A tale of two churches is central to the story that I sought to tell through my sabbatical art pilgrimage. The two churches are Notre-Dame des Alpes in Le Fayet and Notre-Dame de Toute Grâce on the Plateau d'Assy. Both are only kilometres apart in the French Alps and were built by same architect in a similar style yet they represent different stages in the sparking of inspiration from the Holy Spirit that led to the twentieth century’s revival of sacred art.
My sabbatical art pilgrimage involved visits to significant sites connected with the renewal of religious art in Europe during the twentieth century. In Europe I visited sites connected with the artists surrounding Maurice Denis, Jacques Maritain, Albert Gleizes and Marie-Alain Couturier, while, in the UK, I primarily visited sites which highlighted the influence of the innovatory commissions undertaken by George Bell and Walter Hussey. These were they that were primarily responsible for the sparking of inspiration in church commissions in this period of time.
At the beginning of the twentieth century modern art looked, sounded and felt very different from the art that had traditionally been made for the Church. This meant that the Church tended to avoid using modern art while many modern artists were excitedly exploring new ways of creating art and often couldn’t see any connection between what they were doing and the styles of art which the Church continued to use.
As a result, a whole segment of society – artists and art lovers – was not being impacted by Christianity. Denis, Maritain, Gleizes, Couturier, Bell and Hussey made it their life’s work to reconnect the Church with modern art. The key debate that they had, through their actions and writings, was whether the sparking of inspiration was best done by artists who were Christians and who primarily focused their work on church decoration or by artists who were reckoned to be contemporary masters, regardless of whether or not they practised the faith.
It was that debate which was played out through the commissions for the churches at Le Fayet and Assy. The decoration of St. Paul Grange-Canal in Geneva by Denis, Alexandre Cingria and others in 1913 – 1915 served as a manifesto for the renaissance in modern sacred art that they and others facilitated. This led to the founding in 1919 of the Ateliers d’Art Sacré in Paris by Denis and Georges Desvallières as well the Group of St Luke and St Maurice in Switzerland by François Baud, Cingria, Marcel Feuillat, Marcel Poncet and Georges de Traz. Both groups produced significant work for many churches in subsequent years.
In 1935 the Group of St Luke secured the decoration of the new church of Notre-Dame-des-Alpes by means of a tender process assessed by Maritain, the Catholic art critic Maurice Brillant and the director of the Ecole des Beaux Arts in Geneva, Adrien Bovy.[i] The process and the resulting work was a showcase for the renaissance of sacred art in which Denis, Maritain and Cingria had played key roles. It was this stage of the revival that was later challenged by the commissions selected for Notre-Dame-de-Toute-Grâce.
Although he trained at the Ateliers d’Art Sacré and worked on schemes of stained glass with its artists, together with his fellow Dominican Friar Pie-Raymond Régamey, Couturier argued in ‘L’Art sacré’, the journal which they jointly edited, that ‘each generation must appeal to the masters of living art, and today those masters come first from secular art.’[ii] Couturier worked with the parish priest at Assy, Canon Jean Devémy, on commissions for the church at Assy.
Initially their commissions were within the earlier phase of the renaissance of sacred art as sparked by the Holy Spirit. On the basis of his work at Le Fayet, Devémy selected Maurice Novarina as architect for Assy. As at Le Fayet, Novarina used his regional style with a chalet-style pitched roof and locally sourced materials. Initial commissions for the nave windows went to artists who had been active in modernist Church decoration before the war but Couturier then moved on to commission Pierre Bonnard, Marc Chagall, Fernand Léger, Jacques Lipchitz, Jean Lurçat, Henri Matisse, Germaine Richier and Georges Rouault.
