“… and know the gesture with which the small flowers open in the morning.” Laura and I spent part of the morning with art profs Brandon Bauer and Shan Bryan-Hanson, with the German poet Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926) and, above all with the artist Ben Shahn (1898-1969). We were looking through Shahn’s Rilke portfolio, “For the Sake of a Single Verse.” There’s one in the Harvard Art Museum, there’s one in the Smithsonian American Art Museum. And there’s one at St. Norbert College. For an hour, we were lost in admiration of Shahn’s line work, his mastery of his medium, and the rhythm of a series that moves from gritty expressionism through social realism to abstraction to sheer loveliness. Rilke wrote: For the sake of a few lines one must see many cities, men and things. One must know the animals, one must feel how the birds fly and know the gesture with which the small flowers open in the morning. One must be able to think back to roads in unknown regions, to unexpected meetings and to partings which one had long seen coming; to days of childhood that are still unexplained, to parents that one had to hurt when they brought […]
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