Controversy and conversation: Churches and art

Here's the talk I gave at last night's Unveiled event in St Andrew's Wickford:

St Andrew’s has a hidden painting – ‘The Descent from the Cross’ by David Folley – which illustrates some of the issues involved in showing modern art in churches. In this talk I want us to look at Folley’s painting and other controversial art commissioned for churches to see the ways in which they open up conversations about faith for those who wouldn’t ordinarily come to church or consider faith.

David Folley is an English painter based in Plymouth. He paints subjects that range from abstracts, landscapes, seascapes, portraits, and race horses, including a life size painting of the famous British racehorse Frankel. He has completed portrait commissions for Trinity College, Cambridge, and University College Plymouth and has had major commissions from Plymouth City Council and Endemol UK (a production company for Channel 4). He describes himself as “a twenty-first century romantic with a belief in the spiritual and redemptive possibilities of art.” Exploring the spiritual and redemptive possibilities of art is the foundation of his “romantic associations with the aesthetic tradition of Northern Romantic painting.”

Revd Raymond Chudley, a former Team Vicar at St Andrew’s, knew Folley and had supported him in his artistic career. As an act of gratitude, Folley made this painting as a gift for Chudley when he got married, around the time he retired from parish ministry. The painting was too large for Chudley’s home, so was gifted to St Andrew’s and was dedicated by the Bishop of Bradwell in 1996.

Folley’s friend Alan Thompson has described the work well. Thompson writes: “David Folley has painted The Descent from the Cross, the melancholy depth of hopelessness, in a major work of heroic proportions. It is a large canvas painted traditionally to inspire the viewer to contemplate all that had culminated in what seemed at the time to be the final act of a tragedy. The viewer cannot share the utter despair of the participants in the painting because he or she knows what they didn't - that the body will be resurrected.

The way David has painted the body expresses the physical suffering Christ endured, whilst the dripping blood from the wound the soldier inflicted on Him, is shown as a rainbow. The explanation of this is that God told Noah that the rainbow was the sign of the new covenant with the earth. This is just one of many examples of Christian iconography illustrated in this work.

Mary, looking up at her son, is depicted as a modern provincial character in the manner we have associated with Stanley Spencer. Behind Jesus, Joseph of Arimathea, with a moustache, is painted in blue to denote spiritual love, constancy, truth and fidelity.

At the extreme right hand side of the picture, the Revd. Raymond Chudley, who commissioned the painting, is shown in the traditional fifteenth century role of the donor, kneeling in prayer, with his attention fixed upon the body of Christ.

Facing him is the artist. He has included himself, portrayed as holding a broken spear as if to suggest that he had been responsible for the wound in the side of Christ. He is balancing precariously on a skull, a memento mori, signifying the transitory nature of life and also reading across to Calvary, which is derived from Golgotha, which is Hebrew for skull. He is also 'pregnant' with a foetus, which the artist sees as humanity giving birth to the Christ within, and transforming themselves into Sons of God rather than sons of man.

From the bottom of the painting is an outstretched arm, which just fails to touch Christ's hand, because the hand is withdrawn. This is intended to signify man's desire, through science, to explain the laws of the universe and so become almighty. He is almost there but cannot touch. There is a visual tension between God and man.”

Folley says, “I sum up this painting as being made up of a composite of the works of great masters of the past. Not copying them slavishly but developing my own concept of individualism with emphasis on vivid imagery, technical refinement, complex iconography and innovation.” Among the artists referenced are: El Greco, Grunewald, and Donatello.

The painting disturbs some through a mix of its expressionist style, its strong colouration, and its unusual symbolism. As it dominates the space in the church where children’s activities have often taken place it was eventually decided to cover it with a large curtain and banner.

Such a response to contemporary art in churches is not unusual. During my sabbatical I visited churches linked to three significant controversies over the commissioning of modern art: 

(i) a set of Stations of the Cross and an altarpiece, The Death of St Teresa, commissioned from the Flemish artist Albert Servaes for the church of the Discalced Carmelites in Luithagen, a suburb of Antwerp. This led, in 1921, to a decree from the Holy Office based on Canon 1399.12, which states that images may not be ‘unusual’, resulting in first the Stations and then the altarpiece being removed from the chapel; 

(ii) the rationalist design for Notre-Dame du Bon Conseil in the Swiss Alps by architect Alberto Sartoris (who had strong links to the Futurists) created a scandal in the Swiss press in 1931, the same year that the publication of a 'Manifesto of Futurist Sacred Art' led to a censure from Pope Pius XI in a speech at the inauguration of a new Vatican Art Gallery and; 

(iii) Germaine Richier’s Crucifix was removed from Notre-Dame de Toute Grâce at Assy and a subsequent instruction on sacred art issued by the Sacred Congregation of the Holy Office in 1952, which was the beginning of two year initiative by the Vatican that severely constrained the modernizing programme of the French Dominicans and represented a victory for the traditionalists within the Church.

