The Impossibility of Representing the Sacrifice of Abraham and Isaac in Barnett Newman’s Painting

1 Introduction

The study undertakes to conduct a comparative analysis of Barnett Newman’s painting entitled Abraham. The religious connotation of the name Abraham leads the reader to the akedah narrative in the Book of Genesis. This narrative has the same significance in the theological approach to the correlation between the sacrifice and the body as in the artistic tradition of the sacrifice and the body. After defining the akedah sacrifice, the next part of the study reminds one of the paradoxes of faith inherent in the Abraham narrative through the interpretation given by Kierkegaard in his treatise entitled Fear and Trembling. Then, the interpretation of Newman’s painting introduced the possibilities inherent in the semiology of the name “Abraham” in widening concentric circles. First, it is the painter’s own life, then it is the twentieth-century culmination of the national traumas, due to his Jewish origins, then finally, the first occurrence of the name in the figure of the patriarch of Christianity, Islam, and Judaism that serve as the starting points for the interpretation of the painting. Most of the last part of the train of thoughts is made up by the comparison with the Biblical Abraham narrative. The concentric approach is meant to ask, again and again, what one can see in the painting, what one can read about the figure of Abraham, who is considered the example par excellence of faith. In the meantime, the study intends to show the context of twentieth-century arts and history not only in an ad hoc relationship with the ancient religious tradition but also to lead one closer to clarifying the ideological relations of the sacrifice and the material relations of the body.

2 The Paradoxical View of the Sacrifice of Abraham and Isaac

The akedah comes from the biblical Hebrew term עקידת יצחק, which in its full form, literally means the binding of Isaac. In the Book of Genesis, it is linked to one of the most quoted moments of the Abrahamic narratives (Gen 12-25): the patriarch binds his only son as a sacrificial gift in the land of Moriah (Gen 22:9). Later, Mount Moriah was identified as the Temple Mount, precisely because of the akedah, a sacred place for Jews, Islam, and Christianity as one of the New Testament locations. From the beginning, all three monotheistic religions considered Abraham as the ancestor of humanity and its own particular religious tradition. The shocking Abrahamic story of a single person, therefore, can also be read as a universal drama of humanity in these cultures. It is no coincidence that the European philosophical tradition also paid special attention to the heroes of the akedah, feeling that basic anthropological, ethical, theological, and theodical questions were confronting each other in their stories. Among the early theological writings of Hegel, alongside the positivity of the Christian religion, Søren Kierkegaard’s work Fear and Trembling is also a stage of this thinking process.^[1] The philosophical line was based on the theology of the Christian Church Fathers, together with the Talmud and the Midras. The Greek and Latin-language authors shared each other’s hermeneutics when they considered Isaac, who was innocently sacrificed, as a typological symbol of Christ. For example, St. Gregory of Nyssa, at a point of De deitate Filii et Spiritus Sancti, wrote about the akedah:

First, the father binds the son. I have often seen the representation of this suffering in paintings (γραφῆς εἰκόνα), and I could never observe it without tears, because art (τῆς τέχνης) revealed the event extremely vividly. Isaac is stooping before his father, beside the altar, down on his knees, his hands tied behind his back. Abraham is placed behind him, stepping on his knee joint, pulling the boy’s hair towards himself, bending above his face and looking at him with pity, while his right hand is gripping a dagger and is about to strike. The weapon’s blade is almost bruising the body when the divine voice forbids the act to be performed.^[2]

The Bishop of Cappadocia schematizes ancient depictions unknown to us in these lines and describes the result in an extremely vivid, pictorial formulation. The fact that theological hermeneutics turns into an ecphrasis, and as if the paraphrasing heritage of the Antiochian scripture is kept alive by a painting description, at the same time testifies to the fact that the artists could often process the scene of the akedah as a popular topic very early on, and that the visual perception inserted into the theological treatise is also one of the relevant interpretive paths for Gregory.

Compared to the preaching and scholarly discourse of the Baroque period, this relatively rare procedure in ancient Christian theological literature invites theological and image hermeneutics to a distinguished meeting. The dialogue partner of this meeting is not only biblical exegesis and iconography but also fundamental theological and dogmatic thinking about faith. This is possible because Abraham, as a privileged witness of the faith (Heb 11:8-19), realizes precisely what the theology of the New Testament says, which includes trust in God in the literal and abstract sense of invisibility – precisely in spite of previsibility and/or invisibility. The author of the Epistle to the Hebrews interpreting Abraham as a witness to the faith defined faith in his theological genealogy leading to the patriarch: “Now faith (πίστις) is the substance (ὑπόστασις) of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen (οὐ βλεπομένον).” ^[3] Therefore, in the Christian belief of patriarchs, faith, primarily associated with Abraham, seems to have an adversarial relationship with the perception of vision. Examining the theological and visual aspects in Kierkegaard’s oeuvre, George Pattison elaborates his arguments at the end of Kierkegaard’s book entitled The Aesthetic and the Religious from a different approach, though on similar grounds.^[4] In Pattison’s interpretation of Kierkegaard, the topic of paradox is the scandal of the event regarding Christ.^[5] Kierkegaard, however, discusses the paradox of faith not only in relation to Christ, but also to Abraham on the pages of the aforementioned Fear and Trembling. This is why the Danish philosopher’s theory of communication approach is to be cited here. Since the paradox is a figure of speech, its interpretation is not to be carried out in a systematic theological way, as dogmatic theology performs it, but requires a rhetorical approach. Kierkegaard refers to the paradoxically appearing Christ as a pattern, an English expression behind which – as Pattison points it out with a sharp eye – is “Forbillde” in the Danish original.^[6] The second part of the compound word in Danish thus uses the term “image” that allows Kierkegaard to approach the paradoxical nature of the Christ pattern through visualization. According to Kierkegaard’s interpretation, Christ’s becoming visible is part of Kenosis, since the invisible God has become a visible man. Kierkegaard concludes that nothingness becomes visible, and thus, we arrive at the paradox that must also be raised in connection with Newman’s pictorial unrepresentation of Abraham, who may be considered as the forerunner of Christ.

