Portrait of the Artist . . .

NO PROMINENT ARTIST – at least none who ever talked about it – merged his personal identity so thoroughly with his work as American painter Barnett Newman. We know what he thought about his work and himself because he wrote about it extensively, often in the form of essays and reviews and other screeds that he churned out tirelessly. He was as eloquent in his prose as he was spare in his painting, although he’d have been the first to jump down my throat for such a glib assessment, so let me explain.

Newman came to prominence as one of a loosely affiliated, New York-based group who, by developing what came to be termed abstract expressionism, wheeled the world’s center of art from Paris to their home city. Although there was enough commonality in these works to merit the umbrella term, look more closely and you see how different they were. You’d never mistake a Jackson Pollock for a de Kooning or Rothko, but the collective impudence of this anti-realist art kept many galleries and critics idling on the safe ground of the likes of Hopper and Benton. 

Newman was one of a group of 18 who wrote an open letter to the president of the Metropolitan Museum of Art condemning a proposed exhibit titled “American Painting Today: 1950.” They believed that the candidates were being selected by a too-conservative jury, thus ignoring what they believed was the true face of American art. The letter was published in the New York Times on May 22, 1950, and the controversy it aroused led to a story in Life magazine titled “Irascible Group of Advanced Artists Led Fight Against Show,” and picturing 15 of the 18 posed in a stark, possibly angry manner. Thus they became known as “The Irascibles.” And that article represents the comparatively brief moment when the artists supported and encouraged one another.

More or less. Amy Newman’s excellent biography of Barnett Newman (no relation) dives deeply enough into his character to give us a warts-and-all context at least to Barney’s behavior. He was an articulate firebrand, introspective, deeply committed to his art and similarly committed to his appearance and his family. He met Annalee Greenhouse in 1934; they were wed two years later and she would go on to survive her husband. In 1979, she founded the Barnett Newman Foundation to control the estate and to promote an understanding of the artist’s life and work. 

Who's Afraid of Red, 
White and Blue II

Barnett Newman Here is aptly titled, because a pursuit of a sense of self lay behind his other pursuits, and it was an ever-evolving sense. Compared to his fellow-artists in the New York School, he was a late starter, devoting his formative years to writing and teaching even as he defined himself as an artist. His teaching wages enabled him and his wife to scrape by, although Annalee, also a teacher, provided a full-time salary against his variable rates as a substitute. His own attempt to secure full-time work was thwarted by his repeated failure to pass the Civil Service exam. In 1939 he challenged this failure by presenting his case at a state-level hearing, passionately arguing that an artist like himself would carry on the mission of the Federal Art Project, which, he noted, had “effectively undertaken the salvation of the creative spirit of youth in the largest and most complex city in the world.”

At that time, according to the biography, he also extolled “the need to educate to ‘honestly appraise, enjoy and recognize beauty everywhere,’” even while “he was ‘repelled’ by commercial art, ‘with its useful objects, superficial designs and ideology of the commonplace.’”

Amy Newman thus observes:

That Barney was inconsistent or equivocated in his principles only reveals the consistency of his nature. He was as invested in his pre-painting activities of the 1930s and early ‘40s as he was in the conviction that he was an artist. Unlike other artists, who took jobs with the knowledge that they were the means to support their “real” work, Barney was one hundred percent committed to everything he did, and he bled and suffered one hundred percent on every commitment’s behalf.

This was a time when he welcomed the passionate support of his artist friends. He was a close friend to Adolph Gottlieb and frequently spent time with Pollock and Mark Rothko, and leaped to their defense in 1943 when New York Times art critic Edward Alden Jewell dismissed the work of his friends at a Wildenstein Gallery show. “You will have to make of Marcus Rothko’s The Syrian Bull what you can; nor is this department prepared to shed the slightest enlightenment when it comes to Adolph Gottlieb’s Rape of Persephone.” (NY Times, June 2, 1943.)

Newman joined Gottlieb and Rothko in crafting a response that ran in the Times, a piece that “has come to be considered the verbal opening salvo of ‘Abstract Expressionism.’” “It is our function as artists to make the spectator see the world our way – not his way,” that response insisted.

