Page 23 - Studio International - February 1973

immediate transaction: it takes you into it'. `tragic', it was surely this. remarkable balance of colour — remarkable in
(Rothko, 195867) There are times when the metaphysics seem terms of the unconventional stress laid upon
This implied `absorbtion' of the spectator by to have been used almost as if to keep the extreme relationships between one area of
the painting, particularly in the case of Rothko, technologists of the cult of painting at bay — a colour and another; extremeness in drawing —
to whom the notion was absolutely crucial, common enough strategy among artists. A straightness and roughness of edge, narrowness
also suggested that the spectator was involved in painting like Newman's magnificent and width of areas, symmetricality and
a kind of surrender to the void — an abandonment Vir Heroicus Sublimis of 1950—I sustains the asymmetricality of placing. Newman's paintings
of a contingent sense of himself; i.e. that the high ambition of the artist without in any way are 'extreme' as a whole in the sense that he
painting, as well as being itself a 'heroic' masking the precision and blandness of the seems consistently concerned to play upon
assertion, also served as a means of embodying drawing and painting. minima and maxima: how narrow an area can
to the viewer, even of imposing upon him, that Newman's paintings signify their operations be and still 'hold' from the appropriate viewing
state of solitariness which in the first place on 'elevated' levels in terms of evident distance; how great a tonal contrast or
rendered the assertion necessary, difficult and formalities rather than evident metaphysics : complementarity of colour can be sustained
`heroic' for the painter. Many of Newman's scale — after 1949 there are few works less than without disintegration of the whole; how
titles substantiate this : The Name, The Way, six feet in height (there is an exceptional group `simple' a painting can be in 'means' while
The Gate, Outcry, Right Here, Here. Rothko of very narrow works of 1950); saturation and sustaining great complexity of 'effect', etc.
and Newman both 'characterize' the spectator
as a man standing alone before the painting.
`Original man, shouting his consonants, did
so in yells of awe and anger at his tragic state,
at his own self-awareness, and at his own
helplessness before the void'. (Newman,
194768) Tor me the great achievements of the
centuries in which the artist accepted the
probable and familiar as his subjects were the
pictures of the single human figure — alone in a
moment of utter immobility.' (Rothko,
194769)
It is necessary to be able to see all this at more
than one level : a 'heroic' and 'elevated'
ambition in a context of desperate alienation,
but also strategies of elevation, irony from
behind the tragedian's mask70, sophistication in
the context of 'extremeness'. Newman's
Euclidian Abyss, with its invocation of the
concept of the 'void', is also readable, at a less
exalted level, as a means of derogatory
reference to the emptiness and archaism of
Mondrian's geometry; i.e. it is a very 'literate'
painting. One series of Newman's paintings,
the fourteen Stations of the Cross of 1958-66, has
as generic subtitle Lema Sabachthani, the
Hebrew version of Christ's cry from the cross :
`My God, My God, why hast Thou forsaken
me ?'71 This is consistent with Newman's
preoccupation with heroic or tragic assertion in
total solitude. Another, more recent series, is
titled Who's afraid of Red, Yellow and Blue ?,
instantiating Newman's ironic critique of
dogma and of the elevation of significance and
problematics in the technology of painting.72
The notion of significance at the 'higher'
level becomes more credible in the context of
the ironies of the 'lower'. We are not required
altogether to suspend scepticism. We can be
sure that at whatever level Newman's notion of
the sublime operated, it was certainly not at a
level that would encourage pseudo-religiosity
about the procedures of painting. As painters
the Abstract Expressionists, even Pollock, most
emphatically Pollock, were supremely
practical and down-to-earth. If anything
secured them from pathos in the search for the

Adolph Gottlieb
Masquerade 1945
Oil on canvas, 36 x 24 in.
Coll : Mrs Adolph Gottlieb