Barnett Newman is the most prominent representative of the American division of abstract art. He was born in 1905 in New York. Another spelling of his last name is also common: Newman. In English sources, he is known as Barnett Newman.
How many paintings are preserved
By the way, the artist Barnett Newman destroyed absolutely all of his early canvases, about forty years of work were crossed out and, unfortunately, not at all with a wave of the brush. Therefore, today, speaking of Newman’s work, researchers dismantle exclusively “surviving” paintings of the late period in the amount of 120 pieces, which fit into the time frame of almost twenty-five years.
Stages of formation
His parents were from Poland, Jews of origin. Painting young Barnett Newman studied at the Art Students League, also known as the Art Student League. This period of creativity is characterized by experiments in the style of automatism of Jackson Pollock, then Barnett Newman carries away the graphics, and he headlong goes into the plane of the picture with surrealistic tendencies. It is noteworthy that at the same time he created an art school together with such figures of American painting of the twentieth century as Rothko, Motherwell and Baziotis.
It's time to open
The first solo exhibition, which featured exclusively paintings by Barnett Newman, was literally defeated by art critics in review articles. The result was a prolonged depression and reluctance to show their work to the public, which the artist could cope with only eight years later, when he decided to put a retrospective of the existing works. In addition, it was during that period that Newman destroyed all his early works, so it is safe to say that he was not only a demanding master of the brush, but also vulnerable.
Barnett Newman's most famous works are paintings painted between 1947 and 1970. These are software canvases, named in a pathetic vein, telling about a meaningless world exclusively by the movement of the brush. The Commandment, Unity, The Abyss of Euclid, Midnight Blue and other works of the abstract artist today make up private collections, including the collection of the artist’s family, and are also exhibited in a number of museums in the USA. The Museum of Modern Art in New York possesses perhaps the most complete collection, covering various periods of the artist's life.
Newman manner
Critics rank him among the representatives of American abstract expressionism. Such a prominent theoretician as Clement Greenberg gave this painting a literally sticking definition of field painting, which clearly shows the difference between the large planes of Rothko and Newman sparkling in bright colors. "Field Painting" does not hint at pastoral landscapes at all, but characterizes the love of two masters for monophonic large horizontal planes in their works. Researchers considered that this style has a pronounced philosophical implication, and the boundaries of the tones presented on the canvas do not actually separate anything, which means that this painting proclaims one of the main American principles - freedom.
Inspiration
Barnett Newman (artist) took inspiration from philosophical values. Back in 1947, he proclaimed the lofty goal of any art - not to be momentary, to turn to epoch-making concepts: life, death, man and nature. The complex names given to the canvases emphasized the palette of feelings and emotions that the artist tried to convey with only one color in a meaningless world. Unfortunately, art critics were able to appreciate this approach much later.
How to look at the paintings of Newman
There is an unwritten rule among artists and art lovers: in order to make a general impression of the canvas, you must move away from it by a distance equal to its height. A similar principle worked from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance and much after, but Barnett Newman insisted that his paintings should be viewed exclusively from close range. What gives this approach? The effect of immersing the viewer in the world of colorful fields. Later, the New York master even began to post instructions on how to look at his canvases, right at the exhibitions.
Dear purchase
What was not accepted by contemporaries until the late period of his work was appreciated later and especially in our time. The canvases of the American master of abstractionism periodically pop up at the most visible auctions, including the famous Sotheby's auction. One of them, which went under the hammer recently, was estimated at $ 30 million.
And at the same time, the work of the artist does not cause exclusively positive emotions for everyone. The work of Barnett Newman Onement VI is called by some to be one of the most worthless and disgusting art objects that have ever been put up for auction. The price for the painting at the last sale in 2013 at Sotheby's amounted to more than $ 43 million, but the work was a large-scale canvas, flooded with blue paint with a vertical, fairly even strip.
Creation is referred to as the so-called lightning as opposed to horizontal “fields”. The total size of the work is 2.6 x 3 m.
Barnett Newman dedicated the Light of Anne to his late mother. Strictly speaking, this thing is a horizontal canvas of impressive dimensions, covered with carmine-red paint. In 2013, the “masterpiece” was also auctioned and went under the hammer for an amount of 106 (!) Million dollars.
On the technical side, the canvas is noteworthy in that Newman had to fight with the luminiferous power of red, taking on additional brightness from a translucent white primed canvas. Several layers of red paint deprived the color of this quality and made it “deaf” and “mournful”, such as, according to the artist, it should be in this situation.