Mid-Morning Open Thread [CBD]

From the linked article by Tom Wolfe about the artist:

The hot-blooded boy's passion, as Hart developed his vision of the Creation, could not be consummated by Woman alone. He fell in love with God. For Hart, the process began with his at first purely pragmatic research into the biblical story of the Creation in the Book of Genesis. He had been baptized in the Presbyterian Church, and he was working for the Episcopal Church at the Washington National Cathedral. But by the 1970's, neither of these proper, old-line, in-town Protestant faiths offered the strong wine a boy who was in love with God was looking for. He became a Roman Catholic and began to regard his talent as a charisma, a gift from God. He dedicated his work to the idealization of possibilities God offered man.

Addendum: OregonMuse has provided additional information about this work.

From an interview with Hart:

I'm a big fan of Russian history, and originally that started as a small sketch of the four daughters of Nicholas who were murdered. And then it turned into a larger allegorical work, as a tribute to all of the innocent victims off the 20th Century. It's meant to speak to all of the things -- I even called it Martyrs of Modernism as a subtitle. What I'm talking about, of course, is the deliberate destruction of things that are lovely, beautiful and filled with life, as personified by all of the brutality of the 20th Century.

And I picked Odessa simply because of all of the horrible things that happened in the 20th Century most of them got a dress rehearsal in the Ukraine somewhere along the way, whether it was the Pogroms or the suppression of the rebellion of 1905, or the actual revolution, the Stalinization, the collectivization of the peasants, the famines, the holocaust, the Nazi invasion, Chernobyl, all of the most dreadful things of the 20th Century were sort of played out in the Ukraine, so by making a tribute to all of the innocent victims of the 20th Century, I thought Odessa was kind of a nice poetic reference.

posted by Open Blogger at 10:04 AM

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