Abstract Expressionists that came to be known as the New York School, led by the eldest of the cadre, Dutch painter Willem de Kooning, included acolytes Franz Kline, Clyfford Still, Mark Rothko, Hans Hofmann, Robert Motherwell, Jackson Pollock, and Barnett Newman, just to name some of the more famous of the bunch. All members of The New York School became, to some degree, participants in a postwar zeitgeist that sought to break free from the ancient regime that had for centuries dictated what constituted high art.

Members of The New York School, “the Coonskins” as they were sometimes called in the trade press, sought to break free of European traditionalists’ – the “Redcoats’,” as they were denigrated, aesthetics and worldview in order to create a new conception of painting that would offer viewers an opportunity to sense an entirely new image of the world, themselves, the human condition and, in turn, develop a new concept of the individual self as a prism with which to experience the full spectrum of life.

This self-consciously produced postwar revolution in art, led by The New York School, is reflective of wider cultural changes in the postwar/anti-colonial world. Interest in the individual self and self-image became particularly marketable and vogue in the decades after World War II, especially with the Cold War specter of total annihilation looming as a daily reality of postwar American life. The new Postwar emphasis on the self was in stark contrast to the traditional Anglo-Saxon and Protestant ideal of shared sacrifice that was so prevalent during the Depression and the War.

Individualism became a buzzword made popular by Gestalt therapists and existentialist philosophers, including Barnett Newman. In the fifteen years following World War II, R.D. Laing wrote The Divided Self, literary critic Lionel Trilling wrote The Opposing Self, psychoanalyst Erich Fromm wrote Man for Himself, and Theologian Reinhold Niebuhr wrote The Self and the Dramas of History; Abraham Maslow and Carl Rogers coined the phrase self-actualization based on a hierarchy of personal needs. The symbiosis of individualism, authenticity, and social revolution stoked by the embers of Depression and War was the forerunner of the technological and social changes that helped to reconstruct perceptions of both the individual and collective self throughout the remainder of the Twentieth Century and into the Twenty-First.

Barnett Newman, among the most unsung of the revolutionaries comprising The New York School, was perhaps the most self-consciously revolutionary. His art is hallucinogenic. It seems to convey no tangible meaning or message other than what the viewer infers based on their own prejudices and predilections. But that’s exactly what makes Newman’s art so revolutionary.

Newman, the philosopher-painter, consciously sought to shake free the shackles of Western Civilization, which he felt kept art, which he believed to be a microcosm of the human experience, from evolving and therefore from creating an authentic sensual experience. This echoes the philosophy of Walter Benjamin as expressed in The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (1935).

“For Newman, the point was to get beyond the things that were in front of you,” Jed Perl wrote in New Art City, “to seize the sublime.” On the surface, Newman’s work appears to focus on issues of form, such as shape and color. Those forms, Newman believed, carried immense symbolic and philosophical meaning and weight for the artist and viewer. What is apparently not being said in Newman’s paintings, in short, speaks volumes.

Newman’s art declares three key ideas. Firstly, his art expresses his personal philosophy that the “modern world” had rendered traditional subjects invalid, and that a new commanding content was needed to keep the form evolving. Newman’s ideas serve as a coherent explanation of his art, but also as an exegesis of Abstract Expressionism and the American abstract theory of art. It was a theory shaped by a turbulent age – a time when postwar economic, social, and intellectual restructuring was restructuring of institutions, concomitant with reshaping tired notions of what constituted science, politics, and society, as well as art and philosophy.

Secondly, perhaps the most salient message communicated through Newman’s art, is that he is primarily a philosopher and an artist secondarily. Newman often railed against other painters, critics, philosophers, and art itself. His writings assert that he believed himself to be a philosopher who used his art as a comparative analysis, a starting point – an exhibit-A – with which to express his worldview compared to others’ ideas.

Thirdly, Newman’s art is indicative of humanity’s primal drive to create. He believed prehistoric art, Native-American art particularly, exemplified a more instinctual and relevant form of creativity than much of the art being produced in the postwar period by artists in both Europe and the United States.

