The Barnett Newman Foundation

Barnett Newman is born on January 29 in his parents’ home at 480 Cherry Street on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. Newman’s parents, Abraham and Anna (born c. 1874 and 1882, respectively), are Jewish immigrants who arrived 1900 in New York City from Lomza, a Polish town, then under Russian rule. Abraham makes a living selling sewing-machine heads to garment workers. Barney, as he is known to family and friends, is the eldest child, a previous son having died in infancy. Three younger siblings will follow: George, Gertrude, and Sarah. When he reaches school age, Barney attends P.S. 2 on Henry Street in lower Manhattan.

Abraham establishes a menswear manufacturing company. The business thrives, and by 1915 the Newmans move to 1820 Belmont Avenue, in the middle-class Tremont section of the Bronx. There, Barney enjoys an active childhood full of sports, piano lessons, and street wrangling. As a student at P.S. 44 on Prospect Avenue in the Bronx, he wins first place in the Junior Four-Minute Speaking Contest. Although not religious, Abraham is a passionate Zionist and supporter of the National Hebrew School of the Bronx. In addition to attending Hebrew school, the children are tutored at home by young Jewish scholars from Europe.

Newman attends De Witt Clinton High School in Manhattan, commuting there daily from the Bronx. The annex for freshmen is on East Eighty-eighth Street, and Newman later remembers frequently skipping class to visit the nearby Metropolitan Museum of Art. During his first year of high school, Newman adopts a middle name, Benedict, a Latinate equivalent of his Hebrew name, Baruch. For a time after this, Newman is addressed as both ‚ “Barney” and “B. B.” He will use the extra initial “B” in signing his artwork through the mid-1940s and on official documents until the end of his life. During the fall of his senior year, Newman attends drawing classes six days a week with Duncan Smith at the Art Students League, 215 West Fifty-seventh Street. His much-labored-over drawing of the Belvedere torso is chosen for an exhibition of the best student work.

Through the Art Students League, Newman meets Adolph Gottlieb. Only two years older than Newman, Gottlieb is already pursuing the life of an artist, having dropped out of high school in 1921 to study art and hobo his way across Europe. The two friends frequently visit the Metropolitan Museum of Art and uptown galleries together. After graduating from high school, Newman matriculates at the tuition-free City College of New York (CCNY) in Harlem. During his freshman year he also enrolls in life drawing classes with William Von Schlegell at the Art Students League. A philosophy major at CCNY, Newman studies with two acclaimed pedagogues: Scott Buchanan, who would later found the innovative ""Great Books"" curriculum at St. John’s College in Annapolis, Maryland; and Morris Raphael Cohen, a legendarily exacting practitioner of the Socratic method. Often truant, Newman earns mostly low grades. Newman contributes music reviews to the CCNY newspaper, The Campus, and in 1925 publishes an essay about the paintings of critic Roger Fry in the student literary journal, The Lavender. Among his college friends is Aaron Siskind—at this time an aspiring poet, later to become an acclaimed photographer.

Newman graduates from CCNY. Abraham proposes that Barney enter the family business for a few years in order to build up savings to support himself as an artist. Barney agrees and, with his brother, George, joins his father’s prosperous clothing manufacturing business, headquartered at 37 East Broadway in Lower Manhattan.

The October stock-market crash devastates Newman Clothing Company. George eventually takes a job as an architectural draftsman, but Barney stays on, becoming closely involved in his father’s attempts to salvage the business.

Newman again attends classes at the Art Students League, taking life drawing with Harry Wickey and John Sloan.

As his family's business continues to founder, Newman tries to become an art teacher in the New York City public school system. He fails the exam for a regular teaching license and instead becomes a substitute art teacher, earning $7.50 a day. Through Gottlieb, Newman meets the painter Milton Avery. Gottlieb and Marcus Rothkowitz (later Mark Rothko) are at the center of a group of young artists who regularly gather at Avery’s home to study his work and to participate in life sketching and poetry readings. It is unclear exactly when Newman meets Rothko, but it is evidently during the 1930s. Over the next few years, Newman intermittently shares a studio with Gottlieb. No work from this period survives.

