Of a Different Stripe

When a 19th century artist set out to depict the Stations of the Cross, he could fall back on a ready-made iconography. The fifth painting, he knew, must represent Simon helping Christ shoulder the cross. Not so for an abstract painter, who must face the problem of portraying the progression toward Calvary without the props of episodic, cartoon-strip clarity, and at the same time strive to render its essential agony. Barnett Newman, 61, the most abstract of the U.S. abstract expressionists, made the problem even harder: he resolved to limit himself to his own astringent style, depict Christ's passage in stark vertical chords, using only black and white on raw unprimed canvas.

"I wanted to hold the emotion," says Newman, "rather than waste it on picturesque ecstasies." There is nothing programmatic or descriptive about the resulting 14 Stations, put on view last week in Manhattan's Guggenheim Museum. Each measures 68 in. by 72 in., contains ever so slight variations of vertical bands, each setting up harmonic tensions with the rest. Viewed under intense illumination, Newman's striped Stations seem to quiver with the vibrancy of lines of diffracted light seen through an electric arc spectroscope.

Newman, who has worked on the sequence over the past eight years, subtitled them with Christ's last cry, Lema sabachthani (Aramaic for "My God, my God, why forsake me?"). Says Newman: "This is the outcry of Jesus, the question that has no answer." At the end he has added a 15th painting, Be, II, which breaks the austerity with a bright orange band. He denies that this is a hint of the Resurrection, insists that the series refers to man's agony.

The whole Passion might well be Newman's own existential question as an artist. Long an artist's artist who has refused to have dealers and did not allow a one-man show until he was 45, he has emerged only in recent years as a kind of pioneer figure for younger, hard-edge artists. As uncompromising as his paintings, Newman believes that at the very least his Stations are "an expression of my own involvement." Thus stated, they may well also pose the question every artist must answer for himself: Why paint?

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