The roots of abstract art lie in attempts to better express the essence of the spiritual in art and, from a Christian perspective, such art has predominantly been understood from two opposite poles. Richard Davey expresses one pole well when he writes, in Stations: the new sacred art, that:
“For many artists in the 20th century abstract forms have become the most appropriate way through which faith can be expressed. Artists such as Kandinsky, Rothko, Natkin and Webb have utilised the emotional and expressive qualities of colour and line which offer a profound equivalent for the experience of God. Colour, line, texture and form create a unique visual narrative that is not dependent on words and intellectual concepts. Instead they connect directly with the viewer, generating an emotional response to the work.”
Conversely, however, abstract art can also be understood as saying that God cannot be definitively captured in any representational image. God is beyond representation and is always more than the images that are used to describe aspects of God’s reality. In this sense, abstract art has affinities with the ‘via negativa’ which constantly reminds us that God is not as we have experienced or perceived him to be. As a result, abstract can be equated with absence - the absence of representation equalling the absence of God – making abstract art the art ‘par excellence’ of a modernity which declared the ‘death of God.’
Theologian John Dillenberger, and his art historian wife Jane, were particular advocates of abstraction, knowing abstract expressionists such as Barnett Newman and Mark Rothko personally. They came to maturity in the mid-twentieth century, under the strong influence of Paul Tillich’s existentialist theology, and saw in abstract expressionism an inherently spiritual search — which had the virtue of leaving behind the exhausted religious iconography of Western art.
Wassily Kandinsky’s equation of abstract art with spirituality was signalled by the publication of his book Concerning the Spiritual in Art in the year that he painted his first fully abstract work. Concerning the Spiritual in Art argued that abstraction was the best means available to artists for depicting an unseen realm.
Yet in reaching this conclusion Kandinsky had to journey from representational art to abstract art. He began his career painting representational works and gradually removed all representation from his paintings until they were fully abstract. Therefore his way into abstraction was from representation and there is a story told about Kandinsky which illustrates this transition, although the story itself may be apocryphal. In this story Kandinsky entered his studio to be confronted by a glowing and emotive combination of colours and lines without any obvious subject. He saw what appeared to be a fully abstract painting and was struck by the intensity of emotion that it evoked. On closer inspection however he realised that the painting was in fact one of his landscapes which had been turned upside down.
So, Kandinsky’s first fully abstract works derived from representational images and it is possible to get a sense of how this occurred by comparing two paintings depicting soldiers; his representational St George and the Dragon and his semi-abstract Cossacks. We can get a sense of how he proceeded if we look at the representational image with blurred vision (perhaps because we have removed our glasses). Immediately, we lose our sense of what the figures in the image represent because we cannot see sufficient detail to recognise them but we can still see generalised patches of colour and the shape and direction of objects within the picture. It was this that Kandinsky painted. As he himself said: "I applied streaks and blobs of colors onto the canvas with a palette knife and I made them sing with all the intensity I could..."
Kandinsky sought to express in his initial abstract Compositions his belief in a coming catastrophe with spiritual consequences and because he began with a figurative image of disturbance, such as the Deluge, he was able to retain that same sense of disturbance in the combination of colour and form that he painted. Looking at his Composition VI, which we know derives from an image of the Deluge, we cannot, by looking at the painting, state that we can see a representation of the flood but we can talk in terms of a sense or feeling of conflict and impending doom that pervades the swirl of shapes and colours which form the painting. As in this instance abstract art often communicates most powerfully at the level of our emotions conveying to us a sense of a state of being – conflict or doom, peace or grace – without specifying a specific source for this sense or feeling or emotion.
Kandinsky then, despite his more esoteric spiritual beliefs and investigations, initially created abstract art by abstracting from apocalyptic biblical images. Composition V is an abstraction on the theme of the resurrection of the dead where it is possible to see glimpses of angels blowing their trumpets and the towers of a walled city. More than these vestiges of representational imagery however, the work conveys a sense of infinity as the context for resurrection.
Kandinsky used abstraction to express a sense of coming disorder but, if we look at the work of some Cubist artists we can see the opposite; use of abstraction as a spiritual search for a sense of order and harmony.
Many artists in the early part of the twentieth century were searching for the universal rules that underpinned works of art. The deconstruction of representational art that occurred through movements such as Impressionism, Expressionism, Cubism and so on was, in part, the attempt to discover these fundamental rules. While Expressionism and Fauvism were movements focusing primarily on effects of colour, Cubism was a movement that experimented with form. Cubism worked with the fundamental forms of cubes and circles, lines and curves and several Cubist artists came to locate in Christian Art the rules that they thought governed the use of these fundamental forms in art. One such artist is Albert Gleizes who positioned his shapes on the canvas in relation to the height and width of the canvas and then rotated them to create a spiralling movement within the painting that keeps the eye constantly moving from shape to shape.