In February, Newman secures a regular substitute position teaching art appreciation at Grover Cleveland High School in Ridgewood, Queens.

The Newman family moves southward in the Bronx, settling at 984 Sheridan Avenue, near the Grand Concourse. From February through August, Newman rents a studio at 47 Horatio Street in the West Village. With his friend Alexander Borodulin, Newman conceives of a magazine that will promote civil service and advocate the rights of public workers, such as teachers, street cleaners, and firemen. They print up letterhead and publicity materials for the New York Wednesday Answer but are unable to interest any advertisers. Little more than a week before the election, Newman and Borodulin offer themselves as write-in candidates for New York City mayor and comptroller, respectively. They circulate thousands of copies of their manifesto, “On the Need for Political Action by Men of Culture,” which promotes a three-prong program of “more extensive education, a greater emphasis upon the arts and crafts, and the fostering of cultural living conditions.” On November 7, Fiorello Henry La Guardia wins the election, beginning his first of his three terms as mayor. It is not known how many votes Newman and Borodulin received.

At a faculty meeting at Grover Cleveland High School in February, Newman meets Annalee Greenhouse, a substitute shorthand teacher. The couple begins a courtship nurtured by a mutual passion for music. Annalee Greenhouse was born on August 25, 1909, in Palestine, as her family was making its way from Russia to the United States. The Greenhouses first settled in Akron, Ohio, and, when Annalee was a teenager, moved to Forest Hills, Queens, in New York. A graduate of Hunter College who also studied French at Columbia University and the university in Nancy, France, Greenhouse learned secretarial skills so that she could earn a living as a teacher of shorthand.

Newman acts as manager for the Theater Troupe, a company for which Borodulin is the in-house playwright. In May, the troupe stages an evening of one-act plays at the Artef Theatre on 247 West Forty-eighth Street, home of the renowned leftist Yiddish theater company. Newman resumes work on his civil-service magazine, now to be titled The Answer. A handwritten draft of a column planned for The Answer outlines a list of “Books we recommend”: Spinoza’s Ethics, Plato’s Republic, and the writings of the Russian anarchist Prince Peter Kropotkin. A corresponding list of “Books we condemn” names the complete works of Hegel, Marx, and Lenin. In the spring, Newman takes an education class at CCNY, “Teaching Oral English in High School.” Over the summer, he rents a studio at 234 West Thirteenth Street.

In January, Newman publishes The Answer—America’s Civil Service Magazine but is unable to sustain it beyond this first issue. He applies for a Houghton Mifflin Literary Fellowship to write a book on the American civil service but is turned down. On June 30, Annalee and Barney marry. For their honeymoon, the newlyweds travel to Concord, Massachusetts, where they visit Walden Pond and the houses of Henry David Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Nathaniel Hawthorne. They proceed to Ogunquit, Maine, where they rent a cottage for the summer. After an attempt to teach Annalee figure drawing at a nearby artists’ colony, Barney dedicates the summer to photography, even taking postcard shots for a local camera shop. In return for this service, he receives a number of cards showing the Newmans’ honeymoon cottage that Barney sends out as wedding announcements. The Newmans want to stay in Maine for a year, but financial concerns compel them to return to their teaching jobs in New York in the fall. Barney and Annalee take an apartment in Chelsea, at 300 West Twenty-third Street. Over the next two years they move twice, first to 315 West Twenty-third Street and then to 433 West Twenty-first Street.

Both Newmans are substitute teaching, but Barney applies for a job as a federal inspector in a prison clothing factory and later for a teaching post at Queens College. He is turned down for both positions. He also applies for a Guggenheim Fellowship so that he can pursue his book on the civil service. When the proposal is rejected, Newman abandons this project for good. In April, Newman learns that he has failed the test to obtain a regular art-teaching license, scoring only 15 percent on the performance portion of the exam. He must continue working as a substitute teacher, earning less than $1,400 a year without sick leave, vacation pay, or unemployment insurance. Still, he makes slightly more than what his friends Rothko and Gottlieb earn as painters for the federally sponsored Works Progress Administration (WPA). Abraham suffers a heart attack and retires. Barney is allowed to liquidate the family business. At the same time, he assists Annalee’s father, Samuel Greenhouse, in an unsuccessful legal battle over patent infringement. Reflecting on these years, Newman later stated: “The art situation was so boring, I felt I had more serious problems: my father, her father.”

