The focus of these works on the sufferings
of Christ's passion, he insisted,
emerged from analogous trials of his own:
"I painted ikons bleeding from every stroke,
without mechanical distortions," he wrote to
his early patron George Lester. "Unlike the
dispassionate distortions of cubism, each
stroke becomes a raw nerve. My Man of Sorrow
is paralyzed in divine agony, unable to explode
into some cheap Ism. This creates an almost
unbearable tension. I am a Modernist dying of Modernism.
Robert Smithson, April 1961
from this