Barnett Newman's Who's Afraid of Red, Yellow and Blue

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Bridging the Generation Gaps in Barnett Newman's Who's Afraid of Red, Yellow and Blu

Author(s): Sarah K. RichSource: American Art, Vol. 19, No. 3 (Fall 2005), pp. 16-39Published by: The University of Chicago Press on behalf of the Smithsonian American Art MuseumStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/500230 .

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16 Summer 2005



17 American Art

Bridging the Generation Gaps in Barnett NewmWho’s Afraid of Red, Yellow and Blue?

Sarah K. Rich It is easy to see why Barnett Newman’sWho’s Afraid of Red, Yellow and Blue paintings might intimidate some of their

viewers. The four-canvas group, createdbetween 1966 and 1970, vibrates withbold, unapologetic fields of red deliveredon a scale that meets or exceeds many ofNewman’s other works.1 The paintingsare powerful in their visual effect andchallenging in their structure. They defythe viewer to locate any single organizingprinciple that unites them. Though thecanvases share the common denomina-tor of the three primary colors, theyvary in surface quality, scale, orientation,

pigments used, and the distribution of“zips” (Newman’s word for his verticalstripes). A hard-edged ultramarine bandon the left of Who’s Afraid I (frontispiece)opposes the conspicuous brushstrokes onthe yellow edge at right, and the verticalsserve to contain the red field in between. While the center seems to float somewherein that red field of the first painting, thecentral meridian of Who’s Afraid II (fig. 1)is firmly anchored with a blue stripe, andyellow announces the sides of that secondcanvas. Number III (fig. 2) expands the

earliest work in the series to a horizontalrather than vertical format, as if the artisthad stretched the first canvas, amplifyingthe central red so much that the new work takes up a full eighteen feet, one of

Newman’s favorite dimensions. The finpainting (fig. 3) retains the large laterascale but revives the use of the blue zip

the middle of the canvas, and, for oncethe broad red ground yields equal spaca brilliant yellow.

The Who’s Afraid of Red, Yellow anBlue pictures, as their title indicates, and were very much about fear, even Newman attempted to qualify that fe with a question mark. In this respect tare not so different from Newman’s prous efforts—“fear,” after all, was one odefining emotions of his generation. Aabstract expressionist, Newman mature

as an artist during the most horrifyingevents of World War II. To acknowledthe capacity of human beings to destrothemselves and their world, he producpaintings that were meant, in part, toovercome viewers with sublimity—tomake viewers acknowledge the existentdrama of their humanity. “Modern mahis own terror,” Newman famously wrin 1946.2

“Fear” was a bit passé, a bit too sinchowever, by the time Newman producthe Who’s Afraid paintings in the late

1960s, an age of stoic minimalism anironic pop. Thus the mission of the fcanvas group was to return feelings lifear to the emotional palette of art maSomehow Newman had to argue for

Volume 19, Number 3 © 2005 Smithsonian Institu

Barnett Newman, Who’s Afraid ofRed, Yellow and Blue I , 1966. Oil,75 x 48 in. Collection of DavidGeffen, Los Angeles



1 Barnett Newman, Who’s Afraidof Red, Yellow and Blue II , 1967.

Acrylic, 120 x 102 in. StaatsgalerieStuttgart, Germany

http://www.jstor.org/action/showImage?doi=10.1086/500230&iName=master.img-001.jpg&w=527&h=623



19 American Art

emotional turbulence in opposition to thecool, matter-of-fact characteristics of thecontemporary art scene; for without sub-limity, his paintings would merely serve asexamples of good form and his importancemight fade. So as much as the four-canvasgroup was about the epic terror of abstractexpressionism, the paintings also revealed amore intimate and instrumental concern.They expressed Newman’s anxiety about

his place in the art world, his worriesabout becoming obsolescent in a youngerart environment. The trick, then, was forNewman to rise to the challenge of the artclimate of the 1960s in two ways: by con-vincing newer artists that “fear” remained aviable subject for art, and by making themtremble before the stunning example of hiscontinuing potency.

Newman’s interest in and influenceon such younger artists as RobertRauschenberg, Gene Davis, Dan Flavin,and Larry Poons have been well estab-

lished.3 Far less has been said, however,about the ways in which Newman’sanxiety about his own late arrival asa major artist manifested itself in hisartistic practices. The reluctance to

discuss these concerns about his repution may relate to the terms in whichintergenerational influence has beendiscussed in art history. Many descriptof such relationships have relied on HaBloom’s Anxiety of Influence , a 1973book that establishes different scenarioin which creative individuals—so-callstrong poets—suffer from Oedipal anabout the influence of their poetic fath

According to Bloom, artistic sons rebeby engaging in inventive strategies of(mis)interpretation of their forefathersthus creating a space in which they caproduce their own work.4 As valuable Bloom’s model has been, it suffers fromlack of cultural and historical specificithat renders invisible the intergeneratiocrisis found in Newman’s milieu. Bloomodel presumes a top-down arrangemin which sons fear fathers. But what abthe father who fears erasure by his son

More useful, perhaps, is the rhetor

of the generation gap that emerged inthe mid-1960s, the decade of Newmasuccess. In that period academics andpopular pundits had begun to theorizthe notion of generational difference

2 Barnett Newman, Who’s Afraidof Red, Yellow and Blue III ,1966–67. Oil, 96 x 214 in.Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam




a new way that Bloom would later invert.In March 1969, for example, anthropolo-gist Margaret Mead delivered a seriesof lectures at the American Museum ofNatural History in New York, publisheda year later as Culture and Commitment: A Study of the Generation Gap. She orga-nized world cultures according to three

stages of generational interaction: theprefigurative, cofigurative, and postfigura-tive.5 According to Mead, postfigurativesocieties tend to be isolated, nonindus-trialized societies in which information

and cultural practices follow a top-downarrangement from older to youngergenerations. There change is slow, thelives of parents virtually indistinguishablfrom the lives of their children. Eldershave learned from their parents a sense ohistory as something that is unchangingand teach their children to think of it as

changeless. By contrast, Mead argued, inthe 1960s the United States and most ofthe industrialized world had reached thefinal moments of the cofigurative stage.Typical cofigurative cultures would be

20 Fall 2005

3 Barnett Newman, Who’s Afraid ofRed, Yellow and Blue IV , 1969–70.

Acrylic, 108 x 238 in. StaatlicheMuseen zu Berlin–PreussischerKulturbesitz, Nationalgalerie undVerein der Freunde der National-galerie, Berlin




21 American Art

immigrant communities of industrializingareas in which children often assume agreater level of responsibility and genera-tions co-influence each other. Childrenmay learn languages and other skillsnecessary for family survival, while oldergenerations still impart to the youngmore traditional, yet indispensable,

forms of knowledge. In a cofigurativeculture it is expected that experiences will differ from generation to generation,though such changes are easily absorbedinto daily life and elders determine the

conditions by which change is perceivMead further suggested that the Un

States was on the threshold of a prefigutive stage, in which children have to“teach their parents well.” World Warand postwar developments had turnedthe older generation into “immigrants time,” as change shifted from a geograpto a temporal model. Rapid technologadvances such as the advent of televisiospace exploration, and the atom bomboccurred within the span of one lifetimMead reminded her audience.

