Art and faith: Decades of engagement - 1920s

This is Part 5 in a series of posts which aim to demonstrate the breadth of engagement there has been between the Arts and religion within the modern period and into our contemporary experience. The idea is to provide a brief introduction to the artists and initiatives that were prominent in each decade to enable further research. Inevitably, these lists will be partial as there is much that I don’t know and the lists reflect my interests and biases. As such, the primary, but not exclusive, focus is on artists that have engaged with the Christian tradition.

The introduction and the remainder of the series can be found at: Introduction, 1880s, 1890s, 1900s, 1910s.

• Sigrid Undset’s Kristin Lavansdatter (1920 - 1922) and Master of Hestviken (1925 – 1927), Oskar Milosz's Ars Magna (1924) and Les Arcanes (1926), Julien Green's Mont-Cinère (1926), Adrienne Mesurat (1927), and Léviathan (1928), Georges Bernanos’ Under the Star of Satan (1927) and Joy (1928), Francois Mauriac’s Le Desert de l’amour (1925), Thérèse Desqueyroux (1927), and Destins (1928), Dorothy L. Sayers’ first novel Whose Body? (1923), Kahlil Gibran’s The Prophet (1923), Alfred Noyes’ The Return of the Scare-Crow (1929) are published.
• In 1920, Maire-Alain Couturier begins studying at the Ateliers d'Art Sacré. 
• Art and Scholasticism by Jacques Maritain is published in 1920. It was in thinking of Rouault that Maritain wrote Art and Scholasticism and he also made frequent references to his artist friend in Creative Intuition in Art and Poetry (1953).
• In 1920, Louis Barillet meets Jacques Le Chevalier and they begin collaborating on their first stained glass windows founding their own workshop. Jean Hébert-Stevens and Pauline Peugniez do the same in 1923. Barillet and Le Chevalier found L'Arch et les Artisans de l'Autel, (The Arc and the Artisans of the Altar).
• During the 1920s, Bernard Walke, the Vicar of St Hilary’s in Cornwall invites many Newlyn School artists to contribute works to decorate the church and also installs statues and other paintings from other sources. The majority of the new work, including the white crucifix, the pulpit and two relief works on copper is executed by Ernest Procter. Other artists include Dod Procter, Norman Garstin, Alethea Garstin, Harold Knight, Harold Harvey, Roger Fry and Annie Walke. Some of the artifacts and Walke’s Anglo-Catholic practices are highly controversial and result in a Consistory Court and a raid by Protestant activists in 1932. Items are removed, some damaged in the process, but over the succeeding years many are returned.
• In 1920, the Guild of St Joseph and St Dominic is formed at Ditchling. David Jones becomes a Roman Catholic in 1921 and joins Eric Gill at Ditchling.
• El Cristo de Velázquez (The Christ of Velázquez) (1920) is a religious work of poetry by Miguel de Unamuno y Jugo, divided into four parts, where Unamuno analyzes the figure of Christ from different perspectives. For Unamuno, the art of poetry was a way of expressing spiritual problems. His themes were the same in his poetry as in his fiction: spiritual anguish, the pain provoked by the silence of God, time and death.
In 1921, the poet Pierre Reverdy is baptised into the Catholic faith with Max Jacob as his godfather. Jacob publishes Le laboratoire central before leaving Paris for Saint-Benoit-sur-Loire to live in the town’s historic abbey and in nearby rooms. He attends daily Mass, writes poetry, and paints in gouache. In 1922 Jacob publishes Art poétique.
• In 1921, Mainie Jellett and Evie Hone ask Albert Gleizes to become their teacher.
• In March-April 1922 the statutes of the Maritain’s Thomistic Circles are drawn up with Father Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange becoming advisor of the circles. Prayer and Intelligence is to be provided by by Jacques and Raïssa. September 30 -- October 4 sees the first retreat of the Thomistic Circles preached by Garrigou-Lagrange at Versailles.
• L’Arche participate in the exhibition of Christian Art in Paris in 1922.
• In 1922, G.K. Chesterton is received into the Roman Catholic Church.
• Alfred Noyes' epic verse trilogy The Torch-Bearers – comprising Watchers of the Sky (1922), The Book of Earth (1925) and The Last Voyage (1930) – is an eloquent exposition of a religious synthesis with the history of science.
• On 5 June 1923 Jacques and Raïssa Maritain move to 10 rue du Parc at Meudon, where they will live until war breaks out in 1940. September 26-30 sees the second retreat of the Thomistic Circles at Meudon. These will continue annually until 1940, save for 1936.
• Gino Severini returns to the Roman Catholic Church in 1923, initially through Jacques Maritain.
• In 1923, Maurice Denis, Marie-Alain Couturier, and Marguerite Huré create the first abstract stained-glass windows in the church of Notre Dame du Raincy, built by Auguste Perret.
• Valentine Reyre creates Christ aux outrages for the Abbey of Notre-Dame de Wisques in 1923 and a Virgin of the Apocalypse for the church of the French Village of the Exhibition of Decorative Arts in 1925.
• In 1924, Gino Severini receives his first church commission, wall paintings for the Swiss church of Saint Nicolas de Myre in Semsales. The work is completed between 1924 and 1926.
