Star of the stripes

Martin Gayford

Here are two anecdotes about the American painter Barnett Newman. Bryan Robertson, the critic and curator, was both a great admirer and a good friend of New

man's, but once he got into trouble with the great man. Newman's devoted wife, Annalee, talking about her husband, had remarked that he was given to hiding himself away in his studio for long periods, 'And we never know what he is going to come out with.'

Well, says Robertson, who allowed himself to become humorous on the subject in print, thus arousing the artist's ire, 'one thing we could be pretty certain of is that Newman would emerge with an oblong canvas bearing one or more vertical stripes'. Indeed, that description covers virtually all of Newman's mature production (a good part of which is currently on show in an exhibition at Tate Modern).

It that sense Newman is one of the most repetitive of the great 20th-century artists (only Mondrian stuck so firmly to his path). Once Newman had found his own way of painting in 1948, he never wavered until his death in 1970. It was stripes, stripes, stripes all the way except he called them 'zips'.

Second anecdote: I was wandering, notebook in hand, through the empty galleries

of the Tate's blockbuster Jackson Pollock exhibition in 1999, when I came across the late David Sylvester seated in contempla tion in front of Pollock's huge masterpiece 'One'. We talked for a while, and then Sylvester remarked that another exhibition he would very much like to see was a retrospective of Newman's work (much like the one now at Tate Modern).

'I suppose,' I said, thinking that it would consist entirely of coloured canvases riven

by zips, 'that would be a bit less varied than this Pollock show."Oh. no,' said David, quixotically, characteristically, and as it happens, quite correctly, 'it would be much more varied.' He gave as an example the two Newmans owned by the Tate, 'Adam' and 'Eve'. 'Now those,' he insisted, 'are entirely different sorts of picture'.

Both Robertson and Sylvester were right. Newman's work, baldly described in words, is likely to sound monotonous to the point of aridity. But the experience isn't, and that is to do, among other things, with what he does with those stripes. The pre-war song 'It Ain't What You Do, It's The Way That You Do It' embodies, of course, one of the great

truths about art (another being summed up by the Duke Ellington ditty, 'It Don't Mean A Thing If It Ain't Got That Swing).

Let's take those two Tate pictures, not because they are the best in the show, but because they are indeed completely differ ent types of painting. 'Adam' contains three vertical bands of red — a thick one of crimson abutting the left edge of the canvas, another thick more orangey one to the left of the centre which, unusually for Newman, is slightly bent, and a tenuous thread of dark red towards the right side.

This arrangement — which took Newman two years to find, as he added the middle band long after the other two — is emphatically upright. The experience of confronting it is like meeting tree trunks in the dark, or encountering searchlight beams streaming into the sky. Except that Newman's bars of red seem to have no position in space; instead they seem to challenge you to find the right place to stand in relation to them.

'Eve', in contrast, consists of an expanse of orange-red that almost fills the canvas (that colour, by the way, seems to have spelt femininity to Newman as a huge painting 'Anna's Light', named for his mother, consists almost entirely of a swimming-poolsized oblong of nurturing scarlet). In the case of 'Eve', a narrow brownish strip marks the boundary of this intense zone of red.

So the three pillars of light in 'Adam' seem to root you to the spot, while you float off into the redness of 'Eve', past that portal of brown that somehow gives a sense of scale to the rest. Barnett Newman felt — correctly — that colour was light, and took enormous pains to obtain the luminous strength of, say, these reds. These simpleseeming paintings were far from easy to produce.

Those are only two examples of the variations Newman ran through. Sometimes the zips seem drawn with a ruler, so sharp are the lines. Sometimes, as in the enormous 'Uriel', the paint spatters and fizzes along the edges like the light of the sun as it emerges from a lunar eclipse. The zips can widen until they stop being stripes and become wide rectangles of colour, as in 'The Gate'. They can narrow to the thinnest of cracks.

'The Wild' is an extraordinary painting, perhaps the longest and thinnest ever painted, consisting of almost nothing but a zip. It is 953/4" high by 17.4" wide and looks nothing in photographs. Its secret is that the colour goes round the edges on to the sides, so it is actually a very tall, painted sculpture. Thus Newman's paintings go right to the border with sculpture — and cross over — since he made several pieces in three dimensions (it's interesting to note that several contemporary sculptors, including Anish Kapoor whose work will son be installed in the Turbine Hall at Tate Modern, cite him as an influence).

The dimensions and proportions of the canvas alter too. You get lost in 'Anna's Light', but 'White Fire IV' seems to rear up in front of you like a high building. The unconscious effect of the architecture of New York on Newman and other American painters, by the way, is a little noted factor. Bryan Robertson reports that to walk the streets of Manhattan in the company of Newman, a native New Yorker, was a lesson in the appreciation of the sky-scraper. 'Look up!' being one of his lessons.

Newman belongs with the small army of 20th-century artists who marched under the banner 'less is more'. It's worth noting that they did not do so for the hell of it, but so as to focus more effectively on what they did not omit. Newman's art offers experiences of immersion in colour and physical confrontation with shape and scale more purely than almost anything else in painting. If you give his works time, they will repay it.

But neither his art nor this show is perfect. It is a sign of authenticity that not all his paintings succeed equally, or at all. If you don't make mistakes, the jazz trumpeter Roy Eldridge once remarked, you're not trying.

None of the 'Stations of the Cross', which fill a whole room, works as far as I am concerned. And it is a significant defect of the Tate exhibition that his masterpiece 'Vir Heroicus Sublimis', the biggest and most spectacular of all Newmans, has not been lent to the London leg of the show, because the bigger the Newman the better. But, if you want to understand late 20th-century art, these stripes are one of the keys.