IV

STATEMENTS

With the painting of Onement I in 1948 and his discovery and accept-
ance of its implications, Newman arrived at his mature pictorial state-
ment. Almost immediately, his verbal output changed accordingly, from
discursive private meditations to succinct public pronouncements. AI-
though Newman believed that his paintings could and should stand 'by
themselves, he was nevertheless aware of the startling sparseness of his
means and wanted to ensure that viewers were not blinded to the
meaning and purpose of his paintings either by their absolute abstract-
ness or by their formal innovation. His statements, then, were intended
to suggest how the viewer ought to look and what he ought to look for
in the paintings. Certain themes prove constant: that the artist (or
architect) makes a work of art not through a series of objective design
decisions but by creating the formal elements that express his subject;
that he must work in a state of freedom, free from artistic or philosophi-
cal dogmas as well as from social or political constraints; that he must
always be guided by "high purpose." Newman's statements do not belie
~ut rather underscore his lifelong faith in the possibility of communicat-
lng felt experience through visual abstraction, in the possibility that an
educated audience could comprehend his intensely personal, subjective,
nonverbal message.

178 BARNETT NEWMAN
---------------------------------------------------------------
Newman wrote this terse statement at the time of his first one-man
show, January 23-February 11, 1950, at the Betty Parsons Gallery in
New York.
These paintings are not "abstractions," nor do they depict some "pure"
idea. They are specific and separate embodiments of feeling, to be
experienced, each picture for itself. They contain no depictive allusions.
Full of .restrained passion, their poignancy is revealed in each concen-
trated image.
• • •
In this brief statement, typed on a sheet of notepaper and tacked to a
wall of the Betty Parsons Gallery, Newman instructed the few visitors
to his second one-man show, April 23-May 12, 1951, on how they
should view his new work. Among the nine paintings and one sculpture
included in the exhibition was Vir Heroicus Sublimis (now in the Mu-
seum of Modern Art, New York), the first of Newman's grand pictorial
statements, measuring approximately eight by eighteen feet. The few
reviews the show received were negative; more dispiriting to Newman,
most of his colleagues scorned his work and stayed away from the
opening. That summer Newman decided not to exhibit further and
withdrew his paintings from the gallery.
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.
From The New American Painting
Thanks to the intercession of Ben Heller, Newman's first serious collector, the
Museum of Modern Art, New York, reversed its history of ignoring his work
--
Statements 179
d selected four of his paintings for its traveling exhibition "The New
~rnerican Painting." After a yearlong tour of eight European .countries, ~he
rnnibus exhibition closed in New York at the Modern, where rt was on view
~ay 28-September 8, 1959. Each of the participating artists wrote a state-
ent for the catalogue; Newman's is reprinted here along with a preface,
:hich he discarded at the last minute, that rebuts a decade of critics' miscon-
ceptions and attacks.
-
... It is precisely this death image, the grip of geometry, that has to
be confronted.
In a world of geometry, geometry itself has become our moral crisis.
And it will not be resolved by jazzed-up kicks but only by the answer
of no geometry of any kind. Unless we face up to it and discover a new
image based on new principies, there is no hope for freedom.
Can anyone, therefore, take seriously the mock aesthetic war that the
art journalists and their artist friends have been waging against the new
Pyramid, while they sit in it-under a canopy of triangulation-with
their feeble frenzy-weapons of the hootchy-kootchy dancer?
I realize that my paintings have no link with, nor any basis in, the
art of W orld War I with its principles of geometry that tie it into the
nineteenth century. To reject cubism or purism, whether it is Picasso's
or Mondrian's, only to end up with the collage scheme of free-associated
forms, whether it is Miró's or Malevich's, is to be caught in the same
geometric trapo OnIy an art free from any kind of the geometry princi-
ples of W orld War I, only an art of no geometry, can be a new beginning.
Nor can I find it by buiIding a wall of Iights; nor in the dead infinity
of silence; nor in the painting performance, as if it were an instrument
of pure energy full of a hollow biologic rhetoric.
Painting, like passion, is a Iiving voice, which, when I hear it, I must
let speak, unfettered.
By the way of preface to any statement, I would like to urge a bit of
caution: the American press has already said it about me, since I first
began some dozen years ago to work the way I do.
My work, they charge, is empty of content, when what they mean is
that it is empty of familiar forms and shapes.
My work, they say, is antiart, when what they really mean is that it
