Lord Barney: Barnett Newman's majestic abstractions.(The Critics)

Barnett Newman was forty years old when, in 1945, he made the first of his surviving paintings. (He destroyed his earlier canvases.) From then until he died, of a heart attack, in 1970, he produced a mere hundred and twenty or so paintings, about half of which are now in a formidable retrospective at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. The late bloomer was not promptly recognized. Even most of Newman's fellow Abstract Expressionists scorned his art's drastic simplicity, and, year after year, almost all the critics, except Clement Greenberg, savaged him. His reputation as one of the great moderns took hold only in 1959, when Greenberg arranged a show for him at French & ...