Howard Newman

Howard Newman studied at Miami University of Ohio and received an M.F.A degree from the Rhode Island School of Design in 1971, the year he won a Fulbright grant to work in Italy. Although he has recently exhibited paintings, Newman is best known for drawings and bronzes that are reminiscent of Umberto Boccioni's Futurist sculpture and [Raymond] Duchamp-Villon's mechanical abstractions. Newman combines elements of human figures and machines into tightly interlocking geometric shapes that he assembles from separately cast pieces. Until recently he employed smooth, highly polished surfaces and uniform patinas. In his new sculpture, however, Newman permits surfaces to show marks of their original development in clay, a major stylistic transformation from the mechanical flawlessness of his earlier work.

Virginia M. Mecklenburg Modern American Realism: The Sara Roby Foundation Collection (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press for the National Museum of American Art, 1987)