is antidogma, that it is anti-the kind of stereotyped picture they expect.
180 BA R N ET T NEW M A N
My work, they claim, is antipainting, when what they mean is that
it is antitechnique, antibrushwork, and that the large open areas I use
require, as the restorers of my work are beginning to realize, the highest
artistry.
My work, they say, is involved in line, when it is obvious that there
are no lines.
My work, they charge, is so many optical color tricks, when what they
mean is that I have no colors, that I am involved in color.
My work, they claim, is based on nonvalue painting, when what they
mean is that I depend specifically on the most subtle set of values and
that value to me is of the utmost importance.
My work, they shout, is involved in geometry, when what they mean
is that they miss the geometric pattern of colors, shapes, and line
diagrams they are familiar with.
My work, they say, is more advanced than Malevich's, when what
they really mean is that I have reduced Malevich to yet another color
scheme, so that his white-on-white is just another syntactical device no
more significant than black-on-white.
My work, they say, is more advanced than Mondrian's, when what
they mean is that I have broken the barrier of his dogmas.
They say that I have advanced abstract painting to its extreme, when
it is obvious to me that I have made only a new beginning. In short,
they find me too abstract for the abstract expressionists and too expres-
sionist for the abstract purists.
From Recent American Synagogue Architecture
ue
A street-corner conversation on the uninspired quality of current synagog
design led to the invitation Newman received to participate in the exhibition
"Recent American Synagogue Architecture" at the Jewish Museum in New
York, October 6-December 8, 1963. After hearing of Newman's ideas second-
hand, the architect Richard Meier asked the artist to contribute to the show
he was organizing of work by such architectural eminences as Philip Johnson,
Louis Kahn, and Frank Lloyd Wright. As Newman explains in the accompany-
Statements 181
ing statement, in his design he merged abstract signs for the divine presence
inspired by the kabbalah with a spatial configuration modeled on the concrete
positions of a baseball park.
The impression that today's popular architecture creates is that it has
no subject. It talks about itself as if it were only an object, a machine
or an organic object, or one of new materials, new forms, new volumes,
new spaces.
The subject of architecture is always taken for granted-that some-
how it will supply itself or, what is worse, that the client will supply it,
that a building automatically becomes a work of art.
In the synagogue, the architect has the perfect subject, because it
gives him total freedom for a personal work of art. In the synagogue
ceremony nothing happens that is objective. In it there is only the
subjective experience in which one feels exalted. "Know before whom
you stand," reads the command. But the concern seems to be not with
the emotion of exaltation and personal identity called for by the com-
mand but with the number of seats and clean decoro We have broken
out of the Alhambra. Is it only to fall into a new one? The synagogue
is more than just a house of prayer. It is a place, Makom, where each
man can be called up to stand before the Torah to read his portion. In
the Amsterdam synagogue tradition, men were put on a stage to become
actors and the women were put behind silk curtains. In the Prague
synagogue, the women were even put behind walls. In the new syna-
gogues, the women are there, sometimes even sitting with the men, but
they are there as members of the ladies' auxiliary.
Here in this synagogue, each man sits, private and secluded in the
dugouts, waiting to be called, not to ascend a stage but to go up on the
mound, where, under the tension of that "Tzim-Tzum" that created light
and the world, he can experience a total sense of his own personality
before the Torah and His Name.
The women are also there, as persons and not as wives and mothers,
~ere the women are out in the open, sitting not in any abstract connec-
~lon with what takes place but as persons, distinct from their men but
in the full, clear light, where they can experience their identity as
WOrnenof valor.
My purpose is to create a place, not an environment, to deny the
182 BA RNETT NEWMA N
contemplation of the objects of ritual for the sake of that ultimate
courtesy where each person, man or woman, can experience the vision
and feel the exaltation of "His trailing robes filIing the Temple."
Preface to 18 Cantos
This statement accompanies the 18 Cantos, a boxed series of lithographs
Newman made in an edition of eighteen at Tatyana Grosman's press on Long
Island in 1963-64. Newman owed his introduction to printmaking to the artist
Cleve Gray, whom he thanks in his preface. Gray later recalled the circum-
stances of Newman's initial involvement with lithography in 1961:
[Barney's acknowledgment] refers to the deep depression he was in
because of his brother's death [in February 1961]. [My wife] Francine
