003_Ratcliff, FRAGMENTS
RESEARCH FRAGMENTS ( •
Carter Ratcliff. “Newman’s Perennial Now.” 2002.
Prepared by Katy Crocker for Parenthesis on 30 AUGUST 2026
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01.
Carter Ratcliff is a poet.
“The Artist as Hero,” to name one, where he wrote about a “tarnished god.”
[source]
Ratcliff, Carter. “The Artist as Hero,” Per Contra, Summer 2008, https://percontra.net/archive/11ratcliffpoem.htm.
As an art critic, he wrote about Barnett Newman more than once.
The issue in which
“Newman’s Perennial Now”
appeared.
[Cover of Art in America, Vol. 90, No. 9, September 2002]
03.
From “A Kiss Across the Ages:”
“In 1965 [Newman] declared that the subject of his paintings is ‘the self, terrible and constant’. A militant individualist, Newman counts as one of Herman Melville’s ‘Isolatoes’. The word appears in Moby Dick, where Melville explains that Isolatoes are those pioneer spirits disinclined to acknowledge ‘the common continent of men’. Each explores ‘a separate continent of his own’, and of course the prime instance of an Isolato is Captain Ahab, the monomaniac drawn from the land to the sea by the white whale, his ‘constant and terrible’ obsession. Newman was an Ahab by vocation, but not by temperament.”
[source]
Ratcliff, Carter. “A Kiss Across the Ages,” Tate Etc., September 1, 2007,
https://www.tate.org.uk/tate-etc/issue-11-autumn-2007/kiss-across-ages.
04.
Newman’s birthday was January 29, 1905;
he died in 1970.
Newman, refering to his “zips:”
“I suppose I thought of them as streaks of light” (2:53).
“Barnett Newman speaks about his Art.” KunstSpektrum. March 5, 2014. Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e2c0h1wnxf0.