Structure and Imagery

Jericho by Barnett Newman “Narrow is the Way and few the number. To fill the Lord’s holy temple with an idolatrous crowd clamoring for signs was a folly of everlasting consequence.  Our lord used the whip only once in his life - to drive the crowd away from his church.” Things Fall Apart , Chinua Achebe

Barnett Newman with Onement VI in 1961.  On April 14 the masterpiece sold for 43.8 million dollars via Sotheby's. "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 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. Read more at http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/b/barnett_newman.html#EHi9DmIgW7zk12S9.99 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. Read more at http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/b/barnett_newman.html#EHi9DmIgW7zk12S9.99

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 demonstr...