But he remained a self-described artist who had yet to create any art. He worked in his father’s clothing business, but always with his eye on the exit. He was a newspaper and magazine critic who got paid for piecework. 

In 1945, with the war at an end and the country in significant economic recovery, Barney “was bouncing checks, had at least two bank loans, and was borrowing from family members. But he had just begun making drawings he considered worthwhile and the only obstacle he recognized was how to make them meaningful – ‘moral.’” He sought a studio to work in, a symbol of a necessary seriousness. 

Among the Irascibles was painter William Baziotes; he and his wife, Ethel, frequently socialized with Newmans. “‘Barney Newman was a mystic in art,’ was the way Ethel Baziotes interpreted Barney’s trajectory. He ‘had the need to go from verbalism to the paintbrush ... he wanted the art world to know what was in, was within, Barney Newman’s soul and psyche,’ before he jumped in with both feet.”  

He was paternally (in the best sense) devoted to helping fellow-artists, at least when he didn’t perceive them as threats, yet he showed a juvenile ferocity when he perceived (often incorrectly) that he himself was being belittled or otherwise attacked. With generous access to Barney’s manuscripts, the author is able to present fascinating excerpts from the artist’s intelligent, philosophical, very passionate essays. His verbal wit was often a lance; his tenacity can seem wearying.

But he also was a gracious and erudite host, whether entertaining in his home or on the streets of Manhattan, a city he studied and loved. A day with Barney typically included a tour of his favorite places, be they buildings or delis or restaurants, and wouldn’t end until far into the following morning. This was a routine he also extended, after fame began to overtake him, to potential buyers of his art. You couldn’t simply walk into his studio and select a canvas; you had to join him on one of those jaunts, sharing in meals while listening to his endless opinions about music and architecture and baseball and more.

Amy Newman writes with exuberance and streamlined elegance, unafraid to grace her sentences with poetry disguised as descriptive writing. For example, as she describes the moment in 1948 when Barney made the first of the paintings that came to define his best-known style: a carefully chosen color field relieved by a thin vertical strip in a different color, her paragraphs interleaved with Barney’s own writing from a catalogue essay he wrote for a 1947 exhibition collected under the rubric “The Ideographic Picture”:

He had prepared a canvas, and covered it with a warm, very opaque, mineral tone. He tested a second color against it, running from top to bottom. And then he stopped.

It was the first painting that “contained” nothing concrete, that was two parts of a single field united by what, many years later, some would call a “zip.” No image, no figure, no ground, no atmosphere, no metaphor; “Not space cutting nor space building, not construction nor fauvist destruction; not the pure line, straight and narrow, not the tortured line, distorted and humiliating; not the accurate eye, all fingers, nor the wild eye of dream, winking.”

There’s a style of writing that characterizes academia, dense monographs that, despite their intellectual worth, become the literary equivalent of slogging through mud. This isn’t one of those books. It wears its academic credentials thoroughly but lightly, with discreet endnote numerals referring the reader to a well-organized section combining content note and bibliography. Nevertheless, this is a book that assumes some knowledge of art both classic and contemporary, as well as other cultural references. She assumes you’ll know the names of Leopold Auer and Booth Tarkington, Bobby Jones and Jimmy Giuffre. Which is fine with me: It lays a cultural threshold of appreciation

With the dawn of the 1950s came a splintering of relations among the onetime friends. Now with critically lauded paintings to his credit, Barney was incensed to learn he’d been left out of a 1952 exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art titled “Fifteen Americans,” focusing on the Abstract Expressionist movement, that also included nothing by Barney’s friend Ad Reinhardt.

But even that friendship suddenly, foolishly soured. Reinhardt, a skilled cartoonist as well as painter, frequently published satiric drawings of the art world’s principals, often rendered family-tree style, with caustic cutlines that poked fun at their pretensions. In an April 1954 ARTnews, Reinhardt’s “Foundingfathersfollyday” presented, among other amusing elements in a large, dense panel, a boxing-match card that pitted contemporary artists against one another, such as Rothko vs. Still and Pollack vs. De Kooning.

