Newman has been regarded variously as an exemplar of high modernism, a late romantic, a practitioner of the art of the sublime, a precursor of Minimalism, an existentialist and a spiritual artist obsessed with Judaism and the Kabbalah. Acutely aware of the tragedies of his times and a keen admirer of the art of indigenous and earlier cultures, Newman searched for a way in which to express the human predicament in a post-holocaust era.
Born in New York to Polish Jewish immigrants in 1905, Barnett Newman was obliged to work in his father's clothing factory before being able to embark on a career as an artist. In the 1930s he painted little but produced a series of writings on art and politics. In 1948 he made his breakthrough painting, Onement I. From that point he more or less ceased to write, and concentrated full time on making art. With Onement I, Newman developed a signature style in which a field of colour was interrupted by one or more vertical bands that he called 'zips'. While believing that art must be abstract Newman also believed that subject matter was of crucial importance. His earliest extant works were abstract renderings of the Biblical theme of Creation, but in the aftermath of war the look of his paintings changed to reflect what he called 'the tragedy of our times'.
source www.tate.org.uk