Pursuit of the Sublime

By ROBERT HUGHES

One of the hidden forks in American art history was reached on Jan. 29, 1948, when a painter named Barnett Newman painted a thin, rough orange stripe down the exact center of a small dark red canvas, and left it alone. It is hardly an exaggeration that most of the symmetrical format, stripe, minimal, and otherwise post-De Kooning art produced in New York in the '60s refers, in the end, to this modest picture that Newman called Onement I. Newman's ruthless pursuit of the implications of this canvas both split his work from the main run of '50s painting and later made him, along with Duchamp and Ad Reinhardt, one of the mentors of '60s art. It was his Model T.

Newman's whole bearing suggested a seignioral poise--the big square head thrust forward, the snowy walrus mustache, the steel-rimmed monocle dangling on a black ribbon that neatly bisected his shirt front, vertical black on white, like a detail from one of his own pictures. This was fitting; when he died last year at 65, he left a body of work that seemed the epitome of aristocratic breadth and daring. Newman's canvases, with their engulfing fields of color traversed by vertical "zips," had become intrinsic to the look of American painting. Artists as diverse as Dan Flavin, Kenneth Noland, Clement Meadmore and Alexander Liberman had been deeply affected by the radical openness of his art and his brave, grumpy polemics. Granted obvious differences of context and emphasis, Newman's work had acquired much the same ethical role as Poussin's did for young painters in the 17th century, or Ingres' in the early 19th. This month, Newman is saluted by a full-scale retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art, accompanied by an admirable monograph written by Thomas Hess, editor of Art News.

Unknown Mother. It takes an effort to remember that Newman was not always famous. He spent decades in the cold, both critically and financially. It is only five years since John Canaday's notorious assault on him in the New York Times--"an exhibition so meretricious that within a few days of its opening it had become the subject of appalled snickers along the art circuit." And in the 1950s, not even Newman's fellow artists liked his work much. His painting threatened them by contradicting the Abstract Expressionist orthodoxy of gesture, drip and "action."

A painting like Untitled (Number 2), 1950, now looks like a singular prophecy of the stripe work that dominated New York galleries 15 years later; it predicts Noland all the way, from the long narrow format of canvas to the pure, hard-edged bands of red and black. (Asked if he had begotten stripe paintings, Newman replied with characteristic irony that "if I am the father, I never had the honor of knowing the mother.") But most Abstract Expressionists thought his work perversely formalistic. Its very muteness was an offense.

Numinous Archetype. Yet to look back on Newman's art is to sense that behind this ineloquence lay the source of its strength. To call him a formalist, and his pictures "abstractions," is in some degree to miss the point of his art. Newman sought, and eventually developed, a heroic form of subject matter that was not, in fact, an abstraction of anything, but rather a sum of generalizations that embodied moral images. Newman immersed himself in Judaic and cabalistic lore. He was not quite a religious painter, but he was a numinous one who believed in archetypes.

When Newman made one of his zips streak up the canvas, bisecting a huge field of blue or dense, opaque black, he was not making an image of, say, God dividing the waters at the Creation: he was striving to induce a visual drama parallel to that primordial myth. This drive to find the archetypal grounds of experience haunted Newman from the start. It is present in Pagan Void, 1946, which--with its suggestion of a cell splitting or an ovum penetrated--is virtually a metaphor of conception itself. In The Command, 1946, Newman paints the initial separation of tremulous light from mineral darkness, split by a hard-clear beam of brighter radiance that, inevitably, suggests God.

"Aesthetics is for artists what ornithology is for the birds," Newman once memorably remarked. To paint or sculpt was an end in itself, "the highest role a man could achieve." Much lip service has been paid to the idea of art's necessity, but Newman lived it out--and with a painful, strenuous sense of responsibility.

Aut Caesar, aut nihil--Caesar or nothing--was his unspoken motto. "When he would talk or write about his subject," Hess recalls, "it would be in terms of absolutes, the Sublime, the Tragic." In Newman's scheme of things, the impulse to make agreeable pictures had no place. The only encounter that mattered to him was with the heroic. Hence the scale of his work, designed to engulf the viewer in the illusion of color without limit.

Controlled Epic. Newman's ambition, then, was epic form. Epic is not simply chant: it is controlled discourse. The marvel of Newman's art is the exactness with which he preserved this quality. The placement of the red stripe, just off-center, on the black triangular canvas of Jericho, 1968-69, is as seemingly casual and as inevitably right as the caesura in a line by the dramatist Newman most admired, Racine. The immaculate, silky surface of Midnight Blue, 1970, conceals the labor behind it, for Newman's pursuit of the sublime lay less in nature than in culture. This enabled him to pick ancient, man-made forms and return them to a pristine significance without a trace of piracy.

One index of that ability was his sculpture. Broken Obelisk, perhaps the best American sculpture of its time, is Newman's meditation on ancient Egypt: a steel pyramid, from whose apex an inverted obelisk rises like a beam of light. Here, Newman bypassed the Western associations of pyramids and broken columns with death, and produced a life-affirming image of transcendence. That unruffled self-sufficiency, beyond style, gave Newman's work its mysterious didactic value. It is not "expressive"; the silence at the core bespeaks a man for whom art was a philosophical activity, a way of knowledge.

-Robert Hughes

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.