barnett newman zips

This short study is an examination of Clement Greenberg's written interpretations of Barnett Newman's work from 1947 until the late 1960's.1 It is, of necessity, a particularly self-conscious essay since I am engaging in an act of metacriticism that operates at a distance from Newman (I am considering his work through Greenberg) and from Greenberg as well (I am interested in his writing as motive, mechanism and as ideology.) To write about writing about painting or to criticize criticism (with both, to write within a system of removes) may not yield anything close to the weight or content of the subject matter in question. I hope to avoid this misfortune by acknowledging Newman's work as generative and by hanging Greenberg's words alongside Newman's images so that the contradictions that exist in this juxtaposition will be made clear. The aim of this paper is not to defend or extol Newman or Greenberg, but to explore the nature of their meeting. This is thus a specific and general study--specific in that it deals with one critic's responses to the work of one artist, and general in that this instance highlights the tenuous relationships between words and images, intention and reception, critics and artists.

Whenever I have encountered a painting by Newman, the stripes (or "zips") have seemed visually predominant and I have looked to them to expand and ground my responses to the work. It was with some surprise that I discovered Greenberg views these zips as secondary pictorial elements. In a catalog introduction to Newman's first retrospective exhibition at Bennington College in 1958, Greenberg intones that only the "color deaf" will "focus on the stripes." He suggests that "the vertical stripes enter as a result, not as part of a layout" and that "if you are not color-deaf, and if you look at and not into pictures (and all pictures of quality ask to be looked at rather than read), you will be aware of shaped emanations of color and light."2 This short but complicated quote not only contradicts my own take on Newman, but it seems inconsistent with the look of Newman's work, his intentions for it and the way in which it develops.

For Newman, the zips are unquestionably programmatic. Whether they are understood to function as dividers, mystical zones or light sources, they reveal his interest in Kabbalistic mysticism as much as in formal manipulations. Some authors have been compelled by their spiritual origin and have explained the zips as references to Genesis. For example, Thomas Hess summarizes the importance of the zip in Onement I (1948) when he writes "Newman's first move...re-enacts God's primal gesture (and) presents the gesture itself, the zip, as an independent shape--man...the fine cadmium red light of the stripe relates to the cadmium red dark of the field as the body of man relates to the body of the earth..."3 Even if one chooses to ignore these kinds of representational references, a series of paintings and sculptures from 1950 (and their subsequent developments) underscores Newman's particular preoccupation with the zip when it is removed from the color field that Greenberg cites as primary. These paintings and sculptures are only zips--none of the paintings is more than six inches wide and the sculptures present zips as three-dimensional entities.4 Newman goes so far as to isolate the zips and make finished compositions of them, while Greenberg insists that they are only "results."

What can be made of Greenberg's attitude? One way to try to understand it is to place it within the larger context of all of his writing on Newman. The quote which first describes the zips dates from 1958, and it is predated by only a few references. Greenberg first mentions Newman ten years earlier in a 1947 article from The Nation entitled "Review of Exhibitions of Hedda Sterne and Adolph Gottlieb."5 Until 1958 he discusses Newman's work sporadically (he does not write about him at all between 1947 and 1952) and there are approximately a dozen articles and reviews which come before the remarks of 1958. In some ways the 1947 review can be read as an outline of the evolution of Greenberg's ideas about Newman's work even though the first zip painting, Onement I, does not appear until 1948.6 Greenberg accomplishes at least three things when he first deals with Newman. First, he positions him alongside Mark Rothko and Clyfford Still in a "school of symbolism."7 Second, he denies the importance of "symbolical or 'metaphysical' content" in the work of all three artists. Third, he moves from this particular argument about content to a more expansive one when he clarifies that he does not care about the ideology that fuels the painting so long as "this symbolism serves to stimulate ambitious and serious painting...the test is in the art," he writes, "not in the program."8 In other words, Greenberg groups Newman with other American painters in a way that suggests a movement, or at least a unified effort and set of concerns. He rejects the importance of traditional subject matter or mimetic representation in the works of Rothko, Still and Newman. And he indicates that the intent and concerns of an artist during the act of creation have little to do with the resultant meaning or character of reception in and for the artwork in question. This maneuvering leaves much room for the voice of the critic.

