Dead silence or Silence is deceitful painting by George Grie

Dead silence or Silence is deceitful painting by George Grie

Dead silence or Silence is deceitful

It would seem that humanity permanently values truth, goodness, and beauty. These values are essential to religion. But there is a cleft between the popular religion of our day and all these three. There are many persons engaged in healing the breach between religion and science; equally many are concerned with a new ethical seriousness in religion; few seem to be aware of the cleft between religion and art.

A new age is coming. It will be upon us swiftly and we must bestir our imaginations to prepare for it. We are like the dwellers in the war-swept areas of the old world whose homes were wrecked by shell fire. Our intellectual houses are falling about our ears. We do not yet know whether we must rebuild them or desert them. We are hurriedly wondering what to save from the wreckage. We are half unconsciously taking stock of our valuables; making new appraisals of what is most precious. It is a time of reexamination of all things, a time of changes, profound and universal. The disorganization of normal life by the great war has compelled a new openness of mind and roused new demands for a better life.

Yet it is not the war experience that is causing the new age. It hastens it; it more rapidly closes the old age; it will perhaps in history mark the end of a period about ready to be ended anyway. The breakdown of many old sanctions and standards was already taking place. The crisis of war if not the agent was the powerful reagent, precipitating that which the old formulas could no longer hold in solution.
“Art & Religion” By Von Ogden Vogt

1992 year, Oil x Canvas, St. Petersburg, signed as Y. Gribanovsky
Private Collection