BARNETT NEWMAN, his artist quotes + biography of the American painter – Zip painting art
Barnett Newman (1905 -1970), American artist and early Color Field artist – famous for his ‘Zips’ painting art (series ‘Onement’) with his art quotes and biography notes. Newman, with Gottlieb, Clyfford Still and Mark Rothko represented the American artists of the ‘Sublime’ in modern art. Some of Newmann’s painting were destroyed by public, like in Who’s afraid of Red, Yellow or Blue, IV’ in Amsterdam. At the bottom some useful art links for Barnett Newman. – the editor.
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Newman: ‘Who’s afraid of Red, Yellow, Blue IV’, 1969-70 |
Barnett Newman, his artist quotes on Zip painting and American modern art
– 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. To that extend his art is concerned with the sublime. It is a religious art which through symbols will catch the basic truth of life which is its sense of tragedy.
* source, famous American people life quotes: ‘The Plasmic Image’ 1943-1945 as quoted in “Abstract Expressionism: Creators and Critics”, ed. Clifford Ross, Abrahams Publishers, New York 1990, pp. 124-125. (American abstract artist Barnett Newman – his quotes on life & creating modern art; Color Field Painting / New York)
– It was not the inexperienced art public that became American Scenists. It was the artists themselves, a highly sophisticated group, thoroughly familiar with the art work and the art traditions of the world, who had flocked to Paris to participate in the great cultural centre, who were very conscious of the Impressionists and Post-Impressionists revolutions, who fell for this propaganda (for a pure national American art, fh). It is upon them that responsibility falls. Their support of this reactionary philistinism is an inexcusable betrayal… …It is time for the artists to wake up and re-examine their aesthetic foundations; to rid themselves of the millstone that has made art in America an expensive picture postcard-factory… …It is time that artists refused isolationist money, repudiated the art dealers, the favour of the museum directors. It is time artists forgot about success….(1942, on the idea of an independent American art, fh) .
* source, famous American people life quotes: ’’Barnett Newman’’, by Thomas B. Hess, museum of Modern art, New York 1971; as quoted in “Abstract Expressionism: Creators and Critics”, p. 124-125, ed. Clifford Ross, Abrahams Publishers, New York 1990.
– The present painter can be said to work with chaos not only in the sense that he is handling the chaos of the blank picture plane, but also in that he is handling the chaos of form. In trying to go beyond the visible and the known world he is working with forms that are unknown even to him. He is therefore engaged in a true act of discovery in the creation of new forms and symbols that will have the living quality of creation.
* source, famous American people life quotes: ‘The Plasmic Image’ 1943-1945 as quoted in “Abstract Expressionism: Creators and Critics”, ed. Clifford Ross, Abrahams Publishers, New York 1990, p. 125.
– My idea was that with an automatic move you could create a world (comment in 1944, on his series small mixed media works, fh).
* source, famous American people life quotes: “Abstract Expressionism”, David Anfam, Thames and Hudson Ltd., London 1990, p. 112.
– …the present painter is not concerned with the process. Herein lies the difference between them and the Surrealists. At the same time in his desire, in his will to set down the ordered truth… …it can be said that the artist like a true creator is delving into chaos. It is precisely this that makes him an artist for the Creator in creating the world began with the same material, for the artist tries to wrest truth from the void….
* source, famous American people life quotes: ‘The Plasmic Image’ 1943-1945 as quoted in “Abstract Expressionism: Creators and Critics”, ed. Clifford Ross, Abrahams Publishers, New York 1990, p. 126.
– The new painter owes the abstract artist a debt for giving him his language, but the new painting is concerned with a new type of abstract thought… …He (the new painter) is declaring that the art of Western Europe is voluptuous art first, an intellectual art by accident. He is reversing the situation by declaring that art is an expression of the mind first and whatever sensuous elements are involved are incidental to that expression. The new painter is therefore the true revolutionary, the real leader who is placing the artist’s function on its rightful plane of the philosopher and the pure scientist who is exploring the world of ideas, not the world of the senses… …so the artist is today giving us a vision of the world of truth in terms of visual symbols.
* source, famous American people life quotes: ‘The Plasmic Image’ 1943-1945 as quoted in “Abstract Expressionism: Creators and Critics”, ed. Clifford Ross, Abrahams Publishers, New York 1990, p. 127.
– 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…
* source, famous American people life quotes: ‘The Plasmic Image’ 1943-1945 as quoted in “Abstract Expressionism: Creators and Critics”, ed. Clifford Ross, Abrahams Publishers, New York 1990, p. 127.
– …the terror to expect. Hiroshima showed it to us. The terror has indeed become as real as life.
