"Existenzielle Fragen an christliche Themen"

Once again HitTail has provided me with a startlingly random set of search items so I thought I'd use them in a little poem.  The first in the list, 'the smiling Christ artist' refers to Johannes Wickert, whose 'Smiling Christ' we saw while in Luxembourg back in 2007.   'Brad Crowl' doesn't appear on the blog, though Brad Greenburg does, along with Brad Pitt, the animator Brad Bird, and Brad McGann, a NZ film director.  I'd never thought what the name 'Brad' might mean till now, and of course, it's a shortened form of Bradley (usually), and it means a 'broad meadow.'   So there you go. 


Here are the four search items: 

the smiling Christ artist
clippings converter
brad crowl
winnie the pooh symbolism


Another HitTail poem

Wickert's Christ smiles; 
not quite such an 
anomaly as you might expect.  


he whose paintings are 
often existential questions
on Christian themes


might well be ready to put a 
smile on the face of Christ.  
But how curious it is that  


while in the German language 
Fragen has a capital, 
in line with German nouns, 


christliche does not.  Of 
course the word's adject-
tival, but to the English 


eye, and to the average
Spellchecker, christlike sans
capital seems unkempt, 


unfinished.  


A clippings converter seems
to me the machine to translate
hedgerows into leaf litter,


or even leaf-litter-
leftover.  Brad Crowl, I 
suspect, in spite of being a 


spurious adjunct to my 
blog, seems just the man to
deal with such a shrubbery


issue, whilst contemplating, 
between conversions,
Winnie the Pooh symbolism. 
 At the same time can be found in his paintings are often a sign of hope or a new perspective. Many of his images can be understood as an existential questions on Christian theme

Smiling Christ

Today, while in the City Cathedral in Luxembourg, we came across part of the travelling exhibition called Der Pilgerweg des Lächelnden Christus - or in a rough translation, The Pilgrimage of the Laughing/Smiling Christ. This is an exhibition organised across several countries in Europe with participation by a wide number of artists. The paintings and sculptures we saw were only some in the exhibition, and were quite a mixed bag. All of them show that interest in Christ as a subject for art has by no means diminished in the 21st century, and many of the works are quite striking.
You can see all the pictures on a gallery here. Check out the paintings by Johannes Wickert - they’re at the bottom of the gallery’s range. These are ones we saw, and they have a wonderful warmth about them. I tried to find out something about Wickert, but all the entries are coming up in German at the moment. (For some reason, since we’ve been in Luxembourg, both Google and Blogger come up in German, which is fun, but sometimes requires a bit of sorting out.)

June 2012: Since I wrote this back in 2007, the two links to the Laughing Christ have both broken.  Unfortunately, I can't seem to find replacement ones, so if you want to see more of Wickert's work, go to his gallery pages.