Airbrushed from Art History (13)

The expressive element in art, Paul Tillich believed, was able to represent directly the ultimate (i.e. “an original encounter with reality below its surface”) and, as a result, is “adequate to express religious meaning directly, both through the medium of secular and through the medium of traditional religious subject matter.”

The reason for this situation Tillich wrote was easy to find:

“The expressive element in a style implies a radical transformation of the ordinarily experienced reality by using elements of it in a way that does not exist in the ordinarily encountered reality. Expression disrupts the naturally given appearance of things … That which is expressed is the “dimension of depth” in the encountered reality, the ground or abyss in which everything is rooted.”

For Tillich this explained two important facts:

“the dominance of the expressive element in the style of all periods in which great religious art has been created and the directly religious effect of a style which is under the predominance of the expressive element, even if no material from any of the religious traditions is used.”

Therefore, he wrote in 1957, that “the rediscovery of the expressive element in art since about 1900 is a decisive event for the relation of religion and the visual arts” as it “has made religious art again possible.” The “predominance of the expressive style in contemporary art” did not mean that we already had a great religious art but did provide “a chance for the rebirth of religious art.”

Tillich thought that, looking at painting and sculpture, we found that under this predominance of the expressive style over the first fifty years of the twentieth century, “the attempts to re-create religious art have led mostly to a rediscovery of the symbols in which the negativity of man’s predicament is expressed.” So, the “symbol of the Cross has become the subject matter of many works of art – often in the style that is represented by Picasso’s “Guernica”” and that this is the “Protestant element in the present situation.” Tillich considered ‘Guernica’ to be the outstanding example of “an artistic expression of the human predicament in our period” and, as such, “a great Protestant painting.”

Tillich’s views are based on much that is standard art criticism, although the conclusions he draws from them are less so. Horst Uhr in Masterpieces of German Expressionism at the Detroit Institute of Arts, for example, states that:

“German Expressionism was less a unified style than an attitude, a state of mind that in the early years of the twentieth century existed among young artists in a number of different places – in Dresden, Berlin and Munich, as well as in various cities in the Rhineland and Northern Germany. Profoundly critical of the materialism of modern life, these artists probed man’s spiritual condition in search of a new harmonious relationship between him and his environment … they were less concerned with resemblance than with artistic vision, and sought to penetrate appearances in order to lay bare what they perceived to be the inner essence of things.”

Uhr notes that the “term expressionism and the concept of self-expression in art, however, originated not in Germany but in France.” In particular, in the atelier of Gustave Moreau, one of the chief proponents of Symbolism, who encouraged “his students to express themselves according to their individual sensibilities” and from whose atelier came the key artists in the group which came to be known as the Fauves.

Most prominent among these were Henri Matisse and Georges Rouault. Sarah Whitfield, in George Rouault: The Early Years 1903 – 1920, writes that:

“In one sense Rouault’s aims were not dissimilar from those of Matisse … [as] he identified art with expression … When Rouault compiled his replies to the Mercure de France questionnaire in 1905, he ended by saying: ‘Art, the art I aspire to, will be the most profound, the most complete, the most moving expression of what man feels when he finds himself face to face with himself and with humanity’ … Compare that to the crucial paragraph of Matisse’s ‘Notes of a painter’ published in La Grande Revue some three years later, in December 1908, which begins: ‘What I am after, after all, is expression’, and ends with the celebrated declaration: ‘Expression, for me, does not reside in passions glowing in a human face or manifested by violent movement. The entire arrangement of my picture is expressive: the place occupied by the figures, the empty spaces around them, the proportions, everything has its share.’

Rouault, like Matisse, was unable to distinguish between his feelings about life and his way of translating them into paint, which is why both painters give great weight to the word ‘expression’. But, whereas Matisse assimilates the human presence into the overall composition, makes it subordinate, Rouault puts it in charge. In this sense it could be said of him that his means of expression are the exact opposite of Matisse’s in that they do, most emphatically, ‘reside in passions glowing in a human face’. The wretchedness that emanates from the colossal head of The Accused, or the furious indignation exploding from the eyes and the mouth of The Speaker, or the heavy bloated stare of Monsieur X, enforce the point that the key image in Rouault’s art is the human head …

Like Van Gogh, Ensor, Munch, Kirchner, Beckmann and Dix, all painters who have been labeled expressionist or Expressionist, Rouault belongs to the ranks of the artists who have in them something of the preacher. They appeal to the spectator by making him a witness to human fraility and suffering. The Expressionist painter, or indeed the Expressionist writer, selects characters who can be counted upon to elicit a powerful emotional response, hence the choice of anonymous archetypes invariably picked from society’s outcasts, such as ‘the whore’, ‘the drinker’ and ‘the accused’.”

