Straight and Crooked Paths to Wisdom

Those who trust in their riches will wither. (Proverbs 11:28 NRSV)

Known as Death and the Miser, this painting by Hieronymus Bosch is both a didactic admonition for those who would lead a wise and good life and a dramatic allegory of the fate of the human soul after death.

A pale, naked old man is on his deathbed. No human companions tend him. Everything around him indicates that he has led a miserly and selfish life, hoarding money, possessions, and the attributes of status. The richly dressed man in the foreground is most likely to be a visual recollection of the miser in recent life. He is busily adding more gold coins to his demonic stash, his prominent rosary betraying his religious hypocrisy.

But now, Death is near, cadaverous in a grave shroud at the door. This is a moment of moral and spiritual urgency. Will Proverbs’ warning that ‘riches do not profit in the day of wrath’ (11:4) be heeded?

There is hope. A white-robed angel has come to the old miser, urging him at last to look upwards, to the light of Christ on the cross at the upper window—the source of salvation.

The worried expression on the angel’s face as he notices a scaly demon atop the bedhead says it all, however. Even with the fate of his soul at stake, the miser is tempted by the bulging bag of money offered by another ugly little demon, and reaches out for it. Death’s arrow is aimed directly at the man’s grasping hand and lower body; the light of his potential salvation, is, by contrast, aimed straight at his heart.

This panel was originally part of a triptych dealing largely with the congenital condition of human folly. Technical examination has revealed its connection to other surviving panels, though there is no firm consensus about what the subject of the triptych’s probably more explicitly religious central panel may have been. Seen in the light of Proverbs 11, Bosch’s miser reminds us that ‘the wicked earn no real gain’ (v.18). His own fate hangs on whether he can yet recognize the empty nature of riches over the everlasting ‘fruit of the righteous’ (v.30).

The people curse those who hold back grain. (Proverbs 11:26 NRSV)

Georg Scholz’s Industrialised Peasants is one of the most caustic images of the German Weimar Republic. It was first shown in post-war Berlin: at the First International Dada Fair of 1920. Scholz made this work using paint with collage and photographic fragments. The montage technique is characteristic of the Dadaists’ means of encouraging a more critically engaged way of seeing.

These ‘industrialized peasants’ are a farming family. They live surrounded by the trappings of patriotism and bourgeois respectability. A bust of the abdicated Kaiser is visible near a photograph of, perhaps, a son, in military uniform. The father dominates the group, stiffly clutching a gilt-edged hymnbook with a prominent cross, while two paper money fragments show what is really on his mind. A conservative Christian newspaper can be glimpsed on the table. A mother, or grandmother, stares vacantly, clutching a fat piglet to her own porcine body. The child at the table is Scholz’s most grotesque creation, his head hollow and his expression sadistic as he tortures a toad he traps with bony fingers.

Outside is a large modern threshing machine, ready for a big harvest. A fat sack of grain with a marked weight by it stands in the corner, suggesting a hoard and a concern with weights and measures, as doubtful as the evident morality of this crooked family. They resemble the cruel and the godless in Proverbs 11: people who hoard riches and deal in ‘false balances’ (v.1).

Over the course of the war of 1914–18, black market prices for various grains rose from the ‘official’ pre-war price by 2,000–3,000% (Blum 2013: 1070). By 1920, people were suffering the long-term effects of rationing, shortages, and malnutrition.

Scholz related this scathing artwork to his own experience. He claimed that, as a wounded veteran in 1919, he once asked some wealthy farmers for some food to feed his family, but was offered only their compost heap (Doherty 2006: 92). The uncompromising details of Industriebauern express the artist’s own verdict on the wicked’s withholding of ‘what is due’ (Proverbs 11:24).

References

Blum, Matthias. 2013. ‘War, Food rationing, and Socioeconomic Inequality in Germany During the First World War’, The Economic History Review, 66.4: 1063–83

Doherty, Brigid. 2006. ‘Berlin’, in Dada, ed. by Leah Dickerman (Washington, DC: National Gallery of Art), pp. 87–153

The righteousness of the blameless keeps his way straight. (Proverbs 11:26 NRSV)

Richard Long was still a sculpture student at St Martin’s School of Art in London when he made A Line Made by Walking in 1967. A deceptively modest work, it is now recognized as seminal, both for his own oeuvre in what would be a long career, and for the history of post-war sculpture, conceptual art, minimalism, and land art.

A Line Made by Walking works in more than one temporal register. It is a photographic trace of a brief, time-bound, live action by one man on one summer’s day in 1967. The image shows an ordinary field in the southwest of England, and a straight line ahead over the field. It was made by Long walking back and forth, repeatedly, wearing down the grass to impress a light, linear marking on the earth. It is also a lasting material record of that action’s imprint on the land, in the form of a photograph, printed together with an inscription on the mount below, which reads: ‘A LINE MADE BY WALKING. ENGLAND 1967’.

Long is one of the first generation of artists who worked using nature and documentary methods in this way in the late 1960s, mediating between the outdoors and the gallery. The work tended to be unobtrusive and ephemeral, before more monumental earthworks began to be made, particularly by American land artists.

In its simplicity, clarity, modesty, and harmony with nature, A Line Made by Walking also offers some suggestive parallels with the qualities of virtue praised in Proverbs: accuracy; the ‘uprightness’ that ensures one’s way is not crooked (11:3, 11); the ‘righteousness of the blameless’ that ‘keeps their ways straight’ (11:5).

Long has since undertaken many long-distance walks, across the world. He says:

I am interested in … the universal similarities between things, but also in the great differences between places, because each place on earth is absolutely unique. (Long and Cork 1991: 249–50)

Footpaths especially interest him in this context because the walking of pathways is a universal part of human experience and yet paths are always specific. Like the paths of virtue commended in the book of Proverbs, every path, ‘no matter where it is’ is at the same time ‘one footstep after another’ (Long and Cork 1991: 249–50).

References

Long, Richard and Richard Cork. 1991 [1988]. ‘An Interview with Richard Long by Richard Cork’, in Richard Long: Walking in Circles (London: Thames and Hudson), pp. 248–52