Zim Zum

“What about Jewish Art?” A legitimate enough topic, you might think, for a panel at New York’s Jewish Museum in 1965. But Barnett Newman’s response to an invitation to participate was apoplectic. Writing to the museum’s director, he decried the proposed event as “a Am Haoretz performance.” The addressee, Hans Van Weeren-Griek, wasn’t Jewish, but Newman left this parochial insult untranslated. As Amy Newman (no relation to Barnett) comments in her recent survey of the artist’s life, “His identity as a Jew was neatly folded into his identity as an artist.” Yet however deeply his art was informed by his Jewishness, and indeed by Judaism, he could never admit it was anything less than universal.

One expression of Newman’s unapologetic, if not uncomplicated, folding of his identity as a Jew into his identity as an artist appears in a 1947 article he published in the avant-garde magazine Tiger’s Eye titled “The First Man Was an Artist.” In Amy Newman’s words, his argument proceeds from a “tossed-off invocation of ‘Rashi,’ the medieval colossus of Jewish Biblical commentary” to drive home his central point: Art is “an act of defiance against man’s fall and an assertion that he return to the Adam of the Garden of Eden.”

When Barnett Newman wrote this article, he was already forty-two years old. By this point, he had gained some reputation as an art theorist, polemicist, and critic but was only on the cusp of earning recognition as an artist. When he graduated from college in 1927, he joined the family business. His father, Abraham, was a tailor from Lomza who worked his way up to renting space on Manhattan’s Park Row. Newman also worked as a substitute art teacher in the New York Public School system and dreamed of launching a weekly newspaper for fellow civil service workers. In 1933, he proclaimed himself a write-in candidate for mayor of New York. His manifesto called for “free music and art schools” and rested on the principle that “only a society entirely composed of artists would be really worth living in.”

When that didn’t work out, he attempted to obtain a full teaching license and failed the requisite exams at least seven times. Then he unsuccessfully embarked on a seven-year legal odyssey seeking compensation for infringement on his father-in-law’s “beverage-carbonating” patent. With the outbreak of World War II, his complex feelings about fascism, anarchism, and pacifism led him to seek recognition as a conscientious objector, despite having already been declared unfit for service after a physical.

Perhaps overgenerously, Amy Newman regards these obsessive and futile struggles as testimonies to Newman’s moral stance as an artist, which privileged “ecstatic outburst” over social utility. Be that as it may, it was in reaction to the crisis of war that he began formulating an artistic credo that would eventually make him a leading abstract expressionist painter. “No one can tell what Pearl Harbor will bring us,” he wrote in an unpublished essay, but he hoped it spelled the end of “isolationism as a factor in the political life of America.” In that light, he went on: “It is time for artists to wake up and . . . time they understood the political foundation of . . . art.”

Newman’s partner in hashing out a new vision of what art could be was an old friend, the already established artist Adolph Gottlieb, who now began experimenting with more abstract creations, as did Rothko at about the same time. As the war ground on, and as the atrocities of the Holocaust gradually became known, Newman became a vocal lobbyist for the new art, which he and his comrades linked directly to “the present world upheaval.” This was an ontological quest, Amy Newman argues, born of his “outcry—against the war, against the destruction of his people, against his father’s failures of business and health, against injustice done to his father-in-law . . . against regular assaults on his own dignity.”

By the mid-1940s, Newman was moving from writing promotional letters, press releases, and catalog essays, from advising, curating, and hanging the shows of others, to creating his own artworks as well. Yet he was slow to let anyone see them. It would take a while for even his close friends to begin thinking of him as an artist. His first sale—at the nominal price of two hundred dollars—was occasioned by the inclusion of his Euclidian Abyss, retitledBlack with Yellow, in the Chicago Art Institute’s 58th Annual Exhibition of American Paintings and Sculpture at the end of 1947.

This milestone is reached on page 203 of Amy Newman’s tome, and the pace doesn’t get any quicker. The “turning point” comes one decade and some 200 pages later, when the artist gained the enthusiastic patronage of Ben Heller, a textile magnate and one of the most influential collectors of the postwar era. Heller’s first visit to Newman’s studio was such a “non-experience” that he quickly left. But he found himself profoundly “bothered.” On returning for a third visit, he had the “true feeling” he was confronting “one of the most outright shocking paintings around.”

Queen of the Night I (1951), the canvas in question, is a little more than eight feet tall, with a width slightly exceeding one and a half feet. Save for a single variation on Newman’s signature stripe, or “zip,” to the left, it is entirely filled with a rich field of midnight blue. Today, it is in the collection of The National Museum of Art, Osaka, in Japan.

Heller’s swing from the pole of “non-experience” to that of utter “shock” is characteristic of the response invoked by Newman’s works. Their understated presence somehow compels a radical transformation of their environment, of the viewer’s fundamental experience of place and self. The effect is confusing, maddening, exalting, sublime.

Much has been made of abstract art’s rejection of imagery in favor of formalism as resonant with the Bible’s admonition against making “a carved idol or any likeness of anything in the heavens above and the earth below” (Exod. 20:4). Yet despite his deep Jewish interests, this doesn’t feature in Newman’s own extensive ruminations on the nature of his art. Indeed, he distinguished himself from “the abstract painter” who is merely “concerned with his language” and identified himself with “the new painter . . . concerned with his subject matter, with his thought.” His art was not created in flight from image but in search of idea and experience.

