Barnett Newman

In his 1948 essay The Sublime is Now, Barnett Newman proposed his idea of the sublime picture that neither illustrates, represents, nor symbolizes anything, but exists instead as an autonomous experience. Newman was able to make manifest this radical philosophy and conception of art throughout his productive and illustrious career — as this important new volume on his works amply illustrates. This book considers the artist’s ideas as integral to his output, and author Armin Zweite traces and analyzes both the key works themselves and the origins of Newman’s search for the pure realm of art. The result is an indispensable volume on one of the true titans of post-war art, whose cool lucidity and understated abstraction provided vehicles for a radical aesthetic consciousness both cool and sensuous.