Christianity, of course, is the heir of the religious tradition of Judaism at this point, which is even more radical than Christianity, when, in addition to the prohibition of pronouncing the name of the Lord, it also advocated the written form of the unreadability of the name of God, and, like the later prohibition of Islam, generally opposed pictorial representations since they could become objects of worship.^[7] Moreover, the Abrahamic religions and especially the rabbinic tradition of Judaism held that Abraham was the first iconoclast, the idea that can be considered evidence of the heroic experience of faith, although the text of the Torah does not notify of any image destruction.^[8] This was also the basis of one of the oldest stories about the destruction of Hazor (Joshua 11:10-13), which was based on archaeological findings – from a religious point of view – clearly the systematic mutilation, burning, and other damage of the god representations in the conquered, ancient Canaanite city.^[9] That systematic iconoclasm during the ruining of the city in which Hazor’s statues and other depictions were sacrificed, can also be understood from postbiblical literature as the application of the destruction regulations recorded in the Mishnah.^[10] Thanks to this strict legal regulation and the cultural-religious attitude reflecting this, it is no coincidence that until the advent of modernity, painting remained a prohibited activity for those of Jewish origin outside a well-defined area, starting from the second commandment of the Decalogue.^[11] Continuing Kierkegaard’s proposition, we can say that the case of Abraham from the beginning is not only the paradox of faith, but also that of vision.

3 Barnett Newman’s Painting

Barnett Baruch Newman (1905–1970) has relatively few works of art attributed to him, when compared to his contemporaries. The painter, who produced 120 works on canvas, together with other media, falls short of even reaching 300 pieces in his body of work in visual arts.^[12] As a member of the first generation of American abstract expressionism, he added many of his paintings to the title related to the Book of Genesis, including a very special one called Abraham.^[13] The oil painting of the Jewish artist on canvas in 1949 is 6′ 10¾″ × 34½″, so it is a narrow, human-scale, but slightly larger than the human height, which is still part of the permanent exhibition in New York, in its twentieth-century collection. The uniqueness of the work lies in that it breaks the usual patterns of the reception strategies of paintings with its nonfigurative image painted in black on a dirty black background.^[14] Newman found the specific character of his painting shortly before he made this painting in 1949. The straight line strip, which he marked with the word “zip,” looks like a strip from a distance, with variable sharp contours – for the preparation of which the insulating tape adhered to the foundation or the first cover paint layer provided the technical cover – became a real trademark of Newman’s painting space creation.^[15] Compared to his previous works, the application of zip was the moment of a new understanding of space for Newman.^[16] The reason why Abraham is a radical image among his first zipped artworks is because, with his use of color, the painter puts visibility at risk. The gaze when the painting is seen for the first time, almost without exception, creates a sense of an incomprehensible dark Abraham picture, bringing to play the problem of the biblical figure of Abraham around the paradox of visibility and invisibility, as explained earlier. An anchoring point for interpreting the painting may be the art historical fact that Barnett Newman painted this work a year after losing his father, who was called Abraham Newman. In Western culture, dark colors that express grief can make some sense in this way. However, the international literature prefers a broader interpretation when the title is also applied to Abraham, the father of all nations.^[17]

The transition between the so-called reference (Abraham Newman) and intermediate (Abraham, the patriarch) readings of the title can be facilitated by the etymological examination of the title of the painting. According to the Bible testimony, Abraham belongs to a group of biblical figures to whom God gave a new name during their. The figure of Abram (אברמ) marks the patriarch as the name until Gen 17:5, after which – as a result of the so-called Priestly revision – he receives the personal name Abraham (אברהמ) as his proper name. While the former has a theophoric meaning (“the Father is majestic”), the latter can be translated with the statement “the Father loves.”^[18] In the sentence-level structure of this Western Semitic name, which compresses the subject and predicate, the common component is therefore the fatherly character that can relate to the Creator, but also reveals the significance from the perspective of Salvation History of the patriarch (salaam) who becomes the father of peoples, as the divine articulation of the name change draws attention to it.^[19] Based on this, it is precisely the sacred and profane interpretation of fatherhood that is integrated in the biblical narrative of Abraham and, through this, in the history of the Jewish personal name, thus making the profane and sacred reading of the title of the twentieth-century painting equally plausible. Of the two types of black shown in the painting, the more vividly colored zip may indicate the biographical father on this basis, as he is more sharply visible for the twentieth- to twenty-first-century recipient, also due to his proximity in history, behind whom the use of washed black may refer to the ancient naming patriarch. The same genealogical thinking, which is closely related to both the individual and national self-definition of Judaism, determines the position of the sons in the world of interpretation in addition to remembering the two Abrahams. Just as the two Abrahams can be sons themselves, ultimately the sons of the Lord, so too can their descendants, Isaac and Barnett Newman, be the subject who pronounces the personal name of the title. The sons may be invisible, merely by the utterers of the name and title “Abraham,” but the reality of the zip running black on black serves as the narrower and more vividly black descendant of the washed-out black color. Thus, Abraham, Abraham Newman, Isaac, and Barnett Newman can all be shapers of the zip.

