Some Monday Readings - April 6, 2026

How ‘Tiny Shortcuts’ Are Poisoning Science – Thomas Plumper and Eric Neumayer at The MIT Press Reader. 

The Bills That Destroyed Urban America – Joseph Lawler at The New Atlantis.

 

A Truck Driver Spent 20 Years Building a Miniature Model of New York City. Then, It Went Viral – Sarah Cascone at Artnet.

 

Selma Hall, Jefferson County, Missouri – Chris Naffziger at St. Louis Patina.

 

Spies and Lies: The Rosenbergs and America’s Atomic Secrets – Jason Clark at This Is the Day.

 

Ancient Splendor: Roman Art in the Time of Trajan – St. Louis Art Museum (video).

 

Editor, Do Your Work! – Tery Whalin at The Writing Life.

Photograph: Ethel and Julius Rosenberg.

 

Finding Poetry in an Anselm Kiefer Art Exhibition

In 2014, I was in London, and I’d just recovered from my back going out that I spent a good 24 hours immobilized on the floor of our hotel room. A house doctor was called in, and he gave me a muscle relaxant via hypodermic. My back “felt like a solid brick,” he said. It took about 10 hours to work, but I could finally start moving around again.  

The floor of a hotel room is not the way to experience London. The maids were, however, very polite as they vacuumed around me. 

 

Two days later, I was moving normally again, and I went to see an exhibition at the Royal Academy. I’d heard of the German artist Anselm Kiefer; the St. Louis Art Museum has two of his works. One is a massive painting called “Fuel Rods.” The other is a sculpture, entitled “Breaking of the Vessels,” comprised of a huge shelf of burned books and thousands of pieces of glass scattered on the floor. It commemorates “Kritstallnacht,” or the “Night of Broken Glass,” when German Nazis attacked Jewish businesses, buildings, homes, and people across Germany on Nov. 9-10, 1938.

 

The London exhibition was simply entitled “Anselm Kiefer.”

To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.

Photograph: One of the Anselm Kiefer paintings in Sculpture Hall at the St. Louis Art Museum.

Some Tuesday Readings

 

Winter penance – poem by Franco Amati at Garnage Notes.

 

The Kreutzer Sonata – poem by Donna Hilbert at Every Day Poems.

 

Into the Wasteland – Malcolm Guite at The Rabbit Room (video).

 

“The Shadow on the Stone,” poem by Thomas Hardy – Sally Thomas at Poems Ancient and Modern.

Art Matters: Asking the Questions No One Can Ask

We recently watched a German mini-series (English subtitles) called Generation War, the story of five young friends in Berlin and what happens to them from 1941 to 1946. Two are brothers, soldiers in the Wehrmacht, sent east to fight the Russians. One girl is a café singer with dreams of a singing career. Her boyfriend is a Jewish tailor with his own dreams of fashion design. And the fifth wants to be a nurse, “representing German women” and helping to tend the soldiers wounded at the front.

It was a riveting series. When it first aired in Germany in 2013, it caused no end of controversy, including a protest by the Polish ambassador over the anti-Semitic depiction of Polish partisans fighting the Nazis. Overall, the series renewed a public conversation lying rather dormant over German war guilt.

The series, and the conversation it inspired in Germany, might not have been possible without the paintings of Anselm Kiefer.

Breaking of the Vessels by Anselm Kiefer (1990)

Until 2014, the sum total of my knowledge of Kiefer and his art was limited to a multi-media sculpture in the St. Louis Art Museum, entitled “Breaking of the Vessels” (photograph above). Few St. Louisans know the work’s official title, but ask anyone who’s been to the art museum “Where can I find the broken glass?” and they know exactly what’s being sought. It’s currently in the main entry hall of the museum. Kiefer created it in 1990.

Last year, I was able to see a major exhibition of Kiefer’s work at the Royal Academy of Arts in London (“Breaking of the Vessels’ wasn’t included; I can’t imagine anyone shipping all that broken glass, and there’s a lot of broken glass). His work is overwhelming and often overpowering. It was the kind of exhibition, and the kind of art, you can leave as a changed person. I walked out with the exhibition catalog and a biography of the artist.

