Author 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-a-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.