and I had gone back to 685 [West End Avenue] with him and Annalee
after dinner to see the early Stations; that evening I bought [an] ink
drawing of 1959-related to Station #1, which I later showed in the
"Art in America" show [Decorative Arts Center, December 1961]-and
I told Barney how beautifully I thought his black-and-white paintings
would lend themselves to lithography, which I was then doing at Pratt.
We all thought it might be a way of getting him to work again, since he
hadn't been able to paint for many months. He seemed fairly interested
and told me to telephone him when I was at Pratt working myself; that
is what I did a few days later, and much to my delight he carne right down
and began immediately to get interested. It was great to see him work.
He fussed over the little lithograph for a long time, [and he went] back
after that first day without me. One day he gave me a proof; this proof
had been printed in the conventional way, the margins having been
stopped out by gum arabic. Some time later he decided he didn't like
those margins, and he asked me to give him back the proof he had given
me; and still later he gave me the first print of the final edition. This,
of course, was the origin of his strong feeling about margins; I also felt
that that little stone also was the source of the base of Here II After the
three lithos, he painted the big To George and completely recovered
himself.
Statements lH3
I should say that it was the margins made in printing a lithographic
stone that magnetized the chalIenge that lithography has had for me
from the very beginning. No matter what one does, no matter how
completely one works the stone (and I have always worked the stone
the same way I paint and draw-using the area-complete), the stone,
as soon as it is printed, makes an imprint that is surrounded by inevita-
ble white margins. I would create a totality only to find it change after
it was printed-into another totality. TheoreticalIy, a lithograph con-
sists of the separation between the imprint and the paper it is on.
Unfortunately it never works that way for me. There is always the
inevitable intrusion (in my lithograph at least) of the paper frame. To
crop the extruding paper or to cover it with a mat or to eliminate all
margins by "bleeding" (printing on papers smaller than the drawing on
the stone) is an evasion of this facto It is like cropping to make a
painting. It is success by mutilation.
The struggle to overcome this intrusion-to give the imprint its
necessary scale so that it could have its fulIest expression (and I feel
that the matter of scale in a lithograph has usually not been considered),
so that it would not be crushed by the paper margin and still have a
margin-that was the challenge for me. That is why each canto has its
own personal margins. In some, they are smalI, in others large, in still
others they are larger on one side and the other side is minimal.
However, no formal rules apply. Each print and its paper had to be
decided by me, and in some cases the same print exists with two
different sets of margins, because each imprint means something dif-
ferent to me. In painting, I try to transcend the size for the sake of scale.
So here I was faced with the problem of having each imprint transcend
not only its size but also the white frame to achieve this sense of scale.
These eighteen cantos are then single, individual expressions, each
with its unique difference. Yet since they grew one out of the other, they
~lso form an organic whole-so that as they separate and as they join
III their interplay, their symphonic mass lends additional clarity to each
individual canto, and at the same time each canto adds its song to the
full chorus.
I must explain that I had no plan to make a portfolio of "prints." I
arn not a printmaker. Nor did I intend to make a "set" by introducing
superficial variety. These cantos arose from a compelIing necessity-the
result of grappling with the instrumento
184 B A R N ET T N EW M A N
To me that is what lithography is. It is an instrumento It is not a
"rnedium"; it is not a poor man's substitute for painting or for drawing.
Nor do I consider it to be a kind of translation of something from one
medium into another. For me, it is an instrument that one plays. It is
like a piano or an orchestra; and as with an instrument, it interprets. And
as in all the interpretive arts, so in lithography, creation is joined with
the "playing"-in this case not of bow and string but of stone and press.
The definition of a lithograph is that it is writing on stone. But unlike
Gertrude Stein's rose, the stone is not a stone. The stone is a piece of
paper.
I have been captivated by the things that happen in playing this litho
instrument, the choices that develop when changing a color or the paper
size. I have "played" hoping to evoke every possible instrumentallick.
The prints really started as three, grew to seven, then eleven, then
fourteen, and finished as eighteen. Here are the cantos, eighteen of
them, each one different in form, mood, color, beat, scale, and key.
