Danny Klecko, one of the most recognizable and outspoken personalities on the Twin Cities literary scene, has paused his poetry writing to contemplate a painting. He’s about 65 hours into what he’s calling the Exhausting Jesus project, spending 100 hours looking at Ary Scheffer’s 1851 painting “Christus Consolator” (Christ the Comforter) at the Minneapolis Institute of Art.
“At a time when this country is suffering so much I’ve come to the belief that neither politics nor religions will save us. Only art has that chance and I have started the narrative,” said this tall, tattooed master bread baker and author of 15 books. His work includes poetry tributes to Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald in “Zelda’s Bed” and “The Dead Fitzgeralds,” as well as “3 a.m. Austin Texas,” in which he writes of being a tough, troublesome Polish kid growing up in California and running from the law as a teenager. Especially timely is “Hitman-Baker-Casketmaker: Aftermath of An American’s Clash with ICE,” a prescient story about how he lost his St. Agnes Baking Co. in 2018 when he ran into status problems with some of his immigrant workers. His most recent collection is “We Talked About New York,” inspired by a public discussion he did with actress Isabella Rossellini in Minneapolis.
Klecko hadn’t expected to veer into the art world near the end of 2024 when he took the New York Times 10-Minute Challenge, which invites people to look at one painting for an uninterrupted 10 minutes.
“When I took the challenge I couldn’t focus for 10 minutes,” he recalls. “So, Klecko being Klecko, I decided to go all the way and do 100 hours, an hour at a time. I had just moved from St. Paul to Minneapolis near the art institute and I thought I’d pick a painting and do a book about what I experienced and realized throughout the journey.”
Why did he select Christ the Comforter?
Ary Scheffer’s 1851 painting, “Christus Consolator,” is in the collection of the Minneapolis Institute of Arts. (Courtesy of the Minneapolis Institute of Arts)
“I’ve always been a big fan of religious art, anything that’s got Jesus in it,” Klecko replies. “I know a lot about Jesus and the Bible, and I knew I could riff on that in a book. I went to the MIA website and tried to pick the best painting, not just one that had a bench in front of it for me to sit on.”
It was only later that Klecko learned the painting’s connection to Minnesota.
According to the MIA, Scheffer was a renowned French painter active during the first half of the 19th century, and his Christus Consolator is one of the most celebrated and reproduced images of that time. It was found in a janitor’s closet by the pastor of Gethsemane Lutheran Church in Dassel, Minn., where it had languished for decades. Because it needed restoration and insurance rates were high, the small congregation donated it to MIA in 2009.
Jesus is in the center of the painting, surrounded by “the brokenhearted,” including a kneeling woman mourning her dead child, an exile with his walking stick, a suicide with a dagger. There are also representations of the oppressed past and present, including an enslaved African.
One of Klecko’s favorite figures in the painting is Mary Magdalene, described as being “repentant,” a characterization Klecko disputes.
“The right wing (theologians) saw her as a whore,” he says. “I’m a sucker for Magdalene’s side. It never says in Scripture she was one. She has done nothing wrong and in the painting she has a look of adoration, not repentance.”
Klecko discovered early in his perusal of the painting that he was not going to be alone in MIA Gallery 357. His project has turned into a public affair and that’s fine with him.
Minnesotan Danny Klecko, left, gets a lesson in 19th-century art from Galina Olmsted, associate curator of European Art at the Minneapolis Institute of Art, where Klecko is more than 60 hours — as of June 27 — into 100 hours of looking at Ary Scheffer’s painting “Christus Consolator.” He’s calling the project Exhausting Jesus. (Courtesy of Danyy Klecko)
” All Klecko’s journeys start by myself, but now I’ve got momentum,” he says. “The Institute has been nothing but gracious. It would have cost me thousands of dollars in entrance fees at the Metropolitan Museum in New York, but it’s free at MIA where I know the staff, the guards. I’ve got groupies; everyone wants Klecko time. They bring me song lyrics, poetry. They come and stare at the picture. I always have a game plan when I go into an hour of looking at the painting, but it gets off the track when I meet people who talk about what they see in the painting, interesting poets from Russia, theology students, a guy who has a crush on me.”
Besides learning about art in general during this project, Klecko did some soul searching:
“It’s humbling because when I have spent more than 60 hours looking at a painting backward and forward, there are still things I haven’t seen. I can’t pick out all the details. It made me wonder what I am missing in life. Our focus is diminishing in America. We use to read novels. Now, you get a paragraph. We have to exercise our attention span like a muscle if we want to expand our knowledge.”
As Klecko ticked off hours of his project, he was encouraged by some in the art world. Galina Olmsted, associate curator of European art at MIA, met him on a day the museum was closed to give him context about 19th-century art. He got more help from Samantha Herrick, roommate of Klecko’s fiancee, Erica Christ, at Southern Methodist University in Dallas. (Herrick, who teaches history at Syracuse University, will be in the wedding party when Klecko and Christ are married in August.)
Klecko also emailed Larry Buchanan, editor of the New York Times 10-Minute Challenge. Klecko has a long-distance editing relationship with Ed Shanahan, who has published eight of Klecko’s poems in the Times’ Metropolitan Diary feature, but he didn’t know Buchanan. True to the Klecko habit of calling strangers out of the blue, like author George Saunders for a previous book, Klecko sent an email to Buchanan about the Exhausting Jesus project.
“I told Buchanan I am a master bread maker, never graduated high school, no MFA, and I spend my time writing poems and looking at art. I told him his challenge helped me see the beauty in the world,” Klecko recalls. “He’s the nicest guy. If I had to pick a guru it would be him.”
When Klecko isn’t in the art world he oversees bread baking at Kowalski’s central plant in Shoreview and he’s never been happier in his 40-plus years of baking because his colleagues are kind and encourage one another. He also keeps a high social media profile, posting pictures of author readings and empty parking lots. He’s fond of these forlorn parking spaces because he’s spent years sitting in his car, reading and writing in the dark, waiting for his work shift to begin.
Klecko will be 62 in July and he vows to continue baking into his 80s: “The day I stop baking bread is the day I start dying.”
He credits his future wife with helping him get to the good spot in life he’s enjoying:
“The smartest thing Rikki has done for me was showing me how I was denying myself happiness because of the amount of alcohol I was drinking. On my birthday I will have been sober for a year. Now I want to be the greatest Klecko I can be.”
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