Barnett Newman Quotes (25 quotes) | Quotes of famous people

Quote of Newman (1952), as cited in: C. Greig Crysler, ‎Stephen Cairns, ‎Hilde Heynen (2012). The SAGE Handbook of Architectural Theory. p. 123
1950 - 1960

“.. [by making his work 'Onement', in 1948].. from then on I had to give up any relation to nature, as seen [by himself till then]. That doesn't mean that I think my things are mathematical or removed from life. By 'nature' I mean something very specific. I think that some abstractions - for example Kandinsky's - are really nature paintings. The triangles and the spheres or circles could be bottles. They could be trees, or buildings. I think that in 'Euclydean Abyss' and 'Onement' I removed myself from nature. But I did not remove myself from life.”

Barnett Newman

interview, April 1965, edited for broadcasting by the BBC first published in 'The Listener', Aug. 1972; as quoted in Interviews with American Artists, by David Sylvester; Chatto & Windus, London 2001, p. 37
1960 - 1970, Interview with David Sylvester 1. Spring 1965

“The failure of abstract painting is due to the confusion that exists in the understanding of primitive art [as well as that] concerning the nature of abstraction.”

Barnett Newman

Source: 1940 - 1950, The Plasmic Image 1. 1943-1945, p. 139

Barnett Newman Quotes about the world

“My idea was that with an automatic move you could create a world [Newman's comment on his series small mixed media works, 1944].”

Barnett Newman

1940 - 1950
Source: Abstract Expressionism, David Anfam, Thames and Hudson Ltd., London 1990, p. 112

“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 center, who were very conscious of the Impressionists and Post-Impressionists revolutions, who fell for this propaganda [to strive for a pure national American art]. 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 favor of the museum directors. It is time artists forgot about success..”

Barnett Newman

Quote of 1942; in Barnett Newman', by Thomas B. Hess, museum of Modern art, New York 1971; as cited in Abstract Expressionism: Creators and Critics, ed. Clifford Ross, Abrahams Publishers, New York 1990, p. 124-125
1940 - 1950

“Surrealism, is interested in a dream world that will penetrate the human psyche.”

Barnett Newman

Source: 1940 - 1950, The Plasmic Image 1. 1943-1945, p. 140

“.. 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..”

Barnett Newman

Source: 1940 - 1950, The Plasmic Image 2. 1943-1945, p. 126

“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.”

Barnett Newman

Source: 1940 - 1950, The Plasmic Image 2. 1943-1945, p. 125

Barnett Newman Quotes

“I think every man is an artist.”

Barnett Newman

Quote of Barnett Newman in: American Artists, a 1966 TV Show on New York's educational television network; as cited by Caroline A. Jones (1998) in Machine in the Studio: Constructing the Postwar American Artist. p. 84
1960 - 1970
Context: Does a man want to be an artist? Is it like he wants to be a priest, or a lawyer? Is the artist that kind of profession? Or, as I once actually wrote, I think every man is an artist. An artist is a matter of my birthright... what I'd like to be is a man in the world. And I paint in order to do a painting, not to... make myself into a so-called artist... I'm impelled to do something, to say something.

“All artists whether primitive or sophisticated, have been involved in the handling of chaos.”

Barnett Newman

Source: 1940 - 1950, The Plasmic Image 1. 1943-1945, p. 139

“Let us, rather, like the Greek writers, tear the tragedy to shreds.”

Barnett Newman

in Newman's essay of 1945, as quoted in: Abstract Expressionism, Davind Anfam, Thames and Hudson Ltd., London 1990, p. 20
1940 - 1950

“.. the terror to expect. Hiroshima showed it to us. The terror has indeed become as real as life.”

Barnett Newman

Quote from Newman's essay of 1945, as cited in: Abstract Expressionism, Davind Anfam, Thames and Hudson Ltd., London 1990, p. 20
1940 - 1950

“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

in 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
1960 - 1970

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

Barnett Newman

Barnett Newman, in The New American Painting, exhibition catalogue May 28 - Sept 8. 1959; republished in: Barnett Newman, John Philip O'Neill. (1992). Barnett Newman: Selected Writings and Interviews. p. 160
1950 - 1960

“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

Source: 1940 - 1950, The Plasmic Image 1. 1943-1945, p. 139

“Consequently if our work embodies these beliefs, it must insult anyone who is spiritually attuned to interior decoration; pictures for the home…”

Barnett Newman

Barnett Newman, Mark Rothko and Adolph Gottlieb in thier common 'Manifesto', New York Times, 13 June 13, 1943; republished in: Stella Paul (1999), Twentieth-Century Art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. p. 159
1940 - 1950