Barnett Newman was born in New York City in 1905 the son of Polish immigrants, and attended the City College of New York and the Art Student’s League. He worked in his father’s clothing business for many years while committed to painting and did not have a solo exhibition until he was forty-five years old, in 1950, at the Betty Parsons Gallery in New York City. Only by then was he able to paint full-time. Despite that he had always been well-known in art circles as a polemicist, often engaging in disputatious or controversial debates in writing about art and ideas always emphasizing content over formal issues.

        His style associated with Mark Rothko’s style of Abstract Expressionism, Newman’s work addresses the primordial experience and the transcendent singular act. He painted dramatic canvases with a vertical band or zip that acts like an opening within the picture field and interrupts a unified color field. The zip functions as a break in the canvas rather than a compositional line, a break through which we are asked to go beyond the canvas. But it is the color that suggests presence, or in Newman’s terms, the sublime.

Newman influenced an entire younger generation of color field painters such as Kenneth Noland and Helen Frankenthaler and because of his economy of means and concern for scale and space, the Minimalists of the 1960’s such as Donald Judd and Dan Flavin.

Source: Cited from Microsoft Encarta Encyclopedia with revisions.