Okay, Onement, I, Barnett Newman, 1948, according to Newman himself. The painting that was his own breakthrough. The painting that really started what he considered his mature work. And let's take advantage of this opportunity up here in the galleries today at MoMA. To really get inside Newman's studio by looking very closely at this painting. Which is going to enable us to really understand why this was such a breakthrough moment for him. Not only aesthetically, but actually in terms of Newman's own studio practice. So, as you're already familiar with, we see here Newman's first fully developed zip. Again, that characteristic graphic divisive Newman, his vertical line here right between the eyes right down the center of the painting. Here alternately dividing or uniting the space of the canvas depending on which way you look at these figure ground relationships again. Now, what's very interesting is that underneath this cadmium red light band of paint, you'll see actually a piece of masking tape. And in a moment when we get down to the studio, we'll get into masking techniques, how to make various kind of zips. But I can tell you that because this Alizarin paint of the ground here goes over that masking tape and under this cadmium paint, that Newman very likely intended to rip that tape off. Which would reveal just a white priming layer, again, right down the center of this painting. In other words, a white zip right down the middle. Now who knows what Newman intended to do after that. This could be just the very beginning of some kind of methodical painting process that Newman was beginning. But rather, he took probably one of those cigarette breaks, probably a very long one in this case. And realized exactly what that band, in this case a very regular band of painted masking tape did to this canvas and it is just that. It is at the same time uniting and dividing that pictorial space. Affirming the two dimensional location of the support. The flatness of the painting in other words. But at the same time rather, starting to get that figure ground relationship of something in front of something else. Flat? Yes, but something that's very rigid and opaque versus this very translucent ground that you can kind of read into and see a certain amount of depth in. So we can surmise that in this very long cigarette break, Newman said, you know what? That tape is actually staying. It's not going anywhere. What Newman did next was to apply this cadmium red light paint over that masking tape with a palette knife. Now we can tell that this cadmium red light paint was applied with a palette knife by this very buttery thin texture that we see. And also these little lifts of paint which are very characteristic of squeezing the palette knife down onto the surface of the painting as the paint will kind of squirt, if you will, around the edges of that knife. How do we know it's cadmium red light? Well, we don't exactly, but I have a pretty good educated guess here because not only the hue of this color, but also the opacity. We can see even in these very thin applications of paint, squeezing that knife down with some pressure, leaving this very, very thin paint layer, it's still quite opaque. And cadmium being a heavy metal, think of it like lead, something like that, it's very opaque. In other words, it's not translucent, like this Alizarin in the ground, you can kind of see the whiteness of the ground peaking through. But rather, it's really, really opaque. You either see the orange or you don't. Either or and that's no pigment. Now what else can we say about the color choice here? Newman again, we can surmise had this Alizarin ground applied first. And then probably spend some time thinking about what that last finishing touch of the painting would be and specifically what color it would be. And I will suggest that actually we can bring in Hans Hofmann, the great painter and color teacher here and employ his ideas about push and pull. Specifically what he's talking about with those terms. Is the color temperature of a color and its ability to either push out into your space optically or pull away from you. The way this generally works is that warm colors, those colors we associate with daylight, the reds, the yellows, the oranges, have the pushing quality of pushing into your space. They hit you in the eye first. Whereas cooler colors, those colors we associate with nighttime, the blues, the purples, even these burgundies or maroons are a little bit reticent. They're quieter in our eye, they're pulling back away from us. So by contrasting that push and pull effect, Newman has reinforced that figure ground effects, because this zip now is really, really hitting us in the eye first, as opposed to that ground, which is a cooler color. It's physically further away from us being visibly underneath that orange. And it's somewhat translucent, kind of a weaker character of the color as opposed to this really eye popping orange right down the center.
