Who's Afraid of Red, Yellow and Blue is a series of four large-scale paintings by Barnett Newman painted between 1966 and 1970. Two of them have been the subject of vandalistic attacks in museums. The series' name was a reference to Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, the 1962 play by Edward Albee, which was in itself a reference to "Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?", the 1933 song immortalized in Disney cartoons.[1]
Barnett Newman started the first painting in the series without a preconceived notion of the subject or end result; he only wanted it to be different from what he had done until then, and to be asymmetrical. But after having painted the canvas red, he was confronted with the fact that only the other primary colours yellow and blue would work with it; this led to an inherent confrontation with the works of De Stijl and especially Piet Mondriaan, who had in the opinion of Newman turned the combination of the three colors into a didactic idea instead of a means of expression in freedom.[2]
Who's Afraid of Red, Yellow and Blue I
This 1966 oil on canvas measures 190 by 122cm, making it the smallest of the four. It was dedicated to Jasper Johns.[3] It was the subject of a 2006 installation by Robert Irwin at the Pace Gallery,[4] and also the centerpiece of the 2007 exhibition Who's afraid of red, yellow and blue?: Positionen der Farbfeldmalerei in the Staatliche Kunsthalle Baden-Baden.[5] It is held in a private collection.[6]
Who's Afraid of Red, Yellow and Blue II
Who’s Afraid of Red, Yellow and Blue II
This 1967 acrylic on canvas painting is part of the collection of the Staatsgalerie Stuttgart. It measures approximately 305 x 259cm.
Philip Taaffe's 1985 We Are Not Afraid is openly acknowledged as a reply and tribute to Newman's paintings, especially Who's Afraid of Red, Yellow and Blue II, matching the basic layout and even the dimensions[7][8]
Who's Afraid of Red, Yellow and Blue III
Who’s Afraid of Red, Yellow and Blue III
Measuring 224 by 544cm, this 1967 painting is part of the collection of the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam. It was attacked with a knife by Gerard Jan van Bladeren in 1986[9] and restored by Daniel Goldreyer in 1991. The restoration initially cost some $400,000, but was heavily attacked by critics who claimed that subtle nuances in the three monochrome sections had been lost and that Goldreyer had used house paints and a roller.[10] According to critics, the painting had been destroyed twice: first during the attack, and again during the restoration. Goldreyer filed a $125 million suit against the City of Amsterdam and the Museum, claiming that his reputation was damaged.[11][12]
After lawsuits, settlements, and further restoration, the final cost of the attack was estimated to be close to $1 million. The Amsterdam city council asked for a full forensic report on the controversial restoration.[13] When the report was finished, the City of Amsterdam and Goldreyer agreed to keep it under wraps, as part of a settlement. But almost 20 years later, on 11 September 2013, the Raad van State decided the report had to be made public by the Government of Amsterdam within six weeks.[14] A week later the Volkskrant newspaper published the report's main conclusions. It confirmed that Goldreyer had indeed repainted the entire red section with acrylic paint and had used a roller to add two layers of varnish to the (initially unvarnished) painting.[15] According to the newspaper, Goldreyer's restoration has "forever destroyed" Newman's work.[16] The painting was put on display again in the Stedelijk Museum in 2014. [17]
Wim Beeren, director of the Stedelijk Museum at the time of the 1986 attack, revealed in an interview that Van Bladeren was not pleased with the restoration and called the museum to warn his successor Rudi Fuchs of a second attack. Van Bladeren entered the museum for a second time in 1997 to make good on his intentions to deface Who's Afraid of Red, Yellow and Blue III but was not able to locate the painting. He instead opted to attack a different Barnett Newman painting called Cathedra, which he slashed in a similar fashion to his first attack. Beeren recalled that the painting, not on display at the time, was in a storage facility.[18]
Who's Afraid of Red, Yellow and Blue IV
Who’s Afraid of Red, Yellow and Blue IV
Who's Afraid of Red, Yellow and Blue IV was created in 1969–1970 and is the last major work by Barnett Newman. The oil on canvas painting measures 274 by 603cm. It belongs to the collection of the Nationalgalerie in Berlin, who bought it in 1982 from Newman's widow for 2.7 million Deutschmark (roughly 1 million US dollars), partially with funds raised by the public. It was attacked on April 13, 1982, days before it would be presented to the public, by Josef Nikolaus Kleer, a 29-year-old student who claimed that the picture was a "perversion of the German flag" (the painting has vertical bands of red, yellow and blue, while the German flag has horizontal stripes in black, red and yellow), and that his actions completed the work, a reference to the title of the painting. The restoration took two years.[19][20]
Legacy
The Who's Afraid of series has reached an iconic status in the world of modern and contemporary art, and has been the inspiration for many artworks and exhibitions.
