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On Two Paintings by Barnett Newman**

On Two Paintings by Barnett Newman** On Two Paintings by Barnett Newman* YVE-ALAIN BOIS The two texts that follow are part of a project that some might consider an impossible challenge—that of writing an independent essay, not your usual catalog entry, on every single painting by Barnett Newman. This self-imposed challenge—much more exacting than I expected at first—is not as absurd as it may seem. Newman’s oeuvre may be extraordinarily small by twentieth-century standards—he painted only 120 works on canvas and his overall output, all media included, consists of fewer than 300 works—but this restraint was intentional. This last point was often stressed by his widow, Annalee Newman, during the multiple conversations I had with her throughout the second half of the 1990s. Whenever the issue of the exceptionally poor productivity of Newman would come up—when she was making comparisons between his career and that of his fellow abstract expressionists or when she was protesting, still vehemently so long after the fact, against Clement Greenberg’s pestering request that “Barney” churn out more canvases—Annalee would always insist that her husband hated redundancy, that he wanted above all to avoid repeating himself and that each painting had to be for him like a person, a unicum. http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png October MIT Press

On Two Paintings by Barnett Newman**

October , Volume Spring 2004 (108) – Apr 1, 2004

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References (1)

Publisher
MIT Press
Copyright
© 2004 October Magazine, Ltd. and Massachusetts Institute of Technology
ISSN
0162-2870
eISSN
1536-013X
DOI
10.1162/016228704774115690
Publisher site
See Article on Publisher Site

Abstract

On Two Paintings by Barnett Newman* YVE-ALAIN BOIS The two texts that follow are part of a project that some might consider an impossible challenge—that of writing an independent essay, not your usual catalog entry, on every single painting by Barnett Newman. This self-imposed challenge—much more exacting than I expected at first—is not as absurd as it may seem. Newman’s oeuvre may be extraordinarily small by twentieth-century standards—he painted only 120 works on canvas and his overall output, all media included, consists of fewer than 300 works—but this restraint was intentional. This last point was often stressed by his widow, Annalee Newman, during the multiple conversations I had with her throughout the second half of the 1990s. Whenever the issue of the exceptionally poor productivity of Newman would come up—when she was making comparisons between his career and that of his fellow abstract expressionists or when she was protesting, still vehemently so long after the fact, against Clement Greenberg’s pestering request that “Barney” churn out more canvases—Annalee would always insist that her husband hated redundancy, that he wanted above all to avoid repeating himself and that each painting had to be for him like a person, a unicum.

Journal

OctoberMIT Press

Published: Apr 1, 2004

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