He is the modern Renaissance Man Old Master: accepting categories respected through human history, but always re-examining and re-making them within and through his own contributions. Other artists adapt; Newman’s art generates knowledge, terror, courage, pleasure, life; expressive of a context as historically particular as it is universally timeless.

I think that this generative quality has much to do with his manner of working. He is always direct in re-beginning at the beginning. He uses no preparatory drawings, nor does he apply a theoretical system or ritualised methodology. And he acts only when he thinks it is (morally) right: when he feels passionately that he has something to express of importance beyond himself – in a painting, an essay, or a one-man exhibition. In these statements, he is ruthless in limiting his language to the rudimentary essentials for clarity of expression: ‘For it is only the pure idea that has meaning. Everything else has everything else.’2

Part of the ‘everything else’ rejected by Newman has always been stylistic dogmas. Faced with the 1930s American fashion for the shoddy content and flaccid form of ‘Social Realism’ and the empty rigidity of pseudo-Mondrian geometric ‘Abstraction’, ‘In 1940, some of us woke up to find ourselves without hope — to find that painting did not really exist.’3 The immigration of the Surrealists during World War II opened up new possibilities, but presented equally dogmatic limitations:

‘The fact is that I was in opposition to the Surrealists. No question that the Surrealists made a great contribution by showing that it was possible to paint a subjective thought, a feeling, a subjective idea. No question that the Surrealists freed painting from its old subject matter of nature, of still life, the figure and formal abstraction. It is a debt that I willingly admit. But I found their dogmas, their subject-matter based on Freud and Marx, their techniques, and their failure to get away from the anecdote, to be without interest to me. My paintings are, in fact, a confrontation with Surrealism. Just as they are a confrontation with abstraction.’4

Certainly this double sort of confrontation is explicit in Newman’s paintings between 1945 and 1948. The mythic sensibility, primitive sexual allusions, human drama, and unstructured spaces of dreams associated with Surrealism are infused into the ‘abstract’ language of circles, lines and other almost-geometrical shapes. The ‘circle’ in Pagan Void has less heritage in the geometry of Bauhaus-Kandinsky than in the metaphysical sensuosity of the sexual generative act. In Euclidean Abyss and Genetic Moment of 1947, two linear bands enact a drama of sexual attraction and confrontation across an area as spatially mysterious as man’s subconscious or prehistoric past. If these bands can be read representationally as ‘figures’ from some nameless geometric form or primordial life viewed through a microscope, their essential character is that of human gravity-defying verticality whose colour and visual solidity holds tautly to the picture plane and its physical limits. This ‘pure plastic’ vitality is present even in Genetic Moment’s allusion to the notions of ‘moon’ and rough primeval forest: the circle’s reddish interior vibrates against its whiteness, animating its visual push against the bands’ attraction across the surface; the seemingly scrubbed ‘foliage’ is clearly painted in brushstrokes of such individuality of shape and colour interrelations that they scream ‘pure painting’ to the sensitized eye.5