Audio Stop 29

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Two black bands span the height of this vertical canvas against a field of white mottled with shades of ivory, bone, and parchment in this abstract painting. A narrow, solid black stripe lines the left edge of the canvas, like the spine of a book. About a quarter of the way in from the right edge, black paint swirls and wafts like smoke on either side of a narrow white stripe the same color as the background. The artist signed and dated the painting in black paint in the lower right corner of the canvas: “Barnett Newman 1958.”

Barnett Newman

First Station, 1958

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?”

Read full audio transcript

NARRATOR:

Barnett Newman named this series The Stations of the Cross after the fourteen-stop religious practice that commemorates Christ’s last days on earth.

MOLLY DONOVAN:

... and he subtitled it Lema Sabachthani, which are the Aramaic words for Jesus’s cry from the cross, meaning: “Why have you forsaken me?”

NARRATOR:

He borrowed the name and idea for a different purpose, however.

Molly Donovan, associate curator of modern art.

MOLLY DONOVAN:

Newman, who was Jewish, is not portraying this Christian imagery in any way, shape or form. He’s simply in the title invoking this collective empathic concern of humanity. A larger, more universal consideration.

NARRATOR:

What is similar is how the stations should be experienced, both as a whole and as individual moments as you progress through the space. Let’s walk to the First Station, where we’ll take a closer look at Newman’s technique.

MOLLY DONOVAN:

On the right side of the painting, is one of Newman’s so-called signature “zips.” To make this form, he would put a piece of tape down the vertical plane of the raw canvas, and then he would scumble his brush over that tape. When he was satisfied with what he had, he would remove the tape, and what was revealed was this negative space. In describing this motif, Newman said in 1966: “I feel that my ‘zip’ does not divide my paintings. I feel it does the exact opposite.” So what Newman’s telling us here is that the “zip” doesn’t separate the elements of the canvas; it actually knits them together.

NARRATOR:

We encourage you to spend some time in this gallery, quietly taking in the atmosphere, and looking closely at the paintings themselves.

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