Barnett Newman's fourteen canvases constituting the Stations of the Cross: Lema Sabachthani, completed between 1958 and 1966 and now permanently installed in the East Building of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, represent one of the most ambitious and theologically serious undertakings in 20th-century American art. Newman, a secular Jew from a religious Orthodox background, took the most specifically Christian of devotional formats - the Stations of the Cross, the fourteen moments of Christ's Passion used as the structure of Catholic meditation - and recast it as a series of abstract paintings subtitled with the Aramaic words of Christ's cry of dereliction from the cross: 'Lema Sabachthani' - 'Why have you forsaken me?'
The phrase comes from Matthew 27:46 and Mark 15:34, and both Gospels record it as a quotation from Psalm 22:1 - 'My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? Why are you so far from saving me, so far from my cries of anguish?' Newman identified this cry as the central question of human existence, what he called 'the unanswerable question.' It is the question Job asks, the question the prophets ask, the question every human being who has suffered meaninglessly has asked. Newman did not claim to be making Christian art. He claimed to be making art adequate to the weight of the question.
Each of the fourteen canvases follows a similar formal principle: one or two vertical zips - Newman's term for the narrow bands of color that bisect his fields - on a ground of white or raw linen. The variations across the series are subtle: the zips shift from black to white, from centered to off-center, from single to double. The scale is monumental, the individual canvases approximately eight feet tall. The effect of walking through the room is of entering a space structured by silence and vertical presence - something between a chapel and an experience of exposure to an overwhelming immanence.
Newman described the zip as both a division and a relationship - the line that separates also connects, the boundary that marks difference also marks encounter. In the context of the Stations, the zip can be read as the cross itself, the vertical of divine descent meeting the horizontal of human existence in the specific moment of Christ's cry of abandonment. But Newman resisted this kind of allegorizing interpretation. His paintings were not illustrations of a theological concept. They were vehicles for the experience of the question.
The work's relationship to Judaism is as important as its relationship to Christianity. Psalm 22, which begins with the cry of dereliction, was read by early Christianity as a prophetic anticipation of the Crucifixion - its imagery of pierced hands and feet, of garments divided by lot, of the crowd's mockery, aligns with such precision with the Passion narratives that it became the most cited psalm in the New Testament. But the psalm is also a Jewish text of individual lament, a prayer from someone who has not been answered and refuses to stop asking. Newman's subtitle holds these two readings in tension: the cry belongs to Christ specifically and to human suffering universally.
The series was first exhibited at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in 1966, where it was installed in a curved gallery that gave the paintings a continuous, encompassing presence. Newman later donated it to the National Gallery, stipulating that it be shown together as a complete work. The installation design requires visitors to move through the fourteen stations in sequence, creating an experience of contemplative walking - prayer without petition, meditation without doctrine - that mirrors the tradition of the Via Crucis itself while removing all its narrative content.
In the history of abstract painting's engagement with religious subject matter, Newman's Stations holds a unique position: it takes the most explicit and specific of Christian devotional forms and translates it, without loss of seriousness, into an abstract idiom that makes the underlying question available to anyone willing to stand before it in silence.