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As the Philadelphia Museum of Art’s retrospective “Barnett Newman” goes on view this month, art historian and Artforum contributing editor Yve-Alain Bois examines the legacy of an artist whose oeuvre he considers the most difficult of the last century. As the first US retrospective of Barnett Newman’s work in thirty years goes on view ...
- Yve-Alain Bois
- Introduction
- Most Important Writings
- On Abstract Art
- On Art and Inquiry
- On Beauty
- Barnett Newman vs. Ad Reinhardt
- In Discussion with Hess on Stations of The Cross
Newman stands out among artists of the New York School for the quantity of writing he produced, particularly in the early to mid 1940s. 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 art...
'The First Man Was an Artist' Tiger's Eye October 1947 Newman worked as an associate editor for Tiger's Eye, and 'The First Man Was an Artist' was published in the magazine's first year. 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 arti...
Newman considered himself a pure artist, working with pure forms. For a 1947 exhibition at Betty Parsons Gallery, entitled The Ideographic Picture, he wrote, "The basis of an aesthetic act is the pure idea. But the pure idea is, of necessity, an aesthetic act." Newman affirmed his belief that authentic, expressive abstract art was void of symbolism...
For the first issue of Tiger's Eye, in October 1947, Newman wrote one of his most famous essays, 'The First Man Was an Artist'. In it he sought to establish a rather unorthodox link between art and science; "For there is a difference between method and inquiry," he wrote. "Scientific inquiry, from its beginnings, has perpetually asked a single and ...
According to Newman, all of modern art had been a quest to negate the classical standards of beauty established during the Renaissance. The early Modernists - artists such as Édouard Manet and the Impressionists- had failed to fully achieve this, and the task of completion was left to his own generation. "I believe that here in America," he wrote i...
In 1956, Ad Reinhardt wrote an article in College Art Journal entitled 'The Artist in Search of an Academy', in which he derided Barnett Newman as "the artist-professor and traveling-design-salesman, the Art-Digest-philosopher-poet and Bauhaus-exerciser, the avant-garde-huckster-handicraftsman and educational-shop-keeper, the holy-roller-explainer-...
In a public conversation between Thomas B. Hess and Newman, staged at the Guggenheim Museum on May 1, 1966, Newman was asked a series of questions regarding his Stations of the Crossseries (1958-66), which were exhibited at the museum in Newman's very first solo exhibition at a public gallery. "When I call them Stations of the Cross," he said, "I a...
- American
- January 29, 1905
- New York, New York
- July 4, 1970
Barnett Newman (1905–1970) (b New York, 29 Jan. 1905; d New York, 4 July 1970). American painter (and latterly sculptor), one of the leading figures of Abstract Expressionism and one of the initiators of Colour Field Painting. During the 1930s he had a hard time financially: the Depression almost ruined his father's clothing business (which ...
In the Stations Newman had developed a variety of faired, splashed, and scumbled edges in the painted forms set in isolation on raw canvas and they are here transferred to bright color. In place of ominous internal activity, such as Cathedra’s curling turmoil of blues, there is an increase of unevocative splendor.
- Lawrence Alloway
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Barnett Newman. American, 1905-1970. A key figure in the Abstract Expressionist movement, Barnett Newman is widely considered one of the most innovative and influential painters of the twentieth century. A brilliant colorist and a master of expansive spatial effects, he pioneered a new pictorial language that was at once emphatically abstract ...
One of the great figures of the abstract expressionist movement, Barnett Newman was an intellectual, developing his ideas in his painting, sculpture, and writing. Born and raised in New York, Newman took classes at the Art Students League while in high school and college. At New York's City College he majored in philosophy, graduating in 1927.
Apr 28, 2024 · ‘We felt the moral crisis of a world in shambles, a world destroyed by a great depression and a fierce World War,’ wrote Barnett Newman, ‘and it was impossible at the time to paint the kind of paintings that we were doing — flowers, reclining nudes, and people playing the cello.’. Franz Kline (1910-1962), Washington Wall, 1959.
