Critical Response
A CATALOGUE CRITIQUE From: Violence and Grace in the Art of Edward Knippers, a catalogue essay by Timothy Verdon, now Canon of the Florence Cathedral, Florence, Italy, Director of the Archdiocesan Office for Catechesis through Art, and a member of the Board of Directors of the Cathedral Museum. The exhibition, Edward Knippers: Violence and Grace was mounted by and shown at The University of Oklahoma Museum of Art. “The staggering size, furious execution and searing color of Edward Knippers’ painted panels overwhelm, and their physicality shocks. Indeed, given his chosen field, Biblical illustration, the raw violence of Knippers’ art deeply disturbs. For viewers whose knowledge of the Old Testament may stop at the “fresh, green pastures” and “restful waters” of the 23rd Psalm, moreover – or who conventionally visualize Jesus as blond and sweet – these hot, muscled forms constitute premeditated assault: a kind of esthetic and emotional rape. Nor can victims escape up the alley of art history, for, despite dependence on the classic traditions of 16th-century Italy and 17th-century Flanders, Knippers’ art has neither marmoreal detachment nor heroic transcendence. Knippers denies us distance: this is Michelangelo with body hair, Rubens acrid with sweat. “Yet these are not irreligious paintings. The 23rd Psalm, after all, goes on to thank God for preparing “a banquet for me in the sight of my foes,” and even Jesus tongue-lashed the pharisees as “serpents” culpable for “the blood of every holy man that has been shed on earth” (Mt. 23: 33-35). With genuine religious insight, Knippers has grasped the basic fact that, in a variety of archaic literary modes, Scripture describes real people: people with (often shatteringly) powerful feelings – men and women with “foes” in whose defeat they keenly rejoiced; who hated hypocrisy and thirsted for justice. A committed Christian, Knippers also accepts literally that Christ came not “to abolish the Law and the Prophets…but to complete them” (Mt. 5:17), and paints New Testament scenes that pulse with the fury of an Old Testament God: the God in whose presence the New Testament itself says “war broke out in heaven, when Michael and his angels attacked the dragon: (Rev. 12:7). The cosmic struggle is in fact the larger context of this exhibition, and Knippers’ “message” is the message of the Psalmist: “men’s anger” also serves to praise God; its survivors surround Him with joy (Ps. 76[75]:11), “This is prophetic art, although not in the banal sense of the term usually invoked by critics, since it is hard to image Knippers’ style either pointing to the future or having followers. Knippers’ art is “prophetic” because he himself is a “prophet”: has made himself available to the timeless and unpredictable, unpopular and painful power of truth vibrating through life. Like the Old Testament Jeremiah, Knippers seems to have let himself “be seduced, … overpowered” by Someone stronger than he (Jer. 20:7). The unfashionable themes this artist treats, his undissimulated passion, and the (unsurprisingly) mixed reception his work has had, in fact call to mind Jeremiah’s anguished admission that, “The word of Yahweh has meant for me insult, derision, all day long. I used to say, ‘I will not think about him, I will not speak his name any more’. Then there seemed to be a fire burning in my Heart, Imprisoned in my bones. The effort to restrain it wearied me, I could not bear it … (Jer.20:8-9) CRITICAL REVIEWS “… The Departure (The Prodigal In A Far Country) is the most striking piece in the exhibition….Knippers’ elegant, expressive figures and objects are bathed in rich, shimmering light and juxtaposed with areas of wild, colorful motion. But you really have to see The Departure for yourself to appreciate its incredible power and pathos. Faith Heller, Winston-Salem Journal, review of “Neo Expressionism,” at the Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art. “It’s one of the most powerful exhibitions that Chattanooga has seen in the past decade….”Violence and Grace” is a must see show for anyone interested in the human figure.” Ann Nichols, Chattanooga Times/Chattanooga Free Press, review of “Violence and Grace,” a one-man show at the Urban Art Institute. “One need not share Knippers’s religious beliefs to appreciate his art….The paintings are huge…colorful and done by someone who clearly knows how to handle a brush.” Ferdinand Protzman, The Washington Post, review of “The Other Side of Christmas,” a one-man show at Touchstone Gallery. Knippers’…”large-scale paintings filled with muscular nudes powerfully assert the reality of God living on earth as man, along with the real emotions Jesus must have felt as his flesh shrank from the suffering he was about to endure.” Shafer Parker, Report, News Magazine, Alberta (Canada) Edition, review of “Anno Domini: Jesus through the Centuries,” a survey of 2000 years of Christ’s impact on culture at The Provincial Museum of Albert Abstracted and generalized though [Knippers’ figures] are, the actors in Knippers’s mythic dramas are rendered in such a ‘barbarous,’ painterly style and titanic scale that their immediacy and presence are inescapable. His central figures are at once from this world and from no world, both visceral and abstract, both for now and forever. Through his painting Knippers creates a visual metaphor for his devout faith in Christ’s humanity as well as his divinity, a painterly corollary of the artist’s belief in the presentness of the Savior in the world.” Howard N. Fox, from the catalogue for “Setting the Stage,” at the LA County Museum of Art. Knippers uses the figure “…not to probe social or psychological realities, but to taunt us with soul-crushing questions of life and death….It is through the work’s brutality that its intensity of religious fervor avoids piousness and sentimentality. Peter Clothier, L. A. Weekly, review of “Setting the Stage” at the LA County Museum of Art. “Knippers’s painting style seems a compound of influences from many sources, including Francis Bacon and Max Beckmann, but there is no direct appropriation here; the painting is born of creedal conviction