Barnett Newman Triangle

Barnett Newman Triangle. . , Barnett Newman, one of the foremost painters of the "Abstract Expressionist" era and a pioneer in the "color field" painting, occupied a studio in the building across the street at 35 White Street from 1968 until his death in 1970 at the age of 65. This triangle was named for Newman in 1999 through a competition initiated and run by the local newspaper, The Tribeca Trib, in cooperation with Community Board 1 and elected officials., Newman was born on Jan. 29, 1905 at 480 Cherry St. on the Lower East Side. He attended PS 2 on Henry Street, PS 44 on Prospect Avenue in the Bronx, and Dewitt Clinton High School annex (then in Manhattan on East 88th Street). He later fondly recalled skipping classes to visit the Metropolitan Museum of Art nearby.by., During his senior year in high school, Newman took drawing classes at the Art Students League, and it was there that he met Adolph Gottlieb, who would become part of a group of avant-garde artists with whom Newman was associated in the 1940s and 50s. Newman enrolled in 1923 at City College. He continued to study at the Art Students League through 1930, and his instructors included John Sloan, a founder of the "Ashcan School" of American art., From 1931 to 1939 Newman worked as a substitute teacher in the public schools, and in 1933 ran for mayor as a write-in candidate with a manifesto titled, "On the Need for Political Action by Men of Culture." In 1940 he took a position teaching evening art classes at the Washington Irving Adult Center on Irving Place. He also pursued studies in botany, ornithology and marine life at the American Museum of Natural History, the Audubon Society, and Cornell University., The 1940s saw Newman engaged in art criticism and continued political activism, and developed with others an art of abstraction imbued with expressive meaning. In 1948 he painted the seminal Onement I, a picture he later considered a breakthrough in his career, as it was the first of many by him that used a vertical band (later dubbed a "zip") to divide the canvas., Newman's first solo exhibition was held in 1949 at the Betty Parsons Gallery. His widening artistic circle during this time included Clyfford Still, Mark Rothko, William Baziotes, Jackson Pollock and Lee Krasner. Newman and his fellow artists issued an open letter protesting the bias of the Metropolitan Museum towards modernist art, and the group was dubbed the "irascible eighteen" in a Life magazine story published in January 1951., Criticism of Newman's artwork was decidedly mixed in the 1950s, but began improving in the early 1960s. In 1958 the Museum of Modern Art included his work in the traveling show "The New American Painting." Beginning in 1960 Newman painted a series of stark, minimalist paintings composed of black "zips" on raw canvas titled "Stations of the Cross," which were featured in his first solo museum exhibition, organized by Lawrence Alloway at the Guggenheim Museum in 1966. A late series, "Whose Afraid of Red, Yellow and Blue," 1966-70, made bold use of pure, primary colors in asymmetrical configurations., Over several decades Newman occupied various downtown studios at Horatio Street, East 19th Street, Wall Street, Front Street, and moved to his last at 35 White Street in 1968. In the late 1960s he experimented with triangular canvases, perhaps reinforced by the view from his studio window. One of his best known works, a fragmented cor-ten steel structure, Broken Obelisk, was fabricated at the Lippincott Inc. foundry in 1967. The piece was included that year in an inaugural group exhibition of 24 contemporary artists in city parks and public plazas, titled "Sculpture in Environment", and organized by Doris Freedman and Sam Green., The year after his death in 1970, he was honored by a posthumous retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art.