Milos Forman lived in an apartment with an unobstructed view of the Central Park. It was just there, like in a palm of his hand. The apartment was on the 33rd floor of a building right at Central Park South and the living room’s northern wall was adorned with a floor to ceiling window, allowing the Park to enter the living room.
I had the honor to visit him and his wife Martina during my years in New York and I always marveled at sublime medieval wooden sculpture he had sitting in the living room. It was a large “Palmesel” statue of Jesus sitting on a donkey (in the Middle Ages, it was supposed to commemorate the moment when Jesus entered Jerusalem on a donkey at Easter). The sculpture was fastened to a base with wheels. I told him about a similar statue that was on a permanent exhibit at the Cloisters Museum in Manhattan. He knew of it and said there is another one at some European museum (in France or Germany, I don’t recall any more). “So there are only three in the world”, he said. This was when I got the idea that I will paint him the one from the Cloisters museum, so that he would have two out of the three in his living room. I framed the painting in a cedar frame to pay homage to the country of Jesus a presented it to Milos. He liked it so much, that he hung it on the leather-coated wall in his living room. Thus, Jesus is looking from the painting at the wide green every day. And Central is his Jerusalem.
