Week Twenty-Four: The Lord is My Shepherd by Otto Schubert

June 16, 2019

Week Twenty-Four: The Lord is My Shepherd by Otto Schubert

My next image of the Good Shepherd from the on-line Sacred Art Pilgrim Collection is a watercolor by German Artist Otto Schubert. He belongs to the Lost Generation of European artists who came of age in the trenches of World War I and survived the barbarity of the Third Reich, only to find themselves at the end of World War II on the wrong side of the Iron Curtain in Soviet-dominated Eastern Europe. Schubert holds a special place in European cultural history as one of the 112 artists held up for ridicule in the infamous Degenerate Art exhibition, organized in 1937 by Nazi Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels, a roster that reads now like a who's who of Modern Art. A native of Dresden, Schubert survived the Allied incendiary bombing raid on the city in February 1945, which killed his wife and destroyed much of his art, and managed to find a niche for himself in East Germany as an illustrator of children's books. The Lord is My Shepherd comes from his personal postwar archive and was not intended for public display during the Communist era, when sacred themes did not meet with official approval. The image not only pays homage to the Shepherd King, David, author of Psalm 23 and founder of the royal line from which Jesus Christ came, but also looks forward to the Lamb who will be seated upon the heavenly throne in an apocalyptic vision of the End of Time in the Book of Revelation. (John Kohan)