Newman, O’Neill wrote in Barnett Newman Selected Writings and Interviews, consciously set out to emancipate his art from “the impediments of memory, association, nostalgia, legend, and myths.” These things, Newman believed, were antiquated and plastic devices incessantly exacerbated in European art for thousands of years. That is why he professed such a spiritual kinship with primitives and archaic art. Newman had a profound, seemingly spiritual admiration for what Jed Perl referred to as the “fearless imagery of old American Indian art—an art that is abstract, but in which abstraction is a primary rather than secondary reality.” Newman admired Native-American art because he believed it was a purer form of spiritual expression of the human spirit than art created in the confines of European traditions.

Throughout his career, Newman self-consciously and conspicuously sought to capture an instinctual, authentic energy akin to Native-American spiritual creations or something comparable to the Lascaux cave creations – the prehistoric paintings believed to be the nascent of art history, which were discovered in 1940 – just as The New York School was beginning to gather at de Kooning’s West Village Apartment to ponder and discuss where the form might be taken in the years to come.

Newman believed man was, by nature, an artist and that society had obfuscated man’s true understanding of his living essence. He argued that the point of being a modern artist was to find one’s way back to humanity’s “primordial possibilities.” He believed that art was, in this sense, a microcosm of humanity. He thought that if art could be redeemed and renewed, that society, politics, markets, and everything else could somehow be revolutionized and ultimately vanquished.

Newman’s ideas about art were romantic. He believed that a maker of abstract art was harnessing the most basic human emotions but wasn’t to be bound by any mythology or ancient standard for making art, or even for viewing it. He believed that whatever a painting’s meaning, it would primarily express itself in the seeing of the work, not, ironically, through discussion of it.

Serge Guilbaut, in How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art, quoted Newman, who expressed that humans were artists before they were hunters, and storytellers before they were scientists. “Just as man’s first speech was poetic before it became utilitarian,” Newman said, “so man first built an idol of mud before he fashioned an axe.”

Newman’s art expressed his spirit raging against an ancient, antiquated notion of Western beauty, particularly formulism. “The impulse against modern art was”, John P. O’Neill wrote, “the desire to destroy beauty.” Newman’s art was designed to serve as a counterpoint to Greek antiquity’s aesthetics of beauty, which was hyper-perpetuated during the Renaissance. From this context and aesthetic, Newman set out to create a whole new sense of human experience, one comparable to the zeitgeist tapped into by the painters and viewers in the torch-lit cave paintings of Lascaux. Newman’s art is, in this sense, an expression of a poignant philosophy of life. It is a philosophy that seeks to create an entirely new sense of expression, of communication, and of sublimity.

Newman, frustrated with Western European art’s inability to break the bonds of its “plastic history,” sought to find form through formlessness. He sought to create an entirely new vision and experience of life through experiencing art. He believed the proper pathos of modern art, particularly in New York, was to destroy the antiquated notion of beauty as form, which was perpetuated to the nth degree during Greek antiquity and fully exacerbated during the Renaissance.

Newman, an anarchist since the 1920s, often railed against other painters, critics, and art itself. His rants indicate that Newman was a philosopher who used his art as a comparative analysis, a starting point, with which to express his tenets of art and the world writ large, which was often expressed in stark contrast to other painters, whom he sometimes set up as strawmen.

Though he eventually became a renowned “Coonskin” in postwar New York – the epicenter of the postwar modern art’s avant-garde – he was initially amongst the city’s most misunderstood and defamed painters. Some of his earlier paintings were so disquieting to viewers that some felt compelled to slash his canvases with metal blades. Frustrated and unappreciated, the painter took a four-year hiatus in the early 1940s to write philosophically and study ornithology.

His four years in the proverbial wilderness accentuated the fact that Newman was firstly a philosopher, which then informed his abstract expressionism. He never stopped developing his ideological outlook regarding art, sensual experience, and life in general. In true philosopher form, Newman wanted to change the way the viewer of his paintings critically examined the entire world through his art.

During his time away from painting, Newman developed a pictorial device he called the “Zip,” a vertical shock of color running the length of the canvas. This tweak in Newman’s aesthetic led to the painting Onement I.

The Zip would become the trademark of all his work to come. It permitted him to suspend a painting’s traditional opposition of figure and ground and create an enveloping experience of color in which the viewer could be physically and/or emotionally invoked by the Zip, gestured to, as Perl explained, “being filled with the original spark of life.” The Zip also served as an entry point with which Newman could express his personal philosophy that visual forms reflect deep personal and communal necessities. Discourse and ideas were of paramount importance to him, which is reflected in his employment of The Zip in the years after the end of the war.

