Barnett Newman's Who's Afraid Of Red, Yellow And Blue 2h303g

Bridging the Generation Gaps in Barnett Newman's Who's Afraid of Red, Yellow and Blue? Author(s): Sarah K. Rich Source: American Art, Vol. 19, No. 3 (Fall 2005), pp. 16-39 Published by: The University of Chicago Press on behalf of the Smithsonian American Art Museum Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/500230 . Accessed: 30/01/2011 13:38 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's and Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/.jsp. JSTOR's and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have obtained prior permission, you may not an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use. Please the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher information may be obtained at . http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=uress. . Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed page of such transmission. JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please [email protected].

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Bridging the Generation Gaps in Barnett Newman’s Who’s Afraid of Red, Yellow and Blue?

Sarah K. Rich

Barnett Newman, Who’s Afraid of Red, Yellow and Blue I, 1966. Oil, 75 x 48 in. Collection of David Geffen, Los Angeles

It is easy to see why Barnett Newman’s Who’s Afraid of Red, Yellow and Blue paintings might intimidate some of their viewers. The four-canvas group, created between 1966 and 1970, vibrates with bold, unapologetic fields of red delivered on a scale that meets or exceeds many of Newman’s other works.1 The paintings are powerful in their visual effect and challenging in their structure. They defy the viewer to locate any single organizing principle that unites them. Though the canvases share the common denominator of the three primary colors, they vary in surface quality, scale, orientation, pigments used, and the distribution of “zips” (Newman’s word for his vertical stripes). A hard-edged ultramarine band on the left of Who’s Afraid I (frontispiece) opposes the conspicuous brushstrokes on the yellow edge at right, and the verticals serve to contain the red field in between. While the center seems to float somewhere in that red field of the first painting, the central meridian of Who’s Afraid II (fig. 1) is firmly anchored with a blue stripe, and yellow announces the sides of that second canvas. Number III (fig. 2) expands the earliest work in the series to a horizontal rather than vertical format, as if the artist had stretched the first canvas, amplifying the central red so much that the new work takes up a full eighteen feet, one of

Newman’s favorite dimensions. The final painting (fig. 3) retains the large lateral scale but revives the use of the blue zip in the middle of the canvas, and, for once, the broad red ground yields equal space to a brilliant yellow. The Who’s Afraid of Red, Yellow and Blue pictures, as their title indicates, are and were very much about fear, even if Newman attempted to qualify that fear with a question mark. In this respect they are not so different from Newman’s previous efforts—“fear,” after all, was one of the defining emotions of his generation. As an abstract expressionist, Newman matured as an artist during the most horrifying events of World War II. To acknowledge the capacity of human beings to destroy themselves and their world, he produced paintings that were meant, in part, to overcome viewers with sublimity—to make viewers acknowledge the existential drama of their humanity. “Modern man is his own terror,” Newman famously wrote in 1946.2 “Fear” was a bit é, a bit too sincere, however, by the time Newman produced the Who’s Afraid paintings in the late 1960s, an age of stoic minimalism and ironic pop. Thus the mission of the fourcanvas group was to return feelings like fear to the emotional palette of art making. Somehow Newman had to argue for

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American Art

1

Barnett Newman, Who’s Afraid of Red, Yellow and Blue II, 1967. Acrylic, 120 x 102 in. Staatsgalerie Stuttgart,

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Barnett Newman, Who’s Afraid of Red, Yellow and Blue III, 1966–67. Oil, 96 x 214 in. Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam

emotional turbulence in opposition to the cool, matter-of-fact characteristics of the contemporary art scene; for without sublimity, his paintings would merely serve as examples of good form and his importance might fade. So as much as the four-canvas group was about the epic terror of abstract expressionism, the paintings also revealed a more intimate and instrumental concern. They expressed Newman’s anxiety about his place in the art world, his worries about becoming obsolescent in a younger art environment. The trick, then, was for Newman to rise to the challenge of the art climate of the 1960s in two ways: by convincing newer artists that “fear” remained a viable subject for art, and by making them tremble before the stunning example of his continuing potency. Newman’s interest in and influence on such younger artists as Robert Rauschenberg, Gene Davis, Dan Flavin, and Larry Poons have been well established.3 Far less has been said, however, about the ways in which Newman’s anxiety about his own late arrival as a major artist manifested itself in his artistic practices. The reluctance to

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discuss these concerns about his reputation may relate to the in which intergenerational influence has been discussed in art history. Many descriptions of such relationships have relied on Harold Bloom’s Anxiety of Influence, a 1973 book that establishes different scenarios in which creative individuals—so-called strong poets—suffer from Oedipal anxiety about the influence of their poetic fathers. According to Bloom, artistic sons rebel by engaging in inventive strategies of (mis)interpretation of their forefathers, thus creating a space in which they can produce their own work.4 As valuable as Bloom’s model has been, it suffers from a lack of cultural and historical specificity that renders invisible the intergenerational crisis found in Newman’s milieu. Bloom’s model presumes a top-down arrangement in which sons fear fathers. But what about the father who fears erasure by his sons? More useful, perhaps, is the rhetoric of the generation gap that emerged in the mid-1960s, the decade of Newman’s success. In that period academics and popular pundits had begun to theorize the notion of generational difference in

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Barnett Newman, Who’s Afraid of Red, Yellow and Blue IV, 1969–70. Acrylic, 108 x 238 in. Staatliche Museen zu Berlin–Preussischer Kulturbesitz, Nationalgalerie und Verein der Freunde der Nationalgalerie, Berlin

a new way that Bloom would later invert. In March 1969, for example, anthropologist Margaret Mead delivered a series of lectures at the American Museum of Natural History in New York, published a year later as Culture and Commitment: A Study of the Generation Gap. She organized world cultures according to three stages of generational interaction: the prefigurative, cofigurative, and postfigurative.5 According to Mead, postfigurative societies tend to be isolated, nonindustrialized societies in which information

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and cultural practices follow a top-down arrangement from older to younger generations. There change is slow, the lives of parents virtually indistinguishable from the lives of their children. Elders have learned from their parents a sense of history as something that is unchanging and teach their children to think of it as changeless. By contrast, Mead argued, in the 1960s the United States and most of the industrialized world had reached the final moments of the cofigurative stage. Typical cofigurative cultures would be

conditions by which change is perceived. Mead further suggested that the United States was on the threshold of a prefigurative stage, in which children have to “teach their parents well.” World War II and postwar developments had turned the older generation into “immigrants in time,” as change shifted from a geographic to a temporal model. Rapid technological advances such as the advent of television, space exploration, and the atom bomb had occurred within the span of one lifetime, Mead reminded her audience. [H]aving moved into a present for which none of us was prepared by our understanding of the past . . . all of us who grew up before World War II are pioneers, immigrants in time who have left behind our familiar worlds to live in a new age under conditions that are different from any we have known. . . . The young generation, however, the articulate young rebels all around the world who are lashing out against the controls to which they are subjected, are like the first generation born into a new country. They are at home in this time. Satellites are familiar in their skies. They have never known a time when war did not threaten annihilation.6

immigrant communities of industrializing areas in which children often assume a greater level of responsibility and generations co-influence each other. Children may learn languages and other skills necessary for family survival, while older generations still impart to the young more traditional, yet indispensable, forms of knowledge. In a cofigurative culture it is expected that experiences will differ from generation to generation, though such changes are easily absorbed into daily life and elders determine the

