Barnett Newman

• Born: January 29, 1905
• Birthplace: New York, New York
• Died: July 4, 1970
• Place of death: New York, New York

Artist, educator, and author

Associated with the New York School, Newman created paintings, sculpture, and prints in an abstract style.

Areas of achievement: Art; education; literature

Early Life

Barnett Newman was born in New York City to Abraham and Anna Newman, immigrants from Łomża, Poland, on January 29, 1905. Three more children, George, Gertrude, and Sarah, completed the family. Barnett Newman’s father established a manufacturing business, making it possible for the family to move uptown to Belmont Avenue, a then-fashionable neighborhood of the Bronx. Newman graduated from DeWitt Clinton High School in 1923 and from City College of New York in 1927. The stock-market crash of 1929 decimated his father’s business.

Newman attended classes at the Art Students League and was involved with a group of artists that included Milton Avery, Mark Rothko, Saul Berliner, Adolph Gottlieb, Alexander Borodulin, and others who participated in drawing and poetry readings and wrote brave manifestos about art and cultural living. None of Newman’s paintings from this time survived. He attempted to become a public school art teacher, but he was given a substitute position, teaching art appreciation at Grover Cleveland High School in Queens, where he met Annalee Greenhouse, a graduate of Hunter College. She was born in the British Mandate (now Israel). She and Newman married on June 30, 1936. Both continued working as substitute teachers until Newman began part-time teaching at the Washington Irving Adult Center, and Annalee became a full-time teacher, later head of her department. Newman returned to painting in the mid-1940’s. In 1947, one of his paintings was included in an exhibit at the Art Institute of Chicago. Its purchase by Connecticut collectors was his first sale.

Life’s Work

Newman worked in a surrealist style through the early 1940’s. He considered his 1948 Onement I a breakthrough painting. It was the first of his Onement series, in which he separated areas of color with slender vertical lines that he called “zips.” The “zip” remained an essential facet of his work. His first solo exhibit at Manhattan’s Betty Parsons Gallery in 1950 opened to other artists’ admiration but scathing critical reviews. Still, Newman’s paintings were included in exhibits at the Hawthorne Memorial Gallery in Provincetown, Massachusetts, and the Walker Gallery, Minneapolis, Minnesota. His second solo exhibit at Betty Parsons was again lauded by artists but poorly reviewed by critics.

When he was excluded from the Museum of Modern Art exhibit Fifteen Americans, which featured his friends Jackson Pollock, Rothko, and Clifford Still, Newman was so discouraged that he completely withdrew from gallery activity, not exhibiting again until 1955, when Horizon Light was shown at the Betty Parsons Gallery Tenth Anniversary Exhibition. His eight-foot Vir Heroicus Sublimis, included in American Painting, 1945-1957 at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, was cruelly assailed by critics. Newman suffered his first heart attack that year. However, he was able to paint during his recovery. He viewed his black-and-white Stations of the Cross series, often considered the apex of his work, as a memorial to the victims of the Holocaust. His later series, Who’s Afraid of Red, Yellow, and Blue?, used pure vibrant colors. His paintings were included in the Museum of Modern Art’s traveling exhibition New American Painting, which toured Europe before opening in New York.

In October, 1962, the critical tide turned in his favor when paintings by Newman and Willem De Kooning were hung together in the exhibit Founding Fathers at the Allan Stone Gallery. Major exhibits and honors followed. His sculptures, prints, and paintings became increasingly well received, both nationally and internationally; by 1959 he was exhibiting on three continents simultaneously. His work was chosen for the U.S. Pavilion at the Eighth São Paulo Biennial. He continued to be active in printmaking, painting, and sculpture until his death of a heart attack on July 4, 1970.

Significance

Newman is considered to be an abstract expressionist because of his association with the New York School during the 1940’s and 1950’s, a time when powerful abstract images exploded upon the art world as essentially American, owing little, if anything, to European art. However, his dedication to flat color and hard-edge canvases led the way toward minimalism and color field painting as well as postpainterly abstraction. He was a dedicated teacher and a prolific writer. His enthusiastic encouragement of younger artists made him an important influence on many significant American painters of the mid- and late twentieth century.

Bibliography

Auping, Michael. Declaring Space: Mark Rothko, Barnett Newman, Lucio Fontana, Yves Kline. New York: Prestel, 2007. Illustrated with color photographs of each artist’s significant works, Auping’s book chronicles each of these artists making his own specific mark and representing a different stage in the development of the abstract painting of the 1950’s and 1960’s.

Ho, Melissa, ed. Reconsidering Barnett Newman. Philadelphia: Philadelphia Museum of Art, 2005. Provides an understanding of the scholarship on the art of Newman, including perspectives on his accomplishments as an innovator and a discussion of his themes, techniques, and significant works.

Newman, Barnett. Selected Writings and Interviews by Barnett Newman. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992. Newman’s writings make it easy to understand the artist’s unique place in twentieth century art and culture.

Temkin, Anne. Barnett Newman. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2002. Written as a catalog for a Newman retrospective, this 248-page book interprets Newman’s work, describes the life and times of the artist, and lists principles that informed his work. The book includes a photographic chronology.