Many church commissions are controversial because they introduce something different and therefore dissonant into a familiar building, as is the case with David Folley’s painting. That was the case with modern images of the crucifixion by Servaes and Richier and, in the UK, Graham Sutherland at St Matthew’s Northampton and St Aidan’s East Acton. These viewed Christ’s sacrifice as emblematic of human suffering in conflict and persecution. They were controversial as they challenged sentimental images of Christ and deliberately introduced ugliness into beautiful buildings. On my sabbatical I spoke to parishioners in both Northampton and East Acton who stated that they did not like Sutherland’s Crucifixions but who also appreciated why the paintings were as they were and the challenge that they provided as a result.

I was particularly moved to find, on entering Saint Martin’s Kerk in Latem in Belgium, that the baptistery contains a Passion charcoal by Albert Servaes. Servaes and Richier were both affected by decrees from the holy office which led to the removal of their artworks from the churches for which they had been commissioned. Servaes, with his Stations of the Cross and altarpiece for the Carmelite Chapel in Luithagen and Richier, with her crucifix for the church at Assy. Given all that Servaes experienced in the controversy over the Luithagen Stations, including the removal of work which was a genuine expression of his faith by the Church of which he was part, I found it profoundly moving that a work of his, in the same vein as the Luithagen Stations, should be displayed in the church and area where his faith and art first fused. Richier’s crucifix was later returned to its place in the sanctuary at Assy and the church, like many other churches in France with modern art commissions, is now classed by the Government as a national monument and has become a significant tourist location.

It seems, therefore, that scandals of modern art, whether the reception of the works themselves or that of their challenging content, are, with time, resolved as congregations live with the works and learn to value the challenge of what initially seems to be scandalous.

My main personal experience of this kind of situation was when a sculpture by the Street artist Ryan Callanan was moved ahead of a Stations of the Cross exhibition at St Stephen Walbrook. Complaints from several parishioners at the church prompted, after considerable discussion, the rehanging of the exhibition although initially it had seemed as their complaints would result in the work being removed from the exhibition. That possibility attracted press interest which then calmed down after the work was moved to a different position in the church. Controversy of this sort and attempts to ban, remove or censor artworks thought to be in some way blasphemous or challenging, are, as we have seen, part of the story of faith and art in the modern period.

Let’s think for a moment about the reasons why displaying a crucified stormtrooper in a City church might stimulate those viewing it to think about Christ afresh. In the Star Wars films, stormtroopers are the main ground force of the Galactic Empire, under the leadership of Emperor Palpatine and his commanders, most notably Darth Vader. They are on the dark side in that conflict. That the artist Ryan Callanan chose to create a ‘Crucified Stormtrooper,’ provides Christians and others with the possibility of experiencing something of the sense of scandal that Christ’s crucifixion originally generated.

The imagery of the dark side in the Star Wars films can be seen in this context as equating to the Christian belief that we are all sinners. If we use the imagery opened up for us by ‘Crucified Stormtrooper,’ then we are forced to reflect, much as we dislike the thought, that we are all on the dark side. We are all stormtroopers.

The amazing message of love at the heart of Christianity is that God does something about that situation. God becomes one of us in Christ. He becomes a stormtrooper in order that, through his death, he can take the darkness onto himself and enable us to live in the light. That is the original heartbeat of Christianity, which continues to radically change people's lives on a daily basis around the world when they genuinely acknowledge their own sinfulness. The scandal - the stumbling block - that is the cross, was brought home to us afresh by including this artwork in this exhibition; particularly to any who view their own assets as the basis for their own self-esteem. To show this work in a church enabled that reflection on Christ's love to be seen and shared in a new way and that is why it worthwhile for the Church to show art, especially controversial art, and to explore the questions that it opens up to us.

In the context of the Private View, I was able to talk to people, for whom churchgoing is not necessarily a regular feature of their lives, about the art in relation to the love of Christ. That is both a great privilege and opportunity. Many of those who saw the exhibition described it as 'striking', 'intriguing', 'uplifting' and 'interesting.' It was commended as an extraordinarily broad-minded, human and thought-provoking exhibition in an extraordinary place with others asking that the church reach out to current artists more often. As a result of the controversy, the curator of the exhibition wrote publicly about his own faith.

