|
In 1957 Newman suffered a heart attack. Only
a few weeks after he was released from hospital, he started
work on what would become the Stations of the Cross.
This series of paintings occupied Newman during the next eight
years, from 1958 to 1966, and is widely considered his greatest
masterpiece.
'It was while painting them that it came to
me (I was on the fourth one) that I had something particular
here,' Newman said. 'It was at that moment that the intensity
that I felt the paintings had made me think of them as the
Stations of the Cross.'
According to the artist, the paintings are not
intended to express the succession of events found in traditional
depictions of the Stations of the Cross. Instead they reveal
the single moment when Christ cried out 'God, why have you
forsaken me?' - 'Lema sabachthani', the subtitle
Newman gave to the series.
Newman had always defended the spiritual dimension
of his work, and here, Christ's Passion becomes 'the cry of
man, of every man', and perhaps a mirror of his own personal
crisis. 'I tried to project something I felt was very real
in relation to the Passion,' he said, 'and I feel that kind
of suffering has gotten almost universal.' The series has
also been interpreted as a memorial to the Holocaust and the
tragedy of war.
|
