Vir heroicus sublimis 1951

Here's Barnett Newman's 'Vir heroicus sublimis', a big red painting with some stripes, hanging here at MoMA. Think about the physical act, the artist stretching that massive canvas, priming it, then slathering on layer after layer of red. I wonder what it was like for Newman, wrestling with that much space, trying to make it all work. It feels like he's pushing against something, searching for a way to break through the surface. He lays down these stripes, or "zips" as he called them, to puncture the red. They’re not just lines; they're like sutures holding the whole thing together. It's funny, isn't it? How one person's struggle can become something so powerful for someone else. You can see how his contemporaries like Rothko or Still were all trying to push painting, and themselves, to some kind of limit. It’s like they were daring painting to mean something in a world that kept changing, and challenging them. It's an ongoing conversation between them, and with us.