Barnett Newman

David Gibbs, London
E.J. Power, London
Waddington Galleries, Ltd., London
C & M Arts, New York
The Collection of the Israel Phoenix Assurance Company, Tel Aviv
Christie's, New York, November 13, 2002, lot 14
Acquired by the present owner from the above

London, Tate Gallery, Barnett Newman, June - August 1972, p. 59, illustrated
London, Whitechapel Art Gallery, In Tandem:The Painter-Sculptor in the Twentieth century, March - May 1986, n.p., illustrated
New York, C & M Arts, Newman, Rothko, Still: Search for the Sublime, April - May 1994, n.p., illustrated in color
Berlin, Martin-Gropius-Bau, Die Epoche der Modernen Kunst im 20. Jahrhundert/The Age of Modernism: Art in the 20th Century, May - July 1997, no. 158, illustrated in color
Philadelphia Museum of Art and London, Tate Modern, Barnett Newman, March 2002 - January 2003, cat. no. 56, pp. 206-207, illustrated in color

Thomas B. Hess, Barnett Newman, New York, 1969, p. 55
N.L. Prak, "Persistent Schemes: The Quest for a Neutral Form", Art International, 14, no. 7, September 1970, p. 78
Thomas B. Hess, Barnett Newman, New York, 1971, pp. 82 and 93
Christian Geelhaar, "Museen und Galerien, The Metropolitan Musem of Art: Ausstellung Barnett Newman - Complete Drawings 1944-1969", Pantheon, 38, no. 3, July/September 1980, p. 238
Stephen Polcari, "Barnett Newman: New Beginnings", Abstract Expressionism and the Modern Experience, Cambridge and New York, p. 206
Harold Rosenberg, Barnett Newman, New York, 1994, plate no. 83, p. 115, illustrated in color
Pierre Schneider, "Declarer l'espace: Barnett Newman", Petite Histoire de l'Infini en Peinture, Paris, 2001, pp. 310-311

Barnett Newman's paintings are among the most challenging works of art of the Twentieth Century. Sometimes regarded as philosophic statements made without artistic skill, or conversely, as pure painting devoid of a subject, his paintings, in truth, involve both: spirit and matter. The artist sought to instill in the viewer a profound sense of the spiritual; this did not imply that Newman had religious, but rather that he sought a profound faith in the role of the artist at the highest realm to which a man could aspire, indeed capable of provoking in the viewer an existential sense of awe and wonderment for the sublime miracle of existence. To pioneer an art that was both uncompromisingly abstract and powerfully emotive, Newman forged a language of expansive spatial effects and richly evocative color. "The Europeans had totems and taboos –do’s and don’t’s – about color. Newman used paints as if they has been invented especially for him that same morning." (Thomas B. Hess, Barnett Newman, New York 1968, p. 32)

Newman’s paintings require us to stand before them, close enough to experience all their nuances of color and structure. So adamant was Newman about the way his art should be viewed that he once typed a statement and stuck it to the gallery wall instructing people to stand at only a 'short distance' from his canvases. Seen in proximity, Newman believed that his work could engender feelings of heightened self-awareness in the viewer, who would immerse himself in the field of color. The chromatic experience is interrupted, or better, enhanced, by the ‘zip’, the vertical strip of color that, from 1948, became Newman’s landmark signature. The ‘zip’ divides and yet at the same time adds a striking dynamic presence; it is a line of vitality and energy that seems to assert the mystery of existence and the dynamism of life, sparking a mystical connection with the verticality of the viewer standing in front of the painting. The zips are "an act of division, a gesture of separation, as God separates light from darkness, with a line drawn in the void… Newman’s first move is an act of division, straight down creating an image. The image not only re-enacts God’s primal gesture, it also presents the gesture itself, the zip, as the independent shape - man - the only animal who walks upright, Adam, virile, erect." (Thomas Hess, Exhibition Catalogue, New York, The Museum of Modern Art, Barnett Newman, p. 56)

White Fire I is the first of a series of four paintings sharing the same title (no. II and IV are in the collection of the Kunstmuseum in Basel, no. III in a private collection), which is a Jewish term referring to the mystical fire out of which the Torah (the five books of Moses handed down by God) was originally made.

As Ann Temkin notes in the catalogue of the Newman Retrospective in Philadelphia and London: "The deep blue paintings of 1951-53 gave way in 1954 to a series of works in pale aqua and turquoise that fully reveal Newman’s idiosyncratic color sensibility. Newman took great pains to create unique colors, whether by mixing hues of his palette or by layering them on the canvas. There is no pure white in White Fire I. Instead, a luminous aqua dominates, punctuated by two zips: a wide, pale beige band on the left and a softly bleeding blue stripe on the right." (Ann Temkin, in Exhibition Catalogue, Philadelphia, Museum of Art; London, Tate Gallery, Barnett Newman, 2002-2003, p. 206)

In White Fire I Newman manages to attain a translucent sense of brightness. The pale field of color is made bright – almost a radiant white – by the effects of the two "zips", which also, through their contrasting colors suggest a constantly shifting sense of space against the seemingly infinite expanse of brightness. The overall effect is one of a mystical light, a light that inspired the work’s distinctly mystical title.