Book Description
From 1958 to 1966, master color field painter Barnett Newman created The Stations of the Cross - Lema Sabachthani, a cycle of fourteen canvas paintings, each of them 5 x 6 1/2 feet. Their scale is so large that the viewer is never able to take them all in at once. With The Stations of the Cross, Newman undertook one of the most demanding assignments in the history of modern art, namely to thematize, without the use of color and only in black and white, the tragedy of human existence vis-à-vis an almighty God--bringing it to new pictorial form. Accompanying texts consider the thematic content of the work, as well as the series' inaugural hanging in 1966 at the Guggenheim Museum in New York.
About the author
Barnett Newman was born in New York in 1905 to Russian-Jewish immigrant parents. A lifelong New Yorker, he studied at the Art Students League and the City College of New York. Close friends with Adolph Gottlieb, Mark Rothko, Clyfford Still, and Jackson Pollock, he was at the center of the New York art scene just as Abstract Expressionism was ascending to prominence in the early 1950s. In spite of his important role during the formative years of the New York School, Newman achieved recognition for his own work only late in his career, after decades of struggle. In the 1960s he served as an unofficial father figure to the emerging generation of minimalist and conceptual artists. Newman died in 1970.
Essay by Franz Meyer.
Hardcover, 9 x 12 in., 144 pages, 71 color illustrations