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In this prefigurative stage no one could depend on knowledge of the past, and elders needed to rely on the insights and lessons of the young. Such a scenario produced a crisis as the older generation no longer enjoyed a position of privilege as the guardians of knowledge and culture. Older generations might cling to authority and be ill-equipped to respond productively to young people and the changing world. The resulting generation gap was a function of the shift in pedagogical direction (from the young to the old, rather than vice versa) and the reluctance of elders to adapt. Mead cautioned that the American generation gap in the late 1960s would only be bridged if the older generation would allow itself to absorb lessons of the young—if “in the

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Barnett Newman’s floor plan for solo exhibition at Knoedler & Company, New York, 1969. Graphite, 11 x 8 ½ in. Barnett Newman Foundation, New York

minds of both the young and the old, communication can be established again. But,” she continued, “as long as any adult thinks that he, like the parents and teachers of old, can become introspective, [and] invoke his own youth to understand the youth before him, then he is lost.” Mead concluded: [I]n this new culture it will be the child— and not the parent and the grandparent that represents what is to come. Instead of the erect, white-haired elder, who, in postfigurative cultures, stood for the past and the future in all their grandeur and continuity, the unborn child, already conceived but still in the womb, must become the symbol of what life will be like.7 Mead was a member of Newman’s “white-haired” generation, and her earlier anthropological work had influenced a number of abstract expressionists.8 While it is unlikely that Newman attended her lectures at the museum or read her book, she spoke from the same place, time, and predicament in which he found himself. Like Newman, she was a weathered elder struggling to adapt to accelerating change. However, her advocacy of a prefigurative organization of society was probably too radical for Newman, who was not prepared to abdicate artistic authority entirely. Rather, Newman exemplified the ambivalent condition of the elder straddling the pre- and cofigurative stages. Like many older people in the 1960s, Newman acknowledged that the young were ushering in a new stage of culture but was loath to surrender the potency that previous stages would have granted of his generation. He was thus an immigrantartist in time. Not wanting to relinquish his position of command, yet not wanting to be left behind because of his inability to learn from the young, Newman would engage the artistic lessons of younger artists. But he would do so only (in what Mead might have considered regression) to argue for his value as an old master. It

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was in this spirit that Newman produced and exhibited his Who’s Afraid paintings. Newman introduced the first three canvases at a watershed 1969 exhibit at Knoedler & Company in New York—the first gallery he had allowed to handle exclusive sales of his work since leaving Betty Parsons’s stable in 1951. The venue was new, and so were the paintings. With the exception of Tundra (1950) and Cathedra (1951), the show consisted of works created after 1960, many of which had never been publicly displayed. Indeed, perhaps to remind himself or the people at Knoedler of the rejuvenation ritual the exhibit was to accomplish, Newman jotted a short note (fig. 4) at the top of the floor plan for the show: “8 paintings in the last 2 years / 10 paintings never exhibited.”9 The Knoedler show was to be Newman’s declaration of victory to an art world that, in previous decades, had found him negligible. The 1940s and 1950s saw Newman engaged in a long,

slow struggle for success. As one of the early participants in the New York School, he had contributed critical essays and canvases that would reflect and eventually influence the course of abstract expressionism, but he was often better known in those early years as a lobbyist for metaphysical agendas recognized in other artists’ work. Even by 1948, when Newman developed his signature “zip”—a vertical stripe that punctuated his abstract canvases—the artist did not receive the attention enjoyed by colleagues like Willem de Kooning and Jackson Pollock. He remained an “underknown” until his one-artist show at the French and Company gallery in 1959.10 With that exhibit Newman gained serious attention from critics and, more important perhaps, from a pride of younger (mostly male) artists. Newman reached the zenith of his success at the age of fiftyfour and on the threshold of the 1960s—a

Barnett Newman From Art Now: New York (March 1969) I began this, my first painting in the series, “Who’s Afraid of Red, Yellow and Blue,” as a “first” painting, unpremeditated. I did have the desire that the painting be asymmetrical and that it create a space different from any I had ever done, sort of—off balance. It was only after I had built up the main body of red that the problem of color became crucial, when the only colors that would work were yellow and blue. It was at this moment that I realized that I was now confronting the dogma that color must be reduced to the primaries, red, yellow, and blue. Just as I had confronted other dogmatic positions of the purists, neo-plasticists and other formalists, I was now in confrontation with their dogma, which had reduced red, yellow and blue into an ideadidact, or at best, had made them picturesque. Why give in to these purists who have put a mortgage on red, yellow and blue, transforming these colors into an idea that destroys them as colors? I had, therefore, the double incentive of using these colors to express what I wanted to do—of making these colors expressive rather than didactic and of freeing them of the mortgage. Why should anybody be afraid of red, yellow and blue? BARNETT NEWMAN

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decade in which critics usually referred to abstract expressionism in the past tense. Newman reminded critics many times that the Knoedler show was to feature new works and would be his first solo exhibit in ten years—a reintroduction demonstrating the viability of his work in a new decade. And most critics who wrote reviews assumed that the show addressed those younger color-field painters who had depended so conspicuously on Newman’s example. Elizabeth Baker’s preview in ARTNews primed the critical audience for just such a reaction: Newman’s latest work bears unmistakable evidence of his alertness to new challenges; unlike most of his colleagues of the 1940s and ’50s, he has in a sense been forced by the situation, which he himself helped to create, to deal with a set of new conditions for art. Being what and who he is, he could not remain disengaged from the possibility of being considered a “bridge” to the work which has grown out of his. . . . [I]t is quite possible to see [this new work] as resulting from a generalized dialogue with the present.11 The attributes of many paintings at Knoedler demonstrated Newman’s skill at absorbing the influence of younger “hard-edge” abstract artists. Like the canvases of Ellsworth Kelly, the fields and lines in paintings such as Now II (1967) were crisp and unadulterated by facture, and the surfaces of pictures like Anna’s Light (1968) were, in the words of reviewer Douglas Davis, “as smooth as a well-finished refrigerator.” Two triangular paintings, Jericho and Chartres (both completed in 1969), also clearly engaged the shaped canvas that had preoccupied Frank Stella since the mid-1960s.12 Such prefigurative influence on his Who’s Afraid of Red, Yellow and Blue paintings is not as easy to describe. Newman tried to explain his goals for that group in a statement published in March 1969 in Art Now: New York (see boxed text).13

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of the 1960s. Hess turned to metaphors emerging from Newman’s architectural environment and began with this curious narrative:

