Born In: 1905 New York

Died: 1970 New York

▪ Barnett’s Polish-Jewish parents migrated

to New York in 1900 from Russian Poland.
▪ Barney, as his family and friends call him
grew up in Manhattan with his three
younger siblings.
▪ American Painter
 Newman worked for his father's apparel manufacturing business after college until it failed a
few years after the 1929 stock market crisis. Substitute art teaching, a write-in bid for mayor in 1933, and
the creation of a short-lived magazine championing civil service workers' rights were among his varied
endeavors during the next few years.

▪ He married Annalee Greenhouse, a teacher, in 1936. He stopped painting completely in the early
1940s. He studied natural biology, ornithology, and Pre-Columbian art instead, as well as writing
museum catalogue essays and art reviews and organizing shows.
▪ His interest in ornithology would later inform his famous quote, "Aesthetics is for the artist as
ornithology is for the birds." During this time, he began a friendship with gallery owner Betty Parsons,
for whom he organized several exhibitions. She soon began representing Mark Rothko, Clyfford Still,
and Jackson Pollock, all close friends of Newman.
▪ Newman had returned to art practice by 1944, influenced by Surrealism. He destroyed everything he
had previously done because he was dissatisfied with his earlier figurative work, and he would
continue to destroy work that did not please him throughout his career.
▪ The year 1948 was a major turning point in Newman's career. He His work was not shown
began developing a pictorial device he called a "zip," a vertical stripe anywhere between 1951
of color running the length of the canvas, and this led to the and 1955; he even
painting Onement I(1948). bought back a painting
▪ The new work, including Onement I (1948), was first shown at Betty he no longer wanted on
Parsons Gallery in 1950. The response, however, was chiefly negative; view. And throughout
one painting was even defaced, and Newman's works would these early years, he
continue to excite violent reactions from audiences, being slashed on sold very few paintings. It
several occasions in subsequent years. was not until the early
▪ Throughout this time he continued writing, producing several 1960s - and following a
philosophical essays about art. Most notably, he wrote "The Sublime heart attack in 1957 - that
Is Now," in which he stated, "I believe that here in America, some of some of his most
us, free from the weight of European culture, are finding the answer, ardently negative critics
by completely denying that art has any concern with the problem of began to shift their
beauty and where to find it." viewpoints.
 ▪ In 1966, the Guggenheim gave Newman his first solo museum
▪ In the 1960s, Newman expanded his
exhibition, displaying his Stations of the Cross, a series of
work into lithographs and sculpture,
fourteen pictures executed between 1958 and 1966. Although
which he had only delved into
this show also received many negative reviews, it expanded his
earlier in his career. His work
recognition within the art world. Over the next few years, he
appeared in several important
continued creating some of his most important work. Among
museum exhibitions on Abstract
these included his largest painting, Anna's Light (1968), the
Expressionism, securing his
series Who's Afraid of Red, Yellow and Blue (1966-68) and the
significant place within the
monumental sculpture Broken Obelisk (1963-69). On July 4, 1970,
movement. Despite this broader
Newman died of a heart attack in New York.
recognition, however, many still
misinterpreted his work; Newman
▪ Although largely unappreciated during his life, Barnett Newman
would repeatedly dispute such
is now viewed as crucial to the Abstract Expressionist movement
misunderstandings throughout his
and as a precursor to Minimalism. Yet he never considered
career.
himself a part of any particular movement, nor a contrast to one.
Unlike those more stark canvases that focused on non-
▪ With the critical tide gradually
representational meaning of shapes and colors, Newman
changing, many began to consider
brought a more philosophical edge to his paintings, infusing
Newman an important artist within
them with his own self, and inviting the audience to experience
Abstract Expressionism.
them with both their bodies and their psyches.
 Discussion and ideas remained important to
him, and he likened abstract thought to the
non-objective forms of "primitive" art - both,
he believed, were aimed at generalization and
classification. However, as an artist, Newman
claimed to have never approached any
painting with a plan. "I am an intuitive painter,"
he wrote, one who is concerned with the
"immediate and particular." In this respect,
Newman's ideas about art were romantic. He
believed that a maker of abstract art was
harnessing the most basic human emotions,
but wasn't bound by any mythology or
ancient standard for making art, or even for
viewing it.
This is possibly Newman's most famous article, in which he examines the work of a
number of 20th-century European artists who, in his opinion, defied traditional notions of
beauty. He also touched on the ancient Greeks' ideals of beauty in art and looked at how
famous philosophers - particularly 19th-century Germans - reconciled these views with the
emergence of new modern forms. The key struggle, according to Newman, was that
which occurs between ideas of beauty and ideas of the sublime. Newman concluded that
artists had finally succeeded in creating a new standard of beauty and the sublime. Not
since the Renaissance, he claimed, had a melding of those two concepts occurred with
such force. Before Abstract Expressionism, some of the greatest modern artists had only
succeeded in challenging old ideas about beauty in the visual arts: "Picasso's effort may be
sublime," he wrote, "but there is no doubt that his work is a preoccupation with the
question of what is the nature of beauty." He believed his own generation was a new breed
- artists who didn't simply question or even challenge old standards, but rather created
entirely new and consequently sublime ideas about beauty
In the essay, Newman asserted the priority of the aesthetic over the social: "The
human in language is literature," he wrote, "not communication." Humans were
artists before they were hunters, he claimed, and were storytellers before they
were scientists. "Just as man's first speech was poetic before it became
utilitarian, so man first built an idol of mud before he fashioned an axe."
Newman also questioned the benefits of scientific advancements on the mind
of modern man. His position was not that science was particularly malevolent,
but rather that it had become a strict form of theology that restricted the
creative spirit. "The domination of science over the mind of modern man," he
wrote, "has been accomplished by the simple tactic of ignoring the prime
scientific quest; the concern with its original question What?"
"For there is a difference between method and inquiry," he
wrote. "Scientific inquiry, from its beginnings, has perpetually
asked a single and specific question, What? What is the
rainbow, what is an atom, what is a star [sic]?" This basic and
instinctive question of "what?" was what made all art into a
science - not a science that set out to prove something, but
rather a science that simply sought new knowledge and
experience.
According to Newman, everything of modern art has been a search to
deconstruct the Renaissance's classical criteria of beauty. The early Modernists,
such as Édouard Manet and the Impressionists, had fallen short of this goal, and
it was left to his generation to complete it. "I believe that here in America, free
from the weight of European culture," he wrote in 1948, "some of us are finding
the answer, by completely denying that art has any concern with the problem of
beauty and where to find it... We are reasserting man's natural desire for the
exalted, for a concern with our relationship to the absolute emotions... We are
reasserting man's natural desire for the exalted, for a concern with our
relationship to the absolute emotions."
Newman was asked a series of questions on his Stations of the Cross series (1958-66),
which were displayed at the museum in Newman's first solo exhibition in a public
gallery, during a public conversation between Thomas B. Hess and Newman on May
1, 1966.

