‘The Last Supper’ review: Paul Elie feasts on ’80s arts battle

In his new book, which dominates his new book “The Last Suppr”, Paul Eli picks up a pivotal point in social history in the twentieth century, when some ideas were shattered about religion, art and sex in the eighties of the last century to each other during the seventies of the last century and the second in 90 technological revolutions. “But in fact, there was a land that reproduces for artistic fermentation, where designs struggled with what Elie Inn calls Cleated nomination, “the distance between belief and disbelief” that produced a fortune of popular art.

Elie’s Swrad Survle is a collective image of artists and their travelers who participated during a bloody crossroads in American life, when Ronald Reagan’s rise to the White House collapsed in 1980 the walls between the church and the state, which led to an anti -art revolution. This dialogue, this dialogue, is the one that pushes the wonderful survey of Eli, and put the reader in the thick era of a jammed era when ideas about the role of religion in modern life were fighting in the public domain in ways that we have not seen since then.

Among those voters who invaded him in the presidency in 1980, Reagan was a savior, as he was wearing the country away from unwanted and aggressive secularism during the previous two decades in a new era of “family values” that includes commitment to straight and narrow writing, which the Bible text was the main text. Reagan gathered from fanatics like Jerry Vallail under his new biological tent, preached the virtues of marriage of two different sexes, to preserve the life of the fetus that has not yet been born, from chastity and moderation.

The Roman Catholic Church appeared to Rigan. Pope John Paul II, who ascended to the papacy in 1978, toured the world like a rock music star, and he preaches the Galilee of this new sobriety in football fields throughout the country. This Christianity was entrenched from all the differences or moral mystery, and the memory of the ram of religious belief.

What came out of this great jump back is the various excitement of art that took the immediate things that the Church ignored. Eli calls it Eli, where artists negotiated “the limited space between faith and lack of faith”, and thus created a group of rich work that raised the question “What made it believe, so that the question about what the belief means is very important to the influence of the work.”

The group of characters from Eli – a selective list that includes Andy Warhol, Senead Okunor, Bob Dylan, Bono, Shislo Milosz, Martin Scorsese and Robert Maplezorp, were to varying degrees in America and children “50s”. Elie also brilliantly indicates, even an artist who was outwardly stopped from religious life, as Warhul carried him with the Polish Byzantine System Lessons for his youth. “He made pictures of skulls of skulls, MEMENTO-MORI,” says Eli. “He was wearing dolls as elders, nuns and pictures.” As an adult, Warhol joined the church, albeit intermittently, and a committee to reshape the “last dinner” of Leonardo accepted Milan.

Author Paul Eli.

(Holger Thous)

What these subscriber artists shared is the vision of divinity that was filmed with doubt and wonder, as the desires of the body weigh against the hole from the Holy Spirit. It was necessary for these rebellions to adopt faith in their own conditions, while transferring internal theological dialogues to folk art. In his 1979 album, “Slow Train Come”, Dylan did not come out with unconfirmed phrases as a man who now holds love Jesus. This record will have a profound impact on Okonor, the Irish singer who wrestled with God like the beloved of the contempt: “Tell me, where is the light?” She sang in her song “Troy”. U2, whose main singer Bono also looked into Diane as an example, the rock ponds revolve around the inside, so that it becomes a classic classic like “Gloria” “the crisis of faith”, which is the “anthem of self -anthem” in which Bono feels dedication “involves something greater than himself, and he tries to empty everything in everything in that.

Since religion and coded generalization in a deadly fight, AIDS plague was sweeping gay societies like a fiery storm, to the full indifference of the federal government and its Christian maids. The gay artistic community, and many of the greatest creative geniuses have fallen due to illness. But there is a group of the art of protest that was answering a new type of enthusiastic feeling that it curses false piety and hypocrisy from the homosexual Christian faith.

Peter Hogar, who will die from AIDS in 1987, used a strict and strict image to create a new type of encrypted religious icons, while his compatriot David Wagnarovich, another victim of AIDS, directed his anger towards homosexual indifference to mixed media that returns his human subjects.

Then there was Scorsese. The director, who grew up in a strict Catholic family in small Italy in New York, and in his previous films, was struggling with the ideas of faith in a violent world, he was obsessed with adapting Nikos Kazantzakis’s novel of 1955, “The last temptation to Christ.” It took years to increase funding, but when the 1988 movie was completed, the right religious right did Everything in his power to prevent its release. No wonder: Here the art encoded in the great religion was the vision of Jesus, which was very human, suffering from doubt and troubled internal life. He was, according to Eli, “Jesus History is more than Christ faith” – a man first, in other words. This corresponds to the work of scholars such as Eileen Baglels, who were frame Jesus as a historical figure, rather than “Christ faith”.

Where did you leave all this religious encoding practice in 2025? This specific space describes Elie between faith and disbelief, at least at the present time. However, even even though “the American population has become less religious and religious more diverse”, the idea of ​​the prevailing artists who wrestle with religion no longer exists, perhaps because such matters are not relevant at a time deprived of abroad. The wonderful Elie Book is a reminder of the power of distant art in matters in the heart and soul. He rings his wide vision in the eighties of the last century like Clarion’s call for a new era of strict technical participation with unknown and invisible.

Weingarten is the author of “Thresty: William Mulholland, California Water, and Chinatown Real.