16 Summer 2005
Bridging the Generation Gaps in Barnett Newman’s
Sarah K. Rich
Barnett Newman, Who’s Afraid of
Red, Yellow and Blue I, 1966. Oil,
75 x 48 in. Collection of David
Geffen, Los Angeles
Who’s Afraid of Red, Yellow and Blue?
It is easy to see why Barnett Newman’s
Who’s Afraid of Red, Yellow and Blue
paintings might intimidate some of their
viewers. The four-canvas group, created
between 1966 and 1970, vibrates with
bold, unapologetic fields of red delivered
on a scale that meets or exceeds many of
Newman’s other works.1 The paintings
are powerful in their visual effect and
challenging in their structure. They defy
the viewer to locate any single organizing
principle that unites them. Though the
canvases share the common denomina-
tor of the three primary colors, they
vary in surface quality, scale, orientation,
pigments used, and the distribution of
“zips” (Newman’s word for his vertical
stripes). A hard-edged ultramarine band
on the left of Who’s Afraid I (frontispiece)
opposes the conspicuous brushstrokes on
the yellow edge at right, and the verticals
serve to contain the red field in between.
While the center seems to float somewhere
in that red field of the first painting, the
central meridian of Who’s Afraid II (fig. 1)
is firmly anchored with a blue stripe, and
yellow announces the sides of that second
canvas. Number III (fig. 2) expands the
earliest work in the series to a horizontal
rather than vertical format, as if the artist
had stretched the first canvas, amplifying
the central red so much that the new
work takes up a full eighteen feet, one of
17 American Art
Newman’s favorite dimensions. The final
painting (fig. 3) retains the large lateral
scale but revives the use of the blue zip in
the middle of the canvas, and, for once,
the broad red ground yields equal space to
a brilliant yellow.
The Who’s Afraid of Red, Yellow and
Blue pictures, as their title indicates, are
and were very much about fear, even if
Newman attempted to qualify that fear
with a question mark. In this respect they
are not so different from Newman’s previ-
ous efforts—“fear,” after all, was one of the
defining emotions of his generation. As an
abstract expressionist, Newman matured
as an artist during the most horrifying
events of World War II. To acknowledge
the capacity of human beings to destroy
themselves and their world, he produced
paintings that were meant, in part, to
overcome viewers with sublimity—to
make viewers acknowledge the existential
drama of their humanity. “Modern man is
his own terror,” Newman famously wrote
in 1946.2
“Fear” was a bit passé, a bit too sincere,
however, by the time Newman produced
the Who’s Afraid paintings in the late
1960s, an age of stoic minimalism and
ironic pop. Thus the mission of the four-
canvas group was to return feelings like
fear to the emotional palette of art making.
Somehow Newman had to argue for
Volume 19, Number 3 © 2005 Smithsonian Institution
1 Barnett Newman, Who’s Afraid
of Red, Yellow and Blue II, 1967.
Acrylic, 120 x 102 in. Staatsgalerie
Stuttgart, Germany
2 Barnett Newman, Who’s Afraid
of Red, Yellow and Blue III,
1966–67. Oil, 96 x 214 in.
Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam
emotional turbulence in opposition to the
cool, matter-of-fact characteristics of the
contemporary art scene; for without sub-
limity, his paintings would merely serve as
examples of good form and his importance
might fade. So as much as the four-canvas
group was about the epic terror of abstract
expressionism, the paintings also revealed a
more intimate and instrumental concern.
They expressed Newman’s anxiety about
his place in the art world, his worries
about becoming obsolescent in a younger
art environment. The trick, then, was for
Newman to rise to the challenge of the art
climate of the 1960s in two ways: by con-
vincing newer artists that “fear” remained a
viable subject for art, and by making them
tremble before the stunning example of his
continuing potency.
Newman’s interest in and influence
on such younger artists as Robert
Rauschenberg, Gene Davis, Dan Flavin,
and Larry Poons have been well estab-
lished.3 Far less has been said, however,
about the ways in which Newman’s
anxiety about his own late arrival as
a major artist manifested itself in his
artistic practices. The reluctance to
19 American Art
discuss these concerns about his reputa-
tion may relate to the terms in which
intergenerational influence has been
discussed in art history. Many descriptions
of such relationships have relied on Harold
Bloom’s Anxiety of Influence, a 1973
book that establishes different scenarios
in which creative individuals—so-called
strong poets—suffer from Oedipal anxiety
about the influence of their poetic fathers.
According to Bloom, artistic sons rebel
by engaging in inventive strategies of
(mis)interpretation of their forefathers,
thus creating a space in which they can
produce their own work.4 As valuable as
Bloom’s model has been, it suffers from a
lack of cultural and historical specificity
that renders invisible the intergenerational
crisis found in Newman’s milieu. Bloom’s
model presumes a top-down arrangement
in which sons fear fathers. But what about
the father who fears erasure by his sons?
More useful, perhaps, is the rhetoric
of the generation gap that emerged in
the mid-1960s, the decade of Newman’s
success. In that period academics and
popular pundits had begun to theorize
the notion of generational difference in
3 Barnett Newman, Who’s Afraid of
Red, Yellow and Blue IV, 1969–70.
Acrylic, 108 x 238 in. Staatliche
Museen zu Berlin–Preussischer
Kulturbesitz, Nationalgalerie und
Verein der Freunde der National-
galerie, Berlin
a new way that Bloom would later invert.
In March 1969, for example, anthropolo-
gist Margaret Mead delivered a series
of lectures at the American Museum of
Natural History in New York, published
a year later as Culture and Commitment:
A Study of the Generation Gap. She orga-
nized world cultures according to three
stages of generational interaction: the
prefigurative, cofigurative, and postfigura-
tive.5 According to Mead, postfigurative
societies tend to be isolated, nonindus-
trialized societies in which information
20 Fall 2005
and cultural practices follow a top-down
arrangement from older to younger
generations. There change is slow, the
lives of parents virtually indistinguishable
from the lives of their children. Elders
have learned from their parents a sense of
history as something that is unchanging
and teach their children to think of it as
changeless. By contrast, Mead argued, in
the 1960s the United States and most of
the industrialized world had reached the
final moments of the cofigurative stage.
Typical cofigurative cultures would be

immigrant communities of industrializing
areas in which children often assume a
greater level of responsibility and genera-
tions co-influence each other. Children
may learn languages and other skills
necessary for family survival, while older
generations still impart to the young
more traditional, yet indispensable,
forms of knowledge. In a cofigurative
culture it is expected that experiences
will differ from generation to generation,
though such changes are easily absorbed
into daily life and elders determine the
21 American Art
conditions by which change is perceived.
Mead further suggested that the United
States was on the threshold of a prefigura-
tive stage, in which children have to
“teach their parents well.” World War II
and postwar developments had turned
the older generation into “immigrants in
time,” as change shifted from a geographic
to a temporal model. Rapid technological
advances such as the advent of television,
space exploration, and the atom bomb had
occurred within the span of one lifetime,
Mead reminded her audience.
[H]aving moved into a present for which
none of us was prepared by our under-
standing of the past . . . all of us who
grew up before World War II are pioneers,
immigrants in time who have left behind
our familiar worlds to live in a new age
under conditions that are different from
any we have known. . . . The young genera-
tion, however, the articulate young rebels
all around the world who are lashing
out against the controls to which they are
subjected, are like the first generation born
into a new country. They are at home in this
time. Satellites are familiar in their skies.