Uniquely, Barney was in a bout with the devil: “Newman vs. Beelzebub,” further characterized as “supermanvsdemigod.” To my indulgent eye, it seems like a compliment, but Barney’s skin was too thin to endure it, so he sued his friend, in an action that would drag on for years to nobody’s ultimate satisfaction.

Barney also was sparring with his dentist and with his landlord, the latter ending with an eviction. He was annoyed to see a Cézanne displayed at the Guggenheim without a frame, which he believed was a blatant aping of his own frame-free preference but at odds with Impressionist tradition. At the same time, he was beginning to taste fame, and with it, money. Lots of both.

Then, the unthinkable. Barney’s one reliable friend from the movement died suddenly. Pollock crashed his car a mile from his East Hampton home, the result of driving drunk, killing himself and one of his two passengers.

Broken Obelisk

Pollock had been the one person Barney could most reliably count on for what he experienced as peer recognition and encouragement – as incomprehensible as it would have been to the other artists, or to critics, or museum people, or that mass media that they were “peers.” It was the great, inconceivable loss after the loss of his home and his pride.

In 1957, Time magazine lauded Clyfford Still while covering an exhibition at Buffalo’s Albright Art Gallery (now the AKG Art Museum). The article termed him “the most original painter alive” and, quoting a MoMA assessment, one of “the top four abstract expressionists.” Naturally, this infuriated Barney, along with the snub of not being included in a pavilion display of contemporary art at Expo 58 in Brussels.

But his work was included in a 1957 show titled “The New American Painting” that originated in Basel, Switzerland, and subsequently traveled throughout Europe. He was the focus of a 20-day exhibition at Bennington College, Vermont. He was courted for a Carnegie International show. One of his works was acquired by MoMA. As Amy Newman writes, “After 1958, it would be very hard to exclude Barney – except by his own choice – again.”

There was always tumult in Barney’s life, but this period was particularly tumultuous. Barney and Annalee moved. Barney had a heart attack. Alongside the cadre of critics with whom he quarreled, there now were galleries and buyers to battle, often bizarrely, changing his terms at the last minute or simply withdrawing.

Or getting downright nasty. French & Company, an art dealership with gallery space, was (per their website) “founded in the mid-19th century and was active supplying American robber barons – and the museums they founded – with decorative arts, sculpture, and tapestries.” When Barney was invited to exhibit a roomful of his paintings at the gallery’s new Madison Avenue showroom, he sent letters to Rothko and Still (and their wives) stating, “This is to make certain that you know that you are both not welcome to my show.”

But he and his work (they seemed inseparable) also were being discovered by a younger generation of artists. This began with a summer workshop in 1959, when he was 54, at Emma Lake in central Canada, an offshoot of the University Art Department in Saskatoon. He comfortably styled himself as a mentor, typically dispensing his advice not in the form of actual lessons but in long, rambling, but nevertheless fascinating discourses on art and history and his empowering philosophy. “(H)e opened their eyes, made them aware of how an artist might function in modern society with a degree of focus for which one was entitled to receive respect. As he told an interviewer many years later, there was “no need to apologize for being an artist because you weren’t doing useful work,” and gave them “the guts to be alone in the world and not be overwhelmed by the lack of interest that the world might have in what we were doing.” Until the end of his life, Barney relished being the éminence grisée whose reputation, at long last, lent credibility to the ideas he’d been expounding all his adult life.

Possibly inspired by the 1960 MoMA Monet show, featuring, among other works, the artist’s haystacks series, Barney embarked on creating a series of his own, fourteen black-and-white canvases he eventually would title “Stations of the Cross,” even as he insisted that they had nothing to do with the Biblical event. 

If Barney seemed always sparky, his fellow-abstractionists – minus Barney, this time – turned a New Year’s Day gathering at “The Club” in New York into a “shouting match” as they considered such issues as selling out (appearing in Life magazine and the like), imitation (as in those who “practically made a career out of ‘Me ‘n’ Pollock,’”) and even the artist’s role in a neighborhood community. What did it mean to an artist, after decades of derision, to suddenly become “marketable”?