Brice Marden created a number of works in red, yellow and blue in the early 1970s, influenced by Mondrian and by these paintings by Newman[21]
In 2006, Robert Irwin installation at the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego
Kerry James Marshall's 2012 exhibition "Who’s Afraid of Red, Black and Green" directly references Newman's works.[22]
In 2012, La Maison Rouge organised an exhibition of neon art, titled Neon, Who’s afraid of red, yellow and blue?
A 2018 documentary, The End of Fear, detailed the restoration attempts and attack on Who's Afraid of Red, Yellow and Blue III. The painting was "reproduced" with a white canvas (the actual reproduction proved impossible, given that the artist was not Newman and the painting was lost forever- it could not be reproduced).
99% Invisible, a podcast by Roman Mars that reports on the unseen and overlooked aspects of design, architecture, and activity in the world, detailed the first attack, restoration attempts, and attempted second attack on Who's Afraid of Red, Yellow and Blue III in a 2019 episode titled The Many Deaths of a Painting.
Schneemann, Peter Johannes (1998). Who's afraid of the word?: die Strategie der Texte bei Barnett Newman und seinen Zeitgenossen. Rombach. p.99. ISBN9783793091615.
Wassily Wassilyevich Kandinsky was a Russian painter and art theorist. Kandinsky is generally credited as one of the pioneers of abstraction in western art. Born in Moscow, he spent his childhood in Odessa, where he graduated from Odessa Art School. He enrolled at the University of Moscow, studying law and economics. Successful in his profession, he was offered a professorship at the University of Dorpat. Kandinsky began painting studies at the age of 30.
The Van Gogh Museum is a Dutch art museum dedicated to the works of Vincent van Gogh and his contemporaries in the Museum Square in Amsterdam South, close to the Stedelijk Museum, the Rijksmuseum, and the Concertgebouw. The museum opened on 2 June 1973, and its buildings were designed by Gerrit Rietveld and Kisho Kurokawa.
Barnett Newman was an American artist. He has been critically regarded as one of the major figures of abstract expressionism, and one of the foremost color field painters. His paintings explore the sense of place that viewers experience with art and incorporate simplistic forms to emphasize this feeling.
Christiaan Karel Appel was a Dutch painter, sculptor, and poet. He started painting at the age of fourteen and studied at the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam in the 1940s. He was one of the founders of the avant-garde movement CoBrA in 1948. He was also an avid sculptor and has had works featured in MoMA and other museums worldwide.
Monochromatic painting has played a significant role in modern and contemporary Western visual art, originating with the early 20th-century European avant-gardes. Artists have explored the non-representational potential of a single color, investigating shifts in value, diversity of texture, and formal nuances as a means of emotional expression, visual investigation into the inherent properties of painting, as well as a starting point for conceptual works. Ranging from geometric abstraction in a variety of mediums to non-representational gestural painting, monochromatic works continue to be an important influence in contemporary art.
