Barnett Newman

Barnett Newman 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.

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• Aesthetics is for painting as Ornithology is for the birds.

• The Abuse of Beauty: Aesthetics and the Concept of Art, By Arthur Coleman Danto, p.1, Published by Open Court Publishing, 2003, ISBN 0812695402, 9780812695403

• Painting, like passion, is a living voice, which, when I hear it, I must let it speak, unfettered.

• American Abstract Expressionism of the 1950s An Illustrated Survey, p.250, Herskovic, Marika; nyschoolpress, 2003, ISBN 0-9677994-1-4

• 1. To us art is an adventure into an unknown world, which can be explored only by those willing to take the risks.

• 2. This world of imagination is fancy-free and violently opposed to common sense.

• 3. It is our function as artists to make the spectator see the world our way not his way.

• 4. We favor the simple expression of the complex thought. We are for the large shape because it has the impact of the unequivocal. We wish to reassert the picture plane. We are for flat forms because they destroy illusion and reveal truth.

• 5. It is a widely accepted notion among painters that it does not matter what one paints as long as it is well painted. (Rothko said this is the essence of academicism.)

• 6. There is no such thing as a good painting about nothing.

• 7. We assert that the subject is crucial and only that subject matter is valid which is tragic and timeless. That is why we profess spiritual kinship with primitive and archaic art.

• June 13, 1943 edition of the New York Times, brief manifesto: Barnett Newman with Mark Rothko and Adolph Gottlieb.

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• It is as I work that the work itself begins to have an effect on me. Just as I affect the canvas,so does the canvas affect me.

• The sublime is now.The image we produce is the self evident one of revelation,real and concrete,that can be understood by anyone who will look at it without the nostalgic glasses of history.

• The issue is one of scale, and scale is a felt thing.
  • On the size of his paintings

• My zip is a field that brings life to the other fields, just as the other fields bring life to this so-called line.
  • On the vertical stripe in many of his paintings

• We are creating images whose reality is self evident and which are devoid of the props and crutches that evoke associations with out-moded images, both sublime and beautiful.
• What is the explanation of the seemingly insane drive of man to be painter or poet if it is not an act of defiance against man' fall and an assertion that he return to the Adam of the Garden of Eden.For artists are the first men.