Barnett Newman was the most original and influential artist to emerge in the United States in the decade following World War II. Following his "breakthrough" in 1948 in Onement I - a small painting with a red-orange vertical stripe centered on a red-brown ground - Newman developed his art organically and intensely, expressing his themes of creation and creativity over the next two decades in an astonishing number of true masterworks.
This abundantly illustrated volume, by the late Harold Rosenberg, dean of American art critics, brings together for the first time reproductions in color of almost every one of Newman's paintings, as well as most of the drawings, watercolors, works in mixed media, sculpture, etchings, lithographs, and architecture. Rosenberg's interpretive essay emphasizes the spirituality and metaphysical quality of Newman's art, and it shows how Newman's personae as citizen, polemicist, man of impeccable taste, and metaphysician molded his artistic personality and led to the extraordinary series The Stations of the Cross and to the superb final paintings.
More than most other American artists Newman influenced the course of art in the 1960s and 1970s. His enduring achievement - perhaps the greatest monument to artistic integrity ever created in the United States - is presented chronologically in this volume, medium by medium. Newman's statement of his life and art is fully assembled here, and his radiant paintings and colors shine forth from almost every page in a blaze of transcendent light.