Be II 1961 - 1964

This is Barnett Newman’s “Be II,” and I'm imagining it coming into being as a slow burn of intuition. I see the artist carefully placing that warm, earthy red stripe on the left, and then the darker, cooler one on the right, bracketing a sea of white. I wonder if Newman felt like he was tuning an instrument, coaxing out a vibration. I think he wanted to make something totally new, and to do that, he had to strip painting down to almost nothing. It's like he’s saying: What is the bare minimum I can do to create a feeling? Look at the way the paint sits on the canvas, how it almost disappears into it, becoming one with the surface. Newman always reminds me that painting is a conversation, a back-and-forth across generations. He took cues from the past, and now, we're all still talking to him with our own work. It’s like he set the stage for us to keep asking questions.