"Chorus Captain" On the Edge of Darkness (6.6.12)

Jesus said "if your eye is good, your whole body [your whole personality] is good."

The Yale Museum of Art on Chapel Street in New Haven is a feast for the eye- there's Renoir, Van Gogh, and Edward Hopper, and many others. These artists, along with the principal training of the Holy Ghost, meant to live inside us, can provide training for an eye that is good.

Yale added a portrait in 2002, "Chorus Captain" (1935), by New York painter and Vaudville director Walt Kuhn. It simply portrays a glowing, athletic chorus gal, still of a bridal ivory hue, taking a break.

She's in full bloom and regally sculpted, yet her chestnut eyes are averted but knowing. She sits with a perfect bearing, not so much on a chair, but on the edge of the dark background of the portrait, as if as soon as she rises, she'll walk right out of the theatre, and the portrait too.

Prior to the popular wave of moving pictures, Vaudville captured the general public's desire for live variety entertainment, safe from burlesque and booze. But campy Vaudville still depended on a chorus line which its format had deemed safe and O.K.

The genius of Kuhn's work here is the loving sympathy with which he looks upon his "Chorus Captain" and the human dignity and beauty he affords her (sort of like Jesus would look upon her?). It's as if Kuhn sees that his somewhat miffed subject has come to the realization that she has been used in this show business, and accordingly, she's already moved on.

In the Book of Revelation Chapter Seventeen there's another dancing gal of sorts, the bounding gal of various and sundry bad religion, who failed to step out of the wordly darkness, when she still had her chance, when her her eye was still good.