Barnett Newman
A single vertical band down a field of colour, and forty years of argument about whether that is enough.
Barnett Newman was born in New York in 1905 to Polish Jewish emigrants, studied philosophy, worked as a teacher and a critic, and destroyed most of what he had painted before 1944. Onement I of 1948 — a field of cadmium red divided by a single vertical strip of masking tape left in place and painted over — is the point at which the work begins. He called the bands zips, and made them the entire content of the painting for the rest of his life, at scales from the very small to the wall-filling. He was largely dismissed in his lifetime and died in 1970.
Very little trades: the output was small, he destroyed early work, and the major paintings are institutional. The colour fields are flat, evenly applied and often unvarnished, which makes them among the least forgiving surfaces in post-war painting — a scuff, a retouch or a stretcher mark reads across the whole picture, and several works have suffered high-profile vandalism and difficult restorations. Sculpture exists in small editions. There is a lithograph and etching output, including the 18 Cantos portfolio, which is where most collectors actually encounter him.
If you own a work by Barnett Newman
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