Vir Heroicus Sublimis

Paintings: 1945-1958

~To read Newman’s writings of the late 1940s is to become familiar with a certain vocabulary applied to a certain set of themes: he speaks repeatedly of terror, tragedy, and despair as the human content of art; of the need to act and the futility of acting; of the search for the self and the desire to become self-aware; and of the artist’s mission to...

Despite continuing references in the scholarly and the popular press to the lasting artistic and cultural relevance of Abstract Expressionism, no comprehensive collection of essays related to this movement has been published since David and Cecile Shapiro’s Abstract Expressionism: A Critical Record and Clifford Ross’s Abstract Expressionism: Creators and Critics appeared in 1990...

Barnett Newman’s work – with its superficial affirmation of the two-dimensionality of pictorial space – is so often taken as an exemplar of the formalist tendency in art that one wonders what other aspects to his work there could possibly be. That there are other aspects is shown by his frequent comments...

JACKSON POLLOCK PEERS from a dark interior over a foreground crowded with cans of paint, squinting warily at readers from the pages of the 9 November 1959 issue of Life magazine (fig. 2). Despite its title, “Baffling U.S. Art,” the article accompanying the photograph calls Pollock’s work the most influential in the world and credits him with having created a style that was “tense, explosive, mysterious, and altogether new.” The tone of the posthumous article (Pollock died in an automobile …