[H]aving moved into a present for whichnone of us was prepared by our under-standing of the past . . . all of us who grew up before World War II are pioneeimmigrants in time who have left behinour familiar worlds to live in a new age

under conditions that are different fromany we have known. . . . The young gention, however, the articulate young rebelall around the world who are lashingout against the controls to which they arsubjected, are like the first generation bointo a new country. They are at home intime. Satellites are familiar in their skieThey have never known a time when wadid not threaten annihilation.6

In this prefigurative stage no one

could depend on knowledge of thepast, and elders needed to rely on thinsights and lessons of the young. Sua scenario produced a crisis as the olgeneration no longer enjoyed a positof privilege as the guardians of knowland culture. Older generations mighcling to authority and be ill-equippedrespond productively to young peopleand the changing world. The resultingeneration gap was a function of the sin pedagogical direction (from the youto the old, rather than vice versa) and

reluctance of elders to adapt. Mead cationed that the American generation gin the late 1960s would only be bridgif the older generation would allow itto absorb lessons of the young—if “in




minds of both the young and the old,communication can be established again.But,” she continued, “as long as anyadult thinks that he, like the parents andteachers of old, can become introspective,[and] invoke his own youth to under-stand the youth before him, then he islost.” Mead concluded:

[I]n this new culture it will be the child— and not the parent and the grandparentthat represents what is to come. Insteadof the erect, white-haired elder, who, in postfigurative cultures, stood for the pastand the future in all their grandeur andcontinuity, the unborn child, already con-ceived but still in the womb, must becomethe symbol of what life will be like.7

Mead was a member of Newman’s

“white-haired” generation, and her earlieranthropological work had influenced anumber of abstract expressionists.8 Whileit is unlikely that Newman attended herlectures at the museum or read her book,she spoke from the same place, time, andpredicament in which he found himself.Like Newman, she was a weathered elderstruggling to adapt to accelerating change.However, her advocacy of a prefigurativeorganization of society was probablytoo radical for Newman, who was not

prepared to abdicate artistic authorityentirely. Rather, Newman exemplified theambivalent condition of the elder strad-dling the pre- and cofigurative stages. Likemany older people in the 1960s, Newmanacknowledged that the young were usher-ing in a new stage of culture but was loathto surrender the potency that previousstages would have granted members of hisgeneration. He was thus an immigrant-artist in time. Not wanting to relinquishhis position of command, yet not wantingto be left behind because of his inability

to learn from the young, Newman wouldengage the artistic lessons of youngerartists. But he would do so only (in whatMead might have considered regression)to argue for his value as an old master. It

was in this spirit that Newman producedand exhibited his Who’s Afraid paintings.

Newman introduced the first threecanvases at a watershed 1969 exhibit atKnoedler & Company in New York—thfirst gallery he had allowed to handle

exclusive sales of his work since leavingBetty Parsons’s stable in 1951. The venue was new, and so were the paintings. Withthe exception of Tundra (1950) andCathedra (1951), the show consisted of works created after 1960, many of whichhad never been publicly displayed. Indeedperhaps to remind himself or the peopleat Knoedler of the rejuvenation ritual theexhibit was to accomplish, Newman jottea short note (fig. 4) at the top of the floorplan for the show: “8 paintings in the last2 years / 10 paintings never exhibited.”9

The Knoedler show was to beNewman’s declaration of victory to anart world that, in previous decades, hadfound him negligible. The 1940s and1950s saw Newman engaged in a long,

22 Fall 2005

4 Barnett Newman’s floor planfor solo exhibition at Knoedler& Company, New York, 1969.Graphite, 11 x 8 ½ in. BarnettNewman Foundation, New York




23 American Art

slow struggle for success. As one of theearly participants in the New York School,he had contributed critical essays andcanvases that would reflect and eventu-ally influence the course of abstractexpressionism, but he was often betterknown in those early years as a lobby-ist for metaphysical agendas recognized

in other artists’ work. Even by 1948, when Newman developed his signature“zip”—a vertical stripe that punctuatedhis abstract canvases—the artist did notreceive the attention enjoyed by col-leagues like Willem de Kooning and Jackson Pollock. He remained an “under-known” until his one-artist show at theFrench and Company gallery in 1959.10 With that exhibit Newman gained seriousattention from critics and, more impor-tant perhaps, from a pride of younger

(mostly male) artists. Newman reachedthe zenith of his success at the age of fifty-four and on the threshold of the 1960s—a

decade in which critics usually referredabstract expressionism in the past tens

Newman reminded critics many timthat the Knoedler show was to featurenew works and would be his first soloexhibit in ten years—a reintroductiondemonstrating the viability of his worka new decade. And most critics who w

reviews assumed that the show addressthose younger color-field painters whodepended so conspicuously on Newmaexample. Elizabeth Baker’s preview in ARTNews primed the critical audience just such a reaction:

Newman’s latest work bears unmistakabledence of his alertness to new challenges; umost of his colleagues of the 1940s and ’5he has in a sense been forced by the situatwhich he himself helped to create, to deal

a set of new conditions for art. Being whaand who he is, he could not remain disen gaged from the possibility of being considea “bridge” to the work which has grown oof his. . . . [I]t is quite possible to see [thiswork] as resulting from a generalized diawith the present.11

The attributes of many paintings atKnoedler demonstrated Newman’s skiat absorbing the influence of younger“hard-edge” abstract artists. Like thecanvases of Ellsworth Kelly, the fieldsand lines in paintings such as Now II(1967) were crisp and unadulterated bfacture, and the surfaces of pictures lik Anna’s Light (1968) were, in the wordreviewer Douglas Davis, “as smooth as well-finished refrigerator.” Two triangpaintings, Jericho and Chartres (bothcompleted in 1969), also clearly engagthe shaped canvas that had preoccupiFrank Stella since the mid-1960s.12

Such prefigurative influence on hiWho’s Afraid of Red, Yellow and Blue

paintings is not as easy to describe.Newman tried to explain his goals fothat group in a statement published iMarch 1969 in Art Now: New York (sboxed text).13

Barnett Newman From Art Now: New York (March 1969)

I began this, my first painting in the series, “Who’s Afraid of Red, Yellowand Blue,” as a “first” painting, unpremeditated. I did have the desirethat the painting be asymmetrical and that it create a space differentfrom any I had ever done, sort of—off balance. It was only after I had

built up the main body of red that the problem of color became crucial, when the only colors that would work were yellow and blue. It was at this moment that I realized that I was now confrontingthe dogma that color must be reduced to the primaries, red, yellow, andblue. Just as I had confronted other dogmatic positions of the purists,neo-plasticists and other formalists, I was now in confrontation withtheir dogma, which had reduced red, yellow and blue into an idea-didact, or at best, had made them picturesque. Why give in to these purists who have put a mortgage on red, yellowand blue, transforming these colors into an idea that destroys them ascolors?

I had, therefore, the double incentive of using these colors to express what I wanted to do—of making these colors expressive rather thandidactic and of freeing them of the mortgage. Why should anybody be afraid of red, yellow and blue?

