23 Quotes by Barnett Newman

A painter is a choreographer of space.

When painters feel the need to make a shift toward self-discovery, they turn to black and white for a time.

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.

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

I know that it is impossible to talk about my work. And since it’s impossible for me or anybody else to talk about my work, I feel I might as well talk about it.