One effect of Amy Newman’s exhaustive chronicle of her subject’s exhausting life is that the reader sees that Newman’s art was the most impressive and lasting record of his seemingly constant state of existential irritation. In this biography, every work of art is a geshray, an outcry, and every geshray is a work of art. Newman wielded his irritation with such charming and loquacious generosity that it usually won him admiration, but it also curdled important friendships into bitter rivalries. His interactions with fellow abstract expressionist artists Clyfford Still, Mark Rothko, and Ad Reinhardt became nothing less than poisonous.

He enjoyed a better relationship with S. I. Newhouse, the legendary Condé Nast publisher. In 1966, the two were introduced by Vogue’s editor, Alex Liberman. After a long lunch at the Upper West Side deli Barney Greengrass, Newhouse and Newman walked across Central Park to the Guggenheim, where the artist’s new series, The Stations of the Cross: Lema Sabachthani, had recently been unveiled. When they arrived, Amy Newman recounts, the artist peered through his trademark monocle “at a spot he noticed on one of the canvases.” It turned out to be a fly. But this show of fastidiousness made so “profound” an impression on Newhouse that he “arranged to buy The Word II that very day.”

The Stations consists of fourteen black-and-white paintings followed by a coda, Be II, whose wide white expanse is flanked, on the left, by a narrow band of pumpkin orange with a ragged edge and, on the right, by a straight-edged band of black. In 1991, Newman’s enterprising widow, Annalee, sold the series for an estimated five to seven million dollars to The National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, where it remains on permanent display. Its creator, Amy Newman tells us, had “fantasized about a sale to the Vatican.”

In later life, it was sometimes said of Newman that he had learned Yiddish “so he could read the anarchist newspapers,” but Amy Newman makes it abundantly clear that the language was his mame loshon. While working for the family business he wielded his feder (pen) to produce Yiddish ad copy. His father, we learn, was “a dedicated Hebraist” and “diasporic Zionist,” who hired tutors to protect young Barney from the threat of am ha-aratzes. At one point, we are treated to a complete translation of a letter addressed by Abraham in 1946 to “my dear son, Master Baruch,” composed in a florid and idiomatic Hebrew that would put some contemporary rabbis to shame. Abraham, we are told, was confident his son “would appreciate the linguistic, philosophic, and contextual complexity—and wit.”

Amy Newman gives her book two epigraphs, announcing her argument that Newman’s art should be interpreted within the rich Jewish literary context that was his heritage:

God tested Abraham, saying to him, “Abraham!”

And he said, “Here I am.”

Genesis 22:1

Then I heard the voice of my Lord saying, “Whom shall I send? Who will go for us?” And I said, “Here am I; send me.”

Isaiah 6:8
Barnett Newman Haftarah portion

Abraham, The Voice, and Here are all titles Barnett Newman gave to artistic works. But the influence of his bar mitzvah haftarah apparently ran deeper. In the course of my own research, I found a phrase from its opening verse (Isa. 6:1) scrawled—in flowing Hebrew cursive—across sketches for the artist’s 1963 synagogue design; God’s “trailing robes,” we read, “filled the sanctuary.” Newman’s crucial concepts of “fullness,” “place,” and “subjectivity” originate in Isaiah’s prophetic encounter with the divine presence, which the artist continued to identify with and think about throughout his life.

Unfortunately, Amy Newman sometimes oversteps in her identification of the artist’s Jewish interests and influences. For instance, she writes of his monumental abstract sculpture Broken Obelisk (1963–1969) that it may have been inspired by “an eccentric typographical layout in the Babylonian Talmud.” Proceeding from the merely superficial to the wildly fanciful, she seeks to persuade us that Broken Obelisk “must be seen” in light of Israel’s recent victory in the Six-Day War. “It may simply be a coincidence,” but its “most articulated face . . . bears a striking resemblance to the northern boundary of Israel with Lebanon and the seized Syrian Golan Heights.”

As to Jewish mystical ideas, Barnett Newman clearly enjoyed talking about them, as when the Newmans were visited by the artist Bill Baziotes and his wife, Ethel:

Barney stood in the middle of the living room with one hand on his hip and the other holding what he said was a copy of the Kabbalah. . . . Barney declaimed passages while they drank vodka.

In late-night conversations with Jackson Pollock, perhaps his closest artist friend, we are told that Newman discoursed “rhapsodically about the Hasidim, and the culture of fidelity . . . of devotion to ideas.” And yet the biographer argues that “Newman studies” have given the influence of Kabbalah on the artist “both too much and too little weight.” She doesn’t elaborate on this hedge but portrays the artist’s kabbalistic invocations as party tricks, “like telling jokes, or singing arias from The Magic Flute.” Notes preserved in Newman’s archive, however, suggest a deep theoretical engagement with the Lurianic concept of tzimtzum, the idea that creation was preceded by a withdrawal of God’s infinitude from the place wherein the cosmos would be formed.

Newman spoke and wrote of his quest for a “full” artistic “declaration” that would exceed the “hollow energy” of an “aesthetic object” and compel a “subjective experience in which one feels exalted.” In the transition from “aesthetic object” to “subjectivity,” he recognized, “Zimzum” was the crucial element: “Out of ZimZum was the world created. Only out in subjectivity can come the sense of exaltation.” In 1969, on completing his final masterpiece, a large-scale zigzagging sculpture, he gave it the title Zim Zum.

In that same year, deep into a postdinner early-morning soiree celebrating the critic Barbara Reise’s visit from England, Barnett Newman mused that the Hasidic concept of heaven was “an endless banquet on the Leviathan with endless conversation.” Well, replied the critic, by that score Newman himself must be “a walking manifestation of heaven on earth.” Few of his friends, patrons, or rivals quite shared that sentiment, yet something of the Hasidic spirit that inflected Barnett Newman’s art  is present in this exchange.