They have never known a time when war
did not threaten annihilation.6
In this prefigurative stage no one
could depend on knowledge of the
past, and elders needed to rely on the
insights and lessons of the young. Such
a scenario produced a crisis as the older
generation no longer enjoyed a position
of privilege as the guardians of knowledge
and culture. Older generations might
cling to authority and be ill-equipped to
respond productively to young people
and the changing world. The resulting
generation gap was a function of the shift
in pedagogical direction (from the young
to the old, rather than vice versa) and the
reluctance of elders to adapt. Mead cau-
tioned that the American generation gap
in the late 1960s would only be bridged
if the older generation would allow itself
to absorb lessons of the young—if “in the
4 Barnett Newman’s floor plan
for solo exhibition at Knoedler
& Company, New York, 1969.
Graphite, 11 x 8 ½ in. Barnett
Newman Foundation, New York
minds of both the young and the old,
communication can be established again.
But,” she continued, “as long as any
adult thinks that he, like the parents and
teachers of old, can become introspective,
[and] invoke his own youth to under-
stand the youth before him, then he is
lost.” Mead concluded:

[I]n this new culture it will be the child—

and not the parent and the grandparent
that represents what is to come. Instead
of the erect, white-haired elder, who, in
postfigurative cultures, stood for the past
and the future in all their grandeur and
continuity, the unborn child, already con-
ceived but still in the womb, must become
the symbol of what life will be like.7

Mead was a member of Newman’s

“white-haired” generation, and her earlier
anthropological work had influenced a
number of abstract expressionists.8 While
it is unlikely that Newman attended her
lectures at the museum or read her book,
she spoke from the same place, time, and
predicament in which he found himself.
Like Newman, she was a weathered elder
struggling to adapt to accelerating change.
However, her advocacy of a prefigurative
organization of society was probably
too radical for Newman, who was not
prepared to abdicate artistic authority
entirely. Rather, Newman exemplified the
ambivalent condition of the elder strad-
dling the pre- and cofigurative stages. Like
many older people in the 1960s, Newman
acknowledged that the young were usher-
ing in a new stage of culture but was loath
to surrender the potency that previous
stages would have granted members of his
generation. He was thus an immigrant-
artist in time. Not wanting to relinquish
his position of command, yet not wanting
to be left behind because of his inability
to learn from the young, Newman would
engage the artistic lessons of younger
artists. But he would do so only (in what
Mead might have considered regression)
to argue for his value as an old master. It
was in this spirit that Newman produced
and exhibited his Who’s Afraid paintings.
Newman introduced the first three
canvases at a watershed 1969 exhibit at
Knoedler & Company in New York—the
first gallery he had allowed to handle
exclusive sales of his work since leaving
Betty Parsons’s stable in 1951. The venue
was new, and so were the paintings. With
the exception of Tundra (1950) and
Cathedra (1951), the show consisted of
works created after 1960, many of which
had never been publicly displayed. Indeed,
perhaps to remind himself or the people
at Knoedler of the rejuvenation ritual the
exhibit was to accomplish, Newman jotted
a short note (fig. 4) at the top of the floor
plan for the show: “8 paintings in the last
2 years / 10 paintings never exhibited.”9
The Knoedler show was to be
Newman’s declaration of victory to an
art world that, in previous decades, had
found him negligible. The 1940s and
1950s saw Newman engaged in a long,

22 Fall 2005
 slow struggle for success. As one of the
early participants in the New York School,
he had contributed critical essays and
canvases that would reflect and eventu-
ally influence the course of abstract
expressionism, but he was often better
known in those early years as a lobby-
ist for metaphysical agendas recognized
in other artists’ work. Even by 1948,
when Newman developed his signature
“zip”—a vertical stripe that punctuated
his abstract canvases—the artist did not
receive the attention enjoyed by col-
leagues like Willem de Kooning and
Jackson Pollock. He remained an “under-
known” until his one-artist show at the
French and Company gallery in 1959.10
With that exhibit Newman gained serious
attention from critics and, more impor-
tant perhaps, from a pride of younger
(mostly male) artists. Newman reached
the zenith of his success at the age of fifty-
four and on the threshold of the 1960s—a
Barnett Newman
From Art Now: New York (March 1969)
I began this, my first painting in the series, “Who’s Afraid of Red, Yellow
and Blue,” as a “first” painting, unpremeditated. I did have the desire
that the painting be asymmetrical and that it create a space different
from any I had ever done, sort of—off balance. It was only after I had
built up the main body of red that the problem of color became crucial,
when the only colors that would work were yellow and blue.
It was at this moment that I realized that I was now confronting
the dogma that color must be reduced to the primaries, red, yellow, and
blue. Just as I had confronted other dogmatic positions of the purists,
neo-plasticists and other formalists, I was now in confrontation with
their dogma, which had reduced red, yellow and blue into an idea-
didact, or at best, had made them picturesque.
Why give in to these purists who have put a mortgage on red, yellow
and blue, transforming these colors into an idea that destroys them as
colors?
I had, therefore, the double incentive of using these colors to express
what I wanted to do—of making these colors expressive rather than
didactic and of freeing them of the mortgage.
Why should anybody be afraid of red, yellow and blue?
BARNETT NEWMAN
23 American Art
decade in which critics usually referred to
abstract expressionism in the past tense.
Newman reminded critics many times
that the Knoedler show was to feature
new works and would be his first solo
exhibit in ten years—a reintroduction
demonstrating the viability of his work in
a new decade. And most critics who wrote
reviews assumed that the show addressed
those younger color-field painters who had
depended so conspicuously on Newman’s
example. Elizabeth Baker’s preview in
ARTNews primed the critical audience for
just such a reaction:
Newman’s latest work bears unmistakable evi-
dence of his alertness to new challenges; unlike
most of his colleagues of the 1940s and ’50s,
he has in a sense been forced by the situation,
which he himself helped to create, to deal with
a set of new conditions for art. Being what
and who he is, he could not remain disen-
gaged from the possibility of being considered
a “bridge” to the work which has grown out
of his. . . . [I]t is quite possible to see [this new
work] as resulting from a generalized dialogue
with the present.11
The attributes of many paintings at
Knoedler demonstrated Newman’s skill
at absorbing the influence of younger
“hard-edge” abstract artists. Like the
canvases of Ellsworth Kelly, the fields
and lines in paintings such as Now II
(1967) were crisp and unadulterated by
facture, and the surfaces of pictures like
Anna’s Light (1968) were, in the words of
reviewer Douglas Davis, “as smooth as a
well-finished refrigerator.” Two triangular
paintings, Jericho and Chartres (both
completed in 1969), also clearly engaged
the shaped canvas that had preoccupied
Frank Stella since the mid-1960s.12
Such prefigurative influence on his
Who’s Afraid of Red, Yellow and Blue
paintings is not as easy to describe.
Newman tried to explain his goals for
that group in a statement published in
March 1969 in Art Now: New York (see
boxed text).13
5 Thomas Hess. Photograph from
ARTNews 77 (September 1978): 77
As is typical with many of Newman’s
commentaries, this short essay is more
problematic than explanatory. Newman’s
stated resistance to a “dogma” of color
assumes a great deal of understanding
on the reader’s part. His proclaimed
desire to produce work that will be “off
balance” is confusing. And especially
baffling is the real estate terminology
Newman uses to describe the “mortgage”
on primary colors. All of these enigmatic
points, however, relate to the ways in
which intergenerational conflict operated
in the paintings.
