Executed in 1969, CR 326 is a compact yet commanding graphite sketch on paper that distills Barnett Newman's lifelong preoccupation with the vertical line into its most intimate and immediate form. At just 15.2 by 10.2 centimeters, the work operates with the quiet authority characteristic of Newman's practice, where a single mark or narrow band of drawn graphite becomes a site of profound spatial tension. The sketch belongs to a period of sustained reflection late in the artist's career, when his hand-drawn works on paper offered a counterpoint to the monumental scale of his paintings, revealing the essential gesture beneath the iconic zip in its rawest state. The work's provenance situates it within a context of serious institutional attention, having entered the holdings of the Harvard Art Museums, specifically the Fogg Museum and the Center for the Technical Study of Modern Art, where it has been subject to rigorous art-historical and conservation scholarship. This institutional lineage speaks to the drawing's significance not merely as a preparatory object but as an autonomous work worthy of close material and conceptual study. Newman's signed works on paper from this decade are relatively scarce in private hands, and pieces with documented museum-level provenance represent particularly meaningful acquisitions for collectors attentive to the deeper currents of postwar American abstraction. For the collector, CR 326 offers a rare opportunity to hold something of Newman's process, a work where the philosophical weight of his mature vision is concentrated into a few deliberate marks. Unframed and thus available to be presented according to the collector's own considered vision, the piece invites a direct and unmediated encounter with one of the defining sensibilities of twentieth-century art.