The Stations of the Cross | |
---|---|
Artist | Barnett Newman |
Year | 1958–1966 |
Movement | Abstract expressionism |
Location | National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. |
The Stations of the Cross is a series of fifteen abstract expressionist paintings created between 1958 and 1966 by Barnett Newman, often considered to be his greatest work. [1] It consists of fourteen paintings, each named after one of Jesus's fourteen Stations, followed by a coda, Be II. Unlike most depictions of the Stations of the Cross, Newman did not intend for this to be a narrative journey of Jesus's suffering. Rather, it was intended to evoke the central question of the Passion, lema sabachthani (why have you forsaken me?). [2] The secular, Jewish Newman used this central theme of Christian theology to probe the human condition rather than towards its historical purpose of devotion or worship. [3]
The series has been seen as a memorial to the victims of the Holocaust. [4]
The painting series was unveiled at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in 1966, in an exhibition titled The Stations of the Cross: Lema Sabachthani. [5] [6] [7]
The National Gallery of Art bought the paintings in 1987 from Newman's widow for an estimated $5 to $7 million, through a donation from Robert and Jane Meyerhoff. [8] [9] They were put on permanent display. [10]
Image | Title | Year | Medium |
---|---|---|---|
First Station | 1958 | Magna on canvas | |
Second Station | 1958 | Magna on canvas | |
Third Station | 1960 | Oil on canvas | |
Fourth Station | 1960 | Oil on canvas | |
Fifth Station | 1962 | Oil on canvas | |
Sixth Station | 1962 | Oil on canvas | |
Seventh Station | 1964 | Oil on canvas | |
Eighth Station | 1964 | Oil on canvas | |
Ninth Station | 1964 | Acrylic on canvas | |
Tenth Station | 1965 | Magna on canvas | |
Eleventh Station | 1965 | Acrylic on canvas | |
Twelfth Station | 1965 | Acrylic on canvas | |
Thirteenth Station | 1965/1966 | Acrylic on canvas | |
Fourteenth Station | 1965/1966 | Acrylic and Duco on canvas | |
Be II | 1961/1964 | Acrylic and oil on canvas |
Dates | Museum | City | Show |
---|---|---|---|
April 20 –June 19, 1966 | Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum | New York City | The Stations of the Cross: Lema Sabachthani [5] [6] [7] |
October 21, 1971 –January 10, 1972 | Museum of Modern Art | New York City | Barnett Newman [11] [12] |
June 1, 1978 –January 14, 1979 | National Gallery of Art | Washington, DC | American Art at Mid-Century: The Subjects of the Artist [13] [14] [15] |
May 31 –July 13, 1980 | Schloss Charlottenburg | Berlin | Signs of Faith, Spirit of the Avant-Garde: Religious Tendencies in 20th Century Art |
March 24 –July 7, 2002 | Philadelphia Museum of Art | Philadelphia | Barnett Newman [16] |
September 19, 2002 –January 5, 2003 | Tate Modern | London | |
June 7 –October 12, 2014 | de Young Museum | San Francisco | Modernism from the National Gallery of Art: The Robert + Jane Meyerhoff Collection [17] |
March 14 –June 7, 2015 | Miho Museum | Kyoto | Barnett Newman: The Stations of the Cross [18] |
Kenneth Noland was an American painter. He was one of the best-known American color field painters, although in the 1950s he was thought of as an abstract expressionist and in the early 1960s as a minimalist painter. Noland helped establish the Washington Color School movement. In 1977, he was honored with a major retrospective at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York that then traveled to the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C., and Ohio's Toledo Museum of Art in 1978. In 2006, Noland's Stripe Paintings were exhibited at the Tate in London.
Roy Fox Lichtenstein was an American pop artist. During the 1960's, along with Andy Warhol, Jasper Johns, and James Rosenquist, he became a leading figure in the new art movement. His work defined the premise of pop art through parody. Inspired by the comic strip, Lichtenstein produced precise compositions that documented while they parodied, often in a tongue-in-cheek manner. His work was influenced by popular advertising and the comic book style. His artwork was considered to be "disruptive". Lichtenstein described pop art as "not 'American' painting but actually industrial painting". His paintings were exhibited at the Leo Castelli Gallery in New York City.
Clyfford Still was an American painter, and one of the leading figures in the first generation of Abstract Expressionists, who developed a new, powerful approach to painting in the years immediately following World War II. Still has been credited with laying the groundwork for the movement, as his shift from representational to abstract painting occurred between 1938 and 1942, earlier than his colleagues like Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko, who continued to paint in figurative-surrealist styles well into the 1940s.
Agnes Bernice Martin was an American abstract painter known for her minimalist style and abstract expressionism. Born in Canada, she moved to the United States in 1931, where she pursued higher education and became a U.S. citizen in 1950. Martin's artistic journey began in New York City, where she immersed herself in modern art and developed a deep interest in abstraction. Despite often being labeled a minimalist, she identified more with abstract expressionism. Her work has been defined as an "essay in discretion, inwardness and silence."
