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Church of the Minorites

by Lyonel Charles Adrian Feininger - 1871-1956

 

"American-born artist who was influenced by cubism and the Bauhaus movement and developed a delicate geometric style with intersecting planes of translucent colors."

The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Third Edition

 

Pirsig talks about a print of this work in ZMM

on page 160 of Bantam's paperback. Pirsig writes:

 

"On the way out I open one more door, compulsively. There on the wall I see something which sends a spine-tingling feeling along my neck.

 

"It's a painting. I've had no recollection of it but now I know he [his former self, Phaedrus] bought it and put it there. And suddenly I know it's not a painting, it's a print of a painting he ordered from New York and which DeWeese had frowned at because it was a print and prints are of art and not art themselves, a distinction he didn't recognize at the time. But the print, Feininger's "Church of the Minorites," had an appeal to him that was irrelevant to the art in that its subject, a kind of Gothic cathedral, created from semiabstract lines and planes and colors and shades, seemed to reflect his mind's vision of the Church of Reason and that was why he'd put it here. All this comes back now. This was his office. A find. This is the room I am looking for!

 

"I step inside and an avalanche of memory, loosened by the jolt of the print, begins to come down. The light on the print comes from a miserable cramped window in the adjacent wall through which he looked out onto and across the valley onto the Madison Range and watched the storms come in and while watching this valley before me now through this window here, now — started the whole thing, the whole madness, right here! This is the exact spot!"

 

Note that Minorites are Franciscan friars. Minorite derives from 'minor.'

 

Thanks to Nick Adams of http://www.siliconsalon.com

for sending us a JPG of this Pirsig-related art.

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