home /current paintings / archives / bio / text / in the studio / links / contact
Worlds Apart: Joan Mitchell and Barnett Newman
Joan Mitchell at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York
June 20-September 29, 2002
Barnett Newman at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia
March 24-July 7, 2002
This is a short piece on two artists: one the pioneer of an approach to
art that came to a near dominion over the mediums of painting and sculpture, the
other a fervent acolyte of an existentially driven mannerism, ironically rooted
in tradition; both possessing massive cultural strengths, both extremely
literate; one, an athlete, bringing the competitive nature of sport to the fine
arts, the other, a rather pretentious bon vivant, jovial nearly to a fault; one
impoverished and, for several years, lost to the world of exhibition, a painter
of vast ambition and courage, extending the idea of painting into realms still
being mined by our most accomplished practitioners--the theories of color and
scale, and the weight of intent; the other born into wealth and midwestern
privilege (a painter whom Grace Hartigan said was "made fun of, for
pretending to be poor"), with its attendant exposure to intellectual heft
and nutrition, working, it should be restated, in a mode redolent of tradition,
for better or worse. The artists are Barnett Newman and Joan Mitchell.
It's hard to imagine two artists further apart in meaning and effort, vision and
momentum. Separated by many things--not to mention their vast differences
in the approach to brush and canvas--both artists have had the honor of recent
retrospectives, Newman at the Philadelphia Museum of Art and Mitchell at the
Whitney Museum of American Art in New York.
Mitchell's show at the Whitney pretty much confirmed any misgivings I've come to
feel towards her work. Essentially, as kick-ass a painter as she could be
at times, she would then come across looking, sadly, inept... Passing
through the over-hung galleries available to the show, I was pushed to consider
the idea of a rich kid pursuing a dream and living it through (James Merrill
comes immediately to mind) the possibility of possibility, if you will.
Off the bat, I must say that Mitchell has done some of the most powerful works
in the Ab-Ex canon--notably, a few works from her Canada series (unfortunately,
not shown here) and, in particular, a work present in the exhibition, Clearing
(1973, oil on canvas, 110 1/4" x 236"); the downside is that she also
didn't know when to stop--or, giving her the benefit of the doubt, just loved to
paint so much that nothing else mattered. The core of this argument is
that, despite her lauded melancholia and gotterdamerung angst, she had it made,
quite literally.
Money was simply not an issue, and I would contend that this non-issue, combined
with coming in as part of the somewhat less romantic "second
generation", catapulted Mitchell into a void of aesthetic pandering to both
ego and emotion--an addiction to the "touch", which certain critics
seem to love to discuss regarding her work, that, finally, only came down to a
dependence on what Clement Greenberg called "the 10th Street touch."
Mitchell was a poetic painter and soul; well-read and understanding both
American and European cultures, she played the part of the tortured
aesthete (as did, of course, Newman and his more publicized cohorts...) and
played it well. She offended many close to her and cemented strong
loyalties through a tough, ultimately American strength of purpose. Her
shortcomings lie in the fact that, simply put, she did not have the graphic
skills nor, indeed, the taste of de Kooning (discounting, of course, the
maestro's output from, say, '66 to about 1982.. .), whose gesture she, like
many others (both those anonymous and those of greater skill, particularly the
lovers Hartigan and Alfred Leslie, along with the West Coast monolith Richard
Diebenkorn), mined with varying degrees of success.
The first paintings presented in the show, works of the early to mid-fifties,
rest incongruously in a khaki net of dark strokes and horizontal structures,
slashed this way and that ad infinitum. This moves into essentially the
same format, albeit with a palette of intense primaries and that unfortunate
melding of various greens that plagued Mitchell throughout her career.
From there we move through the more vitriolic works of the sixties--works of
harsh, unwieldingly heady compositions, dominated by vast, tumor-like bodies
floating within and without a generally stunning maze of painterly affects.
