We're now looking at one of the master works by Barnett Newman. This is Vir Heroicus Sublimis of 1950. The title is Latin for Heroic and Sublime Man, and Newman, don't forget, was a very eloquent writer and theorist of what an artist could do In the postwar era. And really in Newman's mind, what an artist should do with abstraction is to plumb the void, so to speak, to try to get somewhere in terms of perception or experience, both the experience of the painter as well as the viewer. That was not possible before. Again, this belief, this promise in abstraction to be able to do something that figurative painting couldn't do, mimetic painting, something about something couldn't do. Rather, Newman's paintings, what are they about? Well that's a very difficult question to answer. Newman would answer that question by saying well, they're about the experience of the void. Daring to paint in a way that had never been seen before. Daring to incur experiences, In paint, which had never been experienced before. What does all this stuff mean? Well, hopefully in the next couple of minutes, we can start to get at the formal mechanism through which some of those experiences could be had. Perhaps you won't have them, perhaps you will. But interestingly this is the kind of painting that I think is going to be very visible and legible, even at home on your computer screen. And from a distance we can already see that no longer are we talking about a Newman painting that can be said to be all over. This all over term, something that comes out of Jackson Pollock, among other artists, the idea of a painting being all over. There's no optical center of gravity. Your eye freely roams around the painting, doesn't know where to start, doesn't know where to stop. Contrast that with Vir Heroicus Sublimis. Now if you think about Onement, I, there's a zip, there's a ground. It's quite simple, many complicated things can be said about it. But optically it's relatively simple. It could also be said, in a way, to be somewhat all over since there's a figure, there's a ground. But that figure is right in the middle, it's dividing and uniting the ground. You can be reading this figure ground relationship both ways. Approaching some kind of alloverness. What we have here is quite the opposite. Something that certainly does not have no optical center of gravity. It has multiple centers of gravity. These different zips, which are interspersed throughout the painting, your eye kind of wants to play ping pong back and forth between them. Certain ones really grabbing your attention. Other ones receding. Away from you and let's start to think about why some of these relationships happen and how. Now first of all, looking at this painting and maybe you'll all have somewhat different readings, but think about which one of these zips really demands your attention and then which direction your eye goes in, where you have one zip that really screams for you and other ones that maybe are the fourth or the fifth one. That your eye finally lands on and then bounces off of, going back to those prominent zips. Now working left to right here, well first of all, the ground is an oil painting, it's a lot of oil paint. It's cadmium red paint, it's opaque, it's incredibly evenly painted. Something that acrylic paint is really engineered to do, but this is oil paint. And for those of you who say Barnett Newman. He's not really a painter's painter. He's not really a technician of paint. Try this one at home, well you better get a paycheck first because this amount of cadmium red paint is going to be extraordinarily expensive, but to paint this evenly in oil paint without a roller. This was all brush by the way is a real, real, feat of painting. Newman by the way painted three canvases. This went 18 feet in length. Quite a monumental canvas. Now even more so in 1950 since really this is on par with the Mexican mural paintings. Frescoes in public spaces or think about the late Italian Renaissance monumental scale and painting goes a long way. Think about Onement, I, an easel painting that you're having an intimate relationship with, and then we have Vir Heroicus Sublimis, a painting that quite literally and physically dominates you. A painting you can get lost in. But returning to these zips, this first one on the left, what can we say about it? Well, first of all, it's much glossier than the ground. The hue is quite related. The value however is lighter. There's been some white added to this paint. And in raising the value, Newman has also reduced the chroma. In a way, allowing this color to be very closely related to the ground. But, a little bit of a weaker sister of it. Which to my eye, allows this paint to kind of flicker in your eye. It doesn't really scream for your attention. Rather, it's just flickering in and out of existence. And the way Newman has applied this band of paint is again, with two pieces of masking tape, one on either side of the zip. And then with a pallet knife, kind of skinning down between it. Now there are large skips and in fact the edges of this very interesting mark making were called gestural painting which certainly was, in the era so to speak, circa 1950 New York. However, put to use in this kind of a painting in this very formalized way again, the physicality of this zip is such that it's kind of insubstantial. All of these gaps in it allowing that ground to literally be read through that zip allows the zip to be kind of this flickering quality again. So moving on to the second zip. To my eye, this is the one that really leaps out into my field of vision first. Why? Mostly because of the value. It's by far and away the highest valued color on this canvas. It's a white, it's a very clean white, it's a very light white, and it's a very cool white. And it's quite opaque because it's actually been put in twice. As you can see, there's some spots where that