More voices on “Fire”
Louis Torres and Michelle Marder Kamhi have a page of screed on the Web about Barney Newman that’s billed as an “online supplement” to the 2000 book “What Art Is: The Esthetic Theory of Ayn Rand”. Edited here for style and length, not inanity. See also A right old Barney.
Three decades ago Hilton Kramer proclaimed that abstract expressionism is among the outstanding achievements of American culture in this century, “by virtue of the worldwide critical esteem [its artists] have enjoyed and the crucial artistic influence they have wielded”. Although postmodernist scholars and critics have in recent years challenged such an exalted view, the work of leading abstract expressionists continues to occupy a pre-eminent status in 20th-century culture, and still influences contemporary abstract painters.
Their typically oversized canvases and “sculptures” are enshrined in major public and private collections, and command exorbitant prices on the world art market; their work regularly receives renewed attention in retrospective exhibitions; and a commemorative stamp was issued in their honor in 1999 by the US Postal Service as part of its “Celebrate the Century” series.
Yet their reputation, like that of the pioneers of abstract art [Kandinsky, Malevich and Mondrian], has rested on a remarkably insubstantial foundation, composed of invalid assumptions and vacuous claims, rarely questioned by the art world until recently – though ordinary people have not been so easily gulled.
Also known as the “New York School”, the abstract expressionists were actually too diverse a group to constitute a true school. Their work ranged in style from the impulsively “gestural” canvases of the so-called action painters, such as Willem de Kooning, Franz Kline and Jackson Pollock, to the more controlled, minimalist “field” compositions of Mark Rothko and Barnett Newman.
Yet they were united by a shared set of assumptions and aspirations. Reacting against the soulless formalism that had dominated American abstract art in the 1930s, they insisted on the profound importance of content and subject matter in their work.
In so doing, they necessarily relied heavily on verbal statements and manifestos to convey their meaning and justify their acceptance – just as the first abstract artists had done, and for the same reason: In the absence of representation, no objective content or meaning was discernible. Remarkably ignorant of the lofty metaphysical meanings the pioneers of abstract art had claimed for their work, the abstract expressionists presented themselves as creating a completely new art.
So Barnett Newman, one of their principal spokesmen for the “new American painting”, as it was often called, asserted that, in contrast with “pure abstractionists” such as Mondrian – who had insisted, according to Newman, on a “purist world of forms and colour” – the new art would be “abstract yet full of feeling, capable of expressing the most abstruse philosophical thought”. Unwittingly echoing Mondrian, he further declared:
“The new painter is … the true revolutionary, the real leader who is placing the artist’s function on its rightful plane of the philosopher and the pure scientist who is exploring the world of ideas, not the world of the senses. Just as we get a vision of the cosmos through the symbols of a mathematical equation, just as we get a vision of truth in terms of abstract metaphysical concepts, so the artist is today giving us a vision of the world of truth in terms of visual symbols.”
The fallacy in Newman’s argument, of course, is his failure to recognise that the “idea” conveyed by a mathematical equation depends on a system of symbols whose meanings are fixed by cultural convention and are, therefore, universally accessible. The abstract forms employed by Newman and his fellow painters have no such meanings – as evidenced by the widely disparate interpretations they invariably engender.
The work of Barnett Newman … offers particularly illuminating evidence of the gaping disparity between art-world claims and the commonsense responses of ordinary people toward abstract painting … A starkly minimalist, symmetrical composition of wall-sized proportions, [his “Voice of Fire” in the National Gallery of Canada] consists simply of a broad vertical stripe of deep cadmium red flanked by two vivid ultramarine blue stripes of identical width.
As reported in the Wall Street Journal by Sarah Jennings, a Canadian writer and broadcaster, the gallery’s curators judged the painting “a modern masterpiece, a mystical work for a secular age”. The general public did not view it that way, however. Outraged at the hefty price paid for Newman’s work … most citizens were not reassured by what Jennings characterised as the “unintelligible art jargonese” the gallery offered in defence of it.
“For ordinary Canadians looking at the three blank stripes of color,” she noted, “being told that ‘the painting helps take us away from the devastating cares of everyday life’has not been enough.”
And the draft version of a brochure the curators were preparing to explain to visitors what the Newman painting was about was “alarmingly bogged down in the language so favoured by contemporary art experts” – “peppered with references to the picture as an ‘objectification of thought’ that ‘floods our consciousness with a sublime sense of awe and tranquility’.”
The intelligent response of ordinary people to Barnett Newman’s work was, on the whole, to call a stripe a “stripe”. Even the critic Harold Rosenberg questioned Newman’s claim that his minimalist paintings pertained to such “sublime” themes as (in Rosenberg’s words) “the creation of man, the division between night and day … and the anguish of man’s abandonment”. “How could all these grandiloquent dramas be seen in the repeated image of a rectangle with stripes?” Rosenberg asked.
Much the same response was documented on a more intimate scale in a remarkably revealing article published the following year in the New York Times about the private musings of the guards at the city’s Museum of Modern Art. Of particular interest was the reaction of Alec Sologob to Newman’s purported “masterpiece” pretentiously entitled “Vir Heroicus Sublimis (Heroic Sublime Man)” – a 17-foot-wide bright red canvas divided by five thin vertical stripes ranging in colour from white to maroon and black.
Sologob “could not discern how the Newman work provided, in the words of the official museum guidebook, ‘direct, intimate contact’ with the viewer as well as an ‘affirmation of Newman’s somewhat mystical sense of the human condition with all its tragedy and dignity’.”
In Sologob’s words: “I don’t see it … With Cézanne or Bonnard, there’s intimate contact because you can feel yourself walking into the painting, into that wooded area with the men chopping firewood. With [Andrew] Wyeth you always find something new. In ‘Christina’s World’ you see the details in her hands, you find cracks in the wooden boards of the house, you get a marvellous sense that this really is her world … But this Newman has never looked to me like anything. This is a blank wall with stripes, and I don’t like the colour red to begin with.”
And, erm, that’s it.