"When I call them Stations of the Cross," he explained, "I'm saying that these paintings
mean something beyond their formal extremes...What I'm saying is that my painting is
physical and what I'm saying also is that my painting is metaphysical...that my life is
physical and my life is also metaphysical.” Hess later inquired about the lack of color
in the paintings, which was unusual in his work. "Tragedy necessitates black,"
Newman said.
 Newman shared the Abstract Expressionists' interest in myth and the
primeval unconscious, but his paintings' massive fields of color and
distinctive "zips" distinguished him from his predecessors' gestural
abstraction. When he first showed his mature work, it received a lukewarm
reception, even from friends. He would not begin to achieve renown until
later in his career, and he would go on to become a touchstone for both
Minimalists and a second generation of Color Field painters.

Commenting on one of Newman's exhibitions in 1959, critic Thomas B.

Hess wrote, "he changed in about a year's time from an outcast or a crank
into the father figure of two generations."
 "old standards of beauty
Newman's paintings
were irrelevant: the sublime
were a clear contrast He believed that
was all that was
from his colleagues' humans had a basic
appropriate - an experience
expressive abstraction. desire to create, and that
of enormity which might lift
Instead, he invented a expressions of the same
modern humanity out of its
method that bypassed inclinations and
torpor."
the traditional yearnings could be
Newman considered that oppositions of figure and found in both ancient
the modern world had left ground in painting. He and modern art. He
conventional art subjects developed a symbol, the considered artists,
and forms obsolete, "zip," that might reach out including himself, as
particularly during the post- and invoke the spectator world creators.
World War II years, which standing in front of it -
were characterized by the viewer igniting with
conflict, dread, and life.
tragedy.
By Barnett Newman
 Oil on canvas - The
Museum of Modern
Art, New York

Vir heroicus sublimis, which means "man, heroic, and sublime," was Newman's largest painting at the
time it was completed, measuring 95 by 213 inches, but he would go on to make far larger works.

He wanted his viewers to be able to see this and other large paintings from a close distance, allowing the colors and
zips to completely surround them. Newman's zips are either solid or wavering in this piece, which is more intricate
than it appears, creating a perfect square in the middle and asymmetrical voids on the periphery.

Mel Bochner, an artist associated with Conceptualism, remembered encountering it at the Museum of Modern Art in
the late 1960s and realizing that its scale and color created a new kind of contact between the artwork and the viewer.
 Newman's famous fourteen-piece sequence,
The Stations of the Cross: Lema Sabachthani,
includes the Third Station (1958-66). The title
alludes to Christ's lament on the cross, but it
Oil on canvas - The National
was also meant to reflect humanity's cries
Gallery of Art, Washington DC throughout history.

The series is distinguished by a stark palette of black, white, and untreated canvas - Newman
wanted the unpainted canvas to take on its own hue - and the image expands the artist's
usage of the zip, with some seeming absolutely straight and others appearing feathery and
about to erupt. The series took Newman eight years to complete because he couldn't plan a
painting; "I couldn't do them all at once, automatically, one after the other...When there was a
spontaneous inclination to make [one of the paintings], that's when I did them," he explained.
Lithograph - The Museum of
Modern Art, New York

Newman also created etchings and

lithographs, such as the series 18
Cantos, in addition to paintings (1963-
64). "Their symphonic mass lends
additional clarity to each individual
canto," he wrote in an introduction to
the series, "and at the same time,
each canto adds its song to the full
chorus." In 18 Cantos, Newman uses
a wide, offset band, a variation on the
thinner zips, and allows the colors to
bleed out into the margins, testing
the idea of spatial boundaries. Each
canto has its own "unique margins,"
according to him.
 Newman created a number of sculptures, but Broken Obelisk is the most significant. The inverted obelisk,
which practically floats above the stable pyramid, is made of heavy, rough-surfaced steel, which contrasts
with the appearance of lightness generated by the inverted obelisk. The huge artwork is stabilized by an
internal steel rod that connects the two halves at a spacing of only two and a quarter inches. Although
pyramids and obelisks are traditionally linked with death, Newman uses them to inspire vitality and
transcendence in this work. There are several variations of Broken Obelisk, one of which is dedicated to the
memory of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and is located in Houston.

Cor-Ten steel –
The Museum of Modern Art, New York