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)
