At this frantic and special advent season, meditating on art may help us pause and contemplate the birth and message of Jesus Christ. Painter Harriet Lorence Nesbitt, in this piece, The Atomic Madonna, depicts Mary praying with the peace that passes all understanding in the presence of the calm baby Jesus, despite a detonated atomic mushroom cloud festooning above a set of buildings behind her.[1] The artist is indicating why we need so desperately the peace she draws from the Prince of Peace.
Worthy to note is the cartoonish quality of this painting, which is the way she presents all her subjects, a distinguishing element about her pictures that makes them identifiable. They are reminiscent of political cartoons. This makes sense, since she did serve the Murry Hill News with the column “Politics and Such.” One reason why her work stays in vogue, full of political opinions and artfully presented, is that the rise of the graphic novel earned profound respect in 1992, when Maus, a “graphic memoir” of the Holocaust, told through the vehicle of a paneled art cat-and-mouse tale, won the Pulitzer Prize’s “Special award in letters,” as well as the American Book Award. On December 16, 2013, Harriet was honored by the Southern California Motion Picture Council with its Golden Halo award “for artistic excellence,” for a painting that “visually illustrates the conviction that drawing on God’s grace in a natural disaster creates a mutually supportive human community,” a value that the Southern California Motion Picture Council has championed “unwaveringly since 1936: to produce art that is civic minded, educational, cultural and family oriented” through “the twin media of film and visual art,” striving “to make a difference in this world.”[2]
Harriet, too, had begun “drawing on God’s grace” to combat disasters both personal and communal. For her, by this time, Jesus had become more than simply the Christmas baby in the obscure manger; he and his mother were now personal. Our friend and fellow author and editor Jeanne DeFazio explains, “My favorite times with Harriet were going to the Metropolitan Museum of Art [in New York]. She knew every painting. Bellini’s Madonna and Child inspired her to create The Atomic Madonna. It is a self-portrait of Harriet and her son Larry. The contrast of the prince of peace and his mother with the nuclear mushroom cloud in the background depicts her concern for the danger of nuclear war and annihilation.”[3] When she modeled herself on Mary and the baby Jesus on her son, Larry had already died.
His mother, identifying with Mary’s pain in the loss of her son, was now focusing her own hope for the restoration of our world gone awry on Jesus the Christ (that is, “messiah,” God’s Anointed One), risen from the dead, the promise of grace, embodying the hope of reconciling humanity to the redeeming God, as Jesus (whose name means “salvation”) was given as God’s gift to redeem humanity (John 3:16), leading and inspiring us all to do works of mercy and reconciliation (2 Corinthians 5:17-20). God had graced earth with the incarnate Jesus, the greatest of all reformers, whose selfless sacrifice on behalf of humanity struck at the mushrooming symbol of the evil which is itself the root of human misery and suffering. In Harriet Nesbitt’s time, the atomic bond was what struck all hearts with terror as the ultimate image of evil.
The Atomic Madonna was her response. The divine tranquility of the ultimate gift of God, the eternal Savior, incarnated as a human, brought the peace of heaven to humanity.
This divine solution united both Harriet and the Southern California Motion Picture Council in their agreement that disaster demands human response, drawing on God’s grace for empowerment by modeling on Christ’s example to do what we can to help alleviate suffering around us, as God chooses to work through our good acts, employing fellow humans to reconcile this fallen world to God’s grace.
Had Harriet Nesbitt painted her vision-driven works in the late nineteenth century, she might have been called a realist, as opposed to a naturalist. For, in the Atomic Madonna, she is telling her viewers that overpowering nature or warmongers who seek to rule and destroy humanity is the calling of humans who want to live. The message in Harriot’s paintings and in the tribute to them, Jeanne’s book Keeping the Dream Alive, is that all those who love the good and want to live significant lives in its behalf is not to give in to evil, but to oppose those who wreak devastation and combat their threats not by doing more violence but by protecting civilization, through promoting the positive and moral use of science, using political positions to free and advance oppressed people, musicians sponsoring harmony, and all human leaders accepting the task to bring about positive change by addressing challenging events that would disrupt such forward progress in each of their spheres, and accordingly receive well-earned honor for their triumphs.
In her vision, the task of the leaders she celebrates in her art is to tame natural forces and bring negative influences under control, in order to promote a good government for the population that desires and trusts positive, not negative, leaders. Thus, her work seeks to encourage leaders to combat and conquer all threatening chaos to restore order, an order that takes into account a wide variety of recipients and provides a freer form for all earth’s inhabitants than merely making cartographic map lines to demarcate turf and territory, such as fascism grants, as represented in her ever-present settings of urban scenes, for the city is where people gather for community, interconnection, and safe living.
So strong was this vision and her identification with the efficacy of God’s grace that she created a microcosmic parallel to the macrocosmic sacrifice of Jesus by infusing a corresponding redemptive dimension into the death of her younger son. To do this she stepped from the realm of art, fulfilling her identification with Mary in the Atomic Madonna, by becoming herself what she had admired in others, an active reformer.
She created her own organization, founding Mothers for more Halfway Houses, explaining to her Linked-in audience, “I am an advocate for the mentally ill, an artist as well as a political columnist.” She could not have expressed her vision more clearly by word or action. She had, in effect, become one of her own subjects, what she admired most in those heroes she painted. She was now herself a leader in bringing positive order to the threatened lives of others in the real world as an agent of reconciliation of the great Reconciler to this fallen world.
In this light, her lasting message in The Atomic Madonna is that, no matter how great the power that evil can muster, an even greater eternal power is the peace that passes all understanding (Philippians 4:7), centered in the gift of God in Jesus Christ, Immanuel: God-Among-Us (the child prophesied in Isaiah 7:14, identified as Jesus in Matthew’s gospel 1:23). This baby, having come to his human mother Mary through the Holy Spirit, was nurtured by Mary in our world gone awry. He would grow as a human, who was also God to nurture all who would join his mission to spread that nurturing in spiritual as well as physical dimensions to others. And, thereby, he would fulfill his holy task of bringing to all who would follow him our heavenly Father’s healing and eternal peace.
Bill
[1] This blog post has been adapted from my afterword in Jeanne C. DeFazio, Keeping the Dream Alive: A Reflection on the Art of Harriot Lorence Nesbitt (Eugene, OR: Resource Publications of Wipf and Stock, 2019). See also Harriot’s portrayals of leaders and Jeanne DeFazio’s comments on each painting.
[2] DeFazio, Keeping the Dream Alive, 27.
[3] Jeanne DeFazio, Keeping the Dream Alive, 21, referring to an interview by email, April 30, 2019.