* source, famous American people life quotes: his essay. 1945, as quoted in: Abstract Expressionisme, Davind Anfam, Thames and Hudson Ltd., London 1990, p. 20
– Let us, rather, like the Greek writers, tear the tragedy to shreds.
* source, famous American people life quotes: his essay, 1945, as quoted in: Abstract Expressionisme, Davind Anfam, Thames and Hudson Ltd., London 1990, p. 20. (famous German woman artist Gabriele Munter/ Münter; woman artist quotes on creating expressive landscape paintings in Murnau and the history of Blaue Reiter / Blue Rider)
– (all painters) working in what is known as the abstract style;… …(the abstract form) is a living thing… …a carrier of the awesome feelings he felt before the unknowable (common quote of Barnett Newman, Cilfford Still, and Rothko, 1947, fh)
* source, famous American people life quotes: the catalogue of the ‘Ideographic Picture’ show, New York, 1947.
– Genesis I: ‘The earth was without form and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And God said, let there be light, and there was light.’
* source, famous American people life quotes: a comment on his first Zip paintings, 1946-1948.
– In 1940 some of us woke up to find ourselves without hope – to find that painting did not really exist.
* source, famous American people life quotes: “Abstract Expressionism”, David Anfam, Thames and Hudson Ltd., London 1990, p. 112.
– The ideograph suggests by means of symbols, figures, or hieroglyphics the idea of an object without expressing its name.
* source, famous American people life quotes: his catalogue-essay for the show ’Ideographic Picture’, 1947.
– The self – terrible and constant – is for me the subject matter of painting.
* source, famous American people life quotes: “Abstract Expressionism”, David Anfam, Thames and Hudson Ltd., London 1990, p. 145.
– They (his paintings, fh) are specific, and separate embodiment’s of feeling, to be experienced, each picture for itself (1950, fh).
* source, famous American people life quotes: “Abstract Expressionism”, David Anfam, Thames and Hudson Ltd., London, 1990, p. 152.
– Each (his lithography suite 18 ‘Cantos’, fh) is separate. Each can stand by itself. But its fullest meaning, it seems to me, is when it is seen together wit the others.
* source, famous American people life quotes: “Abstract Expressionism”, David Anfam, Thames and Hudson Ltd., London, 1990.
– The invention of beauty by the Greeks, that is, their postulate of beauty as an ideal, has been the bugbear of European art and European aesthetic philosophies. Man’s natural desire in the arts to express his relation to the absolute became (so, fh) identified and confused with the absolutism of perfect creations… … so that the European artist has been continually involved in the moral struggle between notions of beauty and the desire for sublimity.
* source, famous American people life quotes: ‘6 opinions on What is sublime in art’ 1946; as quoted in “Abstract Expressionism: Creators and Critics”, ed. Clifford Ross, Abrahams Publishers, New York 1990, p. 127. (American abstract artist Barnett Newman – his quotes on life & creating modern art; Color Field Painting / New York)
– So strong is the grip of the ‘rhetoric’ of exaltation as an attitude in the large context of the European culture pattern that the elements of sublimity in the revolution we know as modern art, exists in its effort and energy to escape the pattern, rather than in the realization of a new experience. Picasso’s effort may be sublime but there is no doubt that his work is a preoccupation with the question of what is the nature of beauty. Even Mondrian in his attempt to destroy the Renaissance picture by his insistence on pure subject matter, succeeded only in raising the white plane and the right angle into a realm of sublimity, where the sublime paradoxically becomes an absolute of perfect sensations… …The failure of European art to achieve the sublime is due to this blind desire to exist inside the reality of sensation (the objective world, whether distorted or pure) and to build an art within a framework of pure plasticity (the Greek ideal of beauty…).
* source, famous American people life quotes: ‘6 opinions on What is sublime in art’ 1946; as quoted in “Abstract Expressionism: Creators and Critics”, ed. Clifford Ross, Abrahams Publishers, New York 1990, p. 129.
– The question that now arise (in the U.S. 1946, fh) is how, if we are living in a time without a legend or mythos (and Europe doesn’t, fh) that can be called sublime, if we refuse to admit any exaltation in pure relations, if we refuse to live in the abstract, how can we be creating a sublime art?
* source, famous American people life quotes: ‘6 opinions on What is sublime in art’ 1946; as quoted in “Abstract Expressionism: Creators and Critics”, ed. Clifford Ross, Abrahams Publishers, New York 1990, pp. 129-130
– It is precisely this death image, the grip of geometry that has to be confronted. In a world of geometry, geometry itself has become our moral crisis. And it will not be resolved by jazzed-up kicks but only by the answer of no geometry of any kind. Unless we face up to it and discover a new image based on new principles, there is no hope for freedom.
* source, famous American people life quotes: “The New American Painting”, by Alfred Barr, The Museum of modern Art , New York 1959; as quoted in “Abstract Expressionism: Creators and Critics”, ed. Clifford Ross, Abrahams Publishers, New York 1990, pp. 129-130.