In January, Newman narrowly misses passing the written examination for high school English teachers. His appeals are unsuccessful. In March, Newman again fails the art teachers’ examination, this time scoring 33 percent for his watercolor skills. On behalf of the Fine Arts Substitutes Association, Newman launches a full-blown publicity assault on the Board of Examiners, garnering the support of well-known artists Max Weber, Thomas Hart Benton, and Rockwell Kent. He organizes an exhibition of work rejected by the board titled Can We Draw? The Board of Examiners Says—No! which includes a painting by Weber. The show attracts a great deal of press attention, and the exhibitors, including Newman and his sister Sarah, are allowed to retake the exam. Unfortunately, Newman once more fails the performance test. In December, Annalee passes the exam to teach stenography and typewriting in city schools.

Newman becomes interested in botany and spends much of his free time at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden. Annalee secures a regular teaching post at William Cullen Bryant High School in Queens.

In March, a watercolor by Newman titled Country Studio is included in an exhibition of art by members of the Art Teachers Association. This painting is likely the same one exhibited as Studio in the Country in Can We Draw? two years earlier. In October, Newman gives up substitute teaching for a part-time job teaching evening classes in silk-screen printing and batik at the Washington Irving Adult Center at 40 Irving Place. Newman is not painting during the early 1940s but pursues his interest in natural science. He takes classes at the American Museum of Natural History and is elected an associate of the American Ornithologists Union. Over the summer, Barney and Annalee attend an Audubon Society camp in Newcastle, Maine, where they study birds and marine life.

Barney and Annalee move to an apartment at 343 East Nineteenth Street, where they will live for the next fifteen years. Annalee receives a master’s degree in education from New York University. She eventually becomes acting chairman of her department at Bryant High, but, as she told an interviewer in 1991: “For me it was no career. It was just a job. A job to earn a living so I could free my husband. . . . We were two people who had a single cause.” Over the summer, Annalee and Barney attend botany and ornithology classes at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. On December 7 the Japanese bomb Pearl Harbor and the United States enters World War II.

Although he has already been disqualified from military service for physical reasons, Newman applies to be classified as a conscientious objector in January.

Newman writes the catalogue foreword for the first exhibition of the American Modern Artists (AMA), held in January and February at the Riverside Museum in New York. The show is a protest against the Metropolitan Museum of Art for its exclusion of modernist art from its juried exhibitions. Newman is not a member of the AMA but seems to have become involved through his friends Gottlieb and Rothko. In June, Newman helps Rothko and Gottlieb compose a response to a negative review by Edward Alden Jewell, the art critic for the New York Times. In their letter, which is printed on June 13 in the Times, the artists outline their “aesthetic beliefs,” culminating with: “There is no such thing as good painting about nothing. We assert that the subject is crucial and only that subject-matter is valid which is tragic and timeless.” At the home of Adolph and Esther Gottlieb, Newman meets Betty Parsons, who is then running a small gallery in the Wakefield Bookshop at 64 East Fifty-fifth Street. Either this summer or the next, Barney and Annalee visit the Peabody museums in Salem and Cambridge, Massachusetts, to see the African, Northwest Coast Indian, and Pre-Columbian collections.

In February, Newman contributes the catalogue foreword for a show of Gottlieb’s drawings at the Wakefield Gallery. This is the beginning of Newman’s close working relationship with Betty Parsons. In May, he organizes an exhibition of Pre-Columbian sculpture for the Wakefield, borrowing many of the objects from the American Museum of Natural History. On the weekends, when Parsons goes to the country, Barney and Annalee tend the gallery. At the Wakefield Gallery, Newman meets Luis Jesus Navascués, the editor of La Revista Belga, a propagandist magazine published for distribution in South America by the Belgian government. Newman contributes an article on Pre-Columbian art to the August issue of La Revista Belga and over the next two years publishes several art reviews in this magazine and a similar one called Ambos Mundos. In both journals, his writings appear translated into Spanish. For the third year in a row, the Newmans summer in East Gloucester, Massachusetts. Barney is beginning to make art again and starts a series of crayon drawings. Near the end of 1944, Betty Parsons leaves the Wakefield Gallery to become the director of modern art for the Mortimer Brandt Gallery at 15 East Fifty-seventh Street.