William Dyrness contends, Rouault: A Vision of Suffering and Salvation, that “Rouault’s faith was the personal and emotional expression of his painful vision of human depravity and suffering. It was an emotional refuge rather than a reasoned apologetic. And it was precisely this lived-through quality of his faith that gave his paintings their tender, sympathetic profundity.” In his book Dryness examines the themes that we have already heard preoccupied Rouault with prostitutes, clowns, judges, the poor and miserable “painted as penetrating types of the misery of human existence” but with grace also seen as “divine meaning is given to human life by the continuing passion of Jesus Christ.”

Uhr notes, that of “the French, only Georges Rouault revealed in his work a comparably serious, indeed tragic, view of life” to that of German Expressionism:

“Evident in the art of many Expressionists and their associates is a … disenchantment with material values and sympathy for the alientated and downtrodden, often combined with an idealistic plea for the transformation of the existing social order. This informs the proletarian themes of Kollwitz, the joyless dancers of Heckel, and Kirchner’s anxiety-ridden city views, inhabited by men and women whose stylish appearance is matched only by their soulless indifference to each other.

Accompanying the Expressionist criticism of modern industrialized society was a conscious effort to become uncivilized, a yearning for an unspoiled form of existence originating in Neitzsche’s vision of a Dionysian return to the wellsprings of nature …

as the open countryside became an antidote to urban life for the Expressionists, they increasingly invested nature with a transcendental significance reminiscent of the nineteenth-century German Romantic tradition … Kirchner’s coastal landscapes from Fehmarn and grandiose mountain views from Switzerland are … subjective projections of empathy with the mysterious forces of nature, as are Nolde’s luminous seascapes and flower pictures from the north German plain. Marc and Klee also developed pictorial parallels to the rhythm they perceived flowing through all of nature. While the former found accord between living beings and their environment in his animal pictures, the latter combined colour and form into poetic metaphors of the very processes of organic growth …

Interestingly, many Expressionists were drawn to religious subjects at various points in their careers, motivated not by any conventionally orthodox considerations, but by the sense of disaffection which, according to Worringer, had given rise to Gothic art. For Nolde, biblical themes offered a refuge from rational existence, and Ernst Barlach’s religious imagery stemmed from an intense longing for a new relationship between man and God. Especially during the bitter years of World War I and the period following immediately thereafter, when questions of life and death touched millions and – if humanity were to survive – man’s spiritual re-orientation became more urgent than ever, themes of guilt and atonement through suffering took on a universal significance. In Christ’s Passion, Beckmann found a surrogate for his own anguish. Schmidt-Rottluff, Pechstein, and Christian Rohlfs turned to the Old and New Testaments in search of symbols with which to express their sympathy for their fellowmen.”

Uhr writes that:

“During World War I religious subjects occupied Rohlfs’s imagination again and again and virtually dominated his graphic output … his biblical paintings and prints provided him not only with a spiritual refuge from the distressing events of the time but also a means to translate his compassion for his fellowmen into universal symbols of human suffering and redemption. Entirely in keeping with Rohlfs’s warm and gentle personality, however, nowhere in these works is there a sign of bitterness, hatred or anger. Only rarely are such Old Testament subjects as the Flood or the Expulsion from Paradise allowed to interrupt the sequence of more conciliatory themes, like the Return of the Prodigal Son, a paradigmatic motif of love and forgiveness Rohlfs treated repeatedly during these years in paintings, drawings, and prints.”

Rohlfs has been encouraged by Emil Nolde to paint with greater expressive force and Nolde was also an artist who, as Felicity Lunn writes in Emil Nolde, “regarded his religious works as central to his art” saying that “he experienced both a greater struggle and a more intense pleasure in the making of them than in any other area of his subject matter”:

“The group of paintings that Nolde made in 1909, in particular The Last Supper and Pentecost, demonstrate the artist’s attempts to portray Christian themes “with spiritual content and innerness” through a radical stylistic change … “the transformation from optical external charm to an experienced inner value”, asserted Nolde in his autobiography …

The momentum that began with these two paintings continued for three years until 1912, a period in which 24 works were produced, including The Life of Christ, stories from the New Testament, particularly events from the life of Christ and their effect on others, miracles He performed and parables …