His sense that the mathematical means for determining the positioning of forms within the frame of the canvas derived from that developed within Christendom during the ‘Dark Ages’ in Western Europe can be seen in the way that he uses these methods to create an image of, for example, Christ in Glory. These paintings are firstly harmonious spiralling combinations of line and colour which secondly indicate a sense of figures equating to traditional images of God. These emerge from the combination of forms and are revealed as eternally united by the continual rotation of shapes within the picture frame.
Similarly, in the catalogue of the From Russia exhibition, Yevgenia Petrova writes, of Kasimir Malevich that, “the quest for one of the 20th century’s most innovative creators for new themes and a new artistic language had its source in the realm of his religious notions.” In The Avant-Garde Icon Andrew Spira seeks to demonstrate how icons underpin the development of nineteenth and twentieth-century Russian art.
During this time new ideas grounded in a radical revolutionary secularism were providing a strong challenge to the values of a society steeped in religious, faith-based traditions. Great artists such as Malevich and Larionov offered an ambivalent response to their religious heritage. Whilst they rebelled against its stifling conservation and credulity, they were also profoundly influenced by its nationalist, populist, aesthetic appeal and, ultimately, its spirituality. Malevich in particular aimed to raise the status of contemporary art to that of icons. He pared his imagery and colour down to black on white, shape on background. He spoke of his Black Cross as an icon of the new time and hung it across the corners of a room in the space traditionally reserved for an icon in a home. His black shapes represent the weight and substance of humanity in the weightlessness and void of the universe.
Spira's argument is not that the Russian avant-garde from the Wanderers to the Suprematists (and Malevich, in particular) were Christians or that they painted icons but that their appreciation of icons, their creation and their meaning, affected the aspects of the development of their work, their artistic practice and their philosophical understanding of the meaning and value of their 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."
In his book God in the Gallery, Daniel Siedell argues that iconography has been an influence of the development of Modern Art citing Kandinsky, Malevich and Mark Rothko as his key examples. The contemporary icongrapher, Aidan Hart, has made the same claim citing Constantin Brancusi, Henri Matisse, Vincent Van Gogh and Cecil Collins, among others, in addition to those cited by Siedell.
Hart's argument has three main aspects. Firstly, positive comments made by these artists regarding key aspects of iconography. Secondly, the adoption in Modern Art of many of the main stylistic techniques of icongraphy such as flatness, inverse perspective, multi-point perspective, isometry, radience etc. Thirdly, the use of abstraction as a language to express objective metaphysical truth, the essence of things. Brancusi is Hart's key witness for his Rumanian Orthodox upbringing and practice and for his aphorisms on the role of the artist such as, "The artist should know how to dig out the being that is within matter and be the tool that brings out its cosmic essence into an actual visible essence."
Similarly, Mark C. Taylor wrote at the beginning of his Disfiguring: Art, Architecture, Religion:
"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."
The Abstract Expressionists worked with contrasts of light and dark and were less concerned with form and more concerned with colour. Barnett Newman created glowing zips of colour and Mark Rothko windows or doors of light. In both there is a sense of light beyond, of an opening into the light of the divine. In both, however, something darker can also be found. Pamela Schaeffer has written:
“I found it especially fascinating to ponder some of the purer abstract works - such as the rich, dark, imageless canvases of Barnett Newman and Mark Rothko - in relation to the apophatic tradition in Christian mysticism. Masters of that tradition, sometimes called the via negativa, choose words like nothingness, darkness and obscurity to symbolize God, the wholly other Absolute who is unknowable by means of the intellect but approachable through love."
Rothko’s later paintings have often been understood as depictions of the absence of God and the darkness of the world; an impression reinforced by Rothko’s suicide on the day that the Tate received those paintings. Newman’s and Rothko’s somber, borderless canvases suggest deep silence and infinite void, yet somehow, too, evoke a sense of presence and mystery. Newman made no attempt to hide his spiritual interests. In 1943 he wrote, "The painter is concerned . . . with the presentation into the world of mystery. His imagination is therefore attempting to dig into metaphysical secrets. To that extent, his art is concerned with the sublime. It is a religious art which through symbols will catch the basic truth of life."