Newman likened abstract thought, which the Zip was emblematic of, to the non-objective forms of “primitive” art. Both of which he believed were aimed at generalization and classification. “Painting, like passion,” Newman wrote, “is a living voice, which, when I hear it, I must let it speak, unfettered.” His ideas are as essential to the modern art movement as are his paintings. His writings are like a criterion or, as Marika Herskovic wrote in American Abstract Expressionism of the 1950s, An Illustrated Survey, a “treatise on the aesthetic and philosophical aims of modern art.”

Newman’s art isn’t merely a revolution rooted in his own ideology. It is a self-evident revelation, tangible to anyone willing to, as O’Neill put it, experience it “without the nostalgic glasses of history.”

Newman believed he was reasserting, or revolutionizing, man’s natural desire for the exalted, for man’s natural relationship to the absolute and universal emotions. His art, although abstract and hallucinogenic, is revolutionary and iconoclastic because he consciously set out to divorce his aesthetic from “the props and crutches that evoke associations with outmoded images, both sublime and beautiful.”

In The Sublime Is Now, Newman wrote, “I believe that here in America, some of us, free from the weight of European culture, are finding the answer, by completely denying that art has any concern with the problem of beauty and where to find it.”

The key struggle, according to Newman, was that which occurs between ideas of beauty and ideas of the sublime. Newman concluded that he and a few other modern artists in New York, namely Mark Rothko, had finally succeeded in creating a new standard of beauty and sublimity. He believed his own generation could be a new breed of artists who did not simply question or merely challenge old standards, but rather, create entirely new and consequently sublime ideas about beauty. “The basis of an aesthetic act is the pure idea,” he wrote, “but the pure idea is, of necessity, an aesthetic act.”

Newman’s writing affirmed his belief that authentic, expressive abstract art was void of symbolism or illusion. He believed that the purest living form in an abstract painting was its shape. He argued that shape is a living thing, “a vehicle for an abstract thought-complex, and a carrier of the awesome feelings the artist felt before the terror of the unknowable.” This is an example of Newman’s belief that he and other American Abstract Expressionists were, as O’Neill explained, “reasserting man’s natural desire for the exalted, for a concern with our relationship to the absolute emotions.”

Newman, by way of his philosophical writings and art, consciously sought to defy the formalism that he felt kept Western European art mired in an antiquated social, cultural, and political tradition. He sought to revolutionize his art from the antiquated, retraced, and formulaic lines of so-called beauty and sublimity that dominated art in Western Europe, including, if not especially, Ancient Greek and Renaissance art.

Newman believed “we (The New York School) are in the process of making the world, to a certain extent, in our own image.” Utilizing his eloquent writing skills, Newman staunchly fought every step of the way to reinforce his image as an artist and to promote his work. My struggle against bourgeois society, he wrote, “has involved the total rejection of it.”

The avant-garde postwar painters in New York, Newman included, who self-consciously talked about their art in a dialectic of social revolution, did not, as some critics have asserted, reject history. How could they? History was there in all its hideous features, staring Newman in the face from the cover of newsstands. Newman did not reject the idea of some kind of action, of some reaction to the social situation. He did not avoid the problems of postwar or Cold War America. He transformed them into something to hang on the wall and to discuss.

Newman, it is important to note, did not consider institutions such as science or art as they emerged from World War II as inherently malevolent; rather, that all ancient institutions had become a strict form of theology that restricted the creative spirit, which inevitably led to world wars.

“The domination of science over the mind of modern man,” Newman wrote, had been “accomplished by the simple tactic of ignoring the prime scientific quest; the concern with its original question – what?”

This basic and instinctive question was, Newman believed, what made abstract expressionism a kind of science. It was not a science that set out to prove something, but rather a science that simply sought new knowledge and experience.

He wholeheartedly believed that once the question of “what?” ceased to be at the forefront of the human mind and experience, advancements in the arts and sciences were no longer possible; they inevitably became the exalted practice of retracing ancient lines – the practice of reaffirming old and tired ideas. For Newman, the value of art, and science for that matter, was that the process of creating allowed humans to ponder and ask “what?” This was, he believed, the most revolutionary action a philosopher and artist could engage in.