Manessier and Keifer: Spirituality, revelation and religious affiliation

The latest ArtWay meditation is about Alfred Manessier’s The Passion According to Matthew. Jérôme Cottin writes that ‘During World War II he went through a double conversion: to Christianity and to non-figurative art. Actually it was the first that led to the latter. Manessier came from a non-believing family. He turned to the Christian faith in September 1943, when he heard a choir of monks sing the Salve Regina in the Trappist monastery of Soligny.’  

Cottin notes that Manessier ‘belongs to the rare group of artists who were well-known internationally as well as sincere believers.’ 

Interestingly, Kathleen Soriano writes, in the catalogue for Anselm Keifer’s RA retrospective, that Keifer also had a revelation whilst at a monastery: ‘During a trip in 1966 to La Tourette, the Dominican monastery designed by Le Corbusier near Eveux, in eastern France, Keifer spent three weeks in a cell meditating on the fundamental questions of life. It was at La Tourette that he ‘discovered the spirituality of concrete’.

In contrast to Cottin, Soriano notes that ‘The search for transcendence, the connection between heaven and earth, God and man, lies at the heart of Keifer’s oeuvre, despite the fact that he would not consider himself a religious man.’

While both are, no doubt, factually correct in articulating the personal stances on faith of these two artists, it is interesting to consider why it is important to both writers to mention these specifically.

Tyler Green has written of ‘the art world’s indifference toward religion’, James Elkins of the strange place of religion in contemporary art and Dan Fox has stated that religious art ‘when it’s not kept safely confined within gilt frames in the medieval departments of major museums, is taboo.’  

Rob Colvin writes that:

‘The close relationship that art and religion maintained for several millennia has in recent decades eroded so drastically that it’s difficult to imagine fine arts and contemporary religion having anything in common. Art is, on the whole, a secular enterprise, and religion is frequently more anesthetic than aesthetic in character. The two worlds happily foster vulgar understandings of each other almost to a point of pride. Some might even suggest that adherence to one entails a rejection of, or at least critical distance from, the other.'

Benedict Read in his 1998 lecture to the Royal Society of British Sculptors noted that following the Second World War: “Churches were being repaired. New work was being installed in them. There was an expansion of church buildings with works of art in them … There is an alternative world there of the commissioning of art for specific purposes that, with no disrespect to established art historians, simply doesn't feature in our notion of cultural history in the post-war period.”

 Fox suggests that art about religion is totally kosher however; as are: “modernist dalliances with spiritualism;” the “obsessive cosmologies and prophecies” of ‘visionary’ or ‘outsider’ artists; and “a little dusting of Buddhism or Eastern philosophy.” But, “contemporary artists who openly declare affiliation to Judaeo-Christian or Islamic religions are usually regarded with the kind of suspicion reserved for Mormon polygamists and celebrity Scientologists.” David Morgan has explained this phenomonen by suggesting 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."

Why is the art world wary of religion? Fox gives five reasons:

1. “For most of the 20th century, art aligned itself with progressive rationalist secularity and radical subjectivity; the ideas that have fed into art come from modern philosophy, liberal or radical politics, sociology and pop culture rather than theology.”

2. “It’s also a question of finance: the money that funds art doesn’t come from churches or religious orders like it did hundreds of years ago.”

3. “Religion is broadly seen by many progressive thinkers to be a cause of intolerance and war.”

4. “The early 21st century has been characterised by a dangerous return to faith-based political conviction, be it radical Islam or neo-conservative fundamentalist Christianity, neither of which has much sympathy for cutting-edge art or ideas.”

5. “Also, religious organisations aren’t, of course, exactly known for their forward thinking attitudes to women or sexuality: the moral teachings of many religious denominations can be at odds with the ways artists want to live their lives.”

Keifer fits this thesis well and Soriano is also thinking within it when she writes that he ‘would not consider himself a religious man.’ In his 2011 Guardian article A Life in Art: Anselm Keifer Nicholas Wroe wrote:

‘Although his move to France coincided with an intensified investigation of myth and religion in his work, Kiefer is no longer a practising Catholic, but acknowledges that "even people who seem not to be spiritual still long for something; I'm sure this is the reason we have art and poetry. I think without spirituality we cannot live, and in this respect the best religion is Hinduism, which teaches that each religion can contain some little truth. Art is an attempt to get to the very centre of truth. It never can, but it can get quite close. It is the dogmatism of the church, the idea that words can express a single truth over hundreds of years, that is complete nonsense. The world changes. Language changes, everything changes. Paintings certainly change.’

Cottin, however, has studied the relationship of modern art to Christianity in the French-speaking world, writes regularly about Christianity and art, edits the website www.protestantismeetimages.com, and is ‘a Calvinist who is at pains to justify the importance of visual theology to the Protestant world.’ As a result, his focus is on those who either belong ‘to the rare group of artists who were well-known internationally as well as sincere believers’ or have produced significant examples of modern religious art. His book La mystique de l’art: Art et christianisme de 1900 à nos jours accordingly features in-depth studies of the work of individual artists such as Gauguin, Ensor, Arnulf Rainer, Picasso, Schmidt-Rottluff, Rouault, Chagall, Bacon, Jawlensky, Manessier, Nolde, Richier.

Both are correct but from different perspectives. Soriano writes of religious affiliation from within the viewpoint of the mainstream art world, while Cottin, from his perspective outside that world, focuses attention on those artists who have expressed religious affiliation within the mainstream art world. The story of religious art in the twentieth century is but one story among many in modernism. However the historical accuracy of the history of modernism can be enhanced through the telling of that tale in a way that refuses to see the predominant separation between art and institutional religion (Christianity, in particular) as being the only game in town.

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Van Morrison - In The Garden.