Beginning in 1952, when Greenberg starts to write about Newman with more regularity, he easily occupies the space he has made for himself. Greenberg takes on the task of defining the interests of Rothko, Still and Newman, discussing the character of content in and similarity of their works, and suggesting some ways in which their art can be understood and appreciated. When Greenberg presents and describes the series of concerns that preoccupy these three painters, he addresses the ways in which they do paint as much as the ways in which they do not. As he writes in a 1962 article in Art International entitled "After Abstract Expressionism","they have renounced painterliness, or at least the painterliness associated with Abstract Expressionism, for the sake, precisely, of a vision keyed to the primacy of color." The reason for this direction, he surmises, is "to save the objects of painterliness--color and openness--from painterliness itself." Greenberg concludes by arguing that "these three Americans happen to be the first serious abstract painters, the first abstract painters of style, really to break with Cubism."9 Rothko, Still and Newman thus occupy the forefront by fulfilling the modernist expectation of a break with abstract expressionism (and Greenberg's sense of modernism's development.) Since Greenberg has understood abstract expressionism to be indebted to cubism (both have a certain "compactness"), he names Matisse as the major source for these three artists. With him as their guide, Rothko, Still and Newman have been able to achieve an "openness" that is unknown to either cubism or abstract expressionism. This openness is an attribute of the zones and fields of color that suppress value contrasts in their paintings--as Greenberg points out, "color is given more autonomy by being relieved of its localizing and denotative function. It no longer fills in or specifies an area or even plane, but speaks for itself by dissolving all definiteness of shape and distance."10 Color is no longer an outline or a delineator, but a thing in and of itself. Greenberg establishes a clear opposition here between draftsmanship, compactness and rectilinearity in cubism or painterliness and tactility in abstract expressionism and the color, openness and thin applications of paint (the dyed effects) that characterize the work of Newman and his bedfellows.
The vocabulary that Greenberg uses in his discussions of Rothko, Still and Newman begins to seem quite opaque at times; it is often as confusing as his apparent ignorance of the conspicuous zips on Newman's canvases. Yet this vocabulary is responsible for describing the content of Newman's work. As Greenberg develops his use of terms like "openness," it is clear that he is operating on a level far more complicated than that of formal analysis. Indeed, adjectives describing Newman's work range from "deep and honest" in "American Type Painting" in the spring, 1955 issue of Partisan Review 11 to "noble and candid"12 in the 1958 Bennington retrospective introduction. These words really describe what Greenberg values as much as what he sees. Greenberg writes that "openness, and not only in painting, is the quality that seems most to exhilarate the attuned eyes of our time...by the new openness they have attained, Newman, Rothko, and Still point to what I would risk saying is the only way to high pictorial art in the near future."13 Greenberg's openness is seemingly the result of an essentialist strategy which supports the future of art. His references to a new openness are equivalent to his desire for an expanded understanding of the possiblities of the pictorial field. He is not careful to distinguish between his own questions and beliefs and those supposedly generated by the artists or artworks he discusses. In a particularly revealing passage, Greenberg writes "the question now asked through their art is no longer what constitutes art, or the art of painting, as such, but what irreducibly constitutes good art as such. Or rather, what is the ultimate source of value or quality in art?"14 This is certainly Greenberg's dilemma as much as it is Rothko's or Still's or Newman's.

Openness as Greenberg describes it is signified by color (thin washes of paint that emanate from rather than three dimensionally define their support), by size (the larger the area, the more indeterminate the effect) and by uniformity (subtle variations of value.) To describe openness in this way is not so much to portray a resultant artwork but to characterize the process by which it is made. If Greenberg is speaking about process, it would seem that he might be interested in the intentions of an artist or his program. Yet Greenberg's preoccupation with process is divorced from such concerns primarily because he believes that an artist's most important moves (their attempts at "truth") are unknown to them. As he says of Newman, "the truth of art lies for him, as for any genuinely ambitious artist, somewhat beyond what he knows he can do."15 This truth is motivated by what Greenberg names "conception," something that he clearly sees as integral to Newman's work. Conception is the antithesis of skill, but the analog of inpiration and intuition. It involves choice (and thus denies a child's ability to paint a Newman) so that "the exact choices of color, medium, size, shape, proportion...are what alone determines the quality of the result." And "it is the site of the individual: "inspiration alone belongs altogether to the individual...(it) remains the only factor in the creation of a successful work of art that cannot be copied or imitated."16 While Greenberg succeeds in clarifying that an artist is more than responsible for what may appear to be banal formal manipulations, there is something of a contradiction here. If conception is a guide it is also a kind of knowledge (even if it is a knowledge-of-the-moment.) Greenberg wants to relate the quality of an artwork to the conception of the artist responsible for it, but at the same time he intimates that an artist's conception is limited and denies the importance of an artist's programmatic intentions for his art.

