The present painter is concerned not with his own feelings or with the mystery of his own personality but with the penetration into the world-mystery… - Barnett Newman

Sylvester: When was it that you first did a painting with one or two simple lines, horizontal or vertical, across the surface?
Newman: I would say that it began in '46— '47. In those years, whenever I did a painting with one or two elements in it, it did always have a sense of an atmospheric background, I suppose — with the exception of a painting which I called Euclidian Abyss, where the background is black and has some of the white coming through, but there's no true atmosphere.

Painting, like passion, is a living voice, which, when I hear it, I must let it speak, unfettered.

In 1940, some of us woke up to find ourselves without hope – to find that painting did not really exist. Or to coin a modern phrase, painting.. ..was dead. The awakening had a exaltation of a revolution. It was that awakening that inspired the aspiration – the high purpose – quite a different thing from ambition – to start from scratch, to paint as if painting never existed before. It was that naked revolutionary moment that made painters out of painters.