4 The Negative Theological Interpretation of the Painting

In the following, I strive to link this broader interpretation of the title of the painting to as many specific points of the biblical Abraham narrative as possible, not only as a reference, but also on the basis of the gradually revealing view of the work of art. I am aware that the nature of abstract painting supports this hermeneutical approach to the same extent as it limits it. For this reason, I think that no matter how impressive the interpretative gestures are, their totalization would be the same as the elimination of the work of art. In this sense, we can discover a kinship between a cataphatic theology that knows its own boundaries and this path of interpretation.

The mention of negative theology is instructive because this expression about God only tells what can be denied, and its origin can be found mostly in the work of Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite. Dionysius is the one to whom the Christian belief of mysticism owes at least as much, if not more, than the discourse of negative theology. This approach to Dionysius’ speech about God, which is rooted in silence and serves as a starting point for mysticism, grew out of the work of St. Gregory of Nyssa entitled The Life of Moses, which, based on the specific obscurity of the cloud of theophany in connection with Moses’ mystical God experiences, presented the unknowability of the Lord in his paradoxical self-discovery. The conceptual basis of the Cappadocian exegesis was inspired by a few lines of Clement of Alexandria:

Whence Moses, persuaded that God is not to be known by human wisdom, said, ‘Show me Thy glory;’ (Ex 33:13) and into the obscurity (Ex 20:21) where God’s voice was, pressed to enter—that is, into the inaccessible and invisible ideas respecting Existence. For God is not in darkness or in place, but above both space and time, and qualities of objects.^[20]

Therefore, the quoted part deals with the theophanies of Moses and in particular refers to the vision related to Mount Sinai in Ex 33. We follow the worship of the golden calf and the Mosaic icons that destroyed it (Ex 32) in the story when the prophet asks YHWH to see his face. However, God refuses to see Moses face to face (Ex 33:20). The perception of vision in a platonic environment such as the Philo of Alexandria,^[21] the city of Clement and Origen was a privileged form of knowledge. Therefore, it is understandable why Clement talks about the unknowability of the biblical God who refuses to see him in the previous quote explaining this event. The God who refused Moses the opportunity to see him on Mount Sinai in a physical sense was unknowable on the spiritual plane. The latter reading of Clement gives the opportunity to read the sentence in Ex 20:21 as prolepsis: “The people remained behind, and Moses entered into the obscurity.”^[22]

The text of the Septuagint is correctly translated into English, if the singular object case of the Greek noun γνόφος is interpreted with the word “obscurity” as the purpose of entering somewhere (είσέρχομαι), since the patristic authors have understood this term in many cases, and therefore, the Latin of the Vulgate (caliginem) also expressed the rolling obscurity of the cloud, and the appropriate word of the Masoretic Text (ערפל – arapel) indicates a thick and dense cloud primarily and the resulting obscurity secondarily. At the same time, it is also true that the primary meaning of the Greek γνόφος is specifically in profane literature, of which Clement of Alexandria was one of the best acquainted among the Christian Church Fathers, is darkness, and the same can be said of Hebrew ערפל and Latin caligo. At one point (12:18), the author of the previously quoted Epistle to the Hebrews, who is famous for his eloquent Greek, recalled the theophany of Moses on Mount Sinai, by using the term γνόφος in Ex 20:21 in a list that shows the paradoxical human perception of the appearance of God by combining two opposing pairs of concepts: “For you have not come to a mountain that can be touched and to a blazing fire, and to gloom and darkness and a raging windstorm […].”^[23] The four figurative phenomena in Heb 12:18 are 1) flaming fire, 2) gloom (γνόφος), 3) darkness (ζόφος),^[24] and 4) storm. We can only interpret that pictorial structure as a visual chiasm if we read darkness as the meaning of the term γνόφος, and not the obscurity of the fog or the cloud, between the extreme members of the light of fire and the storm burdened with the light of the lightning. Thus, the two magnificent sources of light of the numinous pair with two types of dark experiences, whose interpretation of the Moses narrative was probably an intra-biblical interpretation that could be verified by Clement. Therefore, the Alexandrian theologian could mean the Greek noun γνόφος as darkness by the works of Heb 12:18 and other pagan Greek authors.^[25]

5 Intermedial Relationships Standing Out from the Symbolics of Darkness

The darkness, which can have an elemental effect on everyone when viewing the Newman-painting, is not related to Moses, rather to Abraham in its title, but the spiritual relationship between the biblical characters seems to be justified at many points. Thanks to Clement’s writing, the theological historical parallel that has determined the paths of negative theology and mystical theologies will soon come back. On the one hand, the negative theology plays the role of the common background of the inter-artistic connection between the muted music of the contemporary John Cage (e.g. 4’33”) and Abraham, which gained its main source of inspiration from the unknowability of God.

