Newman, Barnett, 1905–70, American artist, b. New York City. A member of the New York school, Newman was one of the first to reject conventional notions of spatial composition in art. Often using monumental scale, he took abstraction to its farther reaches. In his severe Stations of the Cross series (1958–66), he divided raw canvas vertically at intervals by black or white bands of various widths. In other paintings (e.g., Who's Afraid of Red, Yellow, and Blue IV?, 1969–70) Newman used large areas of saturated, sometimes primary color punctuated by narrow vertical bands of other colors that he called "zips" as the source of visual and emotional impact. Newman became known as a major painter in the last decade of his life, and his work was an important influence on the practitioners of color-field painting color-field painting, abstract art movement that originated in the 1960s. Coming after the abstract expressionism of the 1950s, color-field painting represents a sharp change from the earlier movement.
..... Click the link for more information. . He also created a number of monumental abstract sculptures.

Bibliography

See study by T. B. Hess (1971).

Newman, Barnett

orig. Baruch Newman

(born Jan. 29, 1905, New York, N.Y., U.S.—died July 3, 1970, New York City) U.S. painter. Born to Polish immigrant parents, he studied at the Art Students League and City College. With Robert Motherwell and Mark Rothko, he cofounded the school called “Subject of the Artist” (1948), which held open sessions and lectures for other artists. He developed a style of mystical abstraction and achieved his breakthrough with Onement I (1948), in which a single stripe (or “zip”) of orange vertically bisects a field of dark red. This austerely geometric style became his trademark and had a great influence on artists such as Ad Reinhardt and Frank Stella.

Newman, Barnett (1905–70) painter, sculptor; born in New York City. He studied at the Art Students League (1922–26), and joined his father's clothing manufacturing business (1927–37). He lived in New York City, and by 1944 began his series of cosmic landscapes using stripes, circles, and color divisions, as seen in Genetic Moment (1947). He was one of the founders, along with William Baziotes, Mark Rothko and Robert Motherwell, of an art school, Subjects of the Artist, New York (1947). A leader of color-field painting, as seen in Onement I (1948), he stressed the use of color and mythology. His sculptures have a classical composure, as in Broken Obelisk (1967).