Barnett Newman

Here III, 1965-1966

Stainless and Cor-Ten steel
123 7/8 x 23 1/2 x 18 5/8 in. (314.6 x 59.7 x 47.3 cm.)

Raymond and Patsy Nasher Collection, Nasher Sculpture Center, Dallas, TX

Newman is best known as a painter of abstract composi­tions organized around a central stripe, or “zip,” a word the artist preferred as a way to suggest the energy with which these mostly vertical bands coursed through his work. Newman insisted that his zips created, rather than divided, space, and that viewers before his canvases would be made intensely aware of their place before his works. Newman’s Here sculptures gave three-dimensional physicality to his zips. The stainless steel shaft appears to rest lightly on its rough Cor-Ten steel base, held in place by a carefully drawn weld: its polished glow and the slight reveal where it rests on the floor create the sensation of an object that is at once solid yet pulses with energy.

Newman’s emphasis on place, wholeness, and the experience of the viewer made him an important figure for artists of the 1960s. Serra found him challenging and ultimately important to his own interests:

I’ll tell you who I had a hard time seeing: I didn’t under­stand Barnett Newman. I could read [Philip] Guston easily, I could read [Willem] de Kooning easily, but I had no insight into Newman. I didn’t understand the vertical breaks in Newman, the passage of time in Newman, the separation of space in Newman. I don’t think it was until the second Newman show at the Modern, when the Stations of the Cross series was shown—that’s when I got it.

Exhibition:

January 28 - April 23, 2017

In conjunction with the exhibition Richard Serra: Prints the Nasher Sculpture Center’s curators have chosen works from the Nasher Collection that provide context for better understanding Serra’s work. The sculptures span decades, from the experiments of Pablo Picasso, Constantin Brancusi, and Henri Matisse in the first years of the twentieth century to works by Serra’s near-contemporaries Jasper Johns, Ellsworth Kelly, and Richard Long.