The Voice 1950

Barnett Newman made "The Voice" with oil paint, probably sometime in the early 1950's. The whole canvas is more or less one color: a very light off-white. The paint looks thin, maybe applied in layers, so it's got this quality of almost breathing, like it's not quite still. There’s a vertical band on the right edge – his famous “zip.” It isn’t perfectly straight or uniform, and that’s important. It's like a stutter in the field of color, which makes me think about how a voice sometimes cracks, or breaks. I keep thinking about the surface, how it feels so quiet and almost empty, but then that slightly wobbly zip on the right starts singing! Newman’s paintings remind me of Agnes Martin, in the way that they can both make so much from very little. The conversation between paintings is always a wonder.