A Case for Barnett Newman’s “Voice of Fire.”
In March of 1990, The National Gallery of Canada purchased a striped, six by two metered red and blue painting for a measly 1.8 million dollars. The painting in question, Voice of Fire by Barnett Newman, was made in 1967 as part of Montreal’s Expo 67. You would think that this painting would be greeted with kindness upon its return to Canada, but its reception was quite the opposite. The great irony of the painting’s enthusiastic disavowal is that it speaks to the power of art. I would like to declare that this is one of the greatest painting acquisitions in Canadian history; its ability to elicit feelings among Canadians (whether positive or negative) by means of its simplicity is something worth celebrating and studying.
The painting is enormous. It consists of a blood-red center complimented and framed by deep navy blue. There are no explicit connotations behind the use of these colours, but their union to me felt heroic, luxurious, and a bit religious. It stretches over 6 meters in length, and because it is so strictly horizontal, it completely imposes over and dwarfs its viewer, commanding to be looked at as an ascension. In hindsight, its dominance by means of radical simplicity reflects Greenberg’s observation that “you feel as though you are in the presence of high art” when you confront Newman’s paintings. Another thing Greenberg noted was Newman's “Honesty” as well as his “Nerve and Conviction.” I find these three qualities in Newman’s certainty and courage to bring to life a painting that could have been incredibly mundane. This certainty is reflected in the calculated flatness of his colours and sharpness of his line, as well as the size (and consequential “volume”) of this work. This high praise that I, Greenberg, and others would like to give this painting might shock you, but believe me, you cannot rely on your phone or computer screen to simulate the experience of seeing this work in person. Regardless, the refusal for this painting to be taken seriously, I believe, does not discredit its power but actually confirms it.
Newman’s painting is alien compared to other abstract artists like Van Gogh, Picasso, and Manet, who aren’t necessarily ‘realists’ but their art still holds to a degree of representationalism (incidentally, each one of them has a handful of works at the NGC). Despite this, what they and Newman have in common is that their art is part of the shift in Western painting, a result of the advent of photography and the disembodiment of the bourgeoisie and the proletariat (this is further examined and interpreted in Greenberg’s Avant-Garde and Kitsch essay). The consequence of modernity for Western painting was that the practice had to become something new; it could no longer exist as it did before. The days in which painting was something to ‘trick us’; to mediate a sense of drama and hide its limitations through realism and calculated perspective to edify the church, were gone. Instead, painting had to make sense of itself, question its limitations, and reduce and/or add to its core components in order to enrich itself and remain relevant in modern culture. Instead of concealing painting’s flatness, its respective size, and other limitations, modern painting celebrated these aspects and embraced them into the picture itself. When speaking of Manet’s paintings, Clement Greenberg described his work as the first modern pictures due to “the frankness with which they declared the flat surfaces on which they were painted.” The practice of painting went from being a strictly religious tool dominated by elected ‘masters,’ to having nearly every aspect which made it what it was stripped away, and it never lost its mysticism and meaning-making abilities in the process.
Taylor from @theyearbookcommittee (link to their video below) describes this perfectly:
“Art reveals to us our capacity for meaning making in the absence of traditional authority, in the absence of God, in the absence of some divine ordering of the world, art reveals to us that we are capable of being divine. We are capable of doing that which God previously did.”
With this in mind, think about how Barnett Newman radically simplifies painting. His picture is simply two borders of opposing colours (or you can read it as one border repeated twice by mirroring itself). Yet, it still has the pictorial energy to elicit fear, angst, confusion, and other feelings. Like the minimalist movement which came very shortly after Newman, the painting has a degree of objecthood – that is, it seems to have its own totem-like agency or ‘voice.’ Voice of Fire doesn’t need a figure or face to confront and offend you; it just does. Its imposing presence that I spoke of earlier works despite its minimalism, in fact, it is implicitly from its minimalism that it strikes us. Newman plays with this idea in other ‘zip’ paintings like Vir Heroicus Sublimis and Who’s afraid of Red, Yellow and Blue, which exude a sense of bloated hubris simply through colour, size, flatness, and their titles; these things – which traditionally were arranged to exist beyond the realm of the flat picture – become the picture’s sole subject matter and voices. In the same way Newman reduces Voice of Fire to an irreducibly complex picture; I’d argue that he brings forth a defensive, animalistic reaction in people as though the paintings ‘objecthood’ is looking us in the eye. If the painting were bad, you wouldn’t be moved, but the fact that it causes outrage is the actual embodiment and confirmation of its power.
A reddit comment from a forum speaking of the painting says it better than I could “If art is made to elicit feelings, or spark discussion, I’d say the artist completely nailed it.” For the sake of fun, with all this in mind someone could maybe even draw a conclusion that there are hidden figures in Voice of Fire – that is, the angry public who almost have a degree of ‘Caravaggio-Esque’ drama in their reactions to this painting. There’s more to this painting that simply can't be explained. You have to go see it in person and feel its influence on your body. Newman’s painting is an unforgettable, moving piece of art, even if you find it to be offensive to some degree. Ask yourself how three stripes manage to give a lot of us a knee-jerk and almost primal sense of defensiveness. Consider the power that painting still has in spite of its disconnection from the ‘divine’. If it angers you, it’s good art.
Sources
Newman, Barnett. Voice of Fire, 1967. Acrylic on canvas. National Gallery of Canada.
https://csmt.uchicago.edu/glossary2004/objecthood.htm
Feeling is All; Art Chronicle (1952)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LtL4VOWdG20&t=427s
