THE wood-carving by Mestrovich of Christ Driving the Money-Changers from the Temple is a work of art tremendously significant in its expression of force. It bears evidence, not to be gainsaid, of the essential meaning of its subject. That meaning is power. It is not beautiful in any sense ordinarily connoted by the word beauty. It is powerful in every sense which the word power, the idea behind power, connotes. Those who understand Michelangelo's Christ of the Last Judgment, however repellent to them, will understand this Christ. Others will not. It is not natural in that the figure of Christ amounts to little more than an abstraction, almost a symbol; but it is realistic in the extreme as the conveyancer of irresistible and angered strength couched in the form of a barely recognizable human being. That Michelangelo's Christ is the opposite in being concretely anatomical has little if anything to do with the question of understanding or misunderstanding. A symbolic figure in one case, a deceptively real one in the other, victorious over the seemingly irresistible strength of overpowering greed, they mean one and the same thing when it comes to the essential. The might of just wrath in opposition to the might of greed, gone mad, Mestrovich has refined to the basic, and transmuted into the wood upon which he has plowed clean lines and hewn flat, sharp surfaces, their sinister shadows being produced by angular, knife-like edges. So is the wood made to carry our thoughts into retrospect, and raise our understanding above ordinary. The pattern of lines and surfaces as the artist has arranged them are insistently subversive of one another, and abstract to a high degree. Look at the hands, the features, as lines and surfaces forever colliding, not by chance but by intention, with other lines and surfaces. All is conflict. The words “he glorieth in the goad” describe this embodiment of passionately angry outburst, merciless to lay on, which is Christ. The money changers flee. But they are yet utterly consumed with faith in the money that alone can save their present hides and, anon, put them even with their scourger whose house of prayer they have made a den of thieves. This is the whole point. The living heart, the essence of meaning has, as it were, been plucked out by Mestrovich and planted anew in a body of his own creating, a very powerful body fashioned to make us almost cease to breathe as it reveals to us hitherto undreamt-of intensities of anger and rage, of spiritual sorrow and bodily suffering.
Read full abstract
Dec 1, 1957
F W Jones 
