ZIP I remember one morning, walking past the window of the Apollo Gallery and looking in to see if there were any of the Percy French watercolours I love on show, and being stopped in my tracks by the picture below showing the three pretty wrecked looking trees. I dont know if youve had this experience, being mugged by a painting - its half-way between hard and impossible to explain it, it just happens. It was the meantness of the details in the image that drew me. The white lines which I felt were coming down were meant to be there. So what did it mean? Eventually after a couple of weeks of window-gazing at it, I plucked up my nerve and went in and asked about it. They told me it was by Markey Robinson - I remembered him from paintings with women in shawls. The painting is The Crucifixion. The trees represented Christ and the good and bad thieves. The brown silted up muddy colour represented the stranglehold of evil on the world and the falling white lines represented grace coming down from heaven, and freeing the thief who was open but unable to free the other. The white lines falling from heaven through the blue sky into our world. The white breaking through the blue of the sky has always evoke for me the breaking through of the divine into the universe. I thought of this when I saw Barnett Newmans Onement VI. Of course it is abstract expressionism but prompted by the title I could not help seeing it as a revelation symbol. The sky opened from top to bottom by a downpour of the divine presence. He calls the vertical lines zips, and while I have no idea what the word zip meant for him, the word for me conjured up opening downwards, which fitted in with the way they seemed to me. I feel there is an element of Jewish religiousness common to him and Mark Rothko in which the divine is not imaged, but intimated. But the titles are sometimes religious. The title Onement seems to me to echo atonement and to mean at- one-ment, and in terms of the blue and white colours representing the sky and the divine eruption, the painting as a whole would seem to evoke a direct line of communication from heaven through the sky right down to us, a thin line of light at the centre of our lives. I think this painting was done in 1953. He had a heart attack at the end of the fifties and afterwards painted a series of darker paintings which he called, la ma sabach-tha ni. These were the words that Jesus cried out on the cross at the end. They mean, why have You forsaken me? (Mark15:34) They are the opening words of Psalm 22, and surely significantly, Newman has left out the open words, My God, my God, ... as if to make all the more poignant the forsakenness. The series of paintings is also known as the Stations of the Cross. Am I reading too much into this painting? Maybe. But maybe not!
Posted on: Tue, 02 Dec 2014 23:05:29 +0000
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