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At twenty-feet long and nine-feet tall, Anna's
Light is Newman's largest painting. It was made in 1968,
and like all the works in this room, is painted in the new
medium of acrylic, rather than oil. Newman applied the many
coats first with a roller, then with a brush, honing a sleek
surface skin that one critic described as being 'as smooth
as a well-finished refrigerator'. Newman remarked that he
wanted to see how far he could 'push red'. He and the sculptor
Robert Murray, who assisted him in the studio, accorded Anna's
Light the highest level of 'wattage', a term they used
to rate the intensity of Newman's colours. The painting is
named after Newman's mother, who died in 1965.
By 1960, Newman was at last attaining recognition
as a key figure in contemporary art. Major museums had begun
to acquire his work, and critics were now reviewing his work
seriously. As the decade progressed, he gradually left behind
the expressive gestures of his earlier work, and moved towards
a more uniform, controlled style of painting. It was also
in the 1960s that Newman first used the word 'zip' to describe
the bands in his paintings.
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