William S. Rubin noted that this ‘radical aspect’ of Couturier’s plan proved deeply controversial as commissioning modern ‘masters … from secular art’ meant that ‘Side by side with works of the pious Catholic Rouault one saw those of Jews, atheists, and even Communists - a revolutionary situation that struck the keynote of a new evangelical spirit ...’ As a result, ‘Even before its dedication in 1950, the church had become the center of an increasingly bitter dispute which was to cause a marked rupture between the liberal and conservative wings of the clergy and laity during the following years.’[iii]
Despite the controversy caused Couturier’s approach to commissioning sparking inspiration for others and has become part of the commissioning landscape for churches. In England, Bishop Bell sought ‘ways and means for a reconciliation of the Artist and the Church’ while Hussey made it the great enthusiasm of his life and work ‘to commission for the Church the very best artists.’ Both experienced opposition and criticism but at St Matthew’s Northampton, St Michael and All Angels Berwick and Chichester Cathedral enabled commissions by a range of contemporary masters.
My visits to these and other churches confirmed for me the continuing value of commissions made at both stages of the twentieth century renaissance in sacred art. Both churches, Le Fayet and Assy, contain artworks which speak powerfully and movingly of the Christian faith and therefore also inform the spirituality of those who see them. Significant work was done throughout the twentieth century both by artists who were Christians and who primarily focused their work on church decoration and also by artists who were reckoned to be contemporary masters, regardless of whether or not they practised the faith. This continues to be the case in contemporary church commissions and, as a result, one of the lessons we can learn from the twentieth century revival of sacred art and its sparking of inspiration is that debate which sets ‘Christian’ artists against secular masters is unnecessary.
Churches need encouragement and validation to commission challenging and innovative work from either group of artists because the sparking of inspiration by the Holy Spirit derives not from our alignment with statements of belief but from the sharing of our contemplative seeing. As we have been reflecting through this book, this is based on slowing down in order to sustain silent looking by immersing ourselves in the world created by the work combined with reflection on sources. It is this that enables a positive cycle of creativity by sparking inspiration from the Holy Spirit.
Jesus’ disciples spent three years not understanding what he was saying and doing before running away, deserting and denying him at the crucifixion. Then the Day of Pentecost happened and the coming of the Holy Spirit was the moment when it all came together for them, when they finally understood and both knew their part in God’s plan and could begin to play it.
When the Spirit came they could speak in languages they had never learned and were understood, they could explain the scriptures although they were uneducated and their explanations made sense. They could proclaim Jesus as Lord and Christ and people responded to their challenge, and they knew how to structure and organise the new community that grew around them in response to their message. All that Jesus had said to them and done with them suddenly made sense and was useful to them because the Spirit had come and brought clarity and revelation. That is what Jesus had promised them would happen. That is the work which the Holy Spirit comes to do in our lives. Jesus told the disciples that when the Spirit came he would lead them into all truth. In other words, they would have that experience of inspiration being sparked; of revelation, of clarity, of things making sense, coming together and connecting.
This is an experience that is common to artists. Written In My Soul is a series of interviews with some of the most well-known singer-songwriters from the 1950s onward. Many of these great artists – Bob Dylan, Neil Young, Van Morrison and others - felt that their songs were given to them in moments of revelation, that their songs were already written and ‘came through them as though radio receivers – without much conscious effort or direction.’[iv]
That is an experience of the Spirit coming, although often not recognised as such. It has also been my experience, both in creating and preaching. I will often reflect or meditate on an experience, a song, an image, a Bible passage, by putting it in my mind, carrying it around in my mind over several days or weeks, reminding myself of it from time to time and just generally living with it for a period of time. When I do so, then I find that, at some unexpected moment, a new thought or idea or image will come to me that makes sense or takes forward the experience or song or image or passage on which I had been reflecting.