This could be Mitchell working towards her peak, the power of pigment to
surface, the (perhaps) drunken ecstasy of creation: works such as Grandes
Carrieres (1961-62, oil on canvas, 78 3/4" x 118 1/4"), as turbulent a
canvas as ever was cranked out--a piece that takes Harold Rosenberg's eloquent
and equally misguided theses of action strongly to heart. Within a pale
background
, the fore of the painting combusts with ceruleans and, deep within,
aquamarine stains loosened by swirling reds and wet-on-wet pinks and a more
subdued green. The tumor-like form seems to ease diagonally across the
canvas, seemingly upwards from left to right; a multitude of signature drips,
splats, and runs converge this way and that, evidence of the labor involved, the
turning and re-combining of vertical and horizontal orientations. This
flip of visualization is particularly noticeable for its absence in Blue Tree
(1964, oil on canvas, 97 5/8" x 78"), a work of stunning painterly
subtlety. This time the mass of pigment moves downward from the left
corner of the vertical panel, awash in the vivid ceruleans and cobalts that
Mitchell wielded so spectacularly during this period. Here the runs and
drips roll downward with sustained consistency, tugging the composition along
with them. As chaotic as this piece seems, this standard of orientation
offers the work a strangely quiet feel.
Somewhere along 1969 or so, Mitchell began creating forms that could be called
"squares"--freehanded, distinct forms that she placed and piled amid
her dashes and incidental effects, as if building a wall of masonry. For
the most part, the works of this body (displayed in this exhibition) appeared to
toe the line of singular perspective, the errant runs and drips moving naturally
downward, the shapely forms hovering against gravity towards the top of the
strikingly vertical panels. And it is here that Mitchell earns her stripes
as a heroic presence in the canon of abstract painting. These works,
particularly Salut Sally (1970, oil on canvas, 112" x 79") and Mooring
(1971, oil on canvas, 95" x 71"), along with the aforementioned
Clearing, show the absolute concision Mitchell was capable of as a colorist; in
all three works, a milky lavender meanders here and there, supple and quite
simply gorgeous... In Salut Sally, this lavender gives itself rapturously
to slashes of creamy yellows moving in a descending arc from right to left,
holding a rectangle of deep aquamarine and large slathers of crimson and green
in a core of heavy emotive color. In Mooring, the lavenders take over as a
smoldering fog, playing give and take with the panel as a whole, and though so
heavily encrusted, a light airy intensity is seen, as in the most successful
works of the Rothko oeuvre. And finally, the triumph of Clearing:
this triptych is, in a word, sublime... From left to right, the panels
read as a poem in three parts: 1) the faded lavender leavens itself to
purple in a circular form, holding the panel in place; 2) the form shifts into a
squared particle of itself, tearing off and moving upward towards a dominant
black field of wired, baroque force; and 3) the form recombines and takes over
the field of pale fog, the black field now brought under sway, fully half its
size. Part of the vividness of this work is in the naked geometry
suspended by painterly grace--the search and destroy to which my contemporary,
the Los Angeles painter Robert Kingston, so poetically aspires in his present
work, the aggression tendered with a soft, narcotic stoicism...
Sadly, this level of work just couldn't be sustained. From these rich
paintings, Mitchell slides into a self-indulgent end chapter, marked notably by
the series La Grande Vallee. In her catalog essay on the these works,
Yvette Y. Lee concludes by heralding the series' "...richly inventive
chromatic sensation, the life-embracing passion, and the poetic
lyricism...". Rubbish. As a series, Mitchell's only success
braces against the fact that she was able to sustain a serial quality.
Large, vertical panels featuring long, pulling strokes downward; chopped
compositions that, in their obviousness of color and form, lose any power that
could perhaps be linked to the urgency of their creation. In my studio, I
have a hunk of wall that serves as a wiping surface for wet brushes.
Basically, I pull the loaded or emptied brush down over the surface.
That's it. The problem, of course, is that the effect is the same for both
of us. Combined with Mitchell's oddly suburban choices
of color, this series and the resulting later work are a tired, winding
finish to a career.
Mitchell was a fighter. But that doesn't hide the inconsistent shifts in
her aesthetic decisions, the cosmopolitan dilettantism, that, at it's worst,
retards an artists personal gambit with the muse. My girlfriend has a tattered
dictionary left over from her forays of academia at Wellesley, Dartmouth and
Columbia. In it's yellowed pages, one finds the definition of Diletante as
follows: 1: an admirer or lover of the arts 2: a person who cultivates an
art or branch of knowledge as a pastime esp. sporadically
or superficially. Nobody in their right mind could accuse Mitchell of attacking
art sporadically or superficially. But, somehow this defines a broadly general
negative regarding her work. I am, however, reminded that when Robert Motherwell
eulogized Bradley Walker Tomlin, he did, indeed, use the word diletante. And was
subsequently taken to task for it by the second subject of this essay. To
Motherwell, however, he viewed the usage of the word in it's more european
framework, that of an enthusiast... There is no Marxist theory behind my
mention of class and effort. Let's face it; anything that allows an artist the
leisure to create is beneficial to all involved. Simply put, family wealth
enabled Joan Mitchell to move to New York and follow her dream. It allowed
her to move to France, etc. Perhaps it allowed too much.
