Barnett Newman Quotations

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

I prefer to leave the paintings to speak for themselves.

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.

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

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

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

The impulse of modern art is the desire to destroy beauty.

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.

Painting, like passion, is a living voice.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

Aesthetics is to artists as ornithology is to birds.

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

A painter is a choreographer of space.

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