Barnett Newman: From A 1962 Interview In Art In America

Barnett Newman, Midnight Blue, 1970, acrylic on canvas, 193 x 239 cm.

Seckler:  A general public image of your work conceives of it as excessively logical, hieratic, involved with structure and intellectual dialectic.


Newman:  This is not art criticism. This is art politics. It is advanced by painters, and their institutional friends, to give themselves the cloak of romantic spontaneity. I repudiate all these charges. I like your phrase that I am concerned with the immediate and the particular without using a general formula for the painting process with its many particulars. My concern is with the fullness that comes from emotion, not with its initial explosion, or its emotional fallout, or the glow of its expenditure. The fact is, I am an intuitive painter, a direct painter. I have never worked from sketches, never planned a painting, never "thought out" a painting. I start each painting as if I had never painted before. I present no dogma, no system, no demonstrations. I have no formal solutions. I have no interest in the "finished" painting. I work only out of high passion. 


- From an interview conducted by Dorothy Gees Seckler for Art in America.
  Art in America 50, no. 2 (Summer 1962), pp. 83 - 87.