Barnett Newman (1905-70) was forty-two when he had a revelation. On a relatively small canvas stained with Indian red, he placed an upright strip of masking tape, in order to isolate the left from the right, and then proceed with the painting.
Instead, on an instinct, he coloured the masking tape orangey scarlet. «Suddenly, I realized that I had been emptying space instead of filling it, and that now my line came to life». Thus was born Onement 1, a breakthrough work, and the line or zip, a Newman trademark.
Onement 1 was a truly revolutionary work. Its volcanic impact matched that of Manett's Déjeneur sur l'herbe (1863) or Malevich's Black Square (1915). Newman had found himself -the self, terrible and constant, the subject matter of painting- and he had found a cause, a totally new and quintessentially American abstract art, often bundled together under the rubric of Abstract Expressionism. He believed that his own work was fundamental to that project; and he was right. Newman's work was an imperative to be seized. I has had a profound effect on painters and painting ever since.
As a real anarchist, Newman he contributed a foreword to Kropotkin's Memoirs of Revolutionist in the semi-revolutionary year of 1968. «They say that I have advanced abstract painting to its extreme, when it is obvious to me that I have made only a new begining. In short, they find me too abstract for the abstract expressionists and to expressionist for the abstract purists» (preface for an exhibition published in The New American Painting). He was no about to take lessons for them.
The invention of beauty by the Greeks, that is, their postulate of beauty as an ideal, has been the bugbear of European art and European aestheic philosophics. Man's natural desire in the arts to express his relation to the Absolute became identified and confused with the absolutism of perfect creations -with the fetish of quality- so the European artists have been continually involved in the moral struggle between notions of beauty and the desire for sublimity.
Greek art is an insistence that the sense of exaltation is to be found in the perfect form.
«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. The question that now arises is how, if we are living in a time without a legend or mythos that can be called sublime, if we refuse to admit any exaltation in pure relations, if we refuse to live in the abstract, how can we be creating a sublime art?
We are freeing ourselves of the impediments of memory, association, nostalgia, legend, myth, or what have you, that have been the devices of Western European painting. Instead of making cathedrals out of Christ, we're making [them] out of ourselves, out of our own feelings. The image we produce is the self-evident one of revelation, real and concrete, that can be understood by anyone who will look at it without the nostalgic glasses of history.»
