Newman, who majored in philosophy at New York’s City College, was an impoverished self-proclaimed anarchist who kept failing the exam that would promote him from substitute art teacher in the public schools to a regular one. Consequently, his wife, Annalee, worked two jobs, while he dreamed up schemes like concocting a system for picking winners at the horse races and running for mayor as a write-in candidate. As an artist, Newman couldn’t bring himself to commit anything to an actual canvas until he was 40 years old. After he happened suddenly upon the zip in a small painting he made on his 43d birthday, his first two solo shows in 1950 and ‘51 were trounced by the critics and yielded no sales but that of a single painting to a friend of Annalee’s, who bought it as a face-saving favor. But by the time of his death just two decades later, Newman had become a huge influence on younger artists, particularly the minimalists, and was considered by many to be the most advanced of the abstract expressionists because, some claimed, his zips transcended the emotionally self-indulgent paint-flinging of de Kooning and Pollock, and reached something approaching the sublime. That’s the view taken, naturally, by the Philadelphia Museum of Art in this concise, elegantly installed Newman retrospective of 130 works, about half paintings and half watercolors and prints. (The show includes a few sculptures, but they’re beside the point.) The question, though, is not so much whether Newman’s colorful, but militantly austere, work measures up to the artist’s big words (that would be impossible for almost any art), but whether–now that its days of appearing radical have long passed–it’s really anything more than pretentious decoration.
At his best, Newman is a powerful painter. The predominantly red, 18-foot-wide “Vir Heroicus Sublimus” (inspired, Newman said, by Truman’s firing of Douglas MacArthur during the Korean War) justifies curator Ann Temkin’s estimation of Newman as a “master of expansive spatial effects.” Even the pre-zip “Pagan Void” (1946) oozes primeval mystery and a sense of being present at the creation. The trouble is, in 2002 a little Newman goes a long way. Compared with the somewhat similar but less contentious paintings of his contemporary Mark Rothko, Newman’s paintings suffer from their intellectualism; when the very idea that an artist could get away with painting 20 running feet of just a field of color plus a few vertical stripes was cutting-edge, the work probably looked fresher. This is especially true of the monochrome-on-raw-canvas series “Stations of the Cross,” which the artist painted during the 1960s. Newman typically pronounced that their uniform 78-by-60-inch size constituted “a human scale for the human cry.” Certainly an artist is entitled to inspiration wherever he finds it, but you do have to wonder whether a Newman retrospective would come across as less didactic, and more satisfying, if only the guy had lightened up a little along the way.