BARNETT NEWMAN



As is typical with many of Newman’s

commentaries, this short essay is moreproblematic than explanatory. Newman’sstated resistance to a “dogma” of colorassumes a great deal of understandingon the reader’s part. His proclaimeddesire to produce work that will be “offbalance” is confusing. And especiallybaffling is the real estate terminologyNewman uses to describe the “mortgage”on primary colors. All of these enigmaticpoints, however, relate to the ways in which intergenerational conflict operated

in the paintings.Newman’s reference to the “mort-gage” on colors might not have seemedso odd to readers familiar with the criti-cal and social discussion surroundinghis work. Thomas Hess, longtime editorof ARTNews , also related Newman’s work to real estate operations andarchitectural change in the cataloguehe wrote to accompany the Knoedlerexhibit. The catalogue, the first of twomonographs Hess (fig. 5) would entitleBarnett Newman, was going to be the

first book-length work on the artist and,as such, needed to provide biographicalinformation and analyses of individual works, even as it also had to argue forNewman’s place in the newer art context

of the 1960s. Hess turned to metaphoremerging from Newman’s architecturalenvironment and began with this curiounarrative:

We had gone to Barnett Newman’s studioon Front Street to see the “big red paint-ing” before the landlord evicted him andturned the building over to the wreckersto make way for a new glass and steelskyscraper. . . . The oil paint had beenstroked to a silky perfection; every detail ofedge, corner and plane had been adjustedand made to count—it indicated thesame passion for serious work that, in adifferent mode, had inspired the architectand craftsmen who built these commer-cial offices for the East River docks someone hundred and fifty years before. The painting’s image, however, was, is, new. “I

had this red” explained Newman, referringto an earlier work, “about 3 feet wide,and I saw a way to stretch it; I wanted tosee if I could pull it out to 18 feet.” . . .Something transcendental, something forthe future has taken place. Meanwhile,outside the window, where an arm or a leof the new office building screens the viewto the river with a wall of blank fatuity,modern architecture suddenly seems quaina bit like Pop Art, old-fashioned, HighCamp.14

The “big red painting” was Who’s Afraid of Red, Yellow and Blue III ,stretched out, as Newman had describedit, from the format of Who’s Afraid I .Hess’s recruitment of pop in respect toNewman’s work and its architecturalcontext is notable here, as he had previ-ously contended that pop “developed with clockwork logic from the as-sumptions of Abstract Expressionism,”having learned from the first-generationNew York School that “Art can be

Anything.”15 But in Hess’s monographintroduction, abstract expressionism’soffspring curiously represent the anti-quated, due to pop’s ability to attachitself to the obsolete, the about-to-be

24 Fall 2005

5 Thomas Hess. Photograph from ARTNews 77 (September 1978): 77




25 American Art

past—and vulgar modern architecturecould not help but look passé whencompared with the timeless expres-sions of Newman’s work. By contrast,Newman’s new forms seemed, for Hess,to maintain an authentic relationshipto the past with their commitment totraditional craftsmanly values. The big

red painting, through Newman’s tenderapplication of paint and careful workingof the edges, became a monument togood workmanship, reminiscent ofthe less alienating commercial (but

not yet corporate) architecture arounNewman’s Front Street studio. In Hedescription, Newman’s connection tothe future was genuine as well, becauthe older artist’s potency hinged not novelty but on his resistance to fashiNewman’s work would endure—rubnotwithstanding.

Hess’s parable of architectural obsocence presumed a New York readershfamiliar with current urban renewalscandals. In 1966, the year Newmanbegan his Who’s Afraid paintings, thecity of New York had begun an ag-gressive demolition schedule to razedozens of nineteenth-century walkuaround (and including) his downtowstudio, making way for the Mies vander Rohe–like skyscrapers that woullater form the financial district skyli

As part of the development, the cityPlanning Commission allowed privacompanies to destroy the smaller blocnorth of Battery Park to clear space “superplots” from which their massicorporate headquarters could sproutNewman was furious about the desttion of his neighborhood and docu-mented his building with photograpbefore his eviction. He and his wife, Annalee, kept in their files snapshot Jonathan Holstein of Newman amb

along the cobblestone streets still lin with 1830s Greek-revival buildings had housed the coffee and spice companies of lower Manhattan (figs. 6, Along with these intimate shots, theNewmans kept a larger-scale aerial ptograph of their neighborhood, showihis studio building among the fewtemporary survivors (fig. 8). Newmastudio was in the white edifice, threebuildings from the left in the centrablock.

The financial district renovation

was just one of several controversialdevelopment schemes of the decade attract the nervous attention of architectural historians and critics, amongthem New York Times columnist Ada

6 Jonathan Holstein, BarnettNewman Examines Lower

Manhattan Construction Sites ,1968. Photograph, 4 x 6 in.Barnett Newman Foundation,New York

7 Jonathan Holstein, BarnettNewman Walks down Front Street ,1968. Photograph, 4 x 6 in.

Barnett Newman Foundation,New York





Louise Huxtable. Writing specificallyabout Newman’s neighborhood, shecomplained in a 1967 essay headlined“Singing the Downtown Blues” that thePlanning Commission had neglected tomark many buildings as landmarks andthus had foreclosed on any opportunityto preserve a heterogeneous mix ofstructures. Huxtable did not protestthe insertion of mega-skyscrapers that,by virtue of new building technologies, would tower over architecture from anearlier time. Rather, she worried thatthe commission had no overarchingplan for a more graceful integrationof old and new. Big business now was making all the decisions about

the renovation process without properpublic intervention, and maximumefficiency was allowed to outweighaesthetic, historical, or social concerns.“Instead of coordinated planning anddesign, the modus operandi has beensimply to milk the most out of eachseparate, negotiable parcel indepen-dently,” Huxtable said. “The architectsof the blockbusters for two of the hugeplots have no idea what will be on thethird. . . . Actually it is quite clear what will be on that third site: the biggest depossible. . . . Human amenities? Urbanaesthetics? Municipal sense? Publicgood? None of it balances against privateprofit.”16

26 Fall 2005

8 Carl Gossett Jr., ConstructionSites around Front Street, NewYork , 1967. Barnett NewmanFoundation, New York © 1967The New York Times Company,Reprinted by permission




27 American Art

To make her point, Huxtable pro-vided a photograph of the developingregion in question—a print of the samelarge-scale photograph by New YorkTimes photographer Carl Gossett Jr.that Newman kept in his files.17 Hisstudio building won its bittersweetfifteen minutes of fame in the Times asan example of the “old” on the verge ofbeing swept away by newer architecturaltrends. In fact, Huxtable had madeconstruction in the downtown area afocus of her columns for several years.Her 1966 article headlined “The WorldTrade Center: Who’s Afraid of the BigBad Bldgs?” was a bit more optimisticthan the later “Down Town Blues.” Atthe time, demolition had not yet begunand plans for the twin towers were stillon the drawing board. And Huxtable,

never a simple advocate of all things oldand quaint, was still appreciative of New York’s ability to expand and develop.She reminded readers that many of theolder buildings in the financial district,about which New Yorkers were in aprotective frenzy, had seemed grosslymodern to their nineteenth-centuryviewers; the New York public had to beflexible to allow for the city’s growth.Nevertheless, Huxtable ended her pieceon a cautionary note. The World Trade

Center was going to be big—bigger thananything previously done—and it woulddwarf its surroundings, with as-yet-unknown consequences made possibleby new technology. In an unfortunatelyprescient paragraph, Huxtable warned:“Who’s afraid of the big, bad buildings?Everyone, because there are so manythings about gigantism that we justdon’t know. The gamble of triumph ortragedy at this scale—and ultimately itis a gamble—demands an extraordinarypayoff. The Trade Center towers could

be the start of a new skyscraper age orthe biggest tombstones in the world.”18 Huxtable’s column reminds us todaythat the center, on which constructiondid not begin until 1970, was a highly

debated monument to the passage oftime in lower Manhattan, heralding conversion of neighborhoods on theisland’s southern tip from a low-rentdistrict to an increasingly corporatedomain.