Newman’s reference to the “mort-
gage” on colors might not have seemed
so odd to readers familiar with the criti-
cal and social discussion surrounding
his work. Thomas Hess, longtime editor
of ARTNews, also related Newman’s
work to real estate operations and
architectural change in the catalogue
he wrote to accompany the Knoedler
exhibit. The catalogue, the first of two
monographs Hess (fig. 5) would entitle
Barnett Newman, was going to be the
first book-length work on the artist and,
as such, needed to provide biographical
information and analyses of individual
works, even as it also had to argue for
Newman’s place in the newer art context
24 Fall 2005
of the 1960s. Hess turned to metaphors
emerging from Newman’s architectural
environment and began with this curious
narrative:
We had gone to Barnett Newman’s studio
on Front Street to see the “big red paint-
ing” before the landlord evicted him and
turned the building over to the wreckers
to make way for a new glass and steel
skyscraper. . . . The oil paint had been
stroked to a silky perfection; every detail of
edge, corner and plane had been adjusted
and made to count—it indicated the
same passion for serious work that, in a
different mode, had inspired the architects
and craftsmen who built these commer-
cial offices for the East River docks some
one hundred and fifty years before. The
painting’s image, however, was, is, new. “I
had this red” explained Newman, referring
to an earlier work, “about 3 feet wide,
and I saw a way to stretch it; I wanted to
see if I could pull it out to 18 feet.” . . .
Something transcendental, something for
the future has taken place. Meanwhile,
outside the window, where an arm or a leg
of the new office building screens the view
to the river with a wall of blank fatuity,
modern architecture suddenly seems quaint,
a bit like Pop Art, old-fashioned, High
Camp.14
The “big red painting” was Who’s
Afraid of Red, Yellow and Blue III,
stretched out, as Newman had described
it, from the format of Who’s Afraid I.
Hess’s recruitment of pop in respect to
Newman’s work and its architectural
context is notable here, as he had previ-
ously contended that pop “developed
with clockwork logic from the as-
sumptions of Abstract Expressionism,”
having learned from the first-generation
New York School that “Art can be
Anything.”15 But in Hess’s monograph
introduction, abstract expressionism’s
offspring curiously represent the anti-
quated, due to pop’s ability to attach
itself to the obsolete, the about-to-be

6 Jonathan Holstein, Barnett
Newman Examines Lower
Manhattan Construction Sites,
1968. Photograph, 4 x 6 in.
Barnett Newman Foundation,
New York
7 Jonathan Holstein, Barnett
Newman Walks down Front Street,
1968. Photograph, 4 x 6 in.
Barnett Newman Foundation,
New York
past—and vulgar modern architecture
could not help but look passé when
compared with the timeless expres-
sions of Newman’s work. By contrast,
Newman’s new forms seemed, for Hess,
to maintain an authentic relationship
to the past with their commitment to
traditional craftsmanly values. The big
red painting, through Newman’s tender
application of paint and careful working
of the edges, became a monument to
good workmanship, reminiscent of
the less alienating commercial (but
25 American Art
not yet corporate) architecture around
Newman’s Front Street studio. In Hess’s
description, Newman’s connection to
the future was genuine as well, because
the older artist’s potency hinged not on
novelty but on his resistance to fashion.
Newman’s work would endure—rubble
notwithstanding.
Hess’s parable of architectural obsoles-
cence presumed a New York readership
familiar with current urban renewal
scandals. In 1966, the year Newman
began his Who’s Afraid paintings, the
city of New York had begun an ag-
gressive demolition schedule to raze
dozens of nineteenth-century walkups
around (and including) his downtown
studio, making way for the Mies van
der Rohe–like skyscrapers that would
later form the financial district skyline.
As part of the development, the city’s
Planning Commission allowed private
companies to destroy the smaller blocks
north of Battery Park to clear space for
“superplots” from which their massive
corporate headquarters could sprout.
Newman was furious about the destruc-
tion of his neighborhood and docu-
mented his building with photographs
before his eviction. He and his wife,
Annalee, kept in their files snapshots by
Jonathan Holstein of Newman ambling
along the cobblestone streets still lined
with 1830s Greek-revival buildings that
had housed the coffee and spice com-
panies of lower Manhattan (figs. 6, 7).
Along with these intimate shots, the
Newmans kept a larger-scale aerial pho-
tograph of their neighborhood, showing
his studio building among the few
temporary survivors (fig. 8). Newman’s
studio was in the white edifice, three
buildings from the left in the central
block.
The financial district renovation
was just one of several controversial
development schemes of the decade to
attract the nervous attention of archi-
tectural historians and critics, among
them New York Times columnist Ada
 Louise Huxtable. Writing specifically
about Newman’s neighborhood, she
complained in a 1967 essay headlined
“Singing the Downtown Blues” that the
Planning Commission had neglected to
mark many buildings as landmarks and
thus had foreclosed on any opportunity
to preserve a heterogeneous mix of
structures. Huxtable did not protest
the insertion of mega-skyscrapers that,
by virtue of new building technologies,
would tower over architecture from an
earlier time. Rather, she worried that
the commission had no overarching
plan for a more graceful integration
of old and new. Big business now
was making all the decisions about
8 Carl Gossett Jr., Construction
Sites around Front Street, New
York, 1967. Barnett Newman
Foundation, New York © 1967
The New York Times Company,
Reprinted by permission
26 Fall 2005
the renovation process without proper
public intervention, and maximum
efficiency was allowed to outweigh
aesthetic, historical, or social concerns.
“Instead of coordinated planning and
design, the modus operandi has been
simply to milk the most out of each
separate, negotiable parcel indepen-
dently,” Huxtable said. “The architects
of the blockbusters for two of the huge
plots have no idea what will be on the
third. . . . Actually it is quite clear what
will be on that third site: the biggest deal
possible. . . . Human amenities? Urban
aesthetics? Municipal sense? Public
good? None of it balances against private
profit.”16
 To make her point, Huxtable pro-
vided a photograph of the developing
region in question—a print of the same
large-scale photograph by New York
Times photographer Carl Gossett Jr.
that Newman kept in his files.17 His
studio building won its bittersweet
fifteen minutes of fame in the Times as
an example of the “old” on the verge of
being swept away by newer architectural
trends. In fact, Huxtable had made
construction in the downtown area a
focus of her columns for several years.
Her 1966 article headlined “The World
Trade Center: Who’s Afraid of the Big
Bad Bldgs?” was a bit more optimistic
than the later “Down Town Blues.” At
the time, demolition had not yet begun
and plans for the twin towers were still
on the drawing board. And Huxtable,
never a simple advocate of all things old
and quaint, was still appreciative of New
York’s ability to expand and develop.
She reminded readers that many of the
older buildings in the financial district,
about which New Yorkers were in a
protective frenzy, had seemed grossly
modern to their nineteenth-century
viewers; the New York public had to be
flexible to allow for the city’s growth.
Nevertheless, Huxtable ended her piece
on a cautionary note. The World Trade
Center was going to be big—bigger than
anything previously done—and it would
dwarf its surroundings, with as-yet-
unknown consequences made possible
by new technology. In an unfortunately
prescient paragraph, Huxtable warned:
“Who’s afraid of the big, bad buildings?
Everyone, because there are so many
things about gigantism that we just
don’t know. The gamble of triumph or
tragedy at this scale—and ultimately it
is a gamble—demands an extraordinary
payoff. The Trade Center towers could
be the start of a new skyscraper age or
the biggest tombstones in the world.”18
Huxtable’s column reminds us today
that the center, on which construction
did not begin until 1970, was a highly
27 American Art
debated monument to the passage of
time in lower Manhattan, heralding the
conversion of neighborhoods on the
island’s southern tip from a low-rent
district to an increasingly corporate
domain.
