Barnett Newman

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Born: 1905

Died: 1970

Summary of Barnett Newman

Newman shared the Abstract Expressionists’ fascination with myth and the primal unconscious, but his paintings’ massive fields of colour and characteristic “zips” distinguished him from his colleagues’ gestural abstraction. When he initially displayed his mature art, it received a lukewarm reception, even from friends. He didn’t start receiving attention until later in his career, and he went on to become a touchstone for both Minimalists and a new school of Color Field painters. “he changed in about a year’s time from an outcast or a crank into the father figure of two generations.” critic Thomas B. Hess said of one of Newman’s exhibits in 1959.

Newman thought that the contemporary world had left conventional art topics and techniques obsolete, particularly during the post-World War II years, which were characterised by war, terror, and sorrow. “Old standards of beauty were irrelevant,” Newman said, “the sublime was all that was appropriate – an experience of immense magnitude that might lift modern humanity out of its stupor.”

Newman’s paintings were a clear divergence from his predecessors’ expressive abstraction. Instead, he created a method that ignored the traditional oppositions of figure and ground in painting. He devised a symbol, the “zip,” that might reach out and summon the spectator standing in front of it – the viewer igniting with life.

He believed that people had a fundamental need to create, and that manifestations of the same drives and yearnings could be found in both ancient and modern art. He viewed artists, including himself, as world makers.

Childhood

Barnett Newman was born in 1905 to Jewish parents who had moved to New York five years before from Russian Poland. Barney, as he was known by his family and friends, grew up with three younger siblings in Manhattan and the Bronx. During high school, he began painting at the Art Students League and continued to take lessons there while pursuing a philosophy degree at City College of New York. He met and befriended Adolph Gottlieb at the Art Students League, who introduced him to major New York artists and gallery owners.

Early Life

Newman worked for his father’s clothes manufacturing firm after college until it failed a few years after the 1929 stock market crisis. During the next few years, he dabbled with substitute art teaching (despite repeatedly failing the art teacher qualification test), ran for mayor as a write-in candidate in 1933, and founded a short-lived journal campaigning for civil service employees’ rights. 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 organising exhibits.

His fascination in birds inspired him to say, “Aesthetics is for the artist as ornithology is for the birds.” He had a connection with gallery owner Betty Parsons around this period, for whom he arranged numerous exhibits. She soon began representing Newman’s close pals Mark Rothko, Clyfford Still, and Jackson Pollock.

Newman had returned to art practise by 1944, influenced by Surrealism. He destroyed everything he had previously produced because he was dissatisfied with his earlier figurative work, and he would continue to trash work that did not suit him throughout his career. Betty Parsons Gallery began representing him in 1946.

Mid Life

In Newman’s career, the year 1948 was a watershed moment. He began working on a pictorial technique he dubbed a “zip,” a vertical line of colour that ran the length of the canvas, which resulted in the picture Onement I. (1948). The gadget would go on to become a signature of his future work. With it, he suspended the traditional opposition of figure and ground in a painting and created an enveloping experience of colour in which the zip – gestured to as a being filled with the original spark of life, just like Newman’s mythical “first man” – invokes the viewer herself, physically and emotionally (see “Writings and Ideas” below).

In describing how spectators might understand his much bigger 1950 painting Vir heroicus sublimis, he touched on some of these ideas: “It’s really no different from meeting someone new. Physically, one feels a reaction to the individual. There’s also a metaphysical aspect to it, in that if two people meet and it’s important, it impacts both of their lives.”

Betty Parsons Gallery initially exhibited the new art in 1950, including Onement I (1948). However, the reaction was overwhelmingly hostile; one painting was even damaged, and Newman’s works would continue to elicit violent reactions from audiences, with his paintings being cut on many times in the years to come. Parsons exhibited him again the following year, but the reception was not much better, prompting Newman to withdraw from the gallery scene. During this time, he continued to write, publishing a number of philosophical articles on art.

“The Sublime Is Now,” he said in “I believe that here in America, some of us, free from the weight of European culture, are finding the answer, by completely denying that art has any concern with the problem of beauty and where to find it.”

Between 1951 and 1955, his art was not displayed anywhere, and he even purchased back a picture that he no longer wanted on display. And he only sold a few paintings in his early years. Some of his most fiercely hostile detractors did not begin to change their minds until the early 1960s, when he had a heart attack in 1957.

