Background
Baruch Newman was born on January 29, 1905, in New York City, the son of Russian Jewish immigrants. Barney, as his friends and family called him, was brought up in the Bronx and Manhattan with other three younger siblings.
Newman studied philosophy at the City College of New York, from which he graduated in 1927.
Newman studied at New York City’s Art Students League during 1922 – 1926.
Baruch Newman was born on January 29, 1905, in New York City, the son of Russian Jewish immigrants. Barney, as his friends and family called him, was brought up in the Bronx and Manhattan with other three younger siblings.
Newman studied at New York City’s Art Students League during 1922 – 1926 and studied philosophy at the City College of New York, from which he graduated in 1927.
Newman started his drawing career at the Art Students League. Adolph Gottlieb introduced him to important gallery owners and artist in New York, while in high school. Newman was employed in clothing manufacturing business, owned by his father. After leaving his father’s company, he made a living as a writer, teacher, and critic. He made paintings from the 1930s, described as an expressionist style, but later annihilated all these arts.
Newman wrote reviews and catalogue forewords, as well as organizing exhibitions before joining the Uptown Group. In 1948, he held his first solo show at the Beety Parsons Gallery, where he displayed his artwork. The most notable remark after his first exhibition was, “We are in the process of making the world, to a certain extent, in our own image.” Newman used his prowess in writing and arts to promote his work, as well as reinforcing his newly established image.
Before developing his mature career, throughout the 1940s, Newman worked in a surrealist vein. Surrealism is a cultural movement that commenced in the early 1920s and is renowned for its writings and artworks. Surrealist works portrayed elements of a non-sequitur, surprise, and unexpected juxtaposition. Many Surrealist writers and artists, however, describe their works as artifacts, expressing their stand on philosophical movement.
Newman’s artwork portrays surrealism by the use of colors separated by a thin vertical line, which he referred to as “zips.” The color fields are variegated in his first works featuring zips, but afterward, they are flat and pure. From the 1948’s Onement series, he felt that he had fully reached his mature style. The use of zips was to divide and unite the composition, while simultaneously defining the painting’s spatial structure. In 1944, Barnett Newman included a list of “the men in the new movement”, as he tried to explain America’s newest art movement. In his list, he mentioned ex-surrealists like Wolfgang Paalen, Matta, Gottlieb, Pollock, Baziotes, Gorky, Hofman, and others.
Newman’s paintings appear conceptual and did not name many of them. The names, however, that he gave them later hinted a Jewish theme that addressed a specific subject. “Adam and Eve”, “Uriel”, and “Abraham”, his 1950, 1954, and 1949 works respectively, portrays Newman’s belief in the Jewish religion. These paintings are evidence that he was brought up in a Christian setting.
Newman’s subsequent works, such as “Yellow and Blue”, and “Who’s Afraid of Red” series exhibit the use of vibrant, pure colors, mostly on enormous large canvases. His largest work, “Anna’s Light 1968”, named after his mother who passed away in 1965, is 9-feet tall by 28 feet wide (8.5 by 2.7 meters). Newman, late in life, worked on shaped canvases. For example, his 1960 painting, “Chartres”, was triangular. Another notable change in his works was the use of acrylic paint as opposed to the common oil paint used in his initial pieces. “Broken Obelisk (1963)”, is the most recognized and epic of his sculptures, portraying an inverted obelisk with its point balancing on a pyramid’s apex. Newman also had a series of lithographs, a kind of painting done on a stone or metal. “18 Cantos (1934 - 1964)”, according to him, was meant to be redolent of music. He also made a few etchings.
Newman’s work in New City in the 1950s has classified him as an abstract expressionist, having associated himself with other like-minded artists of the group, creating a nonfigurative style which had little or no significance to the European art. He, however, was unacknowledged as an artist in most part of his career and was disregarded in favor of other artists such as Jackson Pollock. Clement Greenberg, an influential critic, nonetheless, wrote passionately about him but was only taken seriously at the end of his life. Newman, nevertheless, served as a great inspiration to many younger artists such as Frank Stella, Donald Judd, and Bob Law.
In 1970, Newman passed away of a heart attack in New York. His widow Annalee, nine years after his death, founded the Barnett Newman Foundation. The foundations serve “to encourage the learning and comprehending of Newman’s life and works,” as well as his official estate. In 2004, the foundation served as an instrument for creating Newman’s catalogue raisonne, a compilation of his entire works. The U.S copyright, Artists Rights Society, is the representative for the Barnett Newman Foundation.
