You can almost imagine old Barnett Newman doing stand-up. Monocle attached to his mustached, Gene Hackmanesque face, the belt line of his heavy suit hovering just under his armpits, a short biblike necktie adding a little color, he begins, "Seriously, folks, there is no such thing as a good painting about nothing." And sculpture? "That's something you bump into when you back up to look at a painting." (Rimshot.) "Hey, I gotta tell ya, an artist paints so that he will have something to look at." (Ba-doom.) Newman did say all those things (albeit without the shtik), but he was deadly serious. In fact, Newman (1905-70) was one of the most insufferably serious artists who ever lived. He is known primarily for large abstract paintings consisting of fields of flat color punctuated by vertical stripes (which he called "zips") of contrasting hues, to which he attached inordinately deep meaning. Take, for example, "If my work were properly understood, it would be the end of state capitalism and totalitarianism." One critic of the time said Newman was out to shock not just the bourgeoisie but other artists and the art world, too.
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