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When push comes to shove: Barnett Newman, abstraction, and the politics of 1968

2008; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 1; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/17541320802063562

1754-1336

Patricia P. Kelly,

Art, Politics, and Modernism

Abstract This essay examines how the volatile politics of the Vietnam War and protest movement, specifically as exemplified by the events surrounding the 1968 Democratic National Convention held in Chicago, penetrated the perceived exclusivity of the art establishment. With the work of the New York School artist Barnett Newman as case study, most importantly his Lace Curtain for Mayor Daley (1968), the relationship between politics and art is considered. Issues addressed include the perceived autonomy of modern art, the possibilities of abstraction, and the meaning of artistic agency at a transformative moment in American art. Keywords: ChicagoDemocratic National Convention, 1968Barnett Newmanabstract art Notes 1. This was one of two works Newman designed for the “Richard J. Daley” exhibition held at the Feigen Gallery in Chicago from October 23 to November 23, 1968. The other sculpture, Mayor Daley’s Outhouse, was never executed. Hess, Barnett Newman, 1971, 123. 2. Of course, attitudes to the protests and violence in Chicago varied. For a recreation of the range of reactions, see Farber, Chicago ‘68. 3. Ginsberg, “Howl” and Other Poems, 9–26. 4. Rubin and Hoffman, “Yippie Manifesto,” 323. 5. O’Neill, Barnett Newman, 178. 6. For example, within a post‐World War II context and as part of a larger body of discourse on modern man, the French existentialist Jean‐Paul Sartre viewed authentic experience as the primary means through which the individual could counteract alienation and engage more fully in social practice. See Sartre, Being and Nothingness. 7. Despite, or possibly because of, its obvious historical relevance, scholarly readings of Lace Curtain for Mayor Daley have rarely situated this work in relation to the social circumstances contributing to its meaning. Exceptions include Zweite, “Lace Curtain for Mayor Daley” and Temkin, Barnett Newman. 8. Philip Leider as quoted in Newman, Challenging Art, 300. 9. Newman, Challenging Art, 435. 10. Much of the existing literature on art and politics in the 1960s can be divided into two broad groups. First, there are studies that consider the involvement by artists in protest organizations and various forms of activism. An example is Frascina, Art, Politics and Dissent. Second, there is a growing body of literature exploring the relationship of minimal art to politics. Key works include Chave, “Minimalism and the Rhetoric of Power” and Raskin, “Specific Opposition.” A more recent contribution to the field is Bryan‐Wilson, “Hard Hats and Art Strikes,” which considers Morris’s 1970 solo show in relation to notions of political commitment, particularly concerning the artist as worker. Bryan‐Wilson’s understanding of politics in terms of subjectivity and individual agency is aligned with my own interpretation of Newman. 11. Reprinted in O’Neill, Barnett Newman, 43. 12. Dan Sullivan, “Artists Agree on Boycott of Chicago Showings,” New York Times, September 5, 1968. On the boycott, see Schwartz, “The Politicization of the Avant‐Garde.” Other artists who initially supported the boycott include James Rosenquist, Philip Guston, Elsworth Kelly, Kenneth Nolan, Larry Poons, Saul Steinberg, and Tony Smith. 13. Claes Oldenburg in a letter to Richard Feigen dated September 5, 1968. Reprinted in “Artists vs. Mayor Daley,” Newsweek, November 4, 1968, 117. Also reprinted in Part II in Schwartz, 70. 14. A partial list of participating artists includes Lee Bontecou, Christo, Sam Francis, Helen Frankenthaler, Leon Golub, Adolph Gottlieb, Red Grooms, Donald Judd, Roy Lichtenstein, Robert Motherwell, Barnett Newman, Kenneth Noland, Claes Oldenburg, Hans Richter, James Rosenquist, Tony Smith, Theodoros Stamos, Frank Stella, and Jean Tinguely. Donald Janson, “Anti‐Daley Art Put in Show in Chicago,” New York Times, October 24, 1968. 15. When Feigen reassembled a partial version of the 1968 protest show 20 years after the Democratic National Convention in November 1988, he included Morris’s telegram as a cataloged work of art. 16. Temkin, 298. As the eye bolts on the top suggest, Lace Curtain for Mayor Daley originally may have been intended as a hanging piece, and, in fact, Don Lippincott, whose company fabricated the work, remembers that the artist suspended the piece at the plant. This, or course, fits the curtain reference of the title. However, when the piece was shown at the Feigen Gallery, it was supported on cinder blocks, possibly because of concerns over its weight. Since then, the work has always been displayed standing. 