Everything about Barnett Newman totally explained
Barnett Newman (
January 29,
1905 –
July 4,
1970) was an
American artist. He is seen as one of the major figures in
abstract expressionism and one of the foremost of the
color field painters.
Youth
Newman was born in
New York City, the son of
Russian Jewish immigrants. He studied
philosophy at the
City College of New York and worked in his father's business manufacturing clothing. From the
1930s he made paintings, said to be in an
expressionist style, but eventually destroyed all these works.
Barnett Newman, a well respected writer and critic who also organized exhibitions and wrote catalogs became only later a member of the
Uptown Group.
Career
Barnett Newman wrote catalogue forewords and reviews and by the late 1940's became an exhibiting artist at Betty Parsons Gallery. His first solo show was in 1948. Soon after his first exhibition, Barnett Newman remarked in one of the Artists' Session at Studio 35: "We are in the process of making the world, to a certain extent, in our own image." Utilizing his writing skills, Newman fought every step of the way to reinforce his newly established image as an artist and to promote his work. An example is his letter in April 9, 1955, "Letter to Sidney Janis: ---It is true that Rothko talks the fighter. He fights, however, to submit to the philistine world. My struggle against bourgeois society has involved the total rejection of it."
In the
1940s he first worked in a
surrealist mode before developing his mature style. This is characterised by areas of color separated by thin vertical lines, or "zips" as Newman called them. In the first works featuring zips, the color fields are variegated, but later the colors are pure and flat. Newman himself thought that he reached his fully mature style with the
Onement series (from 1948). The zips define the spatial structure of the painting, whilst simultaneously dividing and uniting the composition.
The zip remained a constant feature of Newman's work throughout his life. In some paintings of the 1950s, such as
The Wild, which is eight feet tall by one and a half inches wide, the zip is all there's to the work. Newman also made a few
sculptures which are essentially three-dimensional zips.
Although Newman's paintings appear to be purely abstract, and many of them were originally untitled, the names he later gave them hinted at specific subjects being addressed, often with a Jewish theme. Two paintings from the early 1950s, for example, are called
Adam and
Eve (see
Adam and Eve), and there's also
Uriel (1954) and
Abraham (1949), a very dark painting, which as well as being the name of a biblical patriarch, was also the name of Newman's father, who had died in 1947.
The Stations of the Cross series of black and white paintings (1958-66), begun shortly after Newman had recovered from a
heart attack, is usually regarded as the peak of his achievement. The series is subtitled "Lema sabachthani" - "why have you forsaken me" - words spoken by
Christ on the cross. Newman saw these words as having universal significance in his own time. The series has also been seen as a memorial to the victims of the
holocaust.
Newman's late works, such as the
Who's Afraid of Red, Yellow and Blue series, use vibrant, pure colors, often on very large canvases -
Anna's Light (1968), named in memory of his mother who had died in 1965, is his largest work, twenty-eight feet wide by nine feet tall. Newman also worked on
shaped canvases late in life, with
Chartres (1969), for example, being triangular, and returned to sculpture, making a small number of sleek pieces in
steel. These later paintings are executed in
acrylic paint rather than the
oil paint of earlier pieces. Of his sculptures,
Broken Obelisk (1968) is the most monumental and best-known, depicting an inverted obelisk whose point balances on the apex of a pyramid.
Newman also made a series of
lithographs, the
18 Cantos (1963-64) which, according to Newman, are meant to be evocative of music. He also made a small number of
etchings.
Newman is generally classified as an
abstract expressionist on account of his working in New York City in the 1950s, associating with other artists of the group and developing an abstract style which owed little or nothing to European art. However, his rejection of the expressive brushwork employed by other abstract expressionists such as
Clyfford Still and
Mark Rothko, and his use of hard-edged areas of flat color, can be seen as a precursor to
post painterly abstraction and the
minimalist works of artists such as
Frank Stella.
Newman was unappreciated as an artist for much of his life, being overlooked in favour of more colorful characters such as
Jackson Pollock. The influential critic
Clement Greenberg wrote enthusiastically about him, but it wasn't until the end of his life that he began to be taken really seriously. He was, however, an important influence on many younger painters.
Newman died in New York City of a heart attack in 1970.
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