second paint application passed over areas where that first one did not. Again, that first one was done with palette knife, as we can tell from that characteristic edge. And then it was refined with a brush, a second paint application of the same white, the same exact paint most likely, put over top to reinforce that white. To make this white even stronger, even more visually prominent, to allow, at least to my eye, this zip to really, really jump out into your field of vision. Now, what next, we have quite the opposite. We have the lowest value color on the entire canvas, this very, very deep plum color, a color actually that Newman's friend, Mark Rothko, worked with quite extensively just a couple years after the making of this painting in 1950. Here we have a very, very dark color. And again to play that Hans Hofmann game of push and pull, the pushing that's going on with these warm colors, flickering in your field of vision, and among them is also included the ground itself, is contrasted with the coolness the optical pulling away of that very, very dark, very, very cool plum color. Now, in a way, since it's cooler than the field itself, that zip to my eye tends to really recede away from the field of vision. And in fact, can be read to be almost behind, optically speaking, the picture plane itself. Moving further to the right, we have another one of these very flickering, very low chroma, high value versions of that cadmium red medium ground color. Another one of these almost barely existing flickering tones here. And then finally, all the way in the right margin of the canvas, we have another white, but now quite a different white, a very translucent one, a very warm one. And to my eye, most likely a calcium-containing white. Now the white back there is probably lead white, something you can replace on your palette with a titanium white. A very opaque, very cold white color. Here we have a calcium one, a very weak, a very warm, translucent white color. Again, looking at it closely we can see that it's been applied in two passes. Both appear to have been done with a brush. And what we have here is kind of a middle ground. It does have that high value, but not so high, since we're reading some of this murkiness through it, as the red kind of commingles in our eye With this very warm tending toward yellow white color here. And it just has kind of this weaker character. It doesn't have the boldness of the second zip from the left, that very, very crisp white. So in other words, speaking about figure ground relationships we have all these zips kind of competing for prominence in our field of vision, our eye jumping back and forth. A very, very complicated perceptual activity going on in something that, well, the guy at the bar could say, what are you looking at, it's five stripes on a painting, right? But I hope we've gotten beyond that by this point. Now shifting gears again into environmental readings of paintings. In The Wild, the last painting we looked at, which by the way, was also done in 1950, the same year. We talked about environmental viewing a painting the painting as a zip on the wall of the museum, functioning as a ground. In other words, shifting our focus, opening the aperture to see a wider frame of reference, the installation space that a painting is hung in. Well, certainly we can do that here as well, but a way that was even more important, most likely for Newman Was a kind of environment to looking when we're really really close to the painting and we're almost enveloped in it. The painting because it's so large, if we're drawn into it, there is a certain position, many certain positions actually when you don't see any wall space any more, either above, Below, to the left or to the right of the painting. Rather, your field of vision is totally dominated by Newman, by paint. This is an overwhelming experience. One that probably you're not going to be able to have sitting in the comfort of your office or living room, on your laptop. Come to the museum and experience this one first hand. What you can get a feel for is that when your entire monitor, your frame of reference so to speak, is totally dominated by color, in this case is very warm red radiating out from the canvas itself, you have a feeling of loss in a way. You have a feeling of not knowing where you stand any longer because your eye is totally lost in this field of vision. For those of you who are familiar with. Subsequent artists like James Turrell or Robert Irwin, California Light and Space artists, these are artists who directly manipulated light, skipped the canvas altogether, and changed the atmosphere quite literally this time. The light, the space in which we walk. So in a Turrell installation, for example, this room could have almost no light, but only very dim red light. And as our rods and cones adjust, we find ourselves in this very changing environment. That change of course, is a function of our rods and cones adjusting. The same can be said here. And, Newman's paintings like this, in addition to those of Agnes Martin, and Ad Reinhardt, principally, are really the most important artists leading from paint to pure experience, using paint to manipulate your experience and then transitioning into the Irwins and the Turrells of the world, directly manipulating light to change your experience of it. And, well, worst thing last, one of my pet peeves about many of Newman's paintings are the signatures. And what we see here is not only Barnett Newman 1950 scrolled on with guess what? That very very low value very dark color that plum that we are familiar with from the zip towards the right of the paining but we also have here plus fifty one BN. The artist initials this kind of addendum Newman finishing the painting most likely the following year and feeling the need to scrawl that information as well as if this was some kind of legal document.
