632
PARTISAN REVIEW
drawings of sculpture; the hand that draws the volumes of chin and
neck in
Beatrice
of
Aragon
(after a Florentine bust) sometime between
1884 and 1887 seeks out a structural complexity it does not find in
the
Portrait of Mme. Cezanne
in 1887-90. It is as if Cezanne weren't
just drawing three-dimensional images, but marble or bronze , and
in just those places where the material is forced to work against
itself- in the curves of hard muscle, the fall of curly wigs ,the bumpy
surfaces of physiognomies . In the studies of Puget's
Milo of Crotona,
done in the late nineties, Cezanne manages without contour, closed
shape, or anything but the repeated stroking of the pencil to register
every ripple, bulge and torsion in the agonized figure . These are
great drawings - passionately cold , detached, relentlessly autodidac–
tic, too, in their labor of conversion. The show has to be one of the
most satisfying-perhaps the most satisfying-this spring in New
York.
• • •
The Barnett Newman show at the Pace Gallery (April
8-May 7), like the Cezanne show at the Modern, proves just how
good good art can be . The thirteen splendid paintings, which come
from museums, foundations, private collections , and the Newman
estate, comprise a mini-retrospective, with emphasis on works from
the late forties and late sixties. The show performs a real service,
considering that there hasn't been a major Newman show in New
York since the 1971 retrospective at MOMA, a year after the artist's
death , and that a whole generation of artists has matured in the
meantime without a firsthand exposure to his work . They can and
should travel to The National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C .
and see the newly acquired
Stations of the Cross,
but in the interim the
Pace show provides a superb introduction to Newman's concerns .
Important and major paintings include , from the forties ,
Genesis- The
Break, The Beginning, Moment, Euclidean Abyss, Onement
I,
Abraham
(borrowed from The Museum of Modern Art) , and the great
Concord
(borrowed from The Metropolitan Museum of Art). They recapitu–
late Newman's movement from a suggestively poetic , symbolic and
organic imagery to a pure , austere and deeply felt abstraction based
on the use of vertical "zips" which divided the canvas into sym–
metrical and parallel fields of color. Newman's ability to explore the
terms he set himself and to take risks with symmetry, scale and color
remained impressive, as the later works in the show attest.
Untitled,
1970, which has a big rectangle of saturated blue between white ver-
