Everything You Always Wanted To Know About Abstract Art

but were afraid to ask



Barnett Newman here really gives a brilliant insight and idea of what abstract art may be able to achieve. Ever since my first encounter - and I deliberately use this term, because for me it was like encountering a person, something or someone I could not avoid due to the sheer presence - the same sensation of meeting someone has remained intact. For Newman's paintings this has turned out to be a blessing and a curse. A blessing, when, like it happened to me, total strangers meet in front of them and all of a sudden start exchanging there deepest emotions and thoughts. A curse, when there are people who cannot take this and rather would apply a knife to the painting than open up to it.

Barnett Newman - Some Quotes

from "Through the Louvre with Barnett Newman" by Pierre Schneider

- There is no true meaning. Historical reconstructions, in writing or on canvas as in stone, are an absurdity, because a work lives through its presence: The author gone, the presence must needs be ours. Iconology is for epitaphs.

- life is a spelling mistake in the text of death.

- Meaning is the viewer's business; but the incentive which makes him want to mean - that is the picture's prerogative.

Abstract Art

Definitely and correctly Newman argues that even though his art might be abstract, meaning it is not a depiction of an object, it nevertheless has a subject. For me it certainly had a physical effect.

Private Goes Public

Sometimes when strangers meet under a benevolent spirit hovering over the place, the private or personal goes public to the extent that these total strangers share their deepest emotions and stand crying in the face of each other...

"Private? What kind of infernal stuff is this yet again?!"

What remains to be added?!

When one of the greatest artists of all time talks about art?! Just take your time and listen carefully and then go and meet him in his works. And maybe read some of his writings, they are more than worthwhile!


PS: Thanks so very much Raimund for sharing this one ;)!

PPS: Newman is btw in a way the namesake  for this entire blog, for when talking about the creating of Art he stated that it was a impossible (unmöglich)!

Art=Sublimation or The Sublime Is Now (Barnett Newman)

I still write a little every day: only a little, but I do write. And then in the evenings Levitan might come knocking at my window - 'Are you there, crocodile?' - and I let him in and we talk. He has terrible fits of melancholy these days, but if I tell him a funny story he rolls on the floor with pleasure and kicks his feet in the air. But his work is deteriorating: he no longer paints with a feeling of youth, but with a sort of bravura. I think the women have worn him out. It's impossible to paint a landscape without a feeling of pathos, of ecstasy, and ecstasy is impossible when you've gorged yourself. If I were a landsacpe artist I'd live quite an ascetic life: I'd have intercourse once in a year, and I'd eat once a day.   Anton Checkhov, as quoted by the lovely Michael Pennington in his play "Anton Checkhov", cf Are You There Crocodile?-Inventing Anton Checkhov" by Michael Pennington, p 269.

The Irascibles - iintérésting continued

Why didn't I think of this much earlier?! In addition to this , here are The Irascibles.

I'm especially fond of the man in the very middle, the eye of the storm!

A Man With A Soul of that Beautiful White Christ*

* Oscar Wilde in De Profundis

Zip* or the rest matters

Metaphors are translucent veils, that permit the things they disguise to be seen, or fancy dresses, under which the person, who is masked, is perceivable.   Étienne Bonnot de Condillac (1715-1780)

Oh this veil, this veil this wonderful veil, hiding and showing at once. This slight breath, this almost nothing!!


