Depicting Nothing but Itself:

‘(Barnett Newman’s) reputation as a major American painter, the textbook view today, didn’t take hold until the 1960’s. Younger artists like Donald Judd, Dan Flavin, Frank Stella and Richard Serra, whose works Newman didn’t even necessarily regard as related to his own, began to describe his art as crucial to them. But even then, showing at the Guggenheim in 1966 his “Stations of the Cross,” a seemingly plain group of 14 raw canvases with a few black lines, Newman was mostly lambasted.’