Kiefer was born in 1945, not the most auspicious time to be a baby in the wreckage of Nazi Germany. He grew up in southwestern Germany, and graduated from the University of Freiburg in 1969; he began his studies in law and romance languages but switched to painting. Through a series of art installations and also artworks presented as books, the artist asked the question that no one in the German art world was asking or even wanted to ask: what does it mean to be a German artist after the Third Reich?

Anselm Kiefer

Kiefer’s art essentially forced Germans to consider that question. It was part of a broader question: What does it mean to be a German after the Third Reich? That was the conversation Kiefer started. And it was a conversation that had to happen, or Germany and Germans would have forever lived in the dark shadow, and the dark sin, that was Nazism.

The Royal Academy exhibition included numerous striking works: A large oil and acrylic painting entitled “Interior,” representing a rather decayed and ruined version of Albert Speer’s Mosaic Room in Hitler’s New Reich Chancellery; “Man in the Forest,” a man in a nightshirt holding a burning bush in the deep forest; and “Iron Path,” showing railroad tracks through a muddy, gray landscape (railroad tracks have a special meaning in our understanding of Nazi history).

This is what art can do, and this is one of the reasons why art matters. It isn’t just about beauty and the creative act. Art can take us to places we need to go, but that may be politically or culturally difficult if not impossible. Art can force us to acknowledge that “there’s an elephant in the room.” And art can keep asking the questions, which is what Kiefer continues to do with his art today.

More on Anselm Kiefer:

Anselm Kiefer by Matthew Biro provides a good overview of the artist’s works and development.

Anselm Kiefer by Richard Davey and Kathleen Soriano, the book produced for the exhibition at the Royal Academy of Arts.

Related to the theme “Art Matters:”

What I Learned from a 400-Year-Old Painting

The High Calling has a community linkup with the theme of “Art Matters.” To see what others have to see, please visit The High Calling.

Top painting: “Interior,” oil, acrylic and paper on canvas by Anselm Kiefer, 1981; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam.

Carla Rachman’s “Monet”

In May we had visited the exhibition at the St. Louis Art Museum on Impressionist France, which assembled a considerable number of art works and photographs from the 19^th century into a fascinating display of art, history, nationalism, industry, nature, and other themes. It was a wonderful exhibition; we actually went through on two occasions.

In the last room, devoted to works about industry and economics, was Claude Monet’s “Railway Bridge at Argenteuil” (shown above). Many of the Impressionists, including Monet, were fascinated with the changes being wrought by industrialization. That bridge was one, but not the only one. I spent some time studying the painting, and realized that I really didn’t know much about Monet except his penchant for painting water lilies at Giverny (and a wonderful exhibit of the three works that were collectively one, which was held in 2011 and 2012 at the Cleveland, St. Louis and Kansas City art museums).

My wondering about how little I knew about Monet the man and artist found a ready solution in the art museum’s gift ship: a book. Simply entitled Monet, it was written by Carla Rachman, a lecturer on 19^th century art at the University of London. It is published by Phaidon Press, which publishes a lot of books about art, artists, and related subjects (and if you go to any art museum, you’ll likely find books for sale by Phaidon Press).

I bought the book, and what’s more, I read it, and not long after we saw the exhibition.

I loved the book. It’s a highly readable, engaging, and fascinating account of Monet’s life and art. What Rachman presents, and it fit incredibly well with the theme of the Impressionist France exhibition at the museum, is an artist who became bound up in France’s notion of itself as a nation. Monet, for many of the French people, became synonymous with France.

Rachman walks us through the key events of his life – his family, how he came to paint, the various moves around France, his unconventional living arrangements after his first wife died, how he came to settle at Giverny, the trials and tribulations he and the other Impressionists had with the Salon (i.e., the establishment), the alternative shows, the rather daring show of the 37 paintings of haystacks, and, of course, the water lilies.

We learn of his concern that so many of his paintings were being bought by Americans and taken back to the United States (to the extent, Rachman says, that you cannot study Monet without an extended visit to America). We see that while he had periods of financial concern, he was no suffering artist, and he became a successful artist long before many of his fellow painters. We learn of his style and how it developed, and what influenced him. We even see Monet painting his first wife as she was on her deathbed.

