Appreciating “Voice of Fire”
“My five-year-old could paint that.”
This was a familiar response from viewers staring at “Voice of Fire.” The huge painting—on a canvas measuring 5.4 metres by 2.4 metres—by American artist Barnett Newman occupied a central place in the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa. The problem wasn’t that it consisted solely of a vertical red stripe against a blue background, it was that in 1990, $1.76 million of Canadian taxpayers’ money had been used to buy it. It didn’t help that the Canadian economy was sliding into recession at the time. And it didn’t help that the artist was an American.
“Voice of Fire” did have a Canadian angle; it had been created for Expo 67, where it was displayed in Buckminster Fuller’s geodesic dome—the United States pavilion. But when news broke that the Nation...