Thomas Hess. Photograph from ARTNews 77 (September 1978): 77

As is typical with many of Newman’s commentaries, this short essay is more problematic than explanatory. Newman’s stated resistance to a “dogma” of color assumes a great deal of understanding on the reader’s part. His proclaimed desire to produce work that will be “off balance” is confusing. And especially baffling is the real estate terminology Newman uses to describe the “mortgage” on primary colors. All of these enigmatic points, however, relate to the ways in which intergenerational conflict operated in the paintings. Newman’s reference to the “mortgage” on colors might not have seemed so odd to readers familiar with the critical and social discussion surrounding his work. Thomas Hess, longtime editor of ARTNews, also related Newman’s work to real estate operations and architectural change in the catalogue he wrote to accompany the Knoedler exhibit. The catalogue, the first of two monographs Hess (fig. 5) would entitle Barnett Newman, was going to be the first book-length work on the artist and, as such, needed to provide biographical information and analyses of individual works, even as it also had to argue for Newman’s place in the newer art context

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We had gone to Barnett Newman’s studio on Front Street to see the “big red painting” before the landlord evicted him and turned the building over to the wreckers to make way for a new glass and steel skyscraper. . . . The oil paint had been stroked to a silky perfection; every detail of edge, corner and plane had been adjusted and made to count—it indicated the same ion for serious work that, in a different mode, had inspired the architects and craftsmen who built these commercial offices for the East River docks some one hundred and fifty years before. The painting’s image, however, was, is, new. “I had this red” explained Newman, referring to an earlier work, “about 3 feet wide, and I saw a way to stretch it; I wanted to see if I could pull it out to 18 feet.” . . . Something transcendental, something for the future has taken place. Meanwhile, outside the window, where an arm or a leg of the new office building screens the view to the river with a wall of blank fatuity, modern architecture suddenly seems quaint, a bit like Pop Art, old-fashioned, High Camp.14 The “big red painting” was Who’s Afraid of Red, Yellow and Blue III, stretched out, as Newman had described it, from the format of Who’s Afraid I. Hess’s recruitment of pop in respect to Newman’s work and its architectural context is notable here, as he had previously contended that pop “developed with clockwork logic from the assumptions of Abstract Expressionism,” having learned from the first-generation New York School that “Art can be Anything.”15 But in Hess’s monograph introduction, abstract expressionism’s offspring curiously represent the antiquated, due to pop’s ability to attach itself to the obsolete, the about-to-be

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Jonathan Holstein, Barnett Newman Examines Lower Manhattan Construction Sites, 1968. Photograph, 4 x 6 in. Barnett Newman Foundation, New York

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Jonathan Holstein, Barnett Newman Walks down Front Street, 1968. Photograph, 4 x 6 in. Barnett Newman Foundation, New York

past—and vulgar modern architecture could not help but look é when compared with the timeless expressions of Newman’s work. By contrast, Newman’s new forms seemed, for Hess, to maintain an authentic relationship to the past with their commitment to traditional craftsmanly values. The big red painting, through Newman’s tender application of paint and careful working of the edges, became a monument to good workmanship, reminiscent of the less alienating commercial (but

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not yet corporate) architecture around Newman’s Front Street studio. In Hess’s description, Newman’s connection to the future was genuine as well, because the older artist’s potency hinged not on novelty but on his resistance to fashion. Newman’s work would endure—rubble notwithstanding. Hess’s parable of architectural obsolescence presumed a New York readership familiar with current urban renewal scandals. In 1966, the year Newman began his Who’s Afraid paintings, the city of New York had begun an aggressive demolition schedule to raze dozens of nineteenth-century walkups around (and including) his downtown studio, making way for the Mies van der Rohe–like skyscrapers that would later form the financial district skyline. As part of the development, the city’s Planning Commission allowed private companies to destroy the smaller blocks north of Battery Park to clear space for “superplots” from which their massive corporate headquarters could sprout. Newman was furious about the destruction of his neighborhood and documented his building with photographs before his eviction. He and his wife, Annalee, kept in their files snapshots by Jonathan Holstein of Newman ambling along the cobblestone streets still lined with 1830s Greek-revival buildings that had housed the coffee and spice companies of lower Manhattan (figs. 6, 7). Along with these intimate shots, the Newmans kept a larger-scale aerial photograph of their neighborhood, showing his studio building among the few temporary survivors (fig. 8). Newman’s studio was in the white edifice, three buildings from the left in the central block. The financial district renovation was just one of several controversial development schemes of the decade to attract the nervous attention of architectural historians and critics, among them New York Times columnist Ada

Louise Huxtable. Writing specifically about Newman’s neighborhood, she complained in a 1967 essay headlined “Singing the Downtown Blues” that the Planning Commission had neglected to mark many buildings as landmarks and thus had foreclosed on any opportunity to preserve a heterogeneous mix of structures. Huxtable did not protest the insertion of mega-skyscrapers that, by virtue of new building technologies, would tower over architecture from an earlier time. Rather, she worried that the commission had no overarching plan for a more graceful integration of old and new. Big business now was making all the decisions about

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Carl Gossett Jr., Construction Sites around Front Street, New York, 1967. Barnett Newman Foundation, New York © 1967 The New York Times Company, Reprinted by permission

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the renovation process without proper public intervention, and maximum efficiency was allowed to outweigh aesthetic, historical, or social concerns. “Instead of coordinated planning and design, the modus operandi has been simply to milk the most out of each separate, negotiable parcel independently,” Huxtable said. “The architects of the blockbusters for two of the huge plots have no idea what will be on the third. . . . Actually it is quite clear what will be on that third site: the biggest deal possible. . . . Human amenities? Urban aesthetics? Municipal sense? Public good? None of it balances against private profit.”16

To make her point, Huxtable provided a photograph of the developing region in question—a print of the same large-scale photograph by New York Times photographer Carl Gossett Jr. that Newman kept in his files.17 His studio building won its bittersweet fifteen minutes of fame in the Times as an example of the “old” on the verge of being swept away by newer architectural trends. In fact, Huxtable had made construction in the downtown area a focus of her columns for several years. Her 1966 article headlined “The World Trade Center: Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Bldgs?” was a bit more optimistic than the later “Down Town Blues.” At the time, demolition had not yet begun and plans for the twin towers were still on the drawing board. And Huxtable, never a simple advocate of all things old and quaint, was still appreciative of New York’s ability to expand and develop. She reminded readers that many of the older buildings in the financial district, about which New Yorkers were in a protective frenzy, had seemed grossly modern to their nineteenth-century viewers; the New York public had to be flexible to allow for the city’s growth. Nevertheless, Huxtable ended her piece on a cautionary note. The World Trade Center was going to be big—bigger than anything previously done—and it would dwarf its surroundings, with as-yetunknown consequences made possible by new technology. In an unfortunately prescient paragraph, Huxtable warned: “Who’s afraid of the big, bad buildings? Everyone, because there are so many things about gigantism that we just don’t know. The gamble of triumph or tragedy at this scale—and ultimately it is a gamble—demands an extraordinary payoff. The Trade Center towers could be the start of a new skyscraper age or the biggest tombstones in the world.”18 Huxtable’s column reminds us today that the center, on which construction did not begin until 1970, was a highly

