Painter, sculptor, and printmaker. An abstract expressionist who set precedents for color field painting, he is known for enormous solid-color canvases broken only by one or more stripes or “zips,” as he preferred to call them. Like other abstract expressionists, he accepted art as a calling of high seriousness, inherently concerned with existential truths and mystical insights. Nevertheless, the work appealed to younger artists who generally relinquished metaphysics in favor of the reduced expectations of minimalism. Although active in abstract expressionist circles as a theorist and writer during the 1940s, Newman did not have his first one-person show until 1950 and did not attract much interest in his work, even among artists, until the 1960s. A lifelong New Yorker, Newman was given the first name of Baruch, which his parents later Americanized. Everybody called him Barney. Although he began his art studies at the Art Students League in 1922, during his final year of high school, he did not launch a professional art career until more than two decades later. He continued taking drawing classes while attending the City College of New York, where he earned a bachelor’s degree in philosophy in 1927. He then joined a family business, expecting to leave after two or three years to follow his interest in art. However, the Depression dashed those plans, and Newman remained with the firm until 1937. From 1931 until 1947 he also worked as a substitute art teacher in the public schools. In the 1930s, he dabbled in politics, revealing an anarchistic passion for social justice that he never relinquished. He painted off and on in his spare time but later destroyed virtually everything he had done. In the early 1940s he became so interested in botany and ornithology that he studied during the summers of 1940 and 1941 at an Audubon Society camp in Maine and at Cornell University, respectively.

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