* cf Barnett Newman and American/Canadian informal, colloquial: nothing, zero

The Human Scale - In Memoriam Franz Meyer

This is a labour of love and also of penance for not having been courageous enough to speak out loud and defend Franz Meyer the one and regretfully only time I've attended one of his lectures.
It was on the 29th of June 1997 at a symposium accompanying the retrospective of Barnett Newman at the Kunstsammlung in Düsseldorf. I only just had returned from the Biennale in Venice and had spent the night with a German couple, a Dutch student, and two Roman Catholic priests, one from Italy, the other from Nigeria, on the nighttrain from Milan. And there he was, Franz Meyer, a sincere, open-minded and frank art historian, who had been lucky enough to have been acquainted with Barnett Newman. His words were like a beacon and he surely gave a lot away of his own beliefs and foundations as an individual, as I've myself have noticed would happen to people once they are faced with Newman's ouvre. Regretfully this frankness and liberty left him also with no defences against anybody out to scorn him for exactly these beliefs. And regretfully as well, there was Beat Wyss, who had taken a lot of his students on an outing to this symposium. Once given the opportunity they started relentlessly attacking Franz Meyer, the poor man was left absolutely nacked against their forces. Even Wyss, who had not been very kind and critical in his own lecture, felt the urge to quieten them a little, but the damage had already been done. The woman next to me had done the only decent thing possible and left the event murmuring words of protest, yet I stayed because there was one final lecture I desperately wanted to hear...
My conclusion after all these years is that firstly I hope that those students would never have to face anything that threatens their very existence, for from the look of it they wouldn't have zip to fall back on, and secondly I would very much recommend Franz Meyer's monography on Barnett Newman entitled Lema Sabachthani - The Stations of the Cross (despite its title it's in German!!)

Verweile doch, du bist so schön! - Aspects of Love

When I first encountered this painting "Anna's Light" by Barnett Newman, I was absolutely enraptured by it. Though there was a barrier in the museum preventing me to get too close, my feet had to rest there but my upper body was without me noticing bending forward to reach this light. Oh, blessed Barny to have known such love, no need to tell me who Anna was...

The painting "Prometheus Bound", whose scan is below, was the first of Barnett Newman's I've ever encountered. It was screaming on the wall, I was overwhelmed. Barnett named after Baruch Spinoza, who believed that there is no seperation between spirit and matter, had truly enclosed part of his spirit inside the matter of his painting. For why would people, me and a woman, who guarded the retrospective of Newman's works at Düsseldorf, lie in each others' arms, wheeping, sharing our deepest feelings?! This was also the painting I was standing in front, when another guard at the same exhibition, probably getting nervous at me standing for almost a quarter of an hour in front of it, got behind me and suddenly screamed out: "Come, come, there is something! I've seen it!" The exhibition had been on for several weeks ...

Queen Mab

Coincidentally the leitmotif today is dreams. At mass it was Joseph's and the three Magis various dreams that accompany Christmas in Matthew's biblical accounts and therefore I'm telling of two special dreams I had.

The first dream occured when I was about to deliver a speech at a seminar.  I dreamt that we were having the seminar in the dean's room and while I was talking there was a little brown bat flying above our heads, almost touching them, but oddly I and my professor were the only ones able to perceive it, though I kept pointing it out to my fellow students. The morning I was to deliver my speech  I went to the academy's library and rememberring the dream, which had been extraordinary "real", I looked up bats and their meaning.My heart went down when I read that according to Gipsy mythology this represented the ability to perceive beyond the superficial, this made me fear for my speech. And it was proven absolutely right because from all the people present only me and my professor had a slight idea what I was talking about. Still my professor kept certain things in mind, because a few weeks later when he delivered a speech on exactly the same subject - he had in fact written his dissertation on it - at a symposium at the Kunstsammlung in Düsseldorf , perceiving me in the auditorium he came to me and thanked me(?!) for giving him the courage to talk about his subject in the manner he had just done because of my utterances at his seminar.

The other dream was even stranger and it took a long time for me to find out what it actually meant. First the dream: I was in Barnett Newman's studio and apart from the two of us there were no human beings present. There were though other creatures and one of them was cutting the buttons off Newman's shirt and Newman was serenely letting this happen, whereas I began screaming that he was dying. Yet Newman was smiling implying that I should calm down. The strange thing is that within the reality of the dream I perfectly knew the ritual of cutting the buttons and its implications of somebody dying or having recently died, but in real life it took me years before I stumbled across a passage in one of Jacques Derrida's books where he tells of the Jewish ritual that at the father's death the first born son cuts off or is getting cut off the buttons of his waistcoat.