What should we make of the coin-
cidence that Newman conceived of his
red, yellow, and blue paintings in the
same year Huxtable’s comments ap-
peared? Of course, it would be a mistake
to establish a taut causal relationship
between these architectural developments
and Newman’s series, just as it would
be a mistake to claim that Newman’s
title derived from Huxtable. The story
surrounding these four pictures is more
complex. But the connection helps
explain the key tropes of Hess’s introduc-
tion as well as the artist’s preoccupation
with real estate in his 1969 Art Now
statement. Hess erected his story of
skyscraper crises around the “big red
painting,” Who’s Afraid of Red, Yellow
and Blue III, to illustrate Newman’s pre-
dicament. The chief crisis was whether
or not Newman would survive in the
new topography of the art world. If his
pictures remained standing, would they
become merely embalmed specimens of
styles-gone-by, or would they persist as
vibrant monuments in a still-developing
terrain?
Newman provided an innovative
answer. According to Hess’s introduc-
tion, Newman had entertained the
critic and his entourage at the Front
Street studio, and then took them on
a tour across the East River by way of
the Brooklyn Bridge (fig. 9). As Hess
described it:
When the light fades, we drive from the
studio to Brooklyn for a seafood dinner,
examine some bits and pieces of local
nineteenth-century municipal architecture
that have been overlooked by that borough’s
exploiters, then head back to Manhattan
over the top span of the Brooklyn Bridge.
It is a soft June night; the city lights burn
9 Jet Lowe, Looking East from the
Manhattan Shore at the Brooklyn
Bridge, with the Manhattan Bridge
in the Background, 1979. Photo-
graph. Prints and Photographs
Division, Library of Congress,
Washington, D.C.
through velvet layers of pollution. The car
speeds up the roadway and then seems to
wing above a landscape of yellow stars.
“We’re at the top of the bridge,” says
Barney, “at the dip in the parabola; we
are floating across like”—and he laughs a
bit—“if I may be immodest, like you move
across the red in my painting.” 19
While the comparison between Who’s
Afraid III and the Brooklyn Bridge is
remarkable, it would not have been too
surprising to those in Newman’s social
circle. One of the few good things about
the destruction of buildings between his
studio and the river was that for about
six months Newman had an uninter-
rupted view of the bridge. More impor-
tant, though, was Newman’s use of the
bridge metaphor to explain the miracle
of physics he believed Who’s Afraid III,
like the span leading to Brooklyn, had
accomplished. The challenge lay in his
experiment with the uninterrupted field
28 Fall 2005
of red. Newman had used this ambitious
amount of cadmium red before, notably
in Vir Heroicus Sublimis (1950–51), but
he had never offered such a wide expanse
of a single color without the structural
supports of the zip. The narrow dimen-
sions of the smaller Who’s Afraid of Red,
Yellow and Blue I allowed the proximate
viewer to see both zips at either end
while looking at the entire painting. The
stretched-out version, however, required
the viewer either to look from side to
side or to retain by memory the presence
of yellow and blue on the margins. With
the wider canvas, Newman pulled the
field to its limit, to the breaking point,
to the measure at which the red bridge
between the two other colors might
collapse. Newman’s experimentum crucis
was to see if color could hold on its
own without the scaffold of supporting
verticals. At its center, as at the top
and bottom of the parabolic bridge,
the big red canvas put color to the test
by making it support the weight of the
painting—a task usually left to composi-
tional elements such as line or shape.
This shifting analogy for the Who’s
Afraid paintings from the immobile
monument (a building) to the more
dynamic span (a bridge) pertains to
the kind of complex perceptual work
Newman had tried to provoke with
his paintings throughout his career.
He had long deployed the zip, for
example, to activate within the viewer
a self-conscious realization of his or her
own body and perceptual effort. Art
historian Yve-Alain Bois described this
operation in his now canonical essay
“Perceiving Newman,” which discusses
the off-center perceptual experience
operating in Abraham (1949). A dark
zip articulates the center of the canvas
with one edge, but then throws the
center off because the zip is so wide
that it makes the painting asymmetrical.
Pondering Newman’s achievement, Bois
concludes, “Precisely because he used
a symmetrical division but managed to
destroy its power by the most subdued
lateral displacement, he makes us aware
that ‘nothing is more difficult than to
know precisely what we see,’ that our
perception is necessarily ambiguous
and aporetic, that, precisely because we
are oriented in the world, we cannot
ever reach once and for all anything we
perceive.”20
With such cunning perceptual shifts,
Newman caused the viewer to question
his or her own connection to the world
through the senses. Human beings are
not omnipotent, not infinite in time
and space; the mortal, finite viewer must
always see things partially, in an unstable
fashion. A person can never possess a
thing entirely through perception. The
compositional complexities in Newman’s
work often resulted in what he described
as a sense of “sublimity”—a sense of
fear. Part of the “terror” relied on the
fear that accompanies human perceptual
finitude.
29 American Art
There is no central zip to activate
such insecurities in Who’s Afraid III, but
the compositional instability achieved
in Newman’s earlier work remains in
the later painting. Part of the perceptual
challenge operates through scale—the
picture is too big to be visually pos-
sessed at one time. The distance between
the marginal zips makes it impossible
for the viewer to apprehend their true
dimensions simultaneously. But the
bridge analogy keys up this effect. One
cannot occupy a bridge easily—it is a
space between places. And one rarely
sees a bridge all at once; it is difficult
for a human viewer, without mechanical
assistance, to see it straight from the
side. Views of bridges like the famous
span to Brooklyn are usually obtained
(as from Newman’s studio window)
with an oblique perspective offering
a dramatic diminution in size along
orthogonal lines. But at the middle of
the bridge—the point at which Newman
commented on its similarity to his paint-
ing—a viewer is in a state of greatest
perceptual tension. Between sky and
ground, and between the banks of a
river, at the greatest height and yet the
greatest deracination, a person traversing
the bridge feels his or her own percep-
tual ground give way.
Who’s Afraid III was a bridge across
which perceivers were invited to travel,
but the four-canvas group as a whole
would also serve to bridge intergenera-
tional gaps that Newman saw between
his work and that of younger artists.
Newman’s efforts to create a new means
of activating perceptual insecurities
with canvases such as Who’s Afraid III
were meant to impress the emotive
power within his abstract expressionist
ethos on younger artists. At the same
time, his use of primary colors would
address and even question approaches
to hue adopted by later generations of
artists.
Even though Newman debuted his
Who’s Afraid pictures in a show meant
to demonstrate his currency in the
younger art world, most scholars have
discussed those paintings in respect to
work by the neoplasticists—an older
artistic generation with whom Newman
had an antagonistic relationship. There
is good reason for such emphasis, of
course, as Newman mentions that
Dutch modernist movement in his
commentary on the series. Over the
course of his career, Newman had many
times contrasted his goals with what he
considered the gentrified formalism of
Piet Mondrian’s painting. The modest
size of most neoplasticist canvases
seemed precious when compared with
the ambitious dimensions of many
abstract expressionist works. Further,
for Newman, Mondrian’s tasteful ar-
rangements of lines and primary colors
seemed an exercise in mere decoration
when opposed to the epic subject matter
so important to his generation.21 And it
was neoplasticism’s strict palettes, often
consisting solely of “the primaries,” that
made most abstract expressionists afraid
of red, yellow, and blue. Mondrian
and many of his colleagues may have
considered the distillation of painting
to black, white, and the primary colors
a means of picturing the absolute, the
essence of painting. For most abstract
expressionists, however, that act of distil-
lation seemed like sterilization—a means
of eradicating the most basic, and even
base, attributes of hue.
