As an alternative to Western Europe aesthetic ideas including Surrealism and Abstraction, in the aspiration ‘to start from scratch, to paint as if painting had never existed before’,6 Newman and his friends, Rothko, Gottlieb, and Pollock looked to art in its ‘beginnings’ in classically archaic, anthropologically primitive, and pre-historic times. Characteristically, Newman explored this sense of kinship with scholarly depths and active concreteness. In the 1940s he organized exhibitions, wrote catalogue introductions, and criticized contemporary understandings of Pre-Columbian Stone Sculpture, North-west Coast Indian Painting, and the Arts of the South Seas — constantly asserting their relevance to an understanding of the aspirations of himself and his friends.7 The line of thought in these writings culminated in the brilliant, purely created idea of the essay entitled ‘The First Man was an artist’ in the October 1947 issue of Tiger’s Eye. There, quarrelling with the philosophical basis of a recent palaeontological ‘discovery’ of the ‘first man’, Newman insisted on the importance of the ontological question ‘what’ to all scientific enquiry. He argued that the chronological and moral precedence of the aesthetic act over the social-utilitarian act established the ‘artist’ as answer to the timelessly relevant question ‘What is the first man?’ So closely did he identify with that ahistorical beginning that his examples for the metaphysically primordial human-aesthetic act read like anachronistic metaphors for his own subsequent work:

‘Speech was a poetic outcry rather than a demand for communication. Original man, shouting his consonants, did so in yells of awe and anger at his tragic state, at his own self-awareness and at his own helplessness before the void.

‘Man’s first cry was a song. Man’s first address to a neighbour was a cry of power and solemn weakness, not a request for a drink of water.

... man first built an idol of mud before he fashioned an axe. Man’s hand traced the stick through the mud to make a line before he learned to throw the stick as a javelin.’

Onement No. 1, painted in January 1948, virtually represents the primitive aesthetic act of identifying a physically concrete line with the whole of a painting – like letting the cry of a consonant establish man’s ‘own self-awareness and ... his own helplessness before the void.’ More like ‘The First Man’ essay than Newman’s paintings of 1947, Onement No. 1 takes no defensively negative stance towards current art-world dogmas; it uses ostensibly primate plastic components to obtain an extraordinary thought complex; and it demands a sort of ontological agnosticism for full comprehension. What is ‘line’ there? The straight masking tape vertically bisecting the painting? Its edges? The agonized pigment impasto which overlays it like un-brushed cadmium red mud? Its edges? The vertically oriented bands laterally flanking the central ‘zip’ with their own regularity of uninfected surface? Their (canvas) edges? The only answer supportable by the painting itself is that ‘line’ is each of these and all; it is totally relational to and inextricable from the physical fact of the painting as a rectilinear whole. This would not be the case if Newman had stopped the vertical ‘line’ inside the painting’s physical limits. And if he had not limited ‘line’ to the primitive vertical of erect human stance, other concepts like ‘composition’ would have intruded upon the shocking directness of part to whole.

Here then is Newman’s contribution to ‘drawing’: not the freedom of ‘line’ from representation, nor its dissolution into merged edges, but the articulation of those relational measures (which we call ‘scale’ to differentiate from ‘size’) amongst infinitely variable vertical ‘constants’ in direct relation to the wholeness of a rectilinear entity. But the whole size of Onement No. 1 was related more to commercially standardized drawing paper and stretched canvasses than to that of a human being. And our direct understanding of scale is based on perceived relations with the various size of ourselves (both as whole physical bodies and relations of parts such as fingers to hands to arms to whole). Without this human scale relation, Onement No. 1 reads more as an idea about artistic scale than as a painting generating empathy with its own vitality through externally directed scale.