The large scale is involved with several important qualities, each of which forces the existence of the others. Obviously Newman's paintings are open, as is much recent work, though not all in the same way. The areas are very broad and are not tightly delimited by either the stripes or the edges of the canvas, both of which are similar. The stripes are not dominant, thoroughly discrete, stopped before the edge or opposed against an area. Newman's openness and freedom are credible now; the earlier closed and somewhat naturalistic form is not. Ordinary abstract painting and expressionistic painting are bound in the rectangle by their composition. Their space and colour are recessed by a residual naturalism. They are still pictures. If forms run off the edges to imply a continuum, the painting is a segment of that continuum, which isn't true of Newman's paintings. They are whole and aren't part of another whole. There is no implication that the parts extend beyond the edges, just as there is none that they occur within the edges. Everything is specifically where it is. This wholeness is also new and important. It is why the stripes and the edges correspond. Mondrian's work, taking it as representative of his generation, if greater, clearly has traditional and naturalistic aspects. The lines are dominant and the white is secondary, volume and space once removed. The white is both comparatively frontal, only recessed a few inches, and infinitely recessive. The lines form a bound structure and one that is very ordered. Newman's work is not geometric in this sense, just as neither his nor Pollock's is expressionistic. Mondrian's fixed platonic order is no longer credible. ‘Hard-edge-painting,’ primarily defined by Ellsworth Kelly's work, is mainly old abstraction. It employs, though somewhat abridged, the new scale and simplicity and has some of the new specificity of colour but also uses the old abstract space, composition and colour. The openness of Newman's work is concomitant with chance and one person's knowledge; the work doesn't suggest a great scheme of knowledge; it doesn't claim more than anyone can know; it doesn't imply a social order. Newman is asserting his concerns and knowledge. He couldn't do this without the openness, wholeness and scale that he has developed. The colour, areas and stripes are not obscured or diluted by a hierarchy of composition and a range of associations. The few parts, all equally primary, comprise the quality of a painting.

‘We are reasserting man's natural desire for the exalted, for a concern with our relationship to the absolute emotions. We do not need the obsolete props of an outmoded and antiquated legend. We are creating images whose reality is self-evident and which are devoid of the props and crutches that evoke associations with outmoded images, both sublime and beautiful. We are freeing ourselves of the impediments of memory, association, nostalgia, legend, myth, or what have you, that have been the devices of Western European painting. Instead of making cathedrals out of Christ, man, or ‘life’, we are making it out of ourselves, out of our own feelings. The image we produce is the self-evident one of revelation, real and concrete, that can be understood by anyone who will look at it without the nostalgic glasses of history.’

We are making it out of ourselves.

The colour or bare canvas of Newman's paintings is very frontal and is necessarily spreading, lateral. The doubled frontality of Shining Forth is an example. The colour is usually applied flatly and thinly. Infrequently it is thin enough to show brushmarks and becomes a little illusionistic. Newman's colour is itself a major and influential achievement. It is full, rich and somewhat austere, for example, a lot of maroon and a little orange or a full blue and a whitened cerulean blue. Vir Heroicus Sublimis is a good example of the colour. The black and white is also colour. Obviously neither this colour nor the handling of the paint is pure and geometric. As with the canvas, there is much that is specific about what Newman does with the paint, much that is particular to it, such as the way it bled under the masking tape along the narrow black stripe in Shining Forth or the effect of stencilling in the white stripe. Similarly, Newman sometimes leaves brushstrokes along an area, since that is the way the paint was applied. A good deal more could be said about Newman's work, but there isn't space. Shining Forth, Noon-light and Vir Heroicus Sublimis are great paintings.