Tuesday, July 31, 2018

Nineteen Forties Paintings with Rants by Barnett Newman

Jackson Pollock
Birth
ca. 1941
oil paint on canvas
Tate Gallery

Jackson Pollock
Summertime: Number 9A
1948
oil paint, enamel paint and commercial paint on canvas
Tate Gallery

Barnett Newman
Moment
1946
oil paint on canvas
Tate Gallery

"We are reasserting man's natural desire for the exalted, for a concern with our relationship to the absolute emotions.  We do not need the obsolete props of an outmoded and antiquated legend.  We are creating images whose reality is self-evident and which are devoid of the props and crutches that evoke associations with outmoded images, both sublime and beautiful.  We are freeing ourselves of the impediments of memory, association, nostalgia, legend, myth, or what have you, that have been the devices of Western European painting.  Instead of making cathedrals out of Christ, man, or "life," we are making them out of ourselves, out of our own feelings.  The image we produce is the self-evident one of revelation, real and concrete, that can be understood by anyone who will look at it without the nostalgic glasses of history."

– Barnett Newman (written in 1948)

Alan Davie
Entrance to a Paradise
1949
oi paint on board
Tate Gallery

 
Adolph Gottlieb
The Alchemist
1945
oil paint on canvas
Tate Gallery

Arshile Gorky
Waterfall
1943
oil paint on canvas
Tate Gallery

Nicolas de Stael
Marathon
1948
oil paint on canvas
Tate Gallery

Stanley William Hayter
Untitled
1946
oil paint on canvas
Tate Gallery

"The love of space is there, and painting functions in space like everything else because it is a communal fact – it can be held in common.  Only time can be felt in private.  Space is common property.  Only time is personal, a private experience.  That's what makes it so personal, so important.  Each person must feel it for himself.  Space is the given fact of art but irrelevant to any feeling except insofar as it involves the outside world.  Is this why all the critics insist on space, as if all modern art were an exercise and ritual of it?  They insist on having it because, being outside, it includes them, it makes the artist "concrete" and real because he represents or invokes sensations in the material objects that exist in space and can be understood

The concern with space bores me.  I insist on my experiences of sensations in time – not the sense of time but the physical sensation of time."

– Barnett Newman (written in 1949)

Kurt Schwitters
(Relief in Relief)
ca. 1942-45
oil paint on wood and plaster
Tate Gallery

Ivon Hitchens
Forest Edge No. 2
1944
oil paint on canvas
Tate Gallery

Gerald Wilde
Fata Morgana1949
oil paint on canvas
Tate Gallery

David Bomberg
Bomb Store
1942
oil paint on board
Tate Gallery

Marlow Moss
Composition in Yellow, Black and White
1949
oil paint and wood on canvas
Tate Gallery

Lucio Fontana
Spatial Concept
1949-50
painted and pierced canvas
Tate Gallery