CORRIDORS│An Educational Website in the Visual Arts & Humanities. , 2021
Franz Jägerstätter (1907-1943) was an Austrian farmer, husband and father who, in his thirties, r... more Franz Jägerstätter (1907-1943) was an Austrian farmer, husband and father who, in his thirties, refused to vote or fight for Hitler and the Nazis during World War II whose war effort Jägerstätter deemed unjust. Following serious, lonely, and mostly frustrating consultation with family, friends and local church leaders, Jägerstätter ultimately refused to fight in the Wehrmacht and became a conscientious objector. Jägerstätter was jailed by the Nazis in March 1943, tried and condemned in their military court in July 1943, and executed by beheading on August 9, 1943 in Brandenburg-Görden prison as an enemy of the state. His cremated remains were only transferred to his hometown of St. Radegund, Austria, for burial after the war in 1946. Jägerstätter believed as an individual who formed his conscience and acted upon it —in his case, saying “no” to Nazism, including as a conscientious objector to their war effort that he deemed unjust— would “change nothing in world affairs” although he hoped that his decision would be “a sign” that not everyone in the Third Reich let themselves be “carried away with the tide” during wartime. With a global outlook, Jägerstätter voted “no” to Hitler’s Anschluss in Austria with one result being the Gestapo began to monitor his correspondence. Jägerstätter openly deplored the inhuman system of Nazism including its racial delusions, war ideology, and deification of the state. Tracing Jägerstätter’s biography and the details surrounding his conscientious objection, ostracization by society, imprisonment, and execution by beheading for sedition, Jägerstätter’s personal inquiry for, and mortal ramifications of, his socially unpopular and individually dangerous refusal to fight in the German army under Hitler is highlighted. While Jägerstätter’s anti-Nazism was clear, this husband and father of four daughters tried to cooperate with the authorities when being called up for military service including being trained though ultimately he refused to fight. The military denied Jägerstätter’s offer to serve as a non-combatant medic. Conscientious objection was rare in Western societies prior to World War II. The Nazi dictatorship’s obvious illegitimacy led individuals to resist, citing Biblical and philosophical truths as greater authority than obedience to the state as well as the church insofar as its lack of social justice teaching. Such remarkable individuals who bravely resisted the Nazi state and were executed by them include Franz Jägerstätter as well as Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1906-1945) who were both simultaneously at Tegel prison in Berlin in Spring 1943. Jägerstätter was mostly reviled by his society for his conscientious objection - his widow and family were denied state benefits until the 1990’s– though perceptions began to reverse in the 1960’s with protests of the Vietnam War and Vatican II reforms. The legacy of Franz Jägerstätter is briefly explored including his being declared a “Blessed” in the Catholic Church in 2007 and the subject of a major 2019 film by Terrence Malick. The paper concludes with three appendices, as well as footnotes and source materials. You can also visit my blog - https://johnpwalshblog.com/2017/10/26/blessed-franz-jagerstatter-1907-1943-farmer-husband-and-father-conscientious-objector-and-martyr/
The untitled artwork by Pablo Picasso (1881-1973) – generally known as Chicago’s “Picasso” – is a... more The untitled artwork by Pablo Picasso (1881-1973) – generally known as Chicago’s “Picasso” – is a 50-foot-tall, 162-ton Cor-Ten (self-weathering) steel sculpture in the middle of Chicago’s downtown at Richard J. Daley Plaza. It was a gift of the Basque artist to “the people of Chicago.” At its public unveiling by Mayor Richard J. Daley (1902-1976) and others on August 15, 1967 the enigmatic modernist artwork was met with a collective gasp and jeers from the crowd.
With major modern art work installed in Chicago by Richard Lippold (1915-2002) in 1958 at the Inland Steel Building and Antoine Pevsner (1886-1962) in 1964 at the University of Chicago Law School, Chicago’s Picasso was the not the first important sculpture installed in Chicago that was accessible to the public. Yet when completed and installed in August 1967 in today’s Daley Plaza, Chicago’s Picasso is credited with being the public outdoor sculpture that launched a national trend to install outdoor contemporary art for the public. The results of that practice have been spectacular, including, in 2006, the installation of Anish Kapoor’s Cloud Gate (“The Bean”) in Chicago’s Millennium Park that draws thousands of visitors every day.
