Lema Sabachthani "Why have you forsaken me?"

  Stations of the Cross (1958-1966), the title of a major series from Barnett Newman, is about Jesus's long agony on Mount Calvary followed by his crucifixion and death, an event reenacted yearly on Good Friday by the Catholic Church. The Aramaic subtitle Lema Sabachthani, Jesus's anguished plea while dying on the cross, widens the impact of the work: "Why have you forsaken me". Following a heart attack in 1958, Barnett Newman made two paintings which grew to a series of fourteen plus one completed in 1966, inspired by the artist facing his own demise at a time of reckoning in a post-WWII era. The fifteen paintings, gift from Robert and Jane Meyerhoff, are permanently located in the Tower 1 of the East Building at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C..

Usually quiet, the gallery is the perfect space for the fifteen canvasses of the same size (6 1/2 by 5 feet) lined up on the walls in harmony with the architecture. The high glass ceiling lets the natural light gently bathe the room and the display is an invitation to sit on a bench surrounded by the works. The neutral colors, black and white, induce a state of tranquility and contemplation. A slow walk along the stations allows an immersive view of the large rectangular paintings for an "enveloping effect" (Greenberg) intended by the artist. A description of each abstract piece would be fastidious and pointless. A brief look from the first to the sixth painting will reveal slightly different shades of  white for the background, a black vertical band of  almost the same width on the left side and black zips on the right side with variations from brushstrokes, speckles or smudges. One cannot refrain from evoking Japanese calligraphy, updated by Newman. The ninth, tenth and eleventh canvasses are beige and white and match the series's vertical design, pillars? crosses? totems? A funerary black background and white zips relate to the final stages of the journey to Calvary ending with the death of Jesus (twelfth and thirteenth paintings). Fourteenth Station (1965-1966) is white, ethereal, immaculate, so bright that it feels like looking at the sun through white clouds. It reaches perfection without visible brushstrokes. A discreet light grey strip is found on the left side. A close look reveals the "spatial infinity" Barnett Newman was pursuing as he wished to visit the tundra to "... have the sensation of being surrounded by four horizons in a total surrender to spatial infinity." Traditionally the fifteenth Station of the Cross, when present, corresponds to the resurrection of Jesus Christ, one of the mysteries of the Church. Here the fifteenth painting, of the same heavenly white than the fourteenth, features a thin jagged blood-red border on the left side, the only warm color in the show and a narrow black strip on the right. The question stays unanswered: "why have you forsaken me".  

The last two paintings provide a clue to Newman's quest for the sublime and a path to infinity, art's higher goal than a search for beauty. Inspired by the indigenous art from the Northwest Coast of North America he wrote about the typical Kwakiutl artist: "For him, a shape was a living thing, a vehicle for abstract thought-complex, a carrier of the awesome feelings he felt before the terror of the unknowable."  "The Kwakiutl artist, the abstract shape he used, his entire plastic language, was directed by a ritualistic will towards metaphysical understanding." The art historian Robert Rosenblum wrote about Newman in his essay on The Abstract Sublime: "(Barnett Newman) ...explores a realm of sublimity so perilous that it defies comparison with even the most adventurous Romantic explorations into sublime nature." Barnett Newman creates art with a new purpose and as a viewer we have to learn new ways to look at it. Contemplation requires time and introspection to reach the spiritual enlightenment the artist aims to communicate. The artist himself wrote about his work in 1967: "I hope that my painting has the impact of giving someone, as it did me, the feeling of my own totality, of his own separateness, of his own individuality and at the same time of his connection to others, who are also separate." One more quote from The First Man was an Artist : "We are creating images whose reality is self-evident and which are devoid of the props and crutches that evoke associations with outmoded images, both sublime and beautiful. We are freeing ourselves of the impediments of memory, association, nostalgia, legend, myth, or what have you, that have been the devices of Western European painting. Instead of making cathedrals out of Christ, man or "life", we are making it out of ourselves out of our own feelings.  The image we produce is the self-evident one of revelation, real and concrete, that we can be understood by anyone who will look at it without the nostalgic glasses of history." With 14 stations about human suffering, could the 15th painting be a sign of hope?  

Donald Judd who wrote extensively about Newman's work stated: "A painting by Newman is finally no simpler than one by Cézanne". Agree. 

                               

  

photographs by the author:

"First Station" (1958)

View of the gallery

"Be II" (1961/1964)           

Revisiting Colescott at the Rubell Museum DC

The nearly one hundred works assembled at the Rubell Museum DC for the exhibition American Vignettes: Symbols, Society and Satire include five of Robert Colescott's paintings found in the section labelled "Satire". They  represent a mature stage of his practice, when in his sixties he reached the height of his career. Born in 1925, following a seemingly unremarkable childhood, Colescott went through tempestuous decades in his professional as well as his personal life before settling in Tucson, Arizona, in 1985. Never associated with art movements or groups of artists, he refined his unique technique along his peregrinations, from Paris where under the influence of Fernand Léger he adopted a figurative style to Cairo where he discovered Egyptian art and the rich colors of North Africa. The core of his practice was centered around a theme born from a deep family rift overshadowing his early childhood. On his mother's side, his ancestors were slaves from Southern plantations and his father was of mixed black, white and Native American descent. The couple moved from New Orleans to Oakland, California, looking for better opportunities as "white", leaving their "black" roots in Louisiana. Success unfortunately did not concretize. Colescott who was a light-skinned black person identified as white until his mid-forties, including while in the Army during WWII. Racial identity went deeper than his skin color, and shaped his career.   