that is conveyed by a welter of passionate brush strokes, vicious marks and seductive surfaces.” Ruth Weisberg, ARTWEEK, review of “Setting the Stage” at the LA County Museum of Art. “…it would be difficult to ignore the monumentality and the seriousness of the artist’s very personal achievement….Knippers is an anomaly, at least in his very uncontemporary devotion to a religious inspiration…[The paintings] are aggressive icons…creating…a cathedral-like experience….The greatest irony, however, is how familiar these paintings look in a completely modern context….Regular visitors to the Virginia Museum will likely see comparisons to the recent exhibition of Italian post-modernist Mimmo Paladino and a number of other shows… Robert Merritt, Richmond Times-Dispatch, review of “Spiritual Impact” in the Contemporary Galleries of the Virginia Museum. Knippers appropriates a high Baroque painting style and packs it with drama and mythical subject matter. His work is of a piece with the Italian Trans-avant-gardists Chia, Cucchi, and Paladino. Like them Knippers is absolutely sincere. There is no trace of the world-weary irony that often marks the “postmodernism” of Salle or Fischl. Patrick Frank, new art examiner, review of Memento Mori at the Arlington Arts Center. “One is struck first by the intensely vibrant color in these gestural paintings, then by the tremendous energy in the delineation of their frequently writhing and contorted figures. The effect is somewhat akin to encountering Michaelangelo’s Sistine Chapel ceiling as filtered through Rubens at his most flamboyant by a committee of German Expressionists….There is something refreshing in all this because Knippers handily dismisses all those who say that religion…has lost its viability as an inspirer of art in the age of science. Roy Proctor, The Richmond News Leader, review of Spiritual Impact at the Virginia Museum of Art. Knippers’ paintings “…come to us courtesy of Christianity and the classical ideal of Arcadia; of Rubens and Rouault with a dash of Francis Bacon and a trace of George Grosz. Which is not to say Knippers isn’t his own man; spend an hour with these theatrical oils…and you will be moved by Knippers’ astute vision, which is always grand (yes, even a touch grandiose) and an exaltation entirely his own…the viewer of “Memento Mori” will find sharing Knippers’ grand passion to be memorable. Mark Power, The Washington Post, review of “Memento Mori” at the Arlington Arts Center. “Mr. Knippers’art has a primal strength, no question….His work will not be ignored.” Michael Welzenbach, The Washington Times, review of Memento Mori at the Arlington Art Center. “Knippers has focused all of his energies on biblical subject matter, and has created large multipanel cycles that invite comparison with their Renaissance and Baroque forebears. Originally linked to the overwrought attitude of New-Expressionism, Knippers’s work has slowly moderated in palette and form, though it is still full of brio. Knippers sees the figure as the locus of dramatic meaning…Even if one is inclined to think of beauty only formally, the tension between the painting’s means and its meanings creates a dissonance that sharpens the drama. It also suggests that beauty’s presence may illuminate moral and spiritual disorder by way of contrast.” Theodore Prescott, American Arts Quarterly, from “Beauty’s Embrace, Recent Christian Contributions to the Discussion of Her Character.” Knippers’ expressionistically charged images are not pretty, not beautiful by the most conventional standards. But in their “ugliness” they gain an emotional depth and an import which registers as a more profound kind of beauty in the eye and mind and spirit of the beholder. John Montgomery Wilson, from the catalogue for “Searching for the Spiritual,” an exhibition at the Depree Art Center and Gallery, Hope College, Holland Michigan. “If Christ was not gendered, then he was not human and the Incarnation would be a sham, as would the theology of salvation. Knippers has pressed this conviction of the Incarnation to the fullest, using the nude figure as a way of insisting upon the flesh of creation and Incarnation, as well as to argue for universality. And in doing so, he extends the radicality of the Incarnation—of God unclothed of pure divinity and dressed in flesh – by portraying Jesus as nude before a humanity that is naked.” Wayne Roosa, from the catalogue, “The Next Gerneration, Contemporary Expressions of Faith,” an exhibition at the Museum of Biblical Art, New York City. “…the muscular, melodramatic vigor of Edward Knippers’s 12-root-wide Baroque-style painting…is promising, too….the best [works in the exhibition] show that Christian faith and artistic ambition can still be a combustible mixture. Ken Johnson, The New York Times, review for “The Next Generation” at the Museum of Biblical Art. OTHER RESPONSES Edward Knippers has been awarded: The Prize of Salzburg (printmaking), Internationale Sommerakademie fur bidende Kunst (Oskar Kokoschka’s School of Vision), studio of Otto Eglau; also, Zao Wou-ki, awarded him a distinguished rating (ausgezeichnetem) in painting at the Internationale Sommerakademie fur bidende Kunst. He has also received awards and prizes from: Allan D’Arcangelo, painter, printmaker Barbara Haskell, curator of painting and sculpture, Whitney Museum of American Art Michiko Itatani, The School of the Art Institute of Chicago Jane Adams Allen, co-founder of the new art examiner Holly Soloman, Holly Soloman Gallery, New York Peter Morrin, Director of the J. B. Speed Museum, Louisville, KY COLLECTIONS Edward Knippers’ work is found in numerous public and private collections including the University of Oklahoma Museum, Norman; The Christian Keesee Collection, Edmond, OK; Vanderbilt University, Nashville; the Tennessee Fine Arts Center at Cheekwood, Nashville; The Biblical Art Museum, Dallas; the Cincinnati Art Museum, Cincinnati; the Billy Graham Museum, Wheaton, IL; the Grunewald Print Collection at the Armand Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Fieldstead and Company, Irvine, CA; and, the Vatican Museum of Contemporary Religious Art, Rome.

