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Ben and the Psalms
During the later years of Ben's life there was a certain resurgence
of religious imagery in his work. It seemed to me that, since he had rather
emphatically cast off his religious ties and traditions during his youth,
he could now return to them freely with a fresh eye, and without the sense
of moral burden and entrapment that they had once held for him.
He rediscovered myth and story and a holy spirit that had once
offended him but that now held tremendous charm, even amusement, and that
he could now depict with a light touch and with affectionate tenderness.
His awakened interest was not confined to Jewish themes,
although with his intimate knowledge of Jewish lore, he was able to present
it in its most precise details and with all its natural color and variety.
He was greatly moved also by Catholic forms and concepts. I remember a Mass
which we once witnessed in the lower transcept of the Church of St. Francis
in Assisi. Ben was spellbound by the scene, the kneeling monks, the dime light
of the flickering tapers, the sonorous mumbling chant that rather softly filled
the low stone galleries. Again, during another Mass in Palermo, we saw a child
break loose from her mother's grasp and dance around in an open area in front
of the altar. Ben whispered to me, "That's religion!" He so often
quoted the principle by which medieval monks justified their continuation
of graven imagery, which was, "ornamentation toward the greater glory
of God!"
He created several images of Martin Luther, but while he admired
the stubborn freedom of conscience that begot Protestantism, he regarded
the whole movement as being dry and antithetical to art. Heretically, he
conceived of religion as being somewhat Pagan in spirit and it was that spirit
he illuminated in his painting.
Very indicative of Ben's sense of religion is a paragraph from
the writings of Maximus of Tyre of which he once made a beautiful book in
large hand-drawn letters. The paragraph reads in part: "If a Greek is
stirred to the rememberance of God by the art of Pheidias, and Egyptian by
paying worship to animals, another man by a river, another by fire, I have
no anger for their divergences. Only let them know; let them remember!"
Ben loved the psalms, and above all the One Hundred and Fiftieth.
He was deeply affected by its running cadences, its majesty, its vivid imagery.
He had done some small pieces around the musical instruments and figures
of the psalm, then conceived the idea of producing the book, "Hallelujah." He
made drawings and mounted them in book form. He then decided to do the drawings
in larger dimensions with the dual purpose of rendering them on stone for
an edition of lithographs and, in addition to that, creating a mural in mosaic
to be based on the drawings. The mosaic design was not completed, but the
lithographs for this book, "Hallelujah," have been produced according
to plan.
Bernarda Bryson Shahn
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