What should we make of the coincidence that Newman conceived of hred, yellow, and blue paintings in thesame year Huxtable’s comments ap-peared? Of course, it would be a mistto establish a taut causal relationshipbetween these architectural developmand Newman’s series, just as it wouldbe a mistake to claim that Newman’stitle derived from Huxtable. The storsurrounding these four pictures is mocomplex. But the connection helpsexplain the key tropes of Hess’s introtion as well as the artist’s preoccupati

with real estate in his 1969 Art Now statement. Hess erected his story ofskyscraper crises around the “big redpainting,” Who’s Afraid of Red, Yellowand Blue III , to illustrate Newman’s pdicament. The chief crisis was whethor not Newman would survive in thenew topography of the art world. If hpictures remained standing, would thbecome merely embalmed specimensstyles-gone-by, or would they persist vibrant monuments in a still-develop

terrain?Newman provided an innovativeanswer. According to Hess’s introduction, Newman had entertained thecritic and his entourage at the FrontStreet studio, and then took them ona tour across the East River by way othe Brooklyn Bridge (fig. 9). As Hessdescribed it:

When the light fades, we drive from thstudio to Brooklyn for a seafood dinneexamine some bits and pieces of local

nineteenth-century municipal architectthat have been overlooked by that borouexploiters, then head back to Manhattaover the top span of the Brooklyn BridgIt is a soft June night; the city lights bu



through velvet layers of pollution. The carspeeds up the roadway and then seems towing above a landscape of yellow stars.“We’re at the top of the bridge,” saysBarney, “at the dip in the parabola; weare floating across like”—and he laughs a

bit—“if I may be immodest, like you moveacross the red in my painting.” 19

While the comparison between Who’s Afraid III and the Brooklyn Bridge isremarkable, it would not have been toosurprising to those in Newman’s socialcircle. One of the few good things aboutthe destruction of buildings between hisstudio and the river was that for aboutsix months Newman had an uninter-rupted view of the bridge. More impor-tant, though, was Newman’s use of the

bridge metaphor to explain the miracleof physics he believed Who’s Afraid III ,like the span leading to Brooklyn, hadaccomplished. The challenge lay in hisexperiment with the uninterrupted field

of red. Newman had used this ambitiouamount of cadmium red before, notablyin Vir Heroicus Sublimis (1950–51), buthe had never offered such a wide expansof a single color without the structuralsupports of the zip. The narrow dimen-

sions of the smaller Who’s Afraid of Red,Yellow and Blue I allowed the proximateviewer to see both zips at either end while looking at the entire painting. Thstretched-out version, however, requiredthe viewer either to look from side toside or to retain by memory the presencof yellow and blue on the margins. Withthe wider canvas, Newman pulled thefield to its limit, to the breaking point,to the measure at which the red bridgebetween the two other colors mightcollapse. Newman’s experimentum crucis

was to see if color could hold on itsown without the scaffold of supportingverticals. At its center, as at the topand bottom of the parabolic bridge,the big red canvas put color to the test

28 Fall 2005

9 Jet Lowe, Looking East from the Manhattan Shore at the BrooklynBridge, with the Manhattan Bridgein the Background , 1979. Photo-graph. Prints and PhotographsDivision, Library of Congress,

Washington, D.C.




29 American Art

by making it support the weight of thepainting—a task usually left to composi-tional elements such as line or shape.

This shifting analogy for the Who’s Afraid paintings from the immobilemonument (a building) to the moredynamic span (a bridge) pertains tothe kind of complex perceptual workNewman had tried to provoke withhis paintings throughout his career.He had long deployed the zip, forexample, to activate within the viewera self-conscious realization of his or herown body and perceptual effort. Arthistorian Yve-Alain Bois described thisoperation in his now canonical essay“Perceiving Newman,” which discussesthe off-center perceptual experienceoperating in Abraham (1949). A darkzip articulates the center of the canvas

with one edge, but then throws thecenter off because the zip is so widethat it makes the painting asymmetrical.Pondering Newman’s achievement, Boisconcludes, “Precisely because he useda symmetrical division but managed todestroy its power by the most subduedlateral displacement, he makes us awarethat ‘nothing is more difficult than toknow precisely what we see ,’ that ourperception is necessarily ambiguousand aporetic, that, precisely because we

are oriented in the world, we cannotever reach once and for all anything weperceive.”20

With such cunning perceptual shifts,Newman caused the viewer to questionhis or her own connection to the worldthrough the senses. Human beings arenot omnipotent, not infinite in timeand space; the mortal, finite viewer mustalways see things partially, in an unstablefashion. A person can never possess athing entirely through perception. Thecompositional complexities in Newman’s

work often resulted in what he describedas a sense of “sublimity”—a sense offear. Part of the “terror” relied on thefear that accompanies human perceptualfinitude.

There is no central zip to activatesuch insecurities in Who’s Afraid III , the compositional instability achievein Newman’s earlier work remains inthe later painting. Part of the percepchallenge operates through scale—thpicture is too big to be visually pos-sessed at one time. The distance betwthe marginal zips makes it impossiblfor the viewer to apprehend their trudimensions simultaneously. But thebridge analogy keys up this effect. Ocannot occupy a bridge easily—it is space between places. And one rarelysees a bridge all at once; it is difficulfor a human viewer, without mechanassistance, to see it straight from theside. Views of bridges like the famouspan to Brooklyn are usually obtaine(as from Newman’s studio window)

with an oblique perspective offeringa dramatic diminution in size alongorthogonal lines. But at the middle othe bridge—the point at which Newcommented on its similarity to his ping—a viewer is in a state of greatestperceptual tension. Between sky andground, and between the banks of ariver, at the greatest height and yet tgreatest deracination, a person traverthe bridge feels his or her own percetual ground give way.

Who’s Afraid III was a bridge acro which perceivers were invited to travbut the four-canvas group as a whole would also serve to bridge intergenetional gaps that Newman saw betwehis work and that of younger artists.Newman’s efforts to create a new meof activating perceptual insecurities with canvases such as Who’s Afraid II were meant to impress the emotivepower within his abstract expressionethos on younger artists. At the samtime, his use of primary colors woul

address and even question approacheto hue adopted by later generations artists.

Even though Newman debuted hiWho’s Afraid pictures in a show mean



to demonstrate his currency in theyounger art world, most scholars havediscussed those paintings in respect to work by the neoplasticists—an olderartistic generation with whom Newmanhad an antagonistic relationship. Thereis good reason for such emphasis, ofcourse, as Newman mentions thatDutch modernist movement in hiscommentary on the series. Over thecourse of his career, Newman had manytimes contrasted his goals with what heconsidered the gentrified formalism ofPiet Mondrian’s painting. The modestsize of most neoplasticist canvasesseemed precious when compared withthe ambitious dimensions of manyabstract expressionist works. Further,for Newman, Mondrian’s tasteful ar-rangements of lines and primary colors

seemed an exercise in mere decoration when opposed to the epic subject matterso important to his generation.21 And it was neoplasticism’s strict palettes, oftenconsisting solely of “the primaries,” thatmade most abstract expressionists afraidof red, yellow, and blue. Mondrianand many of his colleagues may haveconsidered the distillation of paintingto black, white, and the primary colorsa means of picturing the absolute, theessence of painting. For most abstract

expressionists, however, that act of distil-lation seemed like sterilization—a meansof eradicating the most basic, and evenbase, attributes of hue.

