Barnett Newman

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Barnett Newman (born January 29, 1905 in New York , † July 4, 1970 ibid) was an American painter and sculptor. He was one of the main exponents of abstract expressionism and developed together with Mark Rothko , Clyfford Still and Robert Motherwell , the color field painting as well as the hard-edge painting . In addition, in his writings on art theory, he had a major influence on the development of painting in the 20th century, especially on the emergence of Minimal Art .

Life

Broken Obelisk by Barnett Newman

Newman was born Barnett Baruch Newman in New York to Russian-Jewish emigrants. He studied from 1919 to 1927 at the Art Students League of New York with Duncan Smith and John French Sloan and in 1923 at the City College of New York with a focus on philosophy . In 1927 he received the Bachelor of Arts . From 1931 to 1939 he worked as a temporary art teacher at New York high schools, after he had failed three times in his exam, which he passed in 1942. Active Newman painting turned only to 1937 and 1944/1945 through his was surreal - calligraphic drawings known. At this time he made a list of the desired representatives for the New Art Movement to be founded . In addition to Gottlieb, Rothko, Pollock, Hofmann, Baziotes and Gorky, he also named renegade Surrealists, and Wolfgang Paalen even appears twice. On the other hand, he added a question mark to Motherwell. In 1948 Barnett Newman published the essay The Sublime is Now and together with Mark Rothko , William Baziotes , Robert Motherwell and David Hare founded a school called Subjects of the Artists . At this time, Newman mainly painted abstract expressionist pictures (see also Black Paintings ). From 1948 onwards, Newman took this abstraction (also known as post-painterly ) to purely structurally oriented hard-edge painting, similar to the American painter and art theorist Ad Reinhardt a little later .

Newman had his first solo exhibition in 1950 with Betty Parsons in New York, after which he withdrew, however, due to the devastating reviews until 1958, in order to again present his works to the public in another solo exhibition at Bennington College in Vermont . In the same year he participated in the exhibition The New American Painting at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. In these works he took the reduction of form and color to the extreme by showing large-scale monochrome canvases that were occasionally traversed by contrasting lines. He remained true to this style until his death, for example with his last work Midnight Blue .

In 1951 Newman got into a debate with the respected art historian Erwin Panofsky of Princeton University . Panofsky wrote to ART News after the February 1951 issue of the magazine had presented a large-format red, abstract painting by Newman with the somewhat pompous title “Vir Heroicus Sublimus”, a critical letter to the editor who criticized the incorrect Latin ending sublimus (instead of sublimis). This led to a letter to the editor controversy with Newman, who, with the help of his friend Meyer Schapiro, was able to prove that sublimus was actually a permissible subsidiary form of sublimis. In truth, however, it was not about correct or incorrect Latin or misprints, but about discrediting the Princeton professor, who in his letter to the editor had openly admitted his difficulties with the appreciation of modern art (“I find it increasingly hard to keep up with contemporary art ”).

Barnett Newman was a participant in documenta II in 1959 and in the 4th documenta in Kassel in 1968 and in the São Paulo Biennale in 1965 . In 1964 Newman traveled to Europe and visited London, Basel, Colmar, Paris and Chartres. Two further trips to Europe between 1967 and 1968 took him to Ireland, France, Switzerland, the Netherlands and Spain. He inspired philosophers such as Jean-François Lyotard and Wolfgang Welsch to examine his art and to “re-animation” the sublime in aesthetics. In 1970 he died in New York from complications from a heart attack.

In 1982 his painting Who's Afraid of Red, Yellow and Blue in the New National Gallery in West Berlin was hit by a visitor and in 1997 his work Cathedra in the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam was cut up with a knife.

Works (selection)

literature

Testimonials

  • Barnett Newman: Writings and Interviews 1925–1970 , Gachnang and Springer, Bern / Berlin 1996

Monographs

  • Richard Shiff: Barnett Newman. A catalog raisonné , New Haven, Conn. (et al.), Yale University Press, 2004
  • Franz Meyer : Barnett Newman. The stations of the cross, lema sabachthani , Richter Verlag, Düsseldorf 2003
  • Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen (Hrsg.): Insights. The 20th Century in the Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Düsseldorf , Hatje Cantz Verlag, Ostfildern-Ruit 2000, ISBN 3-7757-0853-7
  • Armin Second , Maria Müller (Ed.): Barnett Newman. Pictures - sculptures - graphics ; (On the occasion of the exhibition Barnett Newman. Pictures - Sculptures - Graphics in the Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen , Düsseldorf, May 17 to August 10, 1997), Hatje Cantz, Ostfildern-Ruit 1999
  • Sebastian Egenhofer: The sublime is now. On the writings and conversations of Barnett Newmans , Fölbach, Koblenz 1996

Magazine articles

  • Matthew Baigell: Newman's "The Stations of the Cross: Lema Sabachthani", A Jewish Take , in: Art criticism , Vol. 19 (2004), 1
  • Martin Gayford: Being in a Field. I don't create space, I declare it, claimed Barnett Newman , in: Modern painters , Vol. 15 (2002), 3
  • Tim Sommer: In Search of the Absolute - Barnett Newman , in: Art , (2002), 11
  • Ulf Poschardt : The sublime is now. On the implosion of the time core in pictures by Barnett Newman , in: Kunstforum international , vol. 150 (2000)
  • Max Imdahl : Barnett Newman, 'Who's Afraid of Red, Yellow and Blue III' , in: Gesammelte Schriften , Vol. 1, pp. 244–270, Frankfurt 1996

Web links

Commons : Barnett Newman  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ s. Barnett Newman's notes, setting out his organizing thoughts on America's new art movement , include a handwritten list of the "men in the new movement." [Barnett Newman Foundation archive 18/103]
  2. ↑ Sandro Bocola: Timelines - The Art of Modernity: 1870-2000 . Taschen, Cologne 2001, ISBN 3-8228-1357-5 , pp. 94 .
  3. ^ Regine Prange: A Contemporaries Against Will: Panofsky's Witz and the Iconology of Modernity. In: Peter K. Klein and Regine Prange, (eds.), Zeitenspiegelung. On the importance of traditions in art and art history. Festschrift for Konrad Hoffmann on his 60th birthday on October 8, 1998. Dietrich Reimer, Berlin 1998, pp. 331–345; Beat Wyss, A misprint. In Erwin Panofsky. Contributions to the symposium Hamburg 1992 , Berlin 1994, p. 191ff.
personal data
SURNAME Newman, Barnett
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American painter and sculptor
DATE OF BIRTH January 29, 1905
PLACE OF BIRTH New York City
DATE OF DEATH 4th July 1970
Place of death New York City