The Arts and Religion Today
by John O’Neil
February 1957
Art and Religion are not necessarily related subjects. More often than not, in the history of each, parallels are found, but it is possible that one might have developed without the other; certainly religions lacking visual images exist, and nonreligious art is a world of its own, particularly in modern times.
The fact that great ages of painting, at least in the Western world, have also produced the important Christian visual documents is more of an attestation of the agreeable partnership between church and artist than a thesis that great religious themes led to great painting. Although it is difficult to imagine El Greco occupying his peak in art history divested of his flaming saints and incandescent angels, it is well to remember that one of his finest paintings, the “View of Toledo”, is a landscape. Aldous Huxley, in Theme and Variations has put it this way: “Man and society are, doubtless, wholes; but they are wholes divided, like ships into watertight compartments. On one side of a bulkhead is art; on the other is religion. The connection between the two is not below the water line, but only from above, only for the overseeing intellect that looks down and can see both simultaneously and recognize them as belonging, by juxtaposition rather than by fusion, to the same individual or social whole.”
The impulse to creative activity is in some ways a religious activity in itself, if by religion one means an attempt to explain, or praise, the universal mysteries in a non-scientific manner. A successful painting, unique in that nothing exactly like it exists anywhere, can be as awesome as a natural mystery; reactions to it can also have a religious quality. However, if this question of religion in art is explored, it would encompass the entirety of contemporary painting. Instead, we will be concerned now with the few brilliant artists of today who have chosen to work with traditional Christian themes, or, more rarely, have been commissioned to do so.
First we might explore some of the problems which confront the artist today if he wishes to paint using any traditional subject matter. Since the great artistic revolutions that began seventy five or more years ago from impressionism through expressionism, painters have been concerned almost exclusively with formal problems of color, light, and space. Subject, if used at all, has been most often a minor element, and there has been no differentiation at all between subjects: an old shoe, a sad face, an empty street could all be equally fascinating to the artist interested only in the plastic aspects of his subject. The reasons for this change in goal of the artist are extremely complex, but the principal motivations would certainly include a new and fresh scientific application to his work (a dispassionate interest in natural phenomena, as well as the nature of the materials of his craft), a release from the necessity of being an illustrator, (the increase in literacy, the invention of the camera contributed to this), and a driving need to state, without compromise, his individualistic reactions to the world.
The first important modern commissions for religious art were those for a church in Assy, France. The decoration by contemporary artists was undertaken in 1937 through the efforts of a courageous local churchman, Canon Devemy. Devemy had persuaded Rouault to design some stained glass windows and, in 1943 Bonnard agreed to paint an altarpiece. By 1945 Leger was at work on the mosaics of the façade, Lurcat on a huge tapestry for the apse. In 1947 Braque and Lipchitz received commissions for sculpture.
Thus, step by step, the obscure, provincial church at Assy had enlisted the services of many of the most famous living artists, all of whom apparently for the first time had been offered and had accepted ecclesiastical commissions. Among the artists Rouault was, in fact, the only practicing Catholic. But in art, Catholic or not, piety is no substitute for talent. Leger’s mosaic and Lurcat’s tapestry were the largest and most conspicuous works of art at Assy. Shortly before accepting his commission, Leger, just back from his war years in New York, had declared his membership in the Communist Party; Lurcat had been an active party worker since the mid-thirties. Their reputations had been made years before as modern painters and their art was, in 1945, still far from the socialist realism enjoined by orthodox Stalinists…by conferring patronage on Leger and Lurcat as well as on Braque, a cubist, and Lipchitz, a Jew and an expressionist, the Church at least on this occasion had not only demonstrated its tolerance and advanced taste but had struck a shrewd blow in the desperate struggle between Catholicism and Communism for the influential good will of the artists and intellectuals of France.
Rarer than the church at Assy, is the idea for the chapel at Vence, in Southern France, a building designed by one of the most influential modern painters, Henri Matisse. The chapel is as much a monument to the genius of Matisse as it is a Christian symbol, since the artist designed the stained glass windows, the stations of the cross, the altar, the crucifix, the wall paintings, and the priest’s vestments.
Joseph A. Barry wrote a detailed story in which Matisse made clear that his interest in the chapel was in no sense a gesture of repentance after 60 years of producing hedonistically pagan art. “In my own way” Matisse told Barry, “I have always sung the glory of God and his creation. I have not changed.”
“In the chapel my chief aim was to balance a surface of light and color against a solid white wall covered with black drawings”. The booklet accompanying the dedication of the chapel, also written by Matisse, does not mention religion at all. And the imagery employed is certainly more Matisse than Christian; the brilliant blues, greens and yellows of the stained glass windows suggest an exuberant tropical growth, a kind of nature hymn akin to the spirit of earth and air.
How does the conservative institution of the Church, committed for centuries to a set of traditional doctrines, react to the advances of modern art? Georges Rouault is the one painter who has dealt all his life with Christian themes and has remained a leading creative artist. Even though an ardent Catholic, no painting by Rouault, as least during the first fifty years of his life, when he had achieved worldwide fame, appeared in a Catholic Church. “The fact is that Rouault’s paintings have gradually become, and especially since the end of the last war, the most popular, and the most expensive, spiritual merchandise among all contemporary art. The profoundest appeal of Rouault’s art lies in it appeal to romantic emotion rather than religious content. (Alfred Frankfurter)
Rouaults’ “stained glass” style is well-known. The black outlining, also an expressionist device for attaining, by contrast, greater purity and intensity of color, is occasionally, with Rouault, a crutch to support a weak structure. How much of the outlining (borrowed from the necessary leading in stained glass windows) is responsible for the popularity of the painters religious themes is an unanswerable question at present. Since Rouault is an excellent draughtsman and a painter of considerable power, his work will undoubtedly remain influential, even though he has not added greatly to the vocabulary of Christian imagery.
