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Lot Essay
Barnett Newman's work is rooted in the spatial experience of the pictorial field, which the artist discovered and developed in small-scale drawings. They are not preparatory sketches for his larger canvases but fields of exploration for the artist to develop his ideas. "It would seem that it was the energy and discovery in the drawings that directly led Newman to effective and fulfilling work on painting"(B. Richardson, "Barnett Newman: Drawing his Way into Painting," in The Baltimore Museum of Art, Barnett Newman, the Complete Drawings, 1944-69, exh. cat., Baltimore, 1979, p.16).
"When an artist wants to change, when he wants to invent, Newman once said, he goes back to black; it is a way of clearing the table - of getting to new ideas" (quoted in op. cit., pp. 13-14). Newman executed the present work in 1960, along with 21 other works showing his archetypal motifs - the vertical zips - applied in black ink on white paper. "For Newman, black became almost synonymous with drawing, and drawing almost synonymous with invention, with change, with 'getting new idea'" (op. cit., p. 14).
The 1960 drawings constitute a crucial step in the development of Newman's contemporaneous and seminal series, The Station of the Cross. In the drawings, Newman seems to concretize the idea he had in 1958, when he painted the first Station, in a more cohesive aesthetic program. "The [1960] drawings are a kind of incubation for the Stations, not in the sense of preparatory studies but as the preliminary exploration necessary for Newman to confirm his visual instincts, to achieve a sense of conviction (both metaphorically and formally) about the direction he found the work taking in 1958-60."( B. Richardson, "The 1960 Drawings" in The Baltimore Museum of Art, Barnett Newman, the Complete Drawings, 1944-69, exh. cat., Baltimore, 1979, p.158).
"When an artist wants to change, when he wants to invent, Newman once said, he goes back to black; it is a way of clearing the table - of getting to new ideas" (quoted in op. cit., pp. 13-14). Newman executed the present work in 1960, along with 21 other works showing his archetypal motifs - the vertical zips - applied in black ink on white paper. "For Newman, black became almost synonymous with drawing, and drawing almost synonymous with invention, with change, with 'getting new idea'" (op. cit., p. 14).
The 1960 drawings constitute a crucial step in the development of Newman's contemporaneous and seminal series, The Station of the Cross. In the drawings, Newman seems to concretize the idea he had in 1958, when he painted the first Station, in a more cohesive aesthetic program. "The [1960] drawings are a kind of incubation for the Stations, not in the sense of preparatory studies but as the preliminary exploration necessary for Newman to confirm his visual instincts, to achieve a sense of conviction (both metaphorically and formally) about the direction he found the work taking in 1958-60."( B. Richardson, "The 1960 Drawings" in The Baltimore Museum of Art, Barnett Newman, the Complete Drawings, 1944-69, exh. cat., Baltimore, 1979, p.158).