Barnett Newman's Stations and the Memory of the Holocaust

Author(s): Mark Godfrey

Source: October, Vol. 108 (Spring, 2004), pp. 35-50
Published by: The MIT Press
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 Barnett Newman's Stations and
the Memory of the Holocaust*

MARK GODFREY

In January 1965, Barnett Newman attended a symposium at New York's Jewish

Museum, an institution then planning his retrospective. The chair was D
Ashton, and the speakers were Paul Brach, Arthur A. Cohen, and Peter Selz. T
title, arrived at after much discussion, was "What about Jewish Art?" Three d
later, Newman wrote to the director to "express my disgust at the Jewish Museum's
sponsorship of the debate 'What aboutJewish Art' ... What the Jewish Museum
done is to compromise me as an artist because I am Jewish. Please therefore not
all concerned not to ask me to cooperate ever with any of your shows since y
have made it impossible for me to show my work in your Museum."l
There is no complete record of the talks Newman heard, but the notes for the
speeches suggest that even those on the panel resisted the title of the discussio
Cohen began his presentation by stating the symposium's question "What abo
Jewish art?" only to answer "Not very much, not very interesting if there is such a
confection, and it is doubtful if there ever was."2 Newman's anger about the evening
topic becomes more noteworthy considering Cohen's own hesitation; clearly this had
not been an evening affirming "Jewish art," but Newman still felt compelled to obj
to the possibility of establishing such a category, as this carried the risk of pige
holing his work within it. (Considering Thomas Hess's posthumous 1971 Museum
Modern Art catalog, Newman's resistance was remarkably prescient.)3

* Many thanks to Briony Fer and Tamar Garb for their comments on earlier drafts of this essay
to Yve-Alain Bois for his encouragement; to Heidi Colsman-Freyberger at The Barnett New
Foundation for her archival assistance; and to Anne Temkin for inviting me to present an earlier versio
the symposium "Reconsidering Barnett Newman," held at the Philadelphia Museum of Art in April 200
1. The Barnett Newman Foundation, Hans van Weeren-Griek files. Letter from Barnett Newman
to Hans van Weeren-Griek, January 18, 1965. At the time of Newman's letter, the Jewish Museum w
planning a small retrospective that would have been Newman's most visible New York show to t
date. Jewish Museum records from 1964 indicate that a retrospective of "12-15 large works"
planned to follow the Jasper Johns show. Jewish Museum archives, "Proposals of the Exhibi
Committee," Box: "Director/Admin, Subjects A-Z, 1962-66," File: "F-G General 1964."
2. Arthur A. Cohen, notes for talk. Arthur A. Cohen archive, courtesy Elaine Lustig Cohen.
thanks to Mel Bochner, who enabled me to access this archive.
3. Newman could not of course prevent the inclusion of his work in Avram Kampfs 1975 exhibi
at the Jewish Museum, Jewish Experience in the Art of the Twentieth Century. Fulfilling Newman's worst f
Kampf wrote in the catalog: "If there were a Jewish art, Newman's work would be regarded as its mo

OCTOBER 108, Spring 2004, pp. 35-50. ? 2004 October Magazine, Ltd. and Massachusetts Institute of Technol

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36 OCTOBER

Cohen did not speak of Newman, but he did allude to "Jewish paint
have responded independently of their art to the demands of Jewish
and well might this allusion have addressed Newman. Cohen, after all, w
at the very place where two years previously Newman had been the only
contribute to Richard Meier's Recent American Synagogue Architecture s
Newman had exhibited his just-completed model and had published tho
synagogue architecture first written twelve years earlier, in 1951.4 This
product of the immediate postwar context, when the widespread reviv
synagogue was routinely described as an effect of the growing conscio
events in Europe.5 In the years following the symposium "What aboutJe
despite his determination never to show again at the Jewish Museum, N
more than happy to identify himself as a Jewish intellectual. He was a s
a letter published in the New York Times protesting the "Arab Threat t
Israel" (June 7, 1967) and a participant-only weeks before he died
conference organized by the "Conference on the Status of Soviet Jews
1970). Comparing the current situation with the story of biblical slavery
read out a simple statement: "Who would ever have thought that one
years after his birth, the mummy in Red Square would turn out to be Ph
Newman's serpentine moves within the organizedJewish cultural sph
plify the compromised position of the post-Holocaust Jewish intellectual
impulse to contribute to the rebuilding and defense ofJewish culture, there
an equally insistent urgency to distance oneself from unacceptable const
Jewish identity. We can now consider Newman as a post-HolocaustJewis
and historical distance allows us to locate his work, as well, in the contex
aftermath of war; Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, for instance, with particular ref

