Airbrushed from Art History? (2)

Mark C. Taylor writes at the beginning of his Disfiguring: Art, Architecture, Religion that religion and the visual arts are at war.

"Many representatives of the religious and political right," he suggests, "assume that it is their God-given mission to purge the polis of [the] catastrophic disease" that is contemporary art. In examining the roots of this situation he focusses on the theorists of art and religion.

Throughout the twentieth century, he argues, that Christian theologians and philosophers of religion have been, for the most part, either critical or dismissive of the arts. For many, this has been under the influence of the dialectical theology of Karl Barth "in which the affirmation of God presupposes the negation of nature, history, and culture."

On the other hand, he notes the influence of the art criticism of Clement Greenberg in which autonomy in art "results from a gradual process of abstraction in which everything that is regarded as extraneous to a particular medium is progressively removed":

"From this point of view, the development of modern art follows an "inexorable logic" that leads from figuration and ornamentation to abstraction and formalism. The process of abstraction reaches closure when the work of art becomes totally self-reflexive and transparently self-referential ... Painting that is essentially about painting seems to leave little room for religious and spiritual concerns."

Andrew Spira, writing in The Avant-Garde Icon, notes that "Avant-garde artists were passionate and vociferous in their denunciation of the credulity, passivity, manipulation and conservatism of conventional religiosity." Their antipathy towards religion should not be underestimated and reflects the fundamentally different points of view commonly understood as meaning that there was little in common between the art form of icons and that of avant-garde art: "the sacred versus the secular, the traditional versus the revolutionary, the faith-based versus the self-righteous, the figurative versus the abstract."

With views of this nature prevelent within modern art criticism it is easy to see how the influence of Christianity on modern art could be dismissed, denigrated or overlooked. Influential modern artists who either had a sincere religious commitment or who consistently explored religious themes had their work dismissed as sentimental or lacking in innovation. So, for example, William S. Rubin in Modern Sacred Art and the Church of Assy dismisses the work of Maurice Denis as "pale and overrefined" and that of his followers as "saccharine" while the work of Catholic converts like Albert Gleizes and Gino Severini is only "derivative modernism."

Such assessments, which resolutely ignore the influence that such artists had on their own generation, reflect the views of those on the rollercoaster ride of modern art movements where the only valid movement is the currently fashionable movement which makes everything that went before passé.

Both Taylor and Spira, like Doss and Siedell, recognise that the views summarised above are one-dimensional takes on the diversity of modern and contemporary art. Spira notes that:

"although evidence of [the] receptivity [of avant-garde artists] to icons is more hidden than evidence of their rejection of the Church and its trappings, it is arguable that the tradition of icon painting was integral to the shaping of their work. As with children who rebel against their parents but turn out to resemble them, the art of the avant-garde often showed striking similarities to icons in looks, mannerisms and even in deeper sympathies."

Similarly, Taylor argues that having "defined the terms of debate for many critics, Greenberg effectively obscures the self-confessed spiritual preoccupations of the very artists whose work he analyzes":

"All of the major abstract expressionists were deeply interested in religion and actively incorporated spiritual concerns in their work. Moreover, such involvement with religion is not limited to postwar American art. From the beginning of modern art in Europe, its practitioners have relentlessly probed religious issues. Though not always immediately obvious, the questions religion raises lurk on or near the surface of even the most abstract canvases produced during the modern era.

One of the most puzzling paradoxes of twentieth-century cultural interpretation is that, while theologians, philosophers of religion, and art critics deny or surpress the religious significance of the visual arts, many of the leading modern artists insist that their work cannot be understood apart from religious questions and spiritual issues."

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Arcade Fire - Intervention.