On the other hand, a similar path leads from the point of view of Jewish mysticism, and especially from the previously mentioned Kabbalistic tradition, to which Newman’s art and theoretical work have proven to be open. From the perspective of the Torah, the most important witnesses of faith are both Abraham and Moses. The stories of both of them affect Egypt and their covenants were the most important commitments to God in the history of Jewry. The connection of their figures in the Christian reception appeals to the witnessing power of the true people from the beginning. However, there is a very important difference between the theophanies of Abraham and Moses: Moses was forbidden to see God, and Abraham’s face-to-face vision was seemingly impossible in the same way. In fact, at the oak tree of Mamre, Abraham hosted three strangers who, although unrecognizable, were God’s messengers, but based on their prophecy and the preliminary communication of the narrator (Gen 18:1), they can be clearly recorded as the manifestations of God. This difference seems to provide enough reason to take steps toward the development of mysticism, negative theology, and even – in accordance with Clementine theology, which thinks about the visibility of the invisible – the icons when we talk about the iconic features of Newman’s dark image.

On the icon of the Holy Trinity, completed in 1411 Andrei Rublyov, we can see three figures who can be linked to the Mamre apparition in Gen 18 according to the professional works of art history and theology. On this basis, the three angels, who may be viewed as the depictions of the three divine persons, could come into antagonistic conflict with the nonfigurative bands of the three-part (due to the zip) Abraham painting, while they can be accepted as paraphrases of each other due to their spatial management and the identity of the blindness of faith. The twentieth-century painting, which is also the dark, inverse triptych of the three angel representations of the modern age, can therefore be the pictorial manifestation of mysticism, sacral iconicity and negative theology.

6 The Painting and the Abraham Cycle of the Hebrew Bible

The symbolism of the black color is the next object that directs our attention to the history of the first patriarch of the Muslim, Jewish, and Christian religions, as well as the American life of the twentieth century. During his life, Abraham had contact with the people of Egypt according to the biblical and later – still to be referred to – Judaist traditions. The most succinct of our sources is the biblical Book of Genesis, which informs us that the patriarch, who visited the Promised Land at the command of the Lord, decides to enter the land of Egypt with his family due to the famine in the region (Gen 12:5-10). The ancestor, who disguises his wife as his sister, goes directly to the court of Pharaoh, according to the biblical report, from where he manages to leave towing to a divine intervention protecting Sarah’s marital status. The significance of all this may be that the memorable encounter with the Egyptian culture, which was included as a member of the Abraham Cycle, makes the relationship of this advanced ancient civilization with the black color and completely different from the perception of the color of Western culture remarkable. Because instead of the proper name of Egypt from Greek mythology, the Egyptians marked their own country with the black (soil) common name meaning kmt radicals (probably pronouncing those consonants as Kemet).^[26] After the flood of the Nile, the black color was the symbol of the land flooded with dark sludge in its fertility in connection with life and its sacred blessing, in contrast with the surrounding desert, which was also given a color-speaking name: red. Based on the Egyptian detour of the Abraham Cycle, black can even give the painting’s dark colors a positive reading. From here, the three lanes can refer to the sediment-laden Nile and its two fertilized shores from the history of Abraham. This symbolic, map-like approach also calls for a more detailed examination of the patriarch’s geographical path in the Torah.

He took the ancestor from the city of Ur in Chaldea to Canaan and then to the south to the region of the Negeb owned by many nations before reaching Egypt. The Hebrew נגב (negev) word is the marker of this penultimate station, which in most cases only indicated the southern compass in the oldest language of the Bible. The meaning of “dry land” clearly refers to the desert, in many cases uninhabitable climate of the land of Kadesh and Beer-sheba. It is no wonder that Abram and his family went to the west of Egypt driven by a banal human need, the famine in the surrounding region, instead of the motivation of the divine mission from Ur, which was studied in more detail in the following (Gen 12:10). This profane circumstance replaces the sacred command of relocation in the life of the nomadic figurative community. The shelter will be the black country of Egypt, which due to the flood of the Nile in the second millennium before Christ, was not as vulnerable as the Negeb region in the south of Israel. This is why the dark color of Kemet may originally be the carrier of abundance and life in the Abraham Cycle, rather than the expression of grief and destruction in postmodern, Western culture. Thus, living permanently on the road seems easy to associate with the nomadic life story of Abraham, and – even within it, similar to the Nile interpretation – the zip can be approached as a possible element of an abstract map.