There are no cadenzas. Each is separate. Each can stand by itself. But
its fullest meaning, it seems to me, is when it is seen together with the
others.
It remains for me to thank Cleve Gray for bringing me to lithography,
particularly at the time he did; Tatyana Grosman for her devotion and
encouragement and patience in my behalf; and Zigmunds Priede for his
sympathetic cooperation on the press.
On Emma Lake
This statement was requested, but never published, by Paul Arthur of Cana-
dian Art magazine for a retrospective article on the interaction of U.S. and
Canadian artists at the Emma Lake Artists' Workshop. Newman had been the
leader of the workshop, which was held at a remote and rugged camp belong-
ing to the University of Saskatchewan, in August 1959.
I have been asked many times what happened at Emma Lake in 1959,
because now, five years later, with the exception of a few artists frorn
Statements 185
the Montreal area, the strongest painters and sculptors have all been
ernerging from that section of Saskatchewan.
The attempt at direct influence has been the poison of art education,
whether it was at the Art Students League with Kenneth Hayes Miller,
Yasuo Kuniyoshi, or Thomas Benton, or with my recent colleagues
who ran art schools in New York, Provincetown, and San Francisco.
"Direct influence" teaching by artists is not an influence. It is a method
whereby an artist creates personal products. It is teaching by capture.
It is the exploitation of willing students that corrupts both them and the
instructor.
I not only refrained from this exploitation at Emma Lake, I not only
refused to produce inferior Newmans (there are too many of my col-
leagues doing that already); I persistently refrained from doing any-
thing.
The first thing I did not do was to bring my work with me. To do so
would have meant that 1 would have had an advantage over any other
artist, since my work was known, just as the works of Pollock, de
Kooning, and Motherwell were known, only through reproductions.
Neither did I bring canvas with me to divide it among the members
of the workshop to teach painting techniques.
Neither did I try to show how to make the right "kind" of painting.
I brought no new aesthetic theories of colo r, form, or facture. Nor.did
1 advocate old theories. I did not instruct or devise definitions of abstract
or nonabstract art.
1 brought no slides from New York. I did not bring any New York
message. N or did 1 agitate for a Canadian art.
~ advocated no systematic theology based on love of paint, angst of
aChon, or the mystic vision.
Neither did I prophesy what the art of the future should be. I brought
no panaceas. I also did not bring any hells.
Yet I never worked harder in my life, because what I did bring was
m~se~f. And what 1 made clear was that anyone can make a good
pamtmg, that anyone can make a beautiful thing, but that a great work
of art must be created and that painting is a matter of high purpose.
 ---------===========================:0'--_
to create color), not area (I wish to declare space), not absolutes (I wish
to feel and to know at all risk).
The fetish and the ornament, blind and mute, impress only those who
From Exhibition 01 the United States cannot look at the terror of Self. The self, terrible and constant, is for
01 America me the subject matter of painting and sculpture.
The play of formal devices, their manipulation, the framing of space,
the association-free or not-of areas, colors, lines, for whatever their
Barnett Newman wa,S the lead artist hors de concours, in the U.S. Exhibition . sake, abstract or otherwise, must lead to the denial of the self through
at the eighth São Paulo Bienal, September 4-November 28, 1965. Orgamzed fetishes with-threats of fire and brimstone and through ornaments
by Walter Hopps, director of the Pasadena Art Mus~um, the show also com- with-voodoo ecstasies. Instead of the falling in love, what comes
prised the work of six younger artists: Larry Bell, Billy AI Bengston, ~obert through is the falling in love with oneself, the self-Iove of the shaman.
. Dona ld J u dd , Larry Poons , and Frank Stella.. Newman
I rWln, .. had prevíously
o
Like the man-made image of an artist instead of the artist as a man
re fuse d any mVI°ta tio
o I n to exhibit that might cause his pamtmgs
. to be miscon-
o
inspired and inspiring, the fetish and the ornament demand only one
strue d ; t h erelOre,
r when the program of the U.S. . entry
" m the .Bienal was emotion-the worship of the artist himself by himself and hy those
announce d in i t h e zvew
I\T Vork Times
L • as representmg the new Amencan formal
whom he can intimidate. Instead of an eloquence that means what it
painting," Newman wrote to Hopps:
says, that gives life to mud, one is left, no matter what the magic and
... It was my impression that you were honoring me for my work and the techniques, with so much mudo
that you were including six younger people because you were also com- Life, as is a true work of art, is, after alI, always positive.
mitted to their work. I had no idea, and somehow you never expressed
it in conversation, that you had chosen me and the oth~rs. because you
o

