Barnett Newman said that the problem of painters of his generation was what to paint. He thought that, after World War II, it was absurd to continue painting vases or people playing the violin. He wanted to continue with the idea of abstract art as opposed to the idea of realistic art of the surrealists. For him, living in New York was a bit like living in exile, in a utopian exile, in a paradisiacal exile.
Adam is earth, and he is red earth and he is blood too. Adam is a Hebrew name. It means a person, an individual. Newman called these bars zip: he said they were not lines, they were bars. He says it also in an interview: that the red bars, the zip, were living fields.
A zipper is really the union, what can unite or separate two fields, and it's lightning, it's obviously lightning. There is a past that touches a “now” and projects itself into a future. This is Walter Benjamin's idea, isn't it?
And the original idea, well, he was also very close to the paintings of the artists on the west coast of Canada, the ones who made sculptures and painted on skins. These works are living forms that convey ideas of awe in the face of the unknown.
Adam, for him, was the first living being and was a creator of worlds. He was really a world-opener. Barnett Newman thought his paintings could change the world. We find that very strange today, but it was possible to think that in the 1940s. And he thought, too, that this painting was subversive, that it could change the world.