Michael Gibson argues, in Symbolism, that the movement was a product of Catholic and of industrial Europe. A significant part of Symbolist art, he notes, “is tinged with a religiosity of a Catholic, syncretic or esoteric kind.”
The Catholic influence on Symbolism was itself part of a wider revival of Catholicism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, known as the French Catholic Revival. Marian E. Crowe has written in Aiming At Heaven, Getting The Earth that the militantly secularists ideals of the Third Republic - materialism, naturalism, scientism, and determinism - were perceived by many to be “choking off vitality and beauty” and “actually made people feel less free and less in control of their own lives.” The result, Gene Kellogg has argued in The Vital Tradition, “was the “decadence” of the period eventually to be known as the “fin de siècle,” a period which by curiously convoluted processes ended by giving way to a revival of Catholicism in France.”
John House writes in Post-Impressionism that the suitability of a return to Roman Catholicism had been outlined in two books published in 1889, Charles Morice's La Littérature de toute á l'heure and Georges Vanor's L'Art symboliste:
"Morice made the equation between the Idea and God when he declared that 'Souls which are the externalization of God, seek to return, through a book, Art, a musical phrase, a pure thought, to the metaphysical realm of Ideas, to God. Truth resides in the harmonious laws of Beauty.' Vanor pursued this equation further. There was a specific and logical link to be made between Ideas, God, Symbols and Christian Symbolism, and, since France was Roman Catholic, it was to Catholic art that all Art should return. The impact of this programme during the 1890s was extensive and profound. Books were published on religious topics, plays about religious subjects proliferated in the theatres of Paris, fringe religions such as Theosophy, Occultism and Satanism were highly popular, conversions of prominent writers and artists to Roman Catholicism multiplied and the walls of the Salons and the avant-garde exhibitions blossomed with religious paintings."
Crowe notes that “an impressive number of intellectuals and cultural figures ... having abandoned their childhood faith and become atheists in their youth, ... reconverted to Catholicism in their adulthood”:
“Among them were Paul Claudel, who wrote poetry and plays stressing sacrifice, chivalry and nobility; Léon Bloy, whose novels expressing the doctrine of the communion of saints called attention to the poor as an integral part of that communion and depicted poverty as both a social evil and source of sanctification; and Charles Péguy, an early socialist, who, like Bloy, stressed the importance of the poor and seemed to embody the best ideals of both the republican and religious traditions of France. Bloy’s novels made a strong critique of the hypocrisy and materialism of many nominal Catholics, a theme that would be repeated in many Catholic novels. Jacques Maritain, who was raised as a liberal Protestant, converted to Catholicism under the influence of Bloy and interpreted the philosophy and theology of St. Thomas Aquinas for the modern world.”
William S. Rubin writes, in Modern Sacred Art and the Church of Assy, that:
“Léon Bloy attacked the complacency of French bourgeois life with the fury of an Old Testament prophet; Charles Péguy, a Republican, tried to reconcile the struggle for social liberty with the French medieval heritage. Paul Claudel, François Mauriac, Georges Bernanos, and Jacques Maritain all broadened what had become a lay Catholic revival.”
This revival, although it encountered significant opposition, was both creative and fruitful resulting in the development of the Catholic Novel, the revival of Sacred Art, and the beginnings of the worker-priest movement.
In the visual arts, fervent young Catholics like Émile Bernard, Paul Sérusier, Maurice Denis and Georges Rouault played key roles in the development of Post-Impressionism, the Nabi’s, 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 and symbolist art in Belgium, Italy, Russia and Switzerland.
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.
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.
The influence of the French Catholic Revival on modern art is often entirely overlooked or described as a nostalgic reaction to militant secularism; the expression of what was felt to be absent in industrialised Europe i.e. the ‘transcendent’ or ‘otherworldly’. As such, it is seen as reactive and nostalgic; “the negative imprint of a bygone age rich in symbols and the expression of yearning and grief at the loss of an increasingly idealised past.” Symbolism, for example, has been viewed as the refuge of the decadent who chose to stay behind and reject the modernist idea of progress. The argument then goes that those who were symbolists were confronted with the paradox that, while the “underlying Symbolism of culture” which they wished to preserve had “constituted the common ground on which the cohesion of society as a whole was built,” now, in clinging to it, they themselves became lonely, isolated souls.
However, when the achievements of the French Catholic Revival are seen in full and its influence around the world understood, it becomes much more difficult to characterise it in terms of reaction and nostalgia. Instead, there is a need to understand what it was about the Catholicism of this period that influenced and inspired so many artists and intellectuals and which empowered them to be at the forefront of developments in their chosen fields.
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Olivier Messiaen - Turangalîla Symphony.
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