It’s a work of insight and knowledge. Rachman knows her artist and she knows his context, and not only his artistic context. She places him in his time, in his country (and he was nothing if not a loyal Frenchman). And she explains how, in so many ways, he effectively became his country.

Monet is a wonderful biography, and more than that, a wonderful overview of the man, his art, and his time.

Related:

Navigating Monet’s Water Lilies (poem)

http://faithfictionfriends.blogspot.com/2011/12/navigating-monets-water-lilies.html

The artist ignores Monet (poem)

http://faithfictionfriends.blogspot.com/2011/12/artist-ignores-monet.html

Painting: Railway Bridge at Argenteuil, oil on canvas by Claude Monet (1873), Philadelphia Museum of Art.

A Visit to Impressionist France

Tuesday night, we went to a wine-and-cheese reception at the St. Louis Art Museum. The reception was for members only (they do member-only events on a regular basis), and this one included either audio tours or docent-led tours of the museum’s latest exhibition, Impressionist France.

The exhibition was in the museum’s new East Building, which opened last year and is mostly dedicated to contemporary art (lots of Gerhard Richter paintings there, which I generally like and my wife generally doesn’t). And what an exhibition it was – almost a century of French photography and painting, arranged by themes but all generally aspects of the building of France as a nation.

The exhibit is a joint project of the Nelson Atkins Art Museum in Kansas City and the St. Louis Art Museum. It was curated by Simon Kelly of the St. Louis museum for the paintings, and April Watson of the Nelson Atkins museum for photography. And it is a marvelous show.

We chose to do one of the docent-led tours, which started with a short discussion by Simon Kelly about the exhibit, French Impressionism, and the importance of photography to Impressionism. On the tour, our docent moved us to and from about 10 stops, focusing upon a particular painting or photograph to represent specific points. In addition to sharing what was clearly a lot of knowledge, she carried with her laminated photographs of the painters and photographers which she would pass among the tour group.

As we walked, observed and listened, I began to meditate a bit on art, and why it has come to be something much more important now that I’m older than when I was young. We’ve always enjoyed art and art museums, going back to a spectacular Cezanne exhibit at the Museum of Fine Art in Houston in early 1978. But it seems more important now, more engaging, and we try to include it whenever we travel.

I don’t think it’s just us. This seems to happen with age. As one gets older, one gets more interested in art. Perhaps it’s because older people have more leisure time (or disposable income). Looking at the crowd at the reception last night, I would say more were over the age of 50.

I think it might be someone else, too. As I’ve aged, I’ve come to see art as some akin to divine creation. Whether it is literature, art, music, photography, or other artistic endeavors, creating something “out of nothing” is something of a human echo of the original creation. Part of what it means to be made in God’s image is to be made in his creative image; it’s almost as if we can’t help ourselves – we are made to create.

If you have the opportunity, you should see this exhibit. We’re going back, and likely more than once. The creators of the works on display read like a history of French photography and art: Le Gray, Corot, Rousseau, Monet, Pissarro, Degas, Cezanne, Manet, and Morisot.

And I’ll try to figure out where they put the Gerhard Richters in the meantime.

Painting: The Promenade with the Railroad Bridge, Arguentil, oil on canvas by Claude Monet (1874), St. Louis Art Museum. 

Photograph: Adalbert Cuvelier, French, 1812–1871, printed by: Alphonse-Louis Poitevin, French, 1819–1882; Effect of Fog, 1852, printed 1855.

Life without Beauty

For a long time, longer than I really care to admit, I was a cretin when it came to modern and contemporary art. I had this tongue-in-cheek attitude that summed up my thinking on the subject in general: if I could do it, it wasn’t art.

Gradually, that attitude began to break down. I read more. I looked more carefully. I stopped rejecting exhibits or installations out of hand (although, I have to say that the installation of several television monitors talking to each other at the St. Louis Art Museum may still fit my tongue-in-cheek attitude).

But there was a moment, some years ago, when something happened that changed my attitude about contemporary and modern art. It was a series of three paintings at the St. Louis Art Museum by Gerhard Richter, titled individually November, December and January. (That’s December at the top of the page).

I still can’t explain why, but the day came when I looked at those three paintings closely, and realized they represented something far more, far larger, than various shades of gray paint on canvas. I looked at those three paintings, and I felt physically cold, as if I was in the very real presence of a representation of weather.

