Barnett Newman. Vir Heroicus Sublimis. 1950-51. Oil on canvas, 7' 11 3/8" x 17' 9 1/4" (242.2 x 541.7 cm). Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Ben Heller. © 2019 Barnett Newman Foundation / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

“The aspiration...to start from scratch, to paint as if painting never existed before....That made painters out of painters.”

Barnett Newman

Painter and theorist Barnett Newman was one of the most intellectual artists of the New York School. He was born and raised in New York, the son of Polish Jewish immigrants. His approach to art making was shaped by his studies in philosophy at The City College of New York and his political activism. In 1933, he ran for mayor of his city on a write-in ticket with a cultural platform, and he maintained a keen awareness of such modern horrors as Nazism and the atomic bomb. For him, art was an act of self-creation and a declaration of political, intellectual, and individual freedom. Master of witticisms, he once quipped: “aesthetics is to artists as ornithology is to the birds.”1

Newman’s artistic career was late-blooming and began in fits and starts. He was around 30 when he started painting, having spent the previous decade teaching, writing, studying, and working in his father’s menswear store. He deemed much of his early work unworthy of consideration and destroyed it. It was not until 1944 that he considered his work mature.

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.” His zips streak through fields of color in spare compositions that prompted critics to dub him a Color Field painter and Minimalists to look to his work for inspiration. But call him what they would, Newman maintained his own view of his abstractions. Claiming that he sought “to start from scratch, to paint as if painting never existed before,” he saw his compositions as forms of thought, as expressions of the universal experience of being alive and individual.2

Though he concentrated primarily on painting, Newman also made sculpture. It was not until the 1960s, the last decade of his life, that he achieved public acclaim for his work. His anarchic independence and uncompromising stance may have contributed to his slow acceptance, but these deep-seated forces within him also shaped his art. Reflecting on his work towards the end of his life, he declared, “One of its implications is its assertion of freedom…if [it were read] properly it would mean the end of all state capitalism and totalitarianism.”3

Karen Kedmey, independent art historian and writer, 2017

  1. John P. O’Neill, ed. Barnett Newman: Selected Writings and Interviews. (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1990), xxv.

  2. John P. O’Neill, ed. Barnett Newman: Selected Writings and Interviews. (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1990), 192.

  3. John P. O’Neill, ed. Barnett Newman: Selected Writings and Interviews. (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1990), 251.

Wikipedia entry
Introduction
Barnett Newman (January 29, 1905 – July 4, 1970) was an American artist. He has been critically regarded as one of the major figures of abstract expressionism, and one of the foremost color field painters. His paintings explore the sense of place that viewers experience with art and incorporate the simplest forms to emphasize this feeling.
Wikidata
Q374504
Information from Wikipedia, made available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License
Getty record
Introduction
Newman was born in New York to the parents of Polish immigrants. He studied painting in the 1920s but gave it up from 1940-1944, during which time he destroyed most of his early work. In 1948, he helped found 'Subject of the Artist' an art school in New York, along with Mark Rothko and Robert Motherwell. His work was usually characterized by vertical stripes on large canvases, using a wide range of colors. His painting style, along with his tendency toward the spritual and transcendental, associated him with the Abstract Expressionists. However, the simple form of his paintings would be a major influence on the next generation of Minimalists.
Nationality
American
Gender
Male
Roles
Artist, Art Critic, Writer, Painter, Sculptor
Name
Barnett Newman
Ulan
500000960
Information from Getty’s Union List of Artist Names ® (ULAN), made available under the ODC Attribution License

Works

61 works online

Exhibitions

Publications

  • MoMA Highlights: 375 Works from The Museum of Modern Art Flexibound, 408 pages
  • MoMA Now: Highlights from The Museum of Modern Art—Ninetieth Anniversary Edition Hardcover, 424 pages
  • Abstract Expressionism at The Museum of Modern Art Exhibition catalogue, Hardcover, 128 pages
  • Barnett Newman Exhibition catalogue, Paperback, pages
  • Barnett Newman Exhibition catalogue, Clothbound, pages
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