Asking the
unanswerable question: the project of Holocaust memorial
Godfrey M.
(2007). Barnett Newman’s ‘The Stations of the Cross: Lema Sabachthani’, from Abstraction and the Holocaust.
This is a
personal summary of the article by Godfrey. M. (2007) ‘Barnett Newman’s The
Stations of the Cross: Lema Sabachthani’, from Abstraction and the Holocaust.
New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, pp51-77.
Godfrey
shows that this series of fifteen works (‘The Stations of the Cross: Lema
Sabachthani’) by Newman was intended to compel the viewer to consider the
question posed by the Holocaust: ‘Why did you forsake me?’
The compromised position of the post-Holocaust Jewish
intellectual
In 1953
Morros Louis exhibited a series of paintings in Washington entitled ‘Charred
Journal: Firewritten’.
In 1954
Barnett Newman gave one of his paintings the title ‘White Fire I’. Newman then painted three further ‘White Fire’
paintings, the last in 1968. Godfrey
asks whether these four paintings by Newman have a strong connection with each
other and their titles in the manner of the Louis works.
Early analyses
of the Louis works paid no attention to Jewish mythology but in the first
account of the Newman works after that artist’s death, Thomas Hess described
the Newman ‘White Fire’ series in terms of Kabbalistic texts. Godfrey is sceptical of Hess’ ‘non-Greenbergian
approach’ to Newman and his lack of depth of critical analysis. In 1995 Newman’s widow - Annalee Newman - asserted that although her late husband
used Kabbalistic titles for some of his works, this was only for their poetic
effect and had no deeper significance.
But Godfrey
wants to explore further the titles of Newman’s four ‘White Fire’ works. At the least, the titles show Newman’s
identification with ‘Jewish religious and literary traditions’: this was a
public statement by Newman who was also ready to assert himself in the public
realm in ways other than art. But a
series of incidents in the 1960s show that Newman’s assertion of his Jewishness
was ‘far from straightforward’.
In 1965 New
York’s Jewish Museum held a symposium entitled ‘What about Jewish art?’ Prior to this event Newman had had a warm
relationship with the museum, but three days after Newman attended the symposium
he wrote a highly critical letter to its Director asserting that the symposium
had compromised him as an artist because he was Jewish. Newman then severed all ties with the
museum.
The notes for
the speeches at the symposium indicate that all the speeches of those on the
panel resisted the title of the symposium.
There is no record of any other aspect of the event.
Godfrey
writes that the symposium took place at a time when art historians and critics
desired to ‘proclaim the category ‘Jewish art’’ as a response to the destruction
of Jewish culture in the Second World War and subsequent claims that Jewish
culture did not exist. But Newman made
the counter-claim – that Jewish art should not be specified as a category. Godfrey writes that Newman feared ‘the risk
of pigeon-holing his work’ within the ‘Jewish art category’.
Nevertheless,
five years after Newman’s death his works were included in the 1975 exhibition
at New York’s Jewish Museum entitled ‘Jewish experience in the art of the
Twentieth Century’. The curator – Avram
Kampf – wrote, of Newman’s work in the show: ‘if there were a Jewish art,
Newman’s work would be regarded as its most authentic and classic
expression’.
Despite the
episode with the New York Jewish Museum, Newman continued to show interest in
Jewish culture by signing declarations in support of Jewish existence and
identity in Israel and the USSR.
Throughout the late 1960s Newman continued to title his works with
‘Kabbalistic phrases such as ‘Voice of Fire’ (1967) and Biblical names such as
‘Jericho’ (1968-69)’.
Godfrey asks
what we are to make of Newman’s contradictory assertions.
He writes
that although Newman’s actions might be regarded as the ‘idiosyncratic
behaviour of the strong minded and obstinate artist’, they should more
accurately be understood as ‘the compromised position of the post-Holocaust
Jewish intellectual’. Godfrey sees that
a series of conflicting impulses led Newman to swing backwards and forwards as
he sought to maintain control of his identity: ‘”yes” to Jewish intellectual-artist-architect’;
“yes” to scholar; “no” to maker of Jewish art’.