Though mysterious – is it a butterfly or bird? or, as Sir Roland Penrose (1900-1984) interpreted it, the abstracted head of a woman with ample flowing hair – or is it more obtuse and had Picasso somehow sexualized it? – over 50 years later, Chicagoans and international visitors continue to seek out the “Picasso” in Daley Plaza. As a monumental art piece by Pablo Picasso fabricated at U.S. Steel in Gary, Indiana, and installed and unveiled in the center of Chicago’s government, business, and shopping district, it adds grace, beauty, personality, proportionality and perspective to the busy downtown urban space between Dearborn and Clark Streets at Washington Street.
This paper, illustrated with photographs of the sculpture, as well as Picasso’s art work that informs the piece and is part of its creation and delivery to the people of Chicago, and its various reactions, looks at the formulation and execution of a bold vision of Chicago’s Irish-American mayor and his city’s leading architectural firms, particularly William E. Hartmann (1916-2003) of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill to coax Picasso to make this art work as part of a comprehensive municipal development. It also considers the engineering feat that brought to manufacture from Picasso’s 42-inch-tall maquette the five-story modernist sculpture in steel that Chicago newspaperman Mike Royko (1932-1997) dubbed “the giant insect.”
ORIGINS OF GERMAN EXPRESSIONIST PAINTING: THE EARLY MODERN ART CAREER OF ALEXEI VON JAWLENSKY (1864-1941), RUSSIAN-ÉMIGRÉ PAINTER, FROM 1889 TO THE BLUE RIDER IN MUNICH IN 1911., 2020
Alexei von Jawlensky (1864-1941), a young Russian-émigré artist to Germany beginning in the mid 1... more Alexei von Jawlensky (1864-1941), a young Russian-émigré artist to Germany beginning in the mid 1890’s, became one of the most progressive avant-garde modernist artists of his generation. His international search—from Russia to France, England and the Low Countries, as well as his lifelong expatriate base in Munich, Germany—led him to experiment and synthesize unto German Expressionism the main currents of modern art styles before World War One. This included significant borrowings from Impressionism, Post Impressionism, Cloisonnism, Synthetism, Symbolism, and Fauvism. Jawlensky, with Russian compatriot Wassily Kandinsky (1866-1944) and German painter Gabriele Münter (1877-1962), among several others, pursued a decade-long dialogue of their individual experimentation, particularly in the liberation of color and form, as, in part, an artistic response to a modern society increasingly saturated by industrialization and mechanization. Within the socio-economic context of a rising newly-formed German Empire before World War I, these emergent German Expressionists sought to free the object (and unto the natural world) from its objective fixity and situate it within the inner feelings and spirit of the artist. Within European modernism, Jawlensky developed a wide network of contacts and took especial inspiration from modern painters such as Édouard Manet (1832-1883), Vincent Van Gogh (1853-1890), Paul Gauguin (1848-1903), Paul Cézanne (1839-1906), Henri Matisse (1869-1954), and others. Jawlensky sought in modern art exhibitions and the co-founding of, and participation in, the New Munich Artist’s Association in 1909 and Der Blaue Reiter in 1911, to lead modern art towards representational expressionism and abstraction.
