Artist Birthday: Barnett Newman
Newman’s earliest paintings share the organic/biomorphic abstract forms of Rothko’s early works from the 1940s. By 1946, however, his forms began to be more abstract and shed their biomorphic nature. In 1948 he produced Onement I, which he considered the beginning of his mature style: a unified color field interrupted by a vertical line (or “zip,” as Newman called it).
Artist birthday for January 29th: Barnett Newman (1905–1970, US)
Barnett Newman was part of the “first generation” of Abstract Expressionism, America’s first home-grown modernism movement.
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Barnett Newman, Onement, 1948, oil and oil on masking tape canvas , 27.2" x 16.2" (69.2 x 41.2 cm). Image courtesy of the Museum of Modern Art, New York © 2025 Barnett Newman Foundation / Artist Rights Society (ARS), New York (MOMA-P2172nwars) |
The vertical element varied from irregular bands to straight, hard-edged strips produced by using masking tape. The effect is a breaking of the domination of the color field with visual blips that advance and recede in colors of contrasting hues and values.
The structural symmetry of Onement I, and subsequent works, eliminated the problem of composition by simply coming up with a painting that “looked right” to him. By reducing the composition to almost zero, Newman forced the viewer to think of the work -- rather than being a physical art object -- more in terms of ideas.
Onement comes from the word atonement, an important concept for Jews during Yom Kippur. Relating his painting to his faith in God, he equated his painting with the omnipresence of God, thus indicating that the layers of meaning in his paintings were infinite.
Many of the pioneer European modernist artists fled to New York when World War II (1939–1945) in Europe broke out. This exposed American artists hungry for change to a wide variety of abstraction and Surrealism. American artists, disillusioned by what they perceived as the failure of traditional values and systems in the war, sought new ways of expression.
The American artists who were interested in modernism rejected any realistic or nationalistic tendencies, as well as the sterile formalism of such abstractionists as Piet Mondrian (1872–1944). They were drawn to forms of abstraction that revealed individual expression, especially to the surrealist work of Matta (1911–2000), who was in New York from 1939 to 1948. Matta introduced the New York artists to the idea of psychic automatism, creating from the subconscious. This would enable American artists to explore new forms.
By the mid-1940s, the leading artists of the New York school were exhibiting in galleries there. The Museum of Modern Art began acquiring their works, and in 1958 held a show called "The New American Painting." This show traveled to eight European countries, thus establishing for Abstract Expressionism (or, the New York School) an international reputation as a premier modernism movement. In 1948 several of the artists founded an informal school called "Subjects of the Artist." They were united in their belief that abstract art could express timeless, universal themes.
Despite the common belief among Abstract Expressionists about the superior value of spontaneous creation, randomness and abstraction, Abstract Expressionism cannot be defined by a single style. For convenience's sake, the movement is characterized by two distinct tendencies. The gestural, or action painters were concerned in a variety of ways with the unique and spontaneous touch of the artist, and the emphasis was on the texture of the paint. The color field painters were concerned with an abstract statement in terms of large, unified color shapes or areas.
Newman’s mature work was by far the most radical in its reductiveness and denial of painterly surface (except for the work of Ad Reinhardt 1913–1967). His work did not receive the acclaim the work of Jackson Pollock (1912–1956), Willem de Kooning (1904–1997), or Mark Rothko (1903–1970) had; however, Newman produced important writing on the work of his contemporaries in Abstract Expressionism.
Newman was born in Manhattan to Jewish immigrants from Russian Poland who had migrated to the United States in 1900. In 1922 he took drawing classes at the Art Students League and met Adolph Gottlieb (1903–1974). In the years up to 1945 he had various teaching jobs in drawing and printmaking. In 1943, with Rothko, Gottlieb, and Milton Avery (1885–1965), he mounted a counter-exhibition to protest the conservative juried shows at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. He had produced a body of work of drawings and watercolors, which he first exhibited in New York in 1944. At that time he destroyed most of his earliest works. His first painting on canvas was executed in 1945.
This image is supplemental to the following Davis program: Discovering Art History 4E: Chapter 17 Art from the Fifties to the Present, 17.3 – Color Field Painting, Barnett Newman
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