Richter was the doorway through which I walked into contemporary and modern art. The St. Louis museum has other Richter works, like Gray Mirror (1991), four mounted panels of gray glass, and Betty, a portrait of the back of Richter’s daughter at about age 12. And then I began to read about his work. And moved on from there. Twenty years ago, if someone had asked me who my favorite artist was, I would have likely Cezanne, pr perhaps Andrew Wyeth. Today, I would answer the question by saying Makoto Fujimura.

And I surprise myself even more by finding significant contemporary and modern elements in a painter like El Greco.

The art itself didn’t change; I changed. I understood what I didn’t understand before. The biggest change came in my understanding of creativity.

In Life After Art, Matt Appling says that “human survival never demanded that a poem be written or a song be sung or a play be performed or a story be told or any number of other beautiful, emotional, moving things be created. Beauty is never essential to survival. Yet humanity has spent millions of hours on unnecessary, nonessential creation.

“God’s life is not just about existing. It is about beauty.”

And I found beauty in what I previously didn’t understand, expressions of the creative self that we carry with us because we are made in God’s image.

Over at The High Calling, we’re reading Appling’s Life After Art. To see the discussion today on “Life without beauty,” pleasevisit the site.

Related:

My review of Life After Art.

Broken Hallelujahs, a poem inspired by Gerhard Richter’s December.

Painting: December, oil on canvas by Gerhard Richter (1989).

What I Learned from a 400-Year-Old Painting

Sometimes, something “societal” or “cultural” will smack me upside the head. Why do the news media seem so hostile to faith? Why does it seem that our entire society is getting more hostile to faith? Why do people often talk about faith only in cartoon caricatures? Or why is it that our so-called cultural and academic elites sneer at anything to do with faith, especially the Christian faith?

It’s easy to blame it all on the 1960s, that decade of my coming of age when the whole world seemed to come unhinged. I’ve blamed the 1960s, too, until I began to wonder if all that craziness from that crazy decade was a cause – or an effect. And if it was an effect, then the answer might be in what caused the 1960s.

I found at least part of the answer – in a 400-year-old painting.

Rory McClure was a student at Covenant Theological Seminary in St. Louis who, as a sideline, did private lecture tours at the St. Louis Art Museum. The tours weren’t about the museum’s collection; instead, they focused on particular paintings and how they represent the power of ideas in culture, and how they relate more broadly to ideas and events of the times they were painted.

One evening, we joined 16 others from our church to learn how ideas in the 19^th century reinvented the world. But first there was an introduction – a painting in the Renaissance collection. That’s where I wanted to linger.

Francois Clouet’s “Admiral Gaspard de Coligny” is a small painting, perhaps 8” x 10”, and it’s easily overlooked. The painting dates from 1567-1570, and in it lies a thread to answering my question.

Clouet (ca 1510 – 1572) painted “miniatures” of members of royal families in France and England and their courts. He lived in a tumultuous time – the Protestant Reformation and the religious wars of the 16^th century, likely when a lot of people thought the world had come unhinged. It was a notoriously political time in the French court – with Catherine d’Medici, the mother of King Charles IX, a power to be reckoned with, and Gaspard de Coligny, the most powerful Huguenot in France, serving as a close advisor of the Catholic king.

After a spate of religious wars, France granted the Huguenots official tolerance, lasting all of two years. What happened in late 1572 will likely never be definitely known, but scholars theorize that Catherine, alarmed at de Coligny’s growing influence over her son, plotted the admiral’s assassination. He survived the first attempt, a shooting. Then, on St. Bartholomew’s Day, he was stabbed and thrown from the window of his home in Paris. The assassin (or assassins) finished the job by beheading him. The Paris mob went crazy, attacking Huguenots wherever they found them. The attacks spread across France. Estimates of the dead range from 5,000 to 30,000; persecution continued for years. The remaining Huguenots eventually left for Holland, Scotland and America, leaving France with a much reduced middle class – which helped spur the country in the direction of the radical change of the French Revolution.

