 Voice of Ire: on Barnett Newman's Voice of Fire I was still a teenager when a big brouhaha broke out in Canadian media and around the dining room tables of people who loved art and outrage. In 1989 and announced a year later in 1990, the National Gallery of Canada had blown $1.8 million dollars on three vertical stripes of red and blue paint by American abstract expressionist colour field painter Barnett Newman. The work had been exhibited at a fair in Montreal and purchased with our tax dollars during an economic recession. As the Canadian weekly newsmag MacLean’s wrote later, “Public umbrage boiled over.” Barnett Newman’s works are common belt-notch purchases for curators and so most museums have one or another version of his zip paintings. He is hailed as an artist concerned with spiritual meaning, depicting Bible stories and Jewish concepts in elegant minimalism. His works are hailed as a million-dollar protest of American wars and imperialism. Voice of Fire was no less than God speaking to us through the burning bush in the Old Testament. “My goal is to give the viewer a 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.” Say what? I was between worlds in that era, extricating myself from high school and family, having just landed fresh and naïve in the big city, Toronto. My entire adolescence had been steeped in the passionate embrace of paintings and sculptures. For me, art and art history was at once substance and escapism. And I was of two minds about this particular controversy. I was a young writer on board with rebellion and anything anti-establishment. But I was also keenly aware that the National Gallery was, after all, the establishment; and that such money could go a lot further supporting artists of less fame and more talent. More, I didn’t like the painting. Almost no one liked the painting. MP Felix Holtmann said it for all the struggling commoners: “It looks like two cans of paint and two rollers and about 10 minutes would do the trick.” The intelligentsia mocked him as a clueless and blundering pig farmer. The Guardian’s Jonathan Jones would gush later about the painter’s blue and white stripes, Onement VI, selling for more than forty million: “a powerful example of his ineffable style at its height of confidence and magic. A single white line divides a flat expanse of blue: it seems to rip open the universe, a crack in space and time.” he wrote. “Great art is essentially priceless.” But the greatest and ever-acerbic art critic Robert Hughes emphatically declared Newman “by far the least formally gifted” of the new minimalist abstract artists in my prize signed copy of The Shock of the New. “He had no discernible talent as a draftsman.” Hughes attributed any success the painter had to his temperament. “…He was tenacious and argumentative, and his reductive cast of mind served him well in the studio.” Newman’s admirers were just “avid for one more hero in an age of entropy.” He went on to say that “Their simple, assertive fields of colour hit the eye with a curiously anesthetic shock. They do not seem sensuous: sensuality is all relationships.” Hughes took the words right out of my mouth. This is exactly the nothingness I felt when standing before the giant stripes, on a visit to Ottawa three and a half decades later, finally seeing the infamous work in person for the first time. In that time, I have myself become an artist with “no discernible talent as a draftsman.” A few decades have convinced me even more profoundly of the importance of other skills and values in art: meaning, aesthetics, symbolism, creativity, texture, contrast, innovation, imitation, provocation, protest, ritual, to name a few. Though I do not share the staunch modernist’s rejection of traditional art, being a huge admirer of the wonders of our artistic past, I do not share the old western art academy’s rejection of modern or multicultural digressions from their viewpoint. Art is an incredible journey of different cultures, different eras, different skills, and different perspectives. And so I desperately wanted to feel something less ambivalent when I got there. I was at least expecting to be in on the joke. Lorette C. Luzajic  Voice of Fire, by Barnett Newman (USA) 1967  Voice of Fire at National Gallery, Ottawa. photo by author.
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 I'm Lorette, an award-winning mixed media artist; a widely published poet and writer of flash fiction; founding editor of two literary journals, The Ekphrastic Review and The Mackinaw; founder of The Ekphrastic Academy where I teach art appreciation and creative writing; and much more. Looking at art and learning more about it has been my lifelong obsession and fuels all of my creative and professional practices. Here, you will find occasional essays and musings on art and artists. Enjoy! |
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