Critical Response

A CATALOGUE CRITIQUE

From: Violence and Grace in the Art of Edward Knippers, a catalogue essay by Timothy Verdon, now Canon of the Florence Cathedral, Florence, Italy, Director of the Archdiocesan Office for Catechesis through Art, and a member of the Board of Directors of the Cathedral Museum. The exhibition, Edward Knippers: Violence and Grace was mounted by and shown at The University of Oklahoma Museum of Art.

“The staggering size, furious execution and searing color of Edward Knippers’ painted panels overwhelm, and their physicality shocks. Indeed, given his chosen field, Biblical illustration, the raw violence of Knippers’ art deeply disturbs. For viewers whose knowledge of the Old Testament may stop at the “fresh, green pastures” and “restful waters” of the 23rd Psalm, moreover – or who conventionally visualize Jesus as blond and sweet – these hot, muscled forms constitute premeditated assault: a kind of esthetic and emotional rape. Nor can victims escape up the alley of art history, for, despite dependence on the classic traditions of 16th-century Italy and 17th-century Flanders, Knippers’ art has neither marmoreal detachment nor heroic transcendence. Knippers denies us distance: this is Michelangelo with body hair, Rubens acrid with sweat.

“Yet these are not irreligious paintings. The 23rd Psalm, after all, goes on to thank God for preparing “a banquet for me in the sight of my foes,” and even Jesus tongue-lashed the pharisees as “serpents” culpable for “the blood of every holy man that has been shed on earth” (Mt. 23: 33-35). With genuine religious insight, Knippers has grasped the basic fact that, in a variety of archaic literary modes, Scripture describes real people: people with (often shatteringly) powerful feelings – men and women with “foes” in whose defeat they keenly rejoiced; who hated hypocrisy and thirsted for justice. A committed Christian, Knippers also accepts literally that Christ came not “to abolish the Law and the Prophets…but to complete them” (Mt. 5:17), and paints New Testament scenes that pulse with the fury of an Old Testament God: the God in whose presence the New Testament itself says “war broke out in heaven, when Michael and his angels attacked the dragon: (Rev. 12:7). The cosmic struggle is in fact the larger context of this exhibition, and Knippers’ “message” is the message of the Psalmist: “men’s anger” also serves to praise God; its survivors surround Him with joy (Ps. 76[75]:11),

