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- [Male Instructor] We're at the Museum of Modern Art
looking at Barnett Newman's Vir Heroicus Sublimis
from 1950-51.
It's a huge canvas, it's 18, it's almost 18 feet long.
- [Female Student] That's enormous!
- [Male Instructor] It's absurdly large.
And I think it's meant
to be something that sort of envelopes you, visually.
- [Female Student] Is that something about the title?
What does the title have to do with?
Seems like the title and the size are related.
- [Male Instructor] Well, it's usually translated
Towards a Heroic Sublime.
And it's a pretty ostentatious title.
And I think the size is pretty ostentatious as well.
You know, Newman is really looking
for a kind of grand statement.
What I love is that MoMA usually has this hanging opposite
a very small, much more humble little painting
that he did just a couple of years earlier
called Onement, 1, which in some ways is,
I think, even a more powerful - [Female Student] Right.
and interesting painting.
- [Male Student] So if we take Newman at his title
and walk towards the work,
I guess the first thing that we realize
is that we don't have
any subject matter per se to fall back upon,
at least not any traditionally recognizable subject matter
to identify, yet we are confronted
with a vast expanse of color.
- [Male Instructor] Yeah, art historians worked really hard
to try to insert subject matter in here
or at least a kind of language of ideas.
- [Female Student] What kind of subject matter?
Because for me this is,
and perhaps this is one of the hardest things about it,
is that I don't know what to make of it,
I don't know what I'm looking at.
I see a lot of red, - [Male Instructor] Yeah.
and I like red,
it's a large-scale red painting with some lines on it
but I don't really feel, I think,
the thing that maybe I'm supposed to feel
in terms of what Newman wants me to feel,
so I've always kind of been confused
about that and had a difficult time with the painting.
- [Male Instructor] Yeah, you know, I think when we look
at abstract expressionism,
and this is always categorized with Pollock,
and with de Kooning and with Rothko,
and paintings with which a sort of
an intense emotional reaction
is almost expected - [Female Student] Right.
Right? A kind of physicality, a kind of emotionalism,
a kind of directness, you know,
the notion of action painting in general,
and all of the sort of romantic ideas,
and I'm not sure that Newman
is really looking for that kind of emotional punch.
I think that there is a kind of emotionality,
but I'm not sure that it's really divorced
from a set of ideas.
Let me step back.
I think ideas are perhaps more central
to what Newman is after.
- [Female Student] What Newman's project is...
- [Male Instructor] Yeah, I think it is perhaps
a more intellectualized project.
- [Female Student] So can I ask a question maybe
about what those lines are?
Now, I remember they're called zips.
- [Male Instructor] Yeah.
- [Female Student] Newman had this whole thing about zips.
- [Male Instructor] He did.
- [Female Student] Can you help me understand
what the zips were?
- [Male Instructor] Well, literally, the zips
are the negative spaces left by masking tape
that he placed down on the canvas
before that layer of paint went on.
- [Female Student] Okay, so there's a real
normal kind of painterly aspect to them.
- [Male Instructor] Yeah, absolutely.
He would put down masking tape.
He'd paint around it, paint over it,
and then remove the paint
and I always imagined that the sound the tape made
when he ripped it off - [Female Student] Oh!
Was this kind of zipping sound.
- [Female Student] Well, no, that's actually,
you know what, that's more interesting to me.
- [Male Instructor] But it's been read
a whole bunch of different ways,
and Newman was often paired with (Jacques Amany)
and these were seen as figural forms.
- [Female Student] In what way? I'm not following you.
- [Male Instructor] In terms of the,
Well, let's go back to Onement, 1, for just minute.
That was the painting where,
it wasn't the first painting he used zip with,
but it was the first painting where
he said, at least, that the zip functioned
as a kind of expression of spontaneity.
And it had to do with, actually in that case,
not removing the masking tape,
which was something that was not expected for him.
He had planned to remove it
and at the last moment,
he decided to paint over it instead.
