Barnett Newman

Barnett Newman painted big pictures and made correspondingly large claims about them. In the early 1960s, when quizzed by a sceptical interviewer about the significance of his art – large paintings formed from panoramic fields of ravishingly pure colour bisected by one or more tremulous, vertical stripes – Newman responded that if critics and others “could read it properly it would mean the end of all state capitalism and totalitarianism”. By the artist’s own extreme criteria, it seems unlikely that the daunting voids of his painting will ever be fully understood. But a new exhibition at Tate Modern – the largest yet dedicated to Newman’s painting – offers audiences in this country a rare opportunity to try their own hand at “reading” the work of this solemn, unashamedly portentous but powerfully original American painter.

Few artists have taken themselves more seriously than Barnett Newman. Born in 1905, the son of first-generation Jewish immigrants from Poland, he set about the task of creating his own artistic identity with unshakeable doggedness. He was not alone, among the painters of post-war New York, in holding the view that the modern artist should act the part of latterday priest or prophet; but he gave voice to it more stridently than any of his contemporaries. Newman expressed a dawning sense of self-confidence and mission among the avant-garde American painters of his time, a shared conviction that the baton of responsibility for the creation of high and serious art had finally been passed from the old world to the new. European art, he argued, had played itself out in a decadent quest for mere beauty. “I believe that here in America,” he wrote, “some of us, free from the weight of European culture, are finding the answer, by completely denying the problem...