A painter writes that the sublime is now

Two years before he laid a brush on this canvas, Barnett Newman (1905–1970) published a short, combative essay. It ran in a little New York art magazine called The Tiger’s Eye in December 1948, and it was titled The Sublime Is Now. Newman was a New York painter, the son of Polish-Jewish immigrants, in his early forties and not yet famous, working among the loose group of artists later called the Abstract Expressionists (Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, Willem de Kooning, and the rest, the first American painters to matter to the wider art world on their own terms). The essay was his manifesto, and this painting is that essay turned into red.

To feel the argument you need the word in the title. The sublime is an old idea in European art and philosophy: not mere beauty, which is pleasant and well-proportioned, but the overwhelming, the exalted, the sense of something vast and terrible and larger than yourself, the feeling you get standing under a thunderhead or at the lip of a canyon. For two centuries European painters had reached the sublime by depictingit, painting storms and Alps and shipwrecks inside a frame, a vastness shown to you through a window. Newman’s claim was that this whole apparatus, the myth, the storm, the borrowed European grandeur, was no longer needed.

Here is the line that matters, the one the painting sets out to prove. Newman wrote that American painters were “asserting man’s desire for the exalted, for a… relationship to the absolute emotions.” Strip the philosophy off it and the wager is simple and enormous: the exalted does not have to be inherited from Europe or pictured through nature. It can be made, here and now, out of nothing but pure painting and the encounter you have with it standing in the room. The sublime is not back then or over there. It is now.

That is a large promise for an essay to make, and Newman knew it sat there as a promissory note, the way Futurism’s manifesto had sat unbacked until someone painted a canvas to cash it. He had to make a painting that produced the exalted directly, with no storm to lean on. In 1950 he started the biggest one he had ever attempted, and he gave it a Latin title that says the theme out loud: Vir Heroicus Sublimis, which translates as “Man, Heroic and Sublime.”