– I realize that my paintings have no link with, nor any basis in, the art of World War 1 with its principles of geometry that tie it into the nineteenth century. To reject Cubism or Purism, whether it is Picasso’s or Mondrian’s, only to end up with the collage scheme of free associations forms, whether it is Miró’s or Malevich’s, is to be caught in the same geometric trap. Only an art free from any kind of the geometry principles of World War 1, only an art of no geometry can be a new beginning.
Nor can I find it by building a wall of lights; nor in the dead infinity of silence, nor in the painting performance, as if it were an instrument of pure energy full of a hollow biologic rhetoric.
Painting, like passion, is a living voice, which, when I hear it, I must let speak, unfettered. .
* source, famous American people life quotes: “The New American Painting”, by Alfred Barr, The Museum of modern Art , New York 1959; as quoted in “Abstract Expressionism: Creators and Critics”, ed. Clifford Ross, Abrahams Publishers, New York 1990, p. 131.
– …I like your phrase that I am concerned with the immediate and the particular without using a general formula for the painting process… …My concern is with the fullness that comes from emotion, not with its initial explosion, fh), or its emotional fall-out, or the glow of its expenditure. The fact is, I am an intuitive painter, a direct painter. I have never worked from sketches, never planned a painting, never ‘thought out’ a painting. I start each painting as if I had never painted before.
* source, famous American people life quotes: an interview with Dorothy Seckler, ‘Art in America’ Vol. 50, no 2, 1962; as quoted in “Abstract Expressionism: Creators and Critics”, ed. Clifford Ross, Abrahams Publishers, New York 1990, p. 131.
– In 1951, at the time of my second one-man show, I was asked by a viewer how long it took me to paint Vir Heroicus Sublimis. I explained that it took a second but the second took a lifetime.
The concept and execution have to work together at the exact, same moment. Impulse and control have to join. This is obviously unscientific and illogical since theoretically one follows the other. But physically this is what has to happen. This is the paradox of the miraculous event. Somehow the two things get joined. .
* source, famous American people life quotes: an interview with Dorothy Seckler, ‘Art in America’ Vol. 50, no 2, 1962; as quoted in “Abstract Expressionism: Creators and Critics”, ed. Clifford Ross, Abrahams Publishers, New York 1990, p. 133.
– I discovered (in the 19 mid-40’s, fh) that one does not destroy the void by building patterns or manipulating space or creating new organisms. A canvas full of rhetorical strokes may be full but the fullness may be just hollow energy, just as a scintillating wall of colors may be full of colors but have no color. My canvases are full not because they are full of colors but because color makes the fullness. The fullness therefore is what I am involved in.
* source, famous American people life quotes: an interview with Dorothy Seckler, ‘Art in America’ Vol. 50, no 2, 1962; as quoted in “Abstract Expressionism: Creators and Critics”, ed. Clifford Ross, Abrahams Publishers, New York 1990, p. 133.
(art quotations)
– I don’t manipulate or play with space. I declare it. It is by my declaration that my paintings become full. All of my paintings have a top and a bottom. They are never divided; nor are they confined or constricted; nor do they jump out of their seize… …For me space is where I can feel all four horizons, not just the horizon in front of me and in back of me because then the experience of space exists only as volume… …Unfortunately, painting is still involved in the notion of space as architectural volumes – intricate small volumes, medium volumes, or pulsating total volumes. I am glad that by 1945 I got out of it. .
* source, famous American people life quotes: an interview with Dorothy Seckler, ‘Art in America’ Vol. 50, no 2, 1962; as quoted in “Abstract Expressionism: Creators and Critics”, ed. Clifford Ross, Abrahams Publishers, New York 1990, p. 133. (American abstract artist Barnett Newman – his quotes on life & creating modern art; Color Field Painting / New York)
– An anecdote can be subjective and internal as well as of the external world so that the expression of biography of self or the intoxicated moment of glowing ecstasy must in the end also become anecdotal.
All such painting is essentially episodic, which means it calls for a sequel. This must happen if a painting does not give a sensation of wholeness or fulfilment. That is why I have no interest in the episodic or ecstatic, however abstract. The excitement always ends at the brink and leaves the subject, so to speak, hanging there like the girl in ‘The perils of Pauline’. The next painting repeats the excitement, in a kind of ritual. One expects the girl to be saved finally, but she is again left hanging on the brink and so on and on. This is the weakness of the ecstatic and the episodic. It is an endless search for a statement of personality that never takes place. The truly passionate exists on a different level.