Newman’s relationship to color
was characteristic for members of the
New York School. Like many abstract
expressionists, he had never used all
three primaries in the same painting
before the 1960s. Though he frequently
enjoyed applying broad fields of a single
primary color such as red to canvases
like Vir Heroicus Sublimis, he usually
interrupted those fields with zips of
non-prismatic hues. In his writings
and painted works, Newman, unlike
Mondrian, preferred intuitive, “undog-
matic” color combinations that deviated
30 Fall 2005
from predetermined color systems.22
Newman’s favorite colors were often raw
and elemental. From the muddy browns
of canvases like Onement I (1948) to the
suite of canvases from 1954 to 1955,
such as The Gate featuring an almost-
institutional mint, he often entirely
avoided primary hues.
When writing as a critic, Newman
also tended to privilege painters who
enjoyed off-colors. In his discussion of
Adolph Gottlieb and Rufino Tamayo
in 1945, Newman mentioned that he
appreciated the ways in which they “love
earth colors, and have revived the use of
brown.” Brown pictures, he commented,
“have almost died out in modern art”
due to the influence of the impression-
ist palette. But “from the high tones
around orange to the deep diapason of
the black browns, these [two] men have
been playing a somber music of intense
warmth that is a relief from the strident
notes of many of the pictures of our
times. They have succeeded in expressing
man’s elemental feelings, the majestic
force of our earthly ties and natures”
and they “confront us with the prob-
lems of man’s spirituality.” In another
essay, “The Plasmic Image,” Newman
defined the allure of Oceanic sculpture
as a function of the material basis of its
color. He remarked, “The intention is
for the color, the stone to carry within
itself that element of thought that will
act purely on the onlooker’s sensibility to
penetrate to the innermost channels in
his being.”23
Newman and other abstract expres-
sionists preferred non-prismatic hues in
part because they believed such colors
typified an authentic connection to the
world supposedly enjoyed by “primitive”
civilizations. For cubists, burnt siennas
and umbers referenced the colors tradi-
tionally used by painters to create space
through chiaroscuro. But for Newman,
jade greens and earthy browns (browns
that on another level commemorated
excrement and other categories of the
“dirty” unassimilated by bourgeois society)
derived from cultures in more immediate
contact with the earth—nonindustrial
civilizations that associated colors directly
with the materials (earth and stone and
body) that produced them.24
Newman almost never titled
his canvases after the colors he
used, and his aversion to color
titles was shared by many of his
colleagues.
Further, muddier colors were attrac-
tive to many abstract expressionists like
Newman because they seemed to elude
containment by language.25 Abstract
expressionist colors, particularly in the
early stages during the 1940s, often slid
indescribably from browns to grays, and
from beiges to greens. This sliding-scale
approach to hue enhanced the irrational
aspects of color, ensuring that such hues
would be difficult to label according to
any set vocabulary of color names such as
“the spectrum” or “the primaries.”
Consequently, while Newman dis-
liked earlier, less “authentic” approaches
to color exemplified by artists such as
the neoplasticists, he also disliked the
ways in which color could be trivialized
by the younger generation. Artists like
Ellsworth Kelly and Frank Stella, for
example, delighted in literal approaches
in which chroma could be presented
as a self-evidentiary visual fact—an
isolated color served cold without any
metaphysical trimmings. This younger
generation of painters had begun to treat
color as a kind of Duchampian found
object. They applied colors directly to
the canvas without mixing them, either
on the palette or on the canvas, trying
to get the paint on the finished work to
be, in Stella’s words, “as good as it was in
the can.”26
31 American Art
When younger painters in the 1960s
used primary colors, they also demon-
strated the ease with which those colors
could be organized and classified ac-
cording to language. Kelly’s mid-1960s
canvases provide the most concrete
example. Around the time that Newman
began his Who’s Afraid paintings, Kelly
was working on a number of canvases
such as Red, Yellow, Blue II (fig. 10) and
multipanel works such as Three Panels:
Red, Yellow, Blue (1966) and Untitled
(Red, Yellow, Blue) (1965).27 Kelly’s
canvases, unsurprisingly consisting of the
colors named in the title, emphasized the
always-already-given organization of hue;
the names “red,” “yellow,” and “blue”
remind the viewer that these primary
colors were not chosen by intuition but
were adopted from conventional divi-
sions and arrangements. The colors of
Kelly’s paintings from this period are
deadpan, offering no optical surprises.
They suggest no metaphysical mystery
or perceptual insecurity, and they are
easy to understand. They are name-
able—and named. Even the syntax of
the panels—red, yellow, blue—obeys the
order described in the title (and repro-
duces the ordering of colors according to
wavelength).
Newman almost never titled his
canvases after the colors he used, and
his aversion to color titles was shared by
many of his colleagues (Mark Rothko
being the most notable exception). The
abstract expressionist phobia regarding
color titles and easily “nameable” colors
became more conspicuous in the 1960s
as critics noticed that hard-edge abstrac-
tionists like Kelly were deliberately using
literal approaches to color and titles to
weaken their paintings’ emotive punch.
Harold Rosenberg, a tireless defender
of abstract expressionism, reviewed
two New York exhibitions showcasing
work by Kelly, Ray Parker, Kenneth
Noland, and others in 1963 under the
title “Black and Pistachio.” The essay’s
title, which evoked associations with
10 Ellsworth Kelly, Red, Yellow,
Blue II, 1965. Acrylic, each
panel 82 x 61 in. Milwaukee Art
Museum, Gift of Mrs. Harry
Lynde Bradley © Ellsworth Kelly
ice-cream parlors, mimicked the way in
which even abstract expressionism could
seem frivolous when renamed. “Abstract
Expressionism may not be as dead as
we keep being told it is, but there is
no denying the will to see it dead,”
Rosenberg wrote, noting that younger
artists had found “too much freedom,
too much angst” in work by Pollock,
de Kooning, Franz Kline, and Philip
Guston. “The paintings of Adolph
Gottlieb are impeccably organized, with
every relation of hue calculated with
microscopic finesse; yet to Gottlieb these
lucid, calm surfaces signify ‘Blast!’ In a
post-Expressionist adaptation, Gottlieb’s
image would lose its ominous overtones
and be named ‘Painting’ or ‘Lavender
and Blue.’”28 Rosenberg understood that
hard-edge painters wielded color naming
as a means of draining the Sturm und
Drang from abstract expressionism. For
him, their color naming transformed
the white-knuckled expressionism of the
32 Fall 2005
New York School into something lighter,
even a bit silly, like the Lichtensteinian
punctuation of “Blast!”
In this context Newman played a
gambit move by naming the colors
of his Who’s Afraid of Red, Yellow and
Blue paintings. Before the mid-1960s,
Newman had occasionally named paint-
ings after the colors in which they were
painted, but usually only canvases in
black and white. It was not until 1966
with the Who’s Afraid pictures that he
began to label paintings after hues—a
short-lived trend that ended with his
Midnight Blue of 1970. There was,
however, one earlier instance in which
Newman had made an exception to his
prohibition on color naming. The single
occasion before 1966 was his Yellow
Painting (fig. 11)—a 1949 canvas virtu-
ally identical in form to Who’s Afraid of
Red, Yellow and Blue II.29 Although it is
larger than Yellow Painting, Who’s Afraid
II nearly duplicates the height-width
11 Barnett Newman, Yellow Painting,
1949. Oil, 67 x 52 in. National
Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.,
Gift of Annalee Newman, in
Honor of the 50th Anniversary of
the National Gallery of Art
ratio of the earlier painting, and its
distribution and width of stripes also
depend on this antecedent. The former
work, however, plays with the ambigu-
ity of a color title. The “yellow” in
Yellow Painting describes two different
golden shades; the darker yellow zip in
the center offsets the lighter color of
the surrounding fields. The “yellow” in
the title emphasizes the uncontainable
qualities of color—the overabundance of
hue that cannot be fully corralled by a
single name.
