Selected Methods for Interpreting a Painting by Barnett Newman

Who’s Afraid of Red, Yellow and Blue IV? Barnett Newman (1969–1970)
Acrylic on canvas, 274.3 × 604.5 cm, Staatliche Museen, Berlin.

ABSTRACT

The essay proposes a method toolkit for interpreting Barnett Newman’s Who’s Afraid of Red, Yellow and Blue IV by bracketing iconographic content and focusing on form, scale, and viewer participation. It outlines a three-phase, dialogic encounter—perceptual, psychological, and contextual—showing how the work’s centering structure and “zip” activate the viewer as co-producer of meaning. Drawing on Arnheim (perceptual organization), Gadamer (fusion of horizons), and Gombrich (projection), it argues that abstraction narrows associative noise and intensifies self-reflection, while warning—via Baxandall and Ockham’s Razor—against over-interpretation. The essay critiques content-led iconology as ill-suited here, favoring strategies that treat the canvas as a visual, experiential system. It concludes that no single universal method suffices; instead, adaptive, phase-specific approaches yield the most truthful insights.

Keywords: Barnett Newman, Abstract Expressionism, Color Field Painting, zip (vertical band), viewer participation, perceptual organization, hermeneutics, fusion of horizons (Gadamer), projection theory (Gombrich), Arnheim, Baxandall, form-centered analysis.

Barnett Newman

Barnett Newman (1905–1970) is one of the most famous painters associated with Color Field Painting, a current within American Abstract Expressionism. Newman, the son of Polish immigrants, was born in New York. He initially painted in a surrealist manner, and in the 1940s began to experiment with monochrome fields. The concept he developed of the “zip”—a vertical line cutting across a color plane—signaled the birth of his inimitable style. Like other painters of this tendency, including Mark Rothko, Newman sought metaphysical aspects in art, partly in response to the atrocities of World War II.

Some of his titles allude to the Bible or to Jewish mysticism, but also to Greek mythology. His paintings are, among other things, a reflection on the human relation to the divine. He encouraged visitors to his exhibitions to stand close to the surface of the canvas in order to experience the painting’s physically and emotionally all-encompassing action—a chance to feel beyond oneself and consider one’s place in the universe.

Brief Description of the Painting: An Interpretive Note

Newman chose a basic, simple compositional structure in which a narrow, vertical, dark-blue band is enclosed between a red and a yellow square. This dark line—known as a “zip”—divides, opens, and clamps together the adjoining color squares of equal size (red and yellow) on an unframed surface. The paint application avoids brush marks, resulting in a completely uniform surface whose perception changes with the light. Yellow and blue consist of a single layer of color, whereas the red consists of 17 superimposed layers to sharpen contrasts and harmonize the color areas.

This monumental painting is rigorously reduced to the primary colors—red, yellow, and blue; any associations with representational imagery have been completely erased. For Newman, contrasting colors are defined by their intensity and extent. Four canvases bear this title; according to Armin Zweite, the fourth version brings the conception to perfection: “In this epoch-making work, structural symmetry balances the asymmetry of colors, and the intensity of the primary colors undermines the rigidity of the picture format, which is designed to entirely reconcile two contradictory guiding principles of Newman’s—to overcome the picture format and at the same time affirm it.” (1997).

Newman’s painting represents what may be an absolute end-point in the history of painting—a philosophically and ethically justified intention in which the work exists autonomously and yet comes to life only in the reception of an activated viewer: “The viewer, stabilized by the blue in the painting, feels himself standing in the middle of the picture, because of the red that is optically very near to him and the yellow that recedes. He himself becomes the center of the color-space that surrounds him.” (Dieter Honisch, 1998). In this meditative, “devotional” twentieth-century painting (unthinkable without nineteenth- and twentieth-century philosophy and the mystical tradition of the Jewish East), the viewer is suspended between the poles of nearness and distance, only to focus entirely on the self.

Title: Who’s Afraid of Red, Yellow and Blue IV?
Date: 1969–1970
Medium & Dimensions: Acrylic on canvas, 274.3 × 604.5 cm
Museum: Staatliche Museen, Berlin.

