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Excerpts from Divine Favor
The following is reprinted with the permission of the Liturgical Press, the Order of Saint Benedict, Collegeville, Minnesota, from Divine Favor: The Art of Joseph O'Connell. Editor, Colman O'Connell. Collegeville, Minn.: Liturgical Press, c1999. CSB, SJU and SJP Libraries Oversize N 6537.O265 D58 1999.
Contents:
Preface to Divine Favor by S. Colman O'Connell, O.S.B.
Introduction to Divine Favor by J. F. Powers: Dear Joe
A Tribute from Divine Favor by Garrison Keillor: He Was In the Arts, You Know
Chronology of Principal Events in the Life and Work of Joseph O’Connell
Other essays in the book:
Unbecoming : A Look at Eve in Baroque by Mara Faulkner
A Bead on Human Folly by Hilary Thimmesh
Transfiguration of the Commonplace by Alan Reed
A Degree in Theology and Fine Arts by Philip Morsberger
Joe's Questions by Nancy Hynes
A Meditation on Peter's Denial : As Imaged by Joseph O'Connell by Mary Hynes-Berry
The Gift of Joe by Rosemary Boyle Petters
Tapping by Dennis Frandrup
The Tree of Life by Mark Conway
Jazz and the Coming of the Kingdom by Mary Schaffer
A Work in Progress (for Joe O'Connell) by Larry Schug
The Moses Man by Mary Willette Hughes
Preface to Divine Favor
Colman O’Connell, O.S.B.
Joseph O’Connell’s many friends have agreed that a book of photographs of the artist’s work should be made available to the widest possible audience. Collaborating as writers, designers, photographers, and editors, these friends present the following pages as glimpses of the prodigious creativity of Joe, the master-artist: printmaker and sculptor of wood, metal, and stone.
Those of us who live in Saint Joseph and Collegeville, Minnesota, where Joe produced most of his work, have watched these deeply moving sculptures and prints take shape in the studios where Joe labored among us for forty years. We have been moved by Joe’s fearlessly exposing oppression and poverty in our affluent society. We have been filled with hope as we share the wisdom of Joe’s insights into the glory and folly of the human condition. We have laughed in surprise at Joe’s probing the human and humorous side of familiar religious themes. His work has forced us to look unblinkingly at both the degradation and the splendor of our lives.
We realize that these experiences are vivid, not just because of the artist’s choice of subjects–moving as these are–but because of the magic of Joe’s art, grounded in a consummate craftsmanship. Influenced as a young artist by Eric Gill’s liturgical art, O’Connell, too, produced many works inspired by religious themes. He had an unsettling ability to put familiar scriptural images, like Christ the King or Judas Iscariot, into a contemporary scene where we prefer not to see them. Working as sculptor and printmaker, O’Connell developed his own visual voice, a unique style–at once representational and stylized, simple and elegant–which distinguishes his work from that of other twentieth-century artists. He honed his skills as a sculptor, using no power tools, but only chisels and hammers like those of the master-craftsmen who carved stone images on the great medieval cathedrals.
While the life of Joseph O’Connell ought to be written, we designed this book of photographs only to introduce the artist’s principal works to a broader public. Readers, however, will find a brief sketch of O’Connell’s life and work in the “Chronology of the Principal Events in the Life and Work of Joseph O’Connell”; and affectionate introduction to the life of Joe as artist and friend in the Introduction, “Dear Joe,” by J. F. Powers; and a tribute to the man and artist in Garrison Keillor’s “He Was in the Arts, You Know.” The other writers present reflections on their favorite works. They represent the hundreds of viewers who admire a favorite print or sculpture.
Joseph O’Connell’s friends are confident that their ranks will swell as you view the photographs in Divine Favor.
Introduction to Divine Favor
Dear Joe
J. F. Powers
Joe O’Connell–his mother’s maiden name was DesMarais–was born in 1927 in Chicago. His father was a principal in the public schools there. His paternal grandfather worked for the telephone company and had invented things for it, for which he was rewarded by the company. He liked Joe. Joe liked him too. Joe also liked the wrought-iron fence in front of his grandfather’s house. He hoped to have one like it someday.
Joe’s best friend (they’d met in second grade) had become a fine jazz pianist and singer at the Drake Hotel and now went by the name Buddy Charles. Buddy’s stepfather was Muggsy Spanier, the famous cornetist. (Joe’s first-born, Tom, was named after Buddy’s brother, a director in Hollywood.) After leaving home, Joe had lived for a time with Muggs, his wife, Ruth, and buddy in their big apartment. Muggs had turned into one of Joe’s best subjects–Joe was a marvelous mimic, but in no other sense an artist yet. He drove a Checker cab at night. During the last year of World War II, he served in the Army, mostly on Okinawa.
