Barnett Newman Quotes

10 Sourced Quotes

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.

Barnett Newman
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.

Barnett Newman
The human in language is literature, not communication. Man's first cry was a song. Man's first address to a neighbor was a cry of power and solemn weakness, not a request for a drink of water.

Barnett Newman
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.

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

Barnett Newman
Instead of making cathedrals out of Christ, man, or "life," we are making it out of ourselves, out of our own feelings.

Barnett Newman
Aesthetics is to me what ornithology is to birds.

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

Barnett Newman
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.

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

Barnett Newman