Vir Heroicus Sublimis

Barnett Newman, 1950 · Gallery 402 · Floor 4

Damn! Look how big this thing is. Alright... now step a little closer. Closer than feels right. When Barnett Newman showed this in 1951, he put a note on the gallery wall. It basically said, people tend to look at big paintings from far away. Don't. This thing’s almost eight feet tall and eighteen feet wide. He wanted you to get close enough, so you can’t see where the red ends. Then you’ve got those lines. He called them zips. Strips of color running straight up and down. Some thin. Some wider. He compared standing in front of the painting to meeting another person. Except this one’s eighteen feet wide. A couple of years before, he’d written an essay called The Sublime Is Now. It basically said forget pretty. He wanted something that got to you. And he gives this painting a Latin title. Vir Heroicus Sublimis. Man, heroic and sublime. Now, don’t picture a guy on a horse. Think of yourself standing here. All that red in front of you. His first solo show had opened the year before. January 1950. The reviews were mostly hostile. Somebody even vandalized a painting right there in the gallery. He sold one. After the gallery took its cut, he was left with eighty-four dollars and fourteen cents. He was nearly forty-five. A year later, he comes back with this. And a note telling everybody to stand closer. That show goes badly too. Eight years before he gets another solo show in New York. Years later, MoMA wants to buy a group of paintings from a collector named Ben Heller. The trustees say yes to the Pollock. The Kline. The Gorky. This one, they won’t pay for. So Heller just gives it to them.

▶ Listen on Listen to Frank

Also in Gallery 402