Late Life

After Clement Greenberg arranged Newman’s solo show at French & Company in 1959, the critical tide began to shift, and many began to see him as a significant artist within Abstract Expressionism. Newman expanded his work into lithographs and sculpture in the 1960s, something he had only dabbled with earlier in his career. His work was included in numerous key Abstract Expressionism museum exhibitions, cementing his place in the movement. Despite this widespread notoriety, many people misunderstood his work; throughout his career, Newman would refute such errors.

He would even go to great lengths to do this; at a period when few institutions were interested in his work, he turned down an invitation to participate in the Whitney’s Geometric Abstraction display in 1962.

Newman’s Stations of the Cross, a series of fourteen paintings created between 1958 and 1966, received his first solo museum show at the Guggenheim in 1966. Despite the fact that this show garnered a lot of critical feedback, it helped him get more notoriety in the art world. He continued to produce some of his most important work during the next few years.

Anna’s Light (1968), the series Who’s Afraid of Red, Yellow, and Blue (1966-68), and the colossal artwork Broken Obelisk were among them (1963-69). Newman died of a heart attack in New York on July 4, 1970.

Barnett Newman, who was generally underappreciated during his lifetime, is today regarded as a pivotal figure in the Abstract Expressionist movement and a forerunner to Minimalism. Despite this, he never saw himself as a part of or in opposition to any one movement. He dismissed parallels to geometric artists and claims that he was the founder of the Minimalist movement. Unlike the more stark canvases that concentrated on the non-representational meaning of forms and colours, Newman’s paintings had a philosophical edge to them, infusing them with his own self and encouraging the audience to feel them with both their bodies and their minds.

Famous Art by Barnett Newman

Vir heroicus sublimis

1950-1951

“Man, heroic and sublime,” as it is translated. Vir heroicus sublimis was Newman’s biggest painting at the time, measuring 95 by 213 inches, but he would go on to produce much larger works. He wanted his viewers to be able to see this and other huge paintings from a close distance, enabling the colours and zips to completely surround them. Newman’s zips are alternately solid or wavering in this sculpture, which is more complicated than it looks, producing a perfect square in the middle and asymmetrical gaps on the outside.

Third Station

1960

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 was also meant to represent humanity’s cries throughout history. The series is distinguished by a stark palette of black, white, and untreated canvas – Newman intended the unpainted canvas to take on its own hue – and the image widens the artist’s usage of the zip, with some seeming absolutely straight and others appearing feathery and poised to erupt.

Broken Obelisk

1963-1969

Newman created a number of sculptures, but Broken Obelisk is the most significant. The inverted obelisk, which nearly hovers above the stable pyramid, is made of hefty, rough-surfaced steel, which contrasts with the sense of lightness given by the inverted obelisk. The enormous artwork is stabilised by an internal steel rod that connects the two sections at a distance of barely two and a quarter inches. Although pyramids and obelisks are generally linked with death, Newman uses them to symbolise vitality and transcendence in this work. There are several variants of Broken Obelisk, one of which is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and is located in Houston.

BULLET POINTED (SUMMARISED)

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• Newman shared the Abstract Expressionists’ fascination with myth and the primal unconscious, but his paintings’ massive fields of colour and characteristic “zips” distinguished him from his colleagues’ gestural abstraction.
• When he initially displayed his mature art, it received a lukewarm reception, even from friends.
• He didn’t start receiving attention until later in his career, and he went on to become a touchstone for both Minimalists and a new school of Color Field painters. “he changed in about a year’s time from an outcast or a crank into the father figure of two generations.” critic Thomas B. Hess said of one of Newman’s exhibits in 1959.
• Newman thought that the contemporary world had left conventional art topics and techniques obsolete, particularly during the post-World War II years, which were characterised by war, terror, and sorrow.
• “Old standards of beauty were irrelevant,” Newman said, “the sublime was all that was appropriate – an experience of immense magnitude that might lift modern humanity out of its stupor.”
• Newman’s paintings were a clear divergence from his predecessors’ expressive abstraction.
• Instead, he created a method that ignored the traditional oppositions of figure and ground in painting.
• He devised a symbol, the “zip,” that might reach out and summon the spectator standing in front of it – the viewer igniting with life.
• He believed that people had a fundamental need to create, and that manifestations of the same drives and yearnings could be found in both ancient and modern art.
• He viewed artists, including himself, as world makers.

Information Citations

En.wikipedia.org, https://en.wikipedia.org/.

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