Bell’s achievement, complemented and continued as it was by Walter Hussey, set the standard for Anglican engagement with the Arts but needs to be set in this context of the remarkable flowering of Christian culture that also occurred across Europe in the same period. Three recent exhibitions – Maurice Denis: Earthly Paradise, Piety and Pragmatism: Spirituality in Futurist Art and From Russia have shed new light on this phenomenon.
France incubated a flowering of Catholic culture which developed firstly through a literary revival spearheaded by the development of the Modern Catholic Novel. The movement blossomed when fervent young Catholics like Émile Bernard, Paul Sérusier, Maurice Denis and Georges Rouault played key roles in the development of Post-Impressionism, the Nabis, and Fauvism. Denis founded the Ateliers de l’Art Sacré or Studios of Sacred Art and went on to exert a particular influence on the development of religious art in Belgium, Italy and Switzerland. Denis became a major reference among Russian Symbolist painters within which the expression of a Russian Orthodox spirituality was most apparent. In the expressive abstraction of Kandinsky and the minimalist abstraction of Malevich, Russian spirituality for a short period led the Modernist stampede towards new artistic movements.
A later recruit to the Nabis, Jan Verkade, linked both Denis and Sérusier with the Beuron monastery in Southern Germany where Father Desiderius Lenz was the Benedictine theorist anticipating ideas associated with twentieth-century art. Sérusier and Denis were joined by Alexei von Jawlensky and Alphonse Mucha in admiring the theories of the Beuron School, while Verkade became an artist-monk at Beuron. Religious themes also featured strongly in the work of German Expressionist artists such as Emil Nolde and Christian Rohlfs.
Rouault helped theologian Jacques Maritain with the formulation of the ideas published in 1920 as Art and Scholasticism and, at their home in Meudon, Jacques and Raissa Maritain created a Thomistic study circle that influenced an increasing number of artists, writers, philosophers and theologians. Maritain played a significant role in the conversion to Catholicism of the futurist Gino Severini, the Dadaist Otto Van Rees and abstract art promoter Michel Seuphor.
Through Severini’s contact with the Futurist Fillia, Maritain’s movement for a renewal of sacred art influenced the development of Futurist Sacred Art while Severini, himself, left a legacy of sacred art in Swiss churches. In England, those involved with the establishment at Ditchling of the Guild of St Joseph and St Dominic, a Catholic community of work, faith and domestic life which included Desmond Chute, Eric Gill, David Jones and Hilary Pepler, were strongly influenced by Maritain.
A further Catholic artistic community formed around the cubist artist Albert Gleizes who tutored an international selection of artists and was hailed by some as having laid out the principles for a renewal of religious art. Two of Gleizes’ pupils, Evie Hone and Mainie Jellett, played a significant role in introducing Modern Art to Ireland and in produced a major body of Irish sacred art.
From the Ateliers d’Art Sacré came the Dominican, Father Marie-Alan Couturier, with a mission to revive Christian art by appealing to the independent masters of his time. Churches, he argued, should commission the very best artists available, and not quibble over the artists' beliefs.
Couturier put this belief into practice by attracting major artists such as Fernand Léger, Georges Braque, Henri Matisse, Marc Chagall, Jacques Lipchitz and others for the decoration of a new church of Assy in the south of France before going on to work with Matisse on the chapel for the Dominican nuns at Vence. In the years which followed, with Father Pie Régamey in the pages of the journal Art Sacré, he explained and further encouraged the breakthrough of twentieth century art that had been initiated in the decoration of Assy and Vence.
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Robert Plant & Alison Krauss - Sister Rosetta Goes Before Us.
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