Jonah has Pity on the Gourd

Jacob Steinhardt

The Political Dr. Seuss

Because of the fame of his children’s books (and because we often misunderstand these books) and because his political cartoons have remained largely unknown, we do not think of Dr. Seuss as a political cartoonist. But for two years, 1941-1943, he was the chief editorial cartoonist for the New York newspaper PM (1940-1948), and for that journal he drew over 400 editorial cartoons.

- Richard H. Minear

Bragging Rights

American WWI Recruitment Poster

The Culture War

Nazi propaganda poster, Belgium, 1944

Angel and Devil Wrestling over Fire

- by David Jones, c. 1924

For HS: Judging by Appearances

Contrary to popular opinion, appearances do not generally deceive. Instead, they are an indispensable feature of the way things are and serve as our first contact with the world. The world reveals itself first through the way it can be sensed and felt, by means of our eyes or ears or by touch or taste. Art helps us see, sense and feel the world in novel ways by revealing new angles and fresh perspectives.

- Adrienne Dengerink Chaplin

More Cardus coming at you. Q & A with Adrienne Dengerink Chaplin, aesthetic philosopher extrodinaire.

Miserere

Jesus Honni (Jesus Reviled), by Georges Rouault, 1922.

Christ in Gethsemane

Christ in Gethsemane by Michael D. Obrien

The Overshadowed: Edvard Munch’s Madonna

I find Munch’s “Madonna” fascinating and frightening, the way I would expect the “overshadowing” of the Holy Spirit to affect a person. Beatified sexuality (note the red halo). Sadly his stylistically innovative print of this image, employing both woodcut and lithograph (a self taught printmaker, Munch made numerous varied prints of this and many of his other images), cheapens the power of the image with a puerile, Hot Topic kind of scatology, reminiscent of some of Serrano’s less compelling work, grasping for “disturbing”, but laying hold on nothing but the laghable blasphemes of a twelve-year-old.

Both are quite a bit different from this image I captured several years ago at St. Mary’s around the corner from my house in Idaho which, to me anyway, seemed to capture both the attraction and un-thankful barrenness of the ideal of Our Lady’s perpetual virginity.

Sleep

Death with Child in Lap, 1921
Kathe Kollwitz (German, 1867 – 1945)

How often do we think of death as a comforter?

For Heidi

woodcut print of “A Dance of Death”
from the Liber Chronicarum, 1493.

Nothing New Under the Sun

Water Torture – a woodcut in Damhoudere’s (1556)
Praxis Rerum Criminalium. Antwerp, Flanders.

The Death of Triangles

All the will-worshippers…always talk of will as something that expands and breaks out. But it is quite the opposite – Every act of will is an act of self-limitation. To desire action is to desire limitation. In that sense every act is an act of self-sacrifice. When you choose anything, you reject everything else…”Thou shalt not” is only one of the necessary corollaries of “I will”…

Anarchism adjures us to be bold creative artists, and care for no laws or limits. But it is impossible to be an artist and not care for laws or limits. Art is limitation…If you draw a giraffe, you must draw him with a long neck. If, in your bold creative way, you hold yourself free to draw a giraffe with a short neck, you will really find that you are not free to draw a giraffe…

Do not go about as a demagogue, encouraging triangles to break out of the prison of their three sides. If a triangle breaks out of its three sides, its life comes to a lamentable end. Somebody wrote a work called “The Loves of Triangles”; I never read it, but I am sure that if triangles ever were loved, they were loved for being triangular. This is certainly the case with all artistic creation…The artist loves his limitations: They constitute the thing he is doing.

- G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy, pp. 45 – 46.