Art and faith: Decades of engagement - 1940s

This is Part 6 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, 1920s, 1930s.

• From 1940-42, T.S. Eliot publishes Four Quartets. He is awarded the Nobel Prize in 1948.
• W.H. Auden returns to the Anglican Church in 1940 after seven years of thought about the moral content of Christianity, about what it means to love—or not to love—one's neighbour as oneself.
• In 1941, Dorothy L. Sayers’ The Man Born To Be King is broadcast on the BBC. The Mind of the Maker, which explores the analogy between a human creator and the doctrine of the Trinity in creation, is published.
• Murals are commissioned in 1941 from Duncan Grant, Vanessa and Quentin Bell for St Michael & All Angels Berwick representing a fulfilment of George Bell’s vision to be a catalyst for promoting the relationship between the Arts and the Church.
• In 1941, Sándor Nagy completes frescos in Pesterzsébet St. Elisabeth Church.
• Dominique and John de Menil meet regularly with Marie-Alain Couturier in New York from 1941 until his return to France after the War.
• Olivier Messiaen’s Quatuor pour la fin du temps (Quartet for the End of Time) is first performed in January 1941 to an audience of prisoners and prison guards, with the composer playing a poorly maintained upright piano in freezing conditions. The title's "end of time" alludes to the Apocalypse.
• Simone Weil writes her Letter to a Religious to Marie-Alain Couturier at the suggestion of Jacques Maritain in 1942 when both Weil and Couturier are in the United States.
• In 1943, David Gascoyne publishes Poems 1937-1942 with illustrations by Graham Sutherland. In these mystical poems Gascoyne writes as an agonized Christian seeker desperate for a transcendent realm beyond the mortal world. Sutherland and Francis Bacon, friends at that time, work on crucifixion-inspired images which drew on photos of the recently liberated Nazi death camps and took inspiration from T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land and Picasso’s crucifixion drawings. Sutherland paints a Crucifixion for St Matthew’s Northampton (1946) and Bacon, Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion (1944).
• In 1943, José Clemente Orozco paints Cristo destruye su cruz.
• In 1943, the artist Colin McCahon and poet James K. Baxter first meet in Brighton, New Zealand.
• Albert Gleizes writes Spirituality, Rhythm, Form at the end of 1943 for a special edition of the Lyon-based journal, Confluences, devoted to 'Les Problèmes de la Peinture'. A Benedictine monk, Dom Angelico Surchamp, still at the time only a novice, came on the strength of Spirituality, Rhythm, Form to study with Gleizes. In 1951, the publishing house Zodiaque was established by Surchamp at his monastery, l'Abbaye de Ste Marie de la Pierre-qui-Vire, becoming well known for its large and impressive collection of books on Romanesque art.
• On a three-day retreat in 1943 with the writer Camille Bourniquel, Alfred Manessier experiences a profound religious conversion at the abbey of Notre Dame de la Trappe de Soligny (Orne).
• In 1944 André Girard has the first of several solo shows featuring his religious work at New York’s Bignou Gallery. In 1948 Girard is commissioned by Saint Vincent Archabbey to execute a triptych depicting St. Bernard of Clairvaux for the Archabbey’s crypt. In 1949 he visits Blessed Sacrament Church at Stowe to install his paintings of the Way of the Cross and offers to decorate the entire church, painting 36 windows plus large-scaled murals on the outer walls of the church.
• Henry Moore's 'Madonna and Child' sculpture (1944) and Graham Sutherland's 'Crucifixion' (1946) are unveiled at St Matthew’s Northampton. 'Litany and Anthem for St Matthew's Day' is commissioned from W.H Auden (1945) and 'The Outer Planet' from Norman Nicholson (1949).
• Max Jacob is arrested by the Gestapo in France in 1944 and dies at the Drancy internment camp en route to Auschwitz. Meditations Religieuses a volume of the artist’s devotional writings from the time of the Nazi Occupation is published posthumously.
• In 1944, the poet Kathleen Raine converts to Catholicism.
• The literary and arts review Orígenes is founded in 1944 by José Lezama Lima and José Rodríguez Feo.
• In 1944, Thomas Merton publishes his first poetry collection and, in 1948, The Seven Storey Mountain. He writes his first letters to Evelyn Waugh, who was editing The Seven Storey Mountain. Until his death in 1968, Merton corresponded with writers around the world, developing an ever-widening circle of friends including Czeslaw Milosz, Henry Miller, Walker Percy, Boris Pasternak, and others.
