Reality Check - Contemporary American Trompe L'Oeil Exhibition Catalogue
Nelson Shanks
What Have We Done to Angels?, 1993-96
Oil on canvas, 38 x 32 inches
Private collection
A world-renowned portraitist of such luminaries as Princess Diana and Pope John Paul II, Shanks is also a painter of dramatic still lifes.
The artist's remarks:
"In What Have We Done to Angels?, I express my deep concern for moral and aesthetic principles under siege in contemporary culture. I suggest the enormity of the risk when values are suspended for the sake of expedience. Suspended from the cross is an 18th-century Neapolitan angel, part of my collection of Italian paintings and sculpture."
