An original and ambitious approach to understanding the creative achievements of one of the most important American artists of the twentieth century.
Totality offers a deeply researched and thoughtful account of the art of Barnett Newman (1905–1970). While Newman’s paintings are widely regarded as among the most significant statements of abstract expressionism—and emblematic of modernism at midcentury—they pose distinct challenges to formal description and historical evaluation. With this book, Michael Schreyach guides readers toward a transformed understanding of Newman’s profound body of work.
Through a sequence of close readings, Schreyach examines six key terms—symbol, surface, self-evidence, space, standpoint, and scale—that illuminate the meaning of Newman’s claims for the “metaphysical” content of his art. Totality progresses from the meticulous analysis of the technical structure and visual appearance of specific works to critical and archivally documented arguments about Newman’s intentions. The result is an altogether original interpretation of the artist’s enterprise, as surprising as it is nuanced.
Michael Schreyach is Professor of Art History at Trinity University in San Antonio, Texas. He is the author of Pollock’s Modernism.
"Michael Schreyach’s Totality more than fulfills the ambition of its title. The author delivers attentive readings of individual works alongside precise accounts of the technical and formal problems that Barnett Newman relentlessly defined and refined through his art. How can painting’s capacity to represent sensation, thought, and feeling—and not merely to cause it in a beholder—be expressed in abstract form? Schreyach offers us, for the first time, a total picture of Newman’s visually powerful answers to such questions."—Jennifer Ashton, Associate Professor of English, University of Illinois at Chicago
"I can only be enthusiastic about a text like this; it demands of its reader to think along with the writer and with Barnett Newman. Schreyach’s scholarly apparatus is impeccable, yet the touch can be light, and always flowing, intriguing, surprising. Newman would have appreciated the number of rather startling conclusions that Schreyach’s attention to Newman’s own nuances produces."—Richard Shiff, Effie Marie Cain Regents Chair in Art, The University of Texas at Austin
296 pp.7 x 10Illus: 22 b/w illustrations, 43 color illustrations
9780520379510$40.00|£34.00Hardcover
Jun 2023