In 1953 Joe and Jody Wylie, herself an artist, a lovable, lethal, left-handed caricaturist, had met at a commercial art college in the Loop, were married in Holy Name Cathedral, and went to live in the woods near Chesterton, Indiana, near the Dunes.
They had decided to rent an old house there because of friends who owned a new house nearby, Norbert and Harriet Smith, both painters of some reputation. Norbert’s day job was art director of an advertising agency on Michigan Avenue in Chicago and Harriet’s was the Smith children. Norbert had encouraged Joe to do something and had got him his first commission–a couple of carved pilasters for a Swedish society of some kind. Joe got his next commission–a short, life-size Saint Francis holding a bird, in limestone–for a church in Chicago.
Joe was then offered and accepted a teaching job for a year in the art department of Saint John’s University at Collegeville, Minnesota. After that, Joe accepted an offer from Siena Heights College in Adrian, Michigan, where he and Jody were well treated and were urged to stay on. But they decided to return to Minnesota, Joe not to teach, not to have to, with, for security, a commission to do a baptismal font for a church in Illinois. And they now had the inheritance from Joe’s grandfather to buy the house in Collegeville they liked just well enough to buy–they would save it and make it their very own, inside and out, and they did–that old frame house, in which Joe would die peacefully forty years later.
During those years he went from cigarettes to cigars to pipes to nothing, and from Martinis and Scotch to wine and beer to nothing.
He was an entertaining, accommodating host, but not perfect in that respect. He knew what it was like to have a guest get up after going to bed and leave in the night without saying goodbye.
How do I mean that?
Well, Garrison Keillor is someone–Dorothy Day, Gene McCarthy, Pope John, and Pope John Paul II are others–Joe was appreciative and admiring of, perhaps to a fault, for if one of them were ever criticized in his presence he’d start to frown and sort of hover over offenders if they were sitting down or sort of walk into them if they were standing up.
Joe’s studio at the College of Saint Benedict in Saint Joseph was where he taught and where he worked on heavyweight commissions, but he’d had another studio built near, though not too near, the house. Here he kept his records, tapes, cassettes, mostly jazz–no bop, no rock. But he was not above Bach, which is force-fed to listeners of Minnesota Public Radio, and which he and I argued about. Here, too, he kept his soprano sax, which once he’d played for fun–he admired Sydney Bechet–but later only to resuscitate his lungs.
Two of his sons became musicians, Eric and Brian, who performed at Joe’s funeral, as did two friends, Don and Jeanne Molloy, playing beautiful Ellingtonia beautifully.
Joe had traveled regularly to the Twin Cities fro reasons medical–Dr. “Mal” Blumenthal–and musical–to hear Brian before he moved to New Orleans. But there were other trips. To visit Buddy in Chicago, Garrison in New York, Ruth (Muggs had died) in California. To Detroit, where Joe had a big three-figure piece (The Family for the American Dental Association in Chicago) cast in bronze and where he was stuck up one night in a parking lot. “Hey!” he’d called after the hoods. “I need the wallet!” It was thrown at him and nothing missing except the money.
To Cincinnati, to see Louise, his stepmother, on her deathbed (his own mother, Cecile, had died three days after his birth). Louise did recognize him, but only for a moment when she opened her eyes, the last time she did. Joe–he could never get over this–had been the odd in the family: his half brother Dick, a gifted silversmith, and his three half sisters, Sharon, Suzanne, Jeanne, were all more related to each other than he was to them. Later, when he learned that under the terms of Louise’s will he would receive a full sharer, though this wasn’t really surprising, he cried.
In Italy, where their older daughter Laurie and her husband and the children were living, and also “Duke,” their youngest daughter, Joe wore himself out daily looking at work he might have done, not only in museums but in the streets, at monuments, and at detail on buildings.
On one trip, Joe and Jody stopped in Paris to see Norbert Smith, who then lived and later died there.
On another trip to Italy, Joe went through customs with, in a heavy little white suitcase, a tombstone for one of his grandchildren, the littlest one, Adriana.
Before beginning his commission for Christ the King Catholic Community in Las Vegas, Joe visited the site, but by the time he’d finished the job (four years later) he wasn’t well enough to attend the dedication ceremonies. Fortunately, his apprentice, David Cofell, did attend and was given a video by the person in charge, Mary Jane Leslie. So Joe was able to see the ceremonies, to hear Father William Kenny’s eulogy, which Joe thought excellent, and to view the work in question, all from his bed.
Joe’s coffin was made at the Saint John’s Woodworking Shop by Br. Gregory Eibensteiner, O.S.B., K.C. Marrin, and Michael Roske, from whom I learned that Joe had decided not to use the English walnut he owned and had been aging for this purpose, but the basswood ordinarily used by the monks, and he showed signs of not wanting to be talked out of it.
