Page 35 - Studio International - February 1970
P. 35

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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
                                                                                              15
          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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