Barnett Newman, Stations of the Cross Station 12, 1966 (x2)
Patrick Sturgess
In his 2008 work, ‘The Emancipated Spectator’, Jacques Rancière devotes a chapter to what he calls the ‘Intolerable Image’. Part of the essay discusses whether the Holocaust is representable. I would like to posit that both the Holocaust and the dropping of the Atom bomb made the representation of mankind, in the style of the time (which in America was primarily the form of Social Realism pursued by Ben Shahn, and Thomas Hart Benton among others) ‘impossible’ to Barnett Newman. In the face of such horror, it would be a falsehood to portray humanity without the figures being warped and twisted, in the manner of Francis Bacon. Newman’s choice to paint large colour-field paintings can be seen as an attempt to transcend the horror of the death camps by attaining a new form of universal image. In his 1948 text ‘The Sublime is Now’, Newman espouses the need for a radically new form of representation, one that is universal and ahistorical, located in a new primitive space: “The image we produce is the self-evident one of revelation, real and concrete, that can be understood by anyone who will look at it without the nostalgic glasses of history” (Landau: 2005 p.139). The weight of history, which had just come crashing down upon European civilisation, was to be exorcised from his paintings. Newman, who was himself Jewish, was responding to the death of civilisation. Newman’s painting can be seen as the natural progression from Walter Benjamin’s interpretation of Paul Klee’s Angelus Novus: as the ‘angel of history’ turns its back, all past representation must be done away with. The void, or seeming emptiness of his paintings, can be seen as Newman’s reduction of “art to an absurdity … in a didactic revelation of ultimate Thule” (Hess: 1969 p.42). Newman’s paintings can thus be seen as a both legitimate and effective response to the Holocaust, intolerable and impossible as it is to represent: “Representation is not the act of producing a visible form, but the act of offering an equivalent” (Rancière: 2009 p.93).
The Impossible Image: The Difficulty of Representing the Holocaust
The abject horror of WWII, exemplified in the dropping of the atom bombs, and most particularly, in the systematic genocide of both the Jews and Romani of Europe, created a complex paradigm which still exists today. The horror was so great that even when confronted with photographic evidence, people could still not believe in its reality. Even though we are often presented with photographic or other forms of documentary evidence, our brains struggle with the incomprehensibility of it. The scale and bureaucratic efficiency of such inhuman atrocities are incomprehensible and thus unimaginable, lending to a sense of the unreal. It is possible that “at the heart of the Shoah there is something unrepresentable—something that cannot structurally be fixed in an image” (Rancière: 2009 p.89), that the true horror of the death camps is not representable. Images cannot come from the inside of the gas chambers themselves, so what we are left with are images of the before and of the after: “The gas chambers are an event that in itself constitutes a kind of aporia, an unshatterable reality that pierces and problematizes the status of the image and jeopardizes any thinking about images” (Wacjman: 2001 in Rancière: 2009 p.89).
In 1947, in Betty Parson’s Gallery, at 15 East 57th Street, Manhattan, one of the first exhibitions to feature many of the most well-known Abstract Expressionists took place. Barnett Newman was among those involved in the exhibition titled ‘The Ideographic Picture’, this form of art, Newman claimed, would be a “carrier of the awesome feelings he felt before the terror of the unknowable” (Landau: 2005 p.136). Newman, along with the other Abstract Expressionists, (most of whom were Jewish) clearly felt the weight of the impossible image, incepted with the gas chambers. In the centre of the Nazi death camps was a great, unknowable horror, on such a scale that no images could ever come from it. Newman was certainly aware of the camps and had seen the photographs. They had undoubtedly had an effect on the way he thought about painting. He stated that “no painting exists (that is better surrealism) than the photographs of German atrocities” (Newman: 1990 p.95). The pre-war surrealism had failed and a new radically different art was necessary to transcend the failed, European-led model.
Otto Dix
In the face of such failure, Newman retreated into an ever more mystical and spiritual abstraction, which will be dissected more below. It was of course possible for an artist to have moved in the opposite direction. Francis Bacon’s work, for instance, also seems to respond the abject horror of the holocaust. However, instead of abstraction, Bacon warps his human forms and, in doing so, manages to paint their twisted souls. Otto Dix, post WWI, also painted extremely warped faces, but his were more literal representations of the war-wounded. These differing approaches, even among two painters working with seemingly similarly aesthetic practices and visual concerns, can be seen as the difference between the sickness in Europe following both World Wars. Although Europe following WWI had experienced being decimated physically, it was post-WWII that Europe truly lost its soul. Both Bacon and, in his own way, Newman were responding to this “destruction of experience” (Agamben: 1993). While Bacon chose to interact with art history through exhuming and interacting with established artists, such as his Screaming Velasquez Popes, Newman chose to forge an entirely new art. This was an art free from European history and the “poverty of experience” (Benjamin: 1933) that it had left behind: “We are freeing ourselves of the impediments of memory, association, nostalgia, legend, myth, or what have you, that have been the devices of Western European painting” (Landau: 2005 p.139).
