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'''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.
'''Barnett Newman''' (January 29, 1905 &ndash; 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. His paintings are [[existential]] in tone and content, explicitly composed with the intention of communicating a sense of locality, presence, and contingency.<ref>{{cite book|last=Sylvester|first=David|title=The Grove Book of Art Writing|year=1998|publisher=Grove Press|location=New York, NY|isbn=0802137202|page=537}}</ref>


==Early life==
==Early life==

Revision as of 14:54, 26 October 2013

Barnett Newman
Color Field painting

Barnett Newman (January 29, 1905 – July 4, 1970) was an American artist. He is seen as one of the major figures in

existential in tone and content, explicitly composed with the intention of communicating a sense of locality, presence, and contingency.[1]

Early life

Newman was born in New York City, the son of

expressionist style, but eventually destroyed all these works. Newman met art teacher Annalee Greenhouse in 1934; they were married on June 30, 1936.[3]

Career

What is the explanation of the seemingly insane drive of man to be painter and poet if it is not an act of defiance against man's fall and an assertion that he return to the Garden of Eden? For the artists are the first men.

— Barnett Newman [4]

Newman wrote catalogue forewords and reviews and also organized exhibitions before becoming a member of the

Uptown Group and having his first solo show at the Betty Parsons Gallery in 1948. Soon after his first exhibition, 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."[5] 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 on 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."[6]

Throughout the 1940s he worked in a

surrealist
vein 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, while simultaneously dividing and uniting the composition.

File:Newman-Who's Afraid of Red, Yellow and Blue.jpg
Who's Afraid of Red, Yellow and Blue?, 1966. Typical of Newman's later work, with the use of pure and vibrant color.

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 (2.4 meters by 2 centimeters), the zip is all there is to the work. Newman also made a few sculptures which are essentially three-dimensional zips.[7]

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 is 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

holocaust.[8]

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, 28 feet wide by 9 feet tall (8.5 by 2.7 meters). 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 (1963) is the most monumental and best-known, depicting an inverted obelisk whose point balances on the apex of a pyramid.

Broken Obelisk in the University of Washington's Red Square

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

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 was not until the end of his life that he began to be taken seriously. He was, however, an important influence on many younger artists such as Donald Judd, Frank Stella and Bob Law.[7]

Legacy

Newman died in New York City of a heart attack in 1970.[2]

Nine years after his death, Newman's widow Annalee founded the Barnett Newman Foundation. The Foundation not only functions as his official Estate, but also serves "to encourage the study and understanding of Barnett Newman's life and works."[9] The Foundation was instrumental in creating Newman's Catalogue Raisonne in 2004.[10] The U.S. copyright representative for the Barnett Newman Foundation is the Artists Rights Society.[11]

Selected collections

Among the public collections holding works by Barnett Newman are the

Whitney Museum of American Art
(New York City).

Art market

After Newman had an artistic breakthrough in 1948, he and his wife decided that he should devote all his energy to his art. They lived almost entirely off Annalee Newman's teaching salary until the late 1950s, when Newman's paintings began to sell consistently.[12] Ulysses (1952), a blue-and-black striped painting, sold in 1985 for $1,595,000 at Sotheby's to an American collector who was not identified.[13] Consigned by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen and previously part of Frederick R. Weisman's collection, Newman’s 8.5-by-10-foot Onement VI (1953) was sold for a record $43.8 million at Sotheby's New York in 2013; its sale was ensured by an undisclosed third-party guarantee.[14]

See also

References

  1. ISBN 0802137202
    .
  2. ^ a b The Barnett Newman Foundation website: Chronology of the Artist's Life page
  3. New York Times
    .
  4. ^ Barbara Hess (2005). Abstract Expressionism. Taschen. p. 40. ISBN 978-382282970-7
  5. ^ John P. O'Neill, ed. (1990). Barnett Newman Selected Writings and Interviews. University of California Press. pp. 240–241.
  6. ^ John P. O'Neill, ed. (1990). Barnett Newman Selected Writings and Interviews. University of California Press. p. 201.
  7. ^ a b Chilvers, Ian and Glaves-Smith, John, A Dictionary of Modern and Contemporary Art, second edition (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), p. 511. ISBN 0199239665. Cite error: The named reference "Dictionary" was defined multiple times with different content (see the help page).
  8. The Jewish Daily Forward
    . Retrieved August 8, 2012.
  9. ^ The Barnett Newman Foundation website: About the Foundation page
  10. ^ The Barnett Newman Foundation website: Catalogue Raisonne page
  11. ^ Most frequently requested artists list of the Artists Rights Society
  12. New York Times
    .
  13. New York Times
    .
  14. ^ Katya Kazakina and Philip Boroff (May 15, 2013), Barnett Newman Leads Sotheby’s NYC $294 Million Auction Bloomberg

Further reading

External links

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Barnett Newman.
Wikiquote has quotations related to Barnett Newman.

Artists Influenced By Newman

  • Ambient music group "The Drive to Uqbar" album titled First Station [1]

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