Page 30 - Studio International - February 1970

4
Genetic Moment 1947
Oil on canvas
38 x 28 in.
Coll: Annalee Newman
5
Onement I 1948
Oil on canvas
27 x 16 in.
Coll: Annalee Newman
6
Adam 1951-52
Oil on canvas
95½ x 80 1/8 in.
Coll: Tate Gallery, London
7
Eve 1950
Oil on canvas
96 x 671 in.
Coll: E. Power

the notions of 'moon' and rough primeval with scholarly depth and active concreteness. precedence of the aesthetic act over the
forest: the circle's reddish interior vibrates In the 1940s he organized exhibitions, wrote social-utilitarian act established the 'artist' as
against its whiteness, animating its visual catalogue introductions, and criticized con- answer to the timelessly relevant question
push against the bands' attraction across the temporary understandings of Pre-Columbian `What is the first man?' So closely did he
surface; the seemingly scrubbed 'foliage' is Stone Sculpture, North-west Coast Indian identify with that a-historical beginning that
clearly painted in brushstrokes of such indi- Painting, and the Arts of the South Seas— his examples for the metaphysically pri-
viduality of shape and colour interrelations constantly asserting their relevance to an mordial human-aesthetic act read like ana-
that they scream 'pure painting' to the sensi- understanding of the aspirations of himself chronistic metaphors for his own subsequent
tized eye.5 and his friends.? The line of thought in these work :
As an alternative to Western Europe aesthetic writings culminated in the brilliant, purely `Speech was a poetic outcry rather than a
ideas including Surrealism and Abstraction, created idea of the essay entitled 'The First demand for communication. Original man,
in the aspiration `to start from scratch, to Man was an artist' in the October 1947 issue shouting his consonants, did so in yells of
paint as if painting had never existed before',6 of Tiger's Eye. There, quarrelling with the awe and anger at his tragic state, at his
Newman and his friends Rothko, Gottlieb, philosophical basis of a recent palaeonto- own self-awareness and at his own help-
and Pollock looked to art in its 'beginnings' logical 'discovery' of the 'first man', Newman lessness before the void.
in classically archaic, anthropologically primi- insisted on the importance of the ontological `Man's first cry was a song. Man's first
tive, and pre-historic times. Characteristi- question 'what' to all scientific enquiry. He address to a neighbour was a cry of power
cally, Newman explored this sense of kinship argued that the chronological and moral and solemn weakness, not a request for a
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