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debated monument to the age of time in lower Manhattan, heralding the conversion of neighborhoods on the island’s southern tip from a low-rent district to an increasingly corporate domain. What should we make of the coincidence that Newman conceived of his red, yellow, and blue paintings in the same year Huxtable’s comments appeared? Of course, it would be a mistake to establish a taut causal relationship between these architectural developments and Newman’s series, just as it would be a mistake to claim that Newman’s title derived from Huxtable. The story surrounding these four pictures is more complex. But the connection helps explain the key tropes of Hess’s introduction as well as the artist’s preoccupation with real estate in his 1969 Art Now statement. Hess erected his story of skyscraper crises around the “big red painting,” Who’s Afraid of Red, Yellow and Blue III, to illustrate Newman’s predicament. The chief crisis was whether or not Newman would survive in the new topography of the art world. If his pictures remained standing, would they become merely embalmed specimens of styles-gone-by, or would they persist as vibrant monuments in a still-developing terrain? Newman provided an innovative answer. According to Hess’s introduction, Newman had entertained the critic and his entourage at the Front Street studio, and then took them on a tour across the East River by way of the Brooklyn Bridge (fig. 9). As Hess described it: When the light fades, we drive from the studio to Brooklyn for a seafood dinner, examine some bits and pieces of local nineteenth-century municipal architecture that have been overlooked by that borough’s exploiters, then head back to Manhattan over the top span of the Brooklyn Bridge. It is a soft June night; the city lights burn

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Jet Lowe, Looking East from the Manhattan Shore at the Brooklyn Bridge, with the Manhattan Bridge in the Background, 1979. Photograph. Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

through velvet layers of pollution. The car speeds up the roadway and then seems to wing above a landscape of yellow stars. “We’re at the top of the bridge,” says Barney, “at the dip in the parabola; we are floating across like”—and he laughs a bit—“if I may be immodest, like you move across the red in my painting.” 19 While the comparison between Who’s Afraid III and the Brooklyn Bridge is remarkable, it would not have been too surprising to those in Newman’s social circle. One of the few good things about the destruction of buildings between his studio and the river was that for about six months Newman had an uninterrupted view of the bridge. More important, though, was Newman’s use of the bridge metaphor to explain the miracle of physics he believed Who’s Afraid III, like the span leading to Brooklyn, had accomplished. The challenge lay in his experiment with the uninterrupted field

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of red. Newman had used this ambitious amount of cium red before, notably in Vir Heroicus Sublimis (1950–51), but he had never offered such a wide expanse of a single color without the structural s of the zip. The narrow dimensions of the smaller Who’s Afraid of Red, Yellow and Blue I allowed the proximate viewer to see both zips at either end while looking at the entire painting. The stretched-out version, however, required the viewer either to look from side to side or to retain by memory the presence of yellow and blue on the margins. With the wider canvas, Newman pulled the field to its limit, to the breaking point, to the measure at which the red bridge between the two other colors might collapse. Newman’s experimentum crucis was to see if color could hold on its own without the scaffold of ing verticals. At its center, as at the top and bottom of the parabolic bridge, the big red canvas put color to the test

by making it the weight of the painting—a task usually left to compositional elements such as line or shape. This shifting analogy for the Who’s Afraid paintings from the immobile monument (a building) to the more dynamic span (a bridge) pertains to the kind of complex perceptual work Newman had tried to provoke with his paintings throughout his career. He had long deployed the zip, for example, to activate within the viewer a self-conscious realization of his or her own body and perceptual effort. Art historian Yve-Alain Bois described this operation in his now canonical essay “Perceiving Newman,” which discusses the off-center perceptual experience operating in Abraham (1949). A dark zip articulates the center of the canvas with one edge, but then throws the center off because the zip is so wide that it makes the painting asymmetrical. Pondering Newman’s achievement, Bois concludes, “Precisely because he used a symmetrical division but managed to destroy its power by the most subdued lateral displacement, he makes us aware that ‘nothing is more difficult than to know precisely what we see,’ that our perception is necessarily ambiguous and aporetic, that, precisely because we are oriented in the world, we cannot ever reach once and for all anything we perceive.”20 With such cunning perceptual shifts, Newman caused the viewer to question his or her own connection to the world through the senses. Human beings are not omnipotent, not infinite in time and space; the mortal, finite viewer must always see things partially, in an unstable fashion. A person can never possess a thing entirely through perception. The compositional complexities in Newman’s work often resulted in what he described as a sense of “sublimity”—a sense of fear. Part of the “terror” relied on the fear that accompanies human perceptual finitude.

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There is no central zip to activate such insecurities in Who’s Afraid III, but the compositional instability achieved in Newman’s earlier work remains in the later painting. Part of the perceptual challenge operates through scale—the picture is too big to be visually possessed at one time. The distance between the marginal zips makes it impossible for the viewer to apprehend their true dimensions simultaneously. But the bridge analogy keys up this effect. One cannot occupy a bridge easily—it is a space between places. And one rarely sees a bridge all at once; it is difficult for a human viewer, without mechanical assistance, to see it straight from the side. Views of bridges like the famous span to Brooklyn are usually obtained (as from Newman’s studio window) with an oblique perspective offering a dramatic diminution in size along orthogonal lines. But at the middle of the bridge—the point at which Newman commented on its similarity to his painting—a viewer is in a state of greatest perceptual tension. Between sky and ground, and between the banks of a river, at the greatest height and yet the greatest deracination, a person traversing the bridge feels his or her own perceptual ground give way. Who’s Afraid III was a bridge across which perceivers were invited to travel, but the four-canvas group as a whole would also serve to bridge intergenerational gaps that Newman saw between his work and that of younger artists. Newman’s efforts to create a new means of activating perceptual insecurities with canvases such as Who’s Afraid III were meant to impress the emotive power within his abstract expressionist ethos on younger artists. At the same time, his use of primary colors would address and even question approaches to hue adopted by later generations of artists. Even though Newman debuted his Who’s Afraid pictures in a show meant

to demonstrate his currency in the younger art world, most scholars have discussed those paintings in respect to work by the neoplasticists—an older artistic generation with whom Newman had an antagonistic relationship. There is good reason for such emphasis, of course, as Newman mentions that Dutch modernist movement in his commentary on the series. Over the course of his career, Newman had many times contrasted his goals with what he considered the gentrified formalism of Piet Mondrian’s painting. The modest size of most neoplasticist canvases seemed precious when compared with the ambitious dimensions of many abstract expressionist works. Further, for Newman, Mondrian’s tasteful arrangements of lines and primary colors seemed an exercise in mere decoration when opposed to the epic subject matter so important to his generation.21 And it was neoplasticism’s strict palettes, often consisting solely of “the primaries,” that made most abstract expressionists afraid of red, yellow, and blue. Mondrian and many of his colleagues may have considered the distillation of painting to black, white, and the primary colors a means of picturing the absolute, the essence of painting. For most abstract expressionists, however, that act of distillation seemed like sterilization—a means of eradicating the most basic, and even base, attributes of hue. Newman’s relationship to color was characteristic for of the New York School. Like many abstract expressionists, he had never used all three primaries in the same painting before the 1960s. Though he frequently enjoyed applying broad fields of a single primary color such as red to canvases like Vir Heroicus Sublimis, he usually interrupted those fields with zips of non-prismatic hues. In his writings and painted works, Newman, unlike Mondrian, preferred intuitive, “undogmatic” color combinations that deviated