In 1958 Joe had produced a slate tombstone for Don Humphrey, a consummate silversmith who’d been employed by Saint Ben’s before Joe had, and who was a good friend of mine and I hope will be again, as I hope Joe will.
Dear Joe. For his love and mercy I believe he has received divine love and mercy, and for his works of art, I dare say, divine favor.
(J. F. Powers died on June 12, 1999, soon after completing this introduction about his friend Joe.)
A Tribute from Divine Favor
He Was In the Arts, You Know
Garrison Keillor
Joe didn’t care to have a eulogy at his funeral and so there wasn’t any. He wasn’t one to be coy about it. If he’d secretly longed for someone to stand up over his coffin and talk about the lyricism of his work, he’d have said so, or left it an open question, and then one of us would have stood up and done it. Probably me. I could have said that he was an Italian artist of the Renaissance, a friend of Ghirlandaio, who was dropped into the Stearns County in the mid-twentieth century, one of God’s noble experiments. I could have said a lot. Maybe he wanted to spare me the trouble. Probably he hoped to spare the congregation. Having tried so hard all his life not to promote himself, he didn’t care to be wrapped in gold foil and sprinkled with canary feathers at the end. And Joe was a Christian who tried to live by his faith and avoid loud pronouncements. And so we skipped the ten-minute talk about his lyrical sensibility and cut to the postlude, Duke Ellington’s “Please Don’t Talk About Me When I’m Gone,” and everybody left the church smiling and trooped down the road to the cemetery and laid him in the ground.
He was an extraordinary fine artist who looked like a former boxer and talked like a carpenter. A wiry guy with large, muscular hands, a hank of black hair falling over his forehead, black hornrim glasses on a creased face, and a really majestic grin. He was a great friend and a classy guy, elaborately kind, and nobody else could be charming the way Joe could. He really knew how to bestow himself.
I think of him as he was on a fall morning back around 1970, working in his old studio on the side of the hill, woods behind it, overlooking the meadow and the railroad tracks between Saint Joseph and Albany. It’s ten o’clock in the morning and I just finished my shift at the radio station at Saint John’s. I walk in, the studio smells of sawdust and wood fire, music is playing, a hot jazz band from the twenties. Joe is bent over a wooden Christ on the cross propped up on a sawhorse, running his fingers over the face and chest, brushing away shavings and flecks of sawdust, squinting at the grain, worrying over it. The piece looks finished to me, a stunning achievement, but to Joe it is a sick patient in a painful late stage of treatment. A tiny crack on the left cheek is troublesome to him, and he feels that the nose is off and needs reshaping. Meanwhile, the priest from the church that commissioned the figure is pressing Joe for a definite delivery date, the original deadline having passed some months before. The priest is pressing him hard, wanting to schedule the dedication. Joe is supposed to telephone him today–Joe groans at the thought.
Joe put a lot of feeling into a groan. He had a great repertoire of groans, with real gravel in them, and he always smiled when he groaned, as if savoring his own hopeless situation. And he had plenty of hopeless situations to choose from. “I am in the arts, you know,” he would say. He liked that phrase.
He had a wife and five children, was supporting his family by carving and sculpting and printmaking, most of it done on commission for churches whose fee, divided by the hours it took to produce work to Joe’s standard, made for something less than the minimum wage, but how could you ask for more, knowing that churches could buy poured-stone copies of the Virgins and Christs that their congregations might even prefer to Joe’s?
So I started calling him Sisyphus, after the myth of the man condemned to eternally roll a stone up the hill and see it come rolling back down. Then I called him Josysphus. “Almost got that rock where I want it now,” he’d say. “Any day, it’ll be done.” It was comical to him and me that my work was transient and got attention, and that his work, as he put it, would last forever but nobody would notice it.
On this fall morning, with the priest looming ahead of him, he invited me up to sit in his loft and have a cup of coffee. The loft was small, like the bridge of a ship, with a bunk, a work table, a filing chest, and shelves. He was very neat about his clutter, his tape and record collection, his tools, little carvings, postcards, clippings. I sit on the bunk, drinking coffee, and I give him a couple stories of mine to read–he was a very generous reader, a great enthusiast about his friends’ work–and he brings out a few of his prints to show me: Peter strangling the cock that crowed when Peter betrayed Jesus, Adam and Eve tiptoeing from the Garden under the weary, patient gaze of God the Father, a man in a suit grabbed by a giant hand in the dark. Joe did not portray jubilation, as a rule, or bliss and contentment. Joe didn’t do angels. His specialty was the dignity of suffering, which he himself was acquainted with and which was the source of his humor.
I talked to him on the phone a few days before he died. He was weak but still himself. He took the phone and said hello. I said, “Saint Joseph–“ and he said, “Not yet.” And then his voice drifted away and he handed the phone to his son and faded into merciful unconsciousness.