* source, famous American people life quotes: an interview with Dorothy Seckler, ‘Art in America’ Vol. 50, no 2, 1962; as quoted in “Abstract Expressionism: Creators and Critics”, ed. Clifford Ross, Abrahams Publishers, New York 1990, p. 134.
– I prefer to talk on the practical or technical level. I don’t mean making drawings, although I have always done a lot of them. I mean the drawing that exists in my painting. Yet no writer on art has ever confronted that issue. I am always referred to in relation to my color. Yet I know that if I have made a contribution, it is primarily in my drawing. The impressionists changed the way of seeing the world through their kind of drawing; the cubists saw the world anew in their drawing, and I hope that I have contributed a new way of seeing through drawing. Instead of using outlines, instead of making shapes or setting off spaces, my drawing declares the space. Instead of working with the remnants of space I work with the whole space.
* source, famous American people life quotes: an interview with Dorothy Seckler, ‘Art in America’ Vol. 50, no 2, 1962; as quoted in “Abstract Expressionism: Creators and Critics”, ed. Clifford Ross, Abrahams Publishers, New York 1990, p. 133.
– Almost 15 years ago Harold Rosenberg challenged me to explain what one of my paintings could possibly mean to the world. My answer was that if he and others could read it properly it would mean the end of all state capitalism and totalitarianism. That answer still goes.
* source, famous American people life quotes: an interview with Dorothy Seckler, ‘Art in America’ Vol. 50, no 2, 1962; as quoted in “Abstract Expressionism: Creators and Critics”, ed. Clifford Ross, Abrahams Publishers, New York 1990, p. 135.
– The history of these works can best be approached if one considers that they have never been successfully pigeonholed… …This was never a movement in the conventional sense of a ‘style’, but a collection of individual voices. That is why to talk of the movement as being dead is ridiculous. With us, only the individual artist can die or continue to grow and live…(questioning the idea of the ‘New York School’ as an real art movement, fh) .
* source, famous American people life quotes: an interview with Dorothy Seckler, ‘Art in America’ Vol. 50, no 2, 1962; as quoted in “Abstract Expressionism: Creators and Critics”, ed. Clifford Ross, Abrahams Publishers, New York 1990, p. 135.
– ‘Lema Sabachthani’ – why? Why did you forsake me? To what purpose? Why? This is the Passion. This outcry of Jesus. Not the terrible walk up the Via Dooorosa, but the question that has no answer) .
* source, famous American people life quotes: a statement in 1958, on the occasion of presenting his series paintings ‘Stations of the Cross’; as quoted in ‘Abstract Expressionism’, Barbara Hess, Taschen, Köln, 2006, p. 86.
– I began these paintings (‘Stations of the Cross, Lema Sabachthani’, fh) eight year ago (1958, fh) the way I begin all my paintings – by painting. It was while painting them that it came to me (it was the fourth one) that I had something particular here. It was at that moment that the intensity that I felt the paintings had, made me think of them as the Stations of the Cross. It is as I work that the work itself begins to have an effect on me. Just as I affect the canvas, so does the canvas affects me (1966, fh).
* source, famous American people life quotes: ‘Abstract Expressionism’, Barbara Hess, Taschen, Köln, 2006, p. 86. (American abstract artist Barnett Newman – his quotes on life & creating modern art; Color Field Painting / New York)
– Pollock was more than a great ‘picture-maker’. His work was his lofty statement in the grand dialogue of human passion, rich with sensitivity and sensibility. But it must not be forgotten that moving through the work is that revolutionary core that gave it life).
* source, famous American people life quotes: ‘Jackson Pollock: An Artists’ Symposium’, ‘ARTnews Vol. 66’, no. 2 April 1967; as quoted in “Abstract Expressionism: Creators and Critics”, ed. Clifford Ross, Abrahams Publishers, New York 1990, p. 147.
– 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.
* source, famous American people life quotes: ‘Jackson Pollock: An Artists’ Symposium’, ‘ARTnews Vol. 66’, no. 2 April 1967; as quoted in “Abstract Expressionism: Creators and Critics”, ed. Clifford Ross, Abrahams Publishers, New York 1990, pp. 147-148.
– The problem of a painting is physical and metaphysical the same as I think life is physical and metaphysical; it’s to me no different really than one’s feeling a relation to meeting another person… …it’s possible to say that just as two people meeting react to each other physically and metaphysically in relation to things that are possible that nobody knows about, I think that’s true in relation to one’s meeting q work of art.
* source, famous American people life quotes: a conversation with David Sylvester, New York March 1967, as quoted in ‘Concerning Barnett Newmann’, ‘The Listener’, London 10 August 1972, p. 169 -172.
art-links for more biography information on the American artist Barnett Newman, about life and Zip art
* biography of great American master artist Barnett Newmann, on Wikipedia
* American great master artist Barnett Newman on the Tate website, with images of his Color field art