• After befriending a Russian Orthodox priest, Father Nicholas, following his move to Nice in 1924, Igor Stravinsky reconnects with his faith. He rejoins the Russian Orthodox Church and afterwards remains a committed Christian.
• In 1925 Jean Cocteau meets Père Henrion at Meudon and three days later makes his confession. In January 1926, Cocteau’s Letter to Jacques Maritain is published and, at the same time, Maritain’s Reply to Jean Cocteau. The exchange is published in English as Art and Faith.
• In 1925, Jacques Maritain and the novelist Julien Green meet for the first time. They correspond with one another from 1926 to 1972 with their correspondence being published as The Story of Two Souls in 1979.
• In 1925, the Society of Spiritual Artists is founded in Hungary, with Barna Basilides as a founding member.
• G.K.'s Weekly, a publication by G. K. Chesterton, is founded in 1925 (its pilot edition appearing in late 1924), which continues until his death in 1936. Its articles typically discuss topical cultural, political, and socio-economic issues as well as poems, cartoons, and other such material that pique Chesterton's interest. It contains much of his journalistic work done in the latter part of his life, and extracts from it are published as the book The Outline of Sanity. Among those whose work appears in G. K.'s Weekly are E. C. Bentley, Alfred Noyes, Ezra Pound, George Bernard Shaw, and George Orwell. The publication advocates the philosophy of distributism in contrast to centre-right and centre-left attitudes regarding socialism and industrialism.
• Antoni Gaudi dies in 1926 with the Sagrada Familia uncompleted.
• Together with Dom Paul Bellot, Maurice Stolz constructs the Saint-Crysole church in Comines (North) from 1926-1928.
• In 1926, Stanley Spencer begins work on his commission to fill a new chapel at Burghclere with images of his experiences in the First World War, at home and abroad.
• In 1926, Georges Desvallières paints L’Ascension and O Salutaris Hostia for the Church of Saint John the Baptist in Pawtucket (New England).
• Hugo Ball publishes Byzantinisches Christentum (1923) and Flucht aus der Zeit (1927), his diaries covering the beginnings of Dada and his conversion. He dies of stomach cancer in 1927.
• Bernard Walke’s Christmas story play ‘Bethlehem’ is broadcast from St Hilary’s on Christmas Eve in 1927 and it was the first ever BBC Radio drama to be broadcast from outside the BBC studios.
• In 1927, Albert Gleizes establishes an artists’ commune at Moly Sabata, where he is joined by Robert Pouyaud, François Manevy, César Geoffrey, Mido, and Anne Dangar.
• Alfred Noyes converts to Catholicism in 1927.
• In 1927, Viking Press commissions Aaron Douglas to illustrate the text of James Weldon Johnson's God's Trombones: Seven Negro Sermons in Verse.
• From the 1920s through the 1930s, groups such as the Dixie Hummingbirds, who formed in 1928, become popular. Such groups sing, usually unaccompanied, in jubilee style, mixing careful harmonies, melodious singing, playful syncopation and sophisticated arrangements to produce a fresh, experimental style far removed from the more sombre style of hymn-singing.
• In 1928, T.S. Eliot announced to a startled world, and the disapproval of his contemporaries, that his general point of view could be described as ‘classicist in literature, royalist in politics and anglo-catholic in religion.’ The previous year he had been baptised behind closed doors in Finstock Church, near Oxford.
• In 1928, Rot-Blau (Red-Blue) is formed in German-speaking Switzerland, led by Hans Stocker and Otto Staiger. Together, they win the Basel-Stadt art credit competition for the stained-glass windows of the Antonius Church in Basel. Stocker becomes an innovator of church art in Switzerland and creates stained-glass for the Catholic cathedral in Kyōto which is designed by the Swiss architect Karl Freuler.
• In 1928, while attending a church service with his sister-in-law, Thomas A. Dorsey claims the minister who prays over him pulled a live serpent from his throat, prompting his immediate recovery from a two-year long depression. Thereafter, he vows to concentrate all his efforts in gospel music. After the death of a close friend, Dorsey is inspired to write his first religious song with a blues influence, ‘If You See My Savior, Tell Him That You Saw Me’.
• As Dean of Canterbury Cathedral, George Bell commissions a new play from John Masefield which is performed in 1928, an event which, in large part, led to the establishing of a series of Canterbury plays. Bell writes to the cast, ‘We have lighted a torch which nothing can extinguish and have given a witness to the fellowship of Religion and Poetry and Art, which will go on telling in ways far beyond our own imagination.’
• Sigrid Undset is awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1928.
• In 1929, Richard Seewald converts to Catholicism in the Collegio Papio of the Benedictines in Ascona and accepts orders for murals in sacred spaces including the chapel SS. Annunziatain Ronco.
• In his 1929 enthronement address as Bishop of Chichester, George Bell expresses his commitment to a much closer relationship between the Anglican Church and the arts.

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