Barnett Newman’s Jewish identity is key to understanding his art

One spring morning in 1966, new york times Subscribers woke up to the news that two bodies had been discovered at the Guggenheim Museum. “Give a man enough rope, they say, and he’ll hang himself,” the paper’s art critic John Canaday wrote one day in April. “That adage was doubly proven this week at the Guggenheim Museum.”

What if there is no real body? For Canady, the painter Barnett Newman, who had just had an exhibition at the Guggenheim, was dead. So does the exhibition’s curator, Lawrence Alloway.

In his review, Canady blasted Newman’s new paintings, a series of 14 abstract paintings that the artist titled “Stations of the Cross.” Canady claimed that the Newman exhibition was “not worth a dime” and that the museum had lost its legitimacy to the point that it “could no longer be taken seriously.” Without any clear logical connection, he compared the black vertical straps in these paintings to “unopened phylacteries,” referring to tefillin, leather boxes containing Torah texts worn by devout Jewish men.

Artists get negative comments all the time, but most people simply ignore them. But Newman was one of the most testy and irritable painters of the 20th century—and he couldn’t ignore the resistance. He has feuded with Canaday in the past and protested with a group of artists era Critics’ open hostility to modern art. Following the Guggenheim review, Newman opened up a new line of criticism.

“What do you think of his remarks about turning a ceremonial phylactery into a nickname?” Newman wrote. erapublisher. “Is he attacking Jesus because he was Jewish and had to wear them, or is he attacking men because he knows I’m Jewish too?”

This line stands out even for Newman, who can be vicious in situations that don’t necessarily merit his anger. (He was, after all, an artist who had sued his friend the painter Ad Reinhardt, claiming that Reinhardt defamed him when he called him an “artist professor” in the journal of the University Art Association.) Newman’s question about Canady suggested that Newman’s Jewish identity was central to him as a person—so important, in fact, that anyone who denigrated his art was also denouncing his identity.

Newman’s relationship with his religion is at the heart of Amy Newman’s remarkable new book, Barnett Newman: Herewhich explains to a large extent why the painter – independent of the author – strives for himself. “The culturally nourishing impact of Barney’s Crusades cannot be overstated,” writes Amy Newman in her book, which is thick (nearly 700 pages) and deeply insightful. She went on to note that although by today’s standards the painter might look “annoying” thin skin,” his diatribe made sense at a time when Jews must fight to be taken seriously.

The author points out that Newman had read James Waterman Wise’s 1938 “Open Letter to My Fellow Jews,” in which Wise wrote that Western society would rather think of tribesmen as “Mr. Zero than as Einstein.” “Barney couldn’t be Mr. Zero,” Amy Newman wrote. Bingo! It’s the kind of revealing moment you want to see in any biography. Barnett Newman: Here Contains a lot.

Amy Newman is an art historian whose past books include a book on art forumHe was not the first to emphasize the role of Jewish identity in the development of postwar abstract art early on—others, such as curator Mark Godfrey, had done so, and with great deliberation. but Barnett Newman: Here making the artist’s religious beliefs so important that they were difficult to ignore, and That is rare. Apparently the book is titled Torah Pasha Read at Newman’s bar mitzvah — one of the holiest passages in the Torah, in which Moses communicates directly with God, saying, “Here I am.”

Newman did not hide his Jewish identity from the public. He often led papers on Kabbalah, a form of Jewish mysticism that, as this new biography points out, “was one of the many symbols he used to define his historical persona.” (“He was not ‘religious,’ but he admitted to being religious,” writes Amy Newman.) A 1949 painting, now owned by the Museum of Modern Art, shows a black streak cutting through a dark void, titled abraham Seems to refer to the artist’s father or the patriarch of Genesis. One of the last events Newman attended before his death was a Jewish antiques auction in 1971, at which he and his wife Annalee purchased a Yardor Torah pointer.