felt that we were practitioners, whether major or mmor IS Ir:~levant: of

a stylistic idea:
o o It was my impression that you were orgamzmg abk~nd
o

of train, full of the work of young men of high purpose, w~o, not emg
toa well known, needed me as a locomotive. Howe:,er, instead of a
locomotive, I have become a cog in a formalist machme. From Barnett Newman: The Stations
Hopps altered his introduction to the exhibition to acco~modate ~e,,:~a~:
0 1the Cross, Lema Sabachthani
obj ections emphasizing hiIS m d epen dence of style and influence wit b I
o o o
o

definite intention to transcend issues of category an d the ensumg

' o
r vert for
a
dilemmas." In his own catalogue statement Newman derides forma ist ar Newman composed this statement for the catalogue of the exhibition at the
its superficial distractions and false enchantments. Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, April 20-June 19, 1966, of his Stations
of the Cross (now in the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.). He gave
the series the Aramaic subtitle Lema Sabachthani ("[My God, my God,] why
have you forsaken me?") to emphasize his idiosyncratic identification of the
First we feel, then we falI.
Passion with Christ's dying protest, with "the cry of a man, of every man who
JAMES JOYCE, Finnegans Wake is unable to understand what is being done to him." Newman discovered that
theempathetic iconography of the Stations of the Cross also applied to his
experience of doing the series, as he explained in an interview in Newsweek
The freedom of space, the emotion of human scale.' t h e sane ÚI y ofplace
(I wish
at the time: "I tried to make the title a metaphor that describes my feeling
are what is moving-not size (I wish to overcome size), not colors en
wh I did the paintings. It's not literal, but a cue. In my work, each station
 •........
--~-----~-----~----------~·r;arem,-elt:f;:J

was a meaningfuI stage in my ow th ., lif .

h I k n- e artist s- ire. It IS an expression of
ow wor ed. I was a piIgrim as I painted."*

LTemaSabachthani-why? Why did you forsake me? Why forsake m ?

The Fourteen Stations of the Cross,
o what purpose? Why? e.
1958-1966
Thi.s is the Passion. This outcry of Jesus. Not the terrihIe walk u
the ~Ia Dolorosa, hut the question that has no answer. p
ThIS o:erw~eImin~ question that does not compIain, makes toda 's In this statement, which he wrote for ARTnews for publication* during the
taIk of alienation, as if aIienation were a modern invention a ha course of his exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum, Newman elaborates on
Th' . , nem ar-
r~ssment. Is.questIOn that has no answer has heen with us so Ion _ the spiritual and material challenges he set himself in pursuing the Stations
smce Jesus-smce Ahraham-since Adam th " I . g series. He unknowingly began the sequence in February 1958, only a few
L ? - e ongma quesnon.
e~a. To what purpose-is the unanswerahIe question of huma weeks after he was released from the hospital following a heart attack. With
suffermg. ,n the scant, severe means he allowed himself, Newman eventually achieved a
somber intensity that reminded him of the tradition of the Stations: "When
Can the Passion he expressed hy a series of anecdotes hy fou t
. I '11 . , r een I did the fourth one, I used a white line that was even whiter than the canvas,
sentimenta I. us~ratIOns? Do not the Stations telI of one event?
really intense, and that gave me the idea for the cry. It occurred to me that
. The first. ~IIgnms waIked the Via Dolorosa to identify themseIves
this abstract cry was the whole thing-the entire Passion of Christ."t
with the .0ngmaI moment, not to reduce it to a pious Iegend; nor even
to worship the story of one man and his agony, hut to stand witness to
the stor~ of e~ch man's agony: the agony that is singIe, constant,
unreIentmg, wIlIed-world without end. No one asked me to do these Stations of the Cross. They were not
commissioned hy any church. They are not in the conventionaI sense
The ones who are bom are to die
"church" art. But they do concern themseIves with the Passion as 1 feel
Against thy will art thou formed
and understand it; and what is even more significant for me, they can
Against thy will art thou bom
Against thy will dost thou live exist without a church.
Against thy will die. 1 hegan these paintings eight years ago the way 1 hegin alI my
paintings-hy painting. It was while painting them that it carne to me
Jesus sureIy heard these words from the Pirke Ab t "The Wisdom (I was on the fourth one) that 1 had something particular here, It was
of the Fathers." o,
at that moment that the intensity that 1 felt the paintings had made me
No one gets anyhody's permission to he horn. No one asks to Iive. think of them as the Stations of the Cross.
Who can say he has more permission than anyhody eIse? It is as 1 work that the work itseIf hegins to have an effect on me.
Just as 1 affect the canvas, so does the canvas affect me.
From the very heginning 1 felt that 1 wouId do a series. However, 1
had no intention of doing a theme with variations. Nor did 1 have any
desire to deveIop a technicaI device over and over. From the very
heginning 1 felt 1 had an important suhject, and it was while working

"Newsweek, May 9, 1966, p. 100. *ARTnews 65, no. 3 (May 1966), pp. 26--28, 57.
tNewsweek, May 9, 1966, p. 100.
-~~--I~U I I l'n~;
W'"M 11: N---------~--------~.
____
----------~~---------~~----~memen~ I~I

that it made itself clear to me that these works involved my understand.

