Quotes from Barnett Newman

The problem of a painting is physical and metaphysical, the same as I think life is physical and metaphysical.

Instead of making cathedrals out of Christ, man, or "life," we are making it out of ourselves, out of our own feelings.

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.

Anonymity is the truest heroism .

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

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.

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

I prefer to leave the paintings to speak for themselves.

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

The impulse of modern art was this desire to destroy beauty.