Roberto Balzarotti noted, in a lecture for the William G. Congdon Foundation, “the fact that in the same period (the 1960s) three eminent proponents of Abstract Expressionism – Mark Rothko, Barnett Newman and William Congdon – were working on painting cycles on a subject specifically Christian [i.e. the Rothko Chapel in Houston, TX, by Mark Rothko; the Stations of the Cross by Barnett Newman; and William Congdon’s painting], which was a truly unique circumstance, even more so given that they reached this common end following paths and motives that were absolutely different, and in any case completely independent from each other.”
Balzarotti also notes that Congdon was the only one who “adhered to a specific faith, Roman Catholic Christianity.” Congdon was a contemporary of Willem de Kooning and Jackson Pollock who painted in the style of the action painters and abstract expressionists while living and exhibiting in New York but then faded from view as he went abroad. After traveling the globe on a spiritual quest, he settled in Assisi, where he had a conversion experience and became a Roman Catholic. His most impressive paintings following his conversion are a series of over 150 crucifixes, which became more and more abstract over the years. He lived in an abandoned Benedictine monastery, while painting with bold strokes of colour and scale.
In An American Artist in Italy Rodolfo Balzarotti notes that Congdon compared his work to:
“that of his ‘brothers’ in Action Painting, painters like Pollock or Rothko. “I was born a painter in that same tremor, or thrill, of self-abandonment to the things simultaneously see and captured as the medium of painting itself, in which every appearance was already transfigured in the unpredictable miraculous birth of the image … the image, in the last analysis, of myself … there was a coincidence of rage, of having to erase a world in order to rip out of one’s innards as though giving birth the image of a new life.”
This led, Balzarotti notes, to “a phase of crisis and bewilderment, which seems to alienate him completely from the world that had been his until then.” After this phase, “Congdon began working intensely, accompanying his painting with a stringent reflection on what he was doing. His isolation, far from constituting a closing off, enabled him to let his language as an Action Painter evolve independently of what was happening on the public art scene in the 1970s and 1980s, increasingly conditioned by the phenomenon of the market, fashion, and the ephemeral.”
Jean Bazaine was a Catholic whose reading of Bergson was implicit in his abstract imagery of plunging, swirling forms. Bazaine was closely connected with the 'personalist' philosopher Emmanuel Mounier and his review Esprit which was at the forefront of debates between Catholicism, Marxism and a nascent existentialism before the Second World War.
Natalie Adamson writes that although his own painting would only make the transition from figuration to a fully “non-figurative” style between 1941 and 1944, Bazaine used his exhibition reviews for two significant press forums that were defined by their progressive Catholic outlook (the monthly journal Esprit and the weekly newspaper Temps présent) as a means of contributing towards the reinvigoration of the sterile, anachronistic formulas of art sacré in offering new, possibly non-realist, modes of representing spiritual experience.
It is as an inspired creator of works enriching the entire history of modern religious art, writes James Kirkup, that Bazaine will best be remembered, by believers and non-believers alike: the windows in the church at Asay (1943-47) in Savoie, the facade mosaics (1951) and windows (1954) of the church at Audincourt in the Jura (1954), the church of Villeparisis (1961) and a reception centre at Noisy le Grand (1955). Bazaine's vivid, dynamic works irradiating the sombre ambulatory and apsidal chapels of St Severin Paris are, according to Kirkup, one of the most wonderful series of stained-glass windows in France. These windows represent the seven sacraments of the Church, portrayed as essential forms from nature in all its glory and symbolising Water, Fire and Light, sacred emblems of Divine Grace. An appropriate biblical verse is inscribed beneath each.
Bazaine organised the clandestine, semi-abstract exhibition 'Twenty Young Painters of the French Tradition', held in defiance of the Nazis at the Galerie Braun in May 1941. This exhibition included The Lunatics (1938) by Alfred Manessier who became, in the 1950s, as Sarah Wilson writes, one of the most prominent painters of the School of Paris, a doyen of both 'lyrical abstraction' and the renewal of sacred art in France after the war. In the words of Werner Schmalenbach he was 'after Georges Rouault the only great painter of Christian art in our age':
“The 'Young Painters' combined the Cubist grid and Fauvist colour, the inheritance of Picasso and Bonnard, with semi-abstract, often religious themes; Charles Lapicque had pioneered the style with his Christ Crowned with Thorns as early as 1939. It was not until 1943, however, on a three-day retreat with the writer Camille Bourniquel that Manessier, then aged 32, experienced his profound religious conversion at the abbey of Notre Dame de la Trappe de Soligny (Orne).
The rigour of the Cistercian Trappist regime and the link between its services and the rhythms of days, night and the seasons were keenly felt by the increasingly ascetic artist. The monks' chant inspired perhaps his greatest early painting, Salve Regina, a work constructed with vertical slabs of singing reds, oranges and blues.
