Image as a Situation: Tragedy, Subjectivity and Painting According to Barnett Newman
Image as a Situation: Tragedy, Subjectivity and Painting According to Barnett Newman

Summary/Abstract: In modern art history Barnett Newman is often regarded as a representative of American Abstract Expressionism or “Post-Painterly Abstraction.” However, in his own view any such classification would seem highly problematic, because – as he said – his paintings remained too abstract for the abstract expressionists and too expressive for the abstract purists. In his large body of writing on art – numerous statements and essays he wrote as a critic and curator – Newman declared a definitely anti-aesthetic, anti-formalist stance, based on the iconoclastic rejection of sensual beauty and formal purity as an end in itself. The article concerns the historical and conceptual background of Newman’s conception of art, which for him should not be an aesthetic object, but an active “vehicle of abstract idea,” a life embodiment of emotions – something that affects the viewer and places him in a specific situation. His view on his own painting may be related to Nietzsche’s dialectic of the Dionysian an Apollonian in The Birth of Tragedy, which was for him one of it remains unceasingly disrupted by it. This sense of tragedy was presented by Newman as a characteristic quality of contemporary life and the immanent feature of human consciousness. His remarks on this question oscilated between antropological generalisations and concrete references he made to the recent historical past: the destruction and atrocities of the second world war. In 1945 surrealist images stroke him as “prophetic tableaux of what the world was to see as reality.” My point is that Newman’s attitude and his sensivity to various artistic expressions of terror and “horror of life” was partly shaped by this particular historical experience, while it was consequently “displaced” to a higher, more universal plane.

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