Additionally, the conversations generated by the exhibition have an ongoing life online at a website documenting Art Below’s Stations of the Cross exhibitions: https://stationsofthecross.co.uk/blog/how-does-a-crucified-stormtrooper-glorify-god and https://stationsofthecross.co.uk/blog/controversial-art-protest-or-engagement.

The reactions from some within the Church to Art Below’s Stations of the Cross exhibitions suggest that we still need to learn that it is far better to engage with art and artists by discussing and debating the questions they raise, instead of seeking to suppress or censor. One example of this being done effectively would the many Da Vinci Code events, bible studies, websites etc. that the Church used to counter the claims made in The Da Vinci Code featured reasoned arguments based on a real understanding of the issues raised which made use of genuine historical findings and opinion to counter those claims. The Church, it seems, still needs to learn that the way to counter criticism is not to try to ban or censor it but to engage with it, understand it and accurately counter it. In other words, to enter into conversation with art and to generate conversations about faith with those who come to visit to see art.

That is what we are seeking to do here with David Folley’s ‘Descent from the Cross’; to make the painting itself and the story of how it came to be hidden talking points that encourage people to explore the ways in which the painting engages with Christ’s Passion and our understandings of it. To put those things in dialogue and encourage people to visit in order to engage in that conversation; a conversation about Christ and the nature of atonement.

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 Bob Dylan - Sign on the Cross.

Sabbatical Art Pilgrimage: Latest ArtWay Report

My latest Church of the Month report for ArtWay focuses on Notre-Dame des Alpes, Le Fayet:

'The church has rightly been described as an essential stage in understanding the revival of sacred art in the twentieth century but is overshadowed by the fame and significance of Notre-Dame de Toute Grâce du Plateau d’Assy ... There are at least two reasons for the significance of Notre-Dame des Alpes. First, the architecture of the church was the inspiration for the church of Assy, Novarina being the architect for both. Second, the decoration of the Le Fayet church represents the first stage in the revival of sacred art that Fr. Marie-Alain Couturier sought to move beyond at the church of Assy.'

This Church of the Month report follows on from others about Aylesford Priory, Canterbury Cathedral, Chapel of St. Thérèse of the Child Jesus and the Holy Face, Hem, Chelmsford Cathedral, Chichester Cathedral, Coventry Cathedral, Église de Saint-Paul à Grange-Canal, Lumen, Metz Cathedral, Notre Dame du Léman, Notre-Dame de Toute Grâce, Plateau d’Assy,Romont, Sint Martinuskerk Latem, St Aidan of Lindisfarne, St Alban Romford, St. Andrew Bobola Polish RC Church, St Margaret's Ditchling and St Mary the Virgin, Downe, and St Paul's Goodmayes, as well as earlier reports of visits to sites associated with Marian Bohusz-Szyszko, Marc Chagall, Jean Cocteau, Antoni Gaudi and Henri Matisse.

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Bruce Cockburn - Jesus Train.

Paintings which seek to dream an ideal of fraternity and love

Here is the talk which I gave to the Walbrook Art Group last Wednesday. This was on the theme of 'My Favourite Art, My Faith.' The other talks in this series are on Wednesday 2 and 9 December at St Stephen Walbrook (1.00pm) and there will be two speakers on each occasion.

Last year I was fortunate, through my sabbatical visits and the Tour of the Holy Land organised by the East London Three Faiths Forum, to see a wide variety of artwork in churches and synagogues by the Russian Jewish artist Marc Chagall. Chagall is one of my favourite artists and the artist, more than any other, who really fired my interest in the visual arts. As well as last year’s visits, I have also visited the National Marc Chagall museum in Nice which houses a collection of 17 large format paintings inspired by the Bible that Chagall gifted to the French state to found the Museum and which form his Message Biblique.

These paintings were originally intended for a Calvary Chapel at Vence and were painted between 1958 and 1966. Chagall spoke of the museum as a house in his inauguration speech saying, ‘I wanted to leave [the paintings] in this House so that men can try to find some peace, a certain spirituality, a religiosity, a meaning in life.’

Meditations on religious art had been part of Chagall’s oeuvre from the off due to the place of religion in his Hasidic upbringing in Vitebsk (Russia). His later commissions for churches, no doubt, also built on discussions about the relations between Judaism and Christianity held when he regularly attended, during his early period in Paris, the Thomist study circle organised by Roman Catholic philosopher Jacques Maritain at his home in Meuden.