Manessier's works such as The St Matthew Passion (1948) continued to bring not only religious but liturgical and musical elements into purely abstract colour compositions. Titles invited readings of predominantly abstract works: in Barabbas (1952) a menacing purple circle approaches the sign for Christ - a crown of thorns - with explicit metaphorical intent. Both Manessier and Bazaine were influenced by a renascent Bergsonism: images of flux with diagonal axes in their work evoke floods of light and water, and are distinct from contemporary 'all-over' experiments in France and the United States.
In 1947, Manessier received a visit from Georges Rouault, who advised him to take up stained-glass design: from 1948 to 1950 Manessier worked on six windows for Saint Agathe des Breseaux, Doubs … Manessier has left his mark in stained glass in many beautiful churches in France and beyond, such as Saint-Pierre de Trinquetaille in Arles (1953), Notre-Dame de la Paix (Le Pouldu, Brittany, 1958), the Saint- Die cathedral (Vosges), and the convent of the Sisters of the Assumption, Rue Violet, Paris (1968-69), together with commissions in Basle, Fribourg, Essen, Cologne, Bremen and elsewhere.”
Bazaine and Manessier together founded the Association pour la Défense des Vitraux de France (the "Association for the Defense of France's Stained Glass").
Manessier wrote of seeking:
“a sort of transfiguration of the real which nourishes painting with a breath of the spirit. It's the passages between things which interest me. Something circulates amongst all forms of human experience ensuring a profound unity. I try to force myself to make that unity appear.”
Similarly, write Peter Serracino Inglott and Gino Gauci in Sacred Art in Malta 1890 - 1960, the “superb and profoundly conceived abstract work” of Alfred Chircop “wells up from a solidly Dominican formation and uncompromising following of the motto: contemplata aliis tradere.” To Dominic Cutajar, “Chircop's catharsis is tied to the cosmic transcendentalism popularised in Catholic intellectual circles by Teilhard de Chardin.”
Chircop’s paintings have been described as “outbursts of creative energy” which suggest “birth and growth, sprouting and blossoming.” “With their transparencies, quasi-magical overlaying of paint, outbursts of energy and light, and the impeccable workmanship through the wielding of the artist’s brush seemingly akin to lithe fingers caressing the strings of a harp,” writes Emmanuel Fiorentino in Alfred Chircop: Paintings 1999 – 2001, “they still manage to transfigure the core of their emotions away from any material grasp in order to let it ascend into the ethereal realm for which they offer intimations away from the crudeness of mortality.”
As a result, “the tenuous vision residing in his abstracts, consistently evolving throughout the greater part of his career, has come to tap the rarified stratosphere of a spiritual dimension, truly and justifiably lending them the epithet of landscapes of the spirit.”
Religious painting in Australia was quickened, writes Robert Hughes in The Art of Australia, by Eric Smith:
“Smith is a Catholic, and religious belief is the core of his art. His abstract work between 1956 and the present day records a continuous struggle to intensify religious experience through non-figurative techniques. The sacramental calm of his colour remained, but form became increasingly fragmented. The Moment Christ Died, 1958, is a slow explosion of flakes of colour, suggesting the separation of soul and body at the point of death. In Christ Is Risen, 1959, a figure emerges from an ecstatic flurry of energy; Smith’s human images seemed usually half-dissolved in light or blur of motion, and their bristling clusters of line were far removed from the solid, deliberate forms of earlier paintings,
By 1960 the breakdown of form was complete … The paintings with which Smith won the 1962 Helena Rubinstein Scholarship are, in some ways, a return to the structural concentration of his 1955 religious paintings. But their intensity is amplified by a more complex space and an increased poignancy of emotion, as in a gravely conceived Crucifixion, 1961 … Leaving aside the gold-leaf-and-angel merchants, there is no doubt that Smith is the first Australian artist to meet his religious impulses on a serious level of inquiry.”
Richard Kenton Webb is a contemporary British artist who has “a passion for the space; the essence of the place; a mirroring of emotion; and other abstract qualities of the land itself.” For him abstract art is about “a search for equivalents.” “As we investigate a place,” he writes, “there are many sensations that we register – the springiness of the turf underfoot, the roughness of the rock on your fingertips, the wind and rain or the scent of a rose in the morning. We can play down such sensations, but they are always there. So, how can we capture these ‘illegible’ impressions and record the non-rational, poetic associations that we experience as painters?” Abstraction provides the “different tempos, shapes, size, mood, colours and forms” needed to express how you feel about the view before you and go beyond the superficial or what is on the surface.