The work of Newman as a ‘post-Holocaust Jewish
subject’
We may therefore
consider the artist Barnet Newman as a ‘post-Holocaust Jewish subject’ in the
aftermath of war.
Godfrey
writes that the Holocaust and Hiroshima would have been both too painful and
too obvious to address explicitly by Newman and his contemporaries. In 2002, at a symposium in Philadelphia,
Benjamin Buchloh referred to Newman’s ‘skinny paintings’ of 1950: he advanced
the view that Newman’s abstract style is an acknowledgement of the
‘impossibilities of lyric painting in the wake of the Holocaust’. A
number of sources lead Godfrey to suggest that Newman understood his works of
the 1960s as his recollections about the impossibilities of painting during the
War and the necessity to reject all styles in painting that pre-date the Holocaust. But Godfrey acknowledges that this approach
does not help us to distinguish the processes behind Newman’s works of the late
1940s such as ‘Onement’, from his works of the 1950s and 1960s.
Godfrey
argues that the titles that Newman gave to his works indicate that he was
concerned with origins and ‘what it meant to begin art again after Auschwitz
and Hiroshima’ (titles such as ‘Genesis’ and ‘The Beginning’) and he
acknowledges that a further question needs to be asked about Newman: ‘Were all
his works equivalent parts of this response?’
In
particular, Godfrey asks whether the series ‘The Stations of the Cross: Lema Sabachthani’
specifically addresses the meaning of the memory of the Holocaust? This series of works by Newman was exhibited
at the Guggenheim between April and June 1966.
Godfrey will show that this series is intended to compel the viewer to
consider the question posed by the Holocaust: ‘Why did you forsake me?’
The Stations of the Cross: Lema Sabachthani
Godfrey then
introduces this series of works that Newman painted between 1958 and 1966: it comprises
a total of fifteen paintings, fourteen of which are six and a half feet high by
five feet wide. The fifteenth painting
is slightly larger and is the only one that contains any colour: the previous
fourteen are all done in black and white.
By 1961 four
of the paintings had been completed, and in this year Newman is recorded to
have come to understand what he was doing: that these were to be the first of a
series of works, and the whole series would be entitled in such a way that it
would have public significance.
Godfrey
describes these four paintings – ‘First Station’, ‘Second Station’, ‘Third
Station’ and ‘Fourth Station’. He
observes that these paintings are ‘calibrated to the size of the (human) body’:
each one of ‘around the breadth of an arm span’. These four paintings do not contain Newman’s
previous handling of colour, and instead they employ a limited palette of greys,
blacks and raw canvas. Newman is
recorded as having stated that the white line in ‘Fourth Station’ was understood
by him as ‘a cry’, and that the whole series would be the Passion of Christ.
Godfrey
observes that Newman could have interpreted the cry as that of Adam or Abraham
or the Psalmist, but Newman explicitly understood the cry to be the cry of
Christ’s Passion. Godfrey asserts that although Newman was not
specific about his meaning, ‘through the title (of the series) Newman was able
to partake in an established metaphor that had been used to address the suffering
of Jews and other groups under Nazism for almost thirty years’.
Christological Symbolism and the Holocaust
Ziva
Amishai-Maisels has written extensively on the subject in his Christological Symbolism of the Holocaust.
In 1933 the
German artist Otto Panok painted ‘My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken
me?’ In this work Christ is painted with
the features of the artist’s friend Karl Schwesig who had been assaulted by the
SS in 1933 for being a Communist and actively anti-Fascist. Later Panok painted Christ with explicitly
Jewish features. Artists employed the
Crucifixion in order to engage with current events.
At the
liberation of the Nazi death camps one photographer’s composition has the
outstretched arms of a corpse ‘spread vertically down the plane of the
photograph, like a bright white band against a grey ground’ – an image that
prompted the artist Harold Paris to continue to use the metaphor of the Passion
of Christ. It is not known if this
photograph was known to Americans at the end of the War. In 1945 Newman had written about ‘the photographs
of the German atrocities’ and he had criticised surrealist artists for failing
to respond to the Holocaust.
