BOOKS
329
Perception and beyond - this topic underlies these two otherwise
different books.
The Selected Writings of Barnett Newman
allow us access
to this artist's voice, in pungent words spoken extemporaneously as he
strode through a museum, or declaimed more deliberately in manifestoes,
appreciations, and tactical complaints directed toward aesthetics, artists
and the art world. Arranged thematically, with a contextual introduction
by Richard Shiff, this selection provides a charming album of opinion
and observation to those already familiar with Newman's art. As a lively
firsthand glimpse into the artist's intention, it is decidedly improvisatory
compared with the sober, reflective, yet scholastic study that Turrell
inspired in Adcock. But both the anthology and the monograph remain
dependent on the reader's prior knowledge of the paintings and the
installations, respectively.
Newman's mission was to make American art competitive with the
European avant- garde, and along with Pollock he accomplished this.
Born in 1905 in New York
t~
Russian-Polish parents, and majoring in
philosophy at CCNY, he spent a decade salvaging his father's menswear
business at the time of the Depression. Newman brought to his study of
art a sense of the importance of principled reasons for action. As he
learned from exiled Europeans fleeing Europe with the advent of
Nazism, it was crucial to understand what one does and how it advances
human understanding. It was not enough to adorn canvas with illusion–
istic wheatfields in celebration of regional "isolationist art," as he put it,
or even
to
stylize such scenes in a semi-abstract manner; such pictorial art
was clearly insufficient. Until he had produced a major critical response
to abstraction, Newman believed, the artist had not earned the right to
consider himself a real painter, let alone to expect a place in future art
history. Newman's problem was the following: Given the modern
necessity of abstraction, what alternative to Cubism could be posited that
respected yet did not illustrate content? His oil sketches in the 1940s
show seismic indications of pods, sprung seeds, and other notation for
germination learned from Surrealism - elemental forms gradually reduced
in number, simplified, and made abstract. The abstract symbolism
Newman sought to advance was the feeling of an idea. Arriving at this
solution took years.
Given his commitment to the artistic breakthrough, it is not surpris–
ing that Newman's
Onement I,
1948 - a paradoxical content, in which a
vertically divided field could raze yet also give birth to space - came only
after an ordeal of three years' self-imposed exploratory drawing and eight
years after a hiatus in painting until he had found "something to say."
(The drive to create significant abstraction belonged to the whole
period. After two decades of struggling with Baroque and Expressionist
antecedents, Jackson Pollock finally achieved a radical synthesis of all ex-
