Most with the Least

No Manhattan art gathering really got off the ground until the courtly figure with the walrus mustache and steel-rimmed monocle appeared and someone announced, as someone always did, "Barney's here." Barney was Barnett Newman, abstract painter, self-proclaimed anarchist, celebrated raconteur, the compleat iconoclast. Before his death in Manhattan this month at the age of 65, he provided the most obvious visual link between the generation that produced Abstract Expressionism and the generation that turned to minimal and color-field painting.

Open and Free. There was nothing in the world about which he had no opinion and nothing in the world that could stop him from delivering one. As one friend put it, "You meet him on the street and stop for a six-hour conversation." He wrote enough letters to the editor to fill a book. Norman Mailer was still a schoolboy when Newman ran against Fiorello La Guardia in 1933 for mayor of New York City on a Writers-Artists ticket. He lost, of course. "My politics," he later recalled, "went toward open forms and free situations."

So did his painting. His was never an easy style to like or understand, and though he was often called an artist's artist, his most hostile critics were frequently his fellow artists. In fact, though he was one of the historic group of Abstract Expressionists that met at Greenwich Village's Cedar bar in the 1940s, Newman's art won real recognition only in the last decade. His first retrospective had been scheduled by the Museum of Modern Art for the fall of 1971.

Born in Manhattan to a Polish immigrant couple in 1905, he used to skip high school classes to spend the day at the Metropolitan Museum. As a student at the Art Students League, he became aware of the dilemma that Malevich and Mondrian had left their successors: where to go from white on white and skin-and-bones geometry? "Painting is finished, we should all give it up," he told a friend, Painter Adolph Gottlieb. World War II added a new dimension to his personal crisis. "How can you continue painting guys playing the fiddle, flowers and sweetness when the world is blowing itself up?" he asked.

His solution was to start with what he called a "void," a blank circle on a spacious canvas, building color and movement around it. Soon the void developed into a stripe, or as he preferred to call it, a "zip." The zip usually zipped straight down for eight feet or so through an unmodulated expanse of plain color. When the paintings were shown in 1950 at the Betty Parsons Gallery, reactions ranged from negative to outrage. "You're a threat to us all," exclaimed one artist. What followed were perhaps Newman's bleakest years.

To Abstract Expressionism he was indeed something of a threat, removing, as Sculptor Tony Smith has observed, "the last vestiges of pictorial approach." By the early '60s, though, a generation of younger artists was involved with massive scale, expansive color, maximizing a few minimal elements. They could look at Barney's painting and appreciate that he had already anticipated the same problems. To scores of minimal and color-field painters, he became a kind of father-confessor.

The approbation injected a new note of self-confidence into his painting. His colors grew warmer and more radiant, his scale ever grander. He turned to sculpture; his most singular work, Broken Obelisk, today stands in Houston as a memorial to Martin Luther King Jr. Intuitive, romantic, passionate, he unabashedly was. "But more than anything else," said Critic Lawrence Alloway last week, "he showed how to do the most with the least."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.