• In 1944, Religious Art Today and An Exhibition of Religious Art Today at the Dayton Museum of Art in Ohio and the Institute of Modern Art in Boston respectively features contemporary American and European painters known for their interpretations of biblical themes.
• Sister Rosetta Tharpe’s 1945 hit ‘Strange Things Happening Every Day’ is the first gospel record to cross over, hitting no. 2 on the Billboard "race records" chart, the term then used for what later became the R&B chart, in April 1945. The recording has been cited as a precursor of rock and roll and has been called the first rock and roll record.
• Bill Monroe, with his band the Blue Grass Boys, creates the bluegrass music genre. The classic lineup of the band comes together with the addition of Lester Flatt and Earl Scruggs in December 1945. Gospel-themed numbers are credited to the "Blue Grass Quartet", which featured four-part vocal arrangements accompanied solely by mandolin and guitar – Monroe's usual practice when performing "sacred" songs. Monroe's performing career spans 69 years as a singer, instrumentalist, composer and bandleader.
• In 1945, Romare Bearden exhibits his Passion series at G Place in Washington D.C.
• In 1945, Arthur Boyd paints The Mockers and The Mourners.
• In 1945, E. Martin Browne takes over the 150-seater Mercury Theatre, Notting Hill Gate, and devotes it for the next three years to the production of modern verse plays, with first productions of plays by Christopher Fry, Ronald Duncan, Norman Nicholson and Anne Ridler, all directed by Browne himself.
• In 1946, Hans Feibusch’s Mural Painting is published.
• Nikos Kazantzakis writes Zorba the Greek (1946) and Christ Recrucified (1948).
• In 1946, The Dixie Hummingbirds sign a record deal with Apollo Records, a growing New York based label. Apollo Records also sign Mahalia Jackson. Groups such as the Dixie Hummingbirds, Pilgrim Travelers, Soul Stirrers, Swan Silvertones, Sensational Nightingales and Five Blind Boys of Mississippi introduce more stylistic freedom to the close harmonies of jubilee style Black Gospel.
• Nationwide recognition comes for Mahalia Jackson in 1947 with the release of "Move On Up a Little Higher", selling two million copies and hitting the number two spot on Billboard charts, both firsts for gospel music.
• In 1947, Arnold Schoenberg writes his memorial to the victims of the Holocaust, A Survivor from Warsaw.
• In 1947, Alfred Manessier receives a visit from Georges Rouault, who advised him to take up stained-glass design. Stained glass windows created by Manessier in 1948 for the church of Sainte-Agathe des Bréseux are the first non-figurative designs to be incorporated in an ancient building.
• On November 24, 1947, Caroline Gordon converts to Catholicism. Gordon is a friend and mentor to Brainard Cheney, Flannery O’Connor and Walker Percy. Influenced by Gordon, the Cheney’s also convert to Catholicism. Gordon introduces the Cheney’s to Flannery O'Connor, with whom they became close friends.
• In 1947 Sadao Watanabe wins the first prize from the Japan Folk Art Museum; and the Kokugokai Prize in 1948.
• In 1948, Jacques Le Chevallier organizes the Centre d’Art sacré in collaboration with Maurice Rocher.
• In 1949, Pál C. Molnár creates a winged altar in the parish church of the Inner City in Pest, Hungary.
• Completion of commissioning in 1949 for Notre-Dame de Toute Grâce du Plateau d'Assy, bringing together works by Braque, Matisse, Bonnard, Lurçat, Rouault, Léger, Bazaine, Chagall, Berçot, Briançon, Richier. Subsequently, Germaine Richier’s Crucifix was removed from the church and an instruction on sacred art issued by the Sacred Congregation of the Holy Office in 1952 was the beginning of two year initiative by the Vatican which severely constrained the modernizing programme of the French Dominicans and represented a victory for the traditionalists within the Church.
• In 1949 Salvador Dalí creates the first version of The Madonna of Port Lligat. He presents it to Pope Pius XII in an audience for approval, which is granted. Dalí creates a second painting in 1950 with the same title and themes.
• Graham Greene’s The Power and the Glory (1940), The Ministry of Fear (1943) and The Heart of the Matter (1948), Francois Mauriac’s A Woman of the Pharisees (1941), Norman Nicholson’s An Anthology of Religious Verse Designed for the Times (1942), George Bernanos’ Monsieur Quine (1943), C.S. Lewis’ The Screwtape Letters (1942) and The Great Divorce (1945), Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited (1945), Jack Clemo’s Wilding Graft (1948), Heinrich Böll’s The Train was on Time (1949) are published.

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Sister Rosetta Tharpe - This Train.