Barnett Newman: “Zips”

Barnett Newman - Concord - 1949 - Oil and masking tape on canvas - 89 3/4 x 53 5/8 in. (228 x 136.2 cm) - Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY (click photo for larger image)Barnett Newman (1905-1970) shared the Abstract Expressionists' interests in myth and the primitive unconscious, but the huge fields of color and trademark "zips" in his pictures set him apart from the gestural abstraction of many of his peers. 

The response to his mature work, even from friends, was muted when he first exhibited it. It was not until later in his career that he began to receive acclaim, and he would subsequently become a touchstone for both Minimalists and a second generation of Color Field painters.

“Claiming that he sought ‘to start from scratch, to paint as if painting never existed before,’ he saw his compositions as forms of thought, as expressions of the universal experience of being alive and individual.”

“Concord was painted during Newman's most prolific year. He exhibited the painting in his first solo exhibition at Betty Parsons Gallery in 1950, which was installed with the help of his friend, Mark Rothko. Concord's green layer of paint is uncharacteristically brushy, and it was perhaps with its atmospheric wash in mind that Newman titled the picture after the town famous for Henry David Thoreau's Walden, where he and his wife, Annalee, had honeymooned fourteen years earlier.” (Metropolitan Museum of Art)