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BARNETT NEWMAN

Barnett Newman was born in New York City on January 29, 1905. He studied a t the Art Students' League in New York and graduated from The City College of New York in 1927. Later, he did graduate work at Cornell University. 

Newman has always been closely identified with the New York school of the first generation, with Pollock, deKooning, Kline, Rothke, and the others. However, at the same time, his more geometric style with its vertical bands/has working in relation to fields of tone served as a model for many of the new generation of painters and sculptors. Although his chronology would seem to place him in a position to be an elder statesman of contemporary art. Newman is in fact one of the liveliest participants in the current situation. Interested in the efforts of all young artists, he goes to all the new shows. Newman is an avid conversationalist and likes to write about art; he is one of the most articulate among American artists.
Unlike most of his contemporaries, Newman has tended to remain apart from the more mundane side of the art scene. He has no dealer, and he always excludes himself from competitions for prizes, as he did in the case of the 1965 Sao Paolo Biennial, where he was the featured American artist. He also avoids frequent exposure in one-man shows, and he has declined invitations to hold retrospective exhibitions in a number of museums. However, there have been major shows of his work at Bennington College in 1958, at French and Company in 1959, and at the Guggenheim Museum in New York, in 1966.
For Expo, Newman painter an imposing symmetrical picture with a red vertical on a blue field. As he often does, Newman turns here from the more open black, white, beige scheme which is typical of much of his work to a resonant coloristic scheme. The painting is large for him, but he chose to explore the problem of scale in a smaller measure than many of the other artists.