And there’s the story, all contained in Clouet’s miniature portrait of the admiral. The painting shows a handsome man, with ice blue eyes and a penetrating gaze (yes, I could see him corresponding with John Calvin, which he did). He was known for his integrity and for his faith, and it says something about the man that his influence was as great as it was. And if had lived, what might have happened, or not happened?

The story doesn’t stop there. It lands right in the middle of the questions I asked in the beginning. The religious wars of the 16^th century contributed to the reaction known as the Enlightenment, whose ideas ultimately justified the Reign of Terror during the French Revolution, which helped lead to Romanticism and the Naturalists and the Impressionists and  to Modernism, and eventually to the 1960s.

It’s not just art, of course. It’s art and philosophy and culture and religion and politics and everyday life involved here. Ideas have consequences. And tidal waves like religious wars and the Enlightenment still ripple hundreds of years later. Challenges to faith, sometimes including persecution and even murder, come with the territory.

This article was originally published by The Christian Manifesto, but the site was redesigned and the archive (with all of my posts) disappeared. So I’m occasionally reposting some of the articles I wrote for the publication.

Pleasantly Disturbed Friday

It’s time for another edition of random musings, idle thoughts, unrelated occurrences – in other words, it’s Pleasantly Disturbed Friday.

I’m currently reading Johnson’s Life of London: The People Who Made the City That Made the World by Boris Johnson, and it’s delightful. Johnson, the mayor of London, provides (relatively) short vignettes on 17 people (and one hotel) who had a major impact directly on London and more broadly on the world. You’ve heard of Geoffrey Chaucer and William Shakespeare, but what about John Wilkes, Robert Hooke and W.T. Stead? The book is history and biography and it’s full of insights on the city and its people. And yes, the title is a take-off of Boswell’s Life of (Samuel) Johnson – and Johnson is one of the 17 profiled. Review is coming Monday.

Yesterday, I had a telephone conversation with a good friend about the publishing business. We talked about publishers, genres, marketing of books, lack of marketing of books, expectations publishers have of authors and expectations authors have of publishers. We both agreed it was one crazy industry. But if you’re a writer and are published or want to publish, it’s what you have to work with.

Magazines sitting on my desk waiting to be read: two issues of Poetry (I’m behind); American Poet; Englewood Review; Oxford American; Writer’s Digest; Ravi Zacharias’s Just Thinking; and the 2012 fall planting guide from Dutch Gardens (summer hasn’t officially started and I’m already having to consider bulbs for the fall).

I biked Grant’s Trail in suburban St. Louis Wednesday after work. It was a beautiful evening. I’ve been gradually building up distance and speed (making sure my ruptured disk stays healed), and I’ve ridden the same 20-mile roundtrip a dozen times or more so far. The trail crosses two or three major streets, a couple of parks, Grant’s Farm (the Clydesdales!), several wooded areas and suburban subdivisions. It can make for an interesting ride – locally sponsored group rides where everyone is afraid of being left behind and so they run the rest of us off the trail; the professionals practicing for races who ignore red lights and trail etiquette; what look like small sticks or branches suddenly wiggling across the paved trail; beavers; suicidal rabbits; families of wild turkeys; and swarms of gnats at certain times of the day.

I forgot to mention that I love biking Grant’s Trail.

On Tuesday I was in downtown St. Louis at the London Tea Room (actually, outside the Team Room on the sidewalk) for our local observance of Queen Elizabeth's Jubilee. There was a raffle to raise funds for a children's disease research association, and one of the raffle items was that fine novel Dancing Priest.

Last week was a significant birthday for my wife; she turned at least 21 (that’s all I’m allowed to say on the subject). Good friends from New Orleans flew in and stayed with us for a few days, and we did a restaurant atop an old, former warehouse with a good view of the Arch and downtown St. Louis, the Lantern Festival at the Missouri Botanical Gardens (and it was COLD), the St. Louis Art Museum, an art fair, an art gallery or two (including Brother Mel’s); and a stroll around downtown Kirkwood, our little St. Louis suburb, during which two of us had an ice cream cone from Jeremiah’s Custard Stand (names withheld to protect the guilty) (but the vanilla was delicious) (from what I understand, of course). We had a great time.

