•

title is Latin for heroic and sublime man

•

Museum of Modern Art, New York City

•

Barnett Newman (1905-1970)

•

wrote about what an author and theorist could do in the postwar era

•

what an artist should do with abstraction is to plumb the void

•

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 the figurative, mimetic painting, something about something, couldn't do

•

Newman's paintings are about the experience of the 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

•

the formal mechanism through which these experiences are had

•

Vir Heroicus Sublimis

•

you eye doesn't know where to start, it just begins roaming and doesn't know where to stop

•

it has multiple centers of gravity

•

different zips which are dispersed throughout the painting

•

your eye wants to play ping-pong back and forth between them

•

certain ones grabbing your attention, others receding away from you

•

consider which zip demands you attention

•

one really screams for you

•

others are maybe the fourth or the fifth that your eye finally lands on and returns to the more prominent zips

•

the ground

•

a lot of oil paint, cadmium red, opaque and incredibly evenly painted

•

something that acrylic paint is engineered to do

•

if you think Barnett Newman is not a painter's painter, not a technician of paint, then try this at home with oil colors

•

to paint this evenly in oils without a roller, this was all done with a brush, is a feat of painting

•

zips, left to right

•

first zip

•

much glossier than the ground

•

the hue is related, but the value is lighter

•

there has been some white added to this paint

•

the lighter color flickers in and out of existence, but doesn't scream

•

masking tape and palette knife

•

but with fairly large skips

•

allows the zip to be weak

•

second zip

•

a very clean, light, cool white

•

it's quite opaque since it has actually been put in twice

•

first with a pallet knife, the second with a brush

•

second application missed some areas

•

by far the highest value color of any zip

•

leaps out into your field of vision first

•

third zip

•

a dark, deep, cool plum color

•

contrasting the flickering of the other zips, you have here an optical pulling-away

•

lowest value color on the canvas

•

color is the cooler than the field itself

•

thus appears to be optically behind the ground of the painting

•

fourth zip

•

another flickering, low-chroma, high-value versions of the cadmium red color

•

fifth zip

•

another white, but a warm, translucent one

•

probably a calcium containing white

•

in contrast, the bright white zip is probably a lead white

•

looking closely, you see it has been applied in two passes

•

both appear to have been done with a brush

•

the red behind the white co-mingles in your eye

•

a warm, tending-toward-yellow color

•

has a weaker character

•

figure-ground relationships

•

we have these zip competing for prominence in our field of vision

•

environmental viewing of painting

•

the installation space that a painting is hung in

•

when we are very close to the painting, almost enveloped in it

•

their are certain positions when you don't see any wall space anymore

•

your field of vision is completely dominated by the painting

•

something that can be experienced first-hand in the museum

•

you have a feeling of loss

•

it's the process of using paint to manipulate your experience, which transitions into the work of light artists such as Albert Irvin (1922-2015) and James Turrell (1943-)