Page 35 - Studio International - February 1970

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shiny surface that reflects as well as material- At this point, the eliptical nature of human 14
Uriel 1955
izes light; it contrasts strongly with the reces- sight bends the painting's rectilinearity into Oil on canvas
sive warmth of the indian-reddish brown and a solid surface bulging forth from the wall 96 x 214 in.
Coll: Alan Power
the more solid opaque brownish black. In through the aggression of its central cadmium
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The Gate these colours work with ironic red. The sort of inert internal but intense The Gate 1954
tension : the blue beckons like open sky external scale in . . . Red, Yellow and Blue III is Oil on canvas
94 X 76 in.
between dark encroaching walls, but its light miles away from Vir Heroicus Sublimis; Coll: Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam
expansively solid light inhibits entrance and but it is shared by more contemporary 16
presses the soft warmth of its lateral flanks paintings like Now II and Profile of Light of Outcry 1958
Oil on canvas
into compression strengths of architectural 1967 and Anna's Light of 1968. 82 x 6 in.
solidity. In Uriel, the almost 14-foot swath of In a sense, Newman had a physical, economic, Coll: Annalee Newman
pure blue glistens outwards like the Angel of
Light visiting the earthy textural warmth of
the scrubbed stained canvas at the right. The
contrast in surface texture is a detail which is 8 It seems to me that the quarrel about who influenced
very important: just as it is to the impact of whom amongst Rothko, Still, Reinhardt, and Newman
Here III of 1966. In Uriel the two colours' is a tempest in a tea-pot. Each is too good an artist to
have sprung from someone else's pocket. A blow-by-
meeting is isolated by white brushed edges
blow analysis of individual works between 1947 and
into tripartite black-blue-brown bands com- 1951—even just those in the 'New American Painting
pressed into a visual intensity different from and Sculpture: The First Generation' exhibition at the
the colours' wider expanses. This region reads Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1969—would
like a vertical horizon line establishing a place show that everyone learned from everyone, but that
each artist maintained a continuity of interest and
rather than a landscape; and it provides an
style throughout. A someday Ph.D. thesis on this prob-
internal focus of scale. In its over-all effect, lem would have to focus on Newman as the centre of
Uriel's internal scale is less important than its controversy, although the lack of institutional attention
total scale of pigmental surface directed to Newman in the early 1950s masked his integral
externally to the viewer; this is an important importance amongst the artists during this period.
9 The newly wide, opaque, whitish-ochre band at the
shift from Vir Heroicus Sublimis, on the way to
extreme right of Vir Heroicus Sublimis both accentuated
the almost purely externally directed scale of the painting's soft texture by opposition and effectively
Who's Afraid of Red, Yellow and Blue III. This de-based its potential boredom as self-centred sym-
painting 'works' only when the viewer is in metry by syncopating its lateral balance into an open-
the place pre-determined by the painting : ended sequence. The lighter, more pigmentally solid
band of red slightly bent and off-centre in Adam pulls
centred, and close enough so that the pain-
the otherwise recessive central browns into a surface
ting's blue and yellow lateral edges hit the tension which more actively structures the painting's self-
lateral extremities of one's visual perception. containment.
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