Barnett Newman: Paint

Barnett Newman was American artist. Explore interesting quotes on paint.
Barnett Newman: 50   quotes 0   likes

“.. [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

Life , Mathematics , Nature , Thinking

“Sylvester: When was it that you first did a painting with one or two simple lines, horizontal or vertical, across the surface?
Newman: I would say that it began in '46— '47. In those years, whenever I did a painting with one or two elements in it, it did always have a sense of an atmospheric background, I suppose — with the exception of a painting which I called Euclidian Abyss, where the background is black and has some of the white coming through, but there's no true atmosphere.”

Barnett Newman

Source: 1960 - 1970, Interview with David Sylvester 2. Spring 1965, p. 255

Sense , Painting

“The problem of a painting is physical and metaphysical the same as I think life is physical and metaphysical.”

Barnett Newman

Source: 1960 - 1970, Interview with David Sylvester 2. Spring 1965, p. 259

Life , Problem , Thinking , Painting

“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..”

Barnett Newman

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

Life , Feeling , Nostalgia , Memory

“Aesthetics is for painting as Ornithology is for the birds.”

Barnett Newman

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

Bird , Painting

“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

Art , Failure , Understanding , Nature

“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.”

Barnett Newman

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

Truth , World , Art , Idea

“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

Hope , Painting , Dead

“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

Passion , Painting

“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

Art , Color , Feeling , Fashion