Pleasantly Disturbed Friday

It’s been a while since a “Pleasantly Disturbed Friday” made an appearance. And even though they’ve been somewhat filed in the archives by their originator (one Duane Scott at Scribing the Journey), I thought it might be time for a reappearance. (There’s no official definition, but a Pleasantly Disturbed Friday is a blog post of random thoughts, events and observations, usually because you don’t have a specific theme or idea for that day’s blog post.) (This contribution fits that definition perfectly.)

Last week, we visited the St. Louis Art Museum to see the Monet Water Lilies Exhibit. Because it was the final shopping week before Christmas, the crowds at the museum were non-existent. There was no waiting in line, no fighting to see a painting or poster illustration, no massive throngs to maneuver through. Yesterday, we returned to the art museum, to see an exhibit of American paintings 1900-1945 and a few other small exhibits.

The museum sits within Forest Park, as does the Missouri History Museum, the St. Louis Zoo and the St. Louis Science Center. The weather was partly cloudy and high 50s. The park was packed. So was the museum. So was the Monet exhibit. I congratulated my wife on selecting last week as the time to see the Monet paintings.

One of the paintings we saw was the one at the top of this post – “View of St. Louis” by Joe Jones. The museum had an entire exhibit of his paintings a year ago.

As we were leaving, we walked through the temporary 16^th-17^th century paintings area (just about everything at the museum is in temporary quarters these days because of a major expansion program going on). And I saw this painting, one of my favorites in the museum – El Greco’s “St. Paul.” It was painted between 1598 and 1600, and it simply does not look like it’s 400 years old. It looks almost like a contemporary painting to me. Perhaps it’s because the colors, or the expression on Paul’s face, but I always find it amazing.

I’ve been reading a lot in the last two weeks (I’ve been on vacation time). I read A.E. Housman’s A Shropshire Lad and wrote a post about it for The Master’s Artist. I read Alan Shapiro’s Night of the Republic: Poems and my review will be posted in January at TweetSpeak Poetry. I also read Dave Malone’s Under the Sycamore: Poems and Tania Runyan’s A Thousand Vessels: Poems and will be posting reviews of both, also at TweetSpeak.

Other reading has included Work Matters by Tom Nelson and Amongst My Enemies by William Brown.

I also finished a novel that I didn’t think I would finish. It had been recommended by a friend, who knows the author. It’s a kind of Generation Y novel, or at least the characters are Gen Y. I struggled with reading it and almost stopped at several points. One character kept me engaged – which, I suppose, demonstrates the power of characterization. But the novel needed an editor; it needed better plot development, for one thing. I suspect the original ending was cut off for length purposes – you never find out what happens to the villain.

We saw the George Clooney movie, “The Descendants,” on Wednesday and “The Muppet Movie” last night. I really like “The Descendants,” but all of the characters, including the children, were required to drop the f-bomb at least five times each (scriptwriters should be able to do better than that). “The Muppet Movie” was nostalgic fun. We were young marrieds when “The Muppet Show” started its television run, and we loved both Muppet movies in the 1980s. This one had basically the same script as the others, and even a reprise of the song “The Rainbow Connection,” but it was still fun.

We still hope to see "The War Horse" and the new Sherlock Holmes movie. Have you seen any good movies during the holidays?

The artist ignores Monet

I am here to see the de-deconstruction

of Monet’s water lilies, what

the curator calls Agapanthus,

the African lily grown 45 miles west

of Paris, but instead I watch

a bearded young artist, seated

in front of the magnificent if ignored

collected canvas, as his attention

is focused left to the exit door

and the young museum attendant

who is self-consciously and

embarrassedly aware that he is

being drawn in charcoal, shades

of black and white on gray paper.

I want to see the Monet but instead

I watch the intent artist drawing

the self-conscious attendant and

I glance deliberately to see

the likeness is rather remarkable,

right there in front of Monet’s

inspiring if ignored water lilies.

I would take a photograph

but cameras are not allowed.

On Tuesday, I posted “Navigating Monet’s Water Lilies,” about the three paintings that comprise The Agapanthus triptych currently on display at the St. Louis Art Museum. As I entered the large room containing the triptych, there was actually an artist seated in front of the Monet but focused on the drawing described here. Fortunately, I spent some time looking at Monet’s water lilies before I circled back to see what the artist was drawing.

