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Barnett Newman (January 29, 1905 – July 4,
1970) was an United States|American artist. He is
seen as one of the major figures in abstract
expressionism and one of the foremost of the color
field painters.

Newman was born in New York City, the son of
Russia|Russian Jewish immigrants. He studied
philosophy at the City College of New York and
worked in his father's business manufacturing
clothing. From the 1930s he made paintings, said
to be in an expressionist style, but eventually
destroyed all these works.

In the 1940s he first worked in a surrealist mode
before developing his mature style. This is
characterised by areas of color separated by thin
vertical lines, or "zips" as Newman called them.
In the first works featuring zips, the color
fields are variegated, but later the colors are
pure and flat. Newman himself thought that he
reached his fully mature style with the Onement
series (from 1948).

The zip remained a constant feature of Newman's
work throughout his life. In some paintings of the
1950s, such as The Wild, which is eight feet tall
by one and a half inches wide, the zip is all
there is to the work. Newman also made a few
sculptures which are essentially three-dimensional
zips.

Although Newman's paintings appear to be purely
abstract, and many of them were originally
untitled, the names he later gave them hinted at
specific subjects being addressed, often with a
Jewish theme. Two paintings from the early 1950s,
for example, are called Adam and Eve (see Adam and
Eve), and there is also Uriel (1954) and Abraham
(1949), a very dark painting, which as well as
being the name of a biblical patriach, was also
the name of Newman's father, who had died in 1947.

The Stations of the Cross series of black and
white paintings (1958-64), begun shortly after
Newman had recovered from a myocardial
infarction|heart attack, is usually regarded as
the peak of his achievement. The series is
subtitled "Lema sabachthani" - "why have you
forsaken me" - words spoken by Christ on the
cross. Newman saw these words as having universal
significance in his own time. The series has also
been seen an a memorial to the victims of the
holocaust.

Newman's late works, such as the Who's Afraid of
Red, Yellow and Blue series, use vibrant, pure
colors, often on very large canvases - Anna's
Light (1968), named in memory of his mother who
had died in 1965, is his largest work,
twenty-eight feet wide by nine feet tall. Newman
also worked on shaped canvases late in life, with
Chartres (1969), for example, being triangular,
and returned to sculpture, making a small number
of sleek pieces in steel. These later works are
executed in acrylic paint rather than the oil
paint of earlier pieces. Of his sculptures, Broken
Obelisk is the most monumental and perhaps
best-known, depicting an inverted obelisk whose
point balances on the apex of a pyramid.

Newman also made a series of lithographs, the 18
Cantos (1963-64) which, according to Newman, are
meant to be evocotive of music. He also made a
small number of etchings.

Newman is generally classified as an abstract
expressionist on account of his working in New
York City in the 1950s, associating with other
artists of the group and developing an abstract
style which owed little or nothing to European
art. However, his rejection of the expressive
brushwork employed by other abstract
expressionists such as Clyfford Still and Mark
Rothko, and his use of hard-edged areas of flat
color, can be seen as a precursor to post
painterly abstraction and the
minimalism|minimalist works of artists such as
Frank Stella.

Newman was unappreciated as an artist for much of
his life, being overlooked in favour of more
colorful characters such as Jackson Pollock. The
influential critic Clement Greenberg wrote
enthusiastically about him, but it was not until
the end of his life that he began to be taken
really seriously. He was, however, an important
influence on many younger painters.

Newman died in New York City of a heart attack in
1970.

==External links==
*http://www.barnettnewman.org/ The Barnett Newman
Foundation - 
*http://www.tate.org.uk/modern/exhibitions/newman/
Newman exhibition at the Tate Gallery
*http://209.235.192.90/exhibitions/exhibits/newman
/index.html Newman exhibition at the Philadelphia
Museum of Art
*http://www.tate.org.uk/servlet/ArtistWorks?cgroup
id=999999961&artistid=1699&page=1&sole=y&collab=y&
attr=y&sort=default&tabview=worklist Newman's page
at the Tate Gallery (inclues images of the 18
Cantos and other works)
*http://www.sfmoma.org/collections/recent_acquisit
ions/ma_coll_newman.html Zim Zum I, Newman's last
major sculpture