Barnett Newman and the Art of Not Making Graven Images
Updated: Oct 19
Barnett Newman and the Art of Not Making Graven Images
Barnett Newman was born in 1905 to Abraham and Anna Newman, Jewish immigrants from Poland who came to New York City in 1900. Although not religious, Barnett’s father was a passionate Zionist and a supporter of the National Hebrew School of the Bronx. As well as attending Hebrew school, Barnett and his brothers and sisters were educated at home by Jewish scholars from Europe. He went on to study philosophy at the City College of New York and later made a living as an art teacher, writer and critic.
In the 1930s Newman made several paintings but eventually destroyed all these works. He started painting again in 1944 but it wasn’t until 1948 that he produced his artistic breakthrough: Onement I. This piece was a major achievement and it earned him the reputation as a pioneer of color field paintings.
It was around this time that Newman became preoccupied with Judaic creation stories. Art critic and friend Thomas B. Hess has described how Newman immersed himself in the Torah and Kabbalistic writings in the mid-1940s. Newman began to evolve a distinctive pictorial image: a vertical zip, band, or streak of light, running from the very top to the very bottom of the canvas. These zips (usually created by the ripping away of masking tape from the canvas) are thought to relate to the Kabbalistic notion of a ray of infinite light (kav in Hebrew) that extends from the Endless God (or Ein Sof) prior to the creation of the world. The divine form generated by this first ray of light is identified in Kabbalistic thought as Adam Kadmon, the Primordial Adam. Such an association may illuminate why Hess interpreted the vertical zip as an anthropomorphic motif, signifying not merely humanity in general but Adam himself, the first man, whose upright bearing finds a formal analogue in the zip’s vertical orientation.
Citing Genesis (“Onement I is a complex symbol, in the purest sense, of Genesis itself”), Hess regarded the vertical bands of colour as “an act of division, a gesture of separation, as God separated light from darkness, with a line drawn in the void.” Indeed, Newman himself claimed that the artist begins with the void. As Newman remarked in his essay “The Plasmic Image”:
It can be said that the artist like a true creator is delving into chaos. It is precisely this that makes him an artist for the Creator in creating the world began with the same material, for the artist tries to wrest truth from the void.
In 1951 Newman created Adam, an abstract expressionist colour field painting, complete with multiple zips. It is dominated by two colors: red and brown, blood and earth. The name Adam derives from the Hebrew word adamah (ground), but also adom (red) and dam (blood). As it says in the Torah, “the Lord God formed man [ha-adam] of dust from the ground [adamah].” Newman makes no attempt to depict Adam in any natural sense. As with many of his paintings, there is a conspicuous lack of literal representation. Art critic Arthur C. Danto has suggested that Newman was moved by the Judaic injunction against the making of graven images. “Until Modernism, there was no way of being a painter without making pictures and hence violating the prohibition against images,” Danto wrote. If Danto is right then Newman’s color field painting can be read not as a departure from the Jewish tradition but as one of its most radical artistic consequences. His art eliminates representation in favor of an immediate encounter with color, scale, and presence. The result is a form of painting that aspires to the sublime while remaining faithful to an aniconic sensibility.
Newman’s Adam is not only faceless but depthless. A body-without-organs (to borrow a curious phrase from philosopher Gilles Deleuze), it abandons representational depth for pure surface, a plane of immanence stretching from edge to edge. The zips do not tear apart the pictorial field; they draw its elements into consistency and relation, establishing a dynamic unity. At the same time, they introduce a subtle disequilibrium. There is enough life in the surface to keep it from solidifying into inert matter. Unsurprisingly, Adam has a companion piece, Eve, painted at the same time. In a letter to the Tate Gallery (dated April 6, 1983), Newman’s widow Analee wrote that her husband “thought of them as a pair because he worked on the first painting and then on the second continuously until they were finished and then named them ‘Adam’ and ‘Eve’.”
Like Adam, Eve is a color field painting, with one of Newman’s vertical zips at the right side. Whereas the former is predominantly brown with red zips, the latter has a vast expanse of red, interrupted by a single, narrow band of purplish-brown running the length of the canvas’ right edge. The two paintings were the last Newman completed before his second one-man exhibition at the Betty Parsons Gallery in April–May 1951. At that time, Adam featured two zips, but Newman added a third one a year later, which is why it’s now inscribed with the double date of 1951-1952.
Barnett Newman’s achievement, then, was not simply to abandon figuration but to discover a new way of painting that could remain in dialogue with the Jewish suspicion of images. If the biblical prohibition on graven images poses a challenge to the visual arts, Newman responded not by renouncing painting but by radically reimagining what painting could be. Works such as Adam and Eve do not represent human beings so much as evoke the conditions of creation, presence, and becoming. Their vast fields of color and luminous zips refuse idolatry precisely because they refuse resemblance. Rather than offering the viewer an image to worship, Newman presents an encounter with the void, the sublime, and the possibility of creation itself. In this sense, his art may be understood as the paradoxical fulfilment of an aniconic tradition: a form of painting that remains faithful to the injunction against graven images not by depicting less accurately, but by ceasing to depict altogether.
Bibliography
Danto, Arthur C. “Barnett Newman and the Heroic Sublime.” The Nation, 17 June 2002.
Hess, Thomas B. Barnett Newman. New York: Museum of Modern Art (1971).
Newman, Annalee. Letter to Ronald Alley, 6 April 1983. Tate Acquisition File, Barnett Newman, TG 4/2/773. As cited in “Beholding Adam: Scale and Standing” by Michael Schreyach <https://www.tate.org.uk/research/in-focus/adam/beholding-adam>
Newman, Barnett. “The Plasmic Image” 1943-1945. Abstract Expressionism: Creators and Critics. Ed., Clifford Ross. New York: Abrahams Publishers (1990).
