An abstract painter and lifelong anarchist who specialized in intense color-field paintings, Barnett Newman was born in New York on this date in 1905. His best-known works are large canvases painted in flat yet vibrant colors with long lines — he called them “zips” — crossing the canvases and defining their space. Some of his works were named with Jewish or biblical referents such as “Adam and Eve,” “Uriel,” and “Abraham,” and his “Stations of the Cross” series (1958-66), subtitled in Hebrew, “Lema sabakhthani” (“Why have you forsaken me?”), has been interpreted as memorializing the victims of the Holocaust. Newman was acclaimed by the influential critic Clement Greenberg, but failed to achieve much notice until the end of his life. He destroyed many of his early paintings and produced only some 120 paintings between 1945 and his death in 1970. Yet his influence upon modern art — his impact upon what might legitimately be called a painting — went deep. Newman’s works are in the collections of the Whitney Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the National Gallery of Art, the Tate Gallery in London, the Hirschhorn, and numerous museums around the world.
“I hope that my painting has the impact of giving someone, as it did me, the feeling of his own totality, of his own separateness, of his own individuality.” —Barnett Newman