Julio Z. Berrios'

In a refreshing retreat from neo-con hysteria, the Weekly Standard today called for the censorship of an employee art exhibition at the Library of Congress.

Actually, one employee of the Weekly Standard called for the censorship of one employee of the Library of Congress, but that’s not nearly as grabbing and inflammatory. Under the headline “Communist Art Graces Halls of Library of Congress,” columnist and part-time art critic Michael Warren, identified in his online biography as an editorial assistant, asks whether given “the debate about curbing government spending … can we at least cut out artwork that praises communist revolutionaries?” (Quick answer, Mike: No.)

After backing away from a modest proposal to cut the whole show, Warren concedes that most of the works on view in a corridor of the Library’s Madison building “were fairly decent photographs or watercolors, nice contributions to the collection.” But then he encounters a painting by Julio Z. Berrios, also fairly decent, entitled “Psalm 84-11.”

The image is a reproduction of a photograph by Roberto Salas, probably taken when the photographer was eighteen years old. It’s featured on the cover of a collection of photographs taken by Roberto and his father, Osvaldo Salas, called Fidel’s Cuba: A Revolution in Pictures, published in 1998 by the defunct, too-little-lamented Thunder’s Mouth Press, with a foreword by well-known Communist and New Yorker staff writer Jon Lee Anderson.

Warren reproduces psalm 84-11, found in his “Catholic Bible” as, “For the LORD God is a sun and shield; he bestows favor and honor. No good thing does the LORD withhold from those who walk uprightly.” If this is the praise that so offends Mr. Warren, it is rather indirect. The psalm isn’t quoted in the gallery and what the artist means by referring to it may be inferred—certainly, Mr. Warren thinks so—but not conclusively stated.  Perhaps the depiction of los dos barbudos alone amounts to offensive “praise.” Concerned that Mr. Berrios has made an unwarranted and possibly unintended connection between the revolutionaries and the import of the verse, Warren reminds Mr. Berrios of the Christians, “among others,” imprisoned and executed by Comandante Che. “The artist could have meant for the title to be ironic,” Warren admits, without removing his censure,  “but given the popularity of Latin American communist chic, it’s not likely.”