Barnett Newman's Painting Technique: Vir Heroicus Sublimis Analysis

Color field painting became viable around the time acrylic paint (the new plastic paint) came into being. Oil paint always leaves a slick of oil around the edge of the color, whereas acrylic paint stops at its own edge. Artists roll the canvas on the floor and staple it down, then tape off quantities of areas. Paint can be applied with brushes, sponges, rollers, or any way that gets the tactile result compatible with the nature of the kind of color being used. The experience of color is tactile—descriptive terms like coolness, warmth, transparency, and opacity are all tactile descriptions.

Early conservation assessments revealed significant challenges: there is no surface covering that can permanently preserve the painting because pieces of paper cannot be prevented from drying out and buckling at edges. Scotch tape would need changing every five years as oil painting colors eventually come through the tape. Additionally, canvas and paper do not dry in the same way, causing buckling and rolling of edges.

Color field paintings are characterized by large, filled areas of color that extend from side to side and top to bottom, covering the entire canvas. These works rarely include framing, as they were not intended to be framed. The paintings typically feature variations of a single dominant color range, with occasional interruptions by contrasting colors to create visual interest and emotional impact.

This segment explores Mark Rothko's color field paintings in the museum's towers. Barnett Newman's works feature bold stripes against subtle color fields, while Rothko's paintings demonstrate sophisticated color layering with multiple layers creating depth and emotional resonance. The artist discusses Rothko's influence on their own work and the emotional power of color relationships. The segment also addresses preservation challenges, noting that Rothko's use of organic materials like animal glue and egg whites creates vulnerability to cracking and deterioration over time.

Color Field Painting features horizontal color fields with completely soft edges. The chromatic richness comes from successive layers of color applied by the artist. The color is not linked to any predetermined function or meaning—it is simply color, used to create emotional and psychological effects through its arrangement and layering.

Color field painting emerged as a counterpoint to gestural abstraction, emphasizing large areas of flat color over dynamic brushwork. Barnett Newman (1905-1970) created imposing works divided by vertical 'zips' designed to energize color fields through dynamic balance. Mark Rothko (1903-1970) believed representation conflicted with his sublime vision of universal themes relating to tragedy; he saw color as the primary conveyor of meaning, considering any other elements distractions. Rothko and Newman favored expressing complex thoughts through simple expression. When MOMA purchased Rothko's painting in 1950, one trustee resigned because it was considered so radical. Helen Frankenthaler (1928-2011) invented soak stain painting—a revolutionary technique where raw unprimed canvas is rolled out on the floor and diluted paint is poured directly onto it, creating a true partnership between artist and medium since complete control was impossible. Morris Lewis (1912-1962) adapted this technique by elevating the canvas at angles so paint would stream down, then flipping it to pour from other directions.

Barnett Newman, a failed art teacher who didn't sell his first painting until age 50, developed minimalist 'zip' paintings featuring single vertical lines on vast color fields. He destroyed all earlier works once discovering this direction. Despite initial failure and criticism, Newman's vision presaged Minimalism. Mark Rothko developed Color Field painting by eliminating gestural marks entirely, painting thin translucent glazes and scrubbing out edges to create immersive color experiences. Helen Frankenthaler and Morris Lewis extended these ideas through pouring techniques. Rothko's Four Seasons restaurant commission represented the triumph of modernist integration, but this ubiquity created a crisis: Abstract Expressionism had become the establishment rather than the avant-garde, forcing subsequent generations to seek entirely different approaches.

Barnett Newman and Mark Rothko were pioneers of Color Field Painting, using large color areas to create emotional experiences. Rothko's work evokes personal emotions like compassion, hatred, or joy, with no single correct response. In contrast, Newman's work rejects emotional ambiguity, presenting absolute, unchanging truth. Newman's paintings function as portals to a different reality, offering viewers a gateway to immutable truth rather than inviting subjective emotional responses.

