Why did Newman see this simple painting as an important breakthrough?
Barnett Newman, Onement, I, 1948, oil on canvas, 69.2 x 41.2 cm (The Museum of Modern Art, New York). Speakers: Dr. Beth Harris and Dr. Steven Zucker
[0:00] [music]
Dr. Beth Harris: [0:00] Here we are on the fourth floor of the Museum of Modern Art, and we’re looking at a painting called “Onement I,” by Barnett Newman.
Dr. Steven Zucker: [0:10] I love Barnett Newman.
Dr. Harris: [0:11] It’s from 1948.
Dr. Zucker: [0:13] And I love this painting.
Dr. Harris: [0:14] I know, when we walked by you said, “I love this painting.”
Dr. Zucker: [0:16] It’s a tiny little painting. You know, most people walk into the gallery and they look across the gallery on the other side and they see “Vir Heroicus Sublimis,” this huge red canvas.
Dr. Harris: [0:26] By Newman.
Dr. Zucker: [0:27] They completely ignore this tiny little canvas with this simple little line that Newman called the zip.
[0:34] I think if Newman were still alive, and he were in the gallery with us, I think he’d be very proud of “Vir Heroicus,” but I think he would want us to pay attention to “Onement I.” It was a real breakthrough for him in an important way. He actually talked about it in an interview with Thomas Hess, if I remember correctly.
[0:51] He says that he did it on his birthday and he said that he was — I’ll give you the little, short backstory about it — he was preparing the canvas as he often did. If you look at the canvas, it’s got this broad sort of slightly uneven cadmium gray dark background.
[1:06] Before he had laid that down, if you look closely, you’ll see that there’s a piece of masking tape, just simple three-quarter-inch masking tape that goes down the center. What he would often do is he would paint up the background a bit, and then he would remove the tape and then he would have this stark white zip that would be going down the center of it.
[1:22] This time he decided, he said, to just impulsively take some cadmium red light and paint a line right down on top of that masking tape.
Dr. Harris: [1:32] Is that masking tape still there, underneath there?
Dr. Zucker: [1:34] It’s still there, can you see the ridge?
Dr. Harris: [1:35] In this case, he never removed the masking tape.
Dr. Zucker: [1:38] That’s right, and then what he says…this is great, I love this. He took a chair, he sat down in front of it, he stopped painting and he decided he had done something really important, and he sat back to think about what it was.
[1:48] Now, Newman, you have to understand, was a really interesting guy. He’d gone to City College, he had been a philosophy major, he had actually run for mayor of New York on the artist ticket. Obviously, he didn’t win. He was an ornithologist. He really was a very cerebral guy.
Dr. Harris: [2:02] What is it that you think that he thought he did?
Dr. Zucker: [2:04] Well, art historians have been arguing about that for a long time. Some art historians see this as really a biblical image. There is a long line of art history that sees his childhood in an Orthodox Jewish environment as being expressed in this notion of a biblical origin, the primary division.
[2:24] If you think about the first pages of the Bible, of the Book of Genesis.
Dr. Harris: [2:27] The dividing of light from darkness.
Dr. Zucker: [2:30] Of male from female, of good from evil, yes, exactly right.
Dr. Harris: [2:33] The land and the sea.
Dr. Zucker: [2:34] That’s right. Other art historians, who I tend to prefer actually, disagree with that to a large extent and see this as a much more formal and much more, I think, intellectually rooted set of ideas.
[2:46] Let me step back from that though and just say that I think what Newman saw was a registration of impulse. That his impulse to paint that cadmium red light down the center, which had not been preconceived, was itself the thing that he was valuing here. It was a kind of unexpected turn. That impulsiveness, that moment of creative energy was signified here. That’s what he was interested in.
Dr. Harris: [3:13] But artists do that all the time. They start painting and then they…
Dr. Zucker: [3:17] They go somewhere else.
Dr. Harris: [3:17] They go somewhere else. They have an impulse and their brush takes them somewhere else.
Dr. Zucker: [3:21] It’s true, but this is such a purified expression of it. It’s so elemental. That line, let’s look at it for a second. It’s not a horizontal line, although he did occasionally do that. It’s vertical, and as you stand in front of it, you’re not standing in front of this painting to the side.
[3:36] You’re standing almost directly in front of it. That’s what people do. People align themselves to his zips. They are vertical. They’re the human figure. In fact, there have been some efforts to parallel the line of Newman’s zip with say, Giacometti’s very tall, thin figures.
Dr. Harris: [3:53] Yeah, it reminded me of that.
Dr. Zucker: [3:55] I think there may be something to that, because in some ways I think that that zip is a mirror. It’s a very abstracted mirror of the human in space, of the figure looking at themselves in a kind of isolation.
Dr. Harris: [4:07] So you think that by painting the tape, it was a declaration of human presence?
Dr. Zucker: [4:14] And individuality, yeah. I think there’s something inherently…
Dr. Harris: [4:17] “I’m here” kind of thing.
Dr. Zucker: [4:19] That’s right. It’s really existentialist. If you think about when this was painted in the late ’40s existentialism was very powerful. This was the years immediately after the Second World War.
[4:28] If you think about Newman’s concern for the concentration camps, which had just really became widely understood in the US — this idea of people pushed together — here we have, in a sense, this assertion of the American individual, of this figure in isolation.
Dr. Harris: [4:42] An idea of individuality, but also personal freedom.
[4:46] [music]