CORRIDORS│Visual Arts Photography Music & History, 2019
On May 2, 2019, the world remembered the day 500 years ago when Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519) — I... more On May 2, 2019, the world remembered the day 500 years ago when Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519) — Italian Renaissance artist and polymath—died. This paper provides an assembly and analysis of current scholarship on his lost The Battle of Anghiari of 1503-1506 and in the context of the High Renaissance artist’s invention in drawing. In Florence’s Sala de Gran Consiglio (Great Council Hall) under the Republic, Leonardo’s The Battle of Anghiari—particularly its central section, The Battle of the Standard, known by its copies by other artists, including Peter Paul Rubens (1577-1640) —memorialized a Florentine military victory in 1440. Leonardo’s artistic development, Europe’s age of exploration and scientific discovery in the later 15th and early 16th centuries, and this fresco’s fabled competition with an artist half Leonardo’s age, Michelangelo Buonarroti (1475-1564)—is considered. With the fresco’s ultimate destruction in the early 1560’s under Giorgio Vasari (1511-1574) during a redecoration of the Great Council Hall, Leonardo’s preparatory drawings for three possible sections of The Battle of Anghiari include subjects such as horses, riders, and combatants on the battlefield filled with emotion and atmospherics. Bringing together its other extant fragments as well as judgments by leading art historians, this paper provides a unique complex of insight for what is arguably Leonardo’s most important public commission.
This paper situates one of Aristide Maillol’s earliest modernist sculptures in its uniquely aesth... more This paper situates one of Aristide Maillol’s earliest modernist sculptures in its uniquely aesthetic and sociopolitical context. Made in 1905 Torso of the Monument to Blanqui ([En] Chained Action), a copy of which sits on the landing of the main staircase of The Art Institute of Chicago with the abbreviated title Enchained Action, was the result of a commission to make a memorial to a French socialist revolutionary by an avant-garde sculptor who came out of a generation that believed themselves to be the torchbearers of a new art. This paper is the introduction to a photographic essay (located elsewhere) called “Encountering Maillol” of Enchained Action in The Art Institute of Chicago photographed by the author between 2013 and 2016.
When 24-year-old Marie-Francoise-Thérèse Martin died on September 30, 1897 the Carmelite nuns in ... more When 24-year-old Marie-Francoise-Thérèse Martin died on September 30, 1897 the Carmelite nuns in her community at the Monastery of Our Lady of Mount Carmel in Lisieux didn’t think they had any accomplishments to cite for this young sister’s obituary. Simply her age when she entered the convent (15 years old) and how long she had been there (10 years) was published – also that her life had been marked by “long and cruel sufferings.” Within 25 years this obscure Norman woman would be canonized as Saint Thérèse of Lisieux and, known as “The Little Flower,” take her place as a co-patron saint of France as well as one of today’s most revered and popular saints. Yet many remain unfamiliar with the specifics of this nun’s short and hidden life in the convent as well as in her remarkable family. This paper explicates some of the important highlights of her experiences from birth to death in late-nineteenth-century France.
When the “Wemyss ‘Allegory’” was “rediscovered” around 1930 it was hailed as an important Titian ... more When the “Wemyss ‘Allegory’” was “rediscovered” around 1930 it was hailed as an important Titian masterpiece. Purchased by Old Master collectors in Chicago in the mid-1930's, they lent and eventually gave the painting to the Art Institute of Chicago where it delighted crowds for nearly a decade as a bona fide Titian. The problem was that the Chicago Titian was not a Titian at all. This paper relates how issues of historical connoisseurship gradually convinced the museum with its publics to quell its euphoria and accept established expert opinion about this work’s condition and attribution as well as new possibilities for its more modest, but complex origin and purpose.
In Paris for twenty-two months from August 1893 to June 1895 Paul Gauguin (French, 1848-1903) dee... more In Paris for twenty-two months from August 1893 to June 1895 Paul Gauguin (French, 1848-1903) deepened his vision of his first sojourn to Tahiti by way of his re-workings in his art of his Tahitian experience. From an artist who combined fact and fantasy, reality and imagination and used a variety of artistic media and innovative techniques so to create something new, a handful of monotypes and woodcuts made during the Paris interlude are presented to show their hybrid nature. Whether Breton coifs or Tahitian pareos Gauguin united disparate objects and motifs under a veil of mystery and ambiguity to express his themes of distant memory, savagery, mystery, darkness, androgyny, sensual melancholy, exoticism, and the hieratic. Through hard work and artistic vision involving Synthetism, Symbolism, and newly, Tahitianism, Gauguin prevailed as an avant-garde leader in the Paris interlude.
