exhibition catalogue would have given him the exact size.”
- 77 7/8 x 60 1/2 in 1961 In the spring, Newman has a notorious dispute with art historian Erwin Panofsky in the pages of ARTnews over the spelling of “Sublimis,” which had been misspelled in a photo caption for Vir Heroicus Sublimis as “Sublimus.” Newman defends the misprint as a grammatically correct alternative but also claims, “the basic fact about a work of art . . . [is that] it must rise above grammar and syntax-pro gloria Dei.” In September, Newman, who has long objected to juried exhibitions, writes to the director of the Carnegie Museum of Art, offering to establish a five-hundred-dollar “Barnett Newman Award for an Artist Not Invited to the Pittsburgh International.” His check is returned. 1966: In the May issue of ARTnews, Newman writes of the Stations: “I wished no monuments, no cathedrals. I wanted human scale for the human cry. . . . I wanted to hold the emotion, not waste it in picturesque ecstasies.” “When I call them Stations of the Cross, I am saying that these paintings mean something beyond their formal extremes. . . . What I’m saying is that my painting is physical and what I’m saying also is that my painting is metaphysical . . . that my life is physical and my life is also metaphysical.” The Stations of the Cross series of black and white paintings (1958-64), begun shortly after Newman had recovered from a heart attack, is usually regarded as the peak of his achievement. The series is subtitled "Lema sabachthani" - "why have you forsaken me" - words spoken by Christ on the cross. Newman saw these words as having universal significance in his own time. The series has also been seen as a memorial to the victims of the holocaust. Soon after his first exhibition, Barnett Newman remarked in one of the Artists' Session at Studio 35: "We are in the process of making the world, to a certain extent, in our own image From 1958 to 1966, master color field painter Barnett Newman created The Stations of the Cross - Lema Sabachthani, a cycle of fourteen canvas paintings, each of them 5 x 6 1/2 feet. Their scale is so large that the viewer is never able to take them all in at once. With The Stations of the Cross, Newman undertook one of the most demanding assignments in the history of modern art, namely to thematize, without the use of color and only in black and white, the tragedy of human existence vis-à-vis an almighty God--bringing it to new pictorial form. Accompanying texts consider the thematic content of the work, as well as the series' inaugural hanging in 1966 at the Guggenheim Museum in New York