Blue is the Colour ... Notes on Barnett Newman's Onement VI

Barnett Newman: Onement VI (1953)

Sixty years after it was painted, Barnett Newman's Onement VI sold at Sotheby's in New York for $43.8m, which, as the art critic Jonathan Jones says, is a tremendous bargain for what is an essentially priceless work of art; one that offers us a glimpse not only of the sublime understood from the perspective of traditional aesthetics, but of the blissful blue unity that belongs to what D. H. Lawrence calls the Greater Day. 

In other words, Onement VI is more than an artwork; it's a portal onto a prelapsarian world lying on the other side of angel-guarded gates; an act of defiance against God's judgement and an assertion of man's right to return to Eden home. The hope of regaining paradise - what else, asks Newman, could possibly explain the seemingly insane desire to be a painter or poet ...?

A vertical light-blue line - what Newman liked to term a zip and which is an iconic and revolutionary aspect of his mature work - divides the flat expanse of perfect deep blueness in a manner suggestive of the biblical creation myth when the waters of heaven were separated from those of the earth. Again, it's as if Newman - one of the major figures in abstract expressionism and a leading exponent of colour field painting - is directly challenging God in his capacity as the maker of worlds: 'Anything you can do ...'

But the painting also challenges the viewer who stands before it, obliging them to be aware of their own presence and locality - as well as their own contingency and isolation - before the Void, whilst, at the same time, conscious also of their belonging to and connectedness with the universe and all things in it. In other words, Onement VI - like all great artworks - helps put us back into touch and atone for the Fall (understood as a fall not into sin, so much as into self-consciousness and separateness). 

Whilst at 102" x 120" it's not monumental in size, it's a work - one is tempted to call it an event - on an inhuman scale. And Newman - shamefully underappreciated as a painter for much of his life (the media preferring to promote the work of more volatile characters such as Jackson Pollock) - is a true giant of American art who almost at times makes his far more successful friend Mark Rothko seem a little lame in comparison.       

Blue is the Colour ... Yves Klein is the Name

Yves Klein: IKB 191 (1962)

Portrait of the artist by Charles Wilp / BPK Berlin (1961)

Considered today a major figure in post-War European art, Yves Klein memorably expressed his nouveau réalisme in a series of brightly-coloured monochromes exhibited in Paris during the mid-1950s.

Unfortunately, the public response to these canvases was not what he'd hoped for - it was mistakenly believed he was offering a new form of abstract interior decoration. Annoyed and disappointed by this, Klein decided a further - more radical - step in the direction of monochromatic painting was required. Thus, dispensing with  red and yellow, he decided to work exclusively with one primary colour alone: blue.
     
It was a fateful decision - and the right decision. For his next exhibition, Proposte Monocrome: Epoca Blu (Milan, Jan. 1957), featuring eleven identical blue canvases attached to poles rather than hung on the walls in order to give a greater sense of spatial ambiguity, was a huge critical and commercial success, eventually travelling to Paris, Düsseldorf and London.

Key to its success was the fact that Klein didn't use just any old blue paint; rather, he went for ultramarine pigment suspended in a synthetic resin of his own devising that he called (rather cryptically) The Medium. The latter helped retain the full brilliance of the pigment and the resultant colour on canvas had all the magical intensity of the lapis lazuli used by medieval artists to paint the Madonna's blue robes.

Klein registered his unique paint formula in order to protect the authenticity of the pure idea and proudly gave the world a brand new blue: International Klein Blue (IKB).

From this time on, the blueness of Klein's works was no longer just a component; it was, rather, the very essence of his art and he used IKB not only in the production of conventional canvases, but in his sculptural work - see, for example, Vénus Bleue (1962) - and in his performance art (Klein had a penchant for covering the naked bodies of young models with IKB and having them squirm around or dragged across blank canvases like living brushes - a technique he termed anthropometry but which many WAM enthusiasts know and love as sploshing).

Ultimately, we might best view Klein as a kind of perverse mystic. Someone for whom art was a means of both transforming and transcending the world; of entering that fourth dimensional realm that D. H. Lawrence also describes in terms of its blissful blueness and names the Greater Day, but which Klein simply calls le Vide.

This Zen-inspired concept of the Void refers to a kind of noumenal zone in which real objects sparkle darkly as things in themselves beyond representation. Klein wants his audience to be aware of objects in their invisibility and their absence. The blue monochromes were thus a visual analogue for the Void itself, a view he found support for in the philosophy of Gaston Bachelard who famously wrote:

First there is nothing, next there is a depth of nothingness, then a profundity of blue ...
   

Note: those interested in knowing more about Yves Klein's anthropometry can click here to access a short film on the Tate website that includes footage from a performance and a recent interview with one of his models, Elena Palumbo-Mosca. 

Serenity Now (Notes on 'The Flying Fish' by D. H. Lawrence)

Stephen Alexander 
Window onto the Greater Day (2017) 

 

"'Beauteous is the day of the yellow sun which is the common day of men; but even as the winds roll unceasing above the trees of the world, so doth that Greater Day, which is the Uncommon Day, roll over the unclipt bushes of our little daytime. Even also as the morning sun shakes his yellow wings on the horizon and rises up, so the great bird beyond him spreads out his dark blue feathers, and beats his wings in the tremor of the Greater Day.'"

- D H Lawrence, The Flying Fish (1925)

I've always rather liked this poetic passage in which Lawrence suggests that the day-to-day world of man is not the only reality; that we might, in times of great crises and crack-up, glimpse something of the deeper blue that belongs to the Greater Day, wherein shines that other (darker) sun. It's liberating to think that there is something external to our own small and tight and over-furnished universe; something unconquerable and unknowable in its sheer immensity; the world in which flowers bloom and objects sparkle.

And it's strangely comforting to imagine like Lawrence a new type of humanity living in this fourth dimensional world without walls; that those who belong to the Lesser Day and cannot or will not leave their homes behind, will "'shudder and die out, like clouds of grasshoppers'". For the Greater Day belongs to those men and women who, like flying fish, are able to move between worlds on translucent wings, invisibly rejoicing as they do so.

The poorly protagonist of this unfinished tale gains his clearest insight into how astonishing life can be in the Greater Day, when witnessing a school of porpoises swimming alongside the ship on which he's sailing. Lawrence describes the scene in very beautiful detail as a "spectacle of the purest and most perfected joy in life". Although travelling at high speed, the marine mammals do so with carefree composure and serenity.

And that's the crucial thing; for you can't access the blue splendour of the Greater Day by an act of restless, noisy self-assertion. Rather, it requires qualities that many modern people no longer value: silence, stillness, and attentiveness ... One must, as it were, learn to enjoy watching paint dry and listening to the grass grow. 


See: D. H. Lawrence, 'The Flying Fish', in St. Mawr and Other Stories, ed. Brian Finney, (Cambridge University Press, 1983).