Barnett Newman - expensive abstractionist

Barnett Newman - the most prominent representative of the American division of abstract art. He was born in 1905 in New York. Another spelling of his name is also common: Newman. In English-language sources he is known as Barnett Newman.

How many pictures have been preserved

By the way, the artist Barnett Newman destroyed absolutely all of his early paintings, about forty years of work were crossed out and, unfortunately, not at all with the brush stroke. Therefore, today, speaking of Newman's work, the investigators deal exclusively with the "surviving" canvases of the late period in the quantity of 120 pieces, meeting the time frame almost twenty-five years.

Stages of formation

His parents were from Poland, Jews of origin. Painting the young Barnett Newman was trained in the Art Students League, also known as the Art Student League. This period of creativity is characterized by experiments in the style of automatism of Jackson Pollock, then Barnett Newman carries away the graphics, and he with his head goes into the plane of drawing with surrealistic tendencies. It is noteworthy that at the same time he created an art school in conjunction with such figures of American painting of the twentieth century as Rothko, Motherwell and Basiotis.

It's time to open up

The first solo exhibition, where only Barnett Newman's paintings were presented, was literally smashed by art critics in review articles. The result was a prolonged depression and unwillingness to show their work to the public, to cope with what the artist was able to only eight years later, when he decided to put a retrospective of the existing works. In addition, it was during this period that Newman destroyed all of his early works, so that it is safe to say that he was not only a demanding master of the brush, but also vulnerable.

The most famous works of Barnett Newman are paintings written between 1947 and 1970. These are the program canvases, named in a pathetic vein, which tell of the non-objective world solely by the movement of the brush. "Commandment", "Unity", "Euclid's Eruption", "Midnight Blue" and other works of abstractionist today constitute private collections, including the collection of the artist's family, and are also exhibited in a number of US museums. The Museum of Modern Art in New York has, perhaps, the most complete collection, covering different periods of the artist's life.

Newman's Manner

Critics consider him to be representatives of American abstract expressionism. Such a prominent theoretician as Clement Greenberg gave this painting a definition of field painting that glued to it, which clearly shows the difference between the lines created in the linear manner and the sparkling bright colors of the large planes of Rothko and Newman. "Field painting" hints not at pastoral landscapes, but characterizes the love of two masters for monotonous large horizontal planes in their works. Researchers have found that this style has a pronounced philosophical overtones, and the tones on the canvas do not really divide anything, which means that this painting, which proclaims one of the main American principles, is freedom.

Inspiration

Inspiration Barnett Newman (artist) drew from philosophical magnitudes. Back in 1947, he proclaimed the high goal of any art - not to be momentary, to address epochal concepts: life, death, man and nature. The complex names given to the canvases emphasized the palette of feelings and emotions that the artist was trying to convey with color alone in a non-objective world. Unfortunately, art critics were able to evaluate this approach much later.

How to look at Newman's canvases

In the environment of artists and art lovers there is an unspoken rule: in order to make a general impression of the canvas, it is necessary to move away from it at a distance equal to its height. A similar principle operated from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance and much after, but Barnett Newman insisted that his paintings should be viewed only from a close distance. What does this approach give? The effect of immersing the viewer in the world of colorful fields. Later, the New York master even began to post instructions on how to look at his paintings, right at the shows.

Expensive purchase

What was not accepted by contemporaries until the late period of his work was appreciated later and especially in our time. Cloths of the American master of abstraction periodically pop up in the most prominent auction, including the famous auction Sotheby's. One of them, which went under the hammer recently, was estimated at $ 30 million.

And at the same time the creativity of the artist does not all cause exclusively positive emotions. The work of Barnett Newman Onement VI by some is called one of the most useless and disgusting art objects ever entered for auction. The price for the painting at the last sale in 2013 at Sotheby's was more than 43 million dollars, the work itself was a large canvas, filled with blue paint with a vertical, fairly even strip. Creation is referred to as so-called lightning as opposed to horizontal "fields". The overall dimensions of the work are 2.6 x 3 m.

Barnett Newman "The Light of Anna" dedicated to her deceased mother. Strictly speaking, this thing is a horizontal canvas of impressive size, filled with carmine-red paint. In 2013, the "masterpiece" was also put up for auction and went under the hammer for an amount of 106 (!) Million dollars. On the technical side, the canvas is notable for the fact that Newman had to deal with the luminous power of red color taking extra brightness from the translucent white primed canvas. Several layers of red paint deprived the color of this quality and made it "deaf" and "mourning", such as in the artist's opinion, he should be in this situation.