Therefore, this topographical approach to the painting can indicate the figurative life path in general, not just in the external sense, since it does not only go from Canaan to Egypt and beyond; but before all this, from the very beginning of the twelfth chapter of Genesis, we can read about how God started the chosen Abram from the region of Ur in Chaldea, tearing him from his original environment. In the biblical verse of Gen 12,1, there is a curiosity that reveals to the reader this first departure as an inner mission, as much as it promotes the departure to the topographic place: “Then the Lord said to Abram: ‘Go out of your land, from your relatives and from your father’s house to the land I will show you’” (Gen 12:1 – emphasis added by the Author).

The call to “go out” obscures the importance of the Hebrew lamed (ל) in almost all modern Western national translations. The verb meaning to go appears here and soon after (12:4 a) as the activity of Abram and Lot, since, as previously said, the existence on the road characterized the entire Abraham Cycle. The interesting point about 12:1 is that there is an expression beside the verb of “to go” that sounds like a figura etymologica, which can only be translated by paraphrasing. In the לך‏־לך construction, in addition to the imperative of the verb belonging to the basic vocabulary (to go/walk הלך^[27]), according to the previous results of the secondary literature, we find a dativus ethicus.^[28] In fact, this grammatical category of the dative case does not fit the Semitic languages, and therefore we cannot access the meaning of Gen. 12:1.^[29] The Hebrew verb with an imperative modality encourages Abram to take action that next to his command, he names the inner core of the patriarch’s personality as the reason for the mission. Therefore, it would be appropriate to translate it as “Go out of your own land for yourself,” or exploiting the potential of the grammatical construction even more, the translation “For yourself go out of your land…” also seems to be adequate. The Hebrew call of God, which is not recognized in the Greek of the Septuagint and the Latin of the Vulgate, therefore drives Abraham to external and internal action at the same time.

The semantic causality of these two types of rhetorical calls is more pronounced in the translations, since even in the solutions just proposed, depending on the order in which the term “for yourself” pointing to Abram is published, it can be emphasized that this is the cause or goal of external action. In the Hebrew expression “lechl^echa” (לך‏־לך), the two words built from the same radical (lamed, khaf) are connected by a maqqef. In Hebrew, maqqef indicates a close relationship that phonetically eliminates the emphasis of the word before maqqef, so it becomes one with the word following maqqef in the pronunciation. Therefore, the composition that sounds the same when the expression is pronounced, precisely because of the same consonants, retains something of its independence only with the differences of the high and low vowels (segol, qamec) and the sewa quiescens at the end of the first word, and then the sewa mobile after maqqef. The dropping and writing of the composition, which can be rewritten as “lechl^echa,” is intended to serve the same prose poetic solution: meaning-dense, symbolic highlighting. It is the difference between the horizontal line of maqqef and the vowels of the punctuated text that represents separability in the writing image. However, the same maqqef weakens the distinctiveness when pronounced, and we perceive the difference due to the pronounced vowels and the dormant sewa that remains unpronounced. Based on this, we can draw a parallel between the horizontal maqqef inscribed in the divine invitation sending Abram and the vertical zip of the painting Abraham, which visually divides and connects the space of the picture in the same way as the maqqef did with the לך‏־לך words.^[30]

Moreover, the asymmetric placement of the zip is similar to the phonetic effect of maqqef. In Jewish culture, the first of the words read from right to left becomes out of focus in the ancient text exactly as Barnett Newman’s postmodern zip reduces the left-wing image space in Western culture reading from left to right. Knowing the importance of the writing image in Hebrew thinking from the beginning to the medieval Kabbalistic Aleph-Bet interpretations, we can risk that such a comparison of the writing image and the abstract painting is not foreign to the Christian way of thinking of Judaism and even the Middle Ages.^[31] At the same time, recognizing the complexity of the approach, I will continue to call it the maqqef analogy of the painting for the sake of simplicity.

However, in the separate word forms and descriptions of modern and ancient translations, the figurativeness is lost, which, precisely because of its linguistic concentration, can become a real expression of the fact that, according to the Torah, Abram experiences the external and internal motivations at the same time, with their possible causes and purposes. This is also of paramount importance because the same figure only occurs once in the Abraham Cycle and even in the entire text of the Book of Genesis: at the beginning of the divine mission calling to the akedah. So we could correctly translate this verse as follows: “Take now your son, your only son Isaac, whom you love, and go to the land of Moriah for yourself (ולך‏־לך)” (Gen 22:2b). In this way, the editors of the first book of the Bible connected Abram’s own mission with the test of the akedah, so it can be clear from this motivational framework that God thinks of the sacrifice of Isaac as part of the story of Abraham’s awakening, as well as the previous discovery of the Promised Land.^[32] This also means that the akedah represents itself more radically as the story of Abraham than it is known from the translations according to the Hebrew text.

