Born in New York City, Barnett Newman was a leading figure in 20th century Abstract Expressionism creating canvases with fields of strong saturated colour and vertical stripes. He was both a pioneer of using large-scale canvases, and of a style of painting that heralded the Minimalist movement. He was committed to the idea that art was not merely decoration nor a copy of European models but must be an expression from personal meditation.

Early in his career, he painted in the Surrealist style, but he destroyed most of those paintings as well as others that he completed before 1930.

He studied at the Art Students League in the 1920s and 1930s and in 1940, stopped painting for several years because he needed to clarify his break with European traditions and get in touch with his own mind.

In 1948, he did his first stripe painting with forms appearing to lie flat on the surface and to be a totality rather than single entity. These paintings were only about themselves, hence the name, Minimalist art. From that time, Newman worked within the same format of thin vertical bands placed within broad fields of color of equal size to the bands. Some of his paintings were only several inches wide and have been called the first shaped canvases. He also experimented with lithographs and did some sculpture, one of them a twenty-six foot steel obelisk, "Broken Obelisk" in front of the Rothko Chapel in Houston, Texas. The work memorializes Martin Luther King.

One of his paintings, "Who's Afraid of Red, Yellow and Blue III," was slashed numerous times in 1987 at Amsterdam's Stedelijk Museum, and the same vandal, Gerard Jan van Bladeren, slashed another work, "Cathedra," in 1998. The van Bladeren claimed that vandalism-by-slashing was his art.