A Popular Last Supper

Yesterday, I visited the Andy Warhol exhibit at the Brooklyn Museum, "The Last Decade".  One of the pieces that intrigued me most was "The Last Supper" (the Big "C").  Warhol's irony always leaves space for a dialogue, and his late obsession with religious images invites a longer horizon than his glitzy commercial pop images.  The themes in this picture are so familiar, those bad boys, former Hell's Angels, now converted, clinging to the emblems of their former lives.  Salvation is not out of reach:  $6.99!  I was struck by a section of the painting which seems to underlie the kitschy presentation of Christ, a second image of the Savior, with the details of the eye crossed in death as for a cartoon figure but sketched as a dagger, and the circle at the gather of his cloak recalls a simplified sacred heart with emanating rays.  There is a dignity to this sketch resurrected from crude depictions of popular piety.

Tradition and Modernity

Thanks to our friend Martin for passing along this link to an article about the new artwork commissioned for the new lectionary in Italy. While on the surface it is only about an aesthetic judgment, I think the issue is much broader and opens up many avenues for exploration.

It wasn't so long ago that I myself would have been one of those angered by this artwork and grousing about the incompatibility of it with Sacred Scripture. However, recently my idea of Beauty has been broadened. If Christ cannot come down and speak to modern man - at the place where modern man lives - what good is He? How one-dimensional and powerless is a God and a faith that cannot respond to the tough questions posed by modernism, by existentialism, by idealism, by any-ism? A singular quality of true Christianity, on the contrary, is that it has the ability to meet all of reality head on and transform it with beauty.