Newman’s relationship to color was characteristic for members of theNew York School. Like many abstractexpressionists, he had never used allthree primaries in the same paintingbefore the 1960s. Though he frequentlyenjoyed applying broad fields of a singleprimary color such as red to canvaseslike Vir Heroicus Sublimis , he usually

interrupted those fields with zips ofnon-prismatic hues. In his writingsand painted works, Newman, unlikeMondrian, preferred intuitive, “undog-matic” color combinations that deviated

from predetermined color systems.22 Newman’s favorite colors were often raand elemental. From the muddy brownof canvases like Onement I (1948) to thsuite of canvases from 1954 to 1955,such as The Gate featuring an almost-institutional mint, he often entirelyavoided primary hues.

When writing as a critic, Newmanalso tended to privilege painters whoenjoyed off-colors. In his discussion of Adolph Gottlieb and Rufino Tamayoin 1945, Newman mentioned that heappreciated the ways in which they “lovearth colors, and have revived the use obrown.” Brown pictures, he commented“have almost died out in modern art”due to the influence of the impression-ist palette. But “from the high tonesaround orange to the deep diapason of

the black browns, these [two] men havebeen playing a somber music of intense warmth that is a relief from the stridentnotes of many of the pictures of ourtimes. They have succeeded in expressingman’s elemental feelings, the majesticforce of our earthly ties and natures”and they “confront us with the prob-lems of man’s spirituality.” In anotheressay, “The Plasmic Image,” Newmandefined the allure of Oceanic sculptureas a function of the material basis of its

color. He remarked, “The intention isfor the color, the stone to carry withinitself that element of thought that willact purely on the onlooker’s sensibility topenetrate to the innermost channels inhis being.”23

Newman and other abstract expres-sionists preferred non-prismatic hues inpart because they believed such colorstypified an authentic connection to the world supposedly enjoyed by “primitive”civilizations. For cubists, burnt siennasand umbers referenced the colors tradi-

tionally used by painters to create spacethrough chiaroscuro. But for Newman, jade greens and earthy browns (brownsthat on another level commemoratedexcrement and other categories of the

30 Fall 2005



31 American Art

“dirty” unassimilated by bourgeois society)derived from cultures in more immediatecontact with the earth—nonindustrialcivilizations that associated colors directly with the materials (earth and stone andbody) that produced them.24

Newman almost never titled

his canvases after the colors he

used, and his aversion to color

titles was shared by many of his

colleagues.

Further, muddier colors were attrac-tive to many abstract expressionists likeNewman because they seemed to elude

containment by language.25 Abstractexpressionist colors, particularly in theearly stages during the 1940s, often slidindescribably from browns to grays, andfrom beiges to greens. This sliding-scaleapproach to hue enhanced the irrationalaspects of color, ensuring that such hues would be difficult to label according toany set vocabulary of color names such as“the spectrum” or “the primaries.”

Consequently, while Newman dis-liked earlier, less “authentic” approaches

to color exemplified by artists such asthe neoplasticists, he also disliked the ways in which color could be trivializedby the younger generation. Artists likeEllsworth Kelly and Frank Stella, forexample, delighted in literal approachesin which chroma could be presentedas a self-evidentiary visual fact—anisolated color served cold without anymetaphysical trimmings. This youngergeneration of painters had begun to treatcolor as a kind of Duchampian foundobject. They applied colors directly to

the canvas without mixing them, eitheron the palette or on the canvas, tryingto get the paint on the finished work tobe, in Stella’s words, “as good as it was inthe can.”26

When younger painters in the 196used primary colors, they also demonstrated the ease with which those colcould be organized and classified ac-cording to language. Kelly’s mid-196canvases provide the most concreteexample. Around the time that Newmbegan his Who’s Afraid paintings, Ke was working on a number of canvasesuch as Red, Yellow, Blue II (fig. 10) multipanel works such as Three PaneRed, Yellow, Blue (1966) and Untitled(Red, Yellow, Blue) (1965).27 Kelly’scanvases, unsurprisingly consisting ocolors named in the title, emphasizedalways-already-given organization of the names “red,” “yellow,” and “blueremind the viewer that these primarycolors were not chosen by intuition b were adopted from conventional divi

sions and arrangements. The colors oKelly’s paintings from this period aredeadpan, offering no optical surpriseThey suggest no metaphysical mysteor perceptual insecurity, and they areeasy to understand. They are name-able—and named. Even the syntax othe panels—red, yellow, blue—obeysorder described in the title (and reprduces the ordering of colors accordin wavelength).

Newman almost never titled his

canvases after the colors he used, andhis aversion to color titles was sharedmany of his colleagues (Mark Rothkbeing the most notable exception). Tabstract expressionist phobia regardicolor titles and easily “nameable” colbecame more conspicuous in the 196as critics noticed that hard-edge absttionists like Kelly were deliberately uliteral approaches to color and titles weaken their paintings’ emotive punHarold Rosenberg, a tireless defendeof abstract expressionism, reviewed

two New York exhibitions showcasin work by Kelly, Ray Parker, KennethNoland, and others in 1963 under thtitle “Black and Pistachio.” The essaytitle, which evoked associations with



32 Fall 2005

ice-cream parlors, mimicked the way in which even abstract expressionism couldseem frivolous when renamed. “AbstractExpressionism may not be as dead as we keep being told it is, but there isno denying the will to see it dead,”

Rosenberg wrote, noting that youngerartists had found “too much freedom,too much angst” in work by Pollock,de Kooning, Franz Kline, and PhilipGuston. “The paintings of AdolphGottlieb are impeccably organized, withevery relation of hue calculated withmicroscopic finesse; yet to Gottlieb theselucid, calm surfaces signify ‘Blast!’ In apost-Expressionist adaptation, Gottlieb’simage would lose its ominous overtonesand be named ‘Painting’ or ‘Lavenderand Blue.’”28 Rosenberg understood that

hard-edge painters wielded color namingas a means of draining the Sturm undDrang from abstract expressionism. Forhim, their color naming transformedthe white-knuckled expressionism of the

New York School into something lighteeven a bit silly, like the Lichtensteinianpunctuation of “Blast!”

In this context Newman played agambit move by naming the colorsof his Who’s Afraid of Red, Yellow and

Blue paintings. Before the mid-1960s,Newman had occasionally named paintings after the colors in which they werepainted, but usually only canvases inblack and white. It was not until 1966 with the Who’s Afraid pictures that hebegan to label paintings after hues—ashort-lived trend that ended with his Midnight Blue of 1970. There was,however, one earlier instance in whichNewman had made an exception to hisprohibition on color naming. The singloccasion before 1966 was his Yellow

Painting (fig. 11)—a 1949 canvas virtu-ally identical in form to Who’s Afraid ofRed, Yellow and Blue II .29 Although it islarger than Yellow Painting , Who’s AfraidII nearly duplicates the height-width

10 Ellsworth Kelly, Red, Yellow,Blue II, 1965. Acrylic, eachpanel 82 x 61 in. Milwaukee ArtMuseum, Gift of Mrs. HarryLynde Bradley © Ellsworth Kelly




11 Barnett Newman, Yellow Painting ,1949. Oil, 67 x 52 in. NationalGallery of Art, Washington, D.C.,Gift of Annalee Newman, inHonor of the 50th Anniversary ofthe National Gallery of Art




34 Fall 2005

ratio of the earlier painting, and itsdistribution and width of stripes alsodepend on this antecedent. The former work, however, plays with the ambigu-ity of a color title. The “yellow” inYellow Painting describes two differentgolden shades; the darker yellow zip inthe center offsets the lighter color ofthe surrounding fields. The “yellow” inthe title emphasizes the uncontainablequalities of color—the overabundance ofhue that cannot be fully corralled by asingle name.