Painting: Self-Portrait of the Artist with Beret by Claude Monet.

Navigating Monet's Water Lilies

Sundered for commercial reasons

(three sell better than one)

Rejoined for artistic reasons

(three attract more than one)

To see the originals together

as one, intended, and to see

the originals at an angle,

standing left and looking right,

close to the canvas but not close

enough to alarm the attendants,

is to navigate the unexplored

and uncharted, a terrain

of watery greens and faded blues,

filtered whites and smudged reds,

continents of agapanthus separated

by oceans, seas of color floating

reflecting up

reflecting down

reflecting up and down

reflecting left to right

reflecting right to left

Colors swirl and move toward

a pinpoint on the horizon,

allowing the voyage never to end.

The three paintings popularly known as Monet’s “Water Lilies” are currently on an exhibition tour at the three museums who own them.  Last fall, the exhibit was at the Nelson-Atkins Museum in Kansas City. Currently, it’s at the St. Louis Art Museum, and it will arrive at the Cleveland Museum of Art in February. The official title of the work is “The Agapanthus Triptych” for the African water lilies it depicts.

This poem is submitted for Open Link Night at dVersePoets. To see more poems, please visit dVerse Poets. The links will be link at 2 pm Central time today.

Painting: Monet’s Water Lilies, Cleveland Museum of Art.

Guest Post at High Calling Focus

I have a guest post today, "The Image of God," over at High Calling Focus, a blog dedicated to photography and faith and managed by two of the best photographers I know, Claire Burge and Kelly Sauer. Claire and Kelly are also photography editors for The High Calling.

Yes, I take pictures (hooray for smart phones!) but no, I'm not a photographer. My post is about images, however, and a recent experience my wife and I had at the St. Louis Art Museum that caused me to look at art in a way I never had before. Take a look and let me know what you think.

Simon, Called Peter

In August, my wife and I attended an exhibition of “Vatican Splendors” at the St. Louis History Museum. It was indeed a splendid exhibit, covering almost 2,000 years of religious art and artifacts. Of all the golden and gilded and painted and sculpted things I saw, what moved me moved most was a small brick enclosed in a case, purported to be a brick from the tomb of St. Paul. It was a humble display of a humble brick, and whether it was truly from the tomb of St. Paul was less important than that it truly depicted the origins of Christianity.

The exhibition gift shop had everything – books, exhibition catalogs, toys, scarves, Christmas ornaments, book markers, jewelry – the normal and familiar sight for a big exhibition. Trade was brisk. I wandered around, paying most attention to the books, and I found a little gem: Simon, Called Peter: In the Company of a Man in Search of God by Dom Mauro-Giuseppe Lepori, abbot of the Cistercian abbey of Hauterive in Switzerland. The book was published in Italian in 2004 and published in English this year. (After reading Edith Grossman’s Why Translation Matters, I feel obligated to say that the translator was Matthew Sherry.)

This is not so much a life of St. Peter as it is a meditation on his life, and specifically the major events of his life during the period when he followed Jesus. The events include the original call by Jesus as Peter stood on his fishing boat with his brother Andrew; the receiving of his new name, Peter; the Transfiguration; the Last Supper (“You will not wash my feet!”); the night in Gethsemane and Peter’s three denials; the empty tomb; and meeting with Jesus after the resurrection.

Peter is a totally recognizable person. He is human, with all of our human idiocies and limitations. His heart had been profoundly transformed, while his human spirit keeps throwing wrenches into everything. He’s a hothead, to be sure, full of bluster, opinions and prejudices. And he crumbles in the presence of his Lord.

Much of this mediation is imagined, but imagined realistically. We don’t have a full record of Peter’s thoughts, but how Lepori describes his reactions and thinking rings true to our understanding. When the fisherman Simon is named Cephas (Peter) by Jesus at his calling, here is what Lepori writes:

“No, Simon was not thinking about the future. Was he thinking about his family, his home, his boat, his business? Yes, he thought about all of this, and in an instant he saw it all with complete clarity and in great detail. He had never before seen his life so clearly and how important everything in it was. He felt sad about his lack of attention and concern toward his family, his brother, his people, his work, his home, his boat, his nets and himself. He realized that he was now looking at everything through the eyes of Jesus.”