CORRIDORS│An Educational Website in the Visual Arts & Humanities. , 2021
Franz Jägerstätter (1907-1943) was an Austrian farmer, husband and father who, in his thirties, r... more Franz Jägerstätter (1907-1943) was an Austrian farmer, husband and father who, in his thirties, refused to vote or fight for Hitler and the Nazis during World War II whose war effort Jägerstätter deemed unjust. Following serious, lonely, and mostly frustrating consultation with family, friends and local church leaders, Jägerstätter ultimately refused to fight in the Wehrmacht and became a conscientious objector. Jägerstätter was jailed by the Nazis in March 1943, tried and condemned in their military court in July 1943, and executed by beheading on August 9, 1943 in Brandenburg-Görden prison as an enemy of the state. His cremated remains were only transferred to his hometown of St. Radegund, Austria, for burial after the war in 1946. Jägerstätter believed as an individual who formed his conscience and acted upon it —in his case, saying “no” to Nazism, including as a conscientious objector to their war effort that he deemed unjust— would “change nothing in world affairs” although he hoped that his decision would be “a sign” that not everyone in the Third Reich let themselves be “carried away with the tide” during wartime. With a global outlook, Jägerstätter voted “no” to Hitler’s Anschluss in Austria with one result being the Gestapo began to monitor his correspondence. Jägerstätter openly deplored the inhuman system of Nazism including its racial delusions, war ideology, and deification of the state. Tracing Jägerstätter’s biography and the details surrounding his conscientious objection, ostracization by society, imprisonment, and execution by beheading for sedition, Jägerstätter’s personal inquiry for, and mortal ramifications of, his socially unpopular and individually dangerous refusal to fight in the German army under Hitler is highlighted. While Jägerstätter’s anti-Nazism was clear, this husband and father of four daughters tried to cooperate with the authorities when being called up for military service including being trained though ultimately he refused to fight. The military denied Jägerstätter’s offer to serve as a non-combatant medic. Conscientious objection was rare in Western societies prior to World War II. The Nazi dictatorship’s obvious illegitimacy led individuals to resist, citing Biblical and philosophical truths as greater authority than obedience to the state as well as the church insofar as its lack of social justice teaching. Such remarkable individuals who bravely resisted the Nazi state and were executed by them include Franz Jägerstätter as well as Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1906-1945) who were both simultaneously at Tegel prison in Berlin in Spring 1943. Jägerstätter was mostly reviled by his society for his conscientious objection - his widow and family were denied state benefits until the 1990’s– though perceptions began to reverse in the 1960’s with protests of the Vietnam War and Vatican II reforms. The legacy of Franz Jägerstätter is briefly explored including his being declared a “Blessed” in the Catholic Church in 2007 and the subject of a major 2019 film by Terrence Malick. The paper concludes with three appendices, as well as footnotes and source materials. You can also visit my blog - https://johnpwalshblog.com/2017/10/26/blessed-franz-jagerstatter-1907-1943-farmer-husband-and-father-conscientious-objector-and-martyr/
The untitled artwork by Pablo Picasso (1881-1973) – generally known as Chicago’s “Picasso” – is a... more The untitled artwork by Pablo Picasso (1881-1973) – generally known as Chicago’s “Picasso” – is a 50-foot-tall, 162-ton Cor-Ten (self-weathering) steel sculpture in the middle of Chicago’s downtown at Richard J. Daley Plaza. It was a gift of the Basque artist to “the people of Chicago.” At its public unveiling by Mayor Richard J. Daley (1902-1976) and others on August 15, 1967 the enigmatic modernist artwork was met with a collective gasp and jeers from the crowd.
With major modern art work installed in Chicago by Richard Lippold (1915-2002) in 1958 at the Inland Steel Building and Antoine Pevsner (1886-1962) in 1964 at the University of Chicago Law School, Chicago’s Picasso was the not the first important sculpture installed in Chicago that was accessible to the public. Yet when completed and installed in August 1967 in today’s Daley Plaza, Chicago’s Picasso is credited with being the public outdoor sculpture that launched a national trend to install outdoor contemporary art for the public. The results of that practice have been spectacular, including, in 2006, the installation of Anish Kapoor’s Cloud Gate (“The Bean”) in Chicago’s Millennium Park that draws thousands of visitors every day.