Diego Velasquez, Portrait of Pope Innocent X 1650 & Francis Bacon, Study after Velázquez’s Portrait of Pope Innocent X ,1953
Newman Transcends the Angel of History
When Walter Benjamin was close to his end, he wrote a short piece, now part of his collected writings in Illuminations, about a prized possession of his. The possession in question was Angelus Novus, a monoprint by Paul Klee, himself a Jewish artist who had been labeled a ‘degenerate’ by the Nazis. Benjamin posits that this painting represents the “angel of history” (Benjamin: 1968 p.257). The Angel, for Benjamin, has the long view over the horror that is consuming Europe: “Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet” (Benjamin: 1968 p.257). There is a sense in Benjamin’s reflections of the hopelessness of his situation, represented so symbolically in the Angel’s attempt to “stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed” (Benjamin: 1968 p.257). However, the Angel is powerless against the tide of history, which only moves in one direction, even as it threatens his own destruction, even more pertinent as it is the interpretation of Benjamin, a Jewish man, trying desperately to escape his own destruction: “But a storm is blowing from paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. This storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward” (Benjamin: 1968 p.257-258).
Paul Klee, Angelus Novus, 1920
This weight of history and hopelessness is exactly what Barnett Newman, in his post WWII work, is attempting to subvert. While Klee’s angel was looking backwards at all of the horror that he had been unable to reverse, Newman and the other abstract expressionists were trying to transcend this “storm called progress” (Benjamin: 1968 p.258). Benjamin interpreted the Holocaust through Klee’s painting as “the anti-revelation” (Raphael: 2009 p106), and it is thus significant that Newman can be seen to be representing it “through the very absence of representation” (Raphael: 2009 p.106). The aesthetic approach of abstract expressionism would be one that could transcend Benjamin’s ‘Angel of History’ in order to forge a new separate history. This approach allowed for a look forward into the future, opposed to the Angel’s backwards facing stance: “The brutality of World War II has demonstrated to Newman and his contemporaries that modern and primitive experience … were essentially the same” (Rushing: 1958 In. Landau: 2005 p.434). The form that they created transcended “memory, history, or geometry” (Rothko: 1949 p119) in favour of a kind of primitive simplicity that the colour field created: “They start with the chaos of pure fantasy and feeling, with nothing that has any physical, visual or mathematical counterpart and they bring out of this chaos of emotion images which give these intangibles reality” (Hess: 1969 p.37). The escape from the Angel of History entails the forging of a new primal start, where everything is taken at its base, and the plain colour-field image of Newman embodies a true universal, an image which is “the self-evident one of revelation, real and concrete, that can be understood by anyone who will look at it without the nostalgic glasses of history” (Landau: 2005 p.139).
Barnett Newman, Pagan Void, 1946
Barnett Newman, Onement I, 1948
A New Spiritualism
The paintings of Barnett Newman represent a singularly abstracted take on the image, in that they seem to eschew any relation to the physical world. However, in doing so, through a combination of scale, colour, and Newman’s choice of titles, they instead make contact with the spiritual world. After the final corruption of the old pictorial language, signified by the aforementioned ‘destruction of experience’ (Agamben: 1993) Newman’s language would be new, focused initially on representations of universality. His 1946 painting, Pagan Void, Newman seems to “overtly suggest fertilization of the egg and penetration of the tissue” (Hess: 1969 p.27). Though this may arguably be seen as representative of the rebirth to come, strictly speaking, his paintings of the early 1940’s do not fully cut away from established styles, echoing “the aesthetic of the recent past” (Hess: 1969 p.27). It was not until his first painting from his Onement series that his now familiar zip would appear.
This new ‘metaphysical’ style of painting breaks with the material world and acts as “a supplement for what was lacking in reality” (Jachec: 2000 p.143). This ‘lacking’, as described by Nancy Jachec, is the impossible image; the ‘intolerable image’ as described by Rancière. If the Holocaust is unrepresentable, then Newman’s paintings, which exist in the realm of the metaphysical, are engaged in the “act of offering an equivalent” (Rancière: 2009 p.93). As the photographs of skeletal corpses appeared, signaling the end of modern civilisation, the figure had become unpaintable. As a result, Newman’s rejection of the figure within his work renews “the ancient trope of divine withdrawal and the abstraction of the figure from the image” (Raphael: 2009 p.106). The angels, having been defeated by the tide of history, withdraw, and we are left with nothing. Newman, and the other Abstract Expressionists start with the void, and from that attempt to “bring out from the non-real, from the chaos of ecstasy, something that evokes a memory of the emotion of an experienced moment of total reality” (Newman: 1947 In. Hess: 1969 p.37). Newman firmly believed that he was working within the “reality of transcendental experience” (Hess: 1969 p.37). In both the seeming simplicity of his paintings and their great scale, Newman’s works achieve a kind of sublime visual image. Consider the paraphrased quote below by Edmund Burke on the nature of the Sublime:
If the object is both simple and vast, the eye (and therefore the mind) does not arrive readily at its bounds, and has no rest, since the image is everywhere the same. Hence the impression of an ‘artificial infinite’ is created by a large and unified object which throws the retina into tension and impresses itself so vividly on the mind that an idea of the sublime is suggested.” (Burke in Monk: 1960 in Hess: 1969 p.38)
This effect is most certainly present in Newman’s work. When one looks at his 1951 work Cathedra, the Sublime, as described by Burke, cannot help but be felt. Both the immense scale of the work and the deep blues, that seem to move and melt into one another, leave the viewer visually overwhelmed. The image is cut vertically by an off-white line about a third across the painting. This ‘zip’, as Newman referred to them, gives the “impression of motion” and serves to accentuate the deepness of the colours on either side. This off-white line responds in kind to the ever-deepening blues, giving it “a ghostly, half-seen quality” (Hess: 1969 p.44).