Newman is busy as a writer, penning reviews for La Revista Belga. He also writes several pieces not published in his lifetime, including “The Plasmic Image,” a sprawling multipart essay outlining his thoughts on abstract art. In April, the Newmans learn that many of Annalee’s relatives in France have been deported by the Nazis. By this time, the Newmans would also have heard of the decimation of the Jewish population in Lomza, Poland, the hometown of Abraham and Anna Newman, which had occurred in 1941 and 1942. On vacation in Provincetown, Massachusetts, Newman makes a number of drawings. He and Annalee meet the architect and artist Tony Smith, who will become one of their closest friends. Sometime this year, Newman rents a studio on Mangin Street, off Houston Street, overlooking the East River. In August, the United States drops the first atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. World War II ends.

Newman meets Clyfford Still, who in February has a solo show at Art of This Century, Peggy Guggenheim’s gallery, where Rothko has been exhibiting since the previous year. In September, Parsons opens her own gallery in Mortimer Brandt’s old space. Newman organizes the debut exhibition, a show of Northwest Coast Indian painting. Tony Smith assists with the installation, and Aaron Siskind photographs the objects. Over the next year, Newman writes catalogue forewords for several exhibitions at the Parsons Gallery, including the solo shows of Herbert Ferber and Theodoros Stamos. In June and September, respectively, Newman’s friends Rothko and Still sign with the Betty Parsons Gallery. By December, Newman also joins Betty Parsons’s roster of artists. One of his works is included in the gallery’s Christmas Show. This is the first display of Newman’s art since the Art Teachers Association exhibition in 1940. At the end of the year, Newman rents a studio at 114 Fourth Avenue, near Union Square.

Newman meets Jackson Pollock and Lee Krasner in late 1946 or early 1947. Over the next few years, Newman and Pollock forge a close friendship. Newman introduces Pollock to Betty Parsons, and when Peggy Guggenheim closes Art of This Century at the end of the spring season, Parsons takes over Pollock’s contract. In January, Newman mounts The Ideographic Picture at the Betty Parsons Gallery. The exhibition features eight artists from the Parsons stable. Of his own work, Newman includes Gea and Euclidian Abyss. On June 30, Barney and Annalee’s eleventh wedding anniversary, Abraham Newman dies. At the end of the school year, Barney quits his part-time position at Washington Irving Adult Center. Annalee supports them both on her teacher’s salary, as she will do for the next seventeen years. Newman’s essay “The First Man Was an Artist” appears in the inaugural issue of The Tiger’s Eye, a small arts magazine edited by Ruth Stephan, a writer, and her husband, John Stephan, a painter affiliated with the Parsons Gallery. Later this year, Newman contributes this statement to The Tiger’s Eye, on the topic “Why I Paint”: “An artist paints so that he will have something to look at; at times he must write so that he will also have something to read.” In November, Euclidian Abyss is exhibited as Black and Yellow in Abstract and Surrealist American Art at the Art Institute of Chicago. The painting is purchased out of the exhibition by Connecticut collectors Burton and Emily Tremaine. This is Newman’s first sale. At the end of the year, Newman moves his studio to a storefront at 304 East Nineteenth Street, across the street from his apartment.

Newman paints Onement I. He comes to view this painting as a major breakthrough, and the next two years are the most productive of his career. In June, a painting by Newman is included in the group show Survey of the Season at the Betty Parsons Gallery. Early in the fall, William Baziotes, David Hare, Robert Motherwell, and Mark Rothko establish a cooperative art school at 35 East Eighth Street. Newman suggests the name for the school, “Subjects of the Artist,” in order to emphasize the importance of subject matter in abstract art. Newman’s essay “The Sublime Is Now” appears in the December issue of The Tiger’s Eye. In response to the question “What is sublime in art?” Newman writes: “I believe that here in America, some of us, free from the weight of European culture, are finding the answer, by completely denying that art has any concern with the problem of beauty and where to find it.”

