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Barnett Newman Quotes
1905–1970 United States
Barnett Newman (29 January 1905 – 4 July 1970) 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.
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17 quotes
Surrealism, is interested in a dream world that will penetrate the human psyche.
All artists whether primitive or sophisticated, have been involved in the handling of chaos.
Aesthetics is for painting as Ornithology is for the birds.
Painting, like passion, is a living voice, which, when I hear it, I must let it speak, unfettered.
Let us, rather, like the Greek writers, tear the tragedy to shreds.
I think every man is an artist.
..the terror to expect. Hiroshima showed it to us. The terror has indeed become as real as life.
The problem of a painting is physical and metaphysical the same as I think life is physical and metaphysical.
To us art is an adventure into an unknown world, which can be explored only by those willing to take the risks.
The failure of abstract painting is due to the confusion that exists in the understanding of primitive art [as well as that] concerning the nature of abstraction.
My idea was that with an automatic move you could create a world [Newman's comment on his series small mixed media works, 1944].
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.
This world of imagination is fancy-free and violently opposed to common sense.
It is our function as artists to make the spectator see the world our way not his way.
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.'
We feel that our pictures demonstrate our aesthetic beliefs, some of which we, therefore, list
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..
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