Color Field painters gave up wild surface agitation for large swaths of pure color, representing a philosophical shift toward minimal intervention and material quality. Mark Rothko, with existentialist soul, used floating rectangles to evoke agony, tragedy, ecstasy, and doom through color relationships rather than gesture. His luminous glazes created surfaces that suggested limitless space. Helen Frankenthaler revolutionized painting in 1952 with Mountains and Sea, pouring thinned paint onto raw unprimed canvas so it soaked in like watercolor. This 'soak stain' technique fused image and canvas, eliminating the distinction between support and image. Both Rothko and Frankenthaler believed art reveals the unknown rather than reporting on the visible, expressing the artist's personality through color and material rather than figuration. Rothko's tragic death in 1970 and Frankenthaler's continued innovation through 2011 demonstrate the lasting impact of Color Field painting on art history.

In 1952, 23-year-old Helen Frankenthaler invented the soak-stain painting technique by pouring thin paint onto raw, unprimed canvas laid on the floor, eliminating the barrier between paint and surface. When art critic Clement Greenberg brought Morris Louis and Kenneth Noland to her studio in 1953, they copied her technique and built their careers on it, while Greenberg championed them over her despite being her boyfriend for five years. Despite decades of art world dismissal, Frankenthaler continued creating for six decades, and the art market has since validated her work, with eight of her top 10 auction records coming from the 1970s—the exact decade the art world dismissed her.

The term 'double consciousness' comes from W.E.B. Du Bois and originally referred to the schizophrenia of being African-American in America. However, there are many multiple kinds of double consciousness, and the concept can be modernized in every domain, not just racial politics. The categorical division of abstract and figurative art is more trouble than it's worth because the way in which you see is not based on what the images are, but on the conditions and physical scale of what you're looking at. In Rackstraw Downes' case, he makes paintings where the physical scale of what he's depicting is vastly bigger than we can take in in a single glance. The thinking of the 1970s did not divide along abstract and figurative lines but was fundamental thinking about the phenomenology of perception, influenced by Maurice Merleau-Ponty. This philosophy holds that the viewer is an active constructor or determinant of what is seen. In Downes' work, which is roughly ten feet long, looking at it in the distance means you cannot encompass the whole thing, but you miss all the details if you zoom in. The image as experienced is a construct made by the viewer's mind from viewing at different vantage points and over different durations.

Art can create powerful experiences of scale and vastness by contrasting viewers' small subjectivity against larger systems. When encountering displays about space and scale, viewers experience intense visceral reactions followed by awareness of their own tiny position within vastness. This shift from immersion to objective observation creates profound, sometimes frightening, but exciting experiences of human insignificance. Artists encourage audiences to actively experience vastness as beneficial, similar to how one might be encouraged to eat vegetables for health. The experience involves moving from personal sensation to understanding one's place within universal systems.

Monumental art creates profound relationships between artwork and human viewers through scale and perspective. A sculpture 8.6 meters tall represents approximately four human beings in height, fundamentally changing how viewers experience it. Working on such scales requires scaffolding that creates visual obstructions, forcing artists to mentally reconstruct the complete work from fragmented views. The artist must constantly move up and down scaffolding, similar to how a bullfighter approaches a bull from different angles. Scale affects perception: a 5-meter sculpture (like Michelangelo's David) presents a different visual experience than a 2-meter one because viewers see it from below. Monumental art confronts viewers with their own humanity against vastness, creating experiences that smaller works cannot achieve.

Large-scale art creates immersive experiences that change the viewer's relationship with the work. Artists like Barnett Newman and Sandy Wormfeld create works viewers walk into, becoming completely immersed in color spectra. Scale beyond human dimensions evokes the sublime—feelings of awe, terror, or overwhelming grandeur that transcend human comprehension. The brightness of colors and scale work together to create different effects, with some works being more contemplative and others more overwhelming. This connects to landscape painting's evolution toward abstraction.

Lyotard argued modern art is characterized by an aesthetic of the Sublime rather than the Beautiful. Artists should experiment with surprising, shocking combinations rather than imitating beautiful models. The Sublime represents the irrepresentable—what cannot be shown. Cezanne's mountain painting shows what makes the mountain show itself, not merely its visible appearance. Barnett Newman's 'Vir Heroicus Sublimis' exposes the indefinite, where pure color occurrence is inexpressible and cannot be circumscribed by canvas boundaries.