“… 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 one some joy and one did not grasp it (it was joy for someone else); to childhood illness that so strangely began with a number of profound and grave transformations, to days in rooms withdrawn and quiet and to mornings by the sea, to the sea itself, to seas, to nights of travel that rushed along on high and flew with all the stars – and it is not enough if one may think all of this.
Shahn’s lithograph, above, is accompanied by Rilke’s words “… and know the gesture with which the small flowers open in the morning” in Shahn’s beautiful script. And, if those “nights of travel that rushed along on high and flew with all the stars” capture your imagination, just wait till you see the “Treasure” page in our forthcoming issue. Brandon selected No. XVI in the series, the print that illustrates these lines, as his personal “Treasure.” And, this morning, we were privileged to share it with him.
