Word: newman
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Manhattan art gathering really got off the ground until the courtly figure with the walrus mustache and steel-rimmed monocle appeared and someone announced, as someone always did, "Barney's here." Barney was Barnett Newman, abstract painter, self-proclaimed anarchist, celebrated raconteur, the compleat iconoclast. Before his death in Manhattan this month at the age of 65, he provided the most obvious visual link between the generation that produced Abstract Expressionism and the generation that turned to minimal and color-field painting...
...opinion and nothing in the world that could stop him from delivering one. As one friend put it, "You meet him on the street and stop for a six-hour conversation." He wrote enough letters to the editor to fill a book. Norman Mailer was still a schoolboy when Newman ran against Fiorello La Guardia in 1933 for mayor of New York City on a Writers-Artists ticket. He lost, of course. "My politics," he later recalled, "went toward open forms and free situations...
...like or understand, and though he was often called an artist's artist, his most hostile critics were frequently his fellow artists. In fact, though he was one of the historic group of Abstract Expressionists that met at Greenwich Village's Cedar bar in the 1940s, Newman's art won real recognition only in the last decade. His first retrospective had been scheduled by the Museum of Modern Art for the fall...
...usually zipped straight down for eight feet or so through an unmodulated expanse of plain color. When the paintings were shown in 1950 at the Betty Parsons Gallery, reactions ranged from negative to outrage. "You're a threat to us all," exclaimed one artist. What followed were perhaps Newman's bleakest years...
Painful Accuracy. Nilsson himself speaks of a "certain indefinable something" that he and Newman have in common. But it is really where they differ that tells the most. One of the many ironies about Newman is that, although he sings in a raspy, soul-based blues style, his chief concern as a lyricist is Middle America. In Love Story, which he sang on NBC's Liza Minnelli Special last week, Newman sums up middle-age with painful accuracy: "Some nights we'll go out dancin'/ If I am not too tired/ And some nights...