And then there is Newman. We won't see his like again... Bereft of
coin, a man of philosophies and refined tastes, he liked to brag (perhaps in
jest) that he shared Al Capone's tailor. Portly, brandishing a monocle
from a satin ribbon, he would slam booze with the best of them and move on to
pontificate on the meanings of sublimity and scale, color and the religious
overtones of what it was that he and his contemporaries may, in fact, have been
doing. It's important to note that the first generation of those brash New
Yorkers of the midcentury didn't really know where the path they followed would
lead. This was uncharted territory (unlike the rich commercial enviorment
that Mitchell pushed into...), the vastness of a peopleless continent that
seemed to float ethereally away from the art history seen in the rare copies of
Cahiers d'Art that made it across the ocean. Motherwell recalled helping William
Baziotes hang a solo exhibition at Peggy Guggenheim's Art of This Cent
ury. At the conclusion of their labors, Baziotes asked Motherwell to
tell him if the show was, indeed, any good. If not, Baziotes said that he
would take it down and cancel. "You see," Motherwell recalled,
"at the opposite side of the coin of the abstract expressionist's ambition
and of our not giving a damn was also not knowing whether our pictures were even
pictures, let alone whether they were any good..."
Into this frontier, Barnett Newman staggered upon an aesthetic that would propel
him (albeit posthumously) into the 21st century. He was a late starter in
the rigors of the art world. Making his way through academia, ornithology
and, ridiculously enough, politics (having run for mayor of New York, on a call
for intellectuals to revolt against vulgarity), he fell into the role of house
speaker for a scattered band of Americans painting and trying to live, trying to
survive in the new urban America. He wrote on occasion and curated, making
the acquaintance of Betty Parsons. He rarely exhibited--small, uninspiring
works in crayon and pigments on paper that were heavily influenced by a tepid
reasoning with the surrealism then sweeping New York. And then, in 1948
(actually, perhaps 1947), he painted a small, vertical, brick red canvas and,
adhering common masking tape down its center, vigorously knifed a burnt orange
pigment along its path from top to bottom. The story goes that he then
contemplated this "thing" before him for many months--indeed, from
various tellings of the tale, about a year or so. The work was to be
christened Onement I, and--as
surely as the path of Modernism shifted a notch with Matisse's red studio and
Picasso's d'amoiselles, up to the revolution fired from Pollock's lifting of the
brush away from the canvas--art was irrevocably changed.
Newman's first solo exhibition, at the Betty Parsons Gallery in 1950, was met
with a withered silence, both among his peers and the potentially dire
assessment of critics. Pollock and the eponymous Tony Smith alone grasped
the magnitude of the statement. Taken in the context of its time, with the
violent experiments of post-Cubism going on, Newman's work could have been seen
as a joke, a play on the meaning (or, if you will, the lack thereof) within the
painting of the day. But now--some thirty years after Judd's brilliant
departures from romance, Marden's soft monochromes (back to romance...), the
works of Kelly, Ryman, Martin, Morris--Newman's achievement rests in the ease of
legend. He has ascended to a point of utter relevance and his vision comes
across as both deliciously ubiquitous and firmly anarchic--a fitting conclusion,
given Newman's own political leanings. He fits many roles for us:
the beleaguered visual poet, battling the philistines, his back against the
wall; the doomed aesthete, contemplating form and immortality; and Barney, as he
liked to be called, sharing his wit and whiskey with his friends and embattled
fellow artists, firing venomous letters to magazines and institutions he felt
slighted him or his friends and colleagues--biding his time when there was,
painfully, so little of it to begin with.
Newman's oeuvre is one that (as he would want) needs be reckoned with firsthand.
Art, particularly painting, is a thing lessened by reproduction. This is
the sadness of a glittering contemporanea, the gulf insurmountable. What I
knew of him was leveled at me as a stoned young man in Amsterdam from the
distance of literature and the few, though admirable, holdings of New York,
notably the Metropolitan's Concorde, a work many consider an unfinished piece.
