A lesson in why it’s never too late to start: Painter Barnett Newman was born and raised in New York, the son of Polish Jewish immigrants. For him, art was an act of self-creation and a declaration of political, intellectual, and individual freedom. Newman’s artistic career was late-blooming and began in fits and starts. He was around 30 when he started painting, having spent the previous decade teaching, writing, studying, and working in his father’s menswear store. The signature motif that defined all of his paintings to come was a vertical band connecting the upper and lower margins of the painting that he called a “zip.” His zips streak through fields of color in spare compositions and he saw his paintings as forms of thought, as expressions of the universal experience of being alive and individual.