If the young Hegel, Kierkegaard or Mark C. Taylor had known the semantic depth of this linguistic turn, probably the questioning of the faith and ethics of their akedah interpretation could have been centered around the Abrahamic identity. But the same can be said in the same way when reading the title of Barnett Newman Abraham that anyone who “only” focuses on the identity of the biblical patriarch in relation to the proper name raised in the title misses that God sends and that it was said not once but twice, so it is impossible to study the identity of Abraham independently of the test of Isaac’s sacrifice. This significant relationship from both theological and literary sides regarding image interpretation: the zip and the black image parts outside it can lead the recipient to the traditional Western idea of the body-soul, which is based on the external-internal dichotomy. Although it is foreign to the Tanach’s conception of the body to perceive the soul in its Aristotelian form and to visualize it as the eternal soul of a spiritual nature residing in the temporal body as its vulgarized idea, this is not far from the postmodern American context in which Barnett Newman’s image was born. Thus, the zip can also be referred to as the image part indicating the identity of Abraham compared to other, external markers. This is how YHWH sends Abram to Canaan first, and then Abraham to Mount Moriah, so that the external and internal reality of the father of the peoples is directed to his awakening at the same time. The disparity of the two realities is only seen when the shade of difference between the blacks is perceived, though they are uniform from a distance.

7 Abraham as an Anti-icon

Before moving on to the connection of the relations between the generations – namely, Abraham and Isaac – and the narratives that shape them to the painting, it is worthwhile to dwell on the Rényi’s “mystical anti-icon” of the painting.^[33] The art history basis of this interpretation is provided by the series of so-called black paintings. Goya was the first painter, some of whose works were called black paintings by posterity, but in the case of pictures with controversial names, the black adjective only refers to the grim thematic reality of the depictions. The most important and upcoming prequel is the work of Kazimir Malevich’s Black Square, which is born in Ukraine, representing Russian avant-garde which can be understood as the pravoslavic representation of the anti-icon deprived of light.^[34] Just three years after the famous 1915 avant-garde artwork, Rodchenko’s lesser-known Black on Black painting was made, which is somewhat closer to Newman’s efforts due to the emphasis on space management. The next stage of the black pictures is Newman’s, followed by Adolph Dietrich Friedrich Reinhardt in 1964, the painter who created the next generation of American abstract expressionism, whose work Black Painting sparked a significant debate between him and Newman, due to the questioning of the originality of the idea. In this art history line, it is undoubtedly important to find the place of Barnett Newman’s work. In my opinion, with its dark colors, it is worth viewing the painting as the appropriate rendering of the iconoclast connotation of the title “Abraham,” rather an anti-icon. This distinction within the abstract paintings (rather iconoclasm than anti-icon) is thought of primarily because of the title, which is not related to the titles of either the avant-garde or the postmodern works, as it is clear that the mad themes of Goya point in another direction than Newman’s title choice. For this reason, figurative Abraham depictions, such as the sacrifice of Rembrandt’s 1635 Abraham, may be more closely related to Newman’s painting than their counterparts mentioned in the nonfigurative series. With its aspect ratios and monochrome blackness, the Malevich Black Square is provided the paradoxical criticism of the respective icon. If András Rényi likewise understands the description of Abraham included in the term “counter icon” as the opposite point of the general icon representation, then his interpretation does not take into account the existence of the zip. If the “counter icon” is an artistic position imagined against something, it is worth defining both sides of the opposition. This missing element, in my opinion, must account for the triad and be linked to the title Abraham.

In the spirit of the biblical approach, only the meeting of Abraham with three men seems an adequate opportunity (Gen 18:1-15). The reason why the appearance of the men could very quickly become theophanic through the angels is that both before and after their arrival, the Lord plans to tell Abraham in the first person singular the same things that the men convey to him during their visit. The exegesis of the Church Fathers received the opportunity to read the preview of the Holy Trinity from the number of men, in accordance with the reading of typological symbolism. The best-known icon depiction of this Old Testament Trinity is the work of Andrei Rublyov made in the first quarter of the fifteenth century and mentioned earlier. The painting, which is titled Tpoицa in Russian, is sometimes referred to as the hospitality of Abraham, recalling what happened at the oak of Mamre to this day. The inclusion of these three figures, and the head position of two of them leaning in the same direction, divides the space of the picture similar to Newman’s painting with the zip. The men who predicted Isaac’s conception came at the hottest time of the day according to the biblical narrative (Gen 18:1). The heat must belong to the brightest hours of the day,^[35] which optical experience could create the contrast of the three men appearing unexpectedly as the perception of Abraham, so that in the all-blinding brightness, the men could first stand out as dark figures, which he could apperceive by falling down before them (Gen 18:2), repeating in the trio of their shadows. Both perception phases are made visible with Newman’s Abraham. At the same time, this tension based on the opposite of optical light and darkness also has a symbolic meaning in hospitality, if the suffering from childlessness is associated with the darkness and the divine promise that dissolves it with the light.^[36] We can hardly find any trace of the light-shadow double that is deduced from the biblical text in the picture of Rublyov, but the head restraint of the brown and green tunic figures and the arch of the canopy of the (turpentine) tree appearing above the shoulder of the middle figure asymmetrically push the center of the picture to the left, toward the third angel and the architectural element symbolizing the place of Abraham’s residence. In addition, even in the time of Barnett Newman, a vertical fracture line between the upper body of the blue-clothed and the only upward-facing angels was recognizable on the carrier of the icon made with the tempera, the line that found its organic counterpart in the painting in a zip-like line: through the wings to the foot and beyond, ending on the surface of the postament, on the one side, partly on the filigree held by the angel, lined with a red instrument. To this extent, the work in The State Tretyakov Gallery also has a spatial element that divides the picture horizontally in almost the same proportion as the postmodern zip of Abraham. If we accept Rényi’s definition of “anti-icon” not in a general sense, but in a specific image, the icon of Rublyov can be a work of art arranged in an intermediate relationship with Newman’s painting. In this way, the dark colors can make sense when the three angels appear, referring to the blindness of the biblical figure,^[37] and the thin, white strips along the zip show the invasion of hope with the divine message of the visit: Abram will have innumerable descendants.

