Artist: Barnett Newman
Date: 1970
Size: 213 x 193 cm
Technique: Acrylic On Canvas
This painting’s history reveals how precarious the notion of finish can be in abstract art in general and in the work of one towering figure of the Abstract Expressionist movement in particular. A 1971 scholarly publication presented the work as finished: Untitled (number 2). However, a typewritten inventory of Newman’s studio made after the artist’s death (unknown, apparently, to the author of the aforementioned book) lists the canvas as Untitled 1970 #2 (unfinished), a status now accepted by art historians. Many of Newman’s contemporaries attacked the idea of a finished work of art as an artificial convention, but Newman disavowed it for different reasons. For him, painting was a lifelong struggle, an ongoing act of labor that precluded finishing on both a practical and a philosophical level.
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