Gallery Eight

While Barnett Newman was working on his fourteen-painting series The Stations of the Cross (1958-66), he continued to make other paintings. In some, like Black Fire I (1961), he employed the same raw canvas and black palette that he was using for the Stations. Newman wanted to handle the raw canvas, relative to the black, in such a way that it would "become color" and possess its own sense of light. At the same time, he worked with vivid orange and yellow, making paintings such as The Third (1962), whose intense color forms a marked counterpoint to the achromatic radiance of the Stations. During the mid-sixties Newman also turned to creating sculpture in bronze and steel. Here III (1965-66) presents a single vertical element-Newman's zip-in three dimensions. Like his paintings, Newman's sculpture was intended to give a person "a sense of place," the awareness of one's own presence as well as that of the work of art. With its rounded corners and softly reflective surface, Here III belies it own weight and monumentality. The satiny stainless-steel shaft rises from a pyramidal base that appears to be floating off the floor. The iconic power of Here III leads directly into the twenty-six-foot-tall sculpture entitled Broken Obelisk, displayed outdoors on the Museum's East Terrace.