Barnett Newman Quotes about Art

Barnett Newman was a famous American abstract painter associated with the Abstraction Expressionism and Color Field art movements. He is best known for his minimal abstract paintings. Famous Barnett Newman artworks include “Onement I”, “Who’s Afraid of Red, Yellow and Blue III”, “Vir Heroicus Sublimis”, “Cathedra”, “Black Fire I”, “Anna’s Light”, “The Station of the Cross – First Station” and “Dionysius”.

Mini biography: Born Baruch Newman on the 29th of January, 1905 in New York City, New York, United States of America. His mother was Anna and his father was Abraham Newman. Newman married Annalee Greenhouse in 1936. The artist died on the 4th of July, 1970 in New York City, New York, USA at the age of 73.

List of Famous Barnett Newman Art Quotes

Aesthetics is to artists as ornithology is to the birds. Barnett Newman

The present painter is concerned not with his own feelings or with the mystery of his own personality but with the penetration into the world-mystery. His imagination is therefore attempting to dig into metaphysical secrets. Barnett Newman

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

Let us, rather, like the Greek writers, tear the tragedy to shreds. Barnett Newman

What is the explanation of the seemingly insane drive of man to be painter and poet if it is not an act of defiance against man’s fall and an assertion that he return to the Garden of Eden? For the artists are the first men. Barnett Newman

We are freeing ourselves of the impediments of memory, association, nostalgia, legend, myth, or what have you, that have been the devices of western European painting. Instead of making ‘cathedrals’ out of Christ, man, or ‘life’, we are making it out of ourselves, out of our own feelings. Barnett Newman

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

In 1940, some of us woke up to find ourselves without hope – to find that painting did not really exist. Or to coin a modern phrase, painting.. was dead. The awakening had a exaltation of a revolution. It was that awakening that inspired the aspiration – the high purpose – quite a different thing from ambition – to start from scratch, to paint as if painting never existed before. It was that naked revolutionary moment that made painters out of painters. Barnett Newman

The subject matter of creation is chaos. The present feeling seems to be that the artist is concerned with form, color, and spatial arrangement. This objective approach to art reduces it to a kind of ornament. The whole attitude of abstract painting, for example, has been such that it has reduced painting to an ornamental art whereby the picture surface is broken up in geometrical fashion into a new kind of design-image. It is a decorative art built on a slogan of purism where the attempt is made for an unworldly statement. Barnett Newman

Barnett Newman Abstract Painting

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Related or similar popular artists and celebrities include: Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, Robert Ryman, and other Famous American Artists.