This is not just something for artists or even for preachers, it is something that can happen for us all; not just in major life-changing moments of revelation but also in a series of minor everyday epiphanies. Corita Kent writes that there is ‘an energy in the creative process that belongs in the league of those energies which can uplift, unify, and harmonize all of us.’ This energy or spark or inspiration, ‘which we call “making,” is the relating of parts to make a new whole.’[v]
If done well, this sparking of creativity gives rise to a sparking of response: ‘… the work of art gives us an experience of wholeness called ecstasy – a moment of rising above our feelings of separateness, competition, divisiveness “to a state of exalted delight in which normal understanding is felt to be surpassed” (Webster’s).’ This is as we should expect, as the ‘very word imagination implies that you are into territory no one has ever been to before.’ As a result, ‘a rigid discipline that demands one “right” way is confining and limiting.’[vi]
There is a third spark that precedes those describes thus far. Kent says that new ideas ‘are bursting all around and all this comes into you and is changed by you.’[vii] We are all each other’s sources and anything that comes our way, including the work of artists, ‘is a place for starting’.[viii] Contemplative prayer or reflection enables us to see and grasp these inspirations as they burst around us. Sparks of inspiration and creativity come to us in this way because, as Anaïs Nin notes, there are ‘very few human beings who receive the truth, complete and staggering, by instant illumination.’ Instead, we ‘acquire it fragment by fragment on a small scale, successive developments, cellularly, like a laborious mosaic.’[ix]g
The acquiring of fragments and creative linking of these to form a mosaic as commended by Kent and Jan Steward via Nin may remind us of Betty Spackman’s approach with ‘A Creature Chronicle’. Another artist inspired to create in this way, as a means of mirroring or depicting the contemplative creative process itself, was Marc Chagall. Chagall’s art is one that connects and reconciles disparate images of Bible, experience, history, memory and myth on the canvas through colour and composition. In his work Chagall links up different, unusual and unlikely images in a way that makes visual and emotional sense; in a way that communicates his love of his home, his world, his people, its sights, sounds and smells. He succeeds in ‘achieving a pictorial unity through the yoking of motifs taken from different realms of given reality.’[x] He reconciles emotions, thoughts, and reminiscences with lines, colours and shapes to create harmonious, meaningful paintings. Walther and Metzger have suggested that ‘no other twentieth century artist had Chagall's gift for harmonising what were thought to be irreconcilable opposites.’[xi] That was actually far from being the case, yet the fact that this might seem so is to recognise the lack of awareness and understanding shown to the art of contemplation in modern and contemporary art by critics and the Church alike. This has been to the wider detriment of society and has meant that some artists using the approaches described in this book have been under-appreciated in regard to recognition and, in other respects, as to intent.
The approaches to creative and Spirit-inspired sparking of these artists have synergies with the approaches of David Jones in The Anathemata and T. S. Eliot in The Waste Land. What these poets did in constructing a whole from fragmentary materials is also essentially similar to the form and construction of the Bible itself. Writer and minister, Mike Riddell has described the Bible as 'a collection of bits' assembled to form God’s home page while the Anglican priest Mark Oakley used a more poetic image when he wrote that the Bible is 'the best example of a collage of God that we have.' Riddell continued by saying that, 'what holds all these bits together is the fact that they somehow represent the continued involvement of God with the world in general and humanity in particular.'[xii] Oakley suggested that 'held together, they form a colourful and intriguing picture that draws us into its own landscape' and enables Christians to 'glimpse something of the divine being and his life in the world' and find 'a vocabulary for the Christian life.'[xiii]
What also holds them together is the Spirit-inspired sparking of creativity in creating and linking fragments of meaning that we have been exploring through the work of Chagall, Eliot, Jones, Kent and Spackman. It may be that it is this form of inspiration to which the Bible itself wants to point us when, in 2 Timothy 3.16, we read that ‘All scripture is inspired by God.’ Sparks of the Spirit – the inspiration of God – come not in one fully realised and systematised creation but fragment by fragment, to be creatively linked and held together in a collage of revelation.
This place of renewed inspiration, creativity and revelation is reached by means of learning to see as opposed to merely looking. The ways of learning to see that we have explored enable us to genuinely pay attention by slowing down, sustained looking, surrendering ourselves to art by immersing ourselves within it, staying with the silence inherent in much art, study of sources, the sharing of experiences, and an openness to inspiration, the sparking of the Spirit. In learning to use these ways of paying attention we are opening the gift the artist offers of sharing with us the mindful and prayerful act of seeing; to spend time noticing, looking intently and making careful observation in order to make material from their thoughts and ideas. With these ways of seeing in place, we can now see that there is beauty in all art and life as seen through the concept of sacrament, of heaven in the ordinary, including the artefacts of art. It is this that we contemplate. It is this to which we pay attention. It is this that is prayer.