When Newman recycled the compo-sitional format of Yellow Painting for thesecond canvas of the Who’s Afraid paint-ings, he was engaging in a self-consciousplay in respect to both naming andcolor, as the artist recuperated a format-and-titling strategy he had not employed

for almost twenty years. In naming hisseries after the colors used, Newman, ina rather prefigurative moment, seemedto show that he had learned from hisartistic descendants. He demonstratedthat he was well aware of the new trendregarding color titles, and that he was asfluent in that language as any youngerartist. At the same time, there is a bitof a cofigurative counterpunch here.Through his composition, Newmanargued that his technique of color

naming, which first appeared in the1949 painting, predated the example ofyounger artists. And that earlier paintingeven resisted the banalization Rosenberghad described; Newman flaunted hishistory of fearlessness by alluding to atwenty-year-old example in which hisart had overcome the literalizing effectsof color labels. In doing so, he demon-strated that his epic abstract expression-ist project could not be diminished bycolor titles. He was still the elder.

While the title Who’s Afraid of Red,

Yellow and Blue? purposefully evokesthe color naming and syntax occasionedby “younger” approaches to the pri-maries, Newman’s series sabotages thedeterminate effects of such naming.

In counterdistinction to the youngerexegetes of his work, Newman neverre-created the syntax of the phrase “red,yellow, and blue” through the distri-bution of fields and zips on his fourcanvases. And, unlike Kelly, he nevermaintained any consistency in the sizeof color fields he used. Kelly presentedhis primary colors in equal portions. Thparticular attributes of each individualcolor were thus diminished in favorof a quantitative system that providedoptimal interchangeability. Newman,by contrast, widened and narrowed hisfields, maintaining a more conspicuousconcern for the qualitative properties ofeach hue.

If Newman claimed in his state-ment that he wanted his pictures to be“asymmetrical” and “off balance,” it wa

partly because he wanted to refute theprocedures of such artists as Kelly whono longer privileged colors according totheir particular properties. For Kelly in1966, red was different from yellow andblue, but only according to position, noaccording to the qualities specific to reditself. Since in the Who’s Afraid SeriesNewman would not be using colors likebrown and green—colors whose particularity he had earlier claimed was attacheto the power of certain materials—he

would have to emphasize the featuresof individual hues in other ways. He would have to address Kelly’s systematicand quantitative leveling of color dif-ference by, whenever possible, keepingcolor relationships intuitive—as he said“asymmetrical” and “off balance.”

Symmetry and balance are notnecessarily interchangeable, however.Symmetry implies a perfect mirroring.Balance implies a weighing of qualita-tively different elements so that theyreach a state of relative equilibrium.

Balance was the domain of artists likeMondrian, whose high-style neoplasticist works balanced areas of blue againstothers such as a larger region of redto create a “dynamic equilibrium.”



35 American Art

Symmetry was the means by whichyounger artists like Stella (fig. 12),Kelly, and Donald Judd tried to cir-cumvent the intuitive and artsy choicesmade by painters like Mondrian and,even, Newman. Symmetry was, as

Yve-Alain Bois has noted, the new “anti-compositional” rebuttal to “balance.”30 While balance claimed a space forauthentic artistic decision-making, sym-metry yielded compositional choices to

a preordained system.Newman’s Who’s Afraid pictures test

the tender balance between symmetryand balance. The first and third canvasesof the group, for example, are asym-

metrical in both hue and form. The tzips in each work are of different sizeand different colors. However, these marginal colors still might be considein balance in respect to their effect, ione agrees that blue tends to recede a

yellow tends to advancethe blue and yellow regon both canvases were the same size, the canva would suggest a rotatio(clockwise as seen fromabove); the yellow secti would advance and theblue section would retrBut given that the blueregion is larger than theyellow in both canvasesthe colors compete onequal terms, finding an

equilibrium as the wideblue gains as much attetion as the narrower fieof yellow on the right bvirtue of its size.

Newman further ex-plored blue’s tendency recede in Who’s Afraid Ithe only fully symmetrpicture of the four. Thehe placed blue in thecenter, leaving yellow t

brighten the sides. Thecompositional symmet(the two yellow zips arethe same size and the sdistance from the sidesmight flirt with the noof axial perspective. BuNewman widened the

zip, preventing that darker region froreceding as the center stripe by its sizseems closer to the viewer than the nrower stripes at right and left.

Who’s Afraid I and III are asym-

metrical in both color and form, butin balance in terms of effect. Who’s Afraid II , the only work that is sym-metrical in both color and form, is ain balance in effect. In other words,

12 Frank Stella, Die Fahne Hoch!, 1959. Enamel on canvas,121 ½ x 73 in. Whitney Museumof American Art, New York,Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Eugene M.Schwartz and purchase with fundsfrom the John I. H. Baur Pur-chase Fund, Charles and AnitaBlatt Fund, Peter M. Brant, B. H.Friedman, Gilman FoundationInc., Susan Morse Hilles, LauderFoundation, Frances and SydneyLewis, Albert A. List Fund, SandraPayson, Philip Morris Inc., Mr.and Mrs. Albrecht Saalfield, Mrs.Percy Uris, Warner Communica-

tions Inc., and National Endow-ment for the Arts © 2000 FrankStella/Artists Rights Society(ARS), New York




36 Fall 2005

three of the first works achieve balance,even though I and III depend on asym-metry. Who’s Afraid IV is the only workthat is asymmetrical according to color(a broad area of red on the left opposesa broad area of yellow on the right) andsymmetrical in form (the left and rightregions are the same size, the blue zipdirectly in the center). It is more “offbalance” than the others, however, in

terms of the spatial effects of color. Theprojection of yellow, for the first time,is not offset by a wider blue area asballast.

Newman was exploring, in other words, the variations between twoaltogether different kinds of differenceSymmetry is the differential system whereby two things are identical ac-cording to quality and quantity. Balancis the differential system whereby twoquantitatively different things are equaonly according to quality. Newman’sWho’s Afraid of Red, Yellow and Blueproject creates a system in which twoqualitatively different systems (sym-metry and balance) weigh againsteach other without resolution. He wasnot simply refuting Mondrian’s colordogma. His series was a means of con-

fronting both the new and the old, ofdifferentiating between the equilibriumtypical of earlier modernist canvases anthe symmetry of later modernist artistssuch as Kelly under the rubric of colorThe series was meant to be a mediationa bridge spanning the systems of dif-ference exemplified by the two genera-tions (old and young)—between whichNewman inserted his own practice.

The integration of these two genera-tional modes was anything but benign,

indicated by Newman’s choice of title fothe group. His conception of the seriesin 1966, after all, coincided with thecinematic debut of Edward Albee’s Who Afraid of Virginia Woolf ? —a film thatstunned audiences and shocked censorsin its mobilization of racy expletives,not to mention Elizabeth Taylor’s havinggained twenty pounds to play the role ofMartha. The film was the Life magazinecover story in June 1966, and the subjecof numerous articles in the New YorkTimes and other popular news sources.

By selecting a title that alluded to thisnotorious and much-discussed movie,Newman offered a shorthand summaryof the complex intergenerational relationhis series might perform.31

13 Richard Burton, George Segal,and Elizabeth Taylor in Who’s

Afraid of Virginia Woolf? 1966.

