Barnett Newman - dear abstract artist

2024 Author: Leah Sherlock | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 05:25

Barnett Newman is the most prominent representative of the American division of abstract art. He was born in 1905 in New York. Another spelling of his last name is also common: Newman. In English sources, he is known as Barnett Newman.

How many paintings survived

By the way, the artist Barnett Newman destroyed absolutely all of his early paintings, about forty years of work were crossed out and, unfortunately, not at all with a wave of the brush. Therefore, today, speaking about the work of Newman, researchers are analyzing only the "surviving" paintings of the late period in the amount of 120 pieces, which fit within the time frame of almost twenty-five years.

Stages of formation

His parents were from Poland, Jews by origin. Young Barnett Newman studied painting at the Art Students League, also known as the Art Students League. This period of creativity is characterized by experiments in the style of Jackson Pollock's automatism, then Barnett Newman is carried away by graphics, and he plunges headlong into the plane of drawing with surreal tendencies. It is noteworthy that at the same time he created an art schooltogether with such figures of American painting of the twentieth century as Rothko, Motherwell and Baziotis.

It's time to open

The first solo exhibition, which presented exclusively paintings by Barnett Newman, was literally crushed by art critics in review articles. The result was a prolonged depression and reluctance to show his work to the public, which the artist was able to cope with only eight years later, when he decided to exhibit a retrospective of existing works. In addition, it was during this period that Newman destroyed all of his early works, so it is safe to say that he was not only a demanding brush master, but also vulnerable.

Barnett Newman's most famous works are paintings painted between 1947 and 1970. These are software canvases, named in a pathetic way, telling about the non-objective world exclusively with the movement of the brush. "The Commandment", "Unity", "The Abyss of Euclid", "Midnight Blue" and other works of the abstract artist today form private collections, including the collection of the artist's family, and are also exhibited in a number of US museums. The Museum of Modern Art in New York has perhaps the most complete collection covering various periods of the artist's life.

Newman Manner

Critics rank him among the representatives of American abstract expressionism. Such a prominent theorist as Clement Greenberg gave this painting a definition of field painting that literally stuck to it, which clearly shows the difference betweenthe large planes of Rothko and Newman created in a linear manner of automatism and sparkling with bright colors. "Painting of the field" does not hint at all at pastoral landscapes, but characterizes the love of the two masters for monochromatic large horizontal planes in their works. The researchers considered that this style has a pronounced philosophical overtones, and the borders of tones presented on the canvas do not really separate anything, which means that this is a painting that proclaims one of the main American principles - freedom.

Inspiration

Inspiration Barnett Newman (artist) drew from philosophical values. Back in 1947, he proclaimed the high goal of any art - not to be momentary, to turn to epochal concepts: life, death, man and nature. The complex names given to the canvases emphasized the palette of feelings and emotions that the artist tried to convey with just one color in a non-objective world. Unfortunately, art critics were able to appreciate this approach much later.

How to look at Newman's canvases

There is an unspoken rule among artists and art lovers: in order to get a general impression of the canvas, you need to move away from it at a distance equal to its height. A similar principle worked from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance and long after, but Barnett Newman insisted that his paintings should only be viewed from a close distance. What gives such an approach? The effect of immersing the viewer in the world of colorful fields. Later, the New York master even began to post instructions onhow to look at his paintings, right at the exhibitions.

Expensive purchase

What was not accepted by contemporaries until the late period of his work was appreciated later and especially in our time. The canvases of the American master of abstract art periodically pop up at the most prominent auctions, including the famous Sotheby’s auction. One of them, recently sold under the hammer, was valued at $30 million.

And at the same time, the artist's work does not evoke exclusively positive emotions for everyone. Onement VI by Barnett Newman has been called by some one of the most worthless and disgusting art objects ever to come up for auction. The price for the painting at the last sale in 2013 at Sotheby's was more than 43 million dollars, the work was a large-scale canvas filled with blue paint with a vertical, fairly even stripe.

Creation refers to the so-called lightning as opposed to horizontal "fields". General dimensions of the work - 2, 6 x 3 m.

Barnett Newman dedicated "Anna's Light" to his late mother. Strictly speaking, this thing is a horizontal canvas of impressive dimensions, filled with carmine red paint. In 2013, the “masterpiece” was also put up for auction and sold for $106 (!) million.

From the technical side, the canvas is remarkable in that Newman had to fight with the luminous power of red,taking extra brightness from the translucent white primed canvas. Several layers of red paint stripped the color of this quality and made it "deaf" and "mournful" as, according to the artist, it should be in this situation.