Explore
Chagall's unitive vision finds echoes in the work of some of his peers and has been taken up, responded to and developed by other later artists.
Cecil Collins, in painting fools and angels found a means of depicting divine and human action and response. Collins viewed art as ‘an interpenetration between worlds, as a marriage of the known with the unknown’. In art, he said, the ‘imagination searches out and prefigures the mysterious unity of all life’. As a result of this metaphysical purpose and exploration ‘a picture lives on many different levels at once, it is an interpenetration of planes of reality, it cannot be analyzed or anatomised into single levels because one level can only be understood in the light of others. The reality or interior life of the picture can only be realised as a total experience.’[xiv] That total experience in Collins' work is unitive experience; whether this is the attempt at reconstituting the world that is Images in Praise of Love or the complex combination of symbol and structure that hymns the marriage union and reconciles masculine and feminine qualities in The Artist and His Wife.
Collins was also preoccupied by our expulsion from the Garden of Eden and our longing to return; in itself a reconciliation. This is a theme that was also taken up by Norman Adams. Adams' produced a questioning, probing work based on the expulsion and inspired by Paul Gauguin's Where do we come from? Who are we? Where are we going? An everyman figure is on a sloping pathway which he could be ascending or descending. Above him is a mass of blooming flowers, below a confused, muddy zone of swirls and scraping. His predicament poses the question to us as viewer, are we returning to Eden reconciled to God or descending into confused self-interest? The religious subject matter of Norman Adams' paintings provides him with geometry, a structure of lines and circles that allows his complex colours, his masterly and distinctive use of watercolour, to work their magic.’[xv] For Sister Wendy Beckett this ability of Adams' suggests that a mystical sense of oneness is making itself visible in his work.[xvi]
John Reilly was as strong and explicit as Collins in setting out his intentions: ‘My paintings are not concerned with the surface appearance of people or things but try to express something of the fundamental spiritual reality behind this surface appearance. I try to express in visible form the oneness and unity of this invisible power, binding all things into one whole.’[xvii] Using lessons learnt from Orphism and Rayonism he constructed a pattern of rippling rays emanating from a central source of light. Within this structure he set objects and figures composed of abstract shapes and colours that are indicative of their spiritual qualities. A painting like No Parting includes natural formations, animals, human figures and plants held together, underpinned, in eternal circulation by the central point, which some may see as a pictorial device structuring a work of beauty and others as symbolic of God. In Universal Power - The Fourth Day of Creation we are shown a snapshot of creation, of the first reconciliation of shape and form. As Reilly's abstract shapes spiral out from the central point they coalesce into those same fundamental, elemental shapes of bird, plant and human life.
For David Jones reconciliation comes through the tangle of associations and allusions triggered by words and images. Caroline Collier has noted his ‘fondness for entwinings, for complications, interrelationships, layers and correspondences.’[xviii] We see this most clearly in his use of line but, as Nicolette Gray notes in her comments on Curtained Outlook, the level of unity achieved throughout his work is much greater than simply this alone:
‘The artist has woven a complex of components into a new unity. The verticals of the window-frame, the windows and balustrade of the house outside, and of the jug on the table, are counterbalanced by the horizontal of the sill and the balcony, and by the outward-moving diagonals of the table, the toothbrush and box lid, and the downward-moving lines of the house. Movement runs throughout the composition - there is not a single straight line, not a flat wash of colour. The sudden accents of colour/tone/drawing pick up the movement of the composition. The drawing itself is part soft pencil, part brush drawing in colour, here sketchy, there emphatic. All the elements are worked together: form and content have been reconciled, unity combined with movement.’[xix]
Giles Auty, in writing of Norman Adams, noted that he belongs ‘to a relatively small tradition of painters whose outlook is positive’: ‘An affirmative vision such as his is especially rare in the modern art of the West, artists preferring to shelter more frequently behind masks of disillusionment and cynicism. Indeed, such negative views of life have the additional bonus of being perennially in fashion, the large black-humoured painting sharing something of the timeless chic of the little black dress.’[xx] The tradition of affirmative, unitive, figurative art may be small yet it remains significant, if undervalued.