Film still © Warner BrothersEntertainment Inc., Burbank,California




37 American Art

Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf ? — which takes place over the course of oneevening—is an investigation of ill-fatedparent-child relationships (fig. 13).George and Martha, road-weary aca-demics ironically named after the fatherof our country and his wife, wield theirerudite cynicism against a young profes-sor and his wife who have come to themfor guidance. Fifties meet the sixtieshere; middle age encounters youth. Asthe relationship between the older andyounger couples darkens, another invis-ible generation emerges—two imaginedchildren. Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf ? has not one but two fictional pregnan-cies. The wife of the young professor, we eventually discover, was once great with nonexistent child, a hystericalpregnancy. Martha’s boasting about

her son is also a fabrication—another work of fiction she and her husbandenjoy quoting. In the end, George putsa stop to the doubled paternal conflictsthat motivate the evening. In a twiston the Oedipal story, he kills his ownson by vocally narrating the scene ofthis fictional child’s death. The relation-ships between the two couples and withtheir fantasy offspring in Who’s Afraidof Virginia Woolf ? represent permuta-tions on parenthood gone awry. The

nurturing relationship that is expectedfrom parents in an ideal family is trans-formed into a sequence of interlockingperformances, false promises, andmasquerades.

The title’s associations with Albee’splay-turned-movie did a great deal forNewman’s series, aligning the paintings with the notion of Oedipal conflict in which the father emerges (relatively)victorious. Newman, after all, was notunlike George, although it is doubtfulhe would have admitted to the frailty

of Albee’s protagonist. Like George,Newman found himself in a paternal

role that could be at once powerful afragile. As much as Newman hoped treign supreme as a veteran of the art world, his authority (in a prefigurativera of intergenerational conflict) wasunder attack, and it depended on thedeference of younger artists. He coulnot succeed without their approval.

By virtue of the Albee-esque quest“Who’s Afraid?” Newman embedded within his demand for respect a hopethat he might be able to commandfear as well. He formulated his title aa question in part to convince viewerthat he was unafraid. But his courageconfrontation with primary colors walso meant to convince younger painof his superior engagement with coloTo make the new generation feel anx would be to doubly accomplish the

paternal authority Newman asserted.he could make viewers feel the terrorof their perceptual finitude thoughpaintings like Who’s Afraid III , Newm would return painting to the ethos ogeneration and thus command fear arespect as an elder.

The bridge Newman would try tobuild with the Who’s Afraid painting was somewhat wobbly. It was con-structed to mediate the co- and prefrative phases of the intergenerationa

exchange to which he was subjectedThrough the formal attributes of thepictures, the filmic allusions embed-ded in his title, and the architecturametaphors he and his circle deployedexplain the images, Newman hoped span the gap between his work and of younger artists. This required greatransformations, subjecting his abstrexpressionist project to significant psures. But the paintings as a group sported those pressures and bridged tgaps, to such an extent that Newman

work continues to seem rather youneven today.

Photo Credits

16, 18, 19, 20–21, 33, Courtesy ofthe Barnett Newman Foundation,New York. Photos by Bruce White;22, Courtesy of the BarnettNewman Foundation, New York;25 (both), Courtesy of the Barnett

Newman Foundation, New York, with permission of JonathanHolstein



Notes

My thanks to Heidi Colsman-Freyberger ofthe Barnett Newman Foundation for help

with archival materials and for her insightfulcomments on early versions of this paper.Christiane Wisehart provided assistance withthe manuscript and illustrations. CharlotteHoughton made important comments on

an early draft as well. This paper was firstgiven as a Daniel H. Silberberg HonoraryLecture at the Institute of Fine Arts, New

York University, in 2003. A postdoctoral re-search grant from the J. Paul Getty ResearchInstitute, Los Angeles, provided support forthe project. This paper is also being pub-lished with support from the George Deweyand Mary J. Krummrine Endowment.

1 Newman exhibited the first three can-vases in 1969 under the title Who’s Afraidof Red, Yellow and Blue? before he hadcompleted the final painting. Thus mostcritics writing before 1971 addressedthe group as a series of three. Articles

written on the three canvases includePeter Schjeldahl, “New York Letter,” andLawrence Alloway, “Notes on BarnettNewman,” both in Art International 13,no. 6 (Summer 1969): 64–69 and 35–39; and Barbara Reise, “The Stance ofBarnett Newman,” Studio International 179, no. 919 (February 1970): 49–63.

2 For the quote, see Barnett Newman, “Artof the South Seas,” 1946, reprinted inBarnett Newman: Selected Writings andInterviews , ed. John P. O’Neill (New

York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1990), 100 (here-after BN-SWI ).

3 Most recently, Richard Shiff describedNewman’s influence on artists of the1960s in his “Whiteout: The Not-Influence Newman Effect,” in BarnettNewman, ed. Ann Temkin (Philadelphia:Philadelphia Museum of Art, 2002),76–111.

4 Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence:

A Theory of Poetry (New York: OxfordUniv. Press, 1973).

5 Margaret Mead, Culture and Commit-ment: A Study of the Generation Gap (Garden City, N.Y.: Natural History

Press/Doubleday, 1970). For an earlierdiscussion of the term, see C. D. B.Bryan, “Why the Generation GapBegins at 30,” New York Times , July 2,1967, 11, 34–36. See also Pierre Nora,Realms of Memory: The Construction ofthe French Past , vol. 1, trans. Arthur

Goldhammer (New York: ColumbiaUniv. Press, 1996), 499–531.

6 Mead, Culture and Commitment , 58–59.

7 Ibid., 53, 63, and for the quote 68.

8 Michael Leja discusses the importanceof Mead’s work in Reframing AbstractExpressionism: Subjectivity and Paint-ing in the 1940s (New Haven: YaleUniv. Press, 1993), esp. 56–63. See alsoStephen Polcari, Abstract Expressionismand the Modern Experience (Cambridge:Cambridge Univ. Press, 1991), 4–37,passim.

9 At the Knoedler show Newman also dis-played Black Fire I (1961), Shining Forth(To George) (1961), The Moment (1962),The Three (1962), White Fire II (1963),Now II (1967), Anna’s Light (1968), thefirst three Who’s Afraid of Red, Yellow

and Blue paintings, Chartres (1969), and Jericho (1968–69), in addition to thesculptural works Here II (1965), Here III (1966), and Broken Obelisk (1967). See

Alloway, “Notes on Barnett Newman,”for a discussion of his exhibition strategy.

10 Clement Greenberg, who had seen ashow of Newman’s work at Benning-ton College the previous year, organizedthe exhibit. On Greenberg’s role in therejuvenation of Newman’s career, seeThomas Crow, The Rise of the Sixties:

American and European Art in the Era ofDissent (New York: Harry N. Abrams,1996), 60–62.

11 Nearly every review of the show men-tioned Newman’s remarks on this point;see, for example, Douglas Davis, “AfterTen Years, a One-Man Show by Mr.Newman,” National Observer , April 14,1969, 25, and David Shirey, “Barney,”Newsweek , April 14, 1969, 93–94. Forthe quote, see Elizabeth Baker, “BarnettNewman in a New Light,” ARTNews 67,no. 16 (February 1969): 40. Baker com-pared Newman’s canvases with works byFrank Stella, Kenneth Noland, EllsworthKelly, Jules Olitski, Dan Flavin, andseveral pop artists.