Newman makes seventeen paintings in 1949, the largest number he will ever complete in a single year. In January, Newman joins the faculty of Subjects of the Artist. Annalee and Barney help organize the school’s Friday-night lecture series. There are twelve speakers during the spring term, including Jean Arp, John Cage, and Joseph Cornell. Despite the popularity of these talks, the school dissolves in May 1949. Over the summer, the Newmans travel to Akron to spend time with Annalee’s family. While in Ohio, they visit the prehistoric Native American mounds located in the southwestern and central parts of the state. The experience deeply impresses Newman and inspires the essay (not published in his lifetime) “Prologue for a New Aesthetic.”

On January 23 Newman’s first solo exhibition opens at the Betty Parsons Gallery. Mark Rothko and Tony Smith assist with the installation. The response to the show is largely negative. One of the paintings is vandalized. Thomas Hess in ARTnews writes: “Newman is out to shock, but he is not out to shock the bourgeoisie—that has been done. He likes to shock other artists.” A single painting, End of Silence, sells to a college friend of Annalee’s. After gallery expenses, Newman’s profit is $84.14. Newman and seventeen other artists sign an open letter protesting the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s bias against modernist art. The letter appears on the front page of the New York Times on May 22, triggering a flurry of editorials and countereditorials in both local and national publications. On November 24, Life magazine photographer Nina Leen takes a portrait of the group the New York Herald Tribune has dubbed “The Irascible Eighteen.” At Newman’s insistence the men are dressed “like bankers,” wearing jackets and ties. In August, Newman moves to a studio at 110 Wall Street, in the neighborhood where his father’s business once operated. There he is able to work on much larger canvases. Newman’s work is included in Post-Abstract Painting, 1950, France–America at the Hawthorne Memorial Gallery in Provincetown, Massachusetts, and American Painting at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis. Newman makes his first sculpture, Here I, out of wood and plaster.

On April 23 Newman’s second exhibition at the Betty Parsons Gallery opens. Lee Krasner, Jackson Pollock, and Tony Smith install the show. Among the works included is Newman’s first eighteen-foot-long painting, Vir Heroicus Sublimis. Critics condemn the exhibition and no paintings sell. In the following months, Newman removes his work from the Betty Parsons Gallery and withdraws from all gallery activities.

In his essay “Feeling Is All,” published in the Partisan Review, the critic Clement Greenberg belatedly endorses Newman’s 1950 and 1951 exhibitions. Criticizing Newman’s detractors, Greenberg states: “Newman is a very important and original artist.” In April, Newman is excluded from the Museum of Modern Art exhibition Fifteen Americans, which features the work of, among others, Pollock, Rothko, and Still. This event deeply wounds Newman. An exhibition catalogue inscribed to Newman from Still reads: “To my friend Barnett Newman who, also, should have been represented in this exhibition.” Newman’s lease at 110 Wall Street is terminated, and in August he moves his studio around the corner to 100 Front Street. In August, Newman participates as a speaker in the annual Woodstock Art Conference in Woodstock, New York. In a session with the philosopher Susanne Langer, Newman attacks professional aestheticians, saying: “I feel that even if aesthetics is established as a science, it doesn’t affect me as an artist. I’ve done quite a bit of work in ornithology; I have never met an ornithologist who ever thought that ornithology was for the birds.” He would later hone this remark into the famous quip, “Aesthetics is for the artist as ornithology is for the birds.”

In June, Newman buys back the painting Untitled (No. 1), one of his narrow vertical paintings, from the collection of artist Alfonso Ossorio. He writes to Ossorio: “I have decided to withdraw all of my ‘small’ canvases at this time, from public view. . . . The conditions do not yet exist . . . that can make possible a direct, innocent attitude towards an isolated piece of my work, particularly one of my ‘small’ ones.” This action is representative of Newman’s general withdrawal from the official art world during the mid-1950s. He does not exhibit between 1951 and 1955.

