Barnett Newman quotes

Barnett Newman was an American artist, widely recognized as a leading figure of abstract expressionism. His large-scale, color-field paintings and "zip" motifs significantly shaped the course of modern art in the twentieth century. He inspired generations of artists to explore the expressive potential of pure color and simple form. Here are 34 of his quotes:

Painting, like passion, is a living voice, which, when I hear it, I must let it speak, unfettered.

Barnett Newman

The problem of a painting is physical and metaphysical, the same as I think life is physical and metaphysical.

Barnett Newman

The subject matter of creation is chaos. The present feeling seems to be that the artist is concerned with form, color, and spatial arrangement. This objective approach to art reduces it to a kind of ornament. The whole attitude of abstract painting, for example, has been such that it has reduced painting to an ornamental art whereby the picture surface is broken up in geometrical fashion into a new kind of design-image. It is a decorative art built on a slogan of purism where the attempt is made for an unworldly statement...

Barnett Newman

Genesis I: 'The earth was without form and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And God said, let there be light, and there was light.'

Barnett Newman

Sylvester: When was it that you first did a painting with one or two simple lines, horizontal or vertical, across the surface? Newman: I would say that it began in '46- '47. In those years, whenever I did a painting with one or two elements in it, it did always have a sense of an atmospheric background, I suppose - with the exception of a painting which I called Euclidian Abyss, where the background is black and has some of the white coming through, but there's no true atmosphere.

Barnett Newman

We are freeing ourselves of the impediments of memory, association, nostalgia, legend, myth, or what have you, that have been the devices of western European painting. Instead of making 'cathedrals' out of Christ, man, or 'life', we are making it out of ourselves, out of our own feelings..

Barnett Newman

My idea was that with an automatic move you could create a world [Newman's comment on his series small mixed media works, 1944].

Barnett Newman

..the terror to expect. Hiroshima showed it to us. The terror has indeed become as real as life.

Barnett Newman

Short quote of Newman about his first 'Zip' paintings, c. 1946-1948.

Barnett Newman

The new painter owes the abstract artist a debt for giving him his language, but the new painting is concerned with a new type of abstract thought... He [the new painter] is declaring that the art of Western Europe is voluptuous art first, an intellectual art by accident. He is reversing the situation by declaring that art is an expression of the mind first and whatever sensuous elements are involved are incidental to that expression. The new painter is therefore the true revolutionary, the real leader who is placing the artist's function on its rightful plane of the philosopher and the pure scientist who is exploring the world of ideas, not the world of the senses.... so the artist is today giving us a vision of the world of truth in terms of visual symbols.

Barnett Newman

I prefer to leave the paintings to speak for themselves.

Barnett Newman

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

In 1940, some of us woke up to find ourselves without hope – to find that painting did not really exist. Or to coin a modern phrase, painting.... was dead. The awakening had a exaltation of a revolution. It was that awakening that inspired the aspiration – the high purpose – quite a different thing from ambition – to start from scratch, to paint as if painting never existed before. It was that naked revolutionary moment that made painters out of painters.

Barnett Newman

.. the present painter is not concerned with the process. Herein lies the difference between them and the Surrealists. At the same time in his desire, in his will to set down the ordered truth.... it can be said that the artist like a true creator is delving into chaos. It is precisely this that makes him an artist for the Creator in creating the world began with the same material, for the artist tries to wrest truth from the void..

Barnett Newman

The present painter is concerned not with his own feelings or with the mystery of his own personality but with the penetration into the world-mystery. His imagination is therefore attempting to dig into metaphysical secrets.

Barnett Newman

All artists whether primitive or sophisticated, have been involved in the handling of chaos.

Barnett Newman

Let us, rather, like the Greek writers, tear the tragedy to shreds.

Barnett Newman

Surrealism, is interested in a dream world that will penetrate the human psyche.

Barnett Newman

The present painter is concerned not with his own feelings or with the mystery of his own personality but with the penetration into the world mystery. His imagination is therefore attempting to dig into metaphysical secrets. To that extend his art is concerned with the sublime. It is a religious art which through symbols will catch the basic truth of life which is its sense of tragedy.

Barnett Newman

The present painter can be said to work with chaos not only in the sense that he is handling the chaos of the blank picture plane, but also in that he is handling the chaos of form. In trying to go beyond the visible and the known world he is working with forms that are unknown even to him. He is therefore engaged in a true act of discovery in the creation of new forms and symbols that will have the living quality of creation.

Barnett Newman

Any art worthy of its name should address 'life', 'man', 'nature', 'death' and 'tragedy'.

Barnett Newman

It was not the inexperienced art public that became American Scenists. It was the artists themselves, a highly sophisticated group, thoroughly familiar with the art work and the art traditions of the world, who had flocked to Paris to participate in the great cultural center, who were very conscious of the Impressionists and Post-Impressionists revolutions, who fell for this propaganda [to strive for a pure national American art]. It is upon them that responsibility falls. Their support of this reactionary philistinism is an inexcusable betrayal.. .It is time for the artists to wake up and re-examine their aesthetic foundations; to rid themselves of the millstone that has made art in America an expensive picture postcard-factory.. .It is time that artists refused isolationist money, repudiated the art dealers, the favor of the museum directors. It is time artists forgot about success..

Barnett Newman