Barnett Newman

Bradford A. Epley, Michelle White, Sarah K. Rich

The work of Barnett Newman (1905-1970) has come to define the spiritual aspirations and material innovations of American painting in the mid-20th century. Best known for his zip paintings--in which thin vertical lines rise through large, bold planes of color--Newman's work was an abrupt departure from his contemporaries' gestural abstraction, yet anticipated Color Field painting. During the last five years of his life, Newman worked primarily in acrylic rather than oil paint, used increasingly vibrant colors, and experimented with shaped canvases. When he died at the age of 65, he left a group of works hanging in his studio, some deemed unfinished. Centered on three of these works, this book builds upon ten years of exhaustive technical research to provide a rare glimpse of Newman's relatively mysterious artistic process. The first scholarly publication devoted to the last years of...