Another example is when Jesus preaches the sermon that shocks most of the crowd and most of his followers, and the majority – shocked at what Jesus is claiming to be – walk away. “Gently – but as if a boundary were near that could be crossed with a single word – Jesus looked at the little group of confused disciples. ‘Will you also go away?’ Peter was surprised for a moment when he recognized in the Master’s voice the same tone that he had heard one day from a boy with leprosy, asking them for alms from the side of a country road. An immense sadness took hold of him, and the only reply he could make was a cry for help. His cry, too, was like that of a beggar: ‘Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life.’”

Lepori captures the sheer wonder and strangeness of what Peter and disciples must have experienced in the presence of Jesus. They’d been chosen by him; they believed him. But he said crazy things sometimes that would only make sense much later, long after he was physically gone, only when they had the mind and the heart to understand them.

That is what Lepori captures in this quiet, soulful meditation. It is not a theological treatise; it is a treatise of the heart.

The Face on the Wall

I’m looking at a painting of a man who died in 1572. It hangs in the St. Louis Art Museum, near an arch in a hallway connecting the huge room housing the art of the Enlightenment and a smaller gallery for American art of the 19th and early 20th centuries. On a recent evening, my wife and I joined 16 others from our church for a walking lecture by a student at Covenant Theological Seminary.

The tour wasn’t about the museum’s collection; instead, it focused on particular paintings and how they represent the power of ideas in culture, and how they relate more broadly to ideas and events of the times they were painted, and to our own time. The theme of this tour was how ideas in the 19th century reinvented the world, and we spent most of our time with the Naturalists and the Impressionists. But first, there was this introductory stop in the Renaissance collection. And that’s where I wanted to linger.

The hallway contains paintings of the 15th and 16th centuries. The museum doesn’t have much from this era. And this particularly painting, of a man named Gaspard de Coligny, is very easy to miss, just another face on the wall. Other, more interesting (and larger) paintings are nearby. This one is a miniature portrait, perhaps 8 inches by 10 inches. The artist was Francois Clouet (1510-1572), famous for his miniature portraits of the French and English royals of the time, and most famous, perhaps, for a drawing of Mary Queen of Scots, not for this painting of de Contigny.

He was a handsome man, with ice blue eyes and a penetrating gaze, known for his integrity and his faith. He corresponded with John Calvin. He was a leader of the French Huguenots, a military man who led victorious armies and won a short two years of official toleration for the Protestants from the French king. He was named Admiral of France. He helped organize and fund settlements in what eventually became Florida and Argentina. More remarkably, he was an advisor to the Catholic king, and increasingly influential at court. And that was his undoing. He survived one assassination attempt, possibly masterminded by the king’s mother, Catherine d’Medici. He didn’t survive the second two days later.

On St. Bartholomew’s Day, August 24, 1572, an assassin stabbed de Coligny in his Paris home, then pushed him out of the window to the street below. To make sure the job was finished this time, he was beheaded. The murder triggered an outburst of violence against the Huguenots in Paris and across France that left anywhere from 5,000 to 30,000 dead. Persecution continued for years. Eventually, most of the remaining Huguenots departed for Holland, Scotland and America.

Their departure had enormous consequences, bad for France but good for the places they settled. France lost a major portion of its middle class, and it would reap the harvest of class injustice and hatred 200 years later in the Reign of Terror. De Coligny’s death was a part of the religious wars that so plagued Europe after the Protestant Reformation, wars that eventually led thinkers to look for something other than faith, something like human reason. And you follow the thread from there, from the Enlightenment to the French Revolution to Romanticism (“feelings, not reason, reign supreme”) to Naturalism and Impressionism (“my individual feelings reign supreme”) right through the 1960s and to our own day.

De Coligny was 52 or 53 when he died. His family survived; one daughter married William the Silent, Prince of Orange. His son and a grandson were in the French military, so at least part of the family remained in France.

I look at his face, the face in the painting, and I see the determined look of a man leading armies to defend what he believed. He was so well regarded for his integrity that a Catholic king trusted him, despite standing on the opposite side of the religious divide of 16th century Europe. He was intellectual enough to correspond with John Calvin.

His faith, and his integrity, threatened powerful interests. And they killed him for it.