23 Quotes by Barnett Newman

Man's first expression, like his first dream, was an aesthetic one. Speech was a poetic outcry rather than a demand for communication. Original man, shouting his consonants, did so in yells of awe and anger at his tragic state, at his own self-awareness and at his own helplessness before the void.

Sculpture is what you bump into when you back up to see a painting.

The image we produce is the self evident one of revelation..that can be understood by anyone who will look at it without the nostalgic glasses of history

Any art worthy of its name should address 'life', 'man', 'nature', 'death' and 'tragedy'.

I prefer to leave the paintings to speak for themselves.

I hope that my painting has the impact of giving someone, as it did me, the feeling of his own totality, of his own separateness, of his own individuality.

From the very beginning I felt that I would do a series,

We are in the process of making the world, to a certain extent, in our own image.

We have lost contact with man's natural desire for the exalted, for a concern with our relation to absolute emotions.