Barnett Newman: Concern

Barnett Newman was American artist. Explore interesting quotes on concern.

Barnett Newman: 50 quotes0 likes

“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.”

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

“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.”

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

“[Concerning 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, Clifford Still, and Mark Rothko, 1947]”

1940 - 1950
Source: the catalogue of the 'Ideographic Picture' show, New York, 1947

“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: 1940 - 1950, The Plasmic Image 2. 1943-1945, p. 124

“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: 1940 - 1950, The Plasmic Image 2. 1943-1945, p. 127

“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…”

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

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