Barnett Newman

American, 1905–1970

BiographyBorn in New York in 1905, Newman attended classes the Art Students League during high school and college. He received his B.A. in philosophy from the City College of New York in 1927, worked for two years in his father's clothing manufacturing firm, and then as a substitute art teacher in the public school system from 1931 to 1940. In 1939-40, Newman stopped painting, and studied botany and ornithology. He began making art again in 1944-45, after destroying all previous artwork. Works of this period are partly or largely abstract paintings (and especially drawings) of biomorphic forms; their titles, such as Genesis--The Break (1946; New York, DIA Center for the Arts), refer to notions of origin and creation. At this time Newman was particularly close to Mark Rothko and Adolph Gottlieb, exhibiting with them and other Abstract Expressionist painters at the Betty Parsons Gallery.

Newman began his mature work in 1948 with Onement I. From then on, his painting would consist of fields of color divided by one or more vertical "zips." Newman also wrote a great deal on modern painting, his own work, natural phenonema, and on what was then called "primitive" art. Many of the later paintings have biblical titles, such as Covenant (1949; Washington, D.C., Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution), and the extraordinary group of fourteen paintings comprising The Stations of the Cross (1958-56; Washington, D.C., National Gallery of Art). Barnett Newman died in New York in 1970.