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Notes on video lecture:
Barnett Newman's Vir Heroicus Sublimis (1950)
Notes taken by Edward Tanguay on July 29, 2018 (go to class or lectures)
Choose from these words to fill the blanks below:
incur, lead, brush, wall, viewer, canvas, opaque, flickers, Latin, hung, evenly, acrylic, oil, mimetic, palette, void, Irvin, loss, brush, environmental, receding, optical, value, chroma, postwar, plumb, start, translucent, zips, museum, glossier, vision, dominated, 1970, prominent, screams, gravity
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title is            for heroic and sublime man
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Museum of Modern Art, New York City
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Barnett Newman (1905-        )
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wrote about what an author and theorist could do in the                era
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what an artist should do with abstraction is to            the void
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to try to get somewhere in terms of perception and experience, both that of the painter and the              that was not possible before
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abstraction should be able to do something the figurative,                painting, something about something, couldn't do
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Newman's paintings are about the experience of the         
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daring to paint in a way that had never been seen before
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daring to            experiences in paint which had never been experienced before
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the formal mechanism through which these experiences are had
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Vir Heroicus Sublimis
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you eye doesn't know where to           , it just begins roaming and doesn't know where to stop
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it has multiple centers of               
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different          which are dispersed throughout the painting
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your eye wants to play ping-pong back and forth between them
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certain ones grabbing your attention, others                  away from you
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consider which zip demands you attention
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one really                for you
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others are maybe the fourth or the fifth that your eye finally lands on and returns to the more                    zips
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the ground
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a lot of oil paint, cadmium red, opaque and incredibly              painted
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something that                paint is engineered to do
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if you think Barnett Newman is not a painter's painter, not a technician of paint, then try this at home with        colors
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to paint this evenly in oils without a roller, this was all done with a           , is a feat of painting
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zips, left to right
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first zip
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much                  than the ground
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the hue is related, but the            is lighter
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there has been some white added to this paint
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the lighter color                  in and out of existence, but doesn't scream
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masking tape and                knife
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but with fairly large skips
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allows the zip to be weak
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second zip
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a very clean, light, cool white
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it's quite              since it has actually been put in twice
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first with a pallet knife, the second with a brush
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second application missed some areas
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by far the highest value color of any zip
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leaps out into your field of vision first
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third zip
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a dark, deep, cool plum color
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contrasting the flickering of the other zips, you have here an                pulling-away
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lowest value color on the             
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color is the cooler than the field itself
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thus appears to be optically behind the ground of the painting
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fourth zip
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another flickering, low-            , high-value versions of the cadmium red color
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fifth zip
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another white, but a warm,                        one
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probably a calcium containing white
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in contrast, the bright white zip is probably a          white
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looking closely, you see it has been applied in two passes
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both appear to have been done with a           
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the red behind the white co-mingles in your eye
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a warm, tending-toward-yellow color
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has a weaker character
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figure-ground relationships
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we have these zip competing for prominence in our field of             
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                           viewing of painting
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the installation space that a painting is          in
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when we are very close to the painting, almost enveloped in it
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their are certain positions when you don't see any          space anymore
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your field of vision is completely                    by the painting
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something that can be experienced first-hand in the             
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you have a feeling of         
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it's the process of using paint to manipulate your experience, which transitions into the work of light artists such as Albert            (1922-2015) and James Turrell (1943-)

Ideas and Concepts:

On the function of abstract art, via tonight's Postwar Abstract Painting class:

"The abstract painter Barnett Newman was also an author and theorist who wrote about what one could do in the discipline of art in the the postwar era. In his view, a new aspect of art was abstraction, and what one can and should do with abstraction is to plumb the void, so to speak, to try to get somewhere in terms of perception and experience, both that of the painter and the viewer, that was not possible before.

Abstraction should be able to do something that figurative, mimetic painting, i.e. something about something, couldn't do before.

Newman's paintings are about the experience and exploration of this void, daring to paint in a way that had never been seen before, daring to incur experiences in paint which had never been experienced before, an adventure into an unknown world which can be explored only by those willing to take the risks."
Barnett Newman's Onement, I (1948)
Barnett Newman's The Wild (1950)
Barnett Newman's Vir Heroicus Sublimis (1950)