So here they come again—a wealthy collector, a lavish gift, and a museum exhibition, to entice the second from the first or to pay the first back for the second. You may deride it as a sell-out or dismiss it as more of the same.
What, though, if the collector is the Barnett and Annalee Newman Foundation, established to continue on in the spirit of a leading figure in postwar American art? Barnett Newman presided over Abstract Expressionism and its successors as if they were his personal domain, and he nurtured many an artist along the way. Could he stand as a mentor to others to this day? The Jewish Museum is counting on it, with “After The Wild” through October 1.
It shares the museum with a family that moved easily among artists, the Sassoons, and I have worked this together with my earlier on just that as a longer review and my latest upload. Newman, though, was not a collector but an instigator. He had a memorial exhibition at MoMA on his death in 1970, but fame and fortune were slow in coming. Annalee Newman kept her job in the New York public school system because a woman should not have to stay home, but also because they needed the money. He called a work Vir Heroic Sublimus, or “man the sublime hero,” just as he was catching on for real—and just as the sublime male hero was going out of style. Does that leave room for the foundation and for heroes today?
You may have seen Barnett Newman in a photo last year at the Jewish Museum, for “New York: 1962–1964.” Artists turned out in droves for a solo show of Robert Rauschenberg, but Newman had a special place at the younger man’s right and in his heart. Who else could blow Abstract Expressionism up to a scale that would have challenged anyone—or reduce it to a slim vertical, the “zip”? With The Wild, he eliminated everything but the zip. Its red bleeds out to either side of a blue strip running eight feet tall—the same height as Vir Heroic Sublimus and its Romantic sublime. Rauschenberg would not have been intimidated, but then, as another of Newman’s paintings has it, Who’s Afraid of Red, Yellow, and Blue?
The museum cannot borrow The Wild but does project it on a wall. It allows one to see the zip as light itself, zipping right along. Rauschenberg would have grasped instantly its modesty and humor as well. After all, zip also means nada. Could its wild mix of stasis and motion have influenced the bands and edges of shaped canvas by Ronald Davis, Richard Smith, and David Novros—or the actual light in neon tubes by Keith Sonnier? Hey, you never know, although Novros in black comes closer still to notched canvas from Frank Stella, who does not appear.
All one can say for sure is that, for all his austerity, Newman was open to anything. His zips had to have appealed to Sam Gilliam. The black artist had not yet discovered stained, unstretched canvas when he painted his Column Series in 1963. What, though, would Newman have made of art ever since, and what should artists make of him? It is not obvious who selected them. More than half the fifty works date from after Annalee Newman’s death in 2000, with more than a few from the last five years.
The foundation provides grants to the living, few of them young, with the expectation of acquiring living work. It also has a healthy relationship with the museum. The curator, Kelly Taxter with Shira Backer, has had her twists and turns, including less than a year as director of the Parrish Museum in the Hampton’s (yes, Jackson Pollock country). Before that, though, she was not just a curator at the Jewish Museum, but the Barnett and Annalee Newman Foundation curator of contemporary art. If anything holds this show together, she should know, but what? Like a show last year of collecting abstraction at the Guggenheim Museum, 
it is about the legacy of Modernism for today—and that legacy is heavily contested.
For one thing, it is resolutely abstract—apart from a graphic novel by Kerry James Marshall, manacles by Melvin Edwards, decorative patterns out of pillows from Amnon Ben-Ami, and hints from Cai Guo-Qiang of a howling wolf. (How better to evoke older Chinese art and to howl against barriers in the present?) Mark Bradford has only dense smudges, not the politics of his response to the Great Migration. Lynda Benglis has no trace for once of knots and flowing dresses. You may think of Peter Halley and Philip Taaffe as the postmodern subversion of everything Newman did, but not here. Meanwhile such artists as Gary Petersen, Terry Winters, Fred Tomaselli, Julie Mehretu, Sarah Sze, and Judy Pfaff throw Newman’s restraint to the winds.
For another thing, it treats painting and sculpture on equal terms—for all Newman’s quip that “sculpture is what you bump into when you back up to see a painting.” Its taste in sculpture runs to blobs, but with coarse, encrusted surfaces. If you are sick and tired of late modern “flatness,” you will not find it here. It takes diversity seriously, too. I have already mentioned quite a few African Americans and women in abstraction, but Rafael Ferrer looks to Puerto Rico as well. Seeing Joan Jonas on video in a pig face, balancing on a board while friends dance with empty chairs, I had to think of one last thing—that art is a tough act to follow, and all you can do is not to fall.
Read more, now in a feature-length article on this site.