One of those writers Paul Claudel published a famous letter in which he described the contemporary churches against which Maurice Denis and his colleague, Swiss artist, Alexandre Cingria were reacting, as ‘heavily laden confessions.’ Their ugliness, Claudel insisted, was the ‘demonstration to all the world of sins and shortcomings, weakness, poverty, timidity of faith and feeling, disgust with the supernatural, dominations by conventions and formulae ... worldly luxury, avarice, boasting, sulkiness, Pharisaism and bombast.’
Running alongside that situation in the Churches, was a discourse in modern art that distanced art from Christianity. David Morgan has written that, "Moving through the discourse of Modernism in art was a dominant conception of the sacred, one which distanced art from institutional religion, most importantly Christianity, in order to secure the freedom of art as an autonomous cultural force that was sacralized in its own right."
As a result, there was the need for a reconciliation of the Artist and the Church. This is what George Bell, Bishop of Chichester, sought to bring about through his ministry:
‘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. Nor should the church be afraid to thank the artists for their help, or to offer its blessing to the works so pure and lovely in which they seek to express the Eternal Spirit. Therefore I earnestly hope that in this diocese (and in others) we may seek ways and means for a reconciliation of the Artist and the Church — learning from him as well as giving to him and considering with his help our conception alike of the character of Christian worship and of the forms in which the Christian teaching may be proclaimed.’
Bell believed that pictures could bring home to us ‘the real truth of the Bible story’ and ‘help the pages of the New Testament to speak’ to us – ‘not as sacred personages living in a far-off land and time, but as human beings ...with the same kind of human troubles, and faults, and goodness, and dangers, that we know ... today.’
Bell seemed to have had a deep personal need for things that made him feel ‘human’ in a world of increasing mechanisation. His God was a ‘humanising’ God, expressed most clearly in the life and ministry of Jesus. Art was a vehicle that helped him to feel human and to feel that God was close to him. He was aware of how the church could become a dehumanising system and of how the creativity of the artist could help to rectify this and redeem both individuals and the religion itself.
Bell’s colleague Walter Hussey wrote, in preparation for his final commission that it had been the great enthusiasm of his life and work ‘to commission for the Church the very best artists I could, in painting, in sculpture, in music and in literature.’ He was guided by the principle that, ‘Whenever anything new was required in the first seven hundred years of the history of the cathedral, it was put in the contemporary style.’ Like Bell, Hussey believed that ‘True artists of all sorts, as creators of some of the most worthwhile of man’s work, are well adapted to express man’s worship of God.’ When this is done consciously, he suggested, ‘the beauty and strength of their work can draw others to share to some extent their vision.’
As a result, his aims and work were very similar to that of the Dominican Friars Marie-Alain Couturier and Pie-Raymond Régamey who argued in ‘L’Art sacré’, the journal that they edited that ‘each generation must appeal to the masters of living art, and today those masters come first from secular art.’ Bell, Hussey, Couturier and Régamey took forward the work begun by Denis and Cingria, which by 1933 had improved so much that Denis could write, 'Catholicism is in the vanguard of the modern movement, it has its place in the forefront of arts and sciences alike ... The characteristics of the new religious art are freedom and sincerity.'
Denis, in his work, has been described ‘as a mystic of daily life.' Marc Chagall, one of the great twentieth century stained glass artists, spoke of colouring life ‘with our colours of love and hope.’ He wrote of ‘seeing life’s happenings, as well as works of art, through the wisdom of the Bible’ and of trying to express this sense in works ‘shot through with its spirit and harmony.’
The light which creates stained glass ‘is natural,’ he noted, ‘and all nature is religious.’ Therefore, ‘every colour ought to stimulate prayer’ and, whether in cathedral or synagogue, ‘the phenomenon is the same: something mystical comes through the window.’
Similarly, Alfred Manessier, another great modern stained glass artist, wrote of wanting to ‘express man’s inner prayer’ through his art. ‘The further I penetrated into non-figuration,” he said, “the more I approached the inwardness of things.’ His goal was not to ‘portray a man in his state of suffering’ but to portray ‘suffering itself.’ Similarly, paintings of the Crucifixion by artists like Albert Servaes and Graham Sutherland convey ‘a pure vertigo of grief.’
In these ways, as another stained glass artist Ervin Bossanyi said of his windows at Canterbury Cathedral, the endeavour of these artists was to give their fellow people ‘a visual and a spiritual presence which, by the force of the impact it exercises will long remain with them, just as this Cathedral's views accompany the people and remain in their memory as ever active components of a great living event.’
Basil Spence, the architect for Coventry Cathedral stated that artists create “understandable beauty to help the ordinary man to worship with sincerity.” Bishop Bell also extolled the work of artists, their imagination and their painting, a work of praise. He wrote:
‘With their hearts they are saying it - with their colour and their brushes - ‘We praise Thee, O God: we acknowledge Thee to be the Lord’. The very walls with this new glory on them are singing their praises - and we in the congregation - clergy and people - with our hearts attuned with the subject painted and that the artist created, are stirred afresh and exalted to new heights of adoration as we take our place in the great chorus of praise lifted to the Creator by all creation - man and nature - all that is noblest, strongest, wisest, and swiftest, in heaven and on earth. ‘Every created thing which is in the heaven and on the earth and under the earth and in the sea - all things that are in them - heard we saying ‘Unto Him that sitteth upon the Throne and unto the Lamb be blessing, and honour, and glory, and power, for ever and ever.’
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