Barnett Newman, The Stations of the Cross: Lema Sabachtani

Abstract

According to the art critic Harold Rosenberg there is nothing religious about Barnett Newman’s series of fourteen roughly human-sized, black and white paintings, The Stations of the Cross: Lema Sabachtani. Rosenberg, countering Thomas Hess’s kabalistic reading of Newman’s work, argued that Newman’s The Stations should be understood in the context of Newman’s idiosyncratic, secular world view. This in some respect is correct—Newman was not religious in any traditional sense and railed against dogma of any kind—but Rosenberg surprisingly failed to understand fully that Newman’s recourse to a powerful religious symbol allowed him to point to the political import of his subject when other aesthetic and political vocabularies failed him.