Barnett Newman, Cathedra, 1951
Newman’s work also bears relation to both the Sacred and Ritual. In his 1966 exhibition, Stations of the Cross: Lema Sabachthani, Newman’s fourteen black and white paintings represent a religious ritual. Apart from the obvious connotation that the title suggests, the paintings also seem to represent a reference to the impossible image. The use of Crucifixion as an analogy for Holocaust memory was also used in the postwar period by Marc Chagall, whose painting ‘White Crucifixion’ Newman was almost certainly aware of. Harold Rosenberg, referring to Chagall’s work, wrote that “the crucified one is a Jew, not the Son of God, but the human victim of violence” (Rosenberg: 1945 pp.26-33). This connection to his own Jewishness, and to the destruction of his fellow Jews in such recent memory, made the move towards a metaphysical abstraction inevitable for Newman: “Every Jew has a holocaust within him; in his innermost heart he has gone up in smoke or been starved to death” (Kuspit: 1992). In the aftermath of WWII, Newman found himself unable to paint “flowers, figures, etc” (Newman: 1966). Along with the other Abstract Expressionists, many of whom were also Jewish, he tried to forge a new language, uncorrupted by the history that had led to the destruction of their people.
Irving Penn, Portrait of Newman, 1966
Barnett Newman was engaged in a form of representation, which deals with the universal. His work can be seen as a direct response to the horrors that made up the Holocaust. An image “is a complex set of relations between the visible and the invisible, the visible and speech, the said and the unsaid” (Rancière: 2009 p.93). Newman’s art works within this paradigm, being so reduced that it functions as an outright rejection of the established order, which culminated in and ended with the Nazi death camps. This “repudiation of the visual image” (Raphael: 2009 p.106) by Newman and the other abstract expressionists is their great reaction to the “mechanization and massification of human existence” (Jachec: 2000 p.30). With this mechanisation and massification of the final solution, the evils of industrialisation were revealed, as people became not just the workers on the assembly line, but the numbered ‘Homo Sacer’ (Agamben: 1995). History is made up of that which can be recorded. As the Holocaust, as previously examined, cannot be comprehensively recorded or represented, the only visual response is that which clears the slate of representation; which shows the disruption and destruction of a people and their history through a stark separation from the existent artistic tradition, ruptured from all previous attempts at capturing reality. The Angel of History is no more and the spiritual void left behind is all that can consume the canvas. Through the forging of a new metaphysical representation of a pure image, Newman was trying to break free from the weight of the ‘destruction of experience’, (Agamben: 1993) and form a new, untainted, experience, starting with the void, seeking to find something beyond the borders of the known world (Ultima) Thule.
Barnett Newman, Station One, 1958
Barnett Newman, Vir Heroicus Sublimis, 1950-51
Bibliography
Agamben, G. (1993) Infancy and History. Translated by Liz Heron. London & New York: Verso.
Agamben, G. (1998) Homo Sacer. Translated by Daniel Heller-Roazen. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Benjamin, W. (1933) Experience and Poverty. in (1999) Benjamin, Selected Writings: Vol. 2 (1927-1934). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 731-736.
Benjamin, W. (1968) Illuminations. Translated by Harry Zohn. New York: Schocken Books.
Hess, T. B. (1969) Barnett Newman. New York: Walker & Company.
Jachec, N. (2000) The Philosophy and Politics of Abstract Expressionism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Kuspit, D. (1992) Natan Nuchi. New York: Klarfield Perry Gallery.
Landau, E. G. ed (2005) Reading Abstract Expressionism. New Haven & London: Yale University Press.
Newman, B. (1990) Barnett Newman: Selected Writings and Interviews. Edited by John P. O’Neill. Berkeley & Los Angeles: University of California Press.
Rancière, J. (2009) The Emancipated Spectator. Translated by Gregory Elliot. London: Verso.
Raphael, M. (2009) Judaism and the Visual Image: A Jewish Theology of Art. London & New York: Continuum.
Rothko, M. (1949) Statement of His Attitude in Painting. in, The Tigers Eye, no.6.
New Minds Eye 