Though mysterious – is it a butterfly or bird? or, as Sir Roland Penrose (1900-1984) interpreted it, the abstracted head of a woman with ample flowing hair – or is it more obtuse and had Picasso somehow sexualized it? – over 50 years later, Chicagoans and international visitors continue to seek out the “Picasso” in Daley Plaza. As a monumental art piece by Pablo Picasso fabricated at U.S. Steel in Gary, Indiana, and installed and unveiled in the center of Chicago’s government, business, and shopping district, it adds grace, beauty, personality, proportionality and perspective to the busy downtown urban space between Dearborn and Clark Streets at Washington Street.
This paper, illustrated with photographs of the sculpture, as well as Picasso’s art work that informs the piece and is part of its creation and delivery to the people of Chicago, and its various reactions, looks at the formulation and execution of a bold vision of Chicago’s Irish-American mayor and his city’s leading architectural firms, particularly William E. Hartmann (1916-2003) of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill to coax Picasso to make this art work as part of a comprehensive municipal development. It also considers the engineering feat that brought to manufacture from Picasso’s 42-inch-tall maquette the five-story modernist sculpture in steel that Chicago newspaperman Mike Royko (1932-1997) dubbed “the giant insect.”
ORIGINS OF GERMAN EXPRESSIONIST PAINTING: THE EARLY MODERN ART CAREER OF ALEXEI VON JAWLENSKY (1864-1941), RUSSIAN-ÉMIGRÉ PAINTER, FROM 1889 TO THE BLUE RIDER IN MUNICH IN 1911., 2020
Alexei von Jawlensky (1864-1941), a young Russian-émigré artist to Germany beginning in the mid 1... more Alexei von Jawlensky (1864-1941), a young Russian-émigré artist to Germany beginning in the mid 1890’s, became one of the most progressive avant-garde modernist artists of his generation. His international search—from Russia to France, England and the Low Countries, as well as his lifelong expatriate base in Munich, Germany—led him to experiment and synthesize unto German Expressionism the main currents of modern art styles before World War One. This included significant borrowings from Impressionism, Post Impressionism, Cloisonnism, Synthetism, Symbolism, and Fauvism. Jawlensky, with Russian compatriot Wassily Kandinsky (1866-1944) and German painter Gabriele Münter (1877-1962), among several others, pursued a decade-long dialogue of their individual experimentation, particularly in the liberation of color and form, as, in part, an artistic response to a modern society increasingly saturated by industrialization and mechanization. Within the socio-economic context of a rising newly-formed German Empire before World War I, these emergent German Expressionists sought to free the object (and unto the natural world) from its objective fixity and situate it within the inner feelings and spirit of the artist. Within European modernism, Jawlensky developed a wide network of contacts and took especial inspiration from modern painters such as Édouard Manet (1832-1883), Vincent Van Gogh (1853-1890), Paul Gauguin (1848-1903), Paul Cézanne (1839-1906), Henri Matisse (1869-1954), and others. Jawlensky sought in modern art exhibitions and the co-founding of, and participation in, the New Munich Artist’s Association in 1909 and Der Blaue Reiter in 1911, to lead modern art towards representational expressionism and abstraction.
CORRIDORS│Visual Arts Photography Music & History, 2019
On May 2, 2019, the world remembered the day 500 years ago when Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519) — I... more On May 2, 2019, the world remembered the day 500 years ago when Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519) — Italian Renaissance artist and polymath—died. This paper provides an assembly and analysis of current scholarship on his lost The Battle of Anghiari of 1503-1506 and in the context of the High Renaissance artist’s invention in drawing. In Florence’s Sala de Gran Consiglio (Great Council Hall) under the Republic, Leonardo’s The Battle of Anghiari—particularly its central section, The Battle of the Standard, known by its copies by other artists, including Peter Paul Rubens (1577-1640) —memorialized a Florentine military victory in 1440. Leonardo’s artistic development, Europe’s age of exploration and scientific discovery in the later 15th and early 16th centuries, and this fresco’s fabled competition with an artist half Leonardo’s age, Michelangelo Buonarroti (1475-1564)—is considered. With the fresco’s ultimate destruction in the early 1560’s under Giorgio Vasari (1511-1574) during a redecoration of the Great Council Hall, Leonardo’s preparatory drawings for three possible sections of The Battle of Anghiari include subjects such as horses, riders, and combatants on the battlefield filled with emotion and atmospherics. Bringing together its other extant fragments as well as judgments by leading art historians, this paper provides a unique complex of insight for what is arguably Leonardo’s most important public commission.
