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For Newman and his generation of artists, the
Second World War and its aftermath marked a watershed. 'When
Hitler was ravaging Europe could we express ourselves by having
a beautiful girl lying naked on a divan?' Newman asked himself;
'I felt the issue in those years was - what can a painter
do?'
Abstraction offered a possible route, though
Newman was wary of producing geometric designs which might
be seen as lacking meaning. The exhibition begins with two
rooms devoted to Newman's search for an appropriate subject
for abstraction. These are his earliest known works, the first
that he didn't then destroy. In 1944, Newman was thirty-nine,
and spending the summer with his wife Annalee on the coast
of Massachusetts, when he began a series of crayon drawings.
Sprouting animal and plant forms spiral across richly coloured
backgrounds, a reflection of Newman's interest in botany and
ornithology.
Brush-and-ink drawings, from 1945, have a similarly
organic and playful quality. They owe much to the drawings
of Surrealist artists, particularly those of André
Masson and Joan Miró. Many artists, including members
of the Surrealist movement, found refuge in America during
the war, and New York eclipsed Paris as the principal city
in which to see modern European art.
Some of Newman's paintings from this early period,
such as Pagan Void and Genesis - The Break,
from 1946, maintain the imagery of natural forms, but now
also suggest the creative energies of the cosmos, as cellular
structures explode into star bursts. Scratched paint in these
works (the red dot near the centre of Pagan Void,
for instance) again recall Surrealist techniques.
In a rather different group of drawings and
paintings from 1946, the biological ferment cools. They are
characterised by vertical bands or rays that split the composition
into sections. These bands, which are set against atmospheric
washes of ink or thinned-down paint, rehearse the possibilities
for the vertical band or 'zip', as Newman called it, of his
mature style.
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