On Barnett Newman's The Wild
When in 1951 Barnett Newman first exhibited The Wild, a painting eight feet tall but barely more than an inch and a half wide, the critic Thomas Hess did not know what to make of the "red line surrounded by nothing at all," as he called it in Art News.1 Displayed from time to time in recen...
Saved in:
| Published in: | Art journal (New York. 1960) 2014-04, Vol.73 (1), p.30-43 |
|---|---|
| Main Author: | |
| Format: | Article |
| Language: | eng |
| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | Get full text |
| Tags: |
Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
|
| Summary: | When in 1951 Barnett Newman first exhibited The Wild, a painting eight feet tall but barely more than an inch and a half wide, the critic Thomas Hess did not know what to make of the "red line surrounded by nothing at all," as he called it in Art News.1 Displayed from time to time in recent years at the Museum of Modern Art alongside Newman's big Vir Heroicus Sublimis, the skinny painting has not lost its power to provoke puzzled looks. "4 Moreover, I would argue, Newman's hasty construction of the provisional Here I from wood, plaster, and chicken wire at the end of 1950 has to be understood within the context of sculpture being exhibited by other contemporary painters, including Pollock, who sometimes worked in hardware-store materials similar to Newman's.5 It was Pollock, a fellow gallery member, who encouraged Newman to include the new sculpture in the Parsons show in the spring of 1951, Hess writes.6 (As Hubert Damisch records, Newman himself, near the end of his life, told Damisch "that everything he had been able to do had meaning only in relation to Pollock's work and against it.") |
|---|---|
| ISSN: | 0004-3249 2325-5307 |