8 Talking Colors

The black color, which is subject to achromatic judgment together with gray and white according to modern colorology, allows you to recall the invisible and transcendent characteristics included in the faith.^[38] If we give in to Newman’s warning and take a close look at Abraham, we can observe that the dawn of white color runs parallel to the zip on both sides, and due to the interaction of light and dark colors, the gray appears on the border of the zip. The painting, which looks like a monochrome at first, therefore contains three colors that cannot be regarded as colors.^[39] This work, which shows itself with its colorless colors, again reminds those who are familiar with the Judeo–Christian tradition, which has been talking about the mystical theology again through the experience of theophany since the Sinai theophany of Moses, St. John of the Cross and the mystics of the atomic age with an abundance of uncertainty.^[40] In the vertical of the zip that extends beyond the human dimension, it would be an exaggeration to say that it is read as a reference to the presence of God, but it can perhaps be interpreted as a transcendent way of connecting the Creator with His creation. From a distance, the zip has a single vector-like, vertical line, which, in the iconographic tradition, in addition to the presence of the divine unit and the numinous in general, also indicated the aspiration of man toward God in the history of Western abstract visualization.^[41] This vertical of reciprocity, if it starts from Abraham, the hero of faith, can also be the painted picture of faith freed from idolatry itself. Finally, the abstract image of the same path can be expressed as a sublime moment of the relationship between God and His creation. The alliance of Abram with YHWH was made with the image of the Hebrew idiom.^[42] In the Hebrew language, next to the noun indicating the כרת ברית alliance or obligation, the verb referring to the English binding is replaced by the verb meaning “down, split, cut,” which means that the meaning of the idiomatic expression is correctly given by the version “make an alliance” instead of “cut an alliance.” It is argued that this picture is due to the development of the ritual or legal environment, but a significant part of the biblical scholars are in favor of the fact that the rite of the fifteenth chapter, figurative covenant of the Book of Genesis best explains and models the etymology.^[43] This form of wedding seals the passage between the slaughtered animals in the middle with the curse of those who took the oath: We should do the same if we break our now-bound alliance. As the way to enter this alliance, we can also understand the zip of Abraham, which warns those who want to pass by on both sides and on the road with the color of the death curse, that their oath is a matter of life and death.

In addition to the theological and anthropological connection, from a similar point of view, the light color with a weak light, which is almost completely lost in the darkness, can be interpreted as the abstract formulation of the sky, as the astronomical and astrological bond of Abraham. During the Venetian Baroque, Antonio Zanchi (1631–1722) painted this legend from late Judaist sources, which, looking at Abraham as a cultural hero, claimed that he taught the Egyptians the science of astronomy. The oil picture in Santa Maria del Giglio, entitled Abraham Teaches the Egyptians Astronomy, painted in 1665, captures this moment. In the history of Abraham’s depiction, Zanchi’s painting can only be a distant and inverse parallel to Newman’s twentieth-century painting because of the Caravaggio shading technique, the chiaroscuro. From here, approaching Abraham, we can see the abstract formulation of the starry sky and through it the memento of the scene of the divine promise: “Then He brought him outside and said, ‘Look now toward heaven, and count the stars if you are able to number them.’ And He said to him, ‘So shall your descendants be.’ And he believed in the Lord, and He accounted it to him for righteousness” (Gen 15:5-6).^[44] The same late Judaist tradition that regarded Abraham as the forerunner of astronomy gave the patriarch a similar title in mathematics. As the most important representative of this tradition, the work of Josephus Flavius entitled Jewish Antiquities can be quoted, which shows (I. 167–168) the deep relationship they saw at this time between the arithmetic, astrological, and rhetorical forms of thinking.^[45] The relationship between mathematics and the division of space is linked to the width and location of Abraham’s zip. In the Newman literature, Thomas B. Hess introduced the concept of secret symmetry, which he first mentioned in his book on Newman at the time of the discussion of Abraham.^[46] At first glance, the zip position on the painting, which is moved to the left of the center, radiates the asymmetry to the recipients of the image. However, the width of the zip allows the painting’s space to be divided into six equal parts in the longitudinal direction. There are two zip areas to the left of the zip and three zip areas to the right. For this reason, the zip and the area to the left of it are the same as the width of the field to the right of the zip. Thus, the zip is at the same time the representative of the asymmetry based on its own location, while as the creator of the unit of measurement of the space it does not fill, its right border halves the painting in the longitudinal direction. It is not classical, modern mathematics, but its symbolism linked to ancient numerology, which at this point may be of interest both to Judaism and to the Christian theological thinking that has its origins in it. According to St. Augustine, the sum of the two, one, and three units that result in the six represents the path of the Bible. The Latin Church Father in his work on the Holy Trinity (IV. 4-5.) read out the trinitological symbolism in the digits of one and two at the same time, and by adding the one and two together with the three formed from their sum, the symbol of the six-day creation.^[47] Augustine goes so far as to see in the Pythagorean numerical conclusions that in the six, he sees the manifestation of divine perfection, which in the first creation story sees the timing of the creation of man on the sixth day as intentional: “The perfection of the number six is also indicated by the Holy Scripture.”^[48] In this way, the relationship between the Book of Genesis and the number six in the Christian tradition is even more intense in theosophical Kabbalah. In this mystical trend, which Barnett Newman was sure to study, the Tree of Life (Sefirot) is of central importance.^[49] This model of creation, which produced the ten divine hypostases, including the combination of the twenty-two letters of the Hebrew Aleph-Bet, calls the sixth hypostasis Tifareth. The meaning of the Hebrew תפארה word is beauty. That symbolic beauty is placed on the central axis of Sefirot which a channel for the flow of creative power is in a similar spatial position as the right, framing line of the zip of Abraham.^[50] Thus, the kabbalistic model of creation and the Newman Abraham figures referring to the Book of Genesis are linked to the six in the world of arithmetic by meeting the act of creation and the beauty of art. The topos reflecting the concept of Aristotelian poetics, in parallel with the gesture of Kabbalah’s Sefer Yetzirah identifying Abraham as an artist, suggests in multiple ways that Abraham is also a metanarrative parergon.^[51] As the real authors of the Sefer Yetzirah quote Abraham, who quotes the words of God in the Sefer Yetzirah, Barnett Newman presents the title of his painting that the name Abraham is readable as a name of the artist as a creator instead of a title thanks to the kabbalistic tradition of the first artist. If Abraham is to be interpreted as a title, it can depict the first artist and, as such, the ancestor of all artists. If Abraham is the designation of the creator, Barnett Newman is connected with a fictional opportunity as part of a multiple creative game, which unfolds the role of Abraham as a co-creator of the art work. This latter interpretation is somewhat similar to the narrative border violations of Borges’ novel Pierre Menard, the Author of the Quixote, published ten years earlier, in 1939.

