The willingness of Kierkegaardian thinkers to wrestle with paradox, irony, and tragedy in the aftermath of World War II made the Danish philosopher's ideas very attractive to writers including Thornton Wilder and W.H. Auden, as well as the painters Mark Rothko and Barnett Newman, for whom art was a mythological and heroic 'act of defiance,' which opened the path to transcendence through engage