Zip it

Hal Foster | London Review of Books | 5th February 2026

All the abstract expressionists really BELIEVED. Newman, though, took it to extremes, becoming “pontificating and narcissistic”. Ouch! Inspired by primitivism, he painted canvasses with a vertical “zip” bisecting a flat coloured plane, hoping to convey “the exaltation of its making”. In fact, similar zips had been used by the Russian constructivists a half century earlier. Newman, like his AbEx pals, acted like the proprietor of “a sacred enigma, whose authority must exceed that of all others”.