Revisiting a Modernist Old Master

PHILADELPHIA--In 1967, young California artist Bruce Nauman made a sculpture in the form of a neon sign. The sign’s softly glowing blue words follow a line of red light in an outward spiral path and declare, “The true artist helps the world by revealing mystic truths.”

Nauman’s declaration could describe the philosophical basis for the radically abstract paintings of New York School artist Barnett Newman (1905-1970). Newman’s often large expanses of oil or acrylic color, carefully divided by variously brushed vertical lines, were meant as a numinous utterance. He explained it at a prominent symposium on “The Spiritual Dimension of Contemporary Art,” held the same year Nauman made his sign.

“What matters to a true artist,” Newman said in his typically elliptical way, “is that he distinguish between a place and no place at all; the greater the work of art, the greater will be this feeling. And this feeling is the fundamental spiritual dimension.” (More on this later.)

Nauman’s neon sign hangs in the permanent collection of the Philadelphia Museum of Art. In galleries nearby, the museum on Sunday opened “Barnett Newman,” the first full survey of the late painter’s work to be held since the posthumous retrospective at New York’s Museum of Modern Art in 1970. The serendipitous juxtaposition by these two similarly named artists is telling.

Nauman illuminates--literally--a fundamental tenet of Newman’s. Although Newman had only five solo exhibitions at commercial galleries during his lifetime, he and his fellow New York School artists had become the national (and international) standard-bearers. Four Newman shows were in New York; one was in L.A.--in 1965 at Nicholas Wilder Gallery, where Nauman also began to show the following year. The artists shared a common concern, during a decade of enormous upheaval in art and society, for fathoming the appropriate role of “the true artist.”

But they’re also separated by a smirk--by the wry possibility that your leg is being pulled. Nauman’s neon sign is ambiguous in a way Newman’s paintings never are. Its written statement seems sincere; yes, the puzzle of the human spirit is indeed the territory of serious art. But the vulgar form it takes here--commercial neon sign--seems sarcastic. The piece looks like a crass invitation to enter a palm reader’s shop.

Spiritual profundity? Or hocus pocus? That, in a nutshell, describes the long-term argument over Modern art in general--and Newman in particular.

Newman was famously insistent on the mystical dimension embodied in his visually spare but acutely rendered paintings. He titled them with big names: “Onement,” “Prometheus Bound,” “Day Before One” and “Vir Heroicus Sublimis” (Man, Heroic and Sublime). Or he used biblical and mythological personages, such as “Joshua,” “Abraham,” “Achilles” and “Uriel” (the Judeo-Christian archangel of light). For six years he worked on a cycle of 14 canvases he called “The Stations of the Cross”; the 14th is all-white, except for a vertical strip of raw canvas along the left edge.

Detractors dismissed him as a pompous charlatan. Some of those were writers, like the notoriously ill-informed critic for the New York Times, John Canaday. Others were peers, like the great abstract painter Ad Reinhardt, with whom Newman publicly feuded.

But he had his fierce champions, too, including the influential critic Clement Greenberg--who arrived late to Newman’s side but once there was adamant. Artists who were committed to his vision ranged from Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko to a younger generation of Minimalist artists, notably Frank Stella, Robert Mangold and Donald Judd.

Those battles seem like ancient history now. In this absorbing show, which will be seen only in Philadelphia before moving in September to London’s Tate Modern, we encounter instead a Modernist Old Master.

As an abstract painter for whom color was critical, he assumes a welcome relevance for the new color abstraction that is emerging among so many young artists today. His savvy exploitation of color’s irrational power offers lessons for any painter seeking escape from the long-standing bonds of an art based in language. Newman’s spirituality might differ from most artists’ aims now, but never is he trivial.

Newman’s art is phenomenological. Perceptual experience is its key. Rational analysis can be applied to the ways in which his materials are structured, but it’s never enough to explain the discovery of content within. Newman, whose politics were anarchist, made art that rebelled against established order in painting. He made art whose simplicity is calculated to deceive, then astound.

