Stopped off in Philadelphia for a couple of hours to see the big Barnett Newman exhibition at the Philadelphia Museum. One thing I hadn’t known before was Newman’s (and his other artist friends’) battle with the relevance of painting in the wake of WWII. In a 1966 WNET documentary interview, Newman said how there was no sense painting in the early 40’s, since the world was coming to an end. And in the late 40’s, with global-scale destruction and atom bombs, painting didn’t seem particularly relevant, either. The solution? Newman set to painting the most profound subjects he could, Creation, Genesis, the Universe, the Void. These led to his breakthrough works, the “Onement” series that contained fully realized versions of “zips” (although he didn’t call them that until later).
Also interesting: seeing the chronological development of his work and mapping it to public and critical acceptance. His first two (or three?) gallery shows (in 1950-1) were basically failures; he supposedly stopped painting for four years; yet his work entered the MoMA collection by 1959. By the Sixties, though, his harder-edged work–produced during a period of great acclaim–seems a little synthetic and dry. There’s some inverse correlation going on here.
Anyway, the show’s great, and it’s up until July 7th, then goes to the Tate Modern in London in September. [Buy the exhibition catalog from Amazon.]
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the making of, by greg allen