Chagall’s
‘White Crucifixion’ (1938) was widely known in the USA: it was included in the
Museum of Modern Art’s exhibition of 1946.
Some American critics did not acknowledge as significant Chagall’s presentation of the crucified
Christ surrounded by burning synagogues and scenes of destruction in the shtetl.
Most critics however, including Harold
Rosenburg and Herbert Howarth, did understand the significance: ‘in the
European Holocaust Jewry has undergone a new mass crucifixion’.
American
Jewish artists used Christological symbolism in the 1940s, and Amishai-Maisels
writes that by the late 1950s this had become a mannerism, although its use
continued in the early 1960s at the time of the Eichmann trial.
In the 1940s
Christological symbolism for the Holocaust was also being used in the USA by writers:
this was continuing in the early 1960s at the time of the Eichmann trial. Eichmann referred to himself at his trial as
Pontius Pilate. Godfrey writes, quoting
in part from Hannah Arendt in the New Yorker: ‘The Holocaust posed the
unanswerable question of human suffering, and the idea of Christ’s Passion (the
single moment when he posed that question), could be used to address the
Holocaust’.
Newman did
not directly relate his ‘Stations of the Cross’ to the Holocaust, but in an
interview in 1966 Newman spoke about his admiration for Matthias Grunewald’s
Isenheim altarpiece. Newman stated that
the Isenheim altarpiece is significant because the artist, who was making the
altarpiece for a hospital for syphilitics, portrayed Christ as himself being syphilitic. Newman seems to have been affirming the
importance of the Christian narrative as a means of addressing the most
pressing concern about human suffering in his own time.
Newman also
alluded to the scale of human suffering in the world in 1966, and he suggested
that current suffering exceeded the suffering of Jesus Christ on the cross; the
Holocaust was not specifically mentioned by him. These comments were excised from the
interview as presented in the public domain and no similar assertions were made
when the ‘Stations of the Cross’ series was exhibited. The ‘specificity’ of these comments was
probably seen to be a greater problem than possible accusations of
blasphemy. When ‘Stations of the Cross’
was exhibited, statements tended instead to the universal.
Asking the unanswerable question
20th
April 1966 was the opening date of ‘Stations of the Cross: Lema Sabachthani’ at
the Guggenheim.
The question
posed by Godfrey is: ‘How did the paintings themselves and their arrangement
contribute to Newman’s ambition to make of his viewers the subjects ask “the
unanswerable question”?’
The
arrangement of the works in the gallery forced the viewer to be close to the
paintings: this was Newman’s intention.
The person standing before the works would have been drawn to
concentrate on the differences between the paintings and the methods of making
them: ‘the intensity of process’.
In the
catalogue statement Newman wrote that the series was not the ‘terrible walk’ of
the Via Dolorosa, but the ‘question that has no answer’: not a series of events
but the one event of Jesus Christ uttering ‘Lema’.
But how could
a series of works embody a single moment?
The
successive arrangement would have meant that as the viewer moved from one work
to the next, the two works most recently seen would be the reference point for
the one about to be encountered.
Anticipation and memory between the various works would have held all of
the works together at once in the viewer’s mind.
Prior to 1966
Newman had stated that to view one of his works enabled a person to have ‘a
sense of their own scale’. Newman had
also asserted the distinctiveness of places.
Newman wrote: ‘Some places are more sacred than others, and that
depends, it seems to me, on the quality of the work of art, on its uniqueness,
on its rigor’.
Godfrey
asserts that the manner of display of the ‘Stations of the Cross: Lema
Sabachthani’ in the Guggenheim and the appearance of the last six works in the
series ‘confirmed the specific kind of place that this was: a place of loss’. By the ‘Eighth Station’ the canvasses have
lost the little drama and signs of process that the earliest works had. Contrast is re-introduced in the ‘Twelfth
Station’ and the ‘Thirteenth Station’ but the ‘Fourteenth Station’ ‘is an
extraordinarily blank painting, emptied of the minimal incidents that might
have engaged the viewer before. Seen
with the earlier ‘Stations’ in mind, its sparseness is more apparent
still’.