12 Davis, “After Ten Years, a One-ManShow by Mr. Newman,” 20. In speakingabout the exhibit with Davis, Newmanreferred to the use of the shaped canvasby younger painters and his willing-ness to exchange ideas: “We’re talking toeach other, as I said. My triangles follow

others who have shaped the canvas.”Newman tempered his statement bysaying, “I know young people are doingtriangles, but for different reasons.”Davis interview notes 1969, KnoedlerFile, Barnett Newman Foundation,New York.

13 The statement was first published in Art Now: New York (March 1969), n.p.along with a color illustration of the fircanvas in the series.

14 Thomas Hess, Barnett Newman (New York: Knoedler Gallery, 1969), 7.

15 Thomas Hess, “Pop and Public,” ARTNews 62, no. 7 (November 1963):23.

16 Ada Louise Huxtable, “Down TownBlues,” New York Times , April 16, 196729–30.

17 It is unclear how Newman obtained hiprint of the image. I would like to thanPaula Pelossi of the Barnett NewmanFoundation for helping me find thisimage.

18 Ada Louise Huxtable, “The World TradCenter: Who’s Afraid of the Big BadBldgs?” New York Times , May 29, 196613–14.

19 Hess, Barnett Newman, 1969, 7.

20 Yve-Alain Bois, “Perceiving Newman,”in Painting as Model (Cambridge, Mass

MIT Press, 1990), 199.

21 The first critics to discuss the Who’s Afraid Series associated it with Piet Modrian in part because the 1971 retrospetive of Newman’s work at the Museumof Modern Art (an exhibition featuringthe Who’s Afraid pictures) coincided wia Mondrian retrospective at the Gug-genheim Museum. The two shows wereoften reviewed in the same article, withprolonged discussions of their respec-tive approaches to primary color. See, fexample, Douglas Davis, “The Red, th

Yellow, the Blue,” Newsweek , October18, 1971, 90–93. For Newman’s com-

ments on Mondrian, see his “ThePlasmic Image,” ca. 1945, reprinted inBN-SWI , esp. 141.

22 For example, Mark Rothko’s classes atBrooklyn College during the 1950sencouraged an intuitive approach to

38 Fall 2005



color; he instructed students to applypigment to canvas without recourseto any color system such as those sup-plied by Wilhelm Ostwald and AlbertH. Munsell. See John Gage, “Rothko:Color as Subject,” in Jeffrey Weiss, MarkRothko (Washington, D.C.: NationalGallery of Art, 1998), 251.

23 Barnett Newman, “The Painting ofTamayo and Gottlieb,” La Revista Belga2 (April 1945): 16–25, reprinted in BN-SWI , see 76–77 for quote. Newman,“The Plasmic Image,” BN-SWI , 144.

24 The argument has also been made thatabstract expressionists tried to estab-lish more systematic color symbolism bytying certain hues to specific meanings;see Evan Firestone, “Color in AbstractExpressionism: Sources and Backgroundfor Meaning,” Arts Magazine 55, no. 7(March 1981): 140–43. Ann Gibson,“Regression and Color in Abstract

Expressionism: Barnett Newman, MarkRothko, and Clyfford Still,” Arts Maga-zine 55, no. 7 (March 1981): 144–53,argues that emphasis on hue over value(light-dark relationships) in the work ofRothko, Gottlieb, and Newman indi-cated a longing for prerational psycho-logical operations. By contrast, CharlesHarrison has considered these prefer-ences for gray and brown among theabstract expressionists a “markedly non-Mediterranean chromatic range,” whichprovided one locus of resistance for New

York artists against the more vibranthues of French painting exemplified byHenri Matisse; see his “Abstract Expres-

sionism,” in Concepts of Modern Art ,ed. Nikos Stangos (1974; repr., New

York: Thames and Hudson, 1994), esp.189–90.

25 In addition, color naming could derivefrom commercial labeling systems,as the easier it is to name a color the

easier it is to market and sell it. SeeThierry de Duve, “The Readymade andthe Tube of Paint,” Artforum 24 (May1986): 110–21, and his slightly differ-ent chapter of the same name in his Kantafter Duchamp (Cambridge, Mass.: MITPress, 1996), 147–96. See also BenjaminBuchloh, “The Primary Colors for theSecond Time: A Paradigm Repetitionof the Neo-Avant-Garde,” October 37(Summer 1986): 41–52.

26 De Duve discusses Duchamp’s argu-ment at length in “The Readymadeand the Tube of Paint,” passim. For theStella quote, see “Questions to Stella and

Judd,” reprinted in Gregory Battcock,ed., Minimal Art: A Critical Anthology (New York: Dutton Press, 1968), 157.

27 Both Kelly works were well knownin the mid-1960s. Three Panels wasincluded in the 1967 Large Scale

American Painting show at the Jewish

Museum, New York. Newman’s friendSi Newhouse had sent him a reviewfrom Women’s Wear Daily of that showthat mentioned Kelly’s work; see clip-ping, August 4, 1967, Newhouse Files,Barnett Newman Foundation. ThreePanels: Red, Yellow, Blue (1966) alsoappeared in Sidney Janis’s exhibitionof Kelly’s work in March 1967. Unti-tled (Red, Yellow, Blue) was reproducedin John Coplans, “The Serial Image,”

Artforum 7, no. 2 (October 1968): 34–43. Though Kelly’s Untitled includes afourth canvas of black and white, the

Artforum article illustrated only thethree primary-color canvases. My thanks

to Ellsworth Kelly for discussing thisseries with me in a telephone interview,

June 8, 2000.

28 Harold Rosenberg, “Black and Pista-chio,” originally published in 1963 inthe New Yorker , reprinted in Rosenberg,The Anxious Object (Chicago: Univ. of

Chicago Press, 1966), 49. Rosenberreview discussed the Americans 1963show at the Museum of Modern ArToward a New Abstraction at the JewMuseum.

29 Hess briefly compared the two painaccording to their similarity in formdid not discuss the common denomnator of color naming that also unitthem. Hess, Barnett Newman (NewMuseum of Modern Art, 1971), 13

30 For a discussion of “Anti-Composiin abstract painting, see Yve-AlainBois, “Ellsworth Kelly in France: AComposition in Its Many Guises,” Bois et al., Ellsworth Kelly: The YeaFrance, 1948 –1954 (Washington, DNational Gallery of Art, 1992), 9–

31 Edward Albee’s play originally appein 1962. On public reaction to the see Thomas Thompson, “A Surprisi

Liz in a Film Shocker” and “Raw Dlogue Challenges All the Censors,”

June 10, 1966, 87–91, 92, 96, 98. Iunusual for Newman to have premihis work, at least in a titular sense, oHollywood film. Like many membehis generation, he considered Hollya cliché factory exemplifying some omost pernicious aspects of the cultuindustry. When preparing for a 195show, for example, he complained tBetty Parsons that “critics and artistofficials and art ‘intellectuals’ . . . hatried to typecast me for their own pposes as a maker of straight-line, vertical line pictures, as if the art world

were another Hollywood.” Decemb1955, letter to Parsons, Barnett NewFoundation, reprinted in BN-SWI ,

Armin Zweite briefly connects the pings to the film as well in his BarneNewman: Paintings, Sculptures, Woron Paper (Ostfildern, Germany: HaCantz Verlag, 1999), 10.

Documents

Barnett Newman's Who's Afraid of Red, Yellow and Blue