Onement I

Paintings: 1945-1958

He was trying to find out who he was,” Annalee Newman said. This was the “meta” beyond the physical materiality of Newman’s art

As the German army swept across Europe in 1939 to 1941, and as Japanese forces conquered the Pacific, the United States remained wary of being drawn into another tragic and costly overseas war. Japan’s surprise attack on Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, in December 1941 ended the uncertainty; the country became unified behind President Roosevelt’s ensuing declaration of war. The first several...

Art criticism doesn’t need to be fair to be instructive. Even a misjudging critic can produce rewarding insights ...

Barnett Newman’s work – with its superficial affirmation of the two-dimensionality of pictorial space – is so often taken as an exemplar of the formalist tendency in art that one wonders what other aspects to his work there could possibly be. That there are other aspects is shown by his frequent comments...