My third featured "Angel Artist" in the Sacred Art Pilgrim Collection is Benton Spruance, a Philadelphia-based printmaker who can rightly be called the lithographer's lithographer for his innovative use of this stone slab graphic art technique. Spruance had no great love for organized religion but was drawn to the great themes of the Bible. He was especially interested in angels as supernatural beings that took on human form and blurred the line between heaven and earth. Spruance conveyed post-war angst at the nuclear arms race in the 1948 print, Havoc in Heaven, where an angelic band draw back in horror as the earth disappears in a mushroom cloud. He turned the story in the Hebrew Scriptures of Jacob wrestling with the angel into a Jungian image of a man struggling with his shadow self. When Spruance's art took a more abstract turn, he depicted two expressively distorted angels in a frenzied dance of joy. Said Spruance: “I’m one of those peculiar artists who likes to go back to the Bible for inspiration again and again, not necessarily because of the religious content but because of the universal content.” (John Kohan)