A world for us: on the prefiguration of reconciliation in Barnett Newman’s painting

In his essay on Barnett Newman in Painting as Model, ‘Perceiving Newman’, Bois accounts for the appeal of Newman’s address by positing that the artist’s work invokes ‘a world-for-us, neither the “objective” world described by mathematics or physics nor a kind of mythic space that one could [...] thematise with symbols and ideographs’. However, in this article it is contended that this ‘world-for-us’ is prefigured through the experience of decisive otherness. While Bois cites Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s early opus Phenomenoloy of Perception in ‘Perceiving Newman’, in this article Merleau-Ponty’s late writing is read via the aesthetic theory of Theodor W. Adorno to discuss how the in-itselfness of Newman’s art bindingly engages elements of experience that capitalism dismisses in favour of profit as the fundamental determinant of everyday life.