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M. Leja (1995)
Barnett Newman's Solo TangoCritical Inquiry, 21
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 challengeâthat of writing an independent essay, not your usual catalog entry, on every single painting by Barnett Newman. This self-imposed challengeâmuch more exacting than I expected at ï¬rstâis not as absurd as it may seem. Newmanâs oeuvre may be extraordinarily small by twentieth-century standardsâhe painted only 120 works on canvas and his overall output, all media included, consists of fewer than 300 worksâbut 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 upâwhen 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 Greenbergâs pestering request that âBarneyâ churn out more canvasesâAnnalee 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.
October – MIT Press
Published: Apr 1, 2004
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