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.
1st Station of the Cross
3rd Station of the Cross
'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.'
4th Station of the Cross
5th Station of the Cross
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.
7th Station of the Cross
8th Station of the Cross
12th Station of the Cross
13th Station of the Cross
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