Choice of Interpretive Methods

I chose this work in order to eliminate the aspect of figurative representation. In my view, the painting’s abstraction helps avoid slipping into a “Panofsky-ization” of interpretation, which—because of its user-friendly methodological structure—is liable to abuse. This is a purely subjective choice, of course. Every method is more or less justified, because in the humanities there are no axioms—only traces and cues that, in a given case, can make a method more useful.

Dialogue with the Painting

Phase 1.
Looking first through the lens of features that immediately present themselves to human perception—matter, form, color, composition—we see a gigantic canvas with three basic geometric figures painted in primary colors: red, blue, and yellow. The image shows two fields divided by a very narrow rectangle. The width is six meters; standing before it, we are in a sense absorbed by it. Our visual perception experiences only what has just filled our entire field of view in a physiognomic sense. A Gadamerian fusion of horizons occurs.

Phase 2.
This phase—though not linearly subsequent to the others—concerns the psychological and psychic experience of an active perceptual process. Looking at the painting, we almost perform a Freudian free-association test. The entities “we—the canvas” are isolated; our attention returns from the painting to the I.

Phase 3.
Once we become acquainted and at ease with the presentation—and with ourselves before the primal force of the painting—our reception widens. We perceive the canvas in a specific context: the space between us and the painting (a further isolation of entities that initiates the birth of a relation); between the painting and the wall (here a curious interruption occurs as we notice the title on the label next to the canvas); between the wall and the room and other works; then between the painting and the museum, the park around it, the street, the city, our home, and our familiar surroundings. The space of reception grows like the spreading of a sound wave and begins to incorporate further dimensions, including time. A historical context appears. Space and time are joined by more abstract phenomena: cultural and social contexts, and the artist’s person and biography as factors worth exploring. These external factors act upon and are internalized in the experience. Skipping the complexities for brevity’s sake, once this process is complete we return to the work—perhaps retracing steps, perhaps along entirely new paths. And the whole process can begin anew, with the critical difference that after the journey we are no longer the same person.

Methods that won’t work

It might seem that art-historical methods or theories oriented to content would be less effective here. The iconologies of Warburg and Panofsky, based on identifying content without engaging form, are entirely at odds with what this painting in fact is: pure form. Similarly, satellite approaches—philology, or attempts to translate aesthetic categories into linguistic ones—are of limited use. Mieke (here: “Mike”) Bal’s Reading Art requires accommodating a very broad context, deliberate references to traditions upon which our culture was formed—something that would “dilute” the work’s extraordinarily precise content. Imdahl’s Ikonik likewise attempts to transform aesthetic impression into linguistic categories. The canvas remains categorically and inviolably in the domain of the visual. Nor is there any need to entangle the work in debates on feminist engaged art, which would likely lead only to musings on the situation of Jewish women in the art world (not entirely unjustified given Newman’s origins, yet again needlessly diverting us from the work itself).

I do not claim these methods are useless. Art theory and its methods are not exclusive. One might yield to the provocation and point out those aspects of Newman’s work that would “stick” to these theories like a bandage to skin, but as with any bandage, friction is inexorable: the bandage will peel off the finger—just as Newman’s work peels away from inapplicable concepts under sufficient pressure from the interpreter.

Methods that will work

Which interpretive strategies will reveal the most “truth” about this work? Returning to the dialogic process between ourselves (our I) and the painting, the canvas shows itself as a supple structure that allows us to deploy suitable methods at suitable moments and points.

Phase 1 is tightly centered on two entities: the painting and the viewer. Speaking of the first, primary contact, we think with Rudolf Arnheim’s concept of a centering system that organizes visual perception. Newman’s work has a strict centering structure—not only within the image, but, through this very quality, it centers the viewer and thereby concentrates the viewer on the self. This can be read as an attempt to induce self-reflection in the beholder—consistent with central tenets of Abstract Expressionism.

