Larger than life, the prostitute’s body crowds the edges of the eight-foot-high painting, the spike of her high-heeled shoe and her muscular leg creating a strong diagonal, leading ineluctably to her evasive eye.
Arlington, Virginia, painter Ed Knippers created this woman of the night as one panel of his 20-foot-long depiction of The Departure (The Prodigal in a Far Country). But she was too strong. Thus, she stood by herself as The Invitation, the first painting to confront viewers entering “Spiritual Impact: The Paintings of Edward Knippers,” an overpowering exhibition of flesh and spirit mounted last fall at Richmond’s Virginia Museum of Fine Arts.
The figures in Knippers’s paintings are massively physical, and their mounting by the museum’s curator of twentieth-century art, Frederick Brandt, multiplied their impact. The gigantic paintings nearly covered the walls of the first gallery, their vibrant colors giving the room the glow of a chapel constructed wholly of stained glass. There was no escape—one simply had to stare up the nostrils of the resuscitated Lazarus, feel wrapped in the father’s embrace of the returning prodigal, and uncomfortably avert one’s gaze from the viewer’s-eye-level nakedness of the resurrected Christ.
Gender-Specific
Why is the resurrected Christ nude? “The nudity of Christ is done for theological reasons,” says the painter, who, in addition to studying art, spent a year at Asbury Theological Seminary. “If Christ did not come gender-specific, he didn’t come at all.”
Knippers makes much of Jesus’ maleness and other specific realities of physical creation. “The fact that the world is as it is tells us something about the mind of God and the way he thinks.”
The intense physicality of Knippers’s nudes is a calculated protest against a Christian tendency to spiritualize reality. “We are in a time of neognosticism,” Knippers complains. “In the church we have tended to overspiritualize.” On this he blames the church’s great divisions over issues such as Creation. “We have not seen the gospel as interpenetrating the world in which we live on the physical level. I would hope, therefore, that the painting would meld physical and spiritual reality in the imagination of the viewer.”
Embodiment
Although many of Knippers’s paintings recall familiar Bible stories, they are not storybook illustrations. “I’m trying to find embodiment for the truth I’m after,” he explains, “I’m not illustrating it.”
And what truths does he try to embody? For one, that all is not well. In the second gallery, one entire wall is devoted to the 12-by 24-foot Herod Diptych in which pale, bruised-lavender Herod’s debauchery is juxtaposed with the Massacre of the Innocents. Knippers transforms the Massacre into a visual parable of contemporary abortion by posing the violent, knife-wielding assassin in a spare, asphalt-tiled clinical room with a plain hospital bed, privacy curtain, and a pair of forceps. Surmounting the diptych are the fearful, distorted faces of Adam and Eve as they flee the scythe of Death.
Neither is all well in The First Dead (Lamentation of Adam and Eve), wherein our naked first parents are portrayed in twisted protective postures while Abel lies spread-eagled, openly vulnerable, and unprotected. Nor is all well in Lamentation (Angel in a Desecrated Land), with its barren landscape and impaled and bound corpses.
Knippers’s work is not political, but the artist is very aware of political aspects of contemporary life and how they are related to faith. He recently completed a suite of prints of prisoners and bound figures, taking his inspiration from modern-day prisoners-for-faith in such places as Cuba and Russia. In his painting of Christ’s temptation, Knippers depicts the Devil as a revolutionary, with a machine gun on his back. “The temptations of the world today are the same ones the Devil offered Christ: food and power. Christ rejected them.” There are horrors taking place, he says, “but they pale in light of the true horror: that God came in the flesh and we rejected him.”
Negativity
Knippers defends his gruesome images: “We’ve gone through this period when everything has to be positive—part of a New Age dream world where there is no negativity. But by trying to make the gospel acceptable we’ve made it unacceptable. Nevertheless, I’ve found that if you speak the harsh message, but speak it well, it will be heard.”
His willingness to paint the gospel in the context of devastation and death evokes strong responses: “Your paintings would make a person want to embrace religion entirely,” remarked a Jewish artist who occupies a studio near Knippers’s, “or do without it entirely.”
Not everyone spots signs of hope in Knippers’s work. “People think they don’t see the positive in my art,” says the artist. But when I paint the Angel of the Lord brooding over this scene of devastation, that is a hopeful thing.”
The vibrant floating Angel of the Lord in Lamentation, with its brightly colored halation, is not the only sign of hope in Knippers’s work, however. His resurrected Christ, unlike most traditional depictions, does not come forth from the tomb, but faces back into the cave to call forth all the dead. And while the prostitute’s bedside table holds empty goblets and a picked-bare carcass, in the prodigal’s father’s portico stands a table with a wayfarer’s meal, eucharistic bread and wine. The emptiness of lust is matched by the feast of the gospel.
Knippers’s goal is to leave a transcript of belief. “No matter how secular this age may be, I want to leave a strong record that someone believed something. In the future, they may say, No one then believed anything except … and I want to be part of that except.”
By David Neff.