But on this fall morning, he is leaning back in his chair, postponing the conversation with the priest, listening to Louis Armstrong and King Oliver kick up their heels, and the music naturally reminds him of his hometown Chicago, about which he told so many stories. He was the best one I ever knew to tell a story. One night at Fred and Rosemary Petters’ house, he told an epic tale about going to confession at his parish church in Chicago, which had a high altar so magnificent and high that stairs had to be rolled in for the priest to climb up to open the door of the ark that contained the Host, though the story also included his Grandpa the inventor and his friend Buddy and his eccentric Aunt Margaret, who gradually filled up the rooms of her house with unopened merchandise from Marshall Field’s and died on a stack of boxes and newspapers, her face a few inches from the ceiling. The story took about an hour to tell and consisted of three small scenes with elaborate backdrops and all of us sat weeping with laughter, and on the way home I realized that it could not be summarized or duplicated, it had no frame, it was pure abstract comedy. Also, we’d had quite a bit to drink.
On this fall morning, though, the music reminds him of the Chicago cornetist Muggsy Spanier, who was sort of foster father to Joe, and that leads to W. C. Fields, the notorious hater of small children, and that leads to a story I tell on myself, about driving up my driveway with my two-year-old son standing on the front seat next to me and gunning the engine to try to make it through a snowbank, the dumbest think I ever did as a father, and this reminds Joe of a true story about himself, which I wrote down later and which went something like this:
The circus came to the ballpark in Saint Joseph, one of those little tent circuses that you walk into and discover that the woman who sold you your ticket is also the bareback rider and has a dog act, and on the way out the lion-tamer is selling cotton candy and offering tickets for twenty-five cents to go into another tent and see the tattooed lady, who, he suggests, is not wearing much of anything, and she turns out to be the bareback rider and has three tattoos and is dressed in a bathing suit.
Anyways, that kind of circus, not the kind you run away to join. The kind you might be born into. But my kids thought this was the last word in entertainment, to sit on the top row of the bleachers under the canvas and jump down to the ground and run around under the bleachers and throw popcorn at each other.
The day after we saw the circus, the kids and I drove to town in our old VW to get groceries. It was like a clown car with four of them in it and the back seat full of groceries. They were still talking about the circus and recalling some of the acts when we drove by the ballpark and there, staked in the middle of the field was the elephant, Mazumbo. This was a one-elephant circus and she was it. The kids wanted to go feed her. They begged me, “Please, oh please, please, please, please, please, please can we? This would be the neatest thing. We’ve got peanuts.”
Well, we did have peanuts. Two big bags of them. I said, “All right, but you stay in the car. Nobody gets out of the care.” And I drove onto the ballfield and up to the elephant. And Eric rolled down the window and stuck out a handful of peanuts and Mazumbo swung her trunk over and picked them up and put them in her mouth. Then it was Brian’s turn to feed her. And Laurie, and Duke. By the time they got through a bag of peanuts, Mazumbo had quite a bit of her trunk inside the car, feeling around for provisions. It made me nervous, this gigantic, long, bristly think snaking around inside the VW and brushing the back of my neck and snuffling around the kids, especially since the tip of Mazumbo’s trunk looked like Mazumbo had a bad cold. But the kids, of course, were delighted. Utterly beside themselves. They were squealing and sticking fistfuls of peanuts in her trunk, of which almost the whole trunk seemed to be in the car. And when we ran out of peanuts, we opened up a pack of Oreos and some candy bars and potato chips. I was trying to keep calm, be the master dad, the old hand with elephants, and I turned and fished around in the grocery sack for the vegetables and I felt the car lift slightly and then this large, cold thing on my face and I jumped and banged my head on the ceiling and slipped the care into reverse and backed up, slowly, because Mazumbo was reluctant to let go of us. We inched back and I could hear the ridges on the trunk slide across the window frame, bonk, bonk, bonk, bonk, bonk, and the kids were laughing all the way home, and I was imagining the story in the newspaper, “Family of 6 Perish in Circus Mishap; Father Parked Car Next to Elephant.”
I miss listening to Joe talk. You get a conversation going with someone that you really enjoy and then they go and die on you. But then I come across the work he left behind, such as Adam Waiting in the Garden, which hangs over my desk, the First Man in abject boredom waiting for the First Woman, her magnificent haunches visible through a window, to finish her ablutions and do her toilet, and Joe is still here. He was in the arts, you know, and here’s proof of it.
Reprinted with the permission of the Liturgical Press, the Order of Saint Benedict, Collegeville, Minnesota, from Divine Favor: The Art of Joseph O'Connell. Editor, Colman O'Connell. Collegeville, Minn.: Liturgical Press, c1999. CSB, SJU and SJP Libraries Oversize N 6537.O265 D58 1999.
Special thanks to Ruth Wentz '05 for text transcription.