The Impact of Nietzsche and Northwest Coast Indian Art on Barnett Newman's Idea of Redemption in the Abstract Sublime

AbstractIn the late 1930s and early 1940s the “myth-makers” of the New York avant-garde, including Adolph Gottlieb, Jackson Pollock, Richard Pousette-Dart, and Mark Rothko, made paintings that referred to atavistic myth, primordial origins, and primitive rituals and symbols, especially those of Native American cultures. Barnett Newman began to work in a similar fashion about 1944 and was influential as a theorist and indefatigable promoter of this new art. The “myth-makers” shared a tendency to depict ritual violence or inherently violent myths as well as an archaism exemplified by biomorphic forms and, often, coarse surfaces. This self-conscious primitivism of early Abstract Expressionism, which included totemic imagery and pictographic writing derived from Native American art, differed in essence from the primitivism of the earlier European avant-garde in that it was “an intellectualized primitivism.” Indeed, if the primitivism of Picasso and Matisse, for example, was the decontextualization of the plastic form of African sculpture, then that of the New Yorkers I am considering here was the willful recontextualization of both primitive form and primitive myth. Additional informationNotes on contributorsW. Jackson RushingW. Jackson Rushing is Assistant Professor in the Department of Art, University of Maine, and a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Texas at Austin. His essay “Ritual and Myth: Native American Culture and Abstract Expressionism” appeared in the exhibition catalogue The Spiritual in Art (Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1986).