Newman is so offended by an article published in the summer issue of the College Art Journal that he sues its author, the artist Ad Reinhardt, for libel. The article, “The Artist in Search of an Academy, Part Two: Who Are the Artists?” proposed “four general categories of artist-types,” classing Newman as an “artist-professor and traveling-design-salesman, . . . avant-garde-huckster-handicraftsman, . . . [and] holy-roller-explainer-entertainer-in-residence.” Newman’s suit is eventually dismissed in February 1956, after two days of hearings before a judge and jury. Still a full-time teacher at Bryant High School, Annalee also starts teaching evening classes at City College’s Baruch School of Business.

Newman turns fifty. He has sold only a few paintings, and just one to someone who is not a personal friend. Even with Annalee working two jobs, the Newmans’ financial situation is precarious. The couple resorts to taking loans, pawning a few valuables, and, in Barney’s case, trying to develop a winning scheme at the horse track. Sometime this year, the Newmans leave their apartment on East Nineteenth Street and move to 62 Pierrepont Street in Brooklyn Heights. In his essay “American-Type Painting,” published in the spring issue of the Partisan Review, Clement Greenberg praises Newman’s art as “deep and honest” and “the most direct attack on [easel painting] so far.” But he also portrays Newman as a follower of Still and closely related to Rothko, both associations that rile Newman. In December, Horizon Light is exhibited as No. 7 in the Betty Parsons Gallery’s tenth-anniversary exhibition. It is the first public display of Newman’s work since 1951.

Newman does not make any paintings during 1956 and 1957 or, if so, abandons them. At Jackson Pollock’s suggestion, the young collector Ben Heller visits Newman’s studio. The following year, Heller acquires two paintings, Adam and Queen of the Night I, for $3,500. On August 11, while Lee Krasner is in Europe, Jackson Pollock dies in a car accident on Long Island. Barney and Annalee are among the close friends who travel to Springs, Long Island, to be with Krasner upon her return.

Newman is included in American Painting 1945-1957 at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts in June. His troubles with critics continue. Reviewing the show for the New Republic, Frank Getlein writes that “the most asinine thing on board is Barnett Newman’s ‘Vir Heroicus Sublimis’ in the Design Division. Eight feet high, ‘Vir’ is damn near 18 feet across and is painted a flat red.” In a letter to the editor, Newman replies: “It was unnecessary for Mr. Getlein to swear at the ‘damn’ size of my pictures when a glance at the exhibition catalogue would have given him the exact size.” The Newmans spend Thanksgiving with Krasner on Long Island. Two days later, at a dinner party at the Manhattan home of artist Jeanne Reynal and writer Thomas Sills, Newman suffers a heart attack. He is hospitalized for six weeks.

With the help of Newman’s mother and sister, Annalee nurses him in their Brooklyn Heights apartment. He is able to do some painting at home, and the first work he completes after his heart attack is Outcry. Around February, Newman has the canvases stretched for what will become First Station and Second Station. Ben Heller invites Alfred Barr and Dorothy Miller of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) to visit Newman’s studio. As a result, four of his paintings, Abraham, Concord, Horizon Light, and Adam, are included in MoMA’s traveling exhibition The New American Painting. The exhibition debuts at the Kunsthalle Basel on April 19 and travels to Milan, Madrid, Berlin, Amsterdam, Brussels, Paris, and London before opening in New York the following year. E. C. Goossen, the director of exhibitions and professor of art at Bennington College in Vermont, offers Newman a retrospective exhibition in May. Installed by faculty members Tony Smith and Paul Feeley, the show consists of approximately eighteen works dating from 1946 to 1952. Clement Greenberg contributes an essay. British art critic Lawrence Alloway, on his first trip to the United States, visits the Bennington exhibition with Newman’s former dealer, Betty Parsons. Alloway soon calls on Newman in his studio, where he sees the artist’s latest paintings on raw canvas, not yet titled First Station and Second Station. “The Philosophic Line of B. Newman” by Goossen, the first magazine article devoted to Newman’s work, appears in the summer issue of ARTnews. In October, the Newmans move from Brooklyn Heights to 685 West End Avenue in Manhattan, where they will reside for the rest of the artist’s life.

