Look, See (2003-07)

As I've looked back through my treasure trove of photos taken in New York in May I keep wondering, "Hey, what happened to the picture I took of Barnett Newman's Concord at the Met?" I'm pretty sure I took a picture, or I meant to take a picture, or I thought I took a picture, or I got so caught up in looking at it that when I finally walked away from it I forgot to take a picture.

At the Met, as you look at close range past Jackson Pollock's Autumn Rhythm you see Mark Rothko's No. 13 (White, Red on Yellow), 1958; Newman's Concord is just to the left of the Rothko. I'd been looking at the Pollock from all angles, trying not to let myself be distracted by Concord, being patient, giving a few key works my full attention. It's too easy to be pulled from one thing to another, abandoning prematurely what deserves some time and consideration. I wasn't too drawn to the Rothko. When I came upon Autumn Rhythm there was a large tour group in front of it, and I enjoyed watching them look at the painting, and listening to their tour guide speak Japanese, wondering what she was telling them about "Jack the Dripper." I waited for them to leave, and then I more or less had the painting to myself. And it was quite an experience.

Then I turned to look at Concord, and I was floored. And after about twenty minutes, finally leaving it, I turned away, forgetting to take a picture, kind of stunned by the painting, and feeling somewhat spacy let myself be sucked in by the mysterious shadows cast by some Judd boxes. After not looking at the boxes, but instead looking the shadows, and thinking about which part is the art here, the boxes, the light, or both, and thinking about how a painting has other apsects to it in its presentation that effect how we look at it, I turned a corner for another knockout punch: Warhol's Last Self Portrait and another Newman, Shimmer Bright, facing each other across a small gallery. I was so struck by this pairing that I spent another twenty minutes making notes, knowing I would write about this suddenly moving juxtaposition enhanced by the afterglow of experiencing Pollock's Autumn Rhythm, Newman's Concord, and the shadows from Judd's boxes. I did write Newman and Warhol: Duet at the Met, and as modest an essay as it is it was a wonderful exercise that opened for me a way to look at paintings a little more broadly, which is always a good thing, and which makes me I think to myself, "Why did it take me so long for that understanding to happen?" It's always a good thing.

But where was my picture of Concord? Not to be found. I looked several times- maybe I'd moved it somewhere. I kept looking, thinking that if I found it I'd be motivated to write about the painting, to get down a bunch of things swirling around in my head, things that I know will be difficult to say, and things that won't really get at the experience of seeing the painting. So instead I'll use an image of the painting from the Met site, and here goes.

Concord is about eight and a half feet high and four and a half feet wide. The ground or background is the color of a copper penny that's been soaking in water for a long time. This is one of the loosest of Newman's mature paintings; one clearly sees his brushstrokes, and you can tell that he covered the surface in three horizontal sections that roughly divide the painting in three bands- top, middle, and bottom. One can see the overlap of these sections where the paint darkens. One can see near the top of each of the three sections arcs of paint where Newman pulled the brush up and then pulled it back down. The brush is dragged, the paint is spread, and evidence of Newman's movement is visually evident and physically felt.

Newman's strokes create atmosphere, but the brush marks contain the atmosphere to the edges of this painting. This isn't atmosphere that continues off into infinity; it's atmosphere within this particular painting, an object, and the way this atmosphere is contained within this painting feels logical. The viewer isn't launched or pulled beyond this painting off into space. The atmosphere within this painting is specific to this scale and is complete.

Concord has two of Newman's zips- vertical bands running parallel from top to bottom, positioned near the middle of the painting each three inches wide and separated by about two inches or more. From a distance the two zips look like two painted bars, placed early in the paintings history, that have been submerged in the painting's atmosphere by strokes of the copper green from the step when Newman covers the background in three horizontal passes of arcing strokes.

But up close things change- each zip is made with three inch wide masking tape attached to the painting. A close look reveals that each zip is obviously physically apart from the canvas; the zips lay on top of the canvas, and they have the smoother texture of tape, rather than the texture of canvas fabric. This is collage, and only the second painting, I believe, in Newman's oeurve where the zip is made with tape, the first being his breakthrough painting of the same year, Onement. The same color of copper green use for the background is brushed onto the tape; although the manner in which the paint is brushed on the tape is different that how the background is painted, the effect is to integrate the two zips into the painting which allows them to be enclosed in a swirling atmosphere and alsostand apart from this atmosphere.

