Carpe Diem #1240 Who's Afraid of Red, Yellow and Blue (Barnett Newman)

Dear Haijin, visitors and travelers,

I hope you have had a wonderful weekend and that you have found the inspiration to respond on our "weekend-meditation". I thought I had done an earlier post about "Who's Afraid of Red, Yellow and Blue", but I think it was on one of my other weblogs. I had hoped to create an easy episode today, but I think it will be not that easy.

We are exploring modern art this month and today I love to challenge you with the abstract art of Barnett Newman who painted "Who's Afraind of Red, Yellow and Blue".

Who's Afraid of Red, Yellow and Blue (Barnett Newman)

"Who's Afraid of Red, Yellow and Blue" is a series of four large-scale paintings by Barnett Newman painted between 1966 and 1970. Two of them have been the subject of vandalistic attacks in museums. The series' name was a reference to Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, the play by Edward Albee which had premiered in 1962, which was in itself a reference to Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?, the 1933 song immortalized in Disney cartoons.

Barnett Newman started the first painting in the series without a preconceived notion of the subject or end result; he only wanted it to be different from what he had done until then, and to be asymmetrical. But after having painted the canvas red, he was confronted with the fact that only the other primary colors yellow and blue would work with it; this led to an inherent confrontation with the works of De Stijl and especially Piet Mondriaan, who had in the opinion of Newman turned the combination of the three colors into a didactic idea instead of a means of expression in freedom.

Maybe you can remember this painting which I shared several years ago;

Mondriaan (painting by Chèvrefeuiile)

And this was the haiku which I created inspired on this painting:

morning dew shimmers, 

the sun climbs into the sky -

colored cobweb

© Chèvrefeuille

I hope I have inspired you.

This episode is open for your submissions tonight at 7:00 PM (CET) and will remain open until August 27th at noon (CET). I will try to publish our new episode, exposure, later on .... for now have fun!