Citation/Abstract

The art of Barnett Newman has never quite fit--into the mainstream of modern art; into the prevailing look and feel of the work of his own generation; or into the trailblazing role assigned to him by the succeeding generation of artists and critics. Instead of assuming these estimates of his work to have been completely mistaken, in this dissertation I have proceeded from the premise that perhaps they were at least partially right, that they reflect an uncomfortable but well-founded sense that Newman's version of modernist style neither sprang from the standard formal roots nor embodied a kindred formal intent. Scrutiny of his background and education reveals that he came to art with expectations of its purpose and content more influenced by Western philosophy than by the Western artistic tradition to which he was supposedly heir. So pronounced was his intellectual bias that it inhibited his assimilation of typical artistic attitudes toward the function and character of form. In the many writings in which he developed his ideas prior to his breakthrough to a mature style in 1948, Newman argued for an art in which the plastic elements were no more than finely crafted tools to be taken for granted except as they proved useful in the service of higher goals. In that light, Newman's extremely reductive style is exposed as nothing less than a subversion of the modernist norm of formalism, in an attempt to elevate art to the spiritual and philosophical questions to which he believed it was best dedicated and best suited to expressing.