Barnett Newman was an American painter. He has been critically regarded as one of the major figures of abstract expressionism, and one of the foremost color field painters. His paintings explore the sense of place that viewers experience with art and incorporate the simplest forms to emphasize this feeling.
The National Gallery of Art is an art museum in Washington, D.C., United States, located on the National Mall, between 3rd and 9th Streets, at Constitution Avenue NW. Open to the public and free of charge, the museum was privately established in 1937 for the American people by a joint resolution of the United States Congress. Andrew W. Mellon donated a substantial art collection and funds for construction. The core collection includes major works of art donated by Paul Mellon, Ailsa Mellon Bruce, Lessing J. Rosenwald, Samuel Henry Kress, Rush Harrison Kress, Peter Arrell Browne Widener, Joseph E. Widener, and Chester Dale. The Gallery's collection of paintings, drawings, prints, photographs, sculpture, medals, and decorative arts traces the development of Western art from the Middle Ages to the present, including the only painting by Leonardo da Vinci in the Americas and the largest mobile created by Alexander Calder.
Guido Molinari L.L. D. was a Canadian artist, known nationally and internationally for his serial abstract paintings and their dynamic interplay of colours and focus on modular shapes. His Stripe series is especially celebrated. Molinari himself described their effect - and the effect of all his paintings - as creating a new kind of fictional space "because it happens in the mind and yet also involves the totality of perception".
Broken Obelisk is a sculpture designed by Barnett Newman between 1963 and 1967. Fabricated from three tons of Cor-Ten steel, which acquires a rust-colored patina, it is the largest and best known of his six sculptures.
Morris Louis Bernstein, known professionally as Morris Louis, was an American painter. During the 1950s he became one of the earliest exponents of Color Field painting. While living in Washington, D.C., Louis, along with Kenneth Noland and other Washington painters, formed an art movement that is known today as the Washington Color School.
Anne Truitt, born Anne Dean, was an American sculptor of the mid-20th century.
Lawrence Reginald Alloway was an English art critic and curator who worked in the United States from 1961. In the 1950s, he was a leading member of the Independent Group in the UK and in the 1960s was an influential writer and curator in the US. He first used the term "mass popular art" in the mid-1950s and used the term "Pop Art" in the 1960s to indicate that art has a basis in the popular culture of its day and takes from it a faith in the power of images. From 1954 until his death in 1990, he was married to the painter Sylvia Sleigh.
The Art of This Century gallery was opened by Peggy Guggenheim at 30 West 57th Street in Manhattan, New York City on October 20, 1942. The gallery occupied two commercial spaces on the seventh floor of a building that was part of the midtown arts district including the Museum of Modern Art, the Museum of Non-Objective Painting, Helena Rubinstein's New Art Center, and numerous commercial galleries. The gallery exhibited important modern art until it closed in 1947, when Guggenheim returned to Europe. The gallery was designed by architect, artist, and visionary Frederick Kiesler.
John Harvey McCracken was an American minimalist visual artist. He lived and worked in Los Angeles, Santa Fe, New Mexico, and New York.
Walter "Chico" Hopps was an American museum director, gallerist, and curator of contemporary art. Hopps helped bring Los Angeles post-war artists to prominence during the 1960s, and later went on to redefine practices of curatorial installation internationally. He is known for contributing decisively to “the emergence of the museum as a place to show new art.”
Paul Feeley was an artist and director of the Art Department at Bennington College during the 1950s and early 1960s.
Neil Williams, was an American painter and educator. Williams was an abstract painter primarily known for his pioneering work with shaped canvases in the early 1960s. His paintings of the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s are associated with geometric abstraction, hard-edge painting, color field, and lyrical abstraction, although he did not readily subscribe to any category for his work. He taught fine arts at the School of Visual Arts, from the late 1970s until the early 1980s.
Jack Albert Youngerman was an American artist known for his constructions and paintings.
Minimalism describes movements in various forms of art and design, especially Visual art and music, where the work is set out to expose the essence, essentials or identity of a subject through eliminating all non-essential forms, features or concepts. As a specific movement in the arts it is identified with developments in post–World War II Western Art, most strongly with American visual arts in the 1960s and early 1970s. Minimalism is often interpreted as a reaction to abstract expressionism and a bridge to postminimal art practices. Prominent artists associated with this movement include Ad Reinhardt, Nassos Daphnis, Tony Smith, Donald Judd, John McCracken, Agnes Martin, Dan Flavin, Robert Morris, Larry Bell, Anne Truitt, Yves Klein and Frank Stella. Artists themselves have sometimes reacted against the label due to the negative implication of the work being simplistic.
Justin K. Thannhauser (1892–1976) was a German art dealer and collector who was an important figure in the development and dissemination of modern art in Europe.
Woman Ironing is a 1904 oil painting by Pablo Picasso that was completed during the artist's Blue Period (1901—1904). This evocative image, painted in neutral tones of blue and gray, depicts an emaciated woman with hollowed eyes, sunken cheeks, and bent form, as she presses down on an iron with all her will. A recurrent subject matter for Picasso during this time is the desolation of social outsiders. This painting, as the rest of his works of the Blue Period, is inspired by his life in Spain but was painted in Paris.