“This is prophetic art, although not in the banal sense of the term usually invoked by critics, since it is hard to image Knippers’ style either pointing to the future or having followers. Knippers’ art is “prophetic” because he himself is a “prophet”: has made himself available to the timeless and unpredictable, unpopular and painful power of truth vibrating through life. Like the Old Testament Jeremiah, Knippers seems to have let himself “be seduced, … overpowered” by Someone stronger than he (Jer. 20:7). The unfashionable themes this artist treats, his undissimulated passion, and the (unsurprisingly) mixed reception his work has had, in fact call to mind Jeremiah’s anguished admission that,

“The word of Yahweh has meant for me insult,
derision, all day long.
I used to say, ‘I will not think about him,
I will not speak his name any more’.
Then there seemed to be a fire burning in my
Heart,
Imprisoned in my bones.
The effort to restrain it wearied me,
I could not bear it … (Jer.20:8-9)

CRITICAL REVIEWS

“… The Departure (The Prodigal In A Far Country) is the most striking piece in the exhibition….Knippers’ elegant, expressive figures and objects are bathed in rich, shimmering light and juxtaposed with areas of wild, colorful motion. But you really have to see The Departure for yourself to appreciate its incredible power and pathos.

Faith Heller, Winston-Salem Journal, review of “Neo Expressionism,” at the Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art.

“It’s one of the most powerful exhibitions that Chattanooga has seen in the past decade….”Violence and Grace” is a must see show for anyone interested in the human figure.”

Ann Nichols, Chattanooga Times/Chattanooga Free Press, review of “Violence and Grace,” a one-man show at the Urban Art Institute.

“One need not share Knippers’s religious beliefs to appreciate his art….The paintings are huge…colorful and done by someone who clearly knows how to handle a brush.”

Ferdinand Protzman, The Washington Post, review of “The Other Side of Christmas,” a one-man show at Touchstone Gallery.

Knippers’…”large-scale paintings filled with muscular nudes powerfully assert the reality of God living on earth as man, along with the real emotions Jesus must have felt as his flesh shrank from the suffering he was about to endure.”

Shafer Parker, Report, News Magazine, Alberta (Canada) Edition, review of “Anno Domini: Jesus through the Centuries,” a survey of 2000 years of Christ’s impact on culture at The Provincial Museum of Albert

Abstracted and generalized though [Knippers’ figures] are, the actors in Knippers’s mythic dramas are rendered in such a ‘barbarous,’ painterly style and titanic scale that their immediacy and presence are inescapable. His central figures are at once from this world and from no world, both visceral and abstract, both for now and forever. Through his painting Knippers creates a visual metaphor for his devout faith in Christ’s humanity as well as his divinity, a painterly corollary of the artist’s belief in the presentness of the Savior in the world.”

Howard N. Fox, from the catalogue for “Setting the Stage,” at the LA County Museum of Art.

Knippers uses the figure “…not to probe social or psychological realities, but to taunt us with soul-crushing questions of life and death….It is through the work’s brutality that its intensity of religious fervor avoids piousness and sentimentality.

Peter Clothier, L. A. Weekly, review of “Setting the Stage” at the LA County Museum of Art.

“Knippers’s painting style seems a compound of influences from many sources, including Francis Bacon and Max Beckmann, but there is no direct appropriation here; the painting is born of creedal conviction that is conveyed by a welter of passionate brush strokes, vicious marks and seductive surfaces.”

Ruth Weisberg, ARTWEEK, review of “Setting the Stage” at the LA County Museum of Art.

“…it would be difficult to ignore the monumentality and the seriousness of the artist’s very personal achievement….Knippers is an anomaly, at least in his very uncontemporary devotion to a religious inspiration…[The paintings] are aggressive icons…creating…a cathedral-like experience….The greatest irony, however, is how familiar these paintings look in a completely modern context….Regular visitors to the Virginia Museum will likely see comparisons to the recent exhibition of Italian post-modernist Mimmo Paladino and a number of other shows…

Robert Merritt, Richmond Times-Dispatch, review of “Spiritual Impact” in the Contemporary Galleries of the Virginia Museum.

Knippers appropriates a high Baroque painting style and packs it with drama and mythical subject matter. His work is of a piece with the Italian Trans-avant-gardists Chia, Cucchi, and Paladino. Like them Knippers is absolutely sincere. There is no trace of the world-weary irony that often marks the “postmodernism” of Salle or Fischl.

Patrick Frank, new art examiner, review of Memento Mori at the Arlington Arts Center.