Chagall conceived the idea for the cycle of paintings which became the Message Biblique while working on his first church commission in Assy (a church I also visited during my sabbatical), although many of the images he used in the paintings were based on gouaches he had originally created as maquettes for a series of Bible etchings commissioned by the publisher Ambroise Vollard. He described the Bible as a great, universal book and so eventually decided not to hang the paintings in a building associated with one religion, such as the chapel at Vence. Initially, as a Jew, he had had concerns regarding undertaking commissions for Christian churches, to the extent that he insisted on the phrase, ‘In the Name of the Liberty of All Religions’ on the baptistery mural Le Passage de la Mer Rouge, which was his first church commission.

On entering the rooms of the Message Biblique - first, the room of Genesis and Exodus, then the Song of Songs - one is struck first by the colours of the works before their content. For each of the Genesis and Exodus paintings Chagall chose a bold, saturated colour suited to his subject - a luminous green for Paradise, deep red for Abraham and the Three Angels, bright yellow for Moses Receiving the Tablets of the Law - and worked in pinks and reds for each of the Songs of Songs paintings. Chagall viewed painting as the reflection of his inner self and therefore colour contained his character and message. In his museum inauguration speech he said, ‘If all life moves inevitably towards its end, then we must, during our own, colour it with our colours of love and hope.’ These are paintings which seek to dream, by their colours and lines, an ideal of fraternity and love.

Chagall 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.’ So, while the Biblical scene illustrated dominates each of these huge canvases, in the margins, and completing the overall composition, are images of other Biblical scenes and characters, including often the crucified Christ, together with images suggesting the later suffering of the Jewish people. 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.

This sense of Chagall drawing disparate images and styles together and reconciling them on his canvases was a key part of my initial interest in his work so, to be surrounded by these massive statements demonstrating - through content and construction - the potential of religion for reconciliation, was a wonderful and moving experience.

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, as Walther and Metzger write, in "achieving a pictorial unity through the yoking of motifs taken from different realms of given reality". He reconciles emotions, thoughts, 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".

Chagall’s work can also be understood as exploring Jewish identity by establishing a continuity between Biblical Antiquity and his contemporary experience of exile as, through his Message Biblique and other similar paintings, he engages with his Jewish heritage from the Exodus through the Pogroms to the Holocaust thereby linking past and present together in experience and understanding. In Chagall’s work exodus and exile are the normal state of the Jewish people and the source of their joys, sorrows, inspirations and insights.

Surprisingly, his key symbol of faith in exile is that of the crucified Christ who features centrally or tangentially in many of his works. Always visually and accurately a Jewish Christ, nevertheless Chagall uses this image in ways that have real synergy with Christian theology. In The Sacrifice of Isaac, for example, the crucified Christ appears above Isaac as the future sacrificial son. Christ becomes the embodiment in Chagall’s work of Israel as the suffering servant; an understanding which culminates in the Exodus of 1952 - 1966 where the crucified Christ embraces both the Jews of the Exodus and of the Holocaust.

For Chagall, ‘Christ ... always symbolized the true type of the Jewish martyr.’ He depicted this perception most famously in White Crucifixion painted in 1938 in response to the persecution of Jews by the Nazis, including Kristallnacht. Central to this painting, among scenes of anti-Jewish violence which included the torching of a synagogue, is Jesus on the cross with a tallit, the Jewish prayer shawl, draped around him as a loin cloth. For Chagall, ‘Jesus on the cross represented the painful predicament of all Jews, harried, branded, and violently victimized in an apparently God-forsaken world.’

Chagall came to stained glass relatively late in his career with the commissions for the baptistery at for Notre-Dame-de-Toute-Grâce du Plateau d’Assy completed in 1957. These derived from his friendship with a Dominican Friar, Pere Couturier, who was an artist and commissioner of sacred art. This commission included two small windows in grisaille of an angel holding a jug of holy water and an angel with candelabra and flowers.

Following this commission Chagall began working with Charles Marq, from the Atelier Simon Marq, and received many church commissions for stained glass with his ambulatory windows for Metz Cathedral, realized in 1960, being the first of these commissions. “Marq developed a special process of veneering pigment on glass, which allowed Chagall to use as many as three colours on a single uninterrupted pane, rather than being confined to the traditional technique of separating each colour by lead strips.”

As well as being inspired by the Bible, Chagall was also inspired by his visits to Israel. Accompanied by his wife Bella and his daughter Ida, Chagall went to Israel first in 1931. The main reason for this visit was a commission he had received from the Parisian art dealer and publisher, Ambroise Vollard, to do a series of illustrations to the Bible. He travelled a great deal, painting and drawing in Tel Aviv, Jerusalem and Safed. The country left a vivid impression on him, and back in Paris the light and landscape he had seen were echoed in many of the etchings for his work, The Bible. In 1951, the opening of large retrospective exhibitions of his works, in Jerusalem, Haifa and Tel Aviv, prompted Chagall's second visit, and in 1957, he was again in Israel following the publication of his illustrations to the Bible. Vollard had died shortly before World War II and Tériade published the commission that had finally been completed in 1956. A second book of Bible illustrations was published by Vervé, also in that year.