17. Daniel Schulman in a letter to Armin Zweite, dated November 22, 1996. Barnett Newman, Lace Curtain for Mayor Daley, Object File 1989.4333, Art Institute of Chicago. 18. Before approximately eight million television viewers, Daley could be seen yelling obscenities at Ribicoff. Though the sound was cut by the networks, the words were easily discernible by reading Daley’s lips: “Fuck you, you Jew son of a bitch. You lousy motherfucker, go home.” See Burner, Making Peace with the 60s, 213. To this blatant display of anti‐Semitism by Mayor Daley, Newman responded, “Well if that’s the level he wants to fight at, I’ll fight dirty too; there’re other words besides ‘kike.’” Hess, (1971), 123. 19. Daley grew up in the ethnically white neighborhood of Bridgeport, a historically Irish‐American enclave that was birthplace to a half‐dozen of Chicago’s most prominent mayors. 20. As Sarah Rich has noted, Newman only began using the name “zip” in 1966 in relation to the Who’s Afraid series, possibly to mimic the more racy and playful idioms of pop art. Prior to 1966, he used the descriptors “stripe” or “line.” See Rich, “The Proper Name of Newman’s Zip.” 21. Bois, “Perceiving Newman,” 203. 22. “Interview with David Sylvester” (1965), in O’Neill, Barnett Newman, 257–8. 23. For more on Newman’s particular brand of anarchism, see Temkin, Barnett Newman, 23–4. Temkin connects Newman’s interest in anarchism, which declined greatly in the United States with the deportation of Emma Goldman in 1919, with American Transcendentalism, particularly its emphasis on individual responsibility. In 1936, Newman spent his honeymoon with his wife, Annalee, in Concord, Massachusetts, visiting the places described by such writers as Henry David Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Nathaniel Hawthorne. As Temkin notes: “Transcendentalism greatly affected Newman’s perception of himself as a man and as an artist. It inspired his conviction that the life of an artist meant a life of personal liberty.” Also see Richard Shiff, “Introduction,” in O’Neill, Barnett Newman. 24. “Frontiers of Space: Interview with Dorothy Gees Seckler” (1962), in O’Neill, Barnett Newman, 247–51. 25. See Adolph Gottlieb, Mark Rothko, Barnett Newman, “Statement” (1943), in Harrison and Wood, Art in Theory, 561–3. This statement, which appeared in the New York Times on June 13, 1943, was signed only by Gottlieb and Rothko, though Newman assisted in its composition. The statement set out in a manifesto‐like tone to “explain” the work of these artists in answer to the critic Edward Alden Jewell’s prompting. In so doing, it prioritized their interest in mystery, metaphysics, and myth. 26. See, for example, Barnett Newman, “The Plasmic Image,” in O’Neill, Barnett Newman, 138–55. In this essay, written in 1945, Newman considers the nature of abstract art and the possibilities it holds for contemporary society. 27. Leja, Reframing Abstract Expressionism, 2–3. Leja takes as the starting point of his study what he terms “modern man discourse,” a general set of ideas and beliefs evident in the literature produced in the United States immediately preceding World War II. Focused on an examination of nature, the human mind, and behavior, modern man discourse demonstrates a fascination with the primitive and irrational as alternatives to modern rationality. 28. Central to the development of Newman’s iconography was the influence of Northwest Coast First Nations culture, particularly Indian ritual art. While based in abstraction, it was infused with social ritual and with myth. From the mid‐1940s onward, both in his writings and curatorial practice, Newman highlighted what he viewed as a direct connection between “primitive” and modern experience, using this association to assert the spiritual and transcendental value of modern art. Particularly interested in the art of the Kwakiutl, he believed the use of ideographs in native art was a primary method for communicating intellectual and emotional content, a strategy mirrored in modern painting’s preoccupation with abstract forms. For an in‐depth analysis of Newman’s fascination with Northwest Coast art, see Rushing, Native American Art, 126–37; and in O’Neill, Barnett Newman, “The Ideographic Picture” (1947), 107–8, and “The First Man Was an Artist,” 156–60. 29. Here II is one of a series of three sculptures produced by Newman under this title. Here I, first realized in 1950, was composed of two upright elements, one hard‐edged and the other modulated. Here III from 1965–6 is reduced to only one vertical zip. 30. See Schor, “Barnett Newman’s ‘Here’ Series.” Schor argues that Newman’s naming of the “Here” series and his highlighting of a “sense of place” established the conditions for a possible unity between the viewer and the sculpture. 