It is not difficult to see how Greenberg's own program for color-field painting and his ideas about the development of modernism leave little room for an explanation of Newman's zips. In effect, they are the elements of his canvases which support Greenberg's ideas the least. The most Greenberg can do with the zips is to insult the viewer who deigns to notice them. In the rare cases when he describes the zips, he does so briefly and by asserting that Newman's art is not really geometrical and that there are other, less noticeable factors that are more important to an interpretation of his work.17 Greenberg's omissions are apparently convenient, if silent and absent, supporters of his arguments. In this case however, the omissions do not stand up to the visual demands of Newman's paintings where, in fact, the zips seem to do nothing but predominate.

Notes

1 My sources are intentionally limited for this study. I have chosen to concentrate on Greenberg's references to Newman, for these are plentiful and weighty enough to support a much longer study. Other information has been gleaned from exhibition catalogs of Newman's work as well as a number of articles about Newman that were contemporary with Greenberg's writing.
2 Clement Greenberg, "Introduction to an Exhibition of Barnett Newman" in Barnett Newman: First Retrospective Exhibition (Vermont: Bennington College, May, 1958.) Reprinted in John O'Brian, ed., vol. 4 ofClement Greenberg: The Collected Essays and Criticism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 54-55.
3 Thomas Hess, Barnett Newman (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1971), 56.
4 I supppose one could continue to push Greenberg's point even farther with these works by arguing that they are secondary to the fields of the wall and of the environment. The problem of their obvious objecthood is still not clarified, however.
5 Reprinted in John O'Brian, ed., vol. 2 ofClement Greenberg: The Collected Essays and Criticism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 188-189.
6 Even though Greenberg's remarks in 1947 coincide with a phase of Newman's work that appears most representational and contains no zips or stripes, he develops the same set of ideas throughout his writing without referring to the apparent formal changes in Newman's art.
7 It should be noted that Newman, according to Hess anyway, protested this identification. Hess writes that Newman "objected to Greenberg's insistence on yoking him to Rothko and Still--'as if we were in bed together'." See Hess, Barnett Newman , 92.
8 The unnumbered quotes that precede this note can be found in Greenberg, "Review of Exhibitions of Hedda Sterne and Adolph Gottlieb" in The Nation (6 December 1947), reprinted in O'Brian, vol. 2 ofClement Greenberg: The Collected Essays and Criticism , 189.
9 This October 25, 1962 article is the first major article which mentions Newman after the Bennington College retrospective introduction of 1958. Reprinted in O'Brian, vol. 4 ofClement Greenberg: The Collected Essays and Criticism , 121-134.
10 Ibid., 130.
11 Reprinted in O'Brian, vol. 3 ofClement Greenberg: The Collected Essays and Criticism , 232.
12 Reprinted in O'Brian, vol. 4 ofClement Greenberg: The Collected Essays and Criticism, 54.
13 Greenberg, "After Abstract Expressionism" in Art International (25 October 1962), reprinted in O'Brian, vol. 4 ofClement Greenberg: The Collected Essays and Criticism, 131.
14 Ibid., 132.
15 Greenberg, "Introduction to an Exhibition of Barnett Newman", reprinted in O'Brian, vol. 4 ofClement Greenberg: The Collected Essays and Criticism, 54.
16 Previous unnumbered quote and this from Greenberg, "After Abstract Expressionism," reprinted in O'Brian, vol. 4 ofClement Greenberg: The Collected Essays and Criticism, 132.
17 See for example Greenberg, "Jackson Pollock: 'Inspiration, Vision, Intuitive Decision'" Vogue (1 April, 1967), reprinted in O'Brian, vol. 4 ofClement Greenberg: The Collected Essays and Criticism, 248.