Barnett Newman

Barnett Newman (January 29, 1905, New York - July 4, 1970) was an American painter associated with abstract expressionism and a leading exponent of color field painting.

Youth

Newman was born in New York, the son of Jewish immigrants from Poland. He studied philosophy at the City College of New York and worked in his father's clothing business. Since the 1930s he painted pictures, which are said to be in the expressionist style, but over time he destroyed all these works.

Barnett Newman first worked as a writer and critic; he organized exhibitions and wrote catalogues. He only later became a member of the Uptown Group.

Career

Barnett Newman wrote prefaces to exhibition catalogs and reviews and in the late 1940s became an exhibiting artist at the Betty Parsons Gallery. His first solo exhibition took place in 1948. Shortly after, Barnett Newman commented in one of Studio 35's artist sessions: "We are in the process of making the world to be, to some extent, in our image and likeness." Using his skills as a writer, Newman fought hard at every turn to reinforce his renewed image as an artist and promote his work.

Sculpture in Düsseldorf, Germany

An example is his April 9, 1955 letter to Sidney Janis, in which he says:

It's true that Rothko talks like a fighter. Fight, however, to submit to the Philistine world. My struggle against bourgeois society has implied the total rejection of it.

In the 1940s he first worked in a surrealist style before developing his mature style. This is characterized by simple compositions in which a wide area of color -a field of color- is traversed by one or two thin vertical lines, which Newman called "zip" (zipper).

In his early works of the 1940s, Newman attempted to break away from contemporary influences; his arrangements of vertical and horizontal lines and circular shapes are conceived as representations of surfaces and voids.

In early works featuring zips, the color fields are varied, but later the colors are pure and smooth. Newman himself considered that he fully reached his mature style with the Onement series, beginning in 1948. Onement I (Newman Collection, New York), is reduced to a canvas solid color broken by a single contrasting vertical band (zip), a composition I would use again. These vertical color bands acquire an intense relief, create a tension, a drama on the canvas that captivates the viewer, while dividing the rectangular composition into two analogous color fields. With the bands they define the spatial structure of the painting, while at the same time dividing and unifying the composition.

That vertical line remained a constant feature of Newman's work throughout his life. In some paintings from the 1950s, such as The Wild, which measures 244 cm high by 5 cm wide, the vertical line is what occupies the entire work.

Although Newman's paintings appear to be purely abstract, and many of them were originally untitled, the names he later gave them clues as to the specific themes they refer to, often with a Jewish theme. Two paintings from the early 1950s, for example, are called Adam (Adam) and Eve (Eva) (see Adam and Eve), and there is also a Uriel (1954) and an Abraham (1949), a very dark painting, which in addition to being the name of a biblical patriarch, was also the name of Newman's father, who died in 1947.

The Stations of the Cross series of black-and-white paintings (1958-64) began shortly after Newman had recovered from a heart attack, and is usually considered the pinnacle of his artistic achievements. The series is subtitled "Motto sabachthani" ("Why have you abandoned me?"), words that are attributed to Jesus Christ on the cross. Newman saw these words as having a universal meaning in his own day. The series has also been seen as a memorial to victims of the Holocaust.

Newman also exploited the impact caused by the size of the paintings, exceeding the viewer's field of vision. Examples of this are his late works, such as the series Who & # 39; s Afraid of Red, Yellow and Blue (Who fears red, yellow and blue) , in which colors are used vibrant and pure on large canvases. Anna's Light (1968), named in memory of her mother, who died in 1965, is her largest work, 28 feet (853 cm) wide by 9 high (274 cm). Newman also worked on shaped canvases (canvases with a shape other than rectangular), with works like Chartres (1969), for example, in a triangular shape. The large size of the canvases and the varied shapes are a specific feature of the American "New Abstraction", so that "the shape of the support determines the internal structure of the work"; and it can be seen not only in Newman, but also in other painters such as Frank Stella or Kenneth Noland.

These last paintings were executed with acrylic paint rather than the oil of the earlier works.

Like other artists of this trend, his works have a mystical and spiritual content, to the point that his style has sometimes been called "mystical abstraction."

Newman died in New York of a heart attack.

Other works

Obelisk broken1968, outside the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin.

Newman also made a few sculptures that are essentially three-dimensional zips. Late in his life, he returned to sculpture, making a small number of elegant pieces in steel. Broken Obelisk (Broken Obelisk) (1968) is the most monumental and well-known of his sculptures; it represents an inverted obelisk whose tip is balanced on the top of a pyramid.

Newman also made a series of lithographs, 18 Cantos (1963-64) in which he intends to evoke music. He also made a limited number of etchings.

Lastly, mention should be made of his theoretical writings, most of which appeared in the magazine "Tiger's Eye":

• The first man was an artist (The first man was artist), 1947
• The sublime is now (The sublime is the present), 1948

Assessment

Newman is generally classified within abstract expressionism, considering that he worked in New York in the 1950s, and related to other artists in the group and developed an abstract style that owed little or nothing to European art. However, his rejection of the expressive brushwork used by other Abstract Expressionists such as Clyfford Still and Mark Rothko, and his use of areas of solid color, allow us to see in him a precursor of "post-painterly abstraction" and the minimalist works of artists like Frank Stella. He has also been referred to as a representative of colorfield painting, or color field painting, a subcurrent of abstract expressionism in which Rothko would also stand out.

Newman was not widely appreciated in life, being ignored in favor of more colorful characters like 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 young artists, particularly abstract expressionists.

Books

• Marika Herskovic, American Abstract Expressionism of the 1950s An Illustrated Survey, (New York School Press, 2003.) ISBN 0-9677994-1-4
• Walther, I.F. (dir.), biography The Masters of Western PaintingTaschen, 2005. ISBN 3-8228-4744-5