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With the rise of Minimalism and Pop art in the
1960s a new 'cool' look became ubiquitous, and Newman's restrained
style now seemed highly relevant.
In the past, Newman had often criticised Mondrian's
use of geometric grids and primary colours, a system that
he found overly puritanical and encumbered with theory; but
younger artists, including Jasper Johns, Roy Lichtenstein
and Ellsworth Kelly, had begun to reclaim primary colour,
using it on their own terms. Newman, who had previously always
mixed his own colours, felt compelled to respond. 'I was now
in confrontation with the dogma that colour must be reduced
to the primaries, red, yellow and blue,' he said. The challenge
as he saw it, was to make the colours 'expressive rather than
didactic.'
In 1966, he began a series of paintings called
Who's Afraid of Red, Yellow and Blue, a pun on the
popular stage play and film Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
In the version here, the zips are absolutely symmetrical -
pencil marks at the lower edge show where Newman measured
them out. The balanced format doesn't, however, lead to a
static experience. The colours resonate against each other,
and even the minute imprecisions around the edges of the zips
create a sense of quivering animation.
This painting, and the shaped canvases, Jericho
and Chartres, were included in Newman's last solo
exhibition in 1969. He died a year later of a heart attack,
at the age of sixty-five. The brash, direct character of these
works project a surprisingly youthful spirit and a confident
new direction after the solemn and contemplative grandeur
of the paintings made earlier in his career. As Newman once
remarked: 'They say that I have advanced abstract painting
to its extreme, when it is obvious to me that I have made
only a new beginning.'
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