Barnett Newman Quotes

17 quotes in 208 categories

• Aesthetics is for the artist like ornithology is for the birds.
• 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,…
• It is our function as artists to make the spectator see the world our way not his way.
• The problem of a painting is physical and metaphysical, the same as I think life is physical and metaphysical.
• I prefer to leave the paintings to speak for themselves.
• Sculpture is what you bump into when you back up to see a painting.
• 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…
• 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…
• The impulse of modern art is the desire to destroy beauty.
• Aesthetics is to artists as ornithology is to birds.
• Any art worthy of its name should address 'life', 'man', 'nature', 'death' and 'tragedy'.
• From the very beginning I felt that I would do a series,
• When painters feel the need to make a shift toward self-discovery, they turn to black and white for a time.
• We have lost contact with man's natural desire for the exalted, for a concern with our relation to absolute emotions.
• 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,…
• Painting, like passion, is a living voice.
• A painter is a choreographer of space.

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