Audio Tour Stop 29

First Station, Barnett Newman

NGA, East Building, ET-615-B, W

One of the great figures of the abstract expressionist movement, Barnett Newman was an intellectual who developed his ideas in his painting, sculpture, and writing. In the mid-1940s he made his first works using his signature vertical elements, or “zips,” to punctuate the single-hued fields of his canvases. This painting is the first in a series of 14 paintings that Newman eventually named The Stations of the Cross (along with a coda in the form of a 15th painting, Be II). The Stations of the Cross was Newman’s most ambitious attempt to address what he called a “moral crisis” facing artists after World War II and the Holocaust: “What are we going to paint?”

First Station (English)