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Like Malevich painting a black square just decades earlier, Newman’s straight, vertical line was a visual element of irreducible simplicity. Newman later called these lines zips, and over the next 22 years, they became the defining motif of his painting career.
In 1948, with the completion of a painting titled Onement, I, Newman found his voice. It was in this work that he hit upon what would become the signature motif that defined all of his paintings to come: a vertical band connecting the upper and lower margins of the painting that he called a “zip.”
IN OCTOBER 1949, A NEWSPAPER REVIEWER writing about a group show at Betty Parsons Gallery described Newman’s contribution as a “mural size canvas painted an unrelieved tomato red with a perfectly straight narrow band of deeper red cleaving the canvas in two.” 1 This clipping has a double interest: it is evidence that Newman was early with ...
- Lawrence Alloway
Nov 20, 2004 · 1948. Newman proclaimed Onement, I to be his artistic breakthrough, giving the work an importance belied by its modest size. This is the first time the artist used a vertical band to define the spatial structure of his work. This band, later dubbed a "zip," became Newman's signature mark.
Curator, Ann Temkin: Onement, I is the first painting that Newman made, which contains the device for which he would become famous, and what became later known as the "zip." The zips were basically vertical lines that divided a canvas into different sections.
Throughout the 1940s he worked in a surrealist vein, then developed his signature style. [7] This is characterized by areas of color separated by thin vertical lines, or "zips" as Newman called them. In the first works featuring zips, the color fields are variegated, but later the colors are pure and flat.
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Newman saw Onement I as a breakthrough in his work. It features the first full incarnation of what he later called a "zip," a vertical band of color. This motif would play a central role in many of his subsequent paintings. The painting's title is an archaic derivation of the word "atonement," meaning, "the state of being made into one."
