Barnett Newman
Craig F. Starr Gallery is pleased to announce Newman: Notes – Marden: Suicide Notes, an exhibition that explores the affinities between Barnett Newman and Brice Marden through the focused presentation of two discrete bodies of their work: Newman’s suite of 18 etchings, Notes (1968), and Marden’s series of ink drawings, Suicide Notes (1972-73). Though each of these series was a marked stylistic departure for both artists, they share a similar formal vocabulary: small scale works on paper, articulated only with a restricted palette of black on white, centered on repeated iterations of rectangular forms. These parallels occurred independently: Newman’s series, though etched in 1968, was not published until 1978, eight years after the artist’s death and five years after Marden produced his Suicide Notes. These resemblances serve then to underline the shared motivations that produced them: namely, a restless search, in the words of Richard Shiff, “to create a new beginning.” [1] For Newman, this new beginning came near the end of his career, in the embrace of a new medium; for Marden, it marked a pivotal transition that opened up new avenues of exploration in his practice.
In the spring of 1968, at the age of 63, Barnett Newman began to work in etching for the first time. Earlier that spring, on April 4, 1968, Martin Luther King, Jr., had been assassinated in Memphis; soon thereafter, Newman agreed to contribute a print to a portfolio to commemorate the slain civil rights leader, organized by collector and Jewish Museum trustee Vera List. [2] Newman decided his submission would be an etching despite having never worked in the medium before and soon got to work familiarizing himself with the medium and its tools. As alluded to in their eventual title, Newman originally approached the Notes as preparatory work for this submission—what would ultimately be his Untitled Etching #1 (1969)—before deciding to publish them, unedited, as a portfolio: eighteen prints from twelve plates, all of which are on view here.
Newman worked on the small copper plates at home, in a process akin to drawing: intimate, exploratory, provisional. The first seven of the Notes are devoted to the exploration of linear elements, often loosely and informally etched: short vertical strokes, hatches, grids, as well as small, looping circular forms. Combinations and recombinations of these elements recur from one print to the next, not through a predetermined logic or systematic structure rather through the considered act of making itself, with Newman learning from each plate as he went. Note VIII and the following prints much more closely resemble Newman’s paintings, and it is in this shift in emphasis that the artist began to incorporate aquatint in order to achieve evenly inked “fields” analogous to those in his paintings. Newman’s emphasis on process here becomes even more visible to the viewer, as he chose to include the various states of these plates as equal components of the overall portfolio.
Due to constant activity on a number of other projects, publication of the Notes portfolio was delayed. However, on July 4, 1970, the day he had planned to travel to the ULAE studio in West Islip to view the final proofs, Newman suffered a fatal heart attack. Ultimately, in 1978, ten years after Newman completed work on the plates, his widow Annalee Newman authorized the publication of the portfolio in a small edition of seven. [3] Ordered in the sequence in which Newman worked on them, the prints allow the viewer to follow Newman’s material investigations as he himself experienced them.
Brice Marden, like many artists of his generation, absorbed the impact of both Newman’s art and his theories; he has noted that “Of all the etchings in the world, [Newman’s Untitled Etching #2] has influenced me the most.” Marden’s Suicide Notes (1972-73) demonstrate many of the productive parallels between the two artists. This group of ink drawings are linked by an improvisatory lack of polish, a newfound emphasis on line freed from the structure of the grid, and their shared scale and materials. In these works, Marden’s lines are raw, wiry, and irregular; they remain girded within a variety of vertical rectangular structures but find a seemingly infinite variety of paths through them, moving unpredictably through webs and hatches. Though the Suicide Notes are closely linked by their varied articulations of rectangular forms, each composition appears to have been arrived at organically rather than planned out in advance, evincing in each the fresh start promised by the blank page. While their collective title has been linked to “the idea of notation—that thing that’s left behind, the explanation,” the works serve more as inquiries than clarifications. [4]
Rife with linear fractures, the forms of the Suicide Notes recall doors and windows, suggesting portals like those found in the post-and-lintel structures of classical Greek architecture. Marden encountered these during his first visit to the Greek island of Hydra in 1971, to which he and his wife Helen would return annually. Originally working in Hydra without a studio, Marden turned to drawing as a more mobile, less cumbersome practice: several of the Suicide Notes bear inscriptions related to the island, including Hydra and Hydra Roof. [5] The freedom of movement afforded by the portability of the medium as well as the fluidity of the ink line—a distinct shift away from the materiality of graphite and charcoal Marden had used in his drawings to this point—are both evident in the Suicide Notes themselves. The sinewy lines first found in the Suicide Notes anticipate significant developments in Marden’s practice, from his engagement with the branching veins of the marble fragments he encountered in Hydra and eventually employed as supports in his marble paintings to his calligraphic paintings of the late 1980s.
