Untitled

Flowing, serpentine lines dancing across vertical bands of translucent color exhilarate in Barnett Newman’s Untitled, an exceptionally rare exemplar of the watercolor drawings which mark the genesis of his mature career. Newman had destroyed all of his early works around 1940 in reaction to the horrors of World War II and desisted from art making until 1944, whereupon the artist energetically engaged with this medium in tandem with his theoretical writings to develop his iconic artistic style. Untitled, one of four pure watercolors made by the artist, all in 1945, is the apogee of this development, the work’s grace and fluidity of execution denoting Newman’s newfound confidence and unique vocabulary. Examples from this important series are held at The Museum of Modern Art, New York and the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin. The present work offers incredible insights into the unique interplay of imagination, analysis, and resolution in the great abstract artist’s work which emphasize his persistent singularity.
Embracing a restrained visual vocabulary, Newman formulates vaguely adumbrated biomorphic shapes interspersed with various tendril-like lines intermingled amongst short dashes and zigzags against a variegated ground of modulated, earthly, pigments drawn from a single color family. The artist deploys his watercolors with a brush calligraphically, as if working in ink, exploring new possibilities of spatiality and atmosphere, offered by a purely abstract idiom. Newman’s staccato lines exude expert control, altering variously from broad and soft deployments to precise results. Here Newman delineates a new type of space, advanced from Impressionistic and Cubist notions. The artist remarked that, “Drawing is central to my whole concept… if I have made a contribution, it is primarily in my drawing… instead of using outlines, instead of making shapes or setting of spaces, my drawing declares the space. Instead of working with the remnants of space, I work with the whole space” (quoted in B. Richardson, Barnett Newman: The Complete Drawings, 1944-1969, exh. cat., The Baltimore Museum of Art, 1979, p. 18). In Untitled, Newman articulates his new spatial philosophy via color, line, shape, and space in telling anticipation of his revolutionary stripe paintings.
While abstaining from artistic production from 1940, Newman immersed himself within the vibrant New York artistic scene whilst simultaneously producing copious written treatises on modern art. Newman had theorized modern art to have two painting schools, the pure abstractionists led by Mondrian, and the Surrealists, of whom Kandinsky was a sometimes-member. Writing in 1944, Newman anticipated that the future of modern art would be the fusion of these two schools, and sought to synthesize these two approaches. Simultaneously, Joan Miró’s famous series of paintings on paper, the Constellations, were exhibited for the first time at Pierre Matisse Gallery. Newman much admired Miró, particularly in the Catalan artist’s ability to develop an idiosyncratic painterly language which imbued abstract forms with subject matter communicated through signs alone. Newman described Mondrian and Miró as “the most original of the abstract European painters” and the lessons of European Abstraction are powerfully communicated in the present work (quoted in A. Temkin, Barnett Newman, exh. cat., The Philadelphia Museum of Art, 2002, p. 32). One of only two pure watercolors in private hands, Barnett Newman’s Untitled is a portal to a comprehensive understanding of the great Abstract Expressionist painter’s artistic development.