Newman Relics Find New Home at HUAM

The Harvard University Art Museums (HUAM) recently received a rare and unusual donation, including a paint-spattered hat, a pair of shoes, and a ladder. In addition to these objects, the gift included materials like brushes, paints, models, and preliminary works that once belonged to the influential Abstract Expressionist artist Barnett Newman. Fragments of his paintings—stiff canvases with strips of red, green, and blue—sit in brown boxes in the Straus Center, crucial keys to Newman’s creative past.

Newman made a name for himself with bold blocks of color and vertical lines, which he termed zips. His paitnings often had punning and provocative titles, like the series “Who’s Afraid of Red, Yellow and Blue?”

When he died in 1970, his widow Annalee Newman carefully stored the contents of his studio. Last January, the Barnett and Annalee Newman presented the materials to HUAM’s Center for the Technical Study of Modern Art (CTSMA) along with his ephemera, a sizable gift of drawings and works on paper accessible through the Agnes Mongan Center for the Study of Prints, Drawings, and Photographs.

Daron J. Manoogian, a spokesman for HUAM, emphasizes the importance and scale of the gift. “The Newman studio materials are the most significant gift the Center has received,” he says.

Harvard created CTSMA in 2001 as part of an initiative to build a new museum for modern and contemporary art. Today, with the original proposals long forgotten and the current plans for a museum in Allston postponed, CTSMA has a slightly different role from the one proponents envisioned.

“At this point, it is more a virtual reality than a physical one,” says the Center’s director, Carol Mancusi-Ungaro.

She and her assistant currently comprise the department, collecting, preserving, and presenting materials and research relevant to the conservation of modern art. Unfortunately, until the HUAM move, access to Newman’s materials and tools will be limited.

Mancusi-Ungaro has long had ties to Newman and the studio collection as co-author of “Barnett Newman: A Catalogue Raisonné,” a comprehensive catalogue of Newman’s work published by the Foundation.

Francesca Bewer, a HUAM conservator, points to the donation of John Singer Sargent’s materials and tools in the 1920s as a significant gift of a similar nature. Part of the Forbes Collection of Materials of the Artist, the Sargent studio points to a long-standing interest in an artist’s personal materials.

Newman destroyed canvases he was dissatisfied with, leaving fragments that were later found in his studio. Mancusi-Ungaro compares the destroyed paintings to rough drafts, noting that many artists would far rather destroy such cast-offs than sell them. Yet she argues that these discarded scraps can be extremely revealing.

“If you know why he rejected a painting, you are so much closer to knowing what he was going after,” she says.

“If nothing else, the collection confirms the materials and tools of the artist,” Mancusi-Ungaro says, citing a debate over whether Newman used spray atomizers. An atomizer was among Newman’s tools, still covered in splashes of the same blue as one of his paintings.

“Scholars and conservators in the future should know that they can come to Harvard to study Barnett Newman’s materials and I look forward to the day that happens...Now, no one can seriously study Newman’s work without coming [here],” says Mancusi-Ungaro.

—Staff writer Anna K. Barnet can be reached at abarnet@fas.harvard.edu.