Barnett Newman Quotes

Man's first expression, like his first dream, was an aesthetic one. Speech was a poetic outcry rather than a demand for communication. Original man, shouting his consonants, did so in yells of awe and anger at his tragic state, at his own self-awareness and at his own helplessness before the void.

Sculpture is what you bump into when you back up to see a painting.

Aesthetics is to artists as ornithology is to birds.

[I]t was [Barnett] Newman who made the famously wry remark, “Aesthetics is for the artist as ornithology is for the birds,

Nevertheless, we react to one a bit differently than we do to Rothko’s hovering panels or Barnett Newman’s stripes, though Whistler does approach their extremity of abstraction; part of our pleasure lies in recognizing bridges and buildings in the mist, and in sensing the damp riverine silence, the glimmering metropolitan presence. … The painting - a single blurred stripe of urban shore - is additionally daring in that the sky and sea are no shade of blue, but, instead, an improbable, pervasive cobalt green. Human vision is here taken to its limits, and modern painting, as a set of sensations realized in paint, is achieved.

One of the great artists of this period, Barnett Newman, wrote about his response and that of his fellow artists: “We are freeing ourselves of the impediments of memory, association, nostalgia, legend, myth, or what have you, that have been devices of Western European painting.” In their attempt to

Anonymity is the truest heroism .

The image we produce is the self evident one of revelation..that can be understood by anyone who will look at it without the nostalgic glasses of history

the Inka style was severe, abstract, stripped down to geometric forms—startlingly contemporary, in fact. (According to the Peruvian critic César Paternosto, such major twentieth-century painters as Josef Albers, Barnett Newman, and Mark Rothko were inspired by Inka art.)

I Know" Last night, in the water where Barnett Newman’s line disappeared, I drowned. I swam to the surface, like a black, dark-blue luminous blossom. It’s terrible to be a flower. The world stopped. Mute, like velvet, I opened, perhaps for good. Before, with Tomaž Brejc, we talked about the mystique of finance, about the eye, the triangle, about God, possible readings of chance, of Slovenian history and destiny. Don’t touch me. I’m the greatest capital just as I am. I’m the water in which the destiny of the world takes place for us. I’m dizzy. I don’t understand. I know. Tonight, when I made love, I reported. I’m a black cube now, like marble or granite-from-the-other-world, a bird standing, with yellow feet and an immense yellow beak, my black feathers shining: now the eminent church dignitary, that is: they all wanted me, the blossom. I’m the pure dark blossom standing still on the surface. Untouchable and untouched. Terrifying.