This paper situates one of Aristide Maillol’s earliest modernist sculptures in its uniquely aesth... more This paper situates one of Aristide Maillol’s earliest modernist sculptures in its uniquely aesthetic and sociopolitical context. Made in 1905 Torso of the Monument to Blanqui ([En] Chained Action), a copy of which sits on the landing of the main staircase of The Art Institute of Chicago with the abbreviated title Enchained Action, was the result of a commission to make a memorial to a French socialist revolutionary by an avant-garde sculptor who came out of a generation that believed themselves to be the torchbearers of a new art. This paper is the introduction to a photographic essay (located elsewhere) called “Encountering Maillol” of Enchained Action in The Art Institute of Chicago photographed by the author between 2013 and 2016.
When 24-year-old Marie-Francoise-Thérèse Martin died on September 30, 1897 the Carmelite nuns in ... more When 24-year-old Marie-Francoise-Thérèse Martin died on September 30, 1897 the Carmelite nuns in her community at the Monastery of Our Lady of Mount Carmel in Lisieux didn’t think they had any accomplishments to cite for this young sister’s obituary. Simply her age when she entered the convent (15 years old) and how long she had been there (10 years) was published – also that her life had been marked by “long and cruel sufferings.” Within 25 years this obscure Norman woman would be canonized as Saint Thérèse of Lisieux and, known as “The Little Flower,” take her place as a co-patron saint of France as well as one of today’s most revered and popular saints. Yet many remain unfamiliar with the specifics of this nun’s short and hidden life in the convent as well as in her remarkable family. This paper explicates some of the important highlights of her experiences from birth to death in late-nineteenth-century France.
When the “Wemyss ‘Allegory’” was “rediscovered” around 1930 it was hailed as an important Titian ... more When the “Wemyss ‘Allegory’” was “rediscovered” around 1930 it was hailed as an important Titian masterpiece. Purchased by Old Master collectors in Chicago in the mid-1930's, they lent and eventually gave the painting to the Art Institute of Chicago where it delighted crowds for nearly a decade as a bona fide Titian. The problem was that the Chicago Titian was not a Titian at all. This paper relates how issues of historical connoisseurship gradually convinced the museum with its publics to quell its euphoria and accept established expert opinion about this work’s condition and attribution as well as new possibilities for its more modest, but complex origin and purpose.
In Paris for twenty-two months from August 1893 to June 1895 Paul Gauguin (French, 1848-1903) dee... more In Paris for twenty-two months from August 1893 to June 1895 Paul Gauguin (French, 1848-1903) deepened his vision of his first sojourn to Tahiti by way of his re-workings in his art of his Tahitian experience. From an artist who combined fact and fantasy, reality and imagination and used a variety of artistic media and innovative techniques so to create something new, a handful of monotypes and woodcuts made during the Paris interlude are presented to show their hybrid nature. Whether Breton coifs or Tahitian pareos Gauguin united disparate objects and motifs under a veil of mystery and ambiguity to express his themes of distant memory, savagery, mystery, darkness, androgyny, sensual melancholy, exoticism, and the hieratic. Through hard work and artistic vision involving Synthetism, Symbolism, and newly, Tahitianism, Gauguin prevailed as an avant-garde leader in the Paris interlude.
