Barnett Newman
(American, 1905–1970)
Biography
Barnett Newman was an influential American artist best known for his involvement in Color Field painting. Newman composed his paintings with crisp edges and lines of pure color that focus on form. One of the artist’s best-known works is The Stations of the Cross (1958–1966), a series of 14 black-and-white paintings that explore religion through abstraction. “I hope that my painting has the impact of giving someone, as it did me, the feeling of his own totality, of his own separateness, of his own individuality,” he once explained. Born on January 29, 1905 in New York, NY to Jewish immigrants from Poland, Newman studied philosophy at the City College of New York while also taking courses at the Art Students League alongside Adolph Gottlieb. During the Great Depression, he took on a number of odd jobs and stopped painting for a time while studying Pre-Columbian art and ornithology. Newman returned to producing paintings by 1944, and was soon immersed in the New York milieu of Abstract Expressionists that included Clyfford Still and Jackson Pollock. The late 1940s brought about a pivotal shift in Newman’s work, in where he first used the self-described zip, a vertical stripe of color down the painting. This formal gesture was a means for the artist, both formally and metaphysically, to overcome the traditional horizon line of pictorial space. During the 1950s, Newman’s work was mostly panned or dismissed, but by 1960, his emphasis on simplicity and the sublime had inspired artists such as Frank Stella and Donald Judd. He died on July 4, 1970 in New York, NY. Today, Newman’s works are in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, and the Tate Gallery in London, among others.
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Barnett Newman Artworks
Barnett Newman
(246 results)
.jpg "UNTITLED (EUCLIDIAN ABYSS I), 1946")
.jpg "The Moment (from Four on Plexiglas), 1966")
English (US)
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