BARNETT NEWMAN

Portrait of an iconic artist.

Art historian and journalist Newman (unrelated to the artist) draws on interviews, oral histories, and archival sources for a comprehensive biography of abstract expressionist Barnett Newman (1905-1970): educator, poet, political activist, New York mayoral candidate (who ran against Fiorello La Guardia), and, for the last 25 years of his life, a groundbreaking artist. “A vivid human being with a ravenous appetite for experience and agency,” Barney—as he was known—dived into all of his projects with characteristic “hyperbole, bravo, and brio.” Art occupied him throughout his life: A desultory high school student, he was encouraged by his mother to take classes at the Art Students League; he taught art as a substitute teacher in the New York City public schools, trying and failing to get certification as an art teacher. He wrote about and ruminated on art, whose “ultimate” subject matter, he proclaimed, was “the defense of human dignity.” Beginning in 1945, with his wife’s enthusiastic support, he devoted himself exclusively to creating artworks of “restrained passion” meant to reveal “the nature of self.” His own self story was continually under construction, a mythology in progress. With an insatiable need for recognition and praise, from his first exhibition at the Betty Parsons Gallery in 1950, he sought to establish himself “as not simply a presence among his peers, but as sui generis, a pioneer, a general in the avant garde.” He could be “prickly, verbose and combative,” and also warm and charming. Newman reveals the genesis, details, and reception of Barney’s paintings and sculptures, including Anna’s Light, his largest painting, exhibited in 1968, and the “remarkable, gravity-defying, over-25-foot sculpture” Broken Obelisk, grounding the work not only in Barney’s life, but in the energetic postwar art world.

An impressive, nuanced study.