authentic and classic expression." Jewish Experience in the Art of the Twentieth Century (New Y
Museum, 1975), p. 46.
4. Armin Zweite gives the fullest account of this project in Barnett Newman, Painting
Works on Paper (Ostfildern-Ruit: Hatje Cantz, 1999), pp. 236-54. It has been thought th
text was written after Richard Meier approached him to make a model for the exhibition
Barnett Newman Foundation, the file containing Newman's text is labeled "Project for
1951," and the typed text inside is dated 1951.
5. Paul and Percival Goodman (who also contributed to the 1963 exhibition) described
tunities forJewish artists to make works for the many synagogues being planned across the
impetus for these new buildings: "Suddenly there occurred the fact that six million Jews
tered in three of four years, just because they were Jews. We do not know in what ways ot
would react to such a happening, but among the Jews it seems to have had the following
became aware of themselves as a physical community, a congregation .... The reaction h
sense of the co-presence of a certain identity and certain rudiments of a tradition, what we
the sense of being a physical congregation." "Modern Artist as Synagogue Builder," Comment
1949), p. 52. The article was one of many that addressed the relation between the effects of r
and the growth of interest in the synagogue. Will Herberg noted that arguments connectin
tering experience of demonic anti-Semitism" to the revival of the synagogue were "common
Postwar Revival of the Synagogue," Commentary (April 1950), p. 315. Janay Jadine Wong h
account of the commissions of works by painters and sculptors for these new syn
"Synagogue Art of the 1950s: A New Context for Abstraction," ArtJournal (Winter 1994), p
6. The Barnett Newman Foundation, "Conference on the Status of SovietJews" files.

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Barnett Newman 's Stations 37

Newman's "skinny" paintings of 1950, has argued that Newman's abstraction repre-
sents an acknowledgment of the impossibilities of lyric painting in the wake of the
Holocaust.7 Listening to Newman's own words, this Adornean argument becomes
compelling. In a 1966 television interview with Alan Solomon, Newman said, "the
feelings I had at the time of the war in '41 was that the world was coming to an end.
And to the extent that the world was coming to an end, the whole issue of painting,
I felt, was over because it was impossible to paint flowers, figures, etc., and so the
crisis moved around the problem of what I can really paint."8
Though Newman can now be rethought in this way, it would still seem impossi-
ble to suggest that any particular works represent this historical situation. First
Station and Second Station (both 1958) are the first two of Newman's The Stations of
the Cross: Lema Sabachthani, the series of fifteen paintings that was installed at the
Guggenheim in 1966. Of identical scale, their breadth is around an armspan; both
are organized with flat black bands to the left and incident to the right. Horizontal
strokes dramatize the right of the First; gentler, downward strokes come to the right
of the Second. One might attend to the unfolding of difference through repetition
throughout the Stations to broaden an understanding of painting in series in the

7. Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, "Lines of Abstraction in 1948," unpublished paper presented at

"Reconsidering Barnett Newman" symposium, Philadelphia Museum of Art, April 2002.
8. In the mid-1960s, Newman spoke several times about the problem of painting in the early 1940s.
Here, he makes the nature of the problem most explicit. Alan Solomon was interviewing Newman for a
television program broadcast onJuly 12, 1966, as part of the "U.S.A. Artists" series on National Education
Television. The interviews with Solomon were heavily edited before being broadcast with several of the
comments most interesting for my purposes cut. Archives of American Art, Alan Solomon files. Transcript
of Barnett Newman interview, March 20, 1966. Hereafter cited as "Solomon Interview."

I1 1
I I r
\ii
Barnett Newman. Left: Fir
Second Station. 1958. ? The B
Courtesy National Gallery o