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from predetermined color systems.22 Newman’s favorite colors were often raw and elemental. From the muddy browns of canvases like Onement I (1948) to the suite of canvases from 1954 to 1955, such as The Gate featuring an almostinstitutional mint, he often entirely avoided primary hues. When writing as a critic, Newman also tended to privilege painters who enjoyed off-colors. In his discussion of Adolph Gottlieb and Rufino Tamayo in 1945, Newman mentioned that he appreciated the ways in which they “love earth colors, and have revived the use of brown.” Brown pictures, he commented, “have almost died out in modern art” due to the influence of the impressionist palette. But “from the high tones around orange to the deep diapason of the black browns, these [two] men have been playing a somber music of intense warmth that is a relief from the strident notes of many of the pictures of our times. They have succeeded in expressing man’s elemental feelings, the majestic force of our earthly ties and natures” and they “confront us with the problems of man’s spirituality.” In another essay, “The Plasmic Image,” Newman defined the allure of Oceanic sculpture as a function of the material basis of its color. He remarked, “The intention is for the color, the stone to carry within itself that element of thought that will act purely on the onlooker’s sensibility to penetrate to the innermost channels in his being.”23 Newman and other abstract expressionists preferred non-prismatic hues in part because they believed such colors typified an authentic connection to the world supposedly enjoyed by “primitive” civilizations. For cubists, burnt siennas and umbers referenced the colors traditionally used by painters to create space through chiaroscuro. But for Newman, jade greens and earthy browns (browns that on another level commemorated excrement and other categories of the

“dirty” unassimilated by bourgeois society) derived from cultures in more immediate with the earth—nonindustrial civilizations that associated colors directly with the materials (earth and stone and body) that produced them.24

Newman almost never titled his canvases after the colors he used, and his aversion to color titles was shared by many of his colleagues. Further, muddier colors were attractive to many abstract expressionists like Newman because they seemed to elude containment by language.25 Abstract expressionist colors, particularly in the early stages during the 1940s, often slid indescribably from browns to grays, and from beiges to greens. This sliding-scale approach to hue enhanced the irrational aspects of color, ensuring that such hues would be difficult to label according to any set vocabulary of color names such as “the spectrum” or “the primaries.” Consequently, while Newman disliked earlier, less “authentic” approaches to color exemplified by artists such as the neoplasticists, he also disliked the ways in which color could be trivialized by the younger generation. Artists like Ellsworth Kelly and Frank Stella, for example, delighted in literal approaches in which chroma could be presented as a self-evidentiary visual fact—an isolated color served cold without any metaphysical trimmings. This younger generation of painters had begun to treat color as a kind of Duchampian found object. They applied colors directly to the canvas without mixing them, either on the palette or on the canvas, trying to get the paint on the finished work to be, in Stella’s words, “as good as it was in the can.”26

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When younger painters in the 1960s used primary colors, they also demonstrated the ease with which those colors could be organized and classified according to language. Kelly’s mid-1960s canvases provide the most concrete example. Around the time that Newman began his Who’s Afraid paintings, Kelly was working on a number of canvases such as Red, Yellow, Blue II (fig. 10) and multi works such as Three s: Red, Yellow, Blue (1966) and Untitled (Red, Yellow, Blue) (1965).27 Kelly’s canvases, unsurprisingly consisting of the colors named in the title, emphasized the always-already-given organization of hue; the names “red,” “yellow,” and “blue” remind the viewer that these primary colors were not chosen by intuition but were adopted from conventional divisions and arrangements. The colors of Kelly’s paintings from this period are deadpan, offering no optical surprises. They suggest no metaphysical mystery or perceptual insecurity, and they are easy to understand. They are nameable—and named. Even the syntax of the s—red, yellow, blue—obeys the order described in the title (and reproduces the ordering of colors according to wavelength). Newman almost never titled his canvases after the colors he used, and his aversion to color titles was shared by many of his colleagues (Mark Rothko being the most notable exception). The abstract expressionist phobia regarding color titles and easily “nameable” colors became more conspicuous in the 1960s as critics noticed that hard-edge abstractionists like Kelly were deliberately using literal approaches to color and titles to weaken their paintings’ emotive punch. Harold Rosenberg, a tireless defender of abstract expressionism, reviewed two New York exhibitions showcasing work by Kelly, Ray Parker, Kenneth Noland, and others in 1963 under the title “Black and Pistachio.” The essay’s title, which evoked associations with

10 Ellsworth Kelly, Red, Yellow, Blue II, 1965. Acrylic, each 82 x 61 in. Milwaukee Art Museum, Gift of Mrs. Harry Lynde Bradley © Ellsworth Kelly

ice-cream parlors, mimicked the way in which even abstract expressionism could seem frivolous when renamed. “Abstract Expressionism may not be as dead as we keep being told it is, but there is no denying the will to see it dead,” Rosenberg wrote, noting that younger artists had found “too much freedom, too much angst” in work by Pollock, de Kooning, Franz Kline, and Philip Guston. “The paintings of Adolph Gottlieb are impeccably organized, with every relation of hue calculated with microscopic finesse; yet to Gottlieb these lucid, calm surfaces signify ‘Blast!’ In a post-Expressionist adaptation, Gottlieb’s image would lose its ominous overtones and be named ‘Painting’ or ‘Lavender and Blue.’”28 Rosenberg understood that hard-edge painters wielded color naming as a means of draining the Sturm und Drang from abstract expressionism. For him, their color naming transformed the white-knuckled expressionism of the

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New York School into something lighter, even a bit silly, like the Lichtensteinian punctuation of “Blast!” In this context Newman played a gambit move by naming the colors of his Who’s Afraid of Red, Yellow and Blue paintings. Before the mid-1960s, Newman had occasionally named paintings after the colors in which they were painted, but usually only canvases in black and white. It was not until 1966 with the Who’s Afraid pictures that he began to label paintings after hues—a short-lived trend that ended with his Midnight Blue of 1970. There was, however, one earlier instance in which Newman had made an exception to his prohibition on color naming. The single occasion before 1966 was his Yellow Painting (fig. 11)—a 1949 canvas virtually identical in form to Who’s Afraid of Red, Yellow and Blue II.29 Although it is larger than Yellow Painting, Who’s Afraid II nearly duplicates the height-width

