Wednesday, April 26, 2017

Barnett Newman, Stations of the Cross, and the Grace of Conditions

The east gallery of the National Gallery of Art has reopened after a renovation that serves to highlight some of the most highly-regarded pieces in the modern collection; great news but there is a catch: many of these pieces are works of Abstract Expressionists, and this is not everyone's idea of art. What can a large canvas of paint with swishes or bars of color tell us about real life? Displays of Barnett Newman's and Mark Rothko's works inhabit the top of the renovated Tower, and in the case of Newman, Stations of the Cross: Lema sabachthani is a full- room installation of fourteen paintings; these are fourteen stations of the cross in the catholic Christian tradition. Newman added a fifteenth, Be II.  Thanks to works like the sensitive, figural woodblock depictions of the Stations along the walls of the Episcopal Church of the Redeemer, many Christians beyond Roman Catholics are familiar with the scenes of the Via Dolorosa, a devotional imagination of Jesus' last walk and one of the ways we are told he was tortured- a long walk struggling to drag a cross on which he would be nailed. This seems like a subject for art at its most concrete, dramatic, and potentially horrifying.

Barnett Newman (1905-1970) was an American Jewish artist, born in New York City; his career is art was slow to take off but eventually made him a prominent member of the New York school of painting that moved away from representational art, albeit in a conscious and careful manner. His Jewish identity and this subject matter seem improbable, but perhaps a bit less so if one remembers that those few Jewish painters worked within a visual tradition that was not favored by their own faith and dominated by recurring themes in religious art that were pillars of Christian belief. Indeed, the art of glass and painting in the cathedrals of the European middle ages had served as illustrated Bibles for the faithful for hundreds of years. Marc Chagall's life as a Jewish visual artist and the fictional hero of Chaim Potok's novel My Name is Asher Lev illustrate the challenge. What's a nice Jewish boy like you doing by creating some version of  late Christian devotional art?

I am a fan of abstract expressionism and I loved the sweep of canvasses I encountered, and so I became immediately curious about them and asked this question myself. This prompted me to learn more about Newman, his reasons for undertaking this project, and also to explore my own attraction to the paintings.

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These painting are severe human-sized paintings with rigid bars along one or the other side and/or a stripe that is more like a vertical flash of color or the bursts of light on the screen of an oscilloscope. This is the famous "zip" that Newman describes when he talks about his own work. It expresses an energy that fascinates. As one progresses through the fourteen paintings, a pattern seems to emerge. The early ones have a sober bar of black. Gradually the black on the left grows wide and then thinner. On the other side is a black or gray bar stripe. As we move along there seems to be a dialog and for me the left became fear and the right, always a bit lighter in most of the paintings, seemed to me to be Jesus' commitment to the sacrifice and the hope for life it would bring. Acceptance grows as white planes of paint dominate, and yet black takes over much of one of the stations. Newman wanted simply to focus on "Why has God forsaken me?" as a basic question of meaning. [get exact quotation].
In the end, white light, acceptance, stillness prevails. When it is over it is translucent but still. The light of hope moves across the entire field. At the end of the fourteen Newman decided to place a fifteenth canvas, a departure from the number of stations that the traditional visual narrative would include. This canvas, Be II, has the only orange stripe at the left against a field of white. This would seem to be a new color of life and perhaps a tribute to the acceptance of suffering and of hope as the texture of being.