ing of the Passion. J ust as the Passion is not a series of anecdotes hut
embodies a single event, so these fourteen paintings, even though each
one is whole and separate in its immediacy, all together form a complete Frorn "jackscn Pol~ock:
statement of a single subject. That is why I could not do them all at once
automatically, one after another. It took eight years. I used to do m;
An Artists' Sympos1um, Part I"
other work and come back to these. When there was a spontaneous ,
inevitable urge to do them is when I did them.
The cry of Lema-for what purpose?-this is the Passion and this
--
N wman an d P o11o
e
ck met at Peggy Guggenheim's Art of This Century gallery
d h"
1 1947 but they became the closest of frien s at t e time o
f
is what I have tried to evoke in these paintings. " 1946 or ear y , df 1
m '"11 t d show of 1951 which Pollock was one of a han u to
N wrnan s 1 -S arre, ib
Why fourteen? Why not one painting? The Passion is not a protest e iat Eleven years after Pollock's death, Newmau was asked to contn -
apprecla e. "} k P 11 k:
but a declaration. I had to explore its emotional complexity. That is, on the meaning of Pollock's art and career to ac son o oc .
ute a statemen t " " "h "
each painting is total and complete by itself, yet only the fourteen " 'S "" published in AR Tnews * in conJunctlOn wit a maJor
An Artists ymposlUm, " "" "
together make clear the wholeness of the single evento hibi " t the Museum of Modern Art. In it he tvpically insists that the arnst
ex 1 inon a "" "" 1
As for the plastic challenge, could I ma'intain this cry in all its " th 11"ghtof his own revolutionary aspirations and historica context
be seen m e
intensity and in every manner of its starkness? I felt compelled-my rather than through the objectifying lens of the 1960s.
answer had to be-to use only raw canvas and to discard all color
palettes. These paintings would depend only on the color that I could
create myself. There would be no beguiling aesthetics to scrutinize. The paintings of Iackson Pollock? The time has come to praise a
Each painting had to be seen-the visual impact had to be total, imrne- colleague, not to bury a hero. "
diate-at once. Let us hope it is not too late, for he has already been thr~st"mto art
Raw canvas is not a recent invention. Pollock used it. Miró used it. theory-drip, all-over, stain, gesture, performance, wal~-pamtmg, etc.
Manet used it. I found that I needed to use it here not as a color among Is this all that the admiring theorists and the self-serving dancers on
colors, not as if it were paper against which I would make a graphic "
h is grave see m . him1 -
Pollock "the picturemaker," the inventor of
image, or as colored cloth-batik-but that I had to make the material "styles"?
itself into true color-as white light-yellow light-black light. That Is Pollock the prophet of our fate? "
was my "problern." Pollock was more than a great "picture maker." His work" was ~LS
The white flash is the same raw canvas as the rest of the canvas. The lofty statement in the grand dialogue of human passion, nch w"11h
yellow light is the same raw canvas as the other canvases. sensitivity and sensibility. But it must not be forgott~n ~hat movmg
And there was, of course, the "problem" of scale. I wished no through the work is that revolutionary core that gave it hf~.
monuments, no cathedrals. I wanted human scale for the human cry. Before the art historians succeed in burying that revolution, let us
Human size for the human scale. remember what happened. In 1940, some of us woke u~ to find oU.r-
Neither did I have a preconceived idea that I would execute and then selves without hope-to find that painting did not really eXls"t.Or to com
give a title to. I wanted to hold the emotion, not waste it in picturesque a modern phrase, painting, a quarter of a century before 11 happened
ecstasies. The cry, the unanswerable cry, is world without end. But a to God, was dead.
painting has to hold it, world without end, in its limits. The awakening had the exaltation of a revolution. It was that awaken-

*ARTnews 66, no" 2 (April 1967), P: 29.

192 BA RN ET T N EW MA N
Statements 193

ing that inspired the aspiration-the high purpose-quite a different

thing from ambition-to start from scratch, to paint as if painting never
existed before. It was that naked revolutionary moment that made
painters out of painters. Chartres and lericho