11 Barnett Newman, Yellow Painting, 1949. Oil, 67 x 52 in. National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., Gift of Annalee Newman, in Honor of the 50th Anniversary of the National Gallery of Art

ratio of the earlier painting, and its distribution and width of stripes also depend on this antecedent. The former work, however, plays with the ambiguity of a color title. The “yellow” in Yellow Painting describes two different golden shades; the darker yellow zip in the center offsets the lighter color of the surrounding fields. The “yellow” in the title emphasizes the uncontainable qualities of color—the overabundance of hue that cannot be fully corralled by a single name. When Newman recycled the compositional format of Yellow Painting for the second canvas of the Who’s Afraid paintings, he was engaging in a self-conscious play in respect to both naming and color, as the artist recuperated a formatand-titling strategy he had not employed for almost twenty years. In naming his series after the colors used, Newman, in a rather prefigurative moment, seemed to show that he had learned from his artistic descendants. He demonstrated that he was well aware of the new trend regarding color titles, and that he was as fluent in that language as any younger artist. At the same time, there is a bit of a cofigurative counterpunch here. Through his composition, Newman argued that his technique of color naming, which first appeared in the 1949 painting, predated the example of younger artists. And that earlier painting even resisted the banalization Rosenberg had described; Newman flaunted his history of fearlessness by alluding to a twenty-year-old example in which his art had overcome the literalizing effects of color labels. In doing so, he demonstrated that his epic abstract expressionist project could not be diminished by color titles. He was still the elder. While the title Who’s Afraid of Red, Yellow and Blue? purposefully evokes the color naming and syntax occasioned by “younger” approaches to the primaries, Newman’s series sabotages the determinate effects of such naming.

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In counterdistinction to the younger exegetes of his work, Newman never re-created the syntax of the phrase “red, yellow, and blue” through the distribution of fields and zips on his four canvases. And, unlike Kelly, he never maintained any consistency in the size of color fields he used. Kelly presented his primary colors in equal portions. The particular attributes of each individual color were thus diminished in favor of a quantitative system that provided optimal interchangeability. Newman, by contrast, widened and narrowed his fields, maintaining a more conspicuous concern for the qualitative properties of each hue. If Newman claimed in his statement that he wanted his pictures to be “asymmetrical” and “off balance,” it was partly because he wanted to refute the procedures of such artists as Kelly who no longer privileged colors according to their particular properties. For Kelly in 1966, red was different from yellow and blue, but only according to position, not according to the qualities specific to red itself. Since in the Who’s Afraid Series Newman would not be using colors like brown and green—colors whose particularity he had earlier claimed was attached to the power of certain materials—he would have to emphasize the features of individual hues in other ways. He would have to address Kelly’s systematic and quantitative leveling of color difference by, whenever possible, keeping color relationships intuitive—as he said, “asymmetrical” and “off balance.” Symmetry and balance are not necessarily interchangeable, however. Symmetry implies a perfect mirroring. Balance implies a weighing of qualitatively different elements so that they reach a state of relative equilibrium. Balance was the domain of artists like Mondrian, whose high-style neoplasticist works balanced areas of blue against others such as a larger region of red to create a “dynamic equilibrium.”

Symmetry was the means by which younger artists like Stella (fig. 12), Kelly, and Donald Judd tried to circumvent the intuitive and artsy choices made by painters like Mondrian and, even, Newman. Symmetry was, as 12 Frank Stella, Die Fahne Hoch!, 1959. Enamel on canvas, 121 ½ x 73 in. Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Eugene M. Schwartz and purchase with funds from the John I. H. Baur Purchase Fund, Charles and Anita Blatt Fund, Peter M. Brant, B. H. Friedman, Gilman Foundation Inc., Susan Morse Hilles, Lauder Foundation, s and Sydney Lewis, Albert A. List Fund, Sandra Payson, Philip Morris Inc., Mr. and Mrs. Albrecht Saalfield, Mrs. Percy Uris, Warner Communications Inc., and National Endowment for the Arts © 2000 Frank Stella/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Yve-Alain Bois has noted, the new “anticompositional” rebuttal to “balance.”30 While balance claimed a space for authentic artistic decision-making, symmetry yielded compositional choices to a preordained system. Newman’s Who’s Afraid pictures test the tender balance between symmetry and balance. The first and third canvases of the group, for example, are asym-

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metrical in both hue and form. The two zips in each work are of different size and different colors. However, these two marginal colors still might be considered in balance in respect to their effect, if one agrees that blue tends to recede and yellow tends to advance. If the blue and yellow regions on both canvases were of the same size, the canvases would suggest a rotation (clockwise as seen from above); the yellow section would advance and the blue section would retreat. But given that the blue region is larger than the yellow in both canvases, the colors compete on equal , finding an equilibrium as the wider blue gains as much attention as the narrower field of yellow on the right by virtue of its size. Newman further explored blue’s tendency to recede in Who’s Afraid II, the only fully symmetrical picture of the four. There he placed blue in the center, leaving yellow to brighten the sides. The compositional symmetry (the two yellow zips are the same size and the same distance from the sides) might flirt with the notion of axial perspective. But Newman widened the blue zip, preventing that darker region from receding as the center stripe by its size seems closer to the viewer than the narrower stripes at right and left. Who’s Afraid I and III are asymmetrical in both color and form, but in balance in of effect. Who’s Afraid II, the only work that is symmetrical in both color and form, is also in balance in effect. In other words, all

13 Richard Burton, George Segal, and Elizabeth Taylor in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? 1966. Film still © Warner Brothers Entertainment Inc., Burbank, California

three of the first works achieve balance, even though I and III depend on asymmetry. Who’s Afraid IV is the only work that is asymmetrical according to color (a broad area of red on the left opposes a broad area of yellow on the right) and symmetrical in form (the left and right regions are the same size, the blue zip directly in the center). It is more “off balance” than the others, however, in

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of the spatial effects of color. The projection of yellow, for the first time, is not offset by a wider blue area as ballast. Newman was exploring, in other words, the variations between two altogether different kinds of difference. Symmetry is the differential system whereby two things are identical according to quality and quantity. Balance is the differential system whereby two quantitatively different things are equal only according to quality. Newman’s Who’s Afraid of Red, Yellow and Blue project creates a system in which two qualitatively different systems (symmetry and balance) weigh against each other without resolution. He was not simply refuting Mondrian’s color dogma. His series was a means of confronting both the new and the old, of differentiating between the equilibrium typical of earlier modernist canvases and the symmetry of later modernist artists such as Kelly under the rubric of color. The series was meant to be a mediation, a bridge spanning the systems of difference exemplified by the two generations (old and young)—between which Newman inserted his own practice. The integration of these two generational modes was anything but benign, as indicated by Newman’s choice of title for the group. His conception of the series in 1966, after all, coincided with the cinematic debut of Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf ?—a film that stunned audiences and shocked censors in its mobilization of racy expletives, not to mention Elizabeth Taylor’s having gained twenty pounds to play the role of Martha. The film was the Life magazine cover story in June 1966, and the subject of numerous articles in the New York Times and other popular news sources. By selecting a title that alluded to this notorious and much-discussed movie, Newman offered a shorthand summary of the complex intergenerational relations his series might perform.31