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38 OCTOBER

1960s. Setting aside their inclusion in a series, one might juxtapose th

with Black Fire or Shining Forth (To George) (both 1961), possibly to addre
wider use of black and raw canvas. What might it be, though, to suggest t
the first canvases in a series in which Holocaust memory is in play? To
given their resistance at every level to iconographic interpretation? I w
that the 1966 installation of The Stations constitutes not so much a repres
the Holocaust as a place set out to compel the viewer to ask the questi
them by the memory of the Holocaust: Why did you forsake me? Th
would seem strange were we to consider the surfaces of the paintings
contingent circumstances of their first exhibition, and indeed it relies on
detail about those contingencies.
As is widely known, the first paintings in the series were made in
Newman's heart attack.9 This personal situation is of much less concer
those circumstances in place three years later, when, with four paintings
in view, Newman claimed to have "realized" what he considered to have
meaning of his works. He then addressed them by titling them The St
Cross: Lema Sabachthani, and he endeavored to make eleven more to j
think about this declared moment of realization is not just a matter of co
title; rather, it is to acknowledge that at a certain moment, Newma
meant something to him, their first viewer. This moment of "realiza
important act of interpretation on his part that we need to take seriously
Prior to the 1966 exhibition, Newman wrote about this moment: "
painting them that it came to me (I was on the fourth one) that I had som
ticular here. It was at that moment that the intensity that I felt the painti
me think of them as the Stations of the Cross. It is as I work that the work
to have an effect on me. Just as I affect the canvas, so does the canvas affe
Calling the paintings The Stations of the Cross was never then a matt
of form or of iconography, but of affect. But why, when affected by th
did Newman not title them with words of despair spoken by Adam, b
Why did he not use the psalmist's words "God, why hast thou forsa
associating the "intensity" of the works with "The Stations of the Cro
was clearly doing more than indicating "intensity." He was associati
ings with a chain of ideas associated, at that historical moment, with t
By the time Newman titled his paintings, the Crucifixion had be
almost thirty years as a metaphor to address the suffering of Jews and o
under Nazism. Ziva Amishai-Maisels has written about countless paintin
what she terms "Christological Symbolism."ll In the early Nazi period,
artists used Crucifixion scenes to indicate the brotherhood of Jews a
and to suggest that Nazism was a threat to both. The idea of the Cru

9. Thomas Hess, Barnett Newman (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1971), pp. 93-
10. Barnett Newman, "Statement," ART News 3 (May 1966), p. 26; reprinted in John
Barnett Newman, Selected Writings and Interviews (New York: Knopf, 1990), p. 189.
11. Ziva Amishai-Maisels, "Christological Symbolism of the Holocaust," in Y. Bauer, ed

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Barnett Newman 's Stations 39

structured photographers' documentation of the camps. At the liberation, one

represented a corpse as a Christ-figure composing an image in which the arms
spread down the plane of the photograph, like a bright white band against a gray
ground. This image was republished in 1960 but might have been known at the
end of the war and may have been among "the photographs of German atrocities"
Newman wrote about in 1945.12
We can assume Newman knew Chagall's White Crucifixion from the 1946
Museum of Modern Art retrospective. In his review, Newman's friend Harold
Rosenberg made Chagall's analogies clear: "In his Crucifixions painted during this
tragic period, [Chagall] depicts a world flying apart in chaos, houses overturned,
ships sinking, Jews fleeing in every direction. The crucified one is a Jew, not the Son
of God, but the human victim of violence."13 Herbert Howarth, writing in the same
publication some years later, was even more insistent: "Lest there be any doubt about
the analogy, Chagall defined his meaning by drawing the Jewish phylacteries on

for the Future, Volume II: The Impact of the Holocaust on the Contemporary World (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1989), pp. 1657-71; and Depiction and Interpretation: The Influence of the Holocaust on the Visual Arts
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993).
12. Barnett Newman, "Surrealism and the War," reprinted in O'Neill, ed., Barnett Newman, p. 95.
Richard Shiff discusses this essay in "Newman's Time," unpublished paper presented at "Reconsidering
Barnett Newman" symposium, Philadelphia Museum of Art, April 2002.
13. Harold Rosenberg, "Chagall: Jewish Modernist Master," Jewish Frontier (April 1945), pp. 26-33.
Considering the confidence with which Rosenberg described Chagall's use of the Crucifixion in this
text-written for aJewish readership-it is fascinating how reticent he was when he recalled his friend
Newman's use of the Crucifixion: "To my mind, the title The Stations of the Cross was a mistake, and I
argued against it with Newman on the grounds that an event held sacred by a cult... ought not to be
appropriated by outsiders and given changed meanings." Harold Rosenberg, Barnett Newman (New
York: Abrams, 1978), p. 73. Somehow (perhaps mindful of his readership) Rosenberg had changed his

Left: Photograph of Holocaust victim from Belsen.

Right: Marc Chagall. White Crucifixion. 1938. ? Artists Rights Society
(ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris. Courtesy Art Institute of Chicago.