When Newman recycled the compo-
sitional format of Yellow Painting for the
second canvas of the Who’s Afraid paint-
ings, he was engaging in a self-conscious
play in respect to both naming and
color, as the artist recuperated a format-
and-titling strategy he had not employed
for almost twenty years. In naming his
series after the colors used, Newman, in
a rather prefigurative moment, seemed
to show that he had learned from his
artistic descendants. He demonstrated
that he was well aware of the new trend
regarding color titles, and that he was as
fluent in that language as any younger
artist. At the same time, there is a bit
of a cofigurative counterpunch here.
Through his composition, Newman
argued that his technique of color
naming, which first appeared in the
1949 painting, predated the example of
younger artists. And that earlier painting
even resisted the banalization Rosenberg
had described; Newman flaunted his
history of fearlessness by alluding to a
twenty-year-old example in which his
art had overcome the literalizing effects
of color labels. In doing so, he demon-
strated that his epic abstract expression-
ist project could not be diminished by
color titles. He was still the elder.
While the title Who’s Afraid of Red,
Yellow and Blue? purposefully evokes
the color naming and syntax occasioned
by “younger” approaches to the pri-
maries, Newman’s series sabotages the
determinate effects of such naming.
34 Fall 2005
In counterdistinction to the younger
exegetes of his work, Newman never
re-created the syntax of the phrase “red,
yellow, and blue” through the distri-
bution of fields and zips on his four
canvases. And, unlike Kelly, he never
maintained any consistency in the size
of color fields he used. Kelly presented
his primary colors in equal portions. The
particular attributes of each individual
color were thus diminished in favor
of a quantitative system that provided
optimal interchangeability. Newman,
by contrast, widened and narrowed his
fields, maintaining a more conspicuous
concern for the qualitative properties of
each hue.
If Newman claimed in his state-
ment that he wanted his pictures to be
“asymmetrical” and “off balance,” it was
partly because he wanted to refute the
procedures of such artists as Kelly who
no longer privileged colors according to
their particular properties. For Kelly in
1966, red was different from yellow and
blue, but only according to position, not
according to the qualities specific to red
itself. Since in the Who’s Afraid Series
Newman would not be using colors like
brown and green—colors whose particu-
larity he had earlier claimed was attached
to the power of certain materials—he
would have to emphasize the features
of individual hues in other ways. He
would have to address Kelly’s systematic
and quantitative leveling of color dif-
ference by, whenever possible, keeping
color relationships intuitive—as he said,
“asymmetrical” and “off balance.”
Symmetry and balance are not
necessarily interchangeable, however.
Symmetry implies a perfect mirroring.
Balance implies a weighing of qualita-
tively different elements so that they
reach a state of relative equilibrium.
Balance was the domain of artists like
Mondrian, whose high-style neoplasticist
works balanced areas of blue against
others such as a larger region of red
to create a “dynamic equilibrium.”
 Symmetry was the means by which metrical in both hue and form. The two
younger artists like Stella (fig. 12), zips in each work are of different size
Kelly, and Donald Judd tried to cir- and different colors. However, these two
cumvent the intuitive and artsy choices marginal colors still might be considered
made by painters like Mondrian and, in balance in respect to their effect, if
even, Newman. Symmetry was, as one agrees that blue tends to recede and
yellow tends to advance. If
the blue and yellow regions
12 Frank Stella, Die Fahne Hoch!, on both canvases were of
1959. Enamel on canvas,
121 ½ x 73 in. Whitney Museum the same size, the canvases
of American Art, New York, would suggest a rotation
Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Eugene M. (clockwise as seen from
Schwartz and purchase with funds
from the John I. H. Baur Pur-
above); the yellow section
chase Fund, Charles and Anita would advance and the
Blatt Fund, Peter M. Brant, B. H. blue section would retreat.
Friedman, Gilman Foundation But given that the blue
Inc., Susan Morse Hilles, Lauder
Foundation, Frances and Sydney region is larger than the
Lewis, Albert A. List Fund, Sandra yellow in both canvases,
Payson, Philip Morris Inc., Mr. the colors compete on
and Mrs. Albrecht Saalfield, Mrs.
Percy Uris, Warner Communica- equal terms, finding an
tions Inc., and National Endow- equilibrium as the wider
ment for the Arts © 2000 Frank blue gains as much atten-
Stella/Artists Rights Society
(ARS), New York
tion as the narrower field
of yellow on the right by
virtue of its size.
Newman further ex-
plored blue’s tendency to
recede in Who’s Afraid II,
the only fully symmetrical
picture of the four. There
he placed blue in the
center, leaving yellow to
brighten the sides. The
compositional symmetry
(the two yellow zips are
the same size and the same
distance from the sides)
might flirt with the notion
of axial perspective. But
Newman widened the blue
Yve-Alain Bois has noted, the new “anti- zip, preventing that darker region from
compositional” rebuttal to “balance.”30 receding as the center stripe by its size
While balance claimed a space for seems closer to the viewer than the nar-
authentic artistic decision-making, sym- rower stripes at right and left.
metry yielded compositional choices to Who’s Afraid I and III are asym-
a preordained system. metrical in both color and form, but
Newman’s Who’s Afraid pictures test in balance in terms of effect. Who’s
the tender balance between symmetry Afraid II, the only work that is sym-
and balance. The first and third canvases metrical in both color and form, is also
of the group, for example, are asym- in balance in effect. In other words, all

35 American Art

13 Richard Burton, George Segal,
and Elizabeth Taylor in Who’s
Afraid of Virginia Woolf? 1966.
Film still © Warner Brothers
Entertainment Inc., Burbank,
California
three of the first works achieve balance,
even though I and III depend on asym-
metry. Who’s Afraid IV is the only work
that is asymmetrical according to color
(a broad area of red on the left opposes
a broad area of yellow on the right) and
symmetrical in form (the left and right
regions are the same size, the blue zip
directly in the center). It is more “off
balance” than the others, however, in
36 Fall 2005
terms of the spatial effects of color. The
projection of yellow, for the first time,
is not offset by a wider blue area as
ballast.
Newman was exploring, in other
words, the variations between two
altogether different kinds of difference.
Symmetry is the differential system
whereby two things are identical ac-
cording to quality and quantity. Balance
is the differential system whereby two
quantitatively different things are equal
only according to quality. Newman’s
Who’s Afraid of Red, Yellow and Blue
project creates a system in which two
qualitatively different systems (sym-
metry and balance) weigh against
each other without resolution. He was
not simply refuting Mondrian’s color
dogma. His series was a means of con-
fronting both the new and the old, of
differentiating between the equilibrium
typical of earlier modernist canvases and
the symmetry of later modernist artists
such as Kelly under the rubric of color.
The series was meant to be a mediation,
a bridge spanning the systems of dif-
ference exemplified by the two genera-
tions (old and young)—between which
Newman inserted his own practice.
The integration of these two genera-
tional modes was anything but benign, as
indicated by Newman’s choice of title for
the group. His conception of the series
in 1966, after all, coincided with the
cinematic debut of Edward Albee’s Who’s
Afraid of Virginia Woolf ?—a film that
stunned audiences and shocked censors
in its mobilization of racy expletives,
not to mention Elizabeth Taylor’s having
gained twenty pounds to play the role of
Martha. The film was the Life magazine
cover story in June 1966, and the subject
of numerous articles in the New York
Times and other popular news sources.