Mark Brooke has written that Kenton Webb’s paintings: "have a calm, assured sense of purpose. They are reduced to a stripped down essential. Colour with delicate variations. A word he often uses is "equivalent' to indicate the solutions open to the artist.... The carefully prepared canvas, often with lead white ground laid on in several coats, allows the paint when applied to seem translucent. The small intricate brush lines suggest the uneven, inconsistent and broken patterns of men's lives which somehow, when fused together, form a greater significant whole. Light will find its way through, if we can be still and see the colour.”
David Thistlethwaite writes: "Here are spaces to get into - real finite ones, where the early Creation is alone and quiet with its maker, and his Spoken Word beams intelligence and perspective into the uniformed waste - and pools of reflected gold hint at the beginnings of response.'
By contrast, Clay Sinclair is an artist who is fascinated with vibrant colour, symbolism and the potential to change. He has a unique way of painting ‘backwards’ on to perspex/ plexiglass which gives his paintings a stunning luminosity and purity of colour. He regularly uses text and loves to provoke with each piece he creates. The end results are stimulating and are often laced with a little humour. His inspiration primarily comes from observing the way we are and how we relate to each other and our environment. Issues of ego, relationship and society are themes that regularly appear and influence his work.
Sinclair says: “My paintings aim to be more than just wallpaper. I seek to create work that will engage, stimulate and provoke the viewer. By painting on perspex, my art is vibrant and luminous, but by frequently using text I force the art to be viewed as more than just an ascetic object.”
Leafa Janice Wilson notes the flawless finish and pure, unashamed colour of his works set within a geometric compositional structure:
“Where there is no physical texture on the surface, there is definitely an undulation created by different depths and colour temperatures that make these works operate effectively as highly textured and painterly works.
The colour throughout Sinclair’s works balances up the realism he provides us by the allusions to the recession and his seemingly apologetic approach to having to price his works. There is a certain intensity to the words permeating his works, which leads me to question if the absence of words would have made the same kind of visual impact on first glance … Sinclair’s keen eye for design and visual balance is reminiscent of beautiful urban images of city lightscapes.”
Makoto Fujimura's work combines traditional Japanese painting technique with a Western approach to abstraction. Born in Boston in 1960, Fujimura earned his B.A. at Bucknell, then went on to receive his Master of Fine Arts and Doctorate degrees from the Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music, where he studied the Japanese traditional technique of Nihonga. This technique uses ground minerals such as azurite, malachite and cinnabar mixed with animal hide glue applied to handmade paper. Western artists who have influenced his work include Mark Rothko and Jackson Pollock.
Kristen Frederickson, in an essay written for a 2004 exhibition of new paintings by Fujimura inspired and informed by T.S. Eliot's last poem, 'Four Quartets', wrote: "There is a component of these paintings that cannot be seen except by the naked eye: photographic representation is an inadequate translation, perhaps more for these works than most art. As the eye travels from one moment of the painting to another - from a glistening river of blue to teardrops of green, streaks of vermilion to a shimmering layer of gold leaf falling perilously across the surface - there is an element of utter abstraction and peace that belies the intense training and experience required to produce these paintings." Similarly, Fujimura has written, in 'Gravity and Grace': "We now begin to realize what we do is only temporary and indefinable. Incomplete gestures must be made, because reality beckons us to respond. Beauty, however peripheral, insists that we remain faithful to who we are, as we are."
In 'Beauty without Regret' Fujimura wrote: "The layers of azurite pigments, spread over paper as I let the granular pigments cascade. My eyes see much more than what my mind can organize. As the light becomes trapped within pigments, a "grace arena" is created, as the light is broken, and trapped in refraction. Yet, my gestures are limited, contained, and gravity pulls the pigments like a kind friend.
Every beauty suffers. A research scientist friend once told me that the autumn leaves are most beautiful on the trees by the roadside because they happen to be distressed by the salt and pollution. Every sunset is a reminder of the impending death of Nature herself. The minerals I use must be pulverized to bring out their beauty. The Japanese were right in associating beauty with death.
Art cannot be divorced from faith, for to do so is to literally close our eyes to that beauty of the dying sun setting all around us. Every beauty also suffers. Death spreads all over our lives and therefore faith must be given to see through the darkness, to see through the beauty of "the valley of the shadow of death".
Prayers are given, too, in the layers of broken, pulverized pigments. Beauty is in the brokenness, not in what we can conceive as the perfections, not in the "finished" images but in the incomplete gestures. Now, I await for my paintings to reveal themselves. Perhaps I will find myself rising through the ashes, through the beauty of such broken limitations."
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Iona - Treasure.
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