Barnett Newman

In the aftermath of World War II, Barnett Newman realized that contemporary painting could not adequately respond to the devastation of the Holocaust or the fear of nuclear weapons. Believing that art faced a “moral crisis” and that as a painter he could no longer condone representational imagery, he argued against the kind of painting that previously “was trying to make the world look beautiful.” Concluding in the late 1940s that “the old stuff was . . . no longer meaningful,” he rejected looking to the past for inspiration and decided to “start from scratch as if painting didn’t exist.” His solution was to paint radically reduced, abstract compositions featuring large expanses of color.

The title of Day One signals a point of departure for painting and for a new world. Newman covered the canvas with a vast red field bordered by two thin vertical bands. He called these signature lines “zips,” painting them freehand or with the help of masking tape. At close range—the distance from which the artist intended his viewers to observe his large works—the painting extends beyond the typical field of vision. Yet by invoking the shared human ability to imagine more than sight apprehends, Newman posits a metaphor for the creative process. He believed that his abstractions communicated a set of moral values because they offered an “assertion of freedom” and a “denial of dogmatic principles.” Ultimately, Day One professes a new beginning, and the hope that humanity might move forward into a better era.