Author Talk

After World War II, in various places around the world, there occurred a moment when a small number of artists were experimenting with paintings in startling ways. Their work was more psychologically fraught, more abstract, and on bigger canvases marked with signature motifs and gestures. Attend a reading and book signing for the new biography Barnett Newman: Here featuring author Amy Newman and art historian Pepe Karmel to learn about Newman’s artistic legacy and its many points of connection to the Jewish Museum.

About the speakers:

Amy Newman is the author of the first biography of the Abstract Expressionist painter Barnett Newman, who is not related to her, published by Princeton University Press, October 2025. Newman is also the author of Challenging Art: Artforum 1962-1974 (Soho Press, 2000), and editor of numerous other books and catalogues. She served as a councilmember on the New York State Council on the Arts; taught in the School of the Arts and the Graduate School of Journalism, Columbia University; and was the curator of an extensive collection of contemporary works on paper for two prominent law firms.

Pepe Karmel is a Professor in the Department of Art History and at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University. He is the author of Picasso and the Invention of Cubism (2003), Abstract Art: A Global History (2020), and Looking at Picasso (2023). He has written widely on modern and contemporary art for museum catalogues, as well as for the New York Times, Art in America, Brooklyn Rail, and other publications. He has also curated or co-curated numerous exhibitions, including Robert Morris: Felt Works (Grey Art Gallery, New York, 1989), Jackson Pollock (MoMA, New York, 1998), and Dialogues with Picasso (Museo Picasso Málaga, 2020).

Tickets: $24 General; $16 Students and Seniors; $14 Jewish Museum members

Doors open at 3:30 pm; Includes Museum Admission