Characterizing Onement, I as “the beginning of my present life,” Newman discovered in this breakthrough work a wealth of visual and conceptual complexity. He began by staining a modestly sized canvas with crimson. Over this richly hued ground, he applied a strip of masking tape, and then used a palette knife to scumble over it with cadmium orange. He had originally intended to remove the tape, leaving a lighter strip edged by orange flickers. Instead, he recognized in the vertical line it formed—which he would call a “zip”—a visual device that distilled painting to its essential qualities of space, color, and figure-ground relationship. Newman would spend the rest of his career exploring the potent possibilities of zips on fields of color, creating compositions whose purpose he described in lofty terms: “The image we produce is the self-evident one of revelation…that can be understood by anyone who will look at it without the nostalgic glasses of history.”
In The Studio: Postwar Abstract Painting online course, Coursera, 2017
Gallery label from 2006.
Newman proclaimed Onement, I to be his artistic breakthrough, giving the work an importance belied by its modest size. This is the first time the artist used a vertical band to define the spatial structure of his work. This band, later dubbed a "zip," became Newman's signature mark. The artist applied the light cadmium red zip atop a strip of masking tape with a palette knife. This thick, irregular band on the smooth field of Indian Red simultaneously divides and unites the composition.
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Barnett Newman
American, 1905–1970 61 works onlinePainter and theorist Barnett Newman was one of the most intellectual artists of the New York School. He was born and raised in New York, the son of Polish Jewish immigrants.
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Abstract Expressionism
The dominant artistic movement in the 1940s and 1950s, Abstract Expressionism was the first to place New York City at the forefront of international modern art.
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