9 Isaac’s Sacrifice

In the previous sense, the painting is connected to Isaac in such a way that the vivid and narrow strip of the zip directs the gaze to the son, and the blurred, spacious black part directs the gaze to the father. The joint display of the father and the son can be read as follows: the zip is the space that separates the shape of the boy unfolding in the left lane from the wider lane of the father in front of the zip. The position in front of each other emphasizes descent and intimate relationship, and the one in back, opposing interpretation highlights the confrontational nature of Abraham’s mission. In the story of the two of them, the three-day journey to the land of Moriah is a mourning process in the eyes of Abraham, which shows no more than a nuance of difference in the same darkness. If the space of the painting, which is divided into three parts, is read horizontally in the spirit of this interpretation, it can refer to the passage of time in an abstract way with the width of the lanes, and with their colors it can reflect the tragic process of internal release, which is revived by the laconic dialogue with Isaac.^[52] (Gen 22:7-8) Continuing to look at the painting as a whole, from a distance, the whiteness running on both sides of the zip can indicate the ropes of the akedah, which strap Isaac to the place of the tragic sacrifice. In this case, the painting abstracts the top view of the tied Isaac. The same zip, based on the maqqef analogy, can be viewed at a right angle. In this case, the view of the zip is seen from the bottom, so that Isaac sees the blade of the knife held above his head in the brightness of the day, which shines on the edges of the blade or the physical light of the sun, or the transcendent light of the angel of God who saved Isaac. If the light edges of the zip are paired with the post-Akedah moment, as rope traces left on the body of the rescued boy, the possibility of trauma may be permanent or fleeting, but the traces are still visible.^[53] In this sense, besides Abraham, Isaac is also the dark knight of faith, but who simultaneously witnesses and performs the sacrifice in the passivity of Abraham, who obediently suffers due to his trial.^[54] The biblical characters looking at each other, when they see each other at the moment of the akedah, see something terrible. If they look beyond each other in the visible action of invisible faith, then in the darkness, light can have a chance to dawn.

10 Conclusion

To conclude the study, we may state that the non-figurative painting is subtly related to the title that establishes many intermediate references. The comparative interpretation developing in concentric circles may also help the receiver to make a theological and cultural-historical interpretation of the concept of sacrifice. In both the Abrahamic presentation of sacrifice and Isaac’s experience of vulnerability, we can recognize the defenselessness of the body. The father is about to sacrifice the genetic and symbolic heritage of his own body – indirectly the future of himself. And Isaac, in the helplessness of his own body, is giving back to his father and the Lord the body he has received from them, instead of expressing justifiable anger at the sacrifice. When reading the biblical text, this compulsion to return can only be interpreted as a free choice because of the son’s silence in his consciousness. The simultaneous experience of faith of freedom and compulsion is similar to the artistic paradox that confronts us with the dilemma of the visible and the invisible when glimpsing a colorless painting.