With the grand retrospective exhibition at the Philadelphia Museum of Art (set
to travel on to the Tate Modern in London), Newman finally has come home, more
or less...
Ascending the steps of the museum, one first encounters one of the seminal
sculptural statements of the modern tradition, Newman's Broken Obelisk (1963-67,
Cor-Ten steel, 305" x 126" x 126"). First sketched in 1963,
he finally fabricated two versions of Broken Obelisk in 1967. In 1969, he
created the work that is exhibited in the retrospective, destined to become an
anonymous gift to New York's Museum of Modern Art. A truly breathtaking
work, Broken Obelisk was set off against the lavish facade of the Philadelphia
museum, creating a brisk melding of two very different beauties. Much of
the power of the obelisk lies in its disparities between weight (mass, or girth,
if you will...) and line. The two pyramids meet at a seemingly razor-thin
point of contact, 2 1/4" square. Reaching an overall height of 26
feet, the work illustrates the potentiality of an endless ascension with the
irregular cut of the uppermost point, the "broken" of the title.
This roughly serrated feature contrasts with the stricter geometries of the
lower pyramid--set off, interestingly enough, against this geometry by the
hand-held fire cut of its base. Ideally, sculpture should propel us into
a void of surrounding, demanding a rapt attention as we parade about its
reality. A huge point with Broken Obelisk is that this attention is
adhered to by the juxtaposition of classical import (the pyramid itself, as
concept and model, along with the inversion of the salutory pinnacle) with
modernist innovation.
Upon entering the main galleries of the show, one encounters a selection of
Newman's earlier surviving works, the struggles of an artist with that bane of
midcentury art, subject matter. This is Newman looking for footing against
which to brace his aesthetic ideas. There are hints of mythology (matched
by a somewhat literary pretension) woven in among more organic movements that
generally crowd the surface of the paper. Then you come across two pieces
that give an idea of the power of what is to come. These works--both
untitled; one watercolor and gouache on paper (11 1/4" x 16 1/4"), and
the other simply watercolor on paper (15 1/8" x 20 1/2")--feature a
more open format and the first hints of the linear fusions (or divisions) of the
later work. Then you come upon Onement I (1948, oil and masking tape on
canvas, 27 1/4" x 16 1/4"), the work that defined Newman's vision for
the remainder of his life. The small size of this work is almost shocking,
given Newman's pencha
nt for verbose size later on. Of course, Newman himself spoke often
on the fact that his interest was not in size, but rather in scale. In
this regard, the intimacy of Onement I makes sense. The scale of the work
is impeccable, the rough-hewn line (or "zip") contrasting sharply and
indelibly with the delicate touch of the field. This idea of scale really
comes together in the work End of Silence (1949, oil on canvas, 38" x
30"); in this piece, Newman applies the paint in a more direct and
aggressive style, the impastoed pigment asserting itself through variations in
the catch of light and glare. Here the zip is applied flush on the
surface--knifed on, if you will, somewhat off-kilter. But the big point is
scale. The blunter perimeters of the work go hand in hand with the stouter
proportions of the zip, and this heralds the importance of some of Newman's
mature work.
The exhibition catalog states that "in August 1950, Newman moved to a
studio at 110 Wall Street that afforded him the space to make his first 8-by-18
foot painting," Vir Heroicus Sublimis (1950-51, oil on canvas, 95 3/8"
x 213 1/4"). This massive work, commanding in its sheer objectivity,
is essentially a sheer red painting, set off by five thin zips applied with
varying techniques. Two pastel zips are painted on the primed canvas, the
red field hovering around their soft edges, while the other three are painted
over the field, creating a more forceful demarcation, or dialogue, of field
versus ground. First exhibited at the Betty Parsons Gallery in 1951,
Newman added a note of assistance regarding the viewing of so large a work:
"There is a tendency to look at large pictures from a distance. The
large pictures in this exhibition are intended to be seen from a short
distance." Seen from this short distance, the red field of the
painting takes over the peripheral limits of the eye; only the zips break apart
the fog of color, drawing attention to the spatial qualities of the painting and
acting as anchors of a most physical nature, a tool to keep one from twirling
away into the
crimson abyss. This massive physical declaration is also experienced in
Newman's
two other larger works in the exhibition--interestingly enough, from two stages
of his career. Uriel (1955, oil on canvas, 96" x 216"), with its
massive field of pale aqua pigment taking up the left two-thirds of the canvas,
features a feathery hand and deft placement of three zips (black, aqua, and
burnt sienna), the banding of zips held in by light-inflected willows of white,
primed canvas, separating the banding from the bodies of aqua and burnt sienna.