“Onement I” (1948), the painting Newman considered his breakthrough, is a modest easel picture just 27 inches high and 16 inches wide. It couldn’t appear more artless. The surface is painted the red-brown color of dried blood, in softly brushed vertical strokes. Visually dense, it doesn’t create an illusion of scenic space.

The canvas is split down the middle, top to bottom, by masking tape, onto which Newman laid an irregular stripe of paint in flaming cadmium red. The painted stripe--or zip, as he later came to call his signature motif--was troweled on with a palette knife. Ragged and smeary, it assumes a tangible presence that, through color, is both part of and separate from the field on which it is marked.

Newman likened the maneuver to the Book of Genesis, where creation is an act of division: night from day, earth from water, light from dark. As with a Mondrian or Malevich, if by wholly different means, the effect is uncanny yet wholly matter-of-fact.

Newman’s best paintings are always matter-of-fact. That doesn’t mean they aren’t complex.

Standing before this otherwise unassuming canvas, whose vertical orientation echoes your own stance before it, you see a handmade object that illustrates nothing. Everything about it turns you back on yourself; slowly you become aware of a perceptual unfolding through time. The painting seems at once emphatically separate but deeply connected to you.

“Vir Heroicus Sublimis” (1950-51) is nearly 18 feet wide and almost 8 feet high. The shifts in perceptual scale of the little “Onement I” are enlarged accordingly. The big painting includes five zips in different colors, although their placement starts to throw the count into question. For instance, a creamy yellow-white zip a few inches in from the right edge of the wide, luminous red canvas leaves a red line along that edge. Does that red edge count as a sixth zip?

In fact, just how wide is a zip? Can’t the broad red fields between the skinny zips be perceived as stripes--really wide ones? Their scale relative to the narrow zips suggests the painting was cut from a gargantuan field of color that would dwarf this otherwise monumental canvas. Adding up the fat and skinny zips, there are 11 rather than five, and three instead of one on “Onement I.”

The riddles in a Newman painting create a paradox. They conspire to clarify your conscious awareness.

As art historian Richard Schiff puts it in one of the catalog’s two excellent essays (the other is by the show’s deft curator, Ann Temkin), becoming aware of sensations in lived time creates for the viewer “a place where the self could be recognized.” Your entire being--body and soul, not just eyes--is refreshed and vivified.

There’s something profoundly American in all this. It represents a deep desire to start over from a new beginning.

The American myth is historically of a place of new beginnings. Newman’s parents were impoverished Russian immigrants. His father built a prosperous business but lost it in the Great Depression. World War II, the Holocaust, the atomic bomb--an urge to start anew was understandably intense among artists who lived through all that.

Reason had failed--big time. The irrational was courted for new ideas. Newman’s early crayon drawings are abstract, but they suggest strange life forms taking shape in an amorphous space. They illustrate what “Onement I” would soon come to physically embody, riding on the unruly power of color.

Newman worked slowly. He didn’t start until he was 40, and he was not prolific. About half his 120 or so paintings are in the show.

Some important works are missing (large paintings with fragile surfaces are difficult to lend). The great “Who’s Afraid of Red, Yellow and Blue I” (1966) is incongruously shown in a wood frame, which transforms it from a radical painted object into an old-time picture. The catalog analyzes Newman’s relationship to New York Minimalism, yet ignores acute connections to L.A.’s Nauman, Robert Irwin and others.

But these are small complaints. Enough is here to make the show satisfying. And even if you think Newman didn’t get what he was after, the ambition to aim high stands out starkly amid the puny desires found in too much art today.

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“Barnett Newman,” Philadelphia Museum of Art, Benjamin Franklin Parkway at 26th Street, (215) 763-8100, www.philamuseum.org, through July 7. Closed Monday.