ABRAHAM
BARNETT NEWMAN, 1949
It’s an almost-black painting with a black stripe running down it, just left of center. That’s pretty much it. Black on very dark brown. Nearly seven feet tall. People have looked at paintings like this and assumed they were unfinished. Or a prank. Or maybe the wall where the actual art was supposed to go. It’s none of those. Abraham was Newman’s father’s name. He’d died two years before this was painted. And then there’s the other Abraham. The Bible one. God tells him to take his son up a mountain and kill him, basically to prove he’s loyal. One of the most brutal tests of faith ever written. Now, it’s 1949. Four years after the war. Newman came out of it convinced the old ways of making pictures were finished. Beauty, harmony, the whole world-still-makes-sense routine. He wasn’t buying it anymore. Did he mean this painting as a picture of the camps? He never said that. But he doesn’t give you bodies. He doesn’t give you suffering. He gives you one dark vertical inside a dark field. Barely enough to say: something is standing here. Newman had destroyed almost everything he’d painted before this. Years of work. Gone. He said the old stuff wasn’t meaningful anymore. So he started again, basically from nothing, in his forties. And when he finally showed the new paintings, people treated them like an insult. He stopped showing for years. And people kept taking these paintings personally. In 1986, a guy named Gerard walked into the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam and slashed a Newman with a box cutter. Nearly fifty feet of cuts. Then eleven years later, Gerard came back looking for the same painting. Couldn’t find it. So he slashed a different Newman instead. Nobody does that to a painting they think is empty. And this one isn’t empty either. But it is holding something back. A father. A mountain. A silence with a name on it. Maybe. It’s under no obligation to hand any of that over.