Here, though, the zips function obviously
in a very formal way.
And some art historians and critics
have really talked about how the zips,
because they move from the complete top of the canvas
to the bottom of the canvas
and occupy space sort of completely
create a very complex formal statement
about this notion of an expression of the canvas itself
as an expression of painting.
That is, that the line,
by moving vertically from top to bottom
becomes a sort of full expression
of the height of the canvas,
of its length, of its sort of formal existence.
But I'm not convinced by that.
- [Male Student] You mentioned Onement,
and when we go back to Onement,
it calls up this idea that the zip
is also associative in some way.
It can be a formal statement
but it also, particularly in Onement,
and here I guess when one moves
across this surface of this work,
as a viewer, there looks for example,
as if there's a little sliver
of light or some way in which the field
is beginning to come apart in some sense
as if something is going to happen,
or there's some kind of beginning going on.
- [Male Instructor] Kind of anticipation?
- [Male Student] Yeah, anticipation.
And I think to think about the context
in which Newman is making these works,
World War II has just ended,
the United States has just been heavily involved
in this war,
there's been a lot of loss of life,
and Newman is creating something
which is in some sense very basic, very fresh,
in his mind, I think that he thinks it's very mythical
in some sense, that this is a kind of mythical beginning
if one wants to think about subject matter
in relation to the work outside of form.
- [Male Instructor] See, I get worried when people,
when critics start to read it that literally,
and there's absolutely a body of literature
that speaks of this actually having
almost a kind of biblical reference,
as being sort of an initial division,
an initial parting,
having this almost Genesis-like quality to it.
But I wanted to go back for just a second
to something you said.
If you look for instance at the white zip
that's on the left side of the canvas,
that does seem as if there's kind of light
coming through in one way,
but can't it simultaneously also function
as a positive against a field?
That is, can't it also be, in a sense,
a figure against a ground, just as easily?
- [Male Student] Back to your question
of why would these mean a human presence,
just quite simply
by their very basic abstracted verticality?
Yeah, there would be some kind of human presence.
Again, in an associative way,
it implies it very very very vaguely, connotes that idea.
- [Male Instructor] And that's, in fact,
the interpretation that makes the most sense to me.
Because if you think about,
Newman was incredibly involved emotionally
in the horrors of the war,
even from the safe distance of the United States.
He was a Jew and the revelations of the holocaust
were incredibly powerful for him
and there has been some discussion
about what it meant to reclaim the notion
of the individual in space
after the concentration camps.
The zips have been, in that interpretation,
seen then as an expression
of the lone individual occupying space again
in some very determined and very sort of essential way,
as you had mentioned.
But here's the interesting thing,
this is not just one zip in space, right?
- [Female Student] Two.
- [Male Instructor] Or actually, more than that.
- [Female Student] I feel like it's a restatement.
- [Male Instructor] Or five or six
and there's something really interesting going on
which is that you have sort of different densities
of zips, almost creating kind of a community of isolation.
Or is it just a play of space and color?
- [Female Student] To me, it seems like a lot of paint.
To me, looking at this, the way that I engage it
because I don't really see,
and this is just my interpretation,
I relate to it best if I consider how much paint
that Newman has worked with here.
That I think about the size,
the enormity of the canvas,
that it's divided in two sections,
but there's so much paint,
and to me, that's where the human presence is.
That someone has actually painted all of this.
- [Male Instructor] In the act of making this, yeah.
- [Female Student] In the act of painting,
and if we're going to talk about action painting
and sort of that physicality of it,
then it's Newman putting all this paint on canvas,
and that's the only place that I see it,
and that to me is actually more powerful
than any of the other ideas
that anybody comes up with about it,
because if you're just looking at it and encountering it,
it's, to me, about those very basic things.
- [Male Instructor] I think that's right.
This is a made object and the surface is not so perfect
that we don't see his brushwork in it
and I think that that's right.
This is something that's made.