Interestingly, it begs the question as to how many zips there are: three
or five? No matter, the work is a stunning tour de force of compositional
balance, a perfect example as to why the personal experience of viewing Newman's
work in the flesh is so powerful. The few painterly elements of Uriel
contribute a remarkable humanness to the work, a juxtaposition of the Dionysian
and the Apollonian. This "Spanish touch", if you will, marks
this work in its time. In contrast, the mammoth Anna's Light (1968,
acrylic on canvas, 108 1/4" x 240 1/3"), named for Newman's mother,
Anna Steinberg Newman, who passed away in 1965, settles in at the diametrically
opposite end of the compositional spectrum from both of the earlier works,
easing into the mode of the artist's later compositions--essentially the
crisper, hulking precision, the industrial finish, and the use of synthetic
pigments, a medium increasingly utilized by Newman in the 1960s for their
quick-drying properties. The synthetic materials, acrylics and Magma,
brought to Newman's work an opacity and weight of color, rather than the
light-induced properties of earlier works in oil. These properties came to a
massive fruition in Anna's Light. A large body of crimson banded on either
side by white bodies, the weight of pigment suggests a different sort of density
in the oeuvre. As opposed to the union of elements in both Uriel and Vir
Heroicus Sublimis, Newman was looking to create a dominant factor in the
composition of the work (the red body) and then to have this dominant force held
together, as it were, by two varying compositional tools: the thin,
handpainted band (perhaps, to Newman, not a zip, interestingly enough) to the
left, and the broad, hard-edged white to the right. In examining these
leviathans, it came to me that, indeed, part of the power does, in fact, rest in
the size of the work. The fulsome truth of the matter is that someone
"created" these objects, and--of great import in this day of
appropriation and teams of assistants--a single man did the work, from the
priming to the contemplation involved. This was part of Newman's endurance
in the face of his enforced detachment from the art world in the mid-fifties.
He is Clyfford Still's "Creator-Man", involved in (as unfashionable it
is as a concept...) a heroic feat. (It should be noted that this is also
part of Mitchell's power; even in the face of her most derivative
inconsistencies, she attacked the studio environs with a huge seriousness of
purpose.)
For The Stations of the Cross series, the Philadelphia museum wisely installed
the work in a single gallery. These paintings--completed over eight years,
from 1958-66, in which Newman utilized, at various stages, oil or synthetic
pigments on raw, unprimed canvas--offer one of the sheerest examples of
possiblity within the confines of a strict formal identity. These are
powerful paintings. Austere, even grim in their profundity, they echo the
seriousness of subject and mind which Newman so often
discussed. Created on what Newman called "a human scale, for the
human cry"(referencing Christ's cry, "Lema Sabachthani..."),
these works pulse with a detailed intensity, achieved through the various
chemical exercises inherent in the pigments. At times oil soaks, or
stains, the beige canvas, creating darker, moistened shadows; acrylics and Magma
pigments bring an opaque foundation to the black forms... With these
paintings, Newman ran through the whole of his strategies: the zip is
stained into canvas, at times resting on top, at times a vivid border of raw
canvas; the edges feature feathery mists, or, at times, razor-sharp focus...
Once again, the staining of oil into the canvas elicits a wide variety of
effects, especially in the white Stations, where a striking chromatic salvo is
delivered, bringing to mind the idea that in Eskimo culture, there are, in fact,
over 500 words for white...
A wonderful focus of the exhibition is the intensity with which Newman's graphic
body of work comes to life. The inclusion of etchings, late drawings, and
lithographs brings a delightfully intimate perspective to the show. Of
special note are the Cantos series of lithographs (1963-64, portfolio of 18,
colophon, title page, and preface by the artist); in these works Newman
articulated the certain urgency of the margin with a daring grace and aplomb,
allowing the flow of ink its natural course, cutting loose his urban accuities
in the face of natural occurernce. The true breakthrough, however, came in 1968,
with his work in etchings (essentially a collaboration with Tatyana Grosman) and
aquatint. Here, after an initial foray that rendered basic
"studies" with the crude physicalities inherent in the medium, Newman
went back with the aquatint technique, creating fulsome works on paper that
revisited his most powerful visual themes. Indeed, the late aquatints
bring full circle the Stations of the Cross; further exploring the possibilities
of black and white.
