The Brooklyn Rail

“The fetish and ornament, blind and mute, impress only those who cannot look at the terror of the Self. The self, terrible and constant, is for me the subject matter of painting and sculpture.”¹

Barnett Newman: Here by Amy Newman (hereafter AN) is the definitive biography of one of the most influential American artists of the twentieth century. Barney (b. 1905, d. 1970)—as he was known to peers—significantly advanced abstract painting and sculpture, as well as the language of its critical reception at mid-century: his large-scale, nearly monochromatic canvases punctuated by vertical bands or “zips,” as well as the monumental sculpture Broken Obelisk (1963–69), are foundational for Abstract Expressionism, Color Field painting and Minimalism. Newman was a “giant” at the renowned Betty Parsons Gallery; this only several years after he produced and exhibited his first serious paintings, already in his mid-forties. As AN lays the groundwork, “It was not enough, in 1950, to have had his debut as an artist; for Barney it had to establish him as not simply a presence among his peers, but as sui generis, a pioneer, a general in the avant garde.” ²

Barnett Newman: Here transports the reader deep into Barney’s rich and often self-complicated universe. Considerable weight is devoted to his upbringing within an immigrant Polish-Jewish family that ascended from Jacob Riis’s Lower East Side to moderate prosperity. Fueled by a precocious intellectual drive, Barney became a formidable crusader for justice who viewed life as a grand project: he penned poetry and manifestos, ran for mayor of New York City, became an expert ornithologist, wrote criticism for other artists—all while keeping his aspirations as a serious painter in wait (he had trained at the Art Students League and taught high school art). AN offers the reader several important keys to his constitution as an “artist-citizen”: obsessive pursuit of an unsuccessful, multi-year lawsuit on behalf of his father-in-law; a visit in 1949 to Native American earthwork mounds in Ohio; deep identification with Jewish-American culture and its sacred texts. Ultimately, she locates Newman’s complex life-force in the Yiddish term geshray, or “outcry.” Indeed, Barney cried against injustices (real or perceived), cried out for sublime aesthetic/visual experiences, and loudly broadcasted his selfhood to vanquish a terrifying sense of loneliness within the universe.

Here brilliantly transcends shopworn accounts of the artist’s contributions to the formation, apotheosis and eventual fracturing of Abstract Expressionism, drawing from an extensive trove of primary sources, including unpublished texts in Newman’s hand. The profound impact of so-called “primitive art,” artist-club thinktanks, breakthrough paintings such as Onement I (1948) and Abraham (1949), the ascendence of American art in the international sphere and “Stations of the Cross” are but a few stopping points along a lengthy and fascinating trajectory. AN reminds us that, far from collegial, the New York School was energized by competing factions: downtown painters Willem de Kooning and Robert Motherwell frequently stood in contrast to Newman, Clyfford Still, Ad Reinhardt, Mark Rothko and even Jackson Pollock. Cohesion within this latter flank would ultimately be pulverized by death, dissention and malicious displays of ego. A dramatic turning point occurs in 1954 when Newman—always reading between the lines for slights and seeking misplaced justice for his father-in-law’s failed litigation—sued his close friend Ad Reinhardt for playfully referring to him as “the holy-roller-explainer-entertainer-in-residence.”³ Their relationship would never be repaired.

The Newman we come to know is an avuncular, gregarious and witty self-impresario who is compelled to throw blindsided elbows in order to distinguish himself from the herd. He engaged in spirited critical pugilism with primarily Jewish-American intellectual peers—Clement Greenberg, Meyer Schapiro, Harold Rosenberg—who, as Audrey Flack once noted, were the rabbis of mid-century abstraction: they mediated its laws, commandments and its seemingly esoteric language.⁴ Here leads us to ponder whether, without his wife Annalee—Barney’s unflagging companion and chief breadwinner well into their fifties—could he have succeeded as an artist at all? And a chapter titled “What did you do during the war?” reveals that a majority of New York School artists had sidestepped wartime service. As such, “they were especially vulnerable in a culture blooming with postwar confidence and public glorification of a particular mid-century American fantasy of manly virtues in which they had small participation. How were they to define themselves as men, when the popular culture around them was shining a klieg light on veterans and heroes?”⁵ Was bravura and masculine posturing, therefore, compensation for this deficit? Was the famed The Irascibles (1951) photograph published in Life the artist/conscientious-objector’s answer to famed photograph of the raising of the flag on Iwo Jima (1945)?

Ultimately, we might imagine a cinematic adaptation of Barnett Newman: Here in the hands of Vince Gilligan, whose anti-heroes Walter White and Saul Goodman similarly deploy an arsenal of brilliance, charm offensive, unflagging determination and an innate ability to read the room to wage epic battles against hostile—or worse, ordinary—worlds. As with Barney, we may be flabbergasted by impulsive demagnetizations of their social compasses, but come to appreciate that “acting out” is a necessary engine for self-definition. As AN is exceedingly aware as Newman’s biographer, “No matter how desperately he tried to control what people said, what people thought, how his work was treated, how it was installed, who bought it, and even who saw it, it was only in the presence of his work that he could overcome the feeling that ‘out there’—everywhere—‘was chaos.’”⁶