By selecting a title that alluded to this
notorious and much-discussed movie,
Newman offered a shorthand summary
of the complex intergenerational relations
his series might perform.31

Photo Credits
16, 18, 19, 20–21, 33, Courtesy of
the Barnett Newman Foundation,
New York. Photos by Bruce White;
22, Courtesy of the Barnett
Newman Foundation, New York;
25 (both), Courtesy of the Barnett
Newman Foundation, New York,
with permission of Jonathan
Holstein
Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf ?—
which takes place over the course of one
evening—is an investigation of ill-fated
parent-child relationships (fig. 13).
George and Martha, road-weary aca-
demics ironically named after the father
of our country and his wife, wield their
erudite cynicism against a young profes-
sor and his wife who have come to them
for guidance. Fifties meet the sixties
here; middle age encounters youth. As
the relationship between the older and
younger couples darkens, another invis-
ible generation emerges—two imagined
children. Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf ?
has not one but two fictional pregnan-
cies. The wife of the young professor,
we eventually discover, was once great
with nonexistent child, a hysterical
pregnancy. Martha’s boasting about
her son is also a fabrication—another
work of fiction she and her husband
enjoy quoting. In the end, George puts
a stop to the doubled paternal conflicts
that motivate the evening. In a twist
on the Oedipal story, he kills his own
son by vocally narrating the scene of
this fictional child’s death. The relation-
ships between the two couples and with
their fantasy offspring in Who’s Afraid
of Virginia Woolf ? represent permuta-
tions on parenthood gone awry. The
nurturing relationship that is expected
from parents in an ideal family is trans-
formed into a sequence of interlocking
performances, false promises, and
masquerades.
The title’s associations with Albee’s
play-turned-movie did a great deal for
Newman’s series, aligning the paintings
with the notion of Oedipal conflict in
which the father emerges (relatively)
victorious. Newman, after all, was not
unlike George, although it is doubtful
he would have admitted to the frailty
of Albee’s protagonist. Like George,
Newman found himself in a paternal
37 American Art
role that could be at once powerful and
fragile. As much as Newman hoped to
reign supreme as a veteran of the art
world, his authority (in a prefigurative
era of intergenerational conflict) was
under attack, and it depended on the
deference of younger artists. He could
not succeed without their approval.
By virtue of the Albee-esque question
“Who’s Afraid?” Newman embedded
within his demand for respect a hope
that he might be able to command
fear as well. He formulated his title as
a question in part to convince viewers
that he was unafraid. But his courageous
confrontation with primary colors was
also meant to convince younger painters
of his superior engagement with color.
To make the new generation feel anxiety
would be to doubly accomplish the
paternal authority Newman asserted. If
he could make viewers feel the terror
of their perceptual finitude though
paintings like Who’s Afraid III, Newman
would return painting to the ethos of his
generation and thus command fear and
respect as an elder.
The bridge Newman would try to
build with the Who’s Afraid paintings
was somewhat wobbly. It was con-
structed to mediate the co- and prefigu-
rative phases of the intergenerational
exchange to which he was subjected.
Through the formal attributes of the
pictures, the filmic allusions embed-
ded in his title, and the architectural
metaphors he and his circle deployed to
explain the images, Newman hoped to
span the gap between his work and that
of younger artists. This required great
transformations, subjecting his abstract
expressionist project to significant pres-
sures. But the paintings as a group sup-
ported those pressures and bridged those
gaps, to such an extent that Newman’s
work continues to seem rather young,
even today.
Notes
My thanks to Heidi Colsman-Freyberger of
the Barnett Newman Foundation for help
with archival materials and for her insightful
comments on early versions of this paper.
Christiane Wisehart provided assistance with
the manuscript and illustrations. Charlotte
Houghton made important comments on
an early draft as well. This paper was first
given as a Daniel H. Silberberg Honorary
Lecture at the Institute of Fine Arts, New
York University, in 2003. A postdoctoral re-
search grant from the J. Paul Getty Research
Institute, Los Angeles, provided support for
the project. This paper is also being pub-
lished with support from the George Dewey
and Mary J. Krummrine Endowment.
1 Newman exhibited the first three can-
vases in 1969 under the title Who’s Afraid
of Red, Yellow and Blue? before he had
completed the final painting. Thus most
critics writing before 1971 addressed
the group as a series of three. Articles
written on the three canvases include
Peter Schjeldahl, “New York Letter,” and
Lawrence Alloway, “Notes on Barnett
Newman,” both in Art International 13,
no. 6 (Summer 1969): 64–69 and 35–
39; and Barbara Reise, “The Stance of
Barnett Newman,” Studio International
179, no. 919 (February 1970): 49–63.
2 For the quote, see Barnett Newman, “Art
of the South Seas,” 1946, reprinted in
Barnett Newman: Selected Writings and
Interviews, ed. John P. O’Neill (New
York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1990), 100 (here-
after BN-SWI).
3 Most recently, Richard Shiff described
Newman’s influence on artists of the
1960s in his “Whiteout: The Not-
Influence Newman Effect,” in Barnett
Newman, ed. Ann Temkin (Philadelphia:
Philadelphia Museum of Art, 2002),
76–111.
4 Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence:
A Theory of Poetry (New York: Oxford
Univ. Press, 1973).
5 Margaret Mead, Culture and Commit-
ment: A Study of the Generation Gap
(Garden City, N.Y.: Natural History
Press/Doubleday, 1970). For an earlier
discussion of the term, see C. D. B.
Bryan, “Why the Generation Gap
Begins at 30,” New York Times, July 2,
1967, 11, 34–36. See also Pierre Nora,
Realms of Memory: The Construction of
the French Past, vol. 1, trans. Arthur
38
Goldhammer (New York: Columbia
Univ. Press, 1996), 499–531.
6 Mead, Culture and Commitment, 58–59.
7 Ibid., 53, 63, and for the quote 68.
8 Michael Leja discusses the importance
of Mead’s work in Reframing Abstract
Expressionism: Subjectivity and Paint-
ing in the 1940s (New Haven: Yale
Univ. Press, 1993), esp. 56–63. See also
Stephen Polcari, Abstract Expressionism
and the Modern Experience (Cambridge:
Cambridge Univ. Press, 1991), 4–37,
passim.
9 At the Knoedler show Newman also dis-
played Black Fire I (1961), Shining Forth
(To George) (1961), The Moment (1962),
The Three (1962), White Fire II (1963),
Now II (1967), Anna’s Light (1968), the
first three Who’s Afraid of Red, Yellow
and Blue paintings, Chartres (1969), and
Jericho (1968–69), in addition to the
sculptural works Here II (1965), Here III
(1966), and Broken Obelisk (1967). See
Alloway, “Notes on Barnett Newman,”
for a discussion of his exhibition strategy.
10 Clement Greenberg, who had seen a
show of Newman’s work at Benning-
ton College the previous year, organized
the exhibit. On Greenberg’s role in the
rejuvenation of Newman’s career, see
Thomas Crow, The Rise of the Sixties:
American and European Art in the Era of
Dissent (New York: Harry N. Abrams,
1996), 60–62.
11 Nearly every review of the show men-
tioned Newman’s remarks on this point;
see, for example, Douglas Davis, “After
Ten Years, a One-Man Show by Mr.
Newman,” National Observer, April 14,
1969, 25, and David Shirey, “Barney,”
Newsweek, April 14, 1969, 93–94. For
the quote, see Elizabeth Baker, “Barnett
Newman in a New Light,” ARTNews 67,
no. 16 (February 1969): 40. Baker com-
pared Newman’s canvases with works by
Frank Stella, Kenneth Noland, Ellsworth
Kelly, Jules Olitski, Dan Flavin, and
several pop artists.
