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COPYRIGHT 2002 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.
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 & Company, a gallery on Madison Avenue. The event caused a stir that developed into a storm of renown, though it attracted no immediate buyers. As late as 1955, Newman had sold only one painting to someone other than a friend. For most of the forties and fifties, he and his devoted wife, Annalee Greenhouse, who was a high-school teacher in Queens, lived mainly on her salary. Compared with Newman, the proverbially neglected Vincent van Gogh was an overnight sensation.
It is useful to keep this background of struggle in mind while viewing the Newman retrospective, which, authoritatively organized by Ann Temkin, the museum's head curator of modern and contemporary art, holds forth with imperious ease. Even when he was ignored, Newman aimed his art at museums....
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