Newman, Barnett

Newman, Barnett (1905–1970). American painter, one of the leading figures of Abstract Expressionism and one of the the initiators of Colour Field Painting. He was born in New York, the son of Polish immigrant parents and studied at the Art Students League, 1922, and the City College of New York, 1923–7, before working for his father's clothing company, 1927–37 (he again attended the Art Students League in 1929–30). During the 1930s he had a hard time financially; the Depression almost ruined his father's business, and unlike most American painters of the time Newman did not work for the Federal Art Project, being unwilling to accept State handouts. Part of his living came from teaching art in high schools. He destroyed most of his early work and stopped painting in the early 1940s, but he began again in 1944, and in the second half of the 1940s evolved a distinctive style of mystical abstraction—he considered ‘the sublime’ to be his ultimate subject-matter (see ABSTRACT SUBLIME). The work with which he announced this style was Onement I (MOMA, New York, 1948), a monochromatic canvas of dark red with a single stripe of lighter red running down the middle. Such stripes (or ‘zips’ as Newman preferred to call them) became a characteristic feature of his work. By the time he painted Onement I Newman already had a reputation as a controversialist and a spokesman for avant-garde art (in catalogue essays and in articles in journals such as Tiger's Eye, of which he was associate editor), and in 1948 he collaborated with Baziotes, Hare, Motherwell, and Rothko in founding the Subjects of the Artist School.

In 1949 Newman painted his first wall-size pictures (he was one of the pioneers of the very large format) and in 1950 he had his first one-man exhibition, at the Betty Parsons gallery. This was coolly received by critics and fellow artists, and by the mid-1950s his very spare style had separated him from the predominantly ‘gestural’ idiom of his colleagues. For a time he became a somewhat marginalized figure and he stopped painting in 1956. He had a heart attack in 1957, but the following year a resurgence began with a series of paintings in black-and-white, and in the last decade of his life his reputation soared and his output was prolific. In the 1960s he began producing large steel sculptures featuring slender shafts recalling the vertical strips of his paintings (Broken Obelisk, MOMA, New York, 1963–9) and in his late years he also experimented with shaped canvases, painting several triangular pictures. His work had great influence on the development of Colour Field Painting. His reputation stands high, but he is not without his detractors. John Canaday, for example wrote that: ‘there is nothing inherently mystical or even expressive about a Newman painting … the response is entirely in the mind of the observer … and is stimulated not by what the painting is, but by what Newman said it was. Newman's fans among critics are either people who knew him well, worked with him and discussed theories with him, or other people who have had the experience at second hand through what these critics have written. In either case, the experience is simply not there in the paintings … if ever there was literary painting, it is Barnett Newman's, an extreme case of dependence on verbal exercises.’