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Papers by John Walsh
Jägerstätter believed as an individual who formed his conscience and acted upon it —in his case, saying “no” to Nazism, including as a conscientious objector to their war effort that he deemed unjust— would “change nothing in world affairs” although he hoped that his decision would be “a sign” that not everyone in the Third Reich let themselves be “carried away with the tide” during wartime.
With a global outlook, Jägerstätter voted “no” to Hitler’s Anschluss in Austria with one result being the Gestapo began to monitor his correspondence. Jägerstätter openly deplored the inhuman system of Nazism including its racial delusions, war ideology, and deification of the state.
Tracing Jägerstätter’s biography and the details surrounding his conscientious objection, ostracization by society, imprisonment, and execution by beheading for sedition, Jägerstätter’s personal inquiry for, and mortal ramifications of, his socially unpopular and individually dangerous refusal to fight in the German army under Hitler is highlighted. While Jägerstätter’s anti-Nazism was clear, this husband and father of four daughters tried to cooperate with the authorities when being called up for military service including being trained though ultimately he refused to fight. The military denied Jägerstätter’s offer to serve as a non-combatant medic.
Conscientious objection was rare in Western societies prior to World War II. The Nazi dictatorship’s obvious illegitimacy led individuals to resist, citing Biblical and philosophical truths as greater authority than obedience to the state as well as the church insofar as its lack of social justice teaching. Such remarkable individuals who bravely resisted the Nazi state and were executed by them include Franz Jägerstätter as well as Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1906-1945) who were both simultaneously at Tegel prison in Berlin in Spring 1943.
Jägerstätter was mostly reviled by his society for his conscientious objection - his widow and family were denied state benefits until the 1990’s– though perceptions began to reverse in the 1960’s with protests of the Vietnam War and Vatican II reforms. The legacy of Franz Jägerstätter is briefly explored including his being declared a “Blessed” in the Catholic Church in 2007 and the subject of a major 2019 film by Terrence Malick.
The paper concludes with three appendices, as well as footnotes and source materials. You can also visit my blog - https://johnpwalshblog.com/2017/10/26/blessed-franz-jagerstatter-1907-1943-farmer-husband-and-father-conscientious-objector-and-martyr/
With major modern art work installed in Chicago by Richard Lippold (1915-2002) in 1958 at the Inland Steel Building and Antoine Pevsner (1886-1962) in 1964 at the University of Chicago Law School, Chicago’s Picasso was the not the first important sculpture installed in Chicago that was accessible to the public. Yet when completed and installed in August 1967 in today’s Daley Plaza, Chicago’s Picasso is credited with being the public outdoor sculpture that launched a national trend to install outdoor contemporary art for the public. The results of that practice have been spectacular, including, in 2006, the installation of Anish Kapoor’s Cloud Gate (“The Bean”) in Chicago’s Millennium Park that draws thousands of visitors every day.
Though mysterious – is it a butterfly or bird? or, as Sir Roland Penrose (1900-1984) interpreted it, the abstracted head of a woman with ample flowing hair – or is it more obtuse and had Picasso somehow sexualized it? – over 50 years later, Chicagoans and international visitors continue to seek out the “Picasso” in Daley Plaza. As a monumental art piece by Pablo Picasso fabricated at U.S. Steel in Gary, Indiana, and installed and unveiled in the center of Chicago’s government, business, and shopping district, it adds grace, beauty, personality, proportionality and perspective to the busy downtown urban space between Dearborn and Clark Streets at Washington Street.
This paper, illustrated with photographs of the sculpture, as well as Picasso’s art work that informs the piece and is part of its creation and delivery to the people of Chicago, and its various reactions, looks at the formulation and execution of a bold vision of Chicago’s Irish-American mayor and his city’s leading architectural firms, particularly William E. Hartmann (1916-2003) of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill to coax Picasso to make this art work as part of a comprehensive municipal development. It also considers the engineering feat that brought to manufacture from Picasso’s 42-inch-tall maquette the five-story modernist sculpture in steel that Chicago newspaperman Mike Royko (1932-1997) dubbed “the giant insect.”