Barney no longer was a “downtown artist.” Having had his studios yanked from under his feet as neighborhoods were razed and rebuilt, he celebrated his own acquisition of money by renting a studio in Suite 910 of the Carnegie Hall building, itself recently saved from the wrecking ball.

“I don’t believe that painting is a product ... and I don’t think I’m a product,” Barney told an interviewer in 1963, “although some people are beginning to move towards me as if I am a product.” It could be argued that this phase of Barney’s cantankerousness was a result of the massive amounts of money swirling around now-established artists like himself, but we know that he was passionately argumentative right from the start. Nevertheless, the twining of integrity and marketability would dog him for the rest of his life.

By 1964, the market was getting hard to fight. Invited to join an exhibition at the Tate in London, Barney had three works among the 300 created by painters and sculptors during the previous decade. When he and Annalee visited that city to see the Tate show, they also were treated to a look at the new private gallery opened by ambitious collector Alan Power, who bought Newman’s “Uriel,” a horizontal canvas measuring 18 by 8 feet. Having no suitable room in which to hang it, he bought a house in Ennismore Gardens in London’s ultra-wealthy Knightsbridge District. (“Uriel” was bought from the Powers estate five years ago by hedge fund billionaire Ken Griffin, CEO of Citadel.)

Barney’s fame overlapped with the rise of the Pop Art movement, so that when he was invited to be part of a panel at Seattle conference in 1964, he was dismayed to realize that that was the movement getting the focus. He explained what he saw as a significant difference between that generation of artists and his by stating, “Historically, my generation did not have that audience [that Pop now has] ... no critics talking for ut ... no dealers talking for us ... no museum men talking for us. And so we had to talk ourselves. Everyone of my generation did talk or write or in some way make clear what interested him.” 

He was showing and selling his work out of three of his own studios. As the next generation of artists received more and more acclaim, he refused to publicly denigrate their work. “The adjustment was not easy,” Amy Newman writes; “the constant vigilance took an emotional and psychological toll. But it was worth it: he became the most au courant of the older generation.”

Barney was invited to show his work at the prestigious São Paolo Bienal in Brazil in September 1965, placing him as the only representative of his era alongside six younger artists like Frank Stella and Larry Poons. Prestigious though it was, he found reason to fight when the American press labeled the selection of works as “formalist.” He termed that “an international dirty word in every field of thought,” which, as noted earlier in this book, was the term leveled at Russian composers like Shostakovich and Prokofiev and made their lives into creative hellscapes. Barney withdrew; curator Walter Hopps immediately flew to New York and persuaded him back in. But Barney’s temper remained at the simmer and he spent the next few weeks demanding retractions from the newspapers that he believed had maligned him and his work (which were, for all intents, the same).

At one point in the subsequent, back-and-forth of published essays and inflamed responses, Barney “told an interviewer that his generation’s works ‘have never been successfully pigeonholed.’ They had been labeled ‘abstract expressionism, abstract impressionism, action painting, informal, tachisme, field paintings, color painting ... None can stick the way “pop” and “op” have, because the meaningful work [of the older artists] is so powerfully personal that stylistic slogans at best can only apply to individuals.’”

Earlier in 1965, Barney was invited to participate in the Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s show titled “New York School: The First Generation, Paintings of the 1940s and 1950s,” in which 122 pieces would be on display. With the catalogue already gone to press, Barney suddenly changed course, this time over a question of authenticity, which was a long-running obsession. Were these works truly from the period indicated? Specifically, and unsurprisingly, he contrasted his eight paintings with those by his old nemesis Clyfford Still, insisting that some purportedly recent discoveries of works by Still didn’t fit the chronology. He expected proof of provenance, from Still and every other artist in the show.

