Red with a Black and White Chaser

Barnett Newman, Vir Heroicus Sublimis, 1950-51, oil on canvas

Detail below

In this post we go back to MoMA for another look at the Abstract Expressionist show. Never mind that most of the artists you see here--Newman, Reinhardt, Rothko-- are chromatic abstractionists, it's the generation of art and artists the exhibition embraces. As I mentioned in a previous post about the exhibition, Abstract Expressionist New York is up through April 25. The work is all from the museum's holdings, so if you miss the show, you will see the work--just not all at once.  In a video on the MoMa website, curator Ann Temkin talks about the artists and their art:  

"What did they have in common? Not very much.  What did they share? An ultimately profound and urgent expression of self. Their art was their transformation . . . of the society in which they lived. . . . Today the contemporary art world is a huge industry. In the 1940s it couldn't have been more different. It was a tiny band of people interested in contemporary art."

Detail of the second-in-from-the-right "zip" in Newman's Vir Heroicus Sublimis

(I think this work is sublime, probably the most powerful painting in a show of powerful  paintings in a museum of powerful paintings. But the title--Man, Heroic and Sublime--seems to sum up the attitude of that generaton of male painters, no?)

Barnett Newman, Onement III, 1949, oil on canvas

Detail below

Ad Reinhardt, Abstract Painting, Red and Abstract Painting (Blue), both 1952, oil on canvas

Before the black paintings there was . . . color

Detail of the red painting below

(photographed just below and just to the right of center)

Foreground, Hans Hoffman; in distance, Philip Guston

A roomful of Rothkos

And the black and white chasers:

Louise Nevelson, lithographs flanking the sculpture Ascending, 1951, painted wood

Closer view of Ascending, below

Alfred Leslie, The second Two-Panel Horizontal, 1958, oil on canvas

Detail below