Barnett Newman

Barnett Newman was an American painter and a central figure of Abstract Expressionism who developed one of the most distinctive and philosophically ambitious bodies of work in postwar American art. Born in New York City in 1905 to Polish-Jewish immigrant parents, he studied at the Art Students League and City College of New York while also working in his family's clothing business. After a period of artistic crisis in the late 1930s and early 1940s, he emerged in 1948 with a new visual language that would define his career: the 'zip,' a vertical stripe of paint — sometimes abrupt, sometimes feathered — dividing large fields of pure, saturated color.\n\nNewman's first mature work, Onement I (1948), is considered his breakthrough: a small canvas of cadmium red dark bisected by a single stripe of lighter red, it announced a new approach to the picture plane as a field of presence rather than a representation of space. His subsequent large-scale canvases — among them the Vir Heroicus Sublimis (1950–51), a nearly six-meter-wide expanse of cadmium red — were intended to be experienced at close range, enveloping the viewer in color and inducing what Newman called the 'sublime': an encounter with the overwhelming, the ineffable, and the transcendent. He was deeply influenced by Jewish theology and the Kabbalistic concept of the tzimtzum — God's self-contraction to make space for creation.\n\nNewman's work was little appreciated by the public and most critics for much of his career, but his influence on younger artists — particularly the Minimalists and Color Field painters who came of age in the 1960s — was enormous. His late series Stations of the Cross (1958–66), fourteen black-and-white paintings meditating on suffering and human endurance, is among the most spiritually searching bodies of work in modern American art. He died in New York in 1970.