Top 19 Quotes & Sayings by Barnett Newman

Explore popular quotes and sayings by an American artist Barnett Newman.

Last updated on December 21, 2024.

Barnett Newman was an American artist. He is seen as one of the major figures in abstract expressionism and one of the foremost of the color field painters. His paintings are existential in tone and content, explicitly composed with the intention of communicating a sense of locality, presence, and contingency.

American - Artist | January 29, 1905 - July 4, 1970

Source: Wikipedia

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

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

Barnett Newman

Aesthetics is to artists as ornithology is to birds.

Barnett Newman

From the very beginning I felt that I would do a series.

Barnett Newman

Painting, like passion, is a living voice.

Barnett Newman

We are in the process of making the world, to a certain extent, in our own image.

Barnett Newman

Aesthetics is for the artist like ornithology is for the birds.

Barnett Newman

I know that it is impossible to talk about my work. And since it's impossible for me or anybody else to talk about my work, I feel I might as well talk about it.

Barnett Newman

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

Barnett Newman

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.

Barnett Newman

When painters feel the need to make a shift toward self-discovery, they turn to black and white for a time.

Barnett Newman

A painter is a choreographer of space.

Barnett Newman

It is our function as artists to make the spectator see the world our way not his way.

Barnett Newman

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

Barnett Newman

We have lost contact with man's natural desire for the exalted, for a concern with our relation to absolute emotions.

Barnett Newman

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

Barnett Newman

The impulse of modern art was this desire to destroy beauty.

Barnett Newman

What is the explanation of the seemingly insane drive of man to be painter and poet if it is not an act of defiance against mans fall and an assertion that he return to the Garden of Eden? For the artists are the first men.

Barnett Newman

Top 19 Quotes & Sayings by Barnett Newman

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