Photo Credits 16, 18, 19, 20–21, 33, Courtesy of the Barnett Newman Foundation, New York. Photos by Bruce White; 22, Courtesy of the Barnett Newman Foundation, New York; 25 (both), Courtesy of the Barnett Newman Foundation, New York, with permission of Jonathan Holstein

Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf ?— which takes place over the course of one evening—is an investigation of ill-fated parent-child relationships (fig. 13). George and Martha, road-weary academics ironically named after the father of our country and his wife, wield their erudite cynicism against a young professor and his wife who have come to them for guidance. Fifties meet the sixties here; middle age encounters youth. As the relationship between the older and younger couples darkens, another invisible generation emerges—two imagined children. Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf ? has not one but two fictional pregnancies. The wife of the young professor, we eventually discover, was once great with nonexistent child, a hysterical pregnancy. Martha’s boasting about her son is also a fabrication—another work of fiction she and her husband enjoy quoting. In the end, George puts a stop to the doubled paternal conflicts that motivate the evening. In a twist on the Oedipal story, he kills his own son by vocally narrating the scene of this fictional child’s death. The relationships between the two couples and with their fantasy offspring in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf ? represent permutations on parenthood gone awry. The nurturing relationship that is expected from parents in an ideal family is transformed into a sequence of interlocking performances, false promises, and masquerades. The title’s associations with Albee’s play-turned-movie did a great deal for Newman’s series, aligning the paintings with the notion of Oedipal conflict in which the father emerges (relatively) victorious. Newman, after all, was not unlike George, although it is doubtful he would have itted to the frailty of Albee’s protagonist. Like George, Newman found himself in a paternal

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role that could be at once powerful and fragile. As much as Newman hoped to reign supreme as a veteran of the art world, his authority (in a prefigurative era of intergenerational conflict) was under attack, and it depended on the deference of younger artists. He could not succeed without their approval. By virtue of the Albee-esque question “Who’s Afraid?” Newman embedded within his demand for respect a hope that he might be able to command fear as well. He formulated his title as a question in part to convince viewers that he was unafraid. But his courageous confrontation with primary colors was also meant to convince younger painters of his superior engagement with color. To make the new generation feel anxiety would be to doubly accomplish the paternal authority Newman asserted. If he could make viewers feel the terror of their perceptual finitude though paintings like Who’s Afraid III, Newman would return painting to the ethos of his generation and thus command fear and respect as an elder. The bridge Newman would try to build with the Who’s Afraid paintings was somewhat wobbly. It was constructed to mediate the co- and prefigurative phases of the intergenerational exchange to which he was subjected. Through the formal attributes of the pictures, the filmic allusions embedded in his title, and the architectural metaphors he and his circle deployed to explain the images, Newman hoped to span the gap between his work and that of younger artists. This required great transformations, subjecting his abstract expressionist project to significant pressures. But the paintings as a group ed those pressures and bridged those gaps, to such an extent that Newman’s work continues to seem rather young, even today.

Notes My thanks to Heidi Colsman-Freyberger of the Barnett Newman Foundation for help with archival materials and for her insightful comments on early versions of this paper. Christiane Wisehart provided assistance with the manuscript and illustrations. Charlotte Houghton made important comments on an early draft as well. This paper was first given as a Daniel H. Silberberg Honorary Lecture at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, in 2003. A postdoctoral research grant from the J. Paul Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles, provided for the project. This paper is also being published with from the George Dewey and Mary J. Krummrine Endowment. 1

2

3

Newman exhibited the first three canvases in 1969 under the title Who’s Afraid of Red, Yellow and Blue? before he had completed the final painting. Thus most critics writing before 1971 addressed the group as a series of three. Articles written on the three canvases include Peter Schjeldahl, “New York Letter,” and Lawrence Alloway, “Notes on Barnett Newman,” both in Art International 13, no. 6 (Summer 1969): 64–69 and 35– 39; and Barbara Reise, “The Stance of Barnett Newman,” Studio International 179, no. 919 (February 1970): 49–63. For the quote, see Barnett Newman, “Art of the South Seas,” 1946, reprinted in Barnett Newman: Selected Writings and Interviews, ed. John P. O’Neill (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1990), 100 (hereafter BN-SWI). Most recently, Richard Shiff described Newman’s influence on artists of the 1960s in his “Whiteout: The NotInfluence Newman Effect,” in Barnett Newman, ed. Ann Temkin (Philadelphia: Philadelphia Museum of Art, 2002), 76–111.

4

Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1973).

5

Margaret Mead, Culture and Commitment: A Study of the Generation Gap (Garden City, N.Y.: Natural History Press/Doubleday, 1970). For an earlier discussion of the term, see C. D. B. Bryan, “Why the Generation Gap Begins at 30,” New York Times, July 2, 1967, 11, 34–36. See also Pierre Nora, Realms of Memory: The Construction of the French Past, vol. 1, trans. Arthur

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Goldhammer (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1996), 499–531. 6

Mead, Culture and Commitment, 58–59.

7

Ibid., 53, 63, and for the quote 68.

8

Michael Leja discusses the importance of Mead’s work in Reframing Abstract Expressionism: Subjectivity and Painting in the 1940s (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1993), esp. 56–63. See also Stephen Polcari, Abstract Expressionism and the Modern Experience (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1991), 4–37, im.

9

At the Knoedler show Newman also displayed Black Fire I (1961), Shining Forth (To George) (1961), The Moment (1962), The Three (1962), White Fire II (1963), Now II (1967), Anna’s Light (1968), the first three Who’s Afraid of Red, Yellow and Blue paintings, Chartres (1969), and Jericho (1968–69), in addition to the sculptural works Here II (1965), Here III (1966), and Broken Obelisk (1967). See Alloway, “Notes on Barnett Newman,” for a discussion of his exhibition strategy.

