Barnett Newman’s “Onement I” (1948) is as close to photography yet as far from photorealism as a painting can be. “Onement I” features only one compositional element, a strike down the middle, that conjures all dichotomies and reflects both division with the line and unity with the same deep burgundy on either side of the line. It is certainly a celebration of the “decisive moment” that Cartier Bresson describes. Newman was a contemporary to Bresson, and perhaps this is a factor in some similarities across their works. Both artists were making work during and after the Second World War. This was a dividing moment in human history and Newman’s work also addresses this through the idea of youth or rebirth. Newman claims that “Onement I” was painted on his birthday. He claims it is his first painting, though more accurately it is a rebirth of his painting career, the first painting of his continuing body of work. He also claims that he admired the painting for about nine months after painting it, coincidentally (or not) the gestation period for humans. This painting marks the moment of death of his earlier work and life of is new work. This theme can be seen across Bresson’s work as well, from his youthful children playing or skipping in his images to the images of Gandhi’s funeral, where people gather to both celebrate and mourn the end of a life, a sort of “Onement I” of its own. Further, “Onement I” was unplanned. Newman left the masking tape in the middle of his canvas, which he was accustomed to removing to reveal a white line down the middle, but which he instead painted over impulsively. This decision, or this moment, can be considered analogous to Bresson’s “decisive moment” of clicking the shutter. The conception of the idea was this moment, and the actual painting of the streak was only the developing of the film, the execution of the idea, the “post-mortem examination” that Bresson speaks about.
Sources:
https://www.tate.org.uk/research/publications/in-focus/adam/newmans-beginnings
