All my life, the cries for War have come from the privileged.

[Octafish]

14. Test House

"I have become death, the destroyer of worlds," J. Robert Oppenheimer spontaneously said upon witnessing the first detonation of a nuclear bomb on July 16, 1945. The statement is a slight mistranslation of a passage from the classic Hindu text the Bhagavad-Gita. It is hard to imagine that Oppenheimer's declaration is even an overstatement. The bomb has one purpose: to destroy. But even something as seemingly straight forward as the atomic bomb never remains clear for very long and soon enough the questions begin to arise: What does it mean? Why do we feel compelled to build them? Is it protection for ourselves or from ourselves? In a direct way, by looking at Ashland artist's Robert Beckmann's new paintings that are part of a group show at Jim Kempner Fine Art in New York, the viewer is able to come to grips with some of these questions in their own way. More...

Posted by Arcy Douglass on June 13, 2008 at 10:07 | Comments (0)

Painting by Robert Beckmann