Dionysius
Barnett Newman
BARNETT NEWMAN, 1949. OIL ON CANVAS.
Long before he completed a painting he deemed worthy of public view, in 1933 Barnett Newman ran as a candidate for the Mayor of New York. Working a substitute teacher at the time, his campaign was based on the simple maxim that ‘only a society entirely composed of artists would be really worth living in'. It is unclear how many, if any, votes Newman got, and his political career ended with that election, but his vision for society remained with him forever. It would be nearly fifteen years before his artistic awakening with the development of his Onement series, a third way of painting that comprised of a single vertical line against a deep field of colour. Newman’s work, his new technique and idea of painting was primal, and in its primacy it was so accessible that anyone could understand it, if not create it themselves – he was creating in his work the possibility of a society filled with artists.