“One is struck first by the intensely vibrant color in these gestural paintings, then by the tremendous energy in the delineation of their frequently writhing and contorted figures. The effect is somewhat akin to encountering Michaelangelo’s Sistine Chapel ceiling as filtered through Rubens at his most flamboyant by a committee of German Expressionists….There is something refreshing in all this because Knippers handily dismisses all those who say that religion…has lost its viability as an inspirer of art in the age of science.

Roy Proctor, The Richmond News Leader, review of Spiritual Impact at the Virginia Museum of Art.

Knippers’ paintings “…come to us courtesy of Christianity and the classical ideal of Arcadia; of Rubens and Rouault with a dash of Francis Bacon and a trace of George Grosz. Which is not to say Knippers isn’t his own man; spend an hour with these theatrical oils…and you will be moved by Knippers’ astute vision, which is always grand (yes, even a touch grandiose) and an exaltation entirely his own…the viewer of “Memento Mori” will find sharing Knippers’ grand passion to be memorable.

Mark Power, The Washington Post, review of “Memento Mori” at the Arlington Arts Center.

“Mr. Knippers’art has a primal strength, no question….His work will not be ignored.”

Michael Welzenbach, The Washington Times, review of Memento Mori at the Arlington Art Center.

“Knippers has focused all of his energies on biblical subject matter, and has created large multipanel cycles that invite comparison with their Renaissance and Baroque forebears. Originally linked to the overwrought attitude of New-Expressionism, Knippers’s work has slowly moderated in palette and form, though it is still full of brio. Knippers sees the figure as the locus of dramatic meaning…Even if one is inclined to think of beauty only formally, the tension between the painting’s means and its meanings creates a dissonance that sharpens the drama. It also suggests that beauty’s presence may illuminate moral and spiritual disorder by way of contrast.”

Theodore Prescott, American Arts Quarterly, from “Beauty’s Embrace, Recent Christian Contributions to the Discussion of Her Character.”

Knippers’ expressionistically charged images are not pretty, not beautiful by the most conventional standards. But in their “ugliness” they gain an emotional depth and an import which registers as a more profound kind of beauty in the eye and mind and spirit of the beholder.
John Montgomery Wilson, from the catalogue for “Searching for the Spiritual,” an exhibition at the Depree Art Center and Gallery, Hope College, Holland Michigan.

“If Christ was not gendered, then he was not human and the Incarnation would be a sham, as would the theology of salvation. Knippers has pressed this conviction of the Incarnation to the fullest, using the nude figure as a way of insisting upon the flesh of creation and Incarnation, as well as to argue for universality. And in doing so, he extends the radicality of the Incarnation—of God unclothed of pure divinity and dressed in flesh – by portraying Jesus as nude before a humanity that is naked.”

Wayne Roosa, from the catalogue, “The Next Gerneration, Contemporary Expressions of Faith,” an exhibition at the Museum of Biblical Art, New York City.

“…the muscular, melodramatic vigor of Edward Knippers’s 12-root-wide Baroque-style painting…is promising, too….the best [works in the exhibition] show that Christian faith and artistic ambition can still be a combustible mixture.

Ken Johnson, The New York Times, review for “The Next Generation” at the Museum of Biblical Art.

OTHER RESPONSES

Edward Knippers has been awarded:
The Prize of Salzburg (printmaking), Internationale Sommerakademie fur bidende Kunst (Oskar Kokoschka’s School of Vision), studio of Otto Eglau; also,

Zao Wou-ki, awarded him a distinguished rating (ausgezeichnetem) in painting at the Internationale Sommerakademie fur bidende Kunst.

He has also received awards and prizes from:

Allan D’Arcangelo, painter, printmaker
Barbara Haskell, curator of painting and sculpture, Whitney Museum of American Art Michiko Itatani, The School of the Art Institute of Chicago
Jane Adams Allen, co-founder of the new art examiner
Holly Soloman, Holly Soloman Gallery, New York
Peter Morrin, Director of the J. B. Speed Museum, Louisville, KY

COLLECTIONS

Edward Knippers’ work is found in numerous public and private collections including the University of Oklahoma Museum, Norman; The Christian Keesee Collection, Edmond, OK; Vanderbilt University, Nashville; the Tennessee Fine Arts Center at Cheekwood, Nashville; The Biblical Art Museum, Dallas; the Cincinnati Art Museum, Cincinnati; the Billy Graham Museum, Wheaton, IL; the Grunewald Print Collection at the Armand Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Fieldstead and Company, Irvine, CA; and, the Vatican Museum of Contemporary Religious Art, Rome.