Introduction
A great proponent of abstract art, American artist Barnett Newman (1905-1970) was largely unappreciated in his time. But towards the end of his artistic career Newman gained recognition and acceptance, influencing younger painters and anticipating the post-painterly abstraction and minimalist movement, although he is generally classified overall as an abstract expressionist.
Barnett Newman was born as son of Russian Jewish immigrants in New York City and educated at the City College of New York. Newman began creating expressionist paintings in his late twenties and early thirties but destroyed these early specimens. He began his public career as a critic and catalogue writer. In the late 1940s he was an exhibiting artist at the Betty Parsons Gallery with his first solo show held in 1950. It was in these post-war years that Newman along with artists; Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, Clyfford Still and Adolph Gottlieb developed the new style to be classified as abstract art and abstract expressionism.
Exhibitions and Critical Reviews
The ‘Onement’ series beginning in 1948 displayed Newman’s newly developed mature style that consisted of colour fields separated by vertical lines which he called “zips”. This characteristic would define all his creative abstract art endeavours. All Newman’s works cannot be fully appreciated while viewing from afar. Newman himself suggested that visitors to a particular exhibition should stand really close to his paintings so they could take in all the nuances of colour and structure and be filled with a sense of extreme self-awareness.
Some of Newman’s famous paintings have been titled with Jewish themes including; ‘Abraham’ (1949), ‘Adam’ (1952) and ‘Uriel’ (1954). These have led him to be classified as a spiritual artist and Jewish mystic. Beginning with his first solo exhibition in 1950, responses to his work had largely been negative and by 1955 Newman had sold very few paintings, but Newman’s greatest achievement in abstract art would follow soon. Following a heart attack in 1957, the recuperating Newman completed three paintings that would appear in ‘The New American Painting Exhibition’ held by the Museum of Modern Art, New York. This exhibition was extremely successful and went on to also be shown in Europe. By 1959 many major museums had purchased Newman’s work and the exhibition ‘Barnett Newman: A Selection 1946-1952’ though plagued by negative reviews had attracted and begun to influence a younger breed of New York artists.
Achieving Worldwide Recognition – His Major Works
The series of black and white paintings from 1958 to 1966 entitled ‘The Stations of the Cross’ would become considered to be Newman’s greatest achievement and one that finally earned him the worldwide recognition he was looking for. Subtitled ‘Lama Sabachthani’, the words spoken by Christ on the cross asking why God had forsaken him, Newman considered these words to have universal significance and some see this series of paintings as a memorial to the holocaust victims.
Newman’s abstract art is typically created in a large scale:
- The Wild, One of his paintings from the early 1950s is eight feet tall while being only one and half inches wide with the “zip” being the only feature in it.
- ‘Who’s Afraid of Red, Yellow and Blue’ series (1966) displays a change in Newman’s painting technique with the use of vibrant and pure colours, a characteristic of his later paintings.
- ‘Broken Obelisk’ (1967) - his most monumental sculpture - depicted the point of an inverted obelisk balancing on the apex of a pyramid, versions of which were installed in galleries in New York and Washington D.C.
- ‘Anna’s Light’ (1968) created in memory of his mother who died in 1965 was his largest painting, 28 feet wide and 9 feet tall.
Unlike fellow abstract art expressionists such as Mark Rothko and Clyfford Still, Barnett Newman employed hard edged areas of flat colour, rejecting vibrant brushwork, thereby being linked to the later minimalist trends. The different classifications allotted to Newman only hint at the variety and richness of his artistic expression. He was only beginning to experience American and worldwide recognition of his art when he died of heart attack in 1970 at the age of 63.