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40 OCTOBER

the arms and forehead of the naked Christ on the cross. Christ, bei
comes to stand for him as the Jewish people. His analogy says, as it
European HolocaustJewry has undergone a new mass crucifixion."14
In the U.S., artists such as Abraham Rattner and Seymour Li
Crucifixion scenes, and by the late fifties, as Amishai-Maisels write
obvious [of] symbols" had become "so common" as to prove problema
originality of American Jewish artists, who nonetheless continued t
from 1960-61 after the Eichmann trial.15

The metaphor of the Passion also had textual currency. Commentary published a
report from Europe called "The Passion of a People," and its predecessor,
Contemporary Jewish Record, had printed a poem from the Warsaw Ghetto ending with
a reference to "the cry of the crucified."16 The theologian John Lenz remembered in
his 1960 Christ in Dachau that after the American liberation, the SS road had been
renamed "The Way of the Cross."17 In 1961, Emmanuel Levinas considered "the
Passion lived out by Judaism between 1940 and 1945," and some years later the
rabbinical scholar Ignaz Maybaum wrote, "The Golgotha of modern mankind is
Auschwitz. The Cross, the Roman gallows, was replaced by the gas chamber."18
Around 1960-62, when the Eichmann trial was forcing Americans to witness
the events of the Holocaust, the metaphor of the Crucifixion had ongoing inter-
national currency. Eichmann even referred to himself at trial as Pontius Pilate, an
analogy which made Christs of his victims.19 The Holocaust posed "the unanswer-
able question of human suffering," and the idea of Christ's Passion (the single
moment where he posed that question), could be used to address the Holocaust.
Though Newman refrained from directly relating his idea of the "Passion" to the
Holocaust, there is an illuminating passage in the interview with Solomon made
just after the Guggenheim opening.
Newman recalled a trip to Europe made in 1964. Though he avoided
Germany, he traveled to Colmar (near its border) to see Matthias Griinewald's
Isenheim Altarpiece. He told Solomon that "Gri'newald's Crucifixion is maybe the great-
est painting in Europe, but one of the things that intrigues me about the Grunewald
is the act of active imagination on his part. That he was not illustrating so much the

attitude on how "an event held sacred by a cult" might be used. Needless to say, he did not relate
Newman's use of the Passion to the "tragic period" of the Holocaust.
14. Herbert Howarth, "Chagall's Christ," Jewish Frontier (May 1948), pp. 16-17.
15. Amishai-Maisels, Depiction and Interpretation, pp. 192-93.
16. Zachariah Shuster, "The Passion of a People: Anno MCMXLII," Contemporary Jewish Record
(February 1943), pp. 23-36; "The Funeral" by M.J. was one of the handful of poems collected by A. Glanz-
Leyeless, and published in the article "Poems from the Warsaw Ghetto," Contemporary Jewish Record (April
1945), pp. 129-36.
17. Amishai-Maisels, Depiction and Interpretation, p. 187.
18. Emmanuel Levinas, "Jewish Thought Today" (1961), in Difficult Freedom: Essays on Judaism, trans.
Sean Hand (London: Athlone Press, 1990), p. 162; Ignaz Maybaum, The Face of God After Auschwitz
(Amsterdam: Polak & Van Gennep, 1965), p. 36.
19. Hannah Arendt commented on Eichmann's analogy in her articles published in The New Yorker
in 1963: "Eichmann felt like Pontius Pilate and washed his hands in innocence." Hannah Arendt,
Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (New York: Viking Press, 1963), p. 135.

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 -_^^Hfl _^ MI^^H Zm_~ ~Matthias Griinewald. The Crucifixion,
________________________ __ from the Isenheim Altarpiece. ca. 1510-15.
Musee Unterlinden, Colmar, France.

Christ in terms of the legend, but since he was doing it for a hospital of syphilitics,
that he was able to identity himself with the human agony of those patients, that he
was willing to turn the Christ figure into a syphilitic. Now this of course is one of the
boldest things that anyone could have done. Yet I think this is part of his genius."20
Grunewald's Crucifixion seems to have confirmed for Newman that his own
"act of active imagination" in using the Christian narrative as a means of address-
ing contemporary suffering had a precedent of "greatest" importance. Newman
also admired the way Grunewald identified Christ's agony with the agony of his
work's first viewers-the way Grunewald made his painting with its place of view-
ing in mind.21 Later in the interview, Newman stressed the necessity of
"presenting something new in relation to the story ofJesus. It's always been identi-
fied with something else." He argued that "the nails of the Romans," if compared
to events "going on in Vietnam, or the sort of things that happened in
Hiroshima," diminished in their horror, "so that if we're going to measure the
pain, I think the pain was terrible forJesus, but it somehow-I suppose maybe this
is blasphemous-but it seems mild compared to the kind of physical pain people
suffer today."22 This comment was excised from the broadcasted interview, and ref-
erences to Hiroshima and Vietnam do not find their way into Newman's other
texts around the Stations. It is less their blasphemous nature that accounts for
these cuts than their problematic specificity; in statements for the Guggenheim
exhibition, it was preferable to address his work through universal ideas, rather
than particular ones, opening out associations rather than closing them off.
In photographs taken at the show, Newman posed both in front of his title
and his paintings. But if the title and statements set up a complex of associations
mediating the viewer's encounter with the canvases, how would the paintings

