Tonight, at the Church History Museum in Salt Lake City, an exhibit of 111 works by the regionalist artist Joseph Paul Vorst opens to the public.

I confess I had to fight back the tears at several points this morning as I walked through a preview of the exhibit. I knew a little about Vorst’s life — Keepa’ninnies might remember this 2013 post about the life of the young artist who joined the Church in 1924, immigrated to the United States shortly after, where he settled in the art center of Ste. Genevieve, Missouri, and participated in the branch at St. Louis, and became a significant, prolific, and well-known artist … well-known to the broader world, but lesser-known to the Church centered in Salt Lake City, and ultimately forgotten by us following Vorst’s death at age 50 due to a cerebral aneurysm that felled him while he was conducting his branch choir.

What I did not, expect, however, was the impact of seeing his works in person, and sometimes in color.

Vorst painted images of people in extremity – in the extremes of poverty, or drought, or flood, or war, or physical toil – but the poverty and the distress are not his subjects. It’s the people – the dignified, worthy people who met those extremities with grace.

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There is a lithograph of a woman ironing. What little you can see of the room behind her shows it to be the humblest of shacks. Her iron is primitive, of the kind that was heated by filling it with hot coals, and refilled a few minutes later when the coals cooled off. I can’t tell what she is ironing – a tablecloth? her husband’s shirt? Whatever it is, you might think that ironed fabric would be the last thing a woman in such poverty would concern herself about. But she is ironing, calmly and with surety. If she is ironing a shirt, then maybe she is thinking about the dignity of the man who will face the outside world with pride in his appearance. If she is ironing a tablecloth, then her home honors the gathering of family around the table that she is making an altar.

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Another is a painting of a man at prayer. Again, the little you can see of the room behind him – the rough walls, a thin blanket on an iron bedstead – denotes poverty. The small banner with its star hanging in the window tells you that the man has sent his son to fight in World War II. The newspaper, dropped to the floor as the father dropped to one knee, announces the invasion of Europe. The father prays fervently, without tears, without grimaces, but in an intensity of hope and faith – for his son, certainly, but perhaps also for the cause for which he is fighting. It could be either, or both, because there is something in the man’s face that says he is praying for nothing selfish, but for the will of God.

These may be my two favorite images, and the ones that unexpectedly drew tears (who wants to cry in public, though, or in front of newspaper reporters? I don’t have the dignity of the people Vorst painted!) The images are moving and emotional, but not sentimental – you want to do something, to help, by offering a drink of cool water to that man behind the plow, by offering shelter to that family watching their house wash away, by kneeling with that father and praying that he will be able to bear whatever news might come about his son.

It’s that drawing you to want to help, or to honor the people you see, that makes me feel that Vorst is the artist we need today. In a time when we are torn apart from each other through fear or greed or falling prey to the evil manipulations of others, what more do we need than to be drawn back together? to care about the tragedies of others? to help where we can? to support each other when that is the only help we can offer?

There is a lot more in this exhibit to draw me back again and probably again: Vorst kept an album filled with the portraits of missionaries he had known in Germany. There is a fan chart recording his genealogy back several generations. There are studies for Depression Era post office murals where Vorst has slipped in hints of his Mormon world. There is a painting of his small son – a son who was only 3 when his father died – striking joyously at piano keys.

That once-small son, grown a bit old by now, will be present this evening at the opening of the Exhibit. So will Glen Nelson who located Vorst works previously thought lost, and Laura Allred Hurtado, co-curator, who, with her infant strapped to her back, traveled with Glen to Missouri to meet Vorst’s family and begin to understand his life and work.

If you’re local – lucky you – come to the Museum tonight at 6:00 for an opening reception and a talk by the exhibit’s curators. Enjoy the exhibit, and have Glen Nelson sign a copy of his just-released book – the first monograph on Vorst and his work ever to be published.

And brace yourselves for at least two more Keepa posts related to Vorst in the next little while.

Top: Pacific Miracle, ca. 1942
Oil on canvas
36 x 48 in.
Church History Museum, Salt Lake City, Utah

Depicts the answer to a prayer by Captain Eddie Rickenbacker and his men during their 24 days adrift after their plane went down in the Pacific.

Middle:Proud (Ironing), 1938
Lithograph
17.5 x 20.5 in.
Carl and Carole Vorst Estate Collection, St. Louis, Missouri

Bottom: For Thine Is the Kingdom, ca. 1943
Oil on canvas
41.875 x 51.125 in.
Saint Louis Art Museum, Eliza McMillan Trust