12 Davis, “After Ten Years, a One-Man
Show by Mr. Newman,” 20. In speaking
about the exhibit with Davis, Newman
referred to the use of the shaped canvas
by younger painters and his willing-
ness to exchange ideas: “We’re talking to
each other, as I said. My triangles follow
Fall 2005
others who have shaped the canvas.”
Newman tempered his statement by
saying, “I know young people are doing
triangles, but for different reasons.”
Davis interview notes, 1969, Knoedler
File, Barnett Newman Foundation,
New York.
13 The statement was first published in
Art Now: New York (March 1969), n.p.,
along with a color illustration of the first
canvas in the series.
14 Thomas Hess, Barnett Newman (New
York: Knoedler Gallery, 1969), 7.
15 Thomas Hess, “Pop and Public,”
ARTNews 62, no. 7 (November 1963):
23.
16 Ada Louise Huxtable, “Down Town
Blues,” New York Times, April 16, 1967,
29–30.
17 It is unclear how Newman obtained his
print of the image. I would like to thank
Paula Pelossi of the Barnett Newman
Foundation for helping me find this
image.
18 Ada Louise Huxtable, “The World Trade
Center: Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad
Bldgs?” New York Times, May 29, 1966,
13–14.
19 Hess, Barnett Newman, 1969, 7.
20 Yve-Alain Bois, “Perceiving Newman,”
in Painting as Model (Cambridge, Mass.:
MIT Press, 1990), 199.
21 The first critics to discuss the Who’s
Afraid Series associated it with Piet Mon-
drian in part because the 1971 retrospec-
tive of Newman’s work at the Museum
of Modern Art (an exhibition featuring
the Who’s Afraid pictures) coincided with
a Mondrian retrospective at the Gug-
genheim Museum. The two shows were
often reviewed in the same article, with
prolonged discussions of their respec-
tive approaches to primary color. See, for
example, Douglas Davis, “The Red, the
Yellow, the Blue,” Newsweek, October
18, 1971, 90–93. For Newman’s com-
ments on Mondrian, see his “The
Plasmic Image,” ca. 1945, reprinted in
BN-SWI, esp. 141.
22 For example, Mark Rothko’s classes at
Brooklyn College during the 1950s
encouraged an intuitive approach to
 color; he instructed students to apply
pigment to canvas without recourse
to any color system such as those sup-
plied by Wilhelm Ostwald and Albert
H. Munsell. See John Gage, “Rothko:
Color as Subject,” in Jeffrey Weiss, Mark
Rothko (Washington, D.C.: National
Gallery of Art, 1998), 251.
23 Barnett Newman, “The Painting of
Tamayo and Gottlieb,” La Revista Belga
2 (April 1945): 16–25, reprinted in BN-
SWI, see 76–77 for quote. Newman,
“The Plasmic Image,” BN-SWI, 144.
24 The argument has also been made that
abstract expressionists tried to estab-
lish more systematic color symbolism by
tying certain hues to specific meanings;
see Evan Firestone, “Color in Abstract
Expressionism: Sources and Background
for Meaning,” Arts Magazine 55, no. 7
(March 1981): 140– 43. Ann Gibson,
“Regression and Color in Abstract
Expressionism: Barnett Newman, Mark
Rothko, and Clyfford Still,” Arts Maga-
zine 55, no. 7 (March 1981): 144–53,
argues that emphasis on hue over value
(light-dark relationships) in the work of
Rothko, Gottlieb, and Newman indi-
cated a longing for prerational psycho-
logical operations. By contrast, Charles
Harrison has considered these prefer-
ences for gray and brown among the
abstract expressionists a “markedly non-
Mediterranean chromatic range,” which
provided one locus of resistance for New
York artists against the more vibrant
hues of French painting exemplified by
Henri Matisse; see his “Abstract Expres-
sionism,” in Concepts of Modern Art,
ed. Nikos Stangos (1974; repr., New
York: Thames and Hudson, 1994), esp.
189–90.
25 In addition, color naming could derive
from commercial labeling systems,
as the easier it is to name a color the
39
easier it is to market and sell it. See
Thierry de Duve, “The Readymade and
the Tube of Paint,” Artforum 24 (May
1986): 110–21, and his slightly differ-
ent chapter of the same name in his Kant
after Duchamp (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT
Press, 1996), 147–96. See also Benjamin
Buchloh, “The Primary Colors for the
Second Time: A Paradigm Repetition
of the Neo-Avant-Garde,” October 37
(Summer 1986): 41–52.
26 De Duve discusses Duchamp’s argu-
ment at length in “The Readymade
and the Tube of Paint,” passim. For the
Stella quote, see “Questions to Stella and
Judd,” reprinted in Gregory Battcock,
ed., Minimal Art: A Critical Anthology
(New York: Dutton Press, 1968), 157.
27 Both Kelly works were well known
in the mid-1960s. Three Panels was
included in the 1967 Large Scale
American Painting show at the Jewish
Museum, New York. Newman’s friend
Si Newhouse had sent him a review
from Women’s Wear Daily of that show
that mentioned Kelly’s work; see clip-
ping, August 4, 1967, Newhouse Files,
Barnett Newman Foundation. Three
Panels: Red, Yellow, Blue (1966) also
appeared in Sidney Janis’s exhibition
of Kelly’s work in March 1967. Unti-
tled (Red, Yellow, Blue) was reproduced
in John Coplans, “The Serial Image,”
Artforum 7, no. 2 (October 1968): 34 –
43. Though Kelly’s Untitled includes a
fourth canvas of black and white, the
Artforum article illustrated only the
three primary-color canvases. My thanks
to Ellsworth Kelly for discussing this
series with me in a telephone interview,
June 8, 2000.
28 Harold Rosenberg, “Black and Pista-
chio,” originally published in 1963 in
the New Yorker, reprinted in Rosenberg,
The Anxious Object (Chicago: Univ. of
American Art
Chicago Press, 1966), 49. Rosenberg’s
review discussed the Americans 1963
show at the Museum of Modern Art and
Toward a New Abstraction at the Jewish
Museum.
29 Hess briefly compared the two paintings
according to their similarity in form, but
did not discuss the common denomi-
nator of color naming that also unites
them. Hess, Barnett Newman (New York:
Museum of Modern Art, 1971), 134.
30 For a discussion of “Anti-Composition”
in abstract painting, see Yve-Alain
Bois, “Ellsworth Kelly in France: Anti-
Composition in Its Many Guises,” in
Bois et al., Ellsworth Kelly: The Years in
France, 1948–1954 (Washington, D.C.:
National Gallery of Art, 1992), 9–36.
31 Edward Albee’s play originally appeared
in 1962. On public reaction to the film,
see Thomas Thompson, “A Surprising
Liz in a Film Shocker” and “Raw Dia-
logue Challenges All the Censors,” Life,
June 10, 1966, 87–91, 92, 96, 98. It was
unusual for Newman to have premised
his work, at least in a titular sense, on a
Hollywood film. Like many members of
his generation, he considered Hollywood
a cliché factory exemplifying some of the
most pernicious aspects of the culture
industry. When preparing for a 1955
show, for example, he complained to
Betty Parsons that “critics and artists, art
officials and art ‘intellectuals’ . . . have
tried to typecast me for their own pur-
poses as a maker of straight-line, ver-
tical line pictures, as if the art world
were another Hollywood.” December 1,
1955, letter to Parsons, Barnett Newman
Foundation, reprinted in BN-SWI, 206.
Armin Zweite briefly connects the paint-
ings to the film as well in his Barnett
Newman: Paintings, Sculptures, Works
on Paper (Ostfildern, Germany: Hatje
Cantz Verlag, 1999), 10.