Things wind down a bit with the inclusion of Newman's remaining sculptural
works. The Here series, of course, rates special note, if only because of
its historical measure. Here I (To Marcia) (1950/1962, bronze, 107
3/8" x 28 1/4" x 27 1/4") was initially exhibited in Newman's
debut solo show at Betty Parsons. At that time the sculpture was
simple wood and paint with painter's plaster, molded into an upturned milk
carton--this first stage in its provenance a most Rauschenbergian effect, some
years before Bob entered the city... In fact, I would argue that Newman
presaged the Austrian Franz West with the crusty, totemic feel of this work's
early incarnation. Sculpturally speaking, another key point in discussing
Newman is, once again, the object-hood he endowed the work. The painting
Now II (1967, acrylic on canvas, 132 1/4" x 50 1/8"), one of several
immense verticals that Newman created, has stretchers three inches deep.
It cannot be tossed away that this is a sculptural decision, a dialogue or
discourse of painting in the round... This brings me to a selection of
particularly narrow, vertical works culled from Newman's labors of 1950.
Newman created six paintings that fit this format, all of which were untitled
except for The Wild (1950, oil on canvas, 95 3/4" x 1 5/8"), a work
shown in his debut with Betty Parsons. The catalog entry regarding this
piece mentions that Newman himself said that "he made The Wild to ensure
that he had not been beguiled by the large fields of color in paintings such as
Vir Heroicus Sublimis." This is worth noting in that, again,
Newman's self-dialogue was more one of scale than simply of size--though I would
bring forth the idea that these works highlight (as with the later work Now II)
that Newman was capable of thinking of painting in a wholly different light from
that of mere surface. This, again, is painting in the round, the union of
Newman's two primary mediums. There is a strong force of presence in The
Wild, an active, viable moment of, perhaps, confrontation (?). Here, as in
the Here series, the zip is all...
Any vacuity of ground is suspended clarifying the atmosphere about the work of
art and its surprisingly varied painterly processes. The thin body of the
canvas was painted a flinty blue, while the existing area for the zip was taped
off. After removing the tape, the artist then applied the cadmium red with
a faltering hand, negating (or perhaps highlighting) the intense linearity of
the work.
The absence of Cathedra, from Amsterdam's Steldijk Museum, begs a nagging
question. Indeed, the grotesque vandalism endured by Amsterdam's
monumental possession rather precludes its travel. It's just that I felt
it deeply--away from its siblings, longing for its maritime depths... This
was abated somewhat by the inclusion of Onement V (1952, oil on canvas, 60"
x 38"), a smaller painting that features a similarity of tone and depth and
that mysterious blue Newman wielded so potently--a blue achieved through
painstakingly thin applications of liquid pigment, the brush crossing over and
into itself, the final coat applied with a spray gun (a technique, the catalogue
mentions, Newman later disavowed because of the danger and mess...).
Leaving the museum on a dauntingly humid summer day, anticipating any number of
cold lagers, it felt good to think that Barney had made it this far.
Surely one of the most misunderstood artists to come around the bend, he longed
for membership in the pantheon. It doesn't really matter, but I wonder if
he had any inkling of how very much he would come to influence art after his
passing. I wonder if he really felt confident in his immortality, or if,
to the end--despite the vivid fanfare a mere year or two before his death--he
doubted his impact and, in effect, his efforts. Newman wasn't perfect, no
artist is. There is that stuttering search for expression in those first
surrealist drawings; a notion of repetition in some of the later works. But that
was his project; to excercise the sheer precision of his chosen subject matter;
to push himself to see how far he could take it. This wasn't done for
entertainment value, or to take up casual hours between cafe sessions. This
was a project of extremes and as with most things involving extremities,
there will be a few falls. No matter... His is an importance we feel
today, undoubtedly, more than was ever felt in his own era. Newman brought
to us the challenge of seeing art as a thing to be retrieved from the individual
definition of its creator, an apparition that could be forever broadened, given
the insight of the viewer. He brought to us the idea that the heraldic
implications of visual experience could be an end unto itself--not a mere
compositional element, but a silently affirming entirety.
home /current paintings /
archives
/ bio
/ text / in
the studio / links / contact