Exhibited
New York, Museum of Modern Art; Amsterdam, Stedelijk Museum; London, Tate Gallery and Paris, Galeries Nationales, Grand Palais,
Barnett Newman
, October 1971-December 1972, p. 49, no. 96 (illustrated).
The Baltimore Museum of Art; Detroit Institute of Arts; Chicago, Museum of Contemporary Art; New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art; Amsterdam, Stedelijk Museum; Paris, Centre Georges Pompidou; Cologne, Museum Ludwig and Kunstmuseum Basel,
Barnett Newman: The Complete Drawings
, April 1979-July 1981, pp. 106-107, no. 37 (illustrated).
Minneapolis, Walker Art Center; Saint Louis Art Museum and New York, Pace Wildenstein,
The Sublime is Now: The Early Work of Barnett Newman
, March-November 1994, no. 32 (illustrated).
Washington, D.C., National Gallery of Art,
A Century of Drawing, Works on Paper from Degas to LeWitt
, November 2001-April 2002, pp. 182-183 (illustrated in color).
Notes
Drawings by Barnett Newman are rare, only made in periodic bursts of activity. Most, like the present work, were made between 1944 and 1949 when drawing lay at the forefront of the development of his art and was determining much of the path he took towards the mature style that arrived with his 1948 painting Onement. Newman's drawings were almost always complete and independent works of art in their own right. "I have never worked from sketches" he later said, "never planned a painting, never 'thought out' a painting" (B. Newman cited in B. Richardson, Barnett Newman The Complete Drawings, 1944-1969, exh. cat., The Baltimore Museum of Art, 1979, p. 14). For Newman, his works on paper were not exercises or studies, but self-defining artworks that explored the same possibilities as his paintings through different media.
Untitled, from 1946, is a rare, important fully-realized work made with brush and ink that presents three of the most fundamental forms of Newman's art; the "zip," the "falling form" and the "beam" in a dramatic conjunction. It is the largest of a sequence of three drawings in which Newman explores the pictorial effect of these three elements in various combinations and intensities. Using only black ink brushed over a coarse ground paper to give a textured and atmospheric background that some critics, to Newman's annoyance, compared to Max Ernst's frottages, this drawing has a powerful painterly texture that draws heavily on the media from which it is made. It is also, according to Brenda Richardson, author of the catalogue raisonné of Newman's drawings, one of the very few drawings by the artist to relate directly to one of his paintings-- The Beginning of 1946. The Beginning is an appropriately titled, major work from the same year that presents the same combination of "zip," "falling form" and "beam" in the right hand part of the picture and refers to the primal act of creation.
Before Newman arrived at the "zip" as the single, existential, uniting as well as dividing element of the canvas space in the pictorial epiphany that was Onement, he spent much of the years 1945-1948 investigating the similar effects of vertical forms on the spatial "void" of the empty canvas. Untitled belongs to a period in which Newman sought to evoke the drama and expressive effect of these vertical forms on this void by feathering in an "atmosphere" that enhanced their dramatic and existential power. For Newman, even at this stage, before the revelation he attained in Onement, these vertical forms were indicative of the presence of man-- the only animal who walks upright. While he would later reject the expressive generation of "atmosphere" as an artificial, illusory and unnecessary embellishment, the existential drama of the vertical and the "zip" in particular, would remain. The "zip" was, as it sounds, a swift "act of division" that Thomas Hess described as "a gesture of separation" in the same way that "God separated light from darkness, with a line drawn in the void. The artist, Newman pointed out, must start, like God, with chaos, the void: with blank color, no forms, textures or details. Newman's first move is an act of division, straight down creating an image. The image not only re-enacts God's primal gesture, it also presents the gesture itself, the zip, as an independent shape-- man...Adam, virile, erect" (Barnett Newman, exh. cat. MoMA , New York, 1971, p. 56).
It was this notion of the vertical contrast as an action, as something that the artist had made in the metaphysical void of the canvas that enlightened Newman in Onement. "What it made me realise," he later said, "is that I was confronted for the first time with the thing that I did, whereas up until that moment I was able to remove myself from the act of painting," adding, "I feel that I brought a new way of seeing which could not have happened if I hadn't brought in a new way of drawing" (Barnett Newman cited in R. Schiff, et al, Barnett Newman: A Catalogue Raisonné, New Haven, 2004, p. 44).
As Untitled demonstrates, Newman's "new way of drawing" involved the almost material displacement of space through the deliberate use of contrasting light and dark, material-like form. Acting like beams of light amidst a material background, the two vertical strips of Untitled seem to permeate the surface of the paper at the same time as they bring it to life. Radiant amidst the mottled surface of the coarse-ground paper and its oriental-like brushwork, they seem to infuse the paper with a seemingly infinite or divine energy. Part of the dynamics of this effect is achieved by, what was in 1946, Newman's relatively new use of masking tape as a way of not only separating a pure white ground from the painted background, but also of establishing a sharp but also jagged edge.
In a move that anticipates Newman's later revelation that the "zip" incorporated the painter's action into the work in such a way that it denied the void and "declared a space," in Untitled, Newman has incorporated the action of using masking tape into the form of the work itself. When removing the strip of masking tape from the "zip" in this work, Newman has not only allowed a serrated edge to remain-- something he regularly did in other drawings from this period-- but he has incorporated an accident in the process into the work. At the bottom of the "zip," the tape clearly broke as it lifted some of the underlying paper away from the work and tore it off. Newman clearly responded to this "event" and allowed its occurrence to define the form of this unique "zip." Lying halfway between automatism and strict rule, Newman's way of working relied on a process of conscious intuition. "It's a joining of the intuitive (which) takes place at once, and then the decision, which takes place at the same time," he once explained. (Barnett Newman, cited in Ibid, p. 58). Interestingly, in this respect, it is a similar "partial" "zip," seemingly disappearing into matter at the bottom and created by chance in this work, that has been deliberately rendered once again in the painting The Beginning.
The "falling form," which forms a brush-marked centre of this work seems to have been used as a deliberate contrast to the two radiant light-like strips on either side. For Newman, all these forms "filling the void" held a mystical significance. For instance, the beam-like strip, as Thomas Hess has indicated, may derive from Newman's readings in Jewish mysticism and specifically a passage from a hymn to "Zoharariel, Adonai, God of Israel" in the Greater Hekhaloth which reads, "with a gleam of His ray he encompasses the sky and His splendour radiates from the heights." "The symbol in which the life of Creator and that of Creation become one," Hess wrote, "is ...a beam of light which, from the dark and abysmal depths of existence and cognition, falls into our eyes and penetrates our whole being" (Barnett Newman, exh. cat. MoMA, New York, 1971, p. 53).
Seeing his art as a beacon of hope in that it was an expression of the action of man in the face of this tragedy, Newman's vertical forms set against an infinite void, took on a clear mystical significance for him. A strong sense of this totemic mysticism is powerfully conveyed through the trinity of form and the heavy atmospheric contrast between fierce illuminating energy and dark textural matter established in this imposing black and white work. Marking the purity of human god-like action/creation into the chaos of the world suggested by the drawing's textured background, Untitled, with its feathered brush marks suggesting a radiating dissemination of primal energy burning itself into the paper, is a searingly bold and elemental work-- one that anticipates many of Newman's greatest pictorial achievements.
