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

Abstract

In 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...