10 Clement Greenberg, who had seen a show of Newman’s work at Bennington College the previous year, organized the exhibit. On Greenberg’s role in the rejuvenation of Newman’s career, see Thomas Crow, The Rise of the Sixties: American and European Art in the Era of Dissent (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1996), 60–62. 11 Nearly every review of the show mentioned Newman’s remarks on this point; see, for example, Douglas Davis, “After Ten Years, a One-Man Show by Mr. Newman,” National Observer, April 14, 1969, 25, and David Shirey, “Barney,” Newsweek, April 14, 1969, 93–94. For the quote, see Elizabeth Baker, “Barnett Newman in a New Light,” ARTNews 67, no. 16 (February 1969): 40. Baker compared Newman’s canvases with works by Frank Stella, Kenneth Noland, Ellsworth Kelly, Jules Olitski, Dan Flavin, and several pop artists. 12 Davis, “After Ten Years, a One-Man Show by Mr. Newman,” 20. In speaking about the exhibit with Davis, Newman referred to the use of the shaped canvas by younger painters and his willingness to exchange ideas: “We’re talking to each other, as I said. My triangles follow

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others who have shaped the canvas.” Newman tempered his statement by saying, “I know young people are doing triangles, but for different reasons.” Davis interview notes, 1969, Knoedler File, Barnett Newman Foundation, New York. 13 The statement was first published in Art Now: New York (March 1969), n.p., along with a color illustration of the first canvas in the series. 14 Thomas Hess, Barnett Newman (New York: Knoedler Gallery, 1969), 7. 15 Thomas Hess, “Pop and Public,” ARTNews 62, no. 7 (November 1963): 23. 16 Ada Louise Huxtable, “Down Town Blues,” New York Times, April 16, 1967, 29–30. 17 It is unclear how Newman obtained his print of the image. I would like to thank Paula Pelossi of the Barnett Newman Foundation for helping me find this image. 18 Ada Louise Huxtable, “The World Trade Center: Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Bldgs?” New York Times, May 29, 1966, 13–14. 19 Hess, Barnett Newman, 1969, 7. 20 Yve-Alain Bois, “Perceiving Newman,” in Painting as Model (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1990), 199. 21 The first critics to discuss the Who’s Afraid Series associated it with Piet Mondrian in part because the 1971 retrospective of Newman’s work at the Museum of Modern Art (an exhibition featuring the Who’s Afraid pictures) coincided with a Mondrian retrospective at the Guggenheim Museum. The two shows were often reviewed in the same article, with prolonged discussions of their respective approaches to primary color. See, for example, Douglas Davis, “The Red, the Yellow, the Blue,” Newsweek, October 18, 1971, 90–93. For Newman’s comments on Mondrian, see his “The Plasmic Image,” ca. 1945, reprinted in BN-SWI, esp. 141. 22 For example, Mark Rothko’s classes at Brooklyn College during the 1950s encouraged an intuitive approach to

color; he instructed students to apply pigment to canvas without recourse to any color system such as those supplied by Wilhelm Ostwald and Albert H. Munsell. See John Gage, “Rothko: Color as Subject,” in Jeffrey Weiss, Mark Rothko (Washington, D.C.: National Gallery of Art, 1998), 251. 23 Barnett Newman, “The Painting of Tamayo and Gottlieb,” La Revista Belga 2 (April 1945): 16–25, reprinted in BNSWI, see 76–77 for quote. Newman, “The Plasmic Image,” BN-SWI, 144. 24 The argument has also been made that abstract expressionists tried to establish more systematic color symbolism by tying certain hues to specific meanings; see Evan Firestone, “Color in Abstract Expressionism: Sources and Background for Meaning,” Arts Magazine 55, no. 7 (March 1981): 140– 43. Ann Gibson, “Regression and Color in Abstract Expressionism: Barnett Newman, Mark Rothko, and Clyfford Still,” Arts Magazine 55, no. 7 (March 1981): 144–53, argues that emphasis on hue over value (light-dark relationships) in the work of Rothko, Gottlieb, and Newman indicated a longing for prerational psychological operations. By contrast, Charles Harrison has considered these preferences for gray and brown among the abstract expressionists a “markedly nonMediterranean chromatic range,” which provided one locus of resistance for New York artists against the more vibrant hues of French painting exemplified by Henri Matisse; see his “Abstract Expressionism,” in Concepts of Modern Art, ed. Nikos Stangos (1974; repr., New York: Thames and Hudson, 1994), esp. 189–90. 25 In addition, color naming could derive from commercial labeling systems, as the easier it is to name a color the

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easier it is to market and sell it. See Thierry de Duve, “The Readymade and the Tube of Paint,” Artforum 24 (May 1986): 110–21, and his slightly different chapter of the same name in his Kant after Duchamp (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1996), 147–96. See also Benjamin Buchloh, “The Primary Colors for the Second Time: A Paradigm Repetition of the Neo-Avant-Garde,” October 37 (Summer 1986): 41–52. 26 De Duve discusses Duchamp’s argument at length in “The Readymade and the Tube of Paint,” im. For the Stella quote, see “Questions to Stella and Judd,” reprinted in Gregory Battcock, ed., Minimal Art: A Critical Anthology (New York: Dutton Press, 1968), 157. 27 Both Kelly works were well known in the mid-1960s. Three s was included in the 1967 Large Scale American Painting show at the Jewish Museum, New York. Newman’s friend Si Newhouse had sent him a review from Women’s Wear Daily of that show that mentioned Kelly’s work; see clipping, August 4, 1967, Newhouse Files, Barnett Newman Foundation. Three s: Red, Yellow, Blue (1966) also appeared in Sidney Janis’s exhibition of Kelly’s work in March 1967. Untitled (Red, Yellow, Blue) was reproduced in John Coplans, “The Serial Image,” Artforum 7, no. 2 (October 1968): 34 – 43. Though Kelly’s Untitled includes a fourth canvas of black and white, the Artforum article illustrated only the three primary-color canvases. My thanks to Ellsworth Kelly for discussing this series with me in a telephone interview, June 8, 2000. 28 Harold Rosenberg, “Black and Pistachio,” originally published in 1963 in the New Yorker, reprinted in Rosenberg, The Anxious Object (Chicago: Univ. of

American Art

Chicago Press, 1966), 49. Rosenberg’s review discussed the Americans 1963 show at the Museum of Modern Art and Toward a New Abstraction at the Jewish Museum. 29 Hess briefly compared the two paintings according to their similarity in form, but did not discuss the common denominator of color naming that also unites them. Hess, Barnett Newman (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1971), 134. 30 For a discussion of “Anti-Composition” in abstract painting, see Yve-Alain Bois, “Ellsworth Kelly in : AntiComposition in Its Many Guises,” in Bois et al., Ellsworth Kelly: The Years in , 1948–1954 (Washington, D.C.: National Gallery of Art, 1992), 9–36. 31 Edward Albee’s play originally appeared in 1962. On public reaction to the film, see Thomas Thompson, “A Surprising Liz in a Film Shocker” and “Raw Dialogue Challenges All the Censors,” Life, June 10, 1966, 87–91, 92, 96, 98. It was unusual for Newman to have premised his work, at least in a titular sense, on a Hollywood film. Like many of his generation, he considered Hollywood a cliché factory exemplifying some of the most pernicious aspects of the culture industry. When preparing for a 1955 show, for example, he complained to Betty Parsons that “critics and artists, art officials and art ‘intellectuals’ . . . have tried to typecast me for their own purposes as a maker of straight-line, vertical line pictures, as if the art world were another Hollywood.” December 1, 1955, letter to Parsons, Barnett Newman Foundation, reprinted in BN-SWI, 206. Armin Zweite briefly connects the paintings to the film as well in his Barnett Newman: Paintings, Sculptures, Works on Paper (Ostfildern, : Hatje Cantz Verlag, 1999), 10.