Barnett Newman
Barnett Newman
Barnett Newmanwas 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...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionPainter
Date of Birth29 January 1905
CityNew York City, NY
CountryUnited States of America
From the very beginning I felt that I would do a series,
The impulse of modern art is the desire to destroy beauty.
Painting, like passion, is a living voice, which, when I hear it, I must let it speak, unfettered.
I know that it is impossible to talk about my work. And since it's impossible for me or anybody else to talk about my work, I feel I might as well talk about it.
It is our function as artists to make the spectator see the world our way not his way.
A painter is a choreographer of space.
When painters feel the need to make a shift toward self-discovery, they turn to black and white for a time.
I prefer to leave the paintings to speak for themselves.
Sculpture is what you bump into when you back up to see a painting.
Aesthetics is to artists as ornithology is to birds.
Any art worthy of its name should address 'life', 'man', 'nature', 'death' and 'tragedy'.
I hope that my painting has the impact of giving someone, as it did me, the feeling of his own totality, of his own separateness, of his own individuality.
Man's first expression, like his first dream, was an aesthetic one. Speech was a poetic outcry rather than a demand for communication. Original man, shouting his consonants, did so in yells of awe and anger at his tragic state, at his own self-awareness and at his own helplessness before the void.
The problem of a painting is physical and metaphysical, the same as I think life is physical and metaphysical.