Onement IV

This work-radically (and deceptively) simple in its stark black field bisected by a white stripe-is one of Barnett Newman's earliest "zip" paintings, a term coined by the artist. According to him, such works symbolized the very acts of creation and revelation. Newman remembered his first such painting, entitled Onement and later modified to Onement I, as a profound moment of change in his career:

I recall my first painting-that is, where I felt I had moved into an area for myself that was completely me- and I painted it on my birthday in 1948. It's a small red painting, and I put a piece of tape in the middle, and I put my so-called zip.

In previous works, Newman had made both paintings and drawings that consisted of a narrow zip in a field of color; Onement, however, was the first in which these parts appeared congruently in one field, rather than as a ziplike "figure" and a receding "ground." This would characterize the rest of his artistic practice. In August of 1949, Newman visited Native American burial grounds in southern Ohio and was moved by the sublime sense of his small, human presence amid the vast landscape, writing,

Here is the self-evident nature of the artistic act, its utter simplicity. There are no subjects-nothing that can be shown in a museum or even photographed; [it is] a work of art that cannot even be seen, so it is something that must be experienced there on the spot. .!.!. Suddenly one realizes that the sensation is not one of space or an object in space. It has nothing to do with space and its manipulations. The sensation is the sensation of time-and all other multiple feelings vanish like the outside landscape.

After this experience, Newman continued to create paintings in the Onement series, including Oberlin's, many of which have titles that relate to mystical or biblical subjects and that have helped define his artwork as among the most important examples of postwar American abstraction.