William S. Rubin dismisses, in Modern Sacred Art and the Church of Assy, the attempt by some Catholic critics of his day to “retroactively cite Paul Gauguin as an important precursor of the revival of sacred art.” Rubin dismisses this view because “although Gauguin made a number of pictures with manifestly religious subject matter, they were conceived from the point of view of the nonbeliever.”
This latter point is supported by Robert Goldwater in Symbolism who notes that Gauguin’s Vision after the Sermon has “a double vision, the religious vision of the Breton women and the monk on the right, and the artist’s own inspired view of them and the power of the faith by which they are inspired.” Gauguin has been inspired, not by any faith of his own, but by “his idea ... of the sincerity and purity of a simple people.” His starting point is “an object of faith,” a symbol, “which in itself already concentrates the mood (idea) he is seeking to depict.” He is therefore “twice removed from nature” and “is free to create an ideal scene.”
Rubin then continues his argument by suggesting that Gauguin’s work “was really isolated from the development of a modern tradition in religious art except indirectly, through his influence on the symbolist esthetic of the Nabis, of which group Maurice Denis was a member.”
There are several issues with this statement. First, one of the distinctive differences in the engagement of Modern and Contemporary Art with religion and spirituality is that many artists explore and are fascinated by issues of faith without explicitly holding a religious faith themselves. As a result, art becomes observation rather than explication of faith for many modern and contemporary artists and Gauguin is possibly the first example of this significant trend.
In Coming Home: Self-Taught Artists, the Bible and the American South Erika Doss gives a more contemporary example of an artist revealing and negotiating issues of faith and spirituality. Assemblage artist Ed Kienholz often employed Christian symbols in his work in order to question and appraise Christian belief by scrutinising its assumptions and practices:
“The installation sculpture 76 J.C.s Led the Big Charade ... features seventy-six framed icons of Christ, mounted on the handles of children’s toy wagons and bearing the arms and feet of baby plastic dolls. Kienhloz admired faith but detested its abuse; he was profoundly cynical, as he said, about “the hypocrite who prays in church on Sunday and then preys on his neighbours and associates the rest of the week.” Made from recycled materials and found objects, Kienholz’s installation clearly calls into question the meaning and practice of religious faith in everyday life.”
Second, if Gauguin did influence Denis then that, by itself, was a major impact on the revival of sacred art, as Denis went on to become arguably the most influential figure of that revival. Finally, it may be that Rubin is viewing the argument from the wrong perspective. In order to see the influence of Christianity on the development of Modern Art in this period it is necessary to look not so much at the influence of Gauguin but at the artist that was himself an influence on Gauguin.
When we ask ourselves why it is that this period finds Gauguin painting pictures that are positive observations of the faith of others, we find that he had a “catalytic encounter” with the fervent Catholic artist Émile Bernard in Pont-Aven during the summer of 1888 which led on to the recruiting of Paul Sérusier in the autumn and then the conversion of the Nabi group in Paris to synthetism. Bernard rediscovered his Catholic faith through visits to Brittany, writing in 1886:
“I returned a devout believer ... Brittany has made a Catholic of me again, capable of fighting for the Church. I was intoxicated by the incense, the organs, the prayers, the ancient stained glass windows, the hieratic tapestries and I travelled back across the centuries, isolating myself increasingly from my contemporaries whose preoccupations with the modern industrial world inspired in me nothing but disgust. Bit by bit, I became a man of the Middle Ages. I had no love for anything save Brittany.”
Bernard expressed this essence or Idea that he held to be a truthful representation of Brittany in the painting Breton Women at a Pardon, a painting that combines a synthetist style with a religious subject matter. Bernard was later to cite this painting as proof of his claim to have introduced Gauguin to the ideas that resulted in the Vision after the Sermon.
The debate over who influenced who has revolved around whether the cloisonnisme developed by Bernard and Louis Anquetin the previous summer influenced the synthetism used by Gauguin in these paintings. Regardless of the whys and wherefores of that argument, it would seem clear that Bernard’s Catholicism influenced the subject matter of Gauguin’s paintings. For instance, Michelle Facos, in Symbolist Art in Context, notes that Gauguin painted Vision after witnessing a Pardon (including its wrestling match, which may have "evoked for Gauguin the biblical episode of Jacob wrestling with the angel") and asks whether Gauguin was "struggling with his own agnosticism in the face of Breton peasant piety and that of the Bernard siblings."
Bernard’s goal was “to create a ‘spiritual meaning’ to match the styles of the past – Byzantine, Egyptian or Gothic, and which, like them ‘collective and religious’, would express the whole epoch.” Bernard aimed to “achieve stylisation and significant harmony” in order to “more profoundly convey the underlying ideas” because that was “where the symbol began.”
Everything was nourishment for this symbolism, Bernard wrote, “nature, the Breton Calvaries, the images d’Épinal, popular poetry ... In sum, symbolism did not paint things, but “the idea of things”.”
Bernard’s writings actually support Rubin’s view of the influence of Gauguin on the revival of sacred art, in that he believed Gauguin to be incapable of spiritual meaning “since he lacked true Christian belief.” As a result, “his work was only a simulacrum, ‘a symbolism without symbol’, and his religious themes, painted only at Bernard’s instigation, were a mere pretence.”
Goldwater contests this claim by using Bernard’s faith to argue for the relative weakness of his work in contrast to that of Gauguin. He claims that Breton Women has no sense of symbolism and remains only a Breton genre scene “concerned with purely visual harmonies.” As a result, he then argues that “Bernard’s work, in comparison with Gauguin’s, does not bear out his philosophical contention that only a formal religious belief can infuse symbolist art with true meaning.” But in arriving at this conclusion Goldwater has to overlook the religious subject matter of Breton Women, something attested to in “an inscription in Bernard’s hand on the verso of the canvas.”
It seems then that his view that “a clear religious message, conceived more in traditional than personal terms” leads Bernard close to a ‘literary’ art, may reflect more of Goldwater’s prior expectations than the synthesis between art and faith that Bernard actually achieved. This is further suggested when Goldwater makes similar criticisms of the effect of Denis’ faith on his art but only on the basis that Denis’ art is focussed on peaceful resolutions rather than struggle and mystery.
In Bernard’s work the idea or symbol – the soul of the Breton people – is intended to emerge simply from the depiction of the women themselves at the Pardon. In this sense he is actually using less traditional Christian imagery than Gauguin in the Vision after the Sermon. The fact that Goldwater can either overlook or ignore this to describe Breton Woman simply as a market genre scene with no symbolism, intended or otherwise, suggests too that Bernard’s symbolic synthesis was not fully realised in this painting.
Bernard’s paintings never achieved the influence of Gauguin’s and his writings never achieved the level of influence of Denis who went on to draw deeply on the ideas and approaches shared between Bernard and Gauguin during the summer of 1888 in Pont-Aven. Nevertheless, Bernard’s influence on Gauguin and through him on the Nabis and the wider development of symbolism was significant and one which came from and through Christianity. So much so, that symbolism itself can be seen as tinged with a religiosity that is, in part, Catholic and Bernard can be understood as a father of symbolism.
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James MacMillan - Veni Veni Emmanuel: V. Gaude Gaude.
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