Long passages of Barnett Newman: Here .are given over to its subject’s appetite for complaint. There are vexatious lawsuits brought on behalf of his wife, Annalee, and his own family (his father, Abraham, ran a gents’ clothing business). There are blistering letters to co-op boards on the unsatisfactoriness of shellacked floors, to Governor Nelson Rockefeller about the redevelopment of a Long Island racecourse, to newspapers on the stupidity of their critics, a public feud with the art historian Erwin Panofsky over the use of Latin archaisms, and on and on. As Amy Newman (no relation) notes, ‘Barney would take a stand on any issue – art or otherwise – that he was convinced insulted him.’ 

In her new biography, Newman finds the painter ‘pontificating’, ‘narcissistic’ and ‘self-righteous’. With his charge that European artists fleeing to New York from Nazi oppression were luckier than he was because exile had given them a subject, she finally loses patience. ‘It elevated Barney’s personal trauma … over that of the victims, the war refugees,’ she writes, ‘a stunning formulation.’ That members of Barney’s own Jewish family, left behind in Europe, were then on their way to death camps does not add to the story’s lustre.

The question arises: what has all of this to do with the work of perhaps the greatest painter of Abstract Expressionism (a group among whose number Newman, naturally, complained at being counted)? The answer, surprisingly, is: everything.

As Newman points out, complaining was part and parcel of belonging to the so-called