Stations of the Cross

He took it further, telling ARTnews that “it is particularly strange that the paintings included in the exhibition by Mr. Still are paintings that were never shown in New York, either during the time he exhibited here or since. With the exception of [Still’s] work, I know every painting in this exhibition.” Still responded with a letter to the editor signed by his wife, Pat. As Amy Newman explains, “Calling Barney a ‘frequent visitor and student’ (emphasis added) of her husband’s, ‘she’ wrote that Barney’s claims about altered dates for works that, she said, had been visible in ‘New York City and Easthampton [sic]’ would ‘be dealt with by Mr. Still at a time of his choosing.’” Barney responded. Still answered back under his own name, noting that “he would have had more respect for Barney if he ‘would apply himself to the lessons of the Talmud rather than those of Paul Joseph Goebbels.’”

And if the artists weren’t verbally walloping one another, the critics stepped in to take a turn. Or at least John Canaday did. He’d been the leading art critic for the New York Times since 1959 and proven himself no friend to abstraction of any kind. An exhibition in the spring of 1966 at the Guggenheim consisting of those fourteen (now fifteen) monochrome paintings collectively titled “Stations of the Cross” was what set Canaday off. 

His April 23, 1966, review in the Times, opined that “(t)he Guggenheim can no longer be taken quite seriously as a first-rate institution when it devotes its space to the exhibition of such pretentious yardage as Mr. Newman's ‘Stations of the Cross’ and its money to the publication of such obscurantist verbiage as [museum curator Lawrence] Alloway’s genuflections in front of them. Since cigarette manufacturers are required to state on their packages that smoking may be hazardous to your health, it is unfair that the Guggenheim should be allowed to operate without posting a notice that its exhibitions may endanger the very standard of quality that it purports to uplift.” (Alloway’s exhibition catalogue is available online at archive.org.)

“Without the title,” Amy Newman writes, paraphrasing and quoting the critic, “the work would have been ‘harmless,’ but now the verticals resembled ‘unraveled phylacteries.’” She concludes: “The message in the review was clear to his readers: How dare a Jew take on this subject?”

A few days after the opening, Barney sat down with ARTnews editor (and Newman champion) Thomas Hess for a public conversation, at the outset of which the artist said, “Some people have read the [Canaday’s] notice sort of fast and instead of a conversation they think perhaps it is going to be a conversion.”

Thus was Barney attacked from two flanks: first as an abstractionist who refused to ascribe meanings to his works, now because he had done that very thing by titling this series. But he didn’t have to defend himself against all critics. Charlotte Willard’s column “In the Galleries” in The New York Post (it was a much different periodical then), noted that in this show, Barney “synthesized space and its emotional freight. He has used the mysteries of space, its intervals, its volumes, its expansions, its constrictions to evoke direct emotive responses.”

And, according to the Washington Post, Barney was “one of the giants of postwar America painting.” Eccentric though he seemed, Barney’s eccentricities (his faultless sartorial style, his passionate, often hot-headed essays) supported an image of the artist as one inseparable from the art, an image he espoused early in his career, long before he put brush to canvas, and continued to argue with impressive consistency as career success finally caught up with him. 

Yet he always managed to top himself. He created sculptures; he dabbled in lithography. But when he returned to full-color painting in 1966, he also devised his most outrageously appropriate title: “Who’s Afraid of Red, Yellow and Blue?” It delineated four similar works. Edward Albee’s resonantly titled play had premiered in 1962, but 1966 brought the acclaimed film version, directed by Mike Nichols (whose stage-comedy work Canaday had name-checked in the same review that savaged Barney’s “Stations.”) And it didn’t hurt that Albee’s title suggested an intellectual abstraction that surely appealed to Barney. Three of his “Who’s Afraid” series are almost wholly dominated by red, with offset zips of blue and yellow; the fourth yields much of its space to yellow, with blue in the center as if as a referee.

“Broken Obelisk,” Barney’s 1967 sculpture unveiled in front of Manhattan’s Seagram Building, plays with gravity in a manner consistent with the manipulation of color in his paintings. Two bulky objects, vertical in nature, sit one atop the other but meet in tapered points, as if two sharp pencils were stacked tip to tip.

