Page 31 - Studio International - February 1970

drink of water. directness of part to whole. Here then is relation to internally and externally directed
`. . . man first built an idol of mud before Newman's contribution to 'drawing' : not the scale; physical tangibility of material in can-
he fashioned an axe. Man's hand traced freedom of 'line' from representation, nor its vas, pigment, and even masking tape; colour
the stick through the mud to make a line dissolution into merged edges, but the articu- in terms of hue, tonal value, and intensity,
before he learned to throw the stick as a lation of those relational measures (which we warmth and coolness, opacity or trans-
javelin.' call 'scale' to differentiate from 'size') amongst lucency—all relative to material and physical
Onement No. 1, painted in January 1948, vir- infinitely variable vertical 'constants' in direct scale of area; line relative to rigidity of axis,
tually represents the primitive aesthetic act of relation to the wholeness of a rectilinear entity. edge, width of plane, and colouristic dis-
identifying a physically concrete line with the But the whole size of Onement No. 1 was related cretion from contiguous areas. And in this
whole of a painting— like letting the cry of a more to commercially standardized drawing flexibility of language, Newman has created
consonant establish man's 'own self-awareness paper and stretched canvases than to that of a works which establish their own particularly
and . . . his own helplessness before the void.' human being. And our direct understanding discrete characterizations of space, mood,
More like 'The First Man' essay than New- of scale is based on perceived relations with the persona, and place.
man's paintings of 1947, Onement No. 1 takes various size of ourselves (both as whole Take some of the paintings exhibited in his
no defensively negative stance towards cur- physical bodies and relations of parts such as
rent art-world dogmas; it uses ostensibly fingers to hands to arms to whole). Without
primitive plastic components to obtain an this human scale relation, Onement No. 1 reads
extraordinary thought complex; and it more as an idea about artistic scale than as a 5 The association of this painting with Max Ernst's
Forest Frottages is credible only on the most academic-
demands a sort of ontological agnosticism for painting generating empathy with its own
ally morphological level of 'art history'. It is regrettable
full comprehension. What is 'line' there ? The vitality through externally directed scale. in William Rubin's catalogue essay for Dada, Surrealism
straight masking tape vertically bisecting the Newman obviously understood this, and the and their Heritage (New York, Museum of Modern Art,
painting? Its edges? The agonized pigment potential for direct involvement of a total 1968) ; Lucy Lippard's elaboration of 'specifics' of
impasto which overlays it like un-brushed human being in the larger sized formats of this relationship (`Notes on Dada and Surrealism at
the Modern', Art International May 15, 1968) is un-
cadmium red mud ? Its edges ? The vertically Rothko and Pollock at the time. For in 1949
fortunate.
oriented bands laterally flanking the central his Abraham, Concord, and Onement No. 3 had
6 Newman, in the Pollock Symposium, loc. cit.
`zip' with their own regularity of uninflected heights of six to seven feet; from a close 7 Newman organized the exhibition and wrote the
surface ? Their (canvas) edges ? The only viewing distance (which Newman requested introduction for 'Pre-Columbian Stone Sculpture' at
answer supportable by the painting itself is in a note pinned to the wall of his first one- the Wakefield Gallery in 1944, for North-west Coast
Indian Painting' at the Betty Parsons Gallery in 1946,
that 'line' is each of these and all; it is totally man exhibitions), such sizes fill the eyes as
and for 'The Ideographic Picture' at Betty Parsons in
relational to and inextricable from the physi- analogues of a heroic human height, establish
1947. This last exhibition included work by himself,
cal fact of the painting as a rectilinear whole. empathy between their verticals and the Hans Hofmann, Pietro Lazari, Boris Margo, Ad Rein-
This would not be the case if Newman had wholeness of a human stance, and subtly hardt, Mark Rothko, Theodoros Stamos, and Clyfford
stopped the vertical 'line' inside the painting's accentuate the otherness of the paintings to any Still—and Newman used 'the Kwakiutl artist' as a
poetic metaphor to embody the concerns which he
physical limits. And if he had not limited self-aware person. Since 1949 this 'otherness'
ascribed to his friends. The English version of his
`line' to the primitive vertical of erect human has been explored by Newman in the variable
article 'Las Formas Artisticas del Pacifico' published in
stance, other concepts like 'composition' usage of every conceivable 'constant' offered Ambos Mundos in June 1946 is printed in this issue as
would have intruded upon the shocking by the physical language of painting: size in `Art of the South Seas'.
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