Color field painting is a style of abstract painting that emerged in New York City during the 1940s and 1950s. It was inspired by European modernism and closely related to abstract expressionism, while many of its notable early proponents were among the pioneering abstract expressionists. Color field is characterized primarily by large fields of flat, solid color spread across or stained into the canvas creating areas of unbroken surface and a flat picture plane. The movement places less emphasis on gesture, brushstrokes and action in favor of an overall consistency of form and process. In color field painting "color is freed from objective context and becomes the subject in itself."
The Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, colloquially known as the Stedelijk, is a museum for modern art, contemporary art, and design located in Amsterdam, Netherlands.
The Staatsgalerie Stuttgart is an art museum in Stuttgart, Germany, it opened in 1843. In 1984, the opening of the Neue Staatsgalerie designed by James Stirling transformed the once provincial gallery into one of Europe's leading museums.
Pieter Cornelis Mondriaan, after 1906 known as Piet Mondrian, was a Dutch painter and art theoretician who is regarded as one of the greatest artists of the 20th century. He is known for being one of the pioneers of 20th-century abstract art, as he changed his artistic direction from figurative painting to an increasingly abstract style, until he reached a point where his artistic vocabulary was reduced to simple geometric elements.
Ernst van de Wetering was a Dutch art historian and an expert on Rembrandt and his work.
Josephine Gail Baer is an American painter associated with minimalist art. She began exhibiting her work at the Fischbach Gallery, New York, and other venues for contemporary art in the mid-1960s. In the mid-1970s, she turned away from non-objective painting. Since then, Baer has fused images, symbols, words, and phrases in a non-narrative manner, a mode of expression she once termed "radical figuration." She lives and works in Amsterdam, Netherlands.
Philip Taaffe is an American artist, who has shown his works all around the world. His work sometimes blended motifs from multiple cultures.
Vandalism of art is intentional damage of an artwork. The object, usually exhibited in public, becomes damaged as a result of the act, and remains in place right after the act. This may distinguish it from art destruction and iconoclasm, where it may be wholly destroyed and removed, and art theft, or looting.
The Amsterdamse Joffers were a group of women artists who met weekly in Amsterdam at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th century. They supported each other in their professional careers. Most of them were students of the Rijksakademie van beeldende kunsten and belonged to the movement of the Amsterdam Impressionists. Each one became a successful artist. As a group they contributed to the social acceptance in the Netherlands of women becoming professional artists.
Rudolf Herman "Rudi" Fuchs is a Dutch art historian and curator.
Daniël (Daan) van Golden was a Dutch artist, who has been active as a painter, photographer, collagist, installation artist, wall painter and graphic artist. He is known for his meticulous paintings of motives and details of everyday life and every day images.
The Preacher Eleazar Swalmius is a 1637 oil-on-canvas painting by the Dutch artist Rembrandt. It is currently owned by the Royal Museum of Fine Arts in Antwerp. The painting has been certified a real Rembrandt. The painting was listed in 1727 in the catalog of the Duke of Orléans collection, as a portrait of an Amsterdam mayor by Rembrandt. It remained in the noble family's possession until 1792, when Duke Louis-Philippe-Joseph sold the entire collection to finance his political career and pay off debts. The painting passed through several English collections into the hands of the Bourgeois brothers, art dealers from Cologne, who sold the painting as an original Rembrandt to the museum in 1886. The painting was stored away for a long time due to doubts cast over its authenticity.
Composition with Grid No. 1 or Composition in Grey and Ochre is a 1918 painting by the Dutch artist Piet Mondrian. It is currently in the collection of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.
Wheatfield Under Thunderclouds is an 1890 oil painting by Vincent van Gogh. The painting measures 50.4 cm × 101.3 cm. It depicts a relatively flat and featureless landscape with fields of green wheat, under a foreboding dark blue sky with a few heavy white clouds. The horizon divides the work almost into two, with shades of green and yellow below and shades of blue and white above. Since 1973 it has been on permanent loan to the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam.
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