EDWARD'S LECTURE NOTES:
More notes at http://tanguay.info/learntracker
C O U R S E 
Postwar Abstract Painting
Corey D'Augustine, The Museum of Modern Art
https://www.coursera.org/learn/painting
C O U R S E   L E C T U R E 
Barnett Newman's The Wild (1950)
Notes taken on June 18, 2017 by Edward Tanguay
Barnett Newman (1905-1970)
1950 The Wild
a very tall, extraordinarily narrow painting
the painting is as deep as it is wide
he has stretched his canvas over a solid piece of wood
he has hybridized this painting
it is as much a sculpture as it is a painting
Newman is a minimalist
he sees his paintings as objects
while his painting Oneness had a zip running down the middle, The Wild is a full rendition of the zip itself
we can read the entire painting itself, zip and ground together, as one zip on the ground of the wall
we are reading the painting environmentally
thinking about how the painting reacts to the wall, to the ground
the fact that Yoshio Taniguchi, the architect of the building, as left a recess at the bottom of the wall
makes a dark shadow at the bottom of the floor and up by the ceiling
we are making visual relationships
figure/ground
matt/gloss
push/pull
we can think of how the painting reacts to the wall and the space around it
an important idea for minimalist artists
considered the situation of their painting, sculpture, or in the case of installation art is the main focus of the art, i.e. art that focuses on its space of exhibition
the paint itself
a narrow red zip along a dark, blueish-gray ground
done by using two pieces of masking tape
painting red with a brush
pulling off the pieces of tape
then he has a second red paint application on top of the ground and the previous red zip
this was done with a palette knife
flat, buttery texture
very characteristic lips at the edge of the painting
it was done with a lot more gloss
he added more medium into the paint, perhaps even varnish
when we look at the painting in low light, to allow the light to scrape off the painting, we can see a gap in that second paint application where we see the underlying zip of the same color and values, but a very matte paint
has little binder and certainly no varnish added to it
Newman is playing with these two applications of red paint allowing the second application to visually integrate with the matte, underlying red band of paint