Among the works Newman exhibited in his one-man show at M K dl &

C . 1969 h" . noe er
From Art Now: New York o. III were IS tnangular paintings Chartres and T • h N
'Jenc o. ewman's
nove I canvases were the cover story of the April 1969 . fAR'"
h' h N· issue o 1 news for
w IC ewman wrote this text. * The magazine's editor dN ' f '.
d bi an ewman s nend
an iographer, Thomas B. Hess appended a "h' '. .
Newman provided this statement pertallllllg to work included in his first r " ,n Istonco-IconographlCal
tootnote :
one-man show in ten years, at M. Knoedler & Co. in New York, March 25-
April 19, 1969, to Art Now: New York, a lavishly illustrated survey of current In .1~64, Barnett Newman made his first trip to Europe, which included
exhibitions. In it and in the series it elucidates, Who's Afraid of Red, Yellow a VISltto France, where he was most impressed by a side trip t Ch
and Blue I-IV, Newman confronte the specter of Piet Mondrian and the lock A h h . - o artres.
~yone w o as driven from Paris over the low flat fields to the south
of his purist ideology upon the primary colors, as he had for the first time will always remember the extraordinary vertical silhouette of th h
almost twenty-five years earlier (see p. 140). d l' h' h . e cat e-
ra s towers w IC dominare the plain for twenty miles around.
I~ 1968, to attend a Baudelaire symposium, Newman returned to
Paris, and went to the Louvre for the first time One of the . t
'. . pIC ures wh'ICh
I began this, my first painting in the series Who 's Afraid 01 Red, Yellow most impressed him (along with Courbet's Studio) was the Raft J h
Medusa. . ':J' OJ t. e
and Blue, as a "first" painting, unpremeditated. I did have the desire
that the painting be asymmetrical and that it create a space different Is it farfetched to suggest that the title of his first t . I
]. . h . '. nangu ar canvas,
from any I had ever done, sort of-off balance. It was only after I had enc o, Wlt~ ItS black fi~l~, IS a subconscious recollection of Géricault's
built up the main body of red that the problem of color became crucial, great pyramI~al composltlOn-a triangle which is twisting and movin
when the only colors that would work were yellow and blue. on ~~e churning waves and which has at its top a Negro sailor? Th~
It was at this moment that I realized that I was now confronting the pOSltlOnof the Negro could have given a clue to the painting's dark colar.
And, that th~ Ol~ Testament city, which "carne tumbling down" (New-
dogma that color must be reduced to the primaries, red, yellow and blue.
~an s o~~rt implicatíon), is a pun on the name of the great innovator of
Just as I had confronted other dogmatic positions of the purists, neoplae-
OmantICIsm? (I am informed by Prof. Meyer Schapiro that in G' .
ticists, and other formalists, I was now in confrontation with their cault' l·r· h' , en-
s itetime, IS name was often spelled "J' . h ")
dogma, which had reduced red, yellow and blue into an idea-didact, or Thi erre o.
IS move into a French reference probably the fi t j h'
at best had made them picturesque. would k h' ' rs III IS ceuvre
. ma e t e choice of Chartres even more logical a title for th d'
Why give in to these purists and formalists who have put a mortgage tnangle. e secon
on red, yellow and blue, transforming these colors into an idea that
destroys them as colors?
I had, therefore, the double incentive of using these colors to express
-
In th . f
what I wanted to do-of making these colors expressive rather than tha e sprmg o 1967, whe~ the steel was being cut for the four trian les
t make up the pyrarnidal half of my Broken Ob l' k I b g
didactic and of freeing them from the mortgage. e ts , ecame
Why should anybody be afraid of red, yellow and blue? *ARTnews 68, no. 2 (April 1969), p. 29.

