![]() ![]() At the same time, I attend to how some of the artist’s statements on meaning can be brought to bear on the interpretation of Adam’s pictorial effects. In the present essay I examine Newman’s decision to add the third band in light of the structure of beholding that it allowed him to establish for the painting’s viewers. It is as if some great physical force is being exerted on the quadrangle by its upper and lower limits, causing the central red wedge to buckle slightly – a force that is then offset or equalised by the newly established strength of the painting’s shape and by its bent but unyielding internal structure. Wider at its base than at its top, and angled just below its midpoint as if the lower half were hinged or jointed, the inserted red strut responds to what is now felt to be a palpable compression of the darker field. This explains the artist’s inscription at the work’s lower left corner, which gives two distinct years of completion: ‘Barnett Newman 1951 + 52’ (the ‘plus’ sign was an important indicator that he considered it finished at each date). In 1952 Newman changed the painting, and its internal balance, by adding an assertive third band between the two original verticals (fig.2). ![]() The visual reach of the amplified field was constrained laterally on both sides: on the left, by the broad plank of cadmium red that firmly declared the painting’s framing edge and less emphatically on the right by a much narrower, two-centimetre strip of the same colour running parallel to the right edge, at a distance of fifteen centimetres. At two and a half metres high by two metres wide, the canvas then comprised just three elements: a large expanse of deep, reddish brown and two bright red bands running from the top to the bottom of the canvas. During his second one-man show at Betty Parsons Gallery in New York in April 1951, abstract expressionist painter Barnett Newman (1905–1970) exhibited a large, untitled oil painting, now known as Adam (Tate T01091 fig.1). ![]()
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