20. Solomon interview, p. 7.

21. Andree Hayum describes what might be termed the site-specificity of Grinewald's work in the
chapter "Meaning and Function: The Hospital Context" in his book The Isenheim Altarpiece: God's
Medicine and the Painter's Vision (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989).
22. Solomon interview, p. 8.

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42 OCTOBER

themselves contribute to
Newman's ambition to make of
^ ^ * 1 m <' II-*-* his viewer the subject asking
the "unanswerable question"?
The first four paintings were
ton the Guggenheim ramp,
_ eie se separated from the next ten in
the High Gallery. Rather than
| |;^| moving forwards and back-
wards, viewers would move
across them, "from a short dis-
I: _x^^^ detance," as Newman had always
j deploym t wished, sensing the differences
marking their surfaces-the
I^ |1 smears of black paint in First
Station, the pencil-thin line of
either side of the zip in Second,
the repetitive dabs at the right
side of Third Station, the
uttre _ H mhtflicked paint spoiling the oth-
si of th Pasion thI ses oaserwise empty white expanse at
tha th spcao wa mon the center of Fourth.23 These
details manifested an intensity
of process-Newman's meticu-
lous deployment of different
brushstrokes from a lexicon of
painting modes; for the viewer,
Top: Barnett Newman, Guggenheim Museum, 1966. the series began to demand an
Bottom: Newman in High Gallery, Guggenheim, 1966. intensity of attention as, on
Photograph: Bernard Gotfryd. coming to each new painting,
previous marks were recalled
and differentiated.
In speaking of the Passion, Newman was always keen to assert that it was not
the "terrible walk" along the Via Dolorosa, but the single moment where Christ
uttered "Lema."24 How might the installation have organized this temporal dimen-
sion of the Passion, this sense of a single intense moment, despite the literal fact
that the spectator was moving through the space over time?
On the ramp, in making sense of each successive canvas, each one just
passed would be recalled. What made the Fifth interesting would be the surprise

23. For his 1951 show at Betty Parsons, Newman had stated that "The large pictures in this exhibition
are intended to be seen from a short distance." O'Neill, Barnett Newman, p. 178.
24. Barnett Newman, "Statement," in Lawrence Alloway, The Stations of the Cross: Lema Sabachthani
(New York: Guggenheim Museum, 1966), reprinted in O'Neill, Barnett Newman, p. 188.

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Barnett Newman's Stations 43

1
ij L JI

( .1.
w i - - , ;> ' ' _l.- I .- - 1

Installation view of Barnett Newman: The Stations of the Cross,

Guggenheim Museum, 1966. Above: Stations 1-4. Below: Stations 5-11.
Photographs by Robert E. Mates. ? The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, New York.

III
i

L
?- ,
a- -- -

-1i ".;N, f
; ~.

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44 OCTOBER

that incident comes for the first time on the left. This incident, th
bring to mind strokes already seen in the First, just as the thin line
would evoke the thin lines in the Second. At the same time as the view
was returned to former paintings, as they looked at a painting in fr
the next would be glimpsed at the periphery of vision, pushing itse
with the paint strokes on the left bar of the stretcher. Paintings abo
were glimpsed before they were viewed, and paintings already seen w
as new ones were viewed; this made the experience inside the main
a single moment. Though one painting occupied the visual field, all
mind at once.

The installation would also organize for its viewers "a sense of place." Newma
often spoke about this and would later say that "some places are more sacred th
others."25 Here, the sense of place was achieved by surrounding viewers with th
work both literally (as they looked forward, paintings were behind them, too) an
psychologically (the network they constructed of the connections between th
works would give the space unity).
The stark content of the final works made the nature of the place specific
Nuances that dramatized early Stations were emptied out of the Eighth Statio
whose two straight-edged black bands stretch down the canvas without dramati
signs of process. In the Ninth, Tenth, and Eleventh Stations, white paint took t
place of black; color contrast of black and white was replaced by the tonal contr
25. Barnett Newman, "Response to the Reverend Thomas F. Matthews," reprinted in O'Neill,
Barnett Newman, p. 289.

