Barnett Newman - location and identity.

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What do Barnett's boring blocks of colour tell us about living in Manhatten between 1945 and 1960? What's it got to do with his father's Zionism and his Russian Polish background? Is he just very dull?

― Sick Nouthall (Nick Southall), Wednesday, 5 May 2004 17:29 (twenty-one years ago)

I was gonna just say hi but manhattan.

― RJG (RJG), Wednesday, 5 May 2004 17:30 (twenty-one years ago)

I love Barnett Newman, unfortunately I don't have answers to your questions.

― Spencer Chow (spencermfi), Wednesday, 5 May 2004 17:34 (twenty-one years ago)

http://www.haberarts.com/sublime.htm

― Sick Nouthall (Nick Southall), Wednesday, 5 May 2004 17:47 (twenty-one years ago)

Alright then, ManhattAn.

― Sick Nouthall (Nick Southall), Wednesday, 5 May 2004 17:48 (twenty-one years ago)

It's not supposed to tell you anything. Art, to me, is not always about communication or baring one's soul. Maybe he just liked painting them, and what he was thinking about when he painted them is personal and can only be known to him himself.

Therefore, on the purely (most important) aesthetic level, I find his work quite interesting and nice to look at.

― jel -- (jel), Wednesday, 5 May 2004 17:51 (twenty-one years ago)

Can you translate that into a 2,000 word essay for my girlfriend?

― Sick Nouthall (Nick Southall), Wednesday, 5 May 2004 17:55 (twenty-one years ago)

you have a girlfriend?

― RJG (RJG), Wednesday, 5 May 2004 17:57 (twenty-one years ago)

I mean, I didn't know you had a girlfriend.

― RJG (RJG), Wednesday, 5 May 2004 17:58 (twenty-one years ago)

I can't believe you have the nerve to dis the New-man on ILX. However, to answer your question, the location of the zips has to do with numerology and/or the Kabballah, which I totally just spelled wrong, probably. So he's like Madonna, but good. In other news, Newman v Rothko FITE!

― Donna Brown (Donna Brown), Wednesday, 5 May 2004 18:21 (twenty-one years ago)

Uh, maybe something along the lines that "the zip" = echo of the vertical lines of midtown skyscrapers, esp. as seen from humble downtown, home to artists, and before them immigrants? Just shucking/jiving off the top of my head here.

I went to see the Newman show at the Philly MA a coupla years ago, with my nine-month-old son strapped across my chest in a baby carrier. We both dug it--me quietly, him with a series of gallery-freaking squeals.

― Lee G (Lee G), Wednesday, 5 May 2004 18:28 (twenty-one years ago)

I like his Stations of the Cross.

― tokyo rosemary (rosemary), Wednesday, 5 May 2004 18:39 (twenty-one years ago)

"Esthetics is for artists as ornithology is for the birds"

― jel -- (jel), Wednesday, 5 May 2004 18:41 (twenty-one years ago)

I don't think Newman's work has as much to do with Manhattan as a sort of internal landscape, hence the use of geometry. The placement of zips is always carefully thought out; there is no randomness in any of his paintings, unlike the borough (*shot for excessive pretentiousness*)

― Donna Brown (Donna Brown), Wednesday, 5 May 2004 18:51 (twenty-one years ago)

More pretention please.

― Sick Nouthall (Nick Southall), Wednesday, 5 May 2004 19:03 (twenty-one years ago)

you axed for it- the reason (I think) for the pure color in Newman paintings has to do with the sublime, the color being the representation of our purest being and aspirations. This seems to anger many; see link
http://www.avantart.com/art/newman.html

― Donna Brown (Donna Brown), Wednesday, 5 May 2004 19:14 (twenty-one years ago)

More.

― Sick Nouthall (Nick Southall), Wednesday, 5 May 2004 19:17 (twenty-one years ago)

(mine was a direct quote from Newman, he got into gardening and geometry in the 4o's when he got a bit disilluisoned with painting)

― jel -- (jel), Wednesday, 5 May 2004 19:19 (twenty-one years ago)

(xpost)I could teach you, but I'd have to charge

― Donna Brown (Donna Brown), Wednesday, 5 May 2004 19:21 (twenty-one years ago)

I love Barnett Newman. He claimed some of his works were about specific things - the Stations Of The Cross most obviously, but he said that a number of his paintings were about the Holocaust. I could never work out in what way they were 'about' anything beyond painting - paint on surfaces, interruptions, the way lines seem to continue beyond the picture area, colours that recede and come forward - and looking gorgeous.

