Barnett Newman’s mayoral campaign still reads like a provocation
Before Barnett Newman (1905-70) became one of the defining figures of Abstract Expressionism, he tried to remake New York City itself. In 1933, at age 28 and before he had produced a painting, he ran for mayor on a platform that called for clean air, waterfront parks, free music and art schools in every district, a municipal opera house, and public works designed to clear slums and beautify the city. He lost to Fiorello La Guardia, but the campaign already revealed the scale of his ambition.
That episode sits at the center of Amy Newman’s Barnett Newman: Here, a substantial new biography that treats the artist as both a visionary and a relentless self-mythologizer. The book argues that Newman’s combative temperament was not a side note to his career but one of its engines. He was the son of Jewish immigrants from Poland, Abraham and Anna, and grew up on Belmont Avenue in the Bronx. After a difficult adolescence at DeWitt Clinton High School, he studied philosophy at the City College of New York and worked in his father’s garment business before turning to painting.
Newman later described art as something that gave him a heightened feeling and a sense of vividness, and Amy Newman follows that conviction into the work itself. She places special emphasis on Onement I, the 1948 canvas that became his first great “zip” painting and one of the earliest color-field works. From there, the biography traces how Newman’s spare vertical divisions became inseparable from his larger ideas about Jewish culture, identity, and modern painting.
The book also revisits the artist’s place among the first generation of Abstract Expressionists, alongside Adolph Gottlieb, Arshile Gorky, and Mark Rothko, while noting how often he felt misunderstood, even deliberately so. That tension between grand idealism and public resistance gives the biography its charge. Newman emerges not simply as a painter of austere surfaces, but as an artist who treated art, politics, and cultural identity as parts of the same argument.
