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'I think a man spends his whole lifetime painting
one picture or working on one piece of sculpture.' Newman
said in 1950. Having discovered his own artistic language
with the Onement series, Newman began to explore
its multiple possibilities.
A famous story tells how the artists Elaine
de Kooning and Franz Kline were sitting in a bar when they
were approached by a collector who had just come from Newman's
first exhibition. The collector, nonplussed by what he perceived
as the emptiness and repetition of Newman's work, tells Kline
that there was absolutely nothing there to see. Kline asks
the collector how many canvases were on show, and what sizes
and colours they were; then, moving on to the zips, he enquires
about their particular hue, their dimensions, whether they
are upright or horizontal, thick or thin, darker or lighter
than the background, painted on top of the background colour
or straight onto the canvas. As the collector is forced to
enumerate the many variations, Kline finally remarks: 'Well,
I don't know, it all sounds damned complicated to me.'
This group of works reveals just what Kline
was getting at. Differences in colour, scale, and the way
the paint is applied give the paintings unique personalities.
Newman often compared the 'visual experience of the painting'
to an 'encounter...with a person, a living being.'
One painting stands apart. Newman described
Abraham as an all-black painting, though in fact
the two fields at the sides are a mixture of black and green.
As well as being the name of the biblical patriarch, Abraham
was the name of Newman's father, who had died two years earlier,
in 1947. Newman often talked of his father's life in tragic
terms, an immigrant businessman who had been ruined by the
Great Depression. Death and creation go hand in hand in this
work. In an interview, Newman recalled what he had felt while
making Abraham: 'The terror of it was intense...I
call it terror. It's more than anxiety...Where do I get the
nerve...What's going to happen.' For Newman, the solitary
position of the artist in the studio, utterly alone, in single
confrontation with himself, generated emotions that were at
the core of his work. 'The self, terrible and constant, is
for me the subject matter of painting', he wrote.
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