Untitled,

1946

Newman was one of many artists in the 1940s and 1950s who sought to liberate painting from depictions of the natural world. To this end he developed a distinctive formal vocabulary that emphasized fields of color interrupted—or, as Newman believed, “unified”—by dramatic vertical “zips,” an early variant of which appears here. In his 1945 text “The Plasmic Image,” Newman poetically described the task confronting painters developing a new and abstract formal language for the medium: “In trying to go beyond the visible and the known world [the present painter] is working with forms that are unknown even to him. He is therefore engaged in a true act of discovery in the creation of new forms and symbols that will have the living quality of creation.”