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ABSTRACT
Often overlooked in histories of abstract expressionism is the role that anarchism as a philosophy played in the art of postwar American painters like Barnett Newman. For Newman, anarchism was not merely a programme for revolutionary action but an experimental way of life that, much like painting itself, sought to imagine a life lived free from coercive authority. Through his signature painting style, which featured vertical stripes painted on coloured canvases, Newman put forth a radical political theology based on the writings of Dutch philosopher Baruch Spinoza and Russian anarchist Peter Kropotkin. In his art, Newman presented what might be called an anarchist sublime, an aesthetic experience that opened up viewers to the expressive capacity of being itself.
Keywords: Barnett Newman, sublime, abstract expressionism, Baruch Spinoza
In 1968, at the height of the turmoil in America surrounding the Vietnam War, Horizon Press issued a reprint of Russian anarchist Peter Kropotkin's Memoirs of a Revolutionist, his 1899 autobiographical account of his turn to anarchism as a revolutionary philosophy and his efforts to overthrow the Tsarist government in Russia. The Horizon edition of Memoirs of a Revolutionist also contained an introduction to Kropotkin's thought by activist Paul Goodman, who had spent the 1960s promoting anarchism as an alternative to Cold War liberalism and Soviet communism, and a foreword by American painter Barnett Newman, who professed the importance of Kropotkin's work to his own intellectual development. Both contrasted Kropotkin's principled stand in the late nineteenth century against 'all dogmatic systems' to the politics of the 'New Left' in the 1960s, which had, despite the movement's language, 'already begun to build a new prison with its Marcusian, Maoist, and Guevara walls'.1 While Goodman's introduction reflected his long- time advocacy of anarchism, Newman's foreword, especially to those with only a passing familiarity with his artwork, was a surprising confession of political faith. Indeed, most art historians, even today, have failed to recognise the role that his politics played in his aesthetic project overall, despite the artist's frequent statements.2 'Almost fifteen years ago Harold Rosenberg challenged me to explain what one of my paintings could possibly mean to the world', Newman explained in 1962; 'My answer was that if he and others could read it properly it would mean...