Standing close to the painting you see all of this as material- it's physical. But it's difficult to tell in exactly what order of steps Newman made this painting. Was the copper green background painted first, then the tape was applied, and then more green painted on the tape? Was the tape applied to the canvas first and then the green painted around and over the tape? Some combination of the two?

The Merriam-Webster Dictionary defines "concord" as, "1. a state of agreement, a simultaneous occurrence of two or more musical tones that produces an impression of agreeableness or resolution on a listener", and "2. agreement by stipulation, compact, or covenant", and Concord's dual zips and atmospheric field reify this definition in how the painting creates an inter-resonace with the viewer. But the painting also contains, even exudes dualities. The hard, straight quality of the tape and the atmospheric brushy background are structure and gesture, intellect and emotion, preconception and intuition, architecture and the body. The split between the two zips makes two equal halves; our body confronts and identifies with the two zips as two sides of our bodies, and the small opening between them is a space for human experience that is beyond the body- thought, memory, privacy, recognition, fear- and a place that we come out of, too, back to the surface of the painting, the surface of the zips, and out into the atmosphere.

Concord is a body. The zips are a structure, a spine, and the three horizontal bands of brush green are the body- head and shoulders, the torso, and legs. Just beyond human size, the painting envelopes us without overwhelming us, and our bodies know this painting. Almost like an old a murky mirror, Concord barely reflects back at us; instead it measures and holds us, reaffirms us, something more akin to how the scale of Classical Greek architecture is based on human proportion.

The more darkly painted left zip is easily read as in the shadow of the right zip, which has less paint on it. In this sense the painting, while physically symmetrical, isn't pictorially symmetrical. Newman has it both ways. He has stable composition without stasis. Reading the two zips as not being on the same plane turns our body, makes our left side lean in and our right side hold steady to the surface of the painting. That little movement moves us or throws us off balance, and the space between the two zips is activated in another way: the cause and effect relationship of one zip casting a shadow on another, similar to how not only tall buildings in an urban environment cast shadows on other buildings, but how light can bounce between buildings and one can see the space between buildings as a volume or a shape. But then near the top of each zip, where we might identify a head, and the two zips could be two eyes or two ears, the unpainted areas of tape are vitually equal in color, the painting flattens out again, and feels like the kind of shallow space more like we might feel how our own face is a plane from which we look out with our eyes. Symmetry returns.

It's natural when looking at Concord to think of architecture, the sky, telephone poles, twin stacks, two trees, two lanes of highway, even a pair of skis or the trail of skis left in snow. I saw all of this, juggling and hopping from one image to another and back again, and then leaving these images behind to simply see and feel the form and space Newman made for an experience that is both human-scaled and epic at the same time. Being in New York I couldn't help but being reminded by this painting of the World Trade Center towers, two tall spires reaching high into the air, nothing around like them, and now nothing at all. It was very moving, and inspiring to feel how contemporary Newman is. But it's also a testament to the strength, beauty, and intelligence of Concord that my seeing the twin towers was just one part of the experience, and that the painting provokes a range of experiences. With very simple means Newman's Concord is complex; his depiction is beautiful, mystersious, and real, and he provokes an experience that is slow, human, deep, and current.

Newman's Concord exists at several different levels, a variation on the multi-folded seeing-in that I described taking place in George Lawson's San Cai paintings a few months back: depiction (a painting, a picture showing something); representation (a place or event or feeling that is duplicated or provoked); abstraction (a selective, condensed, elaborated, or metaphorical embodiment); dialogic (a conversation takes place between the viewer and the painting, or the viewer and the painter, formed in language or physical reaction or emotion or memory- associations); and in objecthood (a flat surface, fabric, a chassis, tape, brush strokes).

This is all part of what I like about paintings, how my appreciation for Newman has recently deepened incredibly, and what I brought the very next day to MoMA when I saw Newman's Vir Heroicus Sublimis