Who's Afraid of Red, Yellow and Blue

[1] Barnett Newman started the first painting in the series without a preconceived notion of the subject or end result; he only wanted it to be different from what he had done until then, and to be asymmetrical.

[3] It was the subject of a 2006 installation by Robert Irwin at the Pace Gallery,[4] and also the centerpiece of the 2007 exhibition Who's afraid of red, yellow and blue?

The restoration initially cost some $400,000, but was heavily attacked by critics who claimed that subtle nuances in the three monochrome sections had been lost and that Goldreyer had used house paints and a roller.

But almost 20 years later, on 11 September 2013, the Raad van State decided the report had to be made public by the Government of Amsterdam within six weeks.

Van Bladeren entered the museum for a second time in 1997 to make good on his intentions to deface Who's Afraid of Red, Yellow and Blue III but was not able to locate the painting.

It was attacked on April 13, 1982, days before it would be presented to the public, by Josef Nikolaus Kleer, a 29-year-old student who claimed that the picture was a "perversion of the German flag" (the painting has vertical bands of red, yellow and blue, while the German flag has horizontal stripes in black, red and yellow), and that his actions completed the work, a reference to the title of the painting.

[17][18] The Who's Afraid of series has reached an iconic status in the world of modern and contemporary art, and has been the inspiration for many artworks and exhibitions.