The situation of Henry Moore is quite different. Here we have an artist, a sculptor, whose fame is based on a revolt from the academy, whose sympathies would be entirely with the primitive, the pagan, and the emotionally expressive rather than the surface refinement of Greek sculpture; never having worked by choice with religious subjects, as Rouault had, he met the challenge of an offer to do a commissioned work for a particular church, on a particular theme.
In the Church of St. Matthew in England, Henry Moore has created a sculptured Madonna and Child, which, although not done in his usual identifiably personal abstract style, is an excellent piece of work and a dignified version of an ancient theme. Mr. Moore, in accepting the commission, lost none of his stature as a leading world sculptor, although some artists might have rejected such a commission because it would mean an unacceptable compromise with their style. Reverend Canon Hussy of St. Matthews had this to say of the problem of art in the Church: “The majority of work that is put into churches nowadays…is either a weak and sentimental essay in the most over-ripe Raffaelesque tradition, or occasionally a self-conscious straining after a modernesque style…In the days of a strong tradition of Christian art it was often possible to get from a second rate artist or from a village craftsman an adequate and moving work for the Church; but now, when the tradition is largely lost and civilization is in a state of transition, it is among the finest and most profound artists that the Church should seek help as often as possible.”
The subject that has received the most divergent interpretations by contemporary artists is the difficult one of the crucifixion. Among many who have attempted this theme are Rico Lebrun, George Bellows, Rouault, Matisse, Gauguin, Graham Sutherland, Jose Clemente Orozco…even Salvador Dali. The Bellows version is somewhat theatrical, with emphasis on the dramatic lighting, the stormy sky, and a deep space arrangement of the figures. The Lebrun interpretation, one of the most recent significant ones, is organized along Cubist-Expressionist lines, borrowing liberally from Picasso, but nevertheless creating an imposing image in which the details of thorn, wood and spear are telling. The Dali crucifixion, recently purchased by the Metropolitan Museum, is largely an exercise in visual gymnastics, technically splendid, but otherwise devoid of meaning.
Two unorthodox versions of the crucifixion would be the Sutherland one (also in St. Matthews) and the Orozco fresco, Christ Destroying His Cross. In the former, there is an affinity with the Grunewald visions of torture and horror, in which the crucified figure is far from the rather posed ballet forms of the usual paintings, but conveys the agony of physical suffering. It is, in a deep sense, horrifying. The Orozco painting shows a militant Christ, powerful as an athlete and aggressive as a warrior destroying the symbol of his own physical destruction. One should recall the thoughts of Nicolas Cusamus, the 15th century mystic writing in De Visione Dei: “If the lion were to ascribe to thee a face, he would imagine the face of a lion, the ox would imagine that of an ox, the eagle of an eagle, Oh Lord, how marvelous is thy face, which youths cannot conceive but as youthful, men as manly, and the aged as aged!”
The religious paintings of Paul Gauguin are not so well known as his familiar subjects from the South Seas. “The Yellow Christ” (1889) and “Mount Calvary”, both painted in Brittany, are in the tradition of sacred painting in that he used the faces and costumes of the people about him, as though the events depicted were contemporary ones. The paintings are new in the use of color, in that the color is “moving toward liberation from representational service”. His “Yellow Christ” is the man of sorrows and acquainted with grief, whom we see in old German woodcuts.
The Norwegian painter, James Ensor, died in 1949. Although religious themes are merely episodic in his art, they are nevertheless unique in contemporary art, with their hallucinatory qualities, strange light emanations reminiscent of Rembrandt, and sharp, incisive drawing. His preoccupation with light is indicated in one of the titles: “Christ’s Aureoles, or the Sensibilities of Light.”
In the United States, few artists, other than Abraham Rattner, have been interested in religious subject matter until commissions have confronted them with the problem. This was the case with Herbert Ferber in the sculpture called “And the Bush was Not Consumed”, made recently for the Synagogue at Millburn, New Jersey. Here we have a form, highly abstract, which is also a satisfactory esthetic interpretation of the subject. Sculpturally, it was not the challenge of Moore’s “Madonna and Child” since its symbol is a natural, or rather supernatural, one, in which the human figure is not involved.
One of the characteristics of today’s art is that the image is often arrived at intuitively; titles may also be independently interesting, with only the most indirect reference to the work itself. Such a painting, perhaps, is de Koonig’s “Pink Angels”. The amorphous pink and yellow forms suggest movements of flight, but whether or not the flight of angels is a matter beyond the esthetic interpretation of the painting. Ambiguity of title, complex levels of meaning, indirect references and allusions, the simile and the metaphor…these are all common in contemporary painting, and this particular work shows how even traditional forms from religion may appear using these pictorial qualities.
If no great new religious paintings have been created in the present to usurp those of the past, it may be that the age is more expressive in other themes. A significant contemporary painting, perhaps the most significant of all, is Picasso’s “Guernica” which deals with the nightmare of war in a nightmarish clash of blacks and whites, colorless forms as cruel as newspaper headlines.
