My World Tuesday -- Mankind Needs Art

   There are a lot of little towns here UpNorth, and something I've often thought about is the fact that they can be, well, pretty ugly.  The old buildings are utilitarian and nothing else.  They are boxes, squatting tight to the prairie earth, never more than two stories tall.  They were the blacksmith shop, the grocery, the mercantile, the post office, the drugstore, the feed store, the bank, the newspaper.  They served their purpose well, and there is a kind of attractiveness now in their age and simplicity, but certainly that was not in the builders' intent.

(Wikipedia Image-New Prague)

 But then there are the churches, so often the sole possessor of beautiful architecture, sculpture, paintings, and music in the town. 


In the mid 1800s, a group of Czechoslavakians fled an Iowa cholera epidemic and founded New Prague, Minnesota. This building replaced an outgrown one in 1906.

 They are towering, spired, arched, domed, crenalated, buttressed on the outside. Inside they hold sculpture and paintings and expensive instruments of music, beautiful colors and gold leaf.  They are surrounded by carefully planted trees and old-fashioned flowers, with carved memorials in the cemeteries behind.

Hand carved and gold trimmed altars and pulpits were imported from countries overseas at great expense. . . 

. . . and so were the beautiful stained glass windows.



Lovely details everywhere you look.

   It's kind of like the people boxed up all their need for sensual beauty and built a building around it that befitted its importance and its isolation from the rest of their lives.  And only visited it on Sundays.

   My grandparents were born on homesteads in Minnesota on the Canadian border where the only possibility for many years was filling the most basic needs for food and shelter.  When people came together and built a church, it met needs for social interaction as well as worship.  Now I realize that it also met man's need for art.

 

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