Wonderings
I wonder if you can recall a moment when something new was sparked in you.
I wonder if you can remember what led to that sparking and how it felt.
I wonder what you did with that new something.
Prayer
Creating God, for whom creation is your prayer, may I see creativity as noticing and naming, letting all things be by attending to them for your sake and to see your goodness; that all may be well and all manner of thing be well. Amen.
Spiritual exercise
Take the phrase ‘Through the veil’ and ruminate on it in your heart and mind. Create a list in whatever way you wish of all that this phrase brings to mind for you. Use your list to begin a creative project of whatever kind you wish entitled ‘Through the veil’.
Art actions
View John Reilly’s work at http://thejohnreillygallery.co.uk/index.htm.
Watch the documentary ‘Bill Viola: The Road to St Paul’s’ which follows the world’s most influential video artist Bill Viola and his wife and close collaborator Kira Perov over a twelve-year period as they undertake and complete the installation of their two permanent video works, Mary and Martyrs, in St. Paul’s Cathedral.
Click here for the other parts of 'Seeing is Receiving'. See also 'And a little child shall lead them' which explores similar themes.
[i] L. Mamedova, ‘L’église Notre-Dame des Alpes à Saint-Gervais-le Fayet : une collaboration entre un architecte savoyard et un artiste genevois’, Publié dans L. el-Wakil et P. Vaisse, Genève-Lyon-Paris. Relations artistiques, réseaux, influences, voyages, Genève, Georg, 2004 - http://www.okam-design.com/lada/files/Fayet-article.pdf
[ii] M-A Couturier, ‘What Assy Teaches Us’ in Sacred Art, University of Texas Press, 1989, p.52
[iii] W.S. Rubin, Modern Sacred Art and the Church of Assy, Columbia University Press, New York & London, 1961
[iv] B. Flanagan, Written In My Soul, Omnibus Press, 1990, p. xii
[v] C. Kent & J. Steward, Learning by Heart, Allworth Press, 2008, p.5
[vi] C. Kent & J. Steward, Learning by Heart, Allworth Press, 2008, pps.90-91
[vii] C. Kent & J. Steward, Learning by Heart, Allworth Press, 2008, p.50
[viii] C. Kent & J. Steward, Learning by Heart, Allworth Press, 2008, p.48
[ix] Cited in C. Kent & J. Steward, Learning by Heart, Allworth Press, 2008, p.94
[x] Ingo F. Walther and Rainer Metzger, Marc Chagall 1887 – 1985: Painting as Poetry, Taschen, 2000, p. 20
[xi] Ingo F. Walther and Rainer Metzger, Marc Chagall 1887 – 1985: Painting as Poetry, Taschen, 2000, p. 89
[xii] M. Riddell, God’s home page (Oxford: The Bible Reading Fellowship, 1998), pps.24 & 25
[xiii] M. Oakley, The Collage of God (London: Darton, Longman and Todd Ltd, 2001), p.21
[xiv] Writings and statements by the Artist, Cecil Collins A Retrospective Exhibition, Judith Collins, Tate Gallery, 1989
[xv] M. Walters in ‘Images of Christ’, Modern Painters VI/2
[xvi] Sister W. Beckett, ‘Norman Adams’ in Modern Painters IV/1
[xvii] J. Reilly, ‘Introduction’ in The Painted Word: Paintings by John Reilly, Cross Publishing, 2008
[xviii] Caroline Collier, ‘Under the Form of Paint ...’ in David Jones: Paintings. Drawings. Inscriptions. Prints., The South Bank Centre, 1989
[xix] N. Gray, The Paintings of David Jones, Lund Humphries Publishers Ltd, 1989
[xx] G. Auty, ‘An Affirmative View’ in Norman Adams, R.A., Christopher Hull Gallery, 1991
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