Excerpted from "The Ideographic Picture," Betty Parsons Gallery, NY, Jan 20 - Feb 8, 1947 (source: Johnson)
"The Kwakiutl artist painting on a hide did not concern himself with the inconsequentials that made up the opulent social rivalries of the Northwest Coast Indian scene, nor did he, in the name of a higher purity, renounce the living world for the meaningless materialism of design. The abstract shape he used, his entire plastic language, was directed by a ritualistic will towards metaphysical understanding. The everyday realities he left to the toymakers; the pleasant play of non-objective pattern to the women basket weavers. To him a shape was a living thing, a vehicle for an abstract thought-complex, a carrier of the awesome feelings he felt before the terror of the unknowable. The abstract shape was, therefore, real rather than a formal 'abstraction' of a visual fact, with its overtone of an already-known nature. Nor was it a purist illusion with its overload of pseudo-scientific truths.
The basis of an aesthetic act is the pure idea. But the pure idea is, of necessity, an aesthetic act. Here then is the epistemological paradox that is the artist's problem. Not space cutting nor space building, not construction nor Fauvist deconstruction; not the pure line, straight and narrow, nor the tortured line, distorted and humiliating; not the accurate eye, all fingers, nor the wild eye of dream, winking; but the idea-complex that makes contact with mystery -- of life, of men, of nature, of the hard, black chaos that is death, or the grayer, softer chaos that is tragedy. For it is only the pure idea that has meaning. Everything else has everything else."
From Newman's reply to Clement Greenberg's review in The Nation, December 6, 1947, quoted in Thomas B. Hess, Barnett Newman, New York, 1969 (the original reply was not published in The Nation) (source: Johnson)
"The world the European artists have created has always been tied to sensation in spite of the fact that in recent years their constant struggle has been to free themselves from the natural world. Brilliant as their successes have been they have always had their base in the material world of sensuality. They may have transcended it but they have never been able to do without it. Can anyone name a single European painter who is able to dispense completely with nature? The lists of the Cubists, Fauvists and Surrealists with nature are obvious. The Purists tried to deny nature and became involved with its diagrammatic equivalents -- with the realism of geometric shapes. A ninety-degree angle, a triangle and a circle are as much a part of nature as a tree and have its elements of recognizability. In truth the Purists, from Mondrian to Kandinsky, never denied nature but asserted they were depicting the truest nature, the nature of mathematical law.
The American artists under discussion [ed. note: Newman, Gottlieb, Rothko, Still, and 'others'] create a truly abstract world which can be discussed only in metaphysical terms. These artists are at home in the world of pure idea, in the meanings of abstract concepts, just as the European painter is at home in the world of cognitive objects and materials. And just as the European painter can transcend his objects to build a spiritual world, so the American transcends his abstract world to make that world real, rendering the epistemological implications of abstract concepts with sufficient conviction and understanding to give them body and expression.
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The American painters under discussion create an entirely different reality to arrive at new unsuspected images. They start with the chaos of pure fantasy and feeling, with nothing that has any known physical, visual or mathematical counterpart and they bring out of this chaos of emotion images which give these intangibles reality. There is no struggle to go to the fantastic through the real, or to the abstract through the real. Instead the struggle is to bring out from the non-real, from the chaos of ecstasy, something that evokes a memory of the emotion of an experienced moment of total reality. This of course may be a metaphysical notion but it is no more metaphysical than the idea that the realization by Cézanne of his complete and pure sensation of his apples adds up to more than the apples, or that the two-faced heads by Picasso are more than the two heads, or that the strict geometry of Mondrian is more than the sum of its angles. That to me is an equal kind of mysticism.
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The Americans evoke their world of emotion and fantasy by a kind of personal writing without the props of any known shape. This is a metaphysical act. With the European abstract painters we are into their spiritual world though already known images. This is a transcendental act. To put it philosophically, the European is concerned with the transcendence of objects while the American is concerned with the reality of the transcendental experience.
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