The life of Bishop George Bell is shortly to be celebrated at a Chichester-based conference marking the 50th Anniversary of his death. Entitled Art, Politics and Church: Celebrating George Bell the conference highlights the three major concerns of his ministry. These concerns came together in his drive to re-associate the Church and the Arts, which he viewed as “an effective protection against barbarism, whether the barbarism was Nazism, materialism or any other threat to civilization.”
A.N. Wilson has written that there were artistic giants in the Anglican Church in the first half of the twentieth century and this was certainly true of the artists with whom Bell had contact. As Dean of Canterbury, where he initiated a revival of religious drama, he was involved in commissioning works by T.S. Eliot, Christopher Fry, Gustav Holst, John Masefield, Dorothy L. Sayers and Charles Williams. While, as Bishop of Chichester, he initiated the use of modern works of art to invigorate and beautify the cathedral leading over time to the commissioning of works by Marc Chagall, Cecil Collins, Hans Feibusch, John Piper and Graham Sutherland, among others. Bell’s approach to re-associating the Arts could be summed up as structures, statements, sociality and spirituality.
Bell commissioned drama, music and visual art, put structures in place (e.g. the Sussex Churches Art Council and its ‘Pictures in Churches Loan Scheme’) to support a wider commissioning of artists, placed his trust in the vision of artists when they encountered opposition and he was called on to adjudicate on commissions and strongly supported the appointment of Walter Hussey as Dean of Chichester Cathedral to take forward the commissioning programme he had initiated there. Sociality was demonstrated through the meetings of artists and clergy that he organized (which involved, among others, Eliot, Feibusch, Henry Moore, Piper, Sayers and Williams) and his personal and pastoral care for émigré-artists such as Feibusch, who with Bell’s support became the pre-eminent twentieth century Church muralist in the UK.
The end result, in Bell’s view, was spirituality. He stated, in his enthronement address, “Whether it be music or painting or drama, sculpture or architecture or any other form of art, there is an instinctive sympathy between all of these and the worship of God.” Artists, he argued, could help the Church consider “our conception alike of the character of Christian worship and of the forms in which the Christian teaching may be proclaimed.”
Bell was not an arts theoretician but in his enthronement address and in his introduction to the catalogue for ‘Pictures in Churches Loan Scheme’ pleaded for the Church to trust contemporary artists and allow them to paint in their natural idiom. The 1944 meeting he organized to re-awaken the relationship between contemporary artists and the Church stated that the Church should use artists fearlessly and that artists need not necessarily be a Christian in order to be used by the Church.
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Gustav Holst - This Have I Done For My True Love.
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