New Orleans was the perfect setting to discover Colescott a decade ago at the Arthur Roger Gallery and during the travelling exhibition 30 Americans in 2014 at the Contemporary Art Center. The Crescent City's vibe in sync with his work made it relevant, like being home. This time, the gathering of  five of his large paintings in one room is the occasion to revisit his legacy. Starlet (1976), the earliest, reflects his cartoonish style of the seventies. The poster-like composition features a white Hollywoodian starlet on a snowy background wearing only scarf, woolen hat and gloves, bathing in the light of a projector, as she is pursued by a half-naked suitor under the lewd gaze of the black director. The unabashedly pornographic scene includes in the lower left corner a clapperboard labelled: "Sex On The Slope Scene II" and on top the title written with penises. Funny? Tasteless? Shocking? The previous year, the artist had produced a painting still considered revolutionary and recently bought by The Lucas Museum in Los Angeles (opening in 2026). In George Washington Carver Crossing The Delaware: Page From An American History Textbook (1975), Colescott introduces appropriation to revisit history and challenge the cultural values of the classical painting from Emmanuel Leutze Washington Crossing the Delaware, (1851). At the time, he began a very productive period of his career as he underwent pivotal personal changes, embracing his blackness. 

No subject is off limit for Colescott, including religion. Modern Day Miracles (1988), the title of the next painting hints at a divine intervention. The composition features two different worlds. At the top a white leonine figure with abundant hair and a beard, God in his immaculate gown, ready to have intercourse with a black lady wearing only a pink bra. A blue brushstroke like a slash isolates the scene from a group of smaller black characters at the bottom. The snippets of their domestic life provide a glimpse into black communities aspiring to be part of the American Dream: electricity, food, kitchen appliances, medical care. Fishes are found in a sandwich, in a frying pan on top of a stove, veiled hint  to the Christian religion and its beliefs in miracles. The protagonists appear naïve even submissive and abide by the stereotypes of black portrayal. Only one happy fellow holding a bottle of wine shows his missing teeth through his wide smile. Could God be the artist?         

Most likely inspired by Colescott's sojourns in Egypt in the mid-sixties, Arabs: The Emir of Iswid (How Wide the Gulf) (1992) treats of history, international politics, wars and economies. At the bottom of the painting, two nude females shackled at the wrists sit on oil drums labelled Arabia on the left side and heaps of bananas labelled Africa on the right. In the background, armed soldiers and a group of men wearing keffiyehs surround the captives. Towering the group, the portrait of a powerful figure with two stars on his shoulders profiled on a map of Egypt oversees the brutal scene. Red and green banners with yellow stars complete the setting. Scribbles in Arabic, el-Iswid (an archeological site on the Nile Delta) spelled on the map, three minute silhouettes of oil rigs, bring more to the story which takes a while to decipher. The title gives a clue referring to the Gulf War of 1990-1991, Operation Desert Storm. The black figures could also represent allegories of two cultures: Arabs on the left side, Africans on the right in this attempt at history painting. 

Mythology is a boundless source of inspiration for artists and the story of Pygmalion, the sculptor falling in love with his creation is represented in a number of well-known chef d'oeuvres from Gérôme  to Rodin and was made popular by the famous musical My Fair Lady. At the center of Pygmalion (1987),  Higgins/Colescott dances with his black Elyza. The couple is surrounded by a black face version of two  females defining the canons of beauty, Mona Lisa on the right and the Venus de Milo on the left. Accessory characters in the process of beautification are represented with curlers at the hairdresser or in front of a mirror. Neglecting scale or perspective, the interwoven portraits, white or black, appear to float on a tight background of geometric abstract patterns or blue skies. A lonely wide-eyed male at the bottom center raises his eyebrows, disapprovingly. The lively round of personages contributes to a story  about the pressure on the black community to conform to white European standards of beauty, smothering their culture. The story of Pygmalion fits the artist who claimed "I am playing God with a woman". 

A commemorative medallion of the Louisiana Purchase, historic treaty between France and the United States in 1803, overshadows Sunset on the Bayou (1993). Two white males exchange a purse filled with gold coins to seal the casual transfer of land and its people as a brown pelican, Louisiana's State Bird, looks on. In contrast to the official portraits, quintessential New Orleans scenes fill the rest of the painting. A mother cuddles her daughter as the caption mentions quadroon and octaroon and another caption in French reads "we do not talk about these things". These "things" are drops of blood which defined status in a complex creole society. The personal struggle of Colescott, tormented by his racial background which tore his family apart, is reflected in this very Southern story. Always deflecting the pain with a touch of humor, he includes a po'boy for a smile and also a caricature of the "black" person as seen by white people.  

In 1997, the selection of Robert Colescott, first African-American artist to represent the United States with a solo show at the Venice Biennale, brought its share of controversy, and the nineteen paintings on view were qualified as "kind of competent American regionalist narrative painting" by the art advisor Allan Schwartzman. In 2022 the first retrospective of Colescott's work in thirty years took place at the New Museum in New York City. Art and Race Matters: The Career of Robert Colescott allowed to revisit his legacy in today's context. He was a pioneer, unwavering in his mission to give black culture a voice in history. He chose appropriation, satire, and in an obsessive way treated of race and sex, introducing transgressive art through bold narratives, regardless of cultural sensitivities. He paved the way to a new generation of artists like Carrie May Weems, Kara Walker, Kerry James Marshall,... the list goes on.

Just remembering Colescott's quote when looking at the five paintings: "I am not a writer. I present an image that can leave it to you to write the story." 

  

                                                        

photographs by the author:

"Modern Day Miracles", 1988

"Sunset on the Bayou", 1993

"Pygmalion", 1987