It’s probably unfair to suggest that he was “playing” with gravity except insofar as, like all of his works in whatever medium, he was inhabiting the medium’s driving forces. Balance, weight, line, and color provoke, in their confluences, emotions on a par with the emotions offered by music. But visual art invites a different kind of participation. The viewer is in control of the time to be spent upon viewing and reacting. 

Barney agreed with Baudelaire’s belief that artists must live in their historical times, and, for a Baudelaire-themed event in Paris, Barney wrote that “criticism must be partial, passionate, political.” He put this into practice after the Democratic National Convention in Chicago in 1968, when Mayor Daley ordered the city’s police to rough up the thousands of protesters who gathered in that city. The resulting riot was televised. As a result, fifty artists declared a two-year boycott of that city. Barney was among them, demanding that his painting Gia be withdrawn from a traveling MoMA show. More attention was won by a show quickly put together in protest, featuring work – some new, some older – by many significant artists, not least of whom was Claes Oldenburg, who had been beaten and choked by police. Barney’s composition, created for the occasion, was titled “Lace Curtain for Mayor Daley” and consisted of a six-feet by four-feet sculpture, a rectangle with a checkerboard cross-hatch of barbed wire. The exhibition gained much editorial ink, and Barney’s piece was front-and-centered in every account. 

Newman with Jericho

Knoedler Gallery on 57th Street, was a high-profile institution that opened in 1846 and closed in 2011 when it was discovered that the gallery had been selling forged Abstract Expressionist paintings. But in 1968 it was still riding high, and the gallery not only asked to represent Barney but also to stage his first solo show since 1959, showing works created since 1960.

Adding more luster to 1969, Barney’s penultimate year of life, were an invitation from Japan for a massive sculpture, a proposed solo show in Paris, and retrospectives at the Tate in London, the Stedelijk in Amsterdam, and MoMA. “Who’s Afraid of Red, Yellow and Blue” glowed in a two-page spread in Vogue, and ARTnews put “Chartres,” one of his newest works, on its cover.

“Chartres,” created for the Knoedler Gallery show, was a ten-foot-high isosceles triangle with color fields of yellow and red set off by thin black zips. It was a revolutionary reimagining of the shape of a painting, impressively consistent with Barney’s mission to redefine all aspects of visual art.

He began 1970 with what had become his usual punishing schedule, but those activities slackened with the coming of spring. Annalee took over more and more of the clerical and organizational activities (and there were many), and Barney continued to work – until a heart attack felled him in June. He died at the age of 65. His final assistant, a 26-year-old named Tom Crawford, helped to sort the estate and then left for Japan to study akido. The last anyone heard of him was in 2002, when he was arrested living in a cave on National Forest property. He had been there for eleven years.  

Amy Newman’s summation says it best:

Without doubt, he was, gloriously, “eminent painter and sculptor of the abstract sublime; prophet, savant, ironist and warm human being; patriarch, raconteur and fearless adversary; intransigent creator whose heroic canvases split the rock of convention, opening to artists in the 1960s an empyrean of color and expansiveness; true avant-gardist whose stark and resplendent paintings are among the unadulterated joys of American life.”

But also, uncomfortably, he was a righteous dispenser of harsh judgments; wily and condescending self-promoter; pompous provoker of rental and insurance agents; a manipulator of facts and a pitbull about grudges; needy and too susceptible to flattery.

I went into this book with a knowledge only of Barney’s work, and even then only a few of his best-known paintings. I was more familiar with Rothko’s story, and the works of Reinhardt and Still. And I’d read The Irascibles, which gives a lively view of the New York School at that moment in time. But Barnett Newman Here does what few other artist biographies are able to achieve: it takes you deep into the artist’s mind and ties together the passions and uncertainty, the influences and anger that eventually would lead to a body of astonishingly unique work.

I admire Amy Newman’s assiduity in sifting through the reams of writing that Barney left behind. Nothing, it seems, went unexamined, and much provoked his screeds of dissent. She has chosen well, allowing Barney’s voice to inhabit this manuscript without letting him go on and on for too long – which would not have been the case were Barney available to speak his piece.

Barnett Newman Here
A Biography by Amy Newman
Princeton University Press