Page 39 - Studio International - February 1970

33
use the lithographic propensities for intense,
opaque colours to create single-note con-
trasts of pre-mixed colour to achieve the
`drawing' of their individual songs in varied
hues; whereas the Stations created 'colour' of a
tensely continued cry by the distinctions of
tonal value traditional in 'drawing'. The
Stations were human sized, as public as any
crowd; the Cantos' small, almost book-like
format encourages private pleasure of what
the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary describes
as 'divisions of a long poem, so much as the
minstrel could sing at one "fit" (1590)'. And
individual Stations had particular relations
with paintings utilizing colours of particular
hues : the Twelfth Station of 1965, in its double
band of 'void' articulating an expanse of pig-
ment, relates to the double-sided dry-brushed
expanse of dull green against canvas stripes
in the 1960 Treble; the Tenth Station (1965) is
virtually identical in format (though not in
scale) to the 1964 White Fire III whose pale
colours (the blue is that of Uriel) are close to
the Station's subtle colour scale.
Newman also used the absolute `non-colour'
black against raw canvas in a number of
individual works concurrent with the Stations.
In Black Fire I of 1961, the solid black surface
at the painting's left is built up of mixed oil
and acrylic pigments into a skin which seems

31
White Fire II 1960
Oil on canvas
96 x 80 in.
Coll: Robert C. Scull, New York
32
Black Fire I 1961
Black paint on raw canvas
114 x 94 in.
Coll: Mrs Leonard Holzer, New York
33
Here III 1966
Stainless and Cor-ten steel
126 in. high
Courtesy M. Knoedler & Co. Inc., New York

59