I II
t

Installation view ofBarnett Newman: The Stations o

Guggenheim Museum, 1966. Stations 9-14. Photograph by
? The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, N

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Barnett Newman s Stations 45

of white paint and raw canvas. The Fourteenth Station was alone on its own wall.
The main body of the work is free of all brush marks or value contrasts. It is an
extraordinarily blank painting, emptied of the minimal incidents that might have
engaged the viewer in front of some of the other Stations. Seen with those earlier
paintings in mind, its spareness is more apparent still.26
I am hoping to suggest that the installation was a place where memory was
activated, a place of starkness, a place of loss. Of course this should not be taken
to indicate that the paintings themselves were any simpler than Newman's other
works; as Carol Mancusi-Ungaro argues, the Stations represent the pinnacle of
Newman's technical and material achievement in terms of both the range of
paints and their handling.27 By loss, I mean the loss of the rich chromatic content
that prompted Clement Greenberg to claim that Newman had "enlarged our
sense of the capacities of color."28 Addressing the totality of works in the space,
loss also refers to the paring down of viewing possibilities offered by the paint-
ings. While the installation created a complex web of memories (since paintings
demanded of their viewers acts of recollection), there was none of the diversity
of shape and scale to which Newman's viewers were accustomed. Newman's
former exhibitions had been arranged with juxtapositions of thin paintings and
wide ones, tall paintings near short ones, but these paintings were all the same
size.29 More than anyone else, Yve-Alain Bois has described the way the different
scales of Newman's paintings and the different placements of the zips within
them demanded shifts in the position of the viewing subject, who repositioned
themselves according to each different painting. In the Guggenheim, the posi-
tion to be taken in front of each human-scale canvas was rather more simply
central, from which point the viewer could easily see the difference between one
side and the other. The regularity and repetition of canvas size would bring with
it a loss of one of the pleasures offered by other installations of Newman's work,
just as this regularity itself exacerbated differences between works and asked
more of the viewer's memory.
The kind of loss I am thinking of is suggested by a phrase from one of the
many hostile reviews of the exhibition. Emily Genauer described her experience
as "an adventure in emptiness."30 Older and younger reviewers found common
ground in calling Newman's rhetoric empty, but let us not think the emptiness of

26. These white paintings were also far less nuanced than Newman's white paintings of the early
1950s, The Name II and The Voice. Guggenheim viewers with a good knowledge of Newman's oeuvre
might have recalled that they had had to attend to tiny but crucial inflections all over the earlier paint-
ings' surfaces. Here, however, they were presented with the blunt material contrast of cream canvas
and white paint.
27. Carol Mancusi-Ungaro, "Barnett Newman: Pilgrimage in Paint," unpublished paper presented
at "Reconsidering Barnett Newman" symposium, Philadelphia Museum of Art, April 2002.
28. Clement Greenberg, "Introduction to an Exhibition of Barnett Newman," Barnett Newman: First
Retrospective Exhibition (Bennington, Vt.: Bennington College, 1958).
29. For an account of the arrangement of paintings in Newman's other exhibitions, see Ann Temkin,
"Barett Newman on Exhibition," in Barnett Newman (Philadelphia: Philadelphia Museum of Art, 2002).
30. Emily Genauer, "Christ'sJourney on Canvas," New York Herald Tribune, April 20, 1966.

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46 OCTOBER

The Stations of the Cross unintended.31 The sense of emptiness would be

Be II. Encountered immediately outside the High Gallery, it represented a
of scale, and to its left there is a very thin band of cadmium red. Man
tors considered Be II as a final point in terms of the meaning of New
some even suggesting that it offered a cheery resolution to the somb
series.32 Rather than posing Be II as a resolution to the series, a "hap
you will, I want to think Be II as a kind of second beginning, a moment o
If, before Be II, one painting was seen through the remembered images of
now, all would be remembered at once-with the slightest appearanc
former starkness would be emphasized, ever more apparent.
Bois has written of Newman's paintings as "a deck of cards in which e
has a particular function and the specific role each plays varies acco
changing context."33 Be II heightens awareness of the loss in the canv
but so too it marks their difference from earlier works. Specifically
downward strokes along the red band recall the brushy texture of the
zip in Onement (1948) rather than, say, the flatly painted red ground of V
Sublimis (1950-51).
Let us return to the moment of Onement. In 1948, as he worked on t
ing, Newman also worked on the text "The New Sense of Fate."
distinguished tragedy from terror. "Terror can exist only if the forces of

31. Max Kozloff, "Art," Nation (May 16, 1966), p. 598; John Canaday, "Art: With Pre
Execution," New York Times, April 23, 1966.
32. One critic wrote that Be II "would certainly have Newman replying to the 'Is
tion with an unmistakable and cheerful 'No, not quite!"' Walter Barker, "The Pass
Image," Saint Louis Post Dispatch, June 12, 1966.
33. Yve-Alain Bois, "Here to There and Back," Artforum (March 2002), p. 103.