31. See Hess, Barnett Newman, 1969, and “Newman, Rothko, Still and the Abstract Sublime” in Golding, Paths to the Absolute, 195–232. 32. “The Plasmic Image,” in O’Neill, Barnett Newman, 139–40. 33. The same year that Lace Curtain for Mayor Daley was produced, Newman wrote “The True Revolution Is Anarchist!,” an introduction to a reissue of the Russian anarchist Peter Kropotkin’s Memoirs of a Revolutionist, originally published in America in 1899. Here, Newman connected Kropotkin’s message – that the individual is as restricted under radical ideological systems as by the established state – with his own thoughts on the New Left. To Newman, the New Left had by the late 1960s “begun to build a new prison” complete with “Marcusian, Maoist and Guevara walls.” As an alternative to such dogmatism, Newman offered anarchism as “the only criticism of society which is not a technique for the seizure and transfer of power by one group against another.” See Newman, “The True Revolution,” 45. 34. For example, Andre et al., “The Artist and Politics”; Ashton, “Response to Crisis in American Art”; Rose, “Problems of Criticism IV”; and Schwartz, “The Politicization of the Avant‐Garde,” Parts I–IV. 35. Philip Leider in a letter to Sidney Tillum dated September 30, 1967, in Amy Newman, Barnett Newman, 14. Leider continued: “I know very well what it is like, however, to live as if there were not, and there the edge of discrimination turns not against the politics, but against the art.” 36. Leider, as quoted in Newman, Challenging Art, 264–5. The “Politics” column which ran five times beginning in November 1970 was designated for “political communications from various segments of the art community.” 37. “Modernist Painting” (1960) in Greenberg, Collected Essays, vol. 4, 85–93. Though Greenberg only wrote three articles for the magazine, his influence on Artforum during the 1960s was widely recognized. Francis Frascina considers the relationship between Greenberg and Leider in Art, Politics and Dissent, 143–4. Examining Leider’s correspondence with the critic in 1966–70, Frascina demonstrates Leider’s ideological commitment to Greenberg’s version of modernism; indeed, Leider often referred to Greenberg as “master” and encouraged him to publish with Artforum on a more regular basis. 38. Locating aesthetic value not in subject matter but in form, Greenberg constructed a historical determinism for modern art based on formal innovation. His belief, however, that this would protect modern art from co‐optation was ultimately proven wrong, especially given the ways in which abstract expressionist painting was promoted by the US government in the 1950s as the democratic alternative to socialist realism. See Kozloff, “American Painting During the Cold War”; Cockcroft, “Abstract Expressionism, Weapon of the Cold War,” 107–23 and 125–33; and Guilbaut, How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art. 39. “Modernist Painting,” in Greenberg, Collected Essays, vol. 4, 86. Greenberg, influenced by the theories of autonomous art developed by Leon Trotsky, pitted an artistic avant‐garde against the forces of mass culture in order to preserve the quality of culture as an intellectual preoccupation against the proliferation of kitsch. For an analysis of Greenberg’s political position vis‐à‐vis Trotskyism, see Frascina, “Greenberg and the Politics of Modernism”; Guilbaut, “The New Adventures of the Avant‐Garde”; and Cox, “The Art Criticism of Clement Greenberg.” 40. See “Avant‐Garde and Kitsch” (1939) and “Towards a Newer Laocoon” (1940), in Greenberg, Collected Essays, vol. 1, 5–23 and 23–8; and “The Plight of Our Culture” (1953) in vol. 3, 122–52. See also Greenberg and MacDonald, “10 Propositions on the War”. 41. Andre et al., “The Artist and Politics.” 42. The 12 artists Artforum chose for publication were Carl Andre, Jo Baer, Walter Darby Bannard, Billy Al Bengston, Rosemarie Castoro, Rafael Ferrer, Donald Judd, Irving Petlin, Edward Ruscha, Richard Serra, Robert Smithson, and Lawrence Weiner. 43. Andre et al., “The Artist and Politics: A Symposium,” 36. 44. Ibid, 38. 45. Considering the issue of artist‐organized activism, Judd specifically critiqued the Art Workers Coalition and their targeting of the institutional policies of the Museum of Modern Art. While not against artists’ organizations per se, Judd opposed their demands that a permanent section of the Museum of Modern Art be reserved for artists of color, and that artists without gallery representation be given temporary exhibition space. Adamant that not all artists are equal, he insisted on the use of strict qualitative criteria when making judgments about art, emulating Greenberg’s insistence on quality, and his belief that only an initiate in intellectual and philosophical matters can make lasting claims about the value of art. See Donald Judd, “The Artist and Politics: A Symposium,” 37. 