Barnett Newman

Barnett Newman (1905-1970), American painter associated with the Abstract Expressionists and a prominent exponent of colour-field painting. He is best known for his simplified canvases in which a large area of colour—a colour field—is broken by one or more vertical lines. In his early works of the 1940s, Newman attempted to reject contemporary American and European influences; his arrangements of loose vertical and horizontal lines and circular forms were intended as representations of surfaces and voids. In 1948, with Onement I (Newman Collection, New York), he restricted himself to a solid-colour canvas broken by a single contrasting vertical band, a format he would use again. By treating the band of colour not as a sharply defined stripe but as a rough-edged strip, Newman attempted to create a sense of tension on the canvas, as though the main colour field was ripped or torn apart by the ascending vertical. Newman also exploited the impact of the size of his canvases; some of his works are so large that they fill the viewer's field of vision. His work strongly influenced other Abstract Expressionist painters.