Getting Sucked in by Ade

This week a researcher visited the Collection. She's writing about an artist who was a close friend of Ade Bethune's from the National Academy of Design and Cooper Union.  We have some correspondence between them, but she was also looking for more general information about Bethune. Since Ade Bethune was one of the major influences for the artist she is writing about, she wanted to get a sense of Bethune's thoughts on art. 

I brought out the correspondence between Ade Bethune and Graham Carey, which begins in 1935 and runs through 1973—although there are fewer letters from the later years. Bethune and Carey had a prolific correspondence, discussing (among many other things) their views on art in general and Christian/Catholic art in particular. The researcher was impressed with the precociousness and maturity of ideas Bethune expressed, considering she was in her early 20s when they began writing each other. She remarked how it was difficult not to go slowly through the letters, reading every bit. She had to keep reminding herself she is not actually writing about Bethune.

An increasing fascination with Ade Bethune and her work is a common characteristic of visitors to the Collection. Most people who come find much more than they counted on, and more than a few get sidetracked down paths they didn't originally intend. The same happens when I give presentations on her and the Collection, as I did last week to a theology class. Several students expressed an interest in finding out more about her. The infectious power of Ade Bethune is strong, and draws people in to her art and life.

Saint Joseph the Worker

Saint Joseph the Worker (#3404)

Since 1955, May 1st has been celebrated as the feast of St. Joseph the Worker, adding a religious dimension to the labor union celebrations and military parades surrounding "May Day." Based on Joseph's occupations as a carpenter, it is a day devoted to the dignity and virtue of labor, perhaps especially of working to produce with one's own hands. The Catholic Worker movement took Joseph the Worker as its patron saint and the first issue of its newspaper was published in May 1933. One year later, Ade Bethune's drawings appeared for the first time in the May 1934 issue of The Catholic Worker. That issue contained four of her images, including this depiction of Saint Joseph at work in his carpentry shop. It was also in the May anniversary issues that her original (1935) and revised (1985) mastheads for the newspaper debuted.

The appearance of Saint Joseph and her other drawings in The Catholic Worker helped launch Bethune's fame as an artist. Nearly all of Bethune's succeeding work can be traced to connections and ideas originating because of her involvement with the Catholic Worker movement. But St. Joseph the Worker carries additional significance to her work. In 1937 she published the treatise Work, an essay on the dignity of labor and the worship of God implied in a job done well. She later turned some of these same ideas into "The Person and the Industrial Counter-Revolution," a talk she gave at the College of St. Catherine (now St. Catherine University) in 1939 for the 3rd meeting of the Catholic Art Association. It was also the title of a 1940 article she published in the CAA's journal, Christian Social Art Quarterly.

With all these connections to the day and ideals of Saint Joseph the Worker, it is somehow fitting that Ade Bethune died on May 1, 2002.