May 2- 8, 2002

art

Walking the Line

Barnett Newman, Onement I (1948), 27 1/4 inches by 16 1/4 inches, oil on canvas and oil on masking tape on canvas.

Barnett Newman looms large at the Art Museum.

by Robin Rice

Barnett NewmanThrough July 7, Philadelphia Museum of Art, 26th and the Parkway, 215-763-8100, www.philamuseum.org.

A perverse coincidence of timing has sensitized me to the almost uncanny similarity between Barnett Newman’s “zip” paintings and the lost simplicity of the World Trade Center. Both statements, architectural and painterly, are rather flatfooted but undeniable monuments of un-nuanced humanity on a heroic scale.

Hardly an icon of grace or beauty, the twin towers, like a typical Newman painting, exhibited to the world two vast surfaces divided by a narrow vertical line. The World Trade Center has been brutally extinguished; Newman is very much with us at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

If you have an iota of curiosity about or fondness for this challenging and quintessentially American painter, don't skip the show. Photographs will never convey the way one feels standing in front of so much carefully applied paint. An opportunity to see an exhibit on this scale, the most ambitious Newman show in 30 years, is unlikely to arise again in our lifetimes -- if ever.

The collaborative effort of the PMA and the Tate Modern brings together some 65 paintings, many of a size only a museum or a Gatesian collector could display, plus six sculptures and 65 works on paper. It is a substantial chunk of Newman's relatively tiny, known lifetime output of around 120 paintings.

Several of the big paintings are astonishingly fragile -- astonishing partly because their sheer scale gives them the illusion of architectural indestructibility (but we know all about that now). Curator Ann Temkin somehow cajoled delicate works from lenders who are unlikely to risk them in the future. The Kawamura Memorial Museum of Art in Japan lent the 20-foot-long Anna's Light (1968), Newman's largest painting. After an early refusal, the National Gallery decided to lend the "Stations of the Cross" series of vertical white stripes on unprimed canvas. For those familiar with the installation of the 15 fastidious and substantial (78-inch by 60-inch) paintings at the National Gallery, the luminous PMA installation offers an opportunity to experience them anew.

An artist who never got a degree in art and was perennially unable to pass the New York examination for substitute art teachers, Newman rejected representational subject matter while aiming to share profound spiritual and political ideas. The late work "Stations of the Cross" (1958-1966) jettisons the narrative of Christ's passion, yet aspires, in Newman's words, to capture "a human cry." Though the paintings are good to look at, I doubt that I could arrive at their subject or Newman's intent without his words.

Newman, a mid-20th-century peer and pal of abstract expressionists Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko and Clyfford Still, was a maverick among the iconoclastic postwar set. He wore suits and a watch on a chain when they wore jeans. He espoused anarchism when the typical rebel against conformist America was a commie or, at least, a "fellow traveler." Newman once ran seriously but ridiculously for mayor of New York City. He carried his dislike of government to the point of personal inconvenience. He continued to substitute teach when he could have painted in government make-work for the WPA.

Newman had his first solo show at the age of 45 at the Betty Parsons Gallery in New York. Before this, he wrote a lot and curated exhibitions of pre-Columbian sculpture and Northwest American Indian painted wood carvings, which he perversely described as painting.

Painting was the dominant mid-century art form (Newman once described sculpture as "something you bump into when you back up to look at a painting"). I suspect he sensed in a nonlinear way that categories of art are arbitrary. Since he had dedicated himself to one category, painting, all good art tended to become painting for him.

There's an oblique confirmation of this in his series of vertical, stalklike sculptures commemorating his "zips," the vertical stripes that he rendered on canvas by painting over masking tape. (Perhaps the zipping action of pulling off the tape inspired the nickname).

Here I (To Marcia), a 107-3/4-inch-tall pair of stripes, is oddly touching in its transformation of painting into sculpture (now bronze, originally plaster). One stripe is brushy with irregular margins, and one is severe. Nicely placed in the show near a related painting, it's a tribute to the power of mark-making, or, like an inversion of the empty space between the solid twin towers, a statement of the force of object-ness.

When you see the show, catch the short film. Newman can be fun and provocative. I suspect I like him as a quasi-mythic personage more than I like his art or writing. I respect his stubbornness and the fact that he helped to break down traditional barriers between painting and sculpture -- even when he thought painting was the only real art form going. I imagine I know why he said, "Painting is the most interesting thing to talk about because it's impossible to say something meaningful."