While the Suicide Notes have been described as representing a “demise” within Marden’s practice, Janie C. Lee has noted that this series of drawings are also “full of exploration and new beginnings.” [6] Newman’s etchings offer a model for this type of Janus-faced perspective; though originally commemorative in conception, they display the radical freedom that comes from beginning again. In many ways, the Suicide Notes, as signaled by their title, was Marden’s first attempt to consciously disrupt his own practice. As the artist has stated, “You aren’t making what you [already] know.”[7]
In a sketchbook page filled with the artist’s notes, Marden wondered if the Suicide Notes constituted a “formal search for the romantic.” [8] This dialectical process, which Marden would elsewhere characterize as “taking … that heavy earthen kind of thing, turning it into air and light,” can be found in Newman’s work and thinking as well, in which he sought to disrupt given dichotomies, privileging neither term in order to pursue what lay “beyond” such oppositions. In 1965, Newman stated that he hoped his work “has the impact of giving someone, as it did me, the feeling of his own totality, of his own separateness, of his own individuality, and at the same time of his connection to others, who are also separate.”[9] The post-and-lintel “windows” of the Suicide Notes demonstrate such a process: these discrete units “are united in our perception through their physical separation, they connect through being distinct.” [10] It is thus, for both Marden and Newman, that the line and the field, the formal and the romantic, the material and immaterial, can be linked, for, in Newman’s words, “life is physical but it is also metaphysical—only those who understand the meta can understand the physical.” [11]
Accompanying the exhibition is an illustrated essay, which can be read by following this link to our online viewing room.
Craig F. Starr Gallery is located at 5 East 73rd Street between Fifth and Madison Avenues. Gallery hours are 11am to 5:30pm, Monday through Saturday. Press inquiries and image requests can be made by calling the gallery at 1-212-570 or emailing info@craigstarr.com. For general information, please visit the gallery’s website at craigstarr.com.
[1] Richard Shiff, “Introduction,” in Barnett Newman, Selected Writings and Interviews (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1990), p. xv.
[2] Newman later withdrew from the project when it changed to poster reproductions rather than original works of art. Barnett Newman (Philadelphia: Philadelphia Museum of Art, 2002), p. 296.
[3] The seven complete editions of the Notes are held by the following collections: the Museum of Modern Art, Harvard University, the Art Institute of Chicago, the collection of Jasper Johns, the Donald Judd / Chinati Foundation, the Kunstmuseum Basel, and a private collection.
[4] Saul Ostrow, “Brice Marden,” in Bomb, no. 22 (January 1, 1988). https://bombmagazine.org/articles/brice-marden/
[5] Brice Marden, Suicide Notes (Lausanne: Editions des Massons, 1974), pp. 65, 67, and 68.
[6] Janie C. Lee, “Interview with Brice Marden,” in Brice Marden Drawings: The Whitney Museum of American Art Collection (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 1998), p. 14.
[7] Brice Marden quoted in Richard Shiff, “Force of Myself Looking,” in Plane Image: A Brice Marden Retrospective (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 2006), p. 40.
[8] Marden, Suicide Notes, p. 40.
[9] Barnett Newman, “Interview with David Sylvester,” in Selected Writings and Interviews, p. 257.
[10] Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe, “Brice Marden’s Painting,” in Artforum (October 1974).
[11] Barnett Newman quoted in Richard Shiff, “To Create Oneself,” in Barnett Newman: A Catalogue Raisonné (New York and New Haven: The Barnett Newman Foundation and Yale University Press, 2004), p. 3.
