Broken Obelisk

The sculpture first appeared on display in front of the Seagram Building in New York City and outside the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, DC[2] where it was part of an exhibit titled "Scale and Content" (1967), which also consisted of Tony Smith's Smoke and Ronald Bladen's The X.

[1] A third multiple, which included some internal, structural improvements, was completed in 1969 by Lippincott, Inc., which became part of the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York City.

One was secured by John de Menil with a matching grant from the National Foundation for the Arts and Humanities and was installed on the grounds of the Rothko Chapel in Houston in 1970, surrounded by a reflecting pool.

As a condition set by de Menil, the sculpture in Houston is dedicated to Martin Luther King Jr. Virginia Wright secured another multiple, which was installed in Red Square on the campus of the University of Washington in Seattle in 1971.

Art critic Robert Hughes, writing on Broken Obelisk in 1971, said: Newman's pursuit of the sublime lay less in nature than in culture.