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)

Clyfford Still: “The Vertical Necessity of Life”

Clyfford Still - Untitled - 1960 - Oil on canvas - 113 x 146 1/4in. (287 x 371.5cm) - Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (click photo for larger image)Artist Clyfford Still (1904-1980) was known to be  an extremely difficult man, who eschewed the New York art world, resisted most critiques of his work, and very tightly controlled the ways in which his art was marketed, sold, collected and exhibited.

His evolution to an abstract style in the 1940s predated and influenced similar trends in other of his Abstract Expressionist contemporaries. One of his primary goals was to address what he saw as the monumental conflicts between humankind and nature. Still believed that art could play a moral role in a disorienting modern world. Vast, vertical fields of color became a key means of expression for the artist, and he would eventually influence a second generation of Color Field painters. His work does call to mind many of the vibrant, enormous stained glass panels created during the Middle Ages.

"These are not paintings in the usual sense," he once said, "they are life and death merging in fearful union...they kindle a fire; through them I breathe again, hold a golden cord, find my own revelation." 

Mark Rothko: A Deep Mysticism

Mark Rothko - Orange and Yellow - 1956 - Oil on canvas - 231 × 180 cm. - Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, NY (click photo for larger image)Mark Rothko (1903-1970) was an American painter of Russian Jewish descent. He developed a unique form of Abstract Expressionism. In contrast to the approach of Jackson Pollock, Rothko created “virtually gestureless paintings [which] achieved their effects by juxtaposing large areas of melting colors that seemingly float parallel to the picture plane in an indeterminate, atmospheric space.” The somer intensity of his later works reveal a deep mysticism.