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bike snelle willie 0 92 months ago

About ZIP exploring the ZIP


Throughout his career, Newman referred to his 1948 painting Onement as a moment of origin: "I recall my first painting--that is, where I felt that I had moved into an area for myself that was completely me--and I painted it on my birthday (January 29) in 1948. It's a small red painting, and I put a piece of tape in the middle, and I put my so-called zip." For Newman and for subsequent art historians, Onement I (he added the ordinate after 1948) was a momentous enactment of painting as a "tabula rasa," a primal site or instance of "creation" in various senses of the term. In a statement of 1945 Newman had already defined the role of the artist as creator: "[I]t 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 tried to wrest truth from the void."
...via AMAM


Barnett Newman, Vir Heroicus Sublimis, 1950-51


Newman’s work addresses the primordial experience and the transcendent singular act. He painted dramatic canvases with a vertical band or zip that acts like an opening within the picture field and interrupts a unified color field. The zip functions as a break in the canvas rather than a compositional line, a break through which we are asked to go beyond the canvas. But it is the color that suggests presence, or in Newman’s terms, the sublime.

...via aquavella galleries

His zip, which he developed through trial and error, came to maturity in a 1948 painting, "Onement I," as a taut vertical form that is something between a line and a shape and that either divides or knits the composition, depending on how you choose to look at it. The more you try to see the painting as a plain design, the more overwhelmed you are by its irrepressible ambiguity.

...via the new yorker



In the 1940s he first worked in a surrealist mode before developing his mature style. This is characterised by areas of color separated by thin vertical lines, or "zips" as Newman called them. In the first works featuring zips, the color fields are variegated, but later the colors are pure and flat. Newman himself thought that he reached his fully mature style with the Onement series (from 1948).

The zip remained a constant feature of Newman's work throughout his life. In some paintings of the 1950s, such as The Wild, which is eight feet tall by one and a half inches wide, the zip is all there is to the work. Newman also made a few sculptures which are essentially three-dimensional zips.

...via nationmaster

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