― Martin Skidmore (Martin Skidmore), Wednesday, 5 May 2004 19:28 (twenty-one years ago)

Sadly Anthony isn't here to contribute (and I hope I don't misrepresent him), but we had one great long talk about BN: he'd read about him first, all that stuff about the Holocaust, and couldn't see that in the paintings, so he came across as a let-down. I'd read nothing and just fell in love with the art and thought up my own ideas (those meta ones above), and my opinions and affections were too solid to be disturbed by this background info that I can't grasp.

― Martin Skidmore (Martin Skidmore), Wednesday, 5 May 2004 19:30 (twenty-one years ago)

Although at first glance his paintings appear regimented, if you look more closely you'll see signs of entropy-a zip not totally perpendicular or paint spilling outside the lines, which implies humanity's failure to achieve the Sublime

― Donna Brown (Donna Brown), Wednesday, 5 May 2004 19:39 (twenty-one years ago)

Are the paintings on the website you liked to, Donna, all-white paintings or is something kooky going on?

― Casuistry (Chris P), Wednesday, 5 May 2004 20:25 (twenty-one years ago)

T here is an interesting movie which came out in the early 70's called painters painting, which your gf should definetly see - It has Larry Poons, Frank Stella, Warhol, Clement Greenberg, Harold Rosenberg, Rauschenberg and Barnett Newman in it. Pollock and Rothko are absent because theyíve already killed themselves. Itís about the triumph of American Painting and the downfall of French art. Somebody talks about how american painting kept getting caught up in the contradictions of America itself - We tried to find god in landscapes we were destroying as fast as we could paint them. We painted Indians as fast as we could kill them. We made portraits of ourselves when we had no idea who we were -=etc. Maybe the profound tragedy of this reality couldnít be crammed into the idea of painting as we knew it then. Which apart from the ashcan school was mostly derivative of cubism, picasso. So the only option was to take refuge in abstraction. Then Time/Life and Greenberg came along and it became the thing to do. After all, it really did suck to feel culturally inferior to all the Europeans.

In many ways Newman comes off as the most metaphisical of all the second generation ab exers, he says this great thing about the bigness of paintings - that it is not the size of the canvas that makes a big painting rather paintings are measured on a human scale...or something like that - you really have to see the film.

― turner (turner), Thursday, 6 May 2004 05:41 (twenty-one years ago)

Newman still had this almost religious fervor when he talked about painting, wheras for most of the others it was either about doing something that hadnt been done before, or pushing something to its logical conclusion

― turner (turner), Thursday, 6 May 2004 06:24 (twenty-one years ago)

grr....no, in fact they're called Who's Afraid of Red Yellow and Blue 1 and 2 (probably)-do-overs:
http://www.staatsgalerie.de/media/sammlungen/gem/n45_newman_l.jpg

― Donna Brown (Donna Brown), Thursday, 6 May 2004 16:01 (twenty-one years ago)

That's more of an orange.

I'd have to see it in person to decide how I felt about it. (I don't generally feel comfortable evaluating art via photograph or jpg.)

― Casuistry (Chris P), Thursday, 6 May 2004 16:14 (twenty-one years ago)

Who's Afraid of Slightly Orange, Yellow and...Hey, Get Away From Me with That Knife! sorry

― Donna Brown (Donna Brown), Thursday, 6 May 2004 16:20 (twenty-one years ago)

A Dutch "art anarchist" who slashed a Barnett Newman canvas on exhibit in Amsterdam's Stedelijk Museum, furiously protested his arrest. His assertion was that his slashed deconstruction of Newman's painting was no less a specimen of "fine" art than the unslashed original and must be considered as such.

― Donna Brown (Donna Brown), Thursday, 6 May 2004 16:24 (twenty-one years ago)

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