It's meant to be intensely human, I think,
and it is very much intended
to be very much an expression of human existence
and human presence and I think that that act of making
is absolutely essential,
but that has to do again with a kind of finding
and a kind of spontaneity
and it's something that I don't think
is immediately apparent here,
but I think Newman was looking
for a set of processes and a kind of decision making
even as he was constructing these very geometric
and seemingly very rigorous kinds of paintings.
- [Female Participant] Have you talked about the red?
It is red.
- [Male Instructor] It's really red.
- [Female Student] It's really red.
The redness and the paint are sort of the things
that overpower me.
- [Female Participant] It's not blue,
- [Female Student] So red in terms of violence,
[Female Participant] It's not green,
[Female Student] In terms of blood,
in terms of passion, in terms of those?
- [Female Participant] I don't know,
- [Female Student] Color theory, in terms of?
- [Female Participant] I just think it's red.
- [Male Instructor] No, I'm not sure that it's those things.
Maybe. Maybe.
- [Female Student] Red how?
- [Male Instructor] For me,
it's a space that can be occupied.
You know the red creates a very ambiguous kind of space
and maybe it's because I look back to, say,
Matisse's Red Studio,
but I'm not so sure that Newman isn't also.
- [Female Participant] I think blue might suggest sky,
so you might stay away from that, right?
Or green might suggest,
- [Male Instructor] No, no.
He painted large blue paintings also,
- [Female Participant] He did?
- [Male Instructor] Yeah he did, absolutely.
I'm not so sure that color has those kinds
of traditional associations here.
- [Female Participant] I'm not saying
it has a traditional association,
I'm just saying it's a choice that was made here.
- [Male Instructor] It's a very particular choice
and he's creating a kind of arena or a kind of space
that those zips can then occupy.
And I think that the red becomes
this very rich and very intense
and very dramatic field in which those forms
can then in a sense structure space in themselves.
- [Female Student] But it seems like any color
at this scale would create that same kind of arena.
- [Male Instructor] Yeah, although curiously,
and this is just my opinion, the blues fail to some extent.
The red has a kind of ability to function
almost atmospherically in a curious way that allows for,
I don't know about you, but when I look at this painting,
I actually see both intense surface
but also real depth here,
and when you look at some of the less-defined zips,
the ones that are,
- [Female Student] I like those actually more.
- [Male Instructor] Yeah, they can actually recede in space
in some ways, but they can also be very much on surface,
and there's a really interesting kind of play
that's almost Mondrian-like in a certain curious way
in terms of balance that has to do with verticality
or horizontality but also has to do with near and far
and a kind of play of form within this arena.
I guess what comes across ultimately to me
when I look at Newman is that he is in a sense
absolutely in control of the space that he's constructing.
There is a kind of deliberateness
and a kind of artificial construction of a space
that really speaks of his choices and decisions,
and, in a sense, this very deliberate notion
that we can make and we can occupy space.
I think to the points that you were making before,
this is all grounded in this historical moment
when that notion of the individual acting into space
is incredibly potent.
- [Male Student] I've never really been able
to think of this outside of its physical presence
in the room in the MoMA, I just wanted to say.
It's strange for me to talk about it as this image
without its context because of its scale
which I'm certain was a part of the process
of making this work,
but the way that it occupies space
in terms of the physical space in the room around it
is as important as the space
in terms of how we've been talking about it here
in the image and on the image as well.
- [Male Instructor] It's really interesting
that you say that
because when you watch people looking at this painting,
they react to it very bodily, very physically.
People will walk past it and see the rhythm
of those zips as they walk past it,
which is almost musical,
or they'll sometimes stand directly in front
of one of the zips
and align their own bodies with that vertical form,
creating a kind of almost sort of bilateral symmetry
as their body becomes divided by it.
There's a really interesting kind of physical orientation
that takes place if you watch people look at this,
and a kind of physical engagement with the space
and the forms that this painting constructs.
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