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Newman had his first solo exhibitions at the
Betty Parsons Gallery in New York, in 1950 and 1951. Neither
was a success, either financially or critically. In reviewing
the first show, one New York critic sceptically put the word
'paintings' in quotation marks, and in a terse account of
the second show deliberately left Newman's name out altogether.
Meanwhile, the careers of peers like Pollock, Rothko and Willem
de Kooning were in the ascendant. Wounded by the hostile reception
of his work, Newman withdrew from the gallery world and spent
the next four years working in isolation, showing and selling
nothing.
Two reddish canvases displayed here, Adam
and Eve, were included in the 1951 exhibition. At
the time they were made, Newman, like many of his contemporaries,
preferred not to title his works. He later changed his mind,
and renamed many paintings, explaining that in doing so, he
was attempting 'to create a metaphor that will in some way
correspond to what I think is the feeling in them and the
meaning of it.' The word 'Adam', for instance, the biblical
name of the first man, derives from the Hebrew word adamah
(earth), but is also close to adom, (red) and dam
(blood). Newman associated the red tones in his paintings
with the human presence, and it was one of the colours he
used most often.
The failure of his exhibitions did not stop
Newman making some of his most powerful works over the course
of the next few years. Ulysses, at 11-feet tall,
towers so forcefully that when the artist Frank Stella first
saw it he said that he felt compelled to try 'to keep its
pushy blueness from toppling the Empire State Building'.
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