On March 24, 2002, the Philadelphia Museum of Art opened Barnett Newman, a major retrospective organized with Tate Modern and on view in Philadelphia through July 7 before traveling to London. The museum described the show as assembling more than 100 works that had not been seen together in over 30 years, tracing Newman's path from Surrealist-influenced drawings to the vertical 'zip' paintings and late shaped canvases. The exhibition placed key works such as Onement I, The Stations of the Cross, and Broken Obelisk in a broad career narrative, with important loans from the National Gallery of Art, the Menil Collection, and the Museum of Modern Art. For a painter whose reputation grew slowly during his lifetime, the exhibition helped consolidate a new phase of Newman scholarship.
The retrospective renewed institutional and scholarly attention to Newman as a central figure of postwar abstraction.
