Totality (6)

An Asynchronous Studio Book Club reading of Totality: Abstraction and Meaning in the Art of Barnett Newman by Michael Schreyach.

Barnett Newman, First Station, 1958, from The Stations of the Cross / Lema Sabachthani, magna on canvas, 77 7/8 x 60 1/2 inches, Robert and Jane Meyerhoff Collection, National Gallery of Art (source)

Page 215 of the chapter “Scale”:

Think now of his art in aggregate, the outcome of a compounded effort to elaborate an expressive vocabulary (not an “empty gesture in solitude,” as the critic [Harold Rosenberg] would have it). Individual works are attempts to describe a complex reality of sensation, thought, and feeling in pictorial terms—including “descriptions” (like White Fire II) of previously visualized “descriptions” (Yellow Painting). These works were the objects of Newman’s attention and are now the common objects of his viewers’ attention. By elaborating our own critical vocabulary to describe his descriptions, we progressively approach a fullness of understanding. Our interpretations proceed as a confrontation with otherness in the context of an indefinitely extendable capacity to recognize the reality of irreducibly dissimilar entities: ourselves, the autonomous work, and the artist.

At the risk of sounding pretentious or neurasthenic, I teared up a little at this. “Think now of his art in aggregate” was clearly heading toward a summation. I gripped the diminishing portion of the book in my right hand and realized that one of the better intellectual adventures I’ve had in some time was coming to a close. Too, it was a memento mori. One day any artist’s oeuvre might be considered in aggregate, because discontinued. Isaiah: People are but grass. There’s some scale for you.

Discussion in this last chapter of Totality runs from masking tape to Jesus Christ. If the analysis concerning the latter seemed a little strained in the last chapter, it has comfortably ascended the cliff as it turns towards Newman’s paintings of, or about, or at least titled after the Stations of the Cross. Newman invokes lema sabachthani, Matthew’s rendering of the archaic Hebrew or Aramaic cry of the crucified Jesus, “Why have you forsaken me?” In the midst of this contemplation Schreyach points out that for all of Newman’s use of tape, he seldom put it down, made the kind of marks seen in First Station (1958), and pulled it away to reveal a channel of underlying surface.

For Newman, an important aspect of that exploration was formal. Page 206:

The issue of color became a practical test to myself: could I use the raw canvas the way I use a colored canvas and make that canvas come into some kind of color, so it would have some sense of light?… Could I get that large area to have what I suppose I would call the living quality of color without the use of color?

But that follows, literally in Schreyach’s presentation and perhaps too in Newman’s thinking, on page 202, the thematic connection:

“[T]he cry… was not a complaint, but a declaration, the cry of the, you might say, the human condition. Now in painting you can do one of two things: you can either make the lines so straight, or you can make them curved. Now there’s been an awful lot of association with curved lines as expressing intense emotion. I don’t quite understand that. I think that the sense of the intensity of Christ’s last statement is of such a nature that it has to be held. [But] it was not a physical, muscular thing. He was absolute immobilized by the nails on the cross, and so the thing [about being held] is a question of voice.

Schreyach astutely expands:

Newman frames his endeavor by rejecting the premises of affective formalism—the modernist presupposition that particular colors, shapes, or lines automatically stimulate specific feelings in a viewer, and thus operate independently of the artist’s creative proposition.

The point merits emphasis. Schreyach is describing a certain understanding of modernism that does not capture it at its best: straightness is dour, curves are emotional, blues feel cool, reds feel warm, and so on. None of those claims are wrong but they’re also not decisive, the underlying phenomena don’t operate like signs, and they can be defied. If you know what you’re doing you can paint a cold red. Newman did this in his own work, particularly in the big expanses of red that appear in certain canvases which establish atmospheres that don’t necessarily register as warming.

Modernism is in fact making a bolder claim: that shape, mark, and color may be evocative of shared experiences between the artist and viewer despite there being no underlying system whatsoever. That’s possible because of our common nature. Certainly acculturation plays into it as well, but the acculturation sticks because there’s a shared existential structure to hang it on. Modernism remains a political threat to autocracy because it presupposes, and in practice can prove, both human individuality and human indivisibility.

This by Schreyach, to my mind related, on page 212, is gorgeous:

Newman grows by looking. From his vantage, his works are cumulatively self-reflective. They asymptotically approach his metaphysical reality. From our perspective, they exemplify the process by which an artist has attempted to realize his intentions. As completed works, they constrain our interpretive procedures by directing our attention to their autonomous statements. The limitless human reality of thought and feeling toward which Newman believed his art to gesture is conveyed to us as an idea about pictorial delimitation.

Because of my long study of Walter Darby Bannard, I appreciate the closing reference to him, in which Darby characterizes Newman’s stripe as “there to resonate the surface, like a pebble thrown on calm water.” The line is from “Touch and Scale: Cubism, Pollock, Newman and Still,” and worth quoting in context:

The less the stripes declare themselves, the less weight they have, the more they resist seeing—because they are thin, or similar in value to the field, or “oddly” spaced—the less they act as equal to or more important than the colored surface the better the painting probably is. The fugitive character of the Newman stripe is quite the opposite of Cubism's edge-dominated interior line, and gives away its different purpose. It is there to resonate the surface, like a pebble thrown on calm water, and though it appears to the Cubist-trained eye to be doing Cubist work, and does take its configuration from the edge, it is, because of its edge similarity, the simplest and least obtrusive agent of this non-Cubist effect.

Totality is such a treasure because it both records and exemplifies an effort to approach the asymptote, of the possibilities of art, and the possibilities of language to describe it. When I talk about artistic seriousness, I don’t mean some glum attitude, but the thrill of seeing the horizon and the desire to go stand on it.

May we all grow by looking.

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Thus concludes the Asynchronous Studio Book Club reading of Totality: Abstraction and Meaning in the Art of Barnett Newman by Michael Schreyach, which even if you haven’t been keeping up, you should acquire. I want to thank Michael for following along in the background to offer corrections and further discussion. Choosing Totality as the inaugural book for ASBC was perhaps overly bold and the implementation hit some bumps, but I’m glad for how it turned out. Onward.

Our next book is The Creative Act: A Way of Being by Rick Rubin. Amazon, whatever your feelings about them, has it available for 45% off list, so I recommend that you pick it up there. As always the reading schedule is here. I look forward to your participation.

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We are about to begin an Asynchronous Studio Book Club reading of The Creative Act: A Way of Being by Rick Rubin. Obtain your copy and jump in. See the ASBC schedule.

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