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Lot Essay
Newman’s artistic career was late-blooming and began in fits and starts. He was around 30 when he started painting, having spent the previous decade teaching, writing, studying, and working in his father’s menswear store. He deemed much of his early work unworthy of consideration and destroyed it. It was not until 1944 that he considered his work mature.
His ‘zips’ streak through fields of color in spare compositions that prompted critics to dub him a Color Field painter and Minimalists to look to his work for inspiration. But call him what they would, Newman maintained his own view of his abstractions. Claiming that he sought “to start from scratch, to paint as if painting never existed before,” he saw his compositions as forms of thought, as expressions of the universal experience of being alive and individual.
Although he spent his days in his studio on White Street, Lower Manhattan, working on large, brightly colored acrylics like the twenty-foot long Anna’s Light 1968 (private collection), Newman’s work with etching would take place at home. According to his friend and biographer Thomas Hess, the smaller-scale, monochrome works he created there became a sort of ‘antidote’, preventing him from becoming ‘intoxicated with scale’ (Thomas Hess, Barnett Newman, New York 1971, p.71).
Throughout his career, Newman experienced periods when he stopped painting altogether. During one such episode, following the death of his brother George in 1960, he was introduced to lithography by a concerned friend, fellow painter Cleve Gray, who thought that working in a new medium might spark Newman's interest. He directed Newman to the Pratt Graphic Art Center, a print workshop loosely affiliated with Brooklyn's Pratt Institute. The Graphic Art Center was available to students as well as established artists looking to experiment with printmaking mediums. Newman made three lithographs at Pratt in 1961, including these two Untitled works (lots 93 and 94).
Newman described himself as being "captivated" by lithography and by the various possibilities offered by different inks and papers. In the final decade of his life, he was an extremely productive printmaker, creating approximately forty editions in a variety of mediums. He worked primarily at Universal Limited Art Editions, Tatyana Grosman's renowned Long Island printmaking studio.
His ‘zips’ streak through fields of color in spare compositions that prompted critics to dub him a Color Field painter and Minimalists to look to his work for inspiration. But call him what they would, Newman maintained his own view of his abstractions. Claiming that he sought “to start from scratch, to paint as if painting never existed before,” he saw his compositions as forms of thought, as expressions of the universal experience of being alive and individual.
Although he spent his days in his studio on White Street, Lower Manhattan, working on large, brightly colored acrylics like the twenty-foot long Anna’s Light 1968 (private collection), Newman’s work with etching would take place at home. According to his friend and biographer Thomas Hess, the smaller-scale, monochrome works he created there became a sort of ‘antidote’, preventing him from becoming ‘intoxicated with scale’ (Thomas Hess, Barnett Newman, New York 1971, p.71).
Throughout his career, Newman experienced periods when he stopped painting altogether. During one such episode, following the death of his brother George in 1960, he was introduced to lithography by a concerned friend, fellow painter Cleve Gray, who thought that working in a new medium might spark Newman's interest. He directed Newman to the Pratt Graphic Art Center, a print workshop loosely affiliated with Brooklyn's Pratt Institute. The Graphic Art Center was available to students as well as established artists looking to experiment with printmaking mediums. Newman made three lithographs at Pratt in 1961, including these two Untitled works (lots 93 and 94).
Newman described himself as being "captivated" by lithography and by the various possibilities offered by different inks and papers. In the final decade of his life, he was an extremely productive printmaker, creating approximately forty editions in a variety of mediums. He worked primarily at Universal Limited Art Editions, Tatyana Grosman's renowned Long Island printmaking studio.