Some critics
were fiercely opposed to the exhibition, describing it as empty rhetoric. Newman answered the strongest criticism,
accusing the critics of anti-Semitism. But other criticism was perceptive, even if
its effect was to undermine Newman’s work.
In the Herald Tribune Emily Genaur described her visit to the exhibition
as ‘an adventure in emptiness’.
The fifteenth
painting is entitled ‘Be II’: it is slightly larger than the previous fourteen
paintings and it is the only one that contains any colour. At the Guggenheim it was installed apart
from the preceding works: it was the ‘end point’. ‘Be II’ is more than an arm-span wide: its
centre is white and it has slender bands at each side edge: black to the left
and cadmium red to the right. Some
critics saw this work as a cheerful resolution to the series. Godfrey suggests that a better way of seeing
‘Be II’ is to regard it as ‘a kind of re-beginning, as a moment of confirmation
or awareness’.
Godfrey
writes that in 1948, when Newman was working on his ‘Onement I’ ‘when he first intuited that he had
answered the challenge of “what to paint” in an adequate manner”, Newman was
also working on a text entitled ‘The New Sense of Fate’. This addressed the difference between the
Ancient Greek artists’ attraction to beauty and their poets’ attraction to
tragedy.
Newman favoured the tragic approach for contemporary
artists. He contrasted the surrealists’
understanding of tragedy as terror with the tragedy that was disclosed in the
Second World War – tragedy that has been made real. Awareness was the key for Newman in
distinguishing between the two types of tragedy, and for him awareness involves
the gaining of both knowledge and a sense of responsibility.
Godfrey
considers that ‘Be II’ exists to ‘produce a moment of awareness’ and that it
may be intended to ‘point to the individual responsibility that the viewer may
come to realise. He sees the whole
series of the fifteen works as having ‘a tragic theme’.
By 1966 the
awareness of responsibility for the Holocaust had evolved from the
circumstances of 1948 when Newman first formulated his ideas. In the mid 1960s this responsibility had
become, amongst other things, ‘the responsibility to Be’: ‘the responsibility
of continued life’.
Godfrey
concludes that Newman had a moral purpose in ‘Stations of the Cross: Lema
Sabachthani’: to make the viewer aware of their own responsibility.
Godfrey
writes: ‘the project of Holocaust memorial is not constructed as a project
involving the acquisition of knowledge about history, nor the recollection of
historical detail. Holocaust memorial
instead requires the subject’s repositioning of themselves with regard to the
demands of memory’.
Modes of Jewish commemoration
Godfrey
suggests that by placing the viewer before the metaphorical Crucifixion in
order to induce in him/her the asking of the question that was demanded by the
Holocaust in the mid-1960s, Newman might have been avoiding a specifically
Jewish approach to Holocaust memory. We
know that Newman rejected the notion of ‘Jewish art’.
Two modes of
Jewish commemoration are advanced by Godfrey in order to understand
Newman. These modes are set out in the
book Zachor by Yosef Hayim
Yerushalmi.
Yerushalmi
describes to ways in which Jewish people responded to calamity during the
Medieval period: by superimposing the ritual arising from a current disaster
upon existing ritual that existed for the same purpose; and the way in which
the person who has suffered recent calamity is invited to identify with those
had had suffered calamity in a previous era.
Thus, argues
Godfrey, Newman’s ‘Stations of the Cross: Lema Sabachthani’ employed the
Crucifixion as a means of bringing that previous event into play to help to
address a more recent calamity. And by
the progressive series of the fifteen paintings, and the manner in which they
were shown at the Guggenheim, Newman provided a kind of ritual that enabled the
viewer ‘to identify with the question imposed by the Nazi death camps’.
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