On a buying trip for the Öffentliche Kunstsammlung Basel, Arnold Rüdlinger views Day Before One on display at the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh and arranges to purchase it. Basel thus becomes the first public collection to acquire a Newman painting. The Museum of Modern Art follows later this year, purchasing Abraham and becoming then the only American museum to own a work by Newman. In March, Barnett Newman: A Selection 1946-1952 inaugurates the new contemporary gallery at French and Company at 978 Madison Avenue in New York. The exhibition, initiated by Clement Greenberg, an adviser to the gallery, covers the same period as the Bennington retrospective but is larger, with twenty-nine paintings. Such critics as Dore Ashton (New York Times), Hilton Kramer (Arts Magazine), and Hubert Crehan (ARTnews) remain unsympathetic to Newman’s work. But the show is received with interest by the younger generation of New York artists, for whom this is the first opportunity to experience Newman’s paintings. Carl Andre, Donald Judd, Larry Poons, and Frank Stella are among those who attend. In August, the Newmans travel to Emma Lake, Saskatchewan, Canada, where Barney leads a summer workshop for Canadian artists. Newman proves highly influential for the young artists in attendance, several of whom subsequently move to New York. One of these, sculptor Robert Murray, would later explain: “He helped us get over our provincial paranoia. . . . He made it seem important to be an artist.”

Newman completes his third and fourth paintings using black paint on raw canvas. It is now that he begins to think of the series as the Stations of the Cross. Newman continues working on the Stations, off and on, for the next six years. Newman makes a series of twenty-two ink drawings on fourteen-by-ten-inch and twelve-by-nine-inch paper. Along with three drawings from 1959, these are the first graphic works he has created since 1949. In addition to his Front Street studio, Newman rents a space in the Carnegie Hall building at 881 Seventh Avenue in November.

In January, Ben Heller purchases Vir Heroicus Sublimis. Other significant sales this year will be L’Errance to Robert and Ethel Scull and Onement VI to Frederick and Marcia Weisman. Newman’s younger brother, George, dies suddenly on February 1, sending the artist into a deep depression. Wanting to coax his bereft friend back to work, artist Cleve Gray invites Newman to join him making lithographs at the Pratt Institute Graphic Art Center. In this, his first experience with printmaking, Newman completes three black-and-white lithographs. Soon after, he paints the black-on-raw-canvas painting Shining Forth (To George) in memory of his brother, whose Hebrew name had been Zerach, “to shine.” In the spring, Newman has a notorious dispute with art historian Erwin Panofsky in the pages of ARTnews over the spelling of “Sublimis,” which had been misspelled in a photo caption for Vir Heroicus Sublimis as “Sublimus.” Newman defends the misprint as a grammatically correct alternative but also claims, “the basic fact about a work of art . . . [is that] it must rise above grammar and syntax-pro gloria Dei.” In September, Newman, who has long objected to juried exhibitions, writes to the director of the Carnegie Museum of Art, offering to establish a five-hundred-dollar “Barnett Newman Award for an Artist Not Invited to the Pittsburgh International.” His check is returned.

In January, Newman declines invitations to participate in The Formalists at the Gallery of Modern Art, Washington, D.C., and Geometric Abstraction at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. With Robert Murray’s assistance, Newman casts his 1950 sculpture Here I at Modern Art Foundry in Queens. The resulting bronze is titled Here I (To Marcia), after collector Marcia Weisman, who had urged Newman to make the casting. On June 3 Newman participates in the symposium Modern Art and Mass Culture, hosted by Brandeis University, Waltham, Massachusetts. On October 23 Newman-De Kooning, an exhibition of “two founding fathers,” opens at the Allan Stone Gallery at 48 East Eighty-sixth Street. De Kooning’s and Newman’s paintings are hung side by side in galleries designed by Tony Smith. The critical tide is turning in Newman’s favor. Thomas Hess, who in 1951 flippantly dismissed Newman as a “genial theoretician,” now ranks him as one of the “most remarkable artists alive today.”