Art - Ned Denny discovers great depths and subtleties in emptiness

There's a classic story concerning Barnett Newman that goes something like this. The artist Franz Kline is sitting in a New York bar when a collector approaches, bristling with fury at the work he's just seen in Newman's first show. "How simple can an artist be and get away with it?" he demands. "There was nothing, absolutely nothing there!"

"Nothing?" asks Kline, grinning broadly. "Well, how many canvases were there in the show?"

"Oh, maybe ten or 12 - but all exactly the same - just one stripe down the centre - that's all!"

"I see," says Kline. "And were the pictures all the same colour?"

Not exactly, the collector has to concede. Nor, he admits when pressed, were those stripes all the same hue or width. Some traversed the canvas vertically, some horizontally. Some were darker than the background, some lighter. Sometimes there was more than one.

"And," Kline asks eventually, "were the stripes painted over the background, or was the background painted round the stripes?"

Now the collector's getting rattled. "I'm not sure," he says. "It might have been done either way, or maybe both."

"Well, I don't know," roars Kline. "It all sounds damn complicated to me!"

The anecdote's a good one not just because it shows the myopia of those who rubbish abstract art, but also because it highlights the complex simplicity of Newman's oeuvre. His paintings can seem to be barely doing anything at all, and yet, given time and attention, they reveal depths and subtleties of immense power. Their emptiness isn't the dumb, blank emptiness that comes from the feeling that there's nothing worth saying, but one charged with unfashionable notions of sacredness and mystery. Without resorting to any of the obvious expressiveness or decorative flamboyance we tend to associate with painting, they compel and command. This much is clear from some of Newman's earliest surviving works (he resumed painting at the age of 40 after a long hiatus and destroyed all his previous efforts), a series of ink drawings that evoke a primal, blinding light. One shows what looks like a sun with a blazing halo of black, brushy strokes, but most are sliced by the stripe or ray or "zip" he would become indelibly associated with. What's easy to forget is that the searing whiteness we see in the sun and the rays is merely that of the paper, raised by Newman's brushwork to an unearthly pitch.

Aside from the beautiful and remarkably modern-looking The Word I (1946), in which a pale ray cuts through a desert-like zone of yellows, browns and feathery greys, the paintings of the same period are less successful. Newman chokes them with lurid, overworked textures, and the tapering, predominantly yellow beams give them the look of cheap science-fiction covers. The breakthrough comes with the famous Onement I (1948), actually a semi-worked canvas that Newman scrutinised for eight months before deciding it was complete, and from now on his "zips" are allowed to breathe in clear, featureless voids. After Onement I, Newman said, he produced paintings as opposed to pictures, and you can see what he means. Works like Onement III (1949), its central, slender, flame-like column dominating yet menaced by the deep brown ground, are not in any way illustrative but purely and simply themselves. They are modest and sober and yet quietly, strangely, strong. They are serious paintings, yet without being academic or doctrinaire. They demand a response.

If there are any misgivings about their flatness or lack of sumptuousness (as compared, say, to Rothko), these are dispelled by the majestic group of blue paintings he did from 1951-53. The 11ft-high Day Before One (1951) was his tallest work to date, a chasm of velvety blueness that makes the mind drunk with thoughts of primeval deeps. Ulysses (1952) uses the same vast format and the same technique, the paint applied in multiple washes of ultramarine and cobalt blue to make a canvas of oceanic, brimming intensity. Smaller but no less mesmerising, Onement V (1952) casts the old symmetrical format in a dark sea light. And then, at the opposite end of the spectrum from these voluptuous blues, you have his great series The Stations of the Cross (1958-66). These 14, man-high works ("a human scale for the human cry", Newman called it) do it all with no more than black paint, white paint and expanses of raw canvas. In one, a narrow ray electrifies empty space like a bolt of black light. In another, a dense black beam dissolves into a bareness as rich as milk. Another still has a group of tiny drops riding an invisible current like minnows. In a sense, then, the collector was right - Newman really does give us nothing, but a positive nothing that's embodied and alive.

"Barnett Newman" is at Tate Modern, SE1 (020 7887 8888), until 5 January 2003

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