At this juncture, Wolfgang Kemp reminds us that “we are in the painting”: the shift from nineteenth-century illusionism to late-nineteenth-century modernism makes the painting draw attention to the specificity of its own construction—vital for our purposes, so we do not lose sight of the painting. Yet responsibility does not shift entirely. E. H. Gombrich explains style as the art of eliciting illusion, into which he integrates Karl Popper’s principle of projection. The viewer’s participation is indispensable; according to Gombrich’s schemata, the viewer becomes part of the mechanism of illusion and projects content. Applying this conception here helps us realize that an abstract presentation frustrates the projection mechanism (the classical schemata of illusionistic painting are absent). The viewer is left to confront what is before the eyes. The painting concentrates attention on itself. There is a narrowing of the stream of consciousness, an isolation (of both viewer and painting) from the external world, enabling a specific, intimate dialogue that can arise only between these two entities—the I and Newman’s canvas. Hermeneutic threads are present, too. Many such dialogues can exist simultaneously, each a wholly separate constellation of thoughts, feelings, impressions, conclusions, emotions—just as every person is an individual being. Conclusion: the painting has an interactive character.

The viewer’s participation is thus critical. The canvas alone is not enough. At this point, could we venture psychoanalytic detours? Are not colors—especially red—heavily conditioned culturally (as are the others)? Might a simple analysis of color symbolism and relations in the painting not direct us toward certain cues? Could semiology apply here—and perhaps even Hans Belting’s idea of the human as the bearer of images, very simple, even primitive, as in this case?

The red field on the left signals something sudden, uncertain, even dangerous—something that makes us halt, like stopping short when a car bears down on the crosswalk. Blue, the color of the sky, suggests a gaze away from the self, upward—toward the infinity of the universe (does the strip not somewhat recall the shape of our galaxy viewed from Earth on a fine, cloudless night?). And what do we usually see when we look to the sky? The yellow of the sun. Enlightenment. A turning point. It seems the sizes of the color fields are not accidental if we analyze their “weight” of meaning. The title itself grounds this train of thought. Newman asks, “Who’s afraid…?” Fear here is no accidental emotion correlated with color. Perhaps the artist asks why we are afraid to ask difficult questions.

Does this painting not prompt self-reflection more than any illusionistic image? Paradoxically, its capacity to induce such reflection is considerably greater, because both its form and physical plane give the dialogue partner (by now more than just a viewer) “room to maneuver,” without the need to identify intricate meanings and erudite complexities—without being ensnared in culture. Thus we receive a highly universal work with which each of us has a chance to resonate.

It may sound banal, but in keeping with Ockham’s Razor, the simplest explanation is often the most correct. Michael Baxandall likewise warns us against over-interpretation. And as I indicated at the outset, a broader thread of the artist’s pursuit—the reflection on the human–divine relation—comes to our aid.

Moving through the three-phase structure of dialogue with the painting, each phase offers numerous interpretive possibilities. Given space constraints, other analyses cannot be developed here; I only signal further arenas and a few helpful threads, for instance in Baxandall’s social history of art. To reconstruct intention in a work, one must establish a starting point. In this simple case, the first version of the series Who’s Afraid of Red, Yellow and Blue I? is precisely that—even if still a near reference. With Baxandall, we can trace the relationship between artist and the artistic tradition of his time—not in terms of “influence” but as the purposeful use of resources. We can examine the structure of the art market and look for inspirations beyond artistic tradition (perhaps the Bauhaus, Le Corbusier’s architecture?).

An even more distant sphere worth exploring is whether this painting’s interpretation can be a starting point for showing interrelations among methods, if such occur. Equally interesting is our role as interpreters: the choice of method depends on awareness of our position relative to the material.

Summary

The interpretive process is neither static nor one-dimensional. It resembles a cloud or a many-pointed star in which every point can connect with any other (or lose that connection) dynamically. It is a sphere of overlapping elements in constant dialogue. Rendering this process in linear text imposes an extra layer that hampers communication and the transmission of conclusions.

From the foregoing it seems that the search for universality in general—outside the realm of material existence—is groundless and senseless. Likewise, the attempt to find a universal method for interpreting a work of art is doomed to fail. This is not a defect or disappointment. Inability at times tells us more truth about the world than any affirmative answer. Just as one cannot build a house with a hammer alone, the various aspects of a work should be considered with methods purpose-built for them. Only then do broader, more correct—or at least closer-to-the-truth—conclusions about the work have a better chance. Even if some conclusions seem exclusive, mutually contradictory, or paradoxical, it is worth realizing that life is just so. That is why under “A” in the dictionary we find “ambivalence,” and under “R” “relativism.” And that is why a well-trained attorney answers every question: “It depends.” Besides, what pleasure is there in living in a world where we already know the answers to all questions?

Other Versions of Who’s Afraid…