The tour de force of Nolde’s religious painting, if not of his entire artistic output, is the nine-part work The Life of Christ. The idea of making a polyptych first came to Nolde in 1912 when he happened to place next to each other three religious paintings from the previous year. The remaining six were painted in 1912, and due to a change in Nolde’s approach during this period the polyptych is stylistically heterogeneous …

At the time Nolde was painting The Life of Christ he was experiencing great stress, caused partly by the serious illness of his wife, Ada, but also by emotional extremes of despair and optimism. The spirituality that radiates from the biblical figures in Pentecost and The Last Supper seems to have been replaced here by exaggerated, almost caricatured features often distorted by aggression and anger. Nolde was currently plagued by doubts concerning Christianity …

The third period of Nolde’s religious painting came in 1915, following his return from the Southern Seas, and was accompanied by a dramatic simplification of both form and colour. One of the most important of the seven paintings he made on religious themes was Entombment … Nolde described the work as “the most beautiful … that I was able to produce for a long time … a painting handled in light silver blue, opposite yellowish gold, and in terms of content in inner religious feeling.” Other paintings made in the same year, such as Legend: Saint Simeon and the Woman and The Tribute Money are also characterized by simpler structures, gentler and more lyrical than the passion of earlier work. Although reduced in palette, the colours are saturated and intense.”

Nolde’s religious works were recognized as significant by his supporters but “in contrast, however, were the reactions of more academic artists on the one hand, and the Church and the general public on the other.” His “religious paintings were accused of being “destructive and vandalising” and full of “clumsiness and brutality” as well as “mockery and blasphemy” and, as a result, were on several occasions removed from exhibitions. Eventually The Life of Christ was prominently displayed in the Nazi organized ‘Degenerate Art’ exhibition which sought to hold the work of many of the Expressionists and other Modernist artists up to ridicule but instead drew large and fascinated crowds.

The reaction of the Church to Nolde’s work was typical institutionally (although not, as we have seen, of a theologian like Tillich) of its response to most of the artists we have mentioned here. Dryness notes that “Waldemar George, in the October-December, 1937, issue of La Renaissance, wondered aloud why the Church had so ignored Rouault.” An answer came in an article written by Pére Couturier in the review L’Art Sacré. Couturier argued that Rouault placed “material objects in the way of spiritual appreciation” as his “dark and fierce style sometimes blurred the profundity.” Couturier was arguing that modern art revived “deeper values at the expense of secondary factors such as literal realism” and later was able to assist in windows by Rouault being incorporated in the scheme of works for the Church at Assy.

Possibly the most infamous rejection of expressionist works in a Church setting was the commission in 1919 of Stations of the Cross by Albert Servaes for the church of the Discalced Carmelites in Luythagen, a suburb of Antwerp. When they were hung, they caused such an uproar that, despite there being support from many including Father Titus Brandsma who wrote articles about and meditations on the Stations, the Roman authorities ordered them removed from the chapel. The Stations were eventually purchased by a private collector and passed through several hands before being presented to Koningshoeven Abbey in Tilburg where they were hung in the cloister as a “work of art.” Their story, and those of Servaes and Brandsma, are well told in Ecce Homo.

More positive responses to the work of Expressionist artists can, happily, be found in the UK through the welcome afforded Ernst Blensdorf and Hans Feibusch, both fleeing Nazi prejudice and denigration of their work. Feibusch found a great patron and friend in George Bell, Bishop of Chichester, and went on to become probably the greatest muralist of his day (including the decoration of many churches) while also producing easel paintings, gouaches, drawings, lithographs and sculpture. Feibusch was a prodigious artist of great passion and energy.

Blensdorf too received support from Bell’s initiatives but settled in Somerset where “the beauty and availability of Somerset Elmwood persuaded and enabled him to develop a whole new style of simple, flowing shapes.” His Centenary Exhibition catalogue records sculptures for Hanham Methodist Church Bristol, Long Ashton Church Bristol, Liverpool Metropolitan Cathedral, Salisbury Cathedral, St Edward’s Catholic Church Chandlers Ford, St Johns Glastonbury, and St Marys Bruton. He “believed in using art to express the artist’s emotional responses and spiritual values” and “his most frequent motifs were the family, women, Biblical themes, dancers, seabirds or birds of prey, all moulded into shape by an extraordinarily complete mental grasp of three-dimensional form.”

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Tribe of Judah - Thanks for Nothing.