Outcry
14. Fourteenth Station
Who’s Afraid of Red, Yellow and Blue II
Eve
Canto Xll
Canto XIII
Canto VI
Canto IX
1. First Station
Rothko by Newman
Canto XVII
Untitled
Jericho
Canto II
Title Page from 18 Cantos
8. Eighth Station
Broken Obelisk
The Voice
Be I
Onement, III
Canto XVI
Canto II
Vir heroicus sublimis
The Wild
6. Sixth Station
Yellow Painting
2. Second Station
Adam
14. Fourth Station
Abraham
Achilles
Onement VI
Black Fire I
Canto X
Canto I
The Third
Dionysius
The Station of the Cross - First Station
Canto XVIII
The Station of the Cross - Fourth Station
3. Third Station
Voice of Fire
Treble
Ulysses
Untitled 2
Untitled
Covenant
Untitled Etching #1
Canto IV
Canto VIII
Abstract Composition in Green and Red
Two Edges
Untitled
Uriel
12. Twelfh Station
The Blessing
5. Fifth Station
Canto V
Untitled (Red, Yellow and Green Forms on a Purple Ground)
Onement V
Canto XII
9. Ninth Station
11. Eleventh Station
Moment
Untitled I
Midnight Blue
Concord
White Fire I
The Moment
Canto VII
Onement, I
Canto XI
7. Seventh Station
10. Tenth Station
Galaxy
13. Thirteenth station
By Twos
Untitled 3
Canto XIV
Canto III
Vir Heroicus Sublimis
Canto XV
In 1933, Barnett ran for mayor of his city on a write-in ticket with a cultural platform, and he maintained a keen awareness of such modern horrors as Nazism and the atomic bomb. For him, art was an act of self-creation and a declaration of political, intellectual, and individual freedom. Master of witticisms, he once quipped: “aesthetics is to artists as ornithology is to the birds.”
Coming of age as an artist in the atmosphere of moral crisis that, in America as elsewhere, pervaded the post-war period, Barnett Newman believed that a completely new art was needed. Newman is generally classified as an abstract expressionist on account of his working in New York City in the 1950s, associating with other artists of the group and developing an abstract style which owed little or nothing to European art. However, his rejection of the expressive brushwork employed by other abstract expressionists such as Clyfford Still and Mark Rothko, and his use of hard-edged areas of flat color, can be seen as a precursor to post painterly abstraction and the minimalist works of artists such as Frank Stella.
Three essential ideas shaped his thoughts and work. The first, derived from the writings of the Russian anarchist Peter Kropotkin, was his belief in the responsibility of the individual to free himself from all dogma, whether of the right or the left. The second, inspired by the Kwakiutl art of the Northwest Coast, was his understanding that the abstract shape had its own reality and could convey ideas and feelings directly, without reference to the visual world. The third, occasioned by his reaction to Indian mounds seen on a visit to Ohio, and later deepened by his insight into the Jewish mystical concept of makom – the "place" where God is – was his desire to create a sense of place in his paintings that would convey a similar mystery. In his view, this feeling of being situated is the fundamental spiritual dimension of art; through the attention that he paid to place in his paintings, he hoped to give viewers a “feeling of their own totality, their uniqueness, and, simultaneously, their relationships with others, who are also separate.”
Quotations:
"Aesthetics is for the artist as ornithology is for the birds."
"The central issue of painting is the subject matter... My subject is antianecdotal."
"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... We are reasserting man's natural desire for the exalted, for a concern with our relationship to the absolute emotions."
"When I call them Stations of the Cross I am saying that these paintings mean something beyond their formal extremes... What I'm saying is that my painting is physical and what I'm saying also is that my painting is metaphysical... that my life is physical, and my life is also metaphysical."
"Tragedy demands black, white, and gray. I couldn't paint a green passion, but I did try to make raw canvas come into color. That was my color problem - to get the quality of color without the use of color. A painter should try to paint the impossible."
Newman was a member of the Uptown Group.
Quotes from others about the person
He changed in about a year's time from an outcast or a crank into the father figure of two generations.
In 1934, Newman met Annalee Greenhouse, an art teacher, and married her on June 30, 1936.