intrigued-"intrigued" is a better word than "inspired"-with
triangle as a possible format for painting. It was at that moment that
I "saw" paintings on the huge sheets of steel. Later that year I had some
stretchers made for two triangles, and the challenge of the triangular
format began for me.
I must explain that the triangle had no interest for me either as a
shape in itself or because it has beco me stylish to use shaped canvas.
After all, I had done the so-called "shaped canvases," or what is more
correct in my case, "no shape" canvases, as far back as 1950. What I
wanted to do was find out whether or not the triangle could function for
me pragmatically as an object and whether it could also act as a vehicle
for a subject. Could I do a painting on the triangle that would overcome
the format and at the same time assert it? Could it become a work of
art and not a thing?
I knew that if I conformed to the triangle I would end up with either
a graphic design or an ornamental image. I had to transform the shape
into a new kind of totality.
In a sense this was no different a problem than the rectangle, except
that the triangle brings back into painting physical perspec~ive with its
three vanishing points. How to do a painting without gettmg trapped
by its shape or by the perspective was the ~hallen?e .here.
It was only when I realized that the tnangle is just a truncated
rectangle that I was able to get away from its vanishing points. I knew
that I must assert its shape, but in doing so I must make the shape
invisible or shape-less. I realized that, after all, it is nothing more than
a slice of space, a "space vehicle," which the painter ge.ts into a~d then
has to get out of. It was this drama, my involveme.nt m the ~xlstence
of the triangle as an object and my need to destroy it as an object, that
made it possible for me to begin painting them. After all, format as
format can be a trapo
I called one painting Chartres because of the strong assertion of my
inner structure in contrast with the outside format and because of the
even light in the painting, which has for me the evenness of northern
light-a light without shadows.
The title [ericho explains itself.
Statements 195
the
ln Front of the Real Thing
Newman composed this tribute-cum-critique on the occasion of the one hun-
dredth anniversary of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in answer to an inquiry
sent to artists, critics, and scholars by AR Tnews, which published the results
in January 1970.* The Metropolitan played an eye-opening part in the life of
the young Barnett Newman; in the life ofthe museum Newman sometimes also
played an instructive role, whether as "irascible" agitator (see p. 36) or,
latterly, as exhibitor.
Growing up in New York, the word "museum," for me, meant the
Metropolitan.
After all, I was nearly twenty-five years old when the Museum of
Modern Art first made its appearance, and a little older when the
Whitney Studio Club became a museum.
It was at the Met that I had my earliest encounter with "works of art,"
at the ages of eight and nine, when I used to be taken there by family.
Then through my teens I consistently played hookey from school to
spend my days there-and continued to visit it through my years at
college and at the Art Students League.
By the time I was twenty-five, I had also searched out twentieth-
century art by myself in the galleries, in the Quinn Collection exhibi-
tions and auctions, etc., so that, with the exception of Guemica, I can
say that I was familiar with perhaps every painting in the Museum of
Modern Art before it got there. In those years, therefore, anything that
I knew or studied about "art history" carne from my encounter with the
original works. It was not through photographs, reproductions or from
slides. I have always had a distaste-even a disdain-for reproductions
and photographs of artworks, even those of my own work. That is why
I do not own a collection of books of reproductions. Unless I have seen
the original work so that a photograph can remind me of my own real
*ARTnews 68, no. 9 (January 1970), p. 6.
196 BARNETT NEWMAN

experience, photographs and slides have little interest for me. It seems
to me that an art education based on this material is nothing but a
mirage. It is like studying birds by scrutinizing pictures of them without
ever having seen one in the field or having handled the skins. It is one
of the reasons why so much art writing today and some of the art are
so unreal. They are based on nonexperience.
v
Concerning the collections at the Metropolitan, I do not think this is
the place either to dismiss or to adore them. What was important for
me was something that went beyond the work, that had to do with the
men who had done them. Here was a world of miracles made not by
CORRESPONDENCE
magicians or by an apocalyptic muse but by men, creative men, some
whose names were lost, who said clearly that art is a human activity.
The thought that others had done it and lived it only whetted my desire
to create, that I could do it-not what had been done but that which
hadn't yet been done.
I can only feel fortunate that my art education carne not from the
scrutiny of photographs and the spectaculars of slides or even from
teachers but from myself in front of the real thing (even though the Met Giv~n the readiness with which Newman wielded the pen on almost any
is always so proud to discover its fakes). subject, the body of his correspondence is surprisingly small. Two
However, what was always depressing, at the Met and later at the f~ctors were responsible for the relative paucity of his epistolary efforts:
Modern, were the American collections. True, they have Copley-hut h~s.fon.dness for the quick, direct convenience of the telephone; and his
Sargent instead of Whistler; Homer in abundance-Ryder in scraps; dl.slllclmation to traveI, to be parted from his work, his city, or his
and as for art now, only some token giants. f~lends, most of whom aIso Iived in New York. With very few excep-
The future of the Met? I have already suggested to Mr. Hoving that t~ons, Newman simply did not use Ietters for his personal communica-
he raise the money to build a grand new building-glass curtain ~nd tIons; to him the letter was primarily a practical or politicaI tool a means
all-for the Poussins, the Goyas, the Rembrandts, and the Italian to "r' th" "f" '
aIs e e issue o some disagreernent or to "set the record
primitives where they would have something new and twentieth-century straight." He wrote Ietters of correction, of explanation or instruction,
to shine in, and that he leave his nineteenth-century building to uso o~ reproach or rebuttaI to collectors, editors, critics, dealers, museum
After all, we who make the twentieth-century art do so in nineteenth- dlrectors, and curators. The tone of Newman's missives varies from
century lofts. It would be very appropriate to have those nineteenth- defensiv d di "" d
"e an ispmte to exalted, from contentious and punctilious to
century walls and rooms to bring the museum closer to the New York ~~ngue-m-cheek. A telling picture of the artist's character emerges from
studio. S
dletaIls
~rofessionaI correspondence: principled, persistent, particular about
mindf I f I" h' "
t"'
atIve u" "o s 19 ts, excited by understandínp, jocular , argumen-
, appreclatlve, and always passionate.