Newman. Be II. 1961-64.

? The Barnett Newman Foundation.
Courtesy National Gallery of
Art, Washington, D. C.

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Barnett Newman's Stations 47

unknown. We now know the terror to expect. Hiroshima showed it to us."34 It was
"awareness" that held tragedy and terror apart. Awareness came through the
acquisition of knowledge and produced a sense of responsibility. We can use this
model to consider what happens with Be II; its function suggests that the spectator
of The Stations is cast as a kind of tragic subject experiencing a moment of despair
and loss. Be II might also inspire a sense of responsibility in the viewer.
In 1948, the awareness of recent events prompted a new kind of responsibility.
By 1966, the knowledge of the history of the war had broadened and the idea of
responsibility had also changed. Americans were becoming aware of the former
irresponsibility that enabled their government to stand by-to use the title of a
"chronicle of American apathy" (written in 1965)-"While Six Million Died."35 The
remembrance of old wars brought a sense of responsibility in relation to new ones.
(Remember, for instance, Newman's reference to Vietnam.) Finally, as a "kind of
survivor," to invoke George Steiner's term of 1965, the American Jew, as much as
remembering the Holocaust, as much as asking the difficult questions imposed by
this memory, had now to accept a sense of responsibility as part of this survival.36
Perhaps Newman's most far-reaching ambition with The Stations of the Cross:
Lema Sabachthani was to create a place where a viewer might not only be placed to
ask "Lema Sabachthani?" A tragic subject, aware of his situation and his survival, he
would also be aware of his responsibility in relation to the cause of such despair.
Speaking about a "sense of place" in 1967, Newman said that "It's only after man
knows where he is that he can ask himself 'Who am I?' and 'Where am I going?"'37
Experiencing a "sense of place" before Newman's work was never just to be a
phenomenological experience, but the grounds for an imaginative and moral one.
Holocaust memory is then at play in The Stations of the Cross: Lema Sabachthani-but
Holocaust memory here neither means the acquisition of knowledge about history,
nor the recollection of historical events. Holocaust memorial instead requires the
subject's repositioning of himself with regard to the demands of memory.
Those Holocaust memorials that had been proposed for New York City by
1966 structured very different memorial activities. In architect Eric Mendelsohn
and sculptor Nathan Rappaport's proposals, viewers would be overawed by massive
edifices controlling and directing memory with specific images and texts. The
process of memory in Newman's installation resonates with an historically Jewish
mode of remembrance. Newman, I am arguing, endeavored to trigger the "act of
active imagination" for his viewers so that they would identify with the question
posed to the post-Holocaust subject. In the Passover service, celebrants are
instructed to tell themselves that they had survived slavery in Egypt, that survival
brings responsibility for them. Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi has written that "memories

34. Newman, "The New Sense of Fate," reprinted in O'Neill, Barnett Newman, p. 169.
35. Arthur Morse, While Six Million Died (New York: Random House, 1967).
36. See George Steiner, "A Kind of Survivor," Language and Silence: Essays 1958-1966 (London:
Faber, 1967).
37. Newman, "Response to the Reverend Thomas F. Matthews," p. 289.

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48 OCTOBER

unleashed by the commemorative rituals

[such as the Seder] were surely not a
matter of intellection, but of evocation .
and identification."38 The viewer of The _
Stations, identifying with the despair of
the survivor, might become aware of the
responsibility of survival.39 B _
A different kind of responsibility was \
structured in an abstract design for a L
Holocaust memorial initiated the year
after the Guggenheim exhibition. In his
proposal for New York's Battery Park, _
Louis Kahn imagined a memorial where
figurative reference and symbolism made
way for a grid structure of nine glass
blocks. Entering this space, what spectators
would see through and between the
blocks was other people; the process of
remembering was intertwined with coming
to recognize the responsibility for these To edeoh a a est
Top: Eric Mendelsohn and Ivan Mestrovic.
fellow
fellow subj ects. Kahn
hsubjects. 's 1967
Kahn's proposal
1967 proposal Holocaust memorial proposedfor Riverside
indicates that the project of a public Park, Manhattan. 1951. Bottom:
Holocaust memorial could adopt abstrac- Louis Kahn. Memorial to the Six Mi
tion; however, those modernist critics who Jewish Martyrs (nine pier model). 1966
were theorizing that the development of Courtesy Louis I. Kahn Collection, Univer
of Pennsylvania and the Pennsylvania
abstraction in painting would never allow Historical and Museum Commissio
that abstraction could negotiate history or
any form of memory outside of the memory of the medium. Yet at the same
that Newman was making Stations of the Cross, Mark Rothko let Werner Haftman
know his intention of making paintings for "a very small chapel of expiation" to
be erected in Germany "in memory of Jewish victims."40 This never came to
fruitionsbut other "modernist painters" such as Morris Louis and Frank Stella
did produce series in which they endeavored to negotiate the memory of the
Holocaust.41 The way the relation between abstraction and mnemonic content is

38. Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, Zakhor:Jewish History andJewish Memory (NewYork: Schocken, 1989) p. 44.
39. This argument prompts a new means of thinking about the extremely prominent signatures on
all fifteen paintings, signatures that assert themselves far more than those in other contemporaneous
paintings. Rather than reading these as an indication that Newman is associating himself with Christ,
we could posit the signatures as clues to viewers about their responsibilities. Leading by example, as it
were, Newman places himself in the situation of the survivor, as should they. I am grateful to Newman
scholar Sarah K. Rich for this suggestion.
40. Werner Haftmann, Mark Rothko (Zurich: Kunstaus Zurich, 1971), p. ix.
41. I discuss Morris Louis's series CharredJournal: Firewritten (1951) and Frank Stella's Polish Villages
(1970-74) in my Ph.D. dissertation, "The Memory of Modernism: Abstract Art and the Holocaust,"
University of London, 2002.

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Barnett Newman's Stations 49

configured differs in each of these series, but these artists shared a determination
to negotiate memory through the language of abstraction. Their works indicate
that in its relation to catastrophic history, abstraction should no longer be con-
ceived as an art of respectful silence (as Lyotard might have it), or evasive silence,
nor as a practice which always respects "prohibitions pronounced by modernism
on ... the mnemonic dimensions of representation," but as a terrain where the
nature of the relationship between work and mnemonic content would be as com-
plex as the structures of memory itself.42
Questions about the role of abstraction in the project of Holocaust memorials
are ongoing. Recently, artists who. have always remarked on Newman's importance
have themselves negotiated memory in the process of pursuing and expanding
their formal concerns. In the early 1990s, Mel Bochner and Richard Serra sited
works in a former SS prison in Rome and a disused German synagogue: Bochner's
Via Tasso: Yisgadal, Yarzeit, Yiskor (for the Jews of Rome) and Serra's The Drowned and the

42. Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, "Raymond Pettibon: Return to Disorder and Disfiguration," in Ann
Temkin and Hanza Walker, eds., Raymond Pettibon: A Reader (Philadelphia: Philadelphia Museum of Art,
1998), p. 226. My argument is that though modernist critics constructed these prescriptions, modernist
painters did not necessarily pay attention to them.

~ L

_(for the Jews of Rome). 1993.

Mel Bochne Via Tasso, Yisgadal

(f
g = i ~~~~~~~~~~~~Courtesy Mlel Bochner.
Courtesy Mel Bochner

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50 OCTOBER

Richard Serra. The Drowned and the Saved, install

at Synagogue Stommeln, Pulheim, Germany. 1992
Photo: Werner Hannappel. Courtesy Richard Serra

Saved, itself named after an Italian Jew's memoir.43 Neither conceiving t

as beyond representation, nor making its representation spectacular,
used the interplay of site, title, and the structure and materiality of the
produce an affective viewing environment. Their works are usually
through discourses describing the viewer's intellection or motion, but
and emotion are as important. In these site-specific works, the space
the site bolted to history. Newman's task was both more and less di
because history did not need to be encountered so directly, because
"Lema?" would never have to be tied to a specific referent, and more,
side of an actual site of memory, inside the Guggenheim on the whit
institution, a memorial had to be shaped by paintings alone.

43. Bochner's work consisted of three floor sculptures made from burnt matches
blankets. In each case, all the matches together formed the shape of a Star of David. T
the individual matches within the outline differed from work to work. In Yiskor (for the Je
matches are scattered and pushed into the star shape; in Yahrzeit (for theJews of Rome),
arranged in gates (four vertical matches crossed by a fifth), and in Yisgadal (for the Jew
matches were placed in triangular units. The Drowned and the Saved is a sculpture i
inverted "L" shapes whose short sides stretch vertically from the floor, and whose lo
each other at their ends, propping each other up so each half is prevented from falli
meeting of the two halves creates a bar, dividing space above it from space below.

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