Barnett Newman

I am studying him right now in one of my classes. I read about him late at night, so no critical insights from me. I tend to like minimalism, though, and a work like "oneness" certainly must have inspired artists minimalists in the sixties. I like the "zip".

Is there a big exhibition in London now? I am jealous.

he's full of shit. sorry, but that's about all i can muster. con artiste supreme.

How do you think he conned people, Jess? Is this a general distaste for modern art/abstract expressionists/minimalists, or just Newman?

are you reacting to his bullshit theorizing, or the works themselves?

Loads of my favourites have bullshit theorizing, which doesn't harm my love of their work - most notably, my favourite painter, Kandinsky, whose ideas had a lot in common with those of Mondrian. Both were seriously interested in theosophy and reckoned that was represented in the work. I don't think we need to take the artist seriously when they tell us what their work is about, whether in interview or title (I think they have Newman's Stations Of The Cross series at the Tate show, for instance). This may not be what Jess means anyway, of course.

i think his paintings are holy, i wept when i saw stations of the cross in its own room at the nga in washington. they are also huge,but manage a strict control of colour ande line over a 17 foot canvas, which gives me a formalist hard on.

also i think that assigning meaning almost detracts from the works.

but he assigns heoric and sublime meanings to his own work. i dont know, all i know is that i love him,

no, it's not a general distaste. robert motherwell - with whom newman had a huge falling out when he Dared to imply that the zip was clyfford still's invention and not newman's - is considered newman's contemporary and is certainly one of my favorite artists. my top 10 Artists (since, you know, cartoonists are verbotten) would almost entirely be artists from 1900 on.

it's the bullshit theorizing, i think, although i don't care much for the actual work. like the holocaust parallels which critics have been trying to make for years (including newmann himself); i don't doubt that these painting and their presupposed Weight helped newmann reconnect with his own jewishness perhaps. but that doesn't make them About The Holocaust anymore than they're About Gicometti's portraits or the sistene chapel ceiling or the kabala. they're just a fucking line, a neat formalist/constructivist trick at bisecting a picture plane that got caught up in a lot of rhetoric (and neatly presaged the 80s, what with schnable's broken plates and caked, noxious oils being About Kristalnacht or Basquiat's junkie scribbles - a man who lost what little talent and capacity for internal aesthetic debate he had when wired out of his gills..no charlie parker, he - being About Slavery.) there's also virtually no evidence that newmann could draw worth a damn, which usually isn't among my prereqs for a Great Artist, if he didn't go on at length about draftsmanships importance.

this is probably just backed up ire from having a professor in college who shoveled this shit down our throats (my school was dan clowes' art school confidential writ large), but i still have to laugh when i think of his "stations of the cross" paintings wherein he attempted to "quarrel with michelangelo" with a fucking stripe.

I think the Stations Of The Cross have a room to themselves here too, Anthony.

Last time I went to the Tate Modern was the Picasso/Matisse show. At one point I obviously smiled or something (noticing a painted Picasso cubist fake-collage effect soon after the period with Braque, if I remember rightly) and one of the people I was with said excitedly "Can you see the woman?" as if it was some sort of magic eye game that I had won. I'm not saying this has anything to do with Newman, obviously, but I had to mention it somewhere.

see i think you are right about basquit and schanebel jess, but the qaurell with michaelangelo is the qaurell with representation, with emotions only connected to things that look like things- the radical simplicty and the symbolic weight was the fight.

I wonder if I'd be affected by what Jess says if I'd heard much of it (any maybe) before I grew to love his work? I notice these differences do come out sometimes with people whose exposure to and knowledge of art came about very differently - i.e. I grew up among people who would never go near a gallery, and with no artistic education, and so on, and just somehow got started going to galleries and falling for some artists before knowing who they were or where they were from or who they were associated with, let alone any theorising on their parts or from critics. I have found that I'm not much influenced by the theory stuff afterwards. I'm not claiming credit or superiority for this, obviously (and I've read and studied enough since that there are many artists now who I have encountered in a far more knowing way), but it does have the advantage of minimising the impact of crap or annoying justifications for work.

I can think of one writer where the same happens: Emile Zola, who I love, but on the terms of what he said he was doing, his great project was a laughable failure - again, it's probably best that I had fallen for him before knowing of his purpose.

Enough waffling: I think if I had been initially introduced to Newman's work as being about the Holocaust, I would have probably looked on them differently, and I'd have been more likely to think "Well they are rubbish then, in that they say nothing about it" rather than "Wow, that's beautiful". Now my feelings about his work are sufficiently firm that I can shrug this off and it won't affect my pleasure in the show - I hope.

Anthony, do you see the Stations Of The Cross as being religious in any way beyond the title? Not just spiritual in the way art can be but specifically about that single event, in some way?

yeah, it's certainly that i was pumped full of the rhetoric long before i had ever even seen a newman as anything other than a slide projection on a classroom wall. i can think of at least one artist where this has worked in the reverse: philip guston, whose later "figurative" work took on a lot more signifigance for me when i found out that he had once been a second string ab ex'er of some repute who gave it all up to paint this ridiculously heartbreaking little portraits of cyclops with fat feet. (before that, i just thought he was ripping off crumb ripping off barney google. which he probably was to some extent, but still.)

see there are 13 of them ;)
i dont know- i view them the same way as i do rothko (cf the tate rothko room)

Yes, Jess, it can help to know things. I also don't want to sound like someone with anything against theorising or critical exegesis, because I'm not (I'm just pretty ignorant). I am against the intentional fallacy: when an artist tells us what or why in a painting, that is an interesting fact to add to our knowledge, but it is not therefore gospel truth that defines and exhausts the substance and meaning of the work. Mark Lawson (who is a former student of UCL, where I work, and to whom I have spoken) tonight stated that the paintings are about the Holocaust, when what I want is for knowledgeable people to discuss and illuminate the work, not parrot the artist's claims and say nothing to explain or justify them. I can only see his work as being about painting itself, in a way that an awful lot of the best work of the century and the period was (including Pollock and Rothko, for instance). I have no problem with art for art's sake, nor with work that is politically engaged, but I don't like claims for weight of social/moral/historical meaning to be made with only the artist's words as evidence.

Having just had a quick look in one or two books lying around, I note that there does seem a more direct religious meaning in some of his first zip works, where there is reference to the creation, God dividing things up and bringing light, but there seems incalculably less mileage in this single symbolism than in the wondrous and sublime variation that he found in vertical lines on plain fields of colour. So yes, Anthony, I see them in very much the same way as Rothko too. I'll remember to go straight to the Rothko room after seeing this show, I think.