Totality

"Michael Schreyach's Totality more than fulfills the ambition of its title. The author delivers attentive readings of individual works alongside precise accounts of the technical and formal problems that Barnett Newman relentlessly defined and refined through his art. How can painting's capacity to represent sensation, thought, and feeling--and not merely to cause it in a beholder--be expressed in abstract form? Schreyach offers us, for the first time, a total picture of Newman's visually powerful answers to such questions."--Jennifer Ashton, Associate Professor of English, University of Illinois at Chicago "I can only be enthusiastic about a text like this; it demands of its reader to think along with the writer and with Barnett Newman. Schreyach's scholarly apparatus is impeccable, yet the touch can be light, and always flowing, intriguing, surprising. Newman would have appreciated the number of rather startling conclusions that Schreyach's attention to Newman's own nuances produces."--Richard Shiff, Effie Marie Cain Regents Chair in Art, The University of Texas at Austin