But the association doesn’t seem to be staying in the context of Newman’s legacy. In museums, he tended to appear to the public as an adjunct to Abstract Expressionism, concerned with big questions about man’s place in the world rather than as a Jewish A painter with inner spiritual dilemma.

The National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., for example, regularly exhibits works from the series “Stations of the Cross”—lovely canvases with sharp white and black stripes on a cream background. The texts of these works mention that these works allude to the life and death of Jesus Christ, but do not mention that Newman was Jewish. You’d be forgiven for assuming that Newman was a Christian, as I did when I first saw these paintings in college. When the Philadelphia Museum of Art mounted a Newman retrospective in 2002, a press release stated that the artist’s father was a Russian Zionist, but did not say that Newman’s religious beliefs influenced his art.

Almost from the beginning, Barnett Newman: Here Make sure the connection between the artist and his or her Jewish identity is clear. Amy Newman enriches her rich prose with Yiddish language—Goshleymeaning “to shout out,” aptly recurs throughout the book—as she takes the time to illuminate the artist’s troubled spirituality.

Barnett Newman grew up in relative poverty in the Bronx, where he developed an early penchant for discourse and disagreement. In just 16 pages, Amy Newman writes, “The visceral response to passion, Game TipsJewish-style polemics will forever remain one of Barney’s most distinctive features. It was a sentiment that stayed with him throughout his adolescence and early adulthood, which included multiple failed attempts at other careers before devoting himself to art: as a political loser with ambitions to become mayor of New York City, as a timid critic, and as a city guy. Think of it all as a cry for visibility, and recall a quote from dealer John Kasmin later in the book: “For all Jews, Record Very important. Everything written will be etched in stone. “

Newman’s art is now etched in stone, but Barnett Newman: Here A useful reminder that this was not always the case. Until the 1960s, when Newman’s idle paintings became a guiding light for emerging artists, Newman remained the butt of ridicule among some critics and fellow artists. His canvases were vandalized multiple times, and he failed to participate in exhibitions such as the Museum of Modern Art’s 1952 “15 Americans,” which helped introduce the emerging Abstract Expressionist movement to the museum’s walls.

As for his art: Newman spent about 200 pages creating his first great work onement one (1948), orange barrels flow unruly across a brown field. Newman then spent about another 100 pages creating his masterpiece, noble hero (1950-51), thin lines of white and black cut through a crimson object nearly 18 feet across.

It is easy to imagine a shorter version of this book, periodically weighed down by running citations in reviews and Barnett Newman’s dense, sometimes incoherent writings. It sounds easy to read, but it’s not.

But Amy Newman is a dynamic storyteller who thinks it’s worth spending so much time with a man who can be so annoying. She was not kind to him: she painted Newman as an easily angered alcoholic (“everything irritated him,” she noted), and she often questioned his self-mythology.

Yet she was also a curious biographer, determined to understand her bizarre subjects. Watch the exciting part broken obeliska 1963-67 sculpture that resembles the broken top of an obelisk, inverted on a triangular base. The sculpture has been interpreted as a response to the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., but Amy Newman proposes that it is actually a work about Israel, to which the artist—a “second-generation Zionist,” according to this biography—swore allegiance. Regarding the sculpture, she even noted that “one side—the clearest face, the one he spent countless hours trying to correct—is strikingly similar to Israel’s northern border with Lebanon and the occupied Syrian Golan Heights, as it was drawn on a map printed in a newspaper.” I’m not sure I agree, but the point is truly provocative.

if broken obelisk Does it relate to Newman’s Jewish identity, what other works of his might it have been? Barnett Newman: Here Makes me curious and in a way makes me think more about his art.

It also made me curious to learn more about works I didn’t know about, e.g. Mayor Daley’s Lace Curtains (1968), the barbed wire is splattered with red blood. Mayor Daley is a Chicago politician who sparked controversy when he made an anti-Semitic slur against a Jewish senator. To which Newman said, “Well, if that’s the level he wants to play at, I’m going to play dirty, too.” As this book aptly demonstrates, Newman has essentially been doing just that throughout his career.