You can also visit my blog - https://johnpwalshblog.com/
Jägerstätter believed as an individual who formed his conscience and acted upon it —in his case, saying “no” to Nazism, including as a conscientious objector to their war effort that he deemed unjust— would “change nothing in world affairs” although he hoped that his decision would be “a sign” that not everyone in the Third Reich let themselves be “carried away with the tide” during wartime.
With a global outlook, Jägerstätter voted “no” to Hitler’s Anschluss in Austria with one result being the Gestapo began to monitor his correspondence. Jägerstätter openly deplored the inhuman system of Nazism including its racial delusions, war ideology, and deification of the state.
Tracing Jägerstätter’s biography and the details surrounding his conscientious objection, ostracization by society, imprisonment, and execution by beheading for sedition, Jägerstätter’s personal inquiry for, and mortal ramifications of, his socially unpopular and individually dangerous refusal to fight in the German army under Hitler is highlighted. While Jägerstätter’s anti-Nazism was clear, this husband and father of four daughters tried to cooperate with the authorities when being called up for military service including being trained though ultimately he refused to fight. The military denied Jägerstätter’s offer to serve as a non-combatant medic.
Conscientious objection was rare in Western societies prior to World War II. The Nazi dictatorship’s obvious illegitimacy led individuals to resist, citing Biblical and philosophical truths as greater authority than obedience to the state as well as the church insofar as its lack of social justice teaching. Such remarkable individuals who bravely resisted the Nazi state and were executed by them include Franz Jägerstätter as well as Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1906-1945) who were both simultaneously at Tegel prison in Berlin in Spring 1943.
Jägerstätter was mostly reviled by his society for his conscientious objection - his widow and family were denied state benefits until the 1990’s– though perceptions began to reverse in the 1960’s with protests of the Vietnam War and Vatican II reforms. The legacy of Franz Jägerstätter is briefly explored including his being declared a “Blessed” in the Catholic Church in 2007 and the subject of a major 2019 film by Terrence Malick.
The paper concludes with three appendices, as well as footnotes and source materials. You can also visit my blog - https://johnpwalshblog.com/2017/10/26/blessed-franz-jagerstatter-1907-1943-farmer-husband-and-father-conscientious-objector-and-martyr/
With major modern art work installed in Chicago by Richard Lippold (1915-2002) in 1958 at the Inland Steel Building and Antoine Pevsner (1886-1962) in 1964 at the University of Chicago Law School, Chicago’s Picasso was the not the first important sculpture installed in Chicago that was accessible to the public. Yet when completed and installed in August 1967 in today’s Daley Plaza, Chicago’s Picasso is credited with being the public outdoor sculpture that launched a national trend to install outdoor contemporary art for the public. The results of that practice have been spectacular, including, in 2006, the installation of Anish Kapoor’s Cloud Gate (“The Bean”) in Chicago’s Millennium Park that draws thousands of visitors every day.
Though mysterious – is it a butterfly or bird? or, as Sir Roland Penrose (1900-1984) interpreted it, the abstracted head of a woman with ample flowing hair – or is it more obtuse and had Picasso somehow sexualized it? – over 50 years later, Chicagoans and international visitors continue to seek out the “Picasso” in Daley Plaza. As a monumental art piece by Pablo Picasso fabricated at U.S. Steel in Gary, Indiana, and installed and unveiled in the center of Chicago’s government, business, and shopping district, it adds grace, beauty, personality, proportionality and perspective to the busy downtown urban space between Dearborn and Clark Streets at Washington Street.
This paper, illustrated with photographs of the sculpture, as well as Picasso’s art work that informs the piece and is part of its creation and delivery to the people of Chicago, and its various reactions, looks at the formulation and execution of a bold vision of Chicago’s Irish-American mayor and his city’s leading architectural firms, particularly William E. Hartmann (1916-2003) of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill to coax Picasso to make this art work as part of a comprehensive municipal development. It also considers the engineering feat that brought to manufacture from Picasso’s 42-inch-tall maquette the five-story modernist sculpture in steel that Chicago newspaperman Mike Royko (1932-1997) dubbed “the giant insect.”
You can also visit my blog - https://johnpwalshblog.com/