46. Ibid. 47. On Judd’s political activism, and his affiliation with the War Resisters League and the Lower Manhattan Township, see Raskin, Specific Opposition. 48. Adorno, “Commitment.” For an analysis of the relationship between Judd and Adorno’s ideas, see Frascina, Art, Politics and Dissent, 138–9. 49. Both Judd and Adorno were referencing an understanding of representational art situated within Cold War politics. Despite the work of Diego Rivera and Thomas Hart Benton in the 1930s, by the early 1940s the propagandistic content of Soviet socialist realism was pitted against the “freedom” and “space for critical thought” inherent in American abstract art, at least as promoted by Clement Greenberg and Robert Motherwell (borrowing ideas of André Breton and Leon Trotsky). See Guilbaut, How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art, 25–6. 50. Adorno, “Commitment,” 318. 51. Andre et al., “The Artist and Politics: A Symposium,” 35. 52. Ibid. 53. For an interview with Baer that explains some of the political implications of her paintings, see Guilbaut and Sgan‐Cohen, “Jo Baer: peintre traditionnel ≪radical≫.” 54. Ibid., 18. 55. Andre et al., “The Artist and Politics: A symposium,” 35. 56. Ibid. 57. Rubenfeld, Clement Greenberg, 141–2. 58. Temkin, Barnett Newman, 28. In her essay “Barnett Newman on Exhibition,” Temkin provides a thorough analysis of the critical reception of most of Newman’s major exhibitions with particular attention paid to the Betty Parsons shows. 59. Ibid., 52–7. While Greenberg was sympathetic to Newman’s production earlier in the 1950s, it was not until the French & Co. show in 1959 that Newman began to be taken more seriously. That same year, the Museum of Modern Art acquired one of his paintings, he received his first invitation to show in a Whitney Annual, and major collectors began showing interest in his work. 60. “After Abstract Expressionism,” in Greenberg, Collected Essays, vol. 4, 132–3. 61. While Judd described Newman in these terms in November 1964 in an article entitled “Barnett Newman,” the piece was not published until February 1970 in Studio International. Reprinted in Donald Judd: Complete Writings 1959–1975, 200–2. 62. See Richard Shiff, “Whiteout: The Not Influence Newman Effect”; Temkin, Barnett Newman, 77–111. 63. Ibid., 80. 64. Robert Morris, as quoted in David Sylvester, “Concerning Barnett Newman,” The Listener 88, no. 2263 (August 10, 1972), 172. Reprinted in Shiff, “Whiteout: The Not Influence Newman Effect,” 85. 65. Morris, “Notes on Sculpture [1966],” 232. 66. For an analysis of Morris’ political position, as evidenced though his prioritization of “labor” and notions of the artist as “worker,” see Bryan‐Wilson, “Hard Hats and Art Strikes,” 333–59. 67. Fried, Art and Objecthood, 148–72. 68. Judd, “Barnett Newman,” 200. Cox also considers Judd’s response to Newman’s Vir Heroicus Sublimis in Art‐as‐Politics, 67–8. Cox, however, does not consider the implications of this depoliticization of Newman’s work within the context of the Sixties or in relation to the specific aesthetic and political objectives of Judd. 69. Chave, “Minimalism and the Rhetoric of Power.” Interestingly, the sense of physical danger inherent in this reading of minimal art aligns with the threat posed by the barbed wire of Newman’s Lace Curtain for Mayor Daley, as if Newman were ironically associating minimalism with Daley’s repressive tactics. 70. Foster, “The Crux of Minimalism.” See also Krauss et al., “The Reception of the Sixties.” 71. Foster, “The Crux of Minimalism,” 50. 72. Rich, “The Proper Name of Newman’s Zip,” 100. 73. “The New York School Question: Interview with Neil A. Levine” (1965), in O’Neill, Barnett Newman, 263. 74. Rich, “The Proper Name of Newman’s Zip,” 103. Rich argued that Newman’s use of the zip was also a way to mark out his production from that of the hard‐edge abstractionists, which was devoid of the subject matter inherent in much of the New York School work. She explained: “Newman’s zip, though it seems playful, maybe likewise be understood to signify epic confrontation. It is the sound of Barnett Newman coming to the rescue of authenticity and metaphysical content in painting.” 75. Shiff, 80. In fact, as Shiff notes, when Walter Hopps, the curator of the US pavilion at the eighth Sãn Paulo Biennial included him as the senior figure with six younger artists, Newman insisted that the following statement be added to the catalog: “It is important to realize that Newman has neither undertaken the teaching of his art, nor has he developed an alliance of pupil‐like followers.”