Chagall said that, “In the East, I found the Bible and part of my own being. The air of the Land of Israel makes one wise.” For him, the Bible was “pure poetry, human tragedy.” He said that it “filled him with visions about the faith of the world” and that it inspired him so that he saw life and art “through the wisdom of the bible.”

Chagall also made a link between stained glass which comes alive “through the light it receives” and the Bible which is “light already.” Stained glass, he suggests, “should make this obvious through grace and simplicity.” Jonathan Wilson has noted that “Chagall became fascinated with stained glass after he had moved to the south of France in 1950.” Chagall was undoubtedly “seduced by the endless Mediterranean unfolding of color-as-light and the possibility of capturing in glass the kind of spiritually charged, quasi-mystical, sometimes biblically inspired images to which he was increasingly drawn.” Indeed, Chagall spoke of light as being the material which creates stained glass. “The light is natural,” he suggested, “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.”

André Malraux summed this up when he wrote: “I cannot understand why stained glass, which lives and dies with the day, was ever abandoned. … Artists preferred the light. But the stained glass window, which is brought to life by the morning and snuffed out by the night, brought the Creation home to the worshipper in church. … Stained glass eventually surrendered to painting by incorporating shade, which killed it. It was six hundred and fifty years before someone found a way of shading off colors in glass: Chagall.”

It has been suggested, rightly I think, that Chagall’s use of colour is mystical, with “the yellow of revelation flooding the Tablets of the Law,” “the white of faith surrounding the cross” and “the supremacy of blue in his work” indicating “the wisdom of overcoming bitterness and hatred.” Here we have the yellow of revelation flooding the Garden of Eden in Chagall’s 1963 Creation window for the triforium of the north transept while deep blues and reds characterise the combination of ecstasy and sorrow in the two ambulatory windows from 1960 which tell the story of the Jewish people in key episodes from Abraham to Jeremiah by way of Jacob, Moses and David. James Waller has written that here “Chagall is all curves and tonal flares,” his “modulation of tone, within the fabulously fragmented and flowing glass panes” lending “his colours a deeper, more smoldering dimension.”

The light that emanates from twelve stained glass windows by Marc Chagall bathes the Abbell Synagogue at the Hadassah University Medical Center in a special glow. 'The synagogue's Jerusalem stone floor and walls absorb this beauty and reflect it.' 'The Bible was again Chagall's main inspiration, particularly Genesis 49, where Jacob blesses his 12 sons, and Deuteronomy 33, where Moses blesses the Twelve Tribes. The dominant colors used in each window are inspired by those blessings as well as by the description of the breastplate of the High Priest in Exodus 28:15, which was described as gold, blue, purple and scarlet, and contained 12 distinct gems. Each gem was dedicated to a tribe with the tribe's name engraved on it.'

'To fully understand the significance of the Windows they must be viewed against Chagall's deep sense of identification with the whole of the Jewish history, its tragedies and victories, as well as his own personal background in the shtetl of Vitebsk, where he was born and grew up. "All the time I was working," he said, "I felt my father and my mother were looking over my shoulder, and behind them were Jews, millions of other vanished Jews of yesterday and a thousand years ago."' After our visit I spoke to our group about Chagall's background and work highlighting the fact that these windows inspired commissions for stained glass in the UK at Tudeley Parish Church and at Chichester Cathedral.

Tudeley Parish church is one of the UK’s finest examples of religious art and a moving example of the crucifixion as a 'conduit' for a very personal tragedy. The church in Tudeley is renowned internationally as the only church to have all its windows decorated by Chagall which fulfilled a long term ambition of the artist. The windows were commissioned by the family of Sarah d'Avigdor-Goldsmid as a commemoration of her tragic and untimely death.

Canon Walter Hussey, Dean of Chichester Cathedral, provided Chagall with a brief for his stained glass window at the Cathedral based on Psalm 150. 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.’ This thought underpinned his brief to Chagall for the window based on Psalm 150 and titled The Arts to the Glory of God which takes as its theme ‘O praise God in his holiness … Let everything that has breath praise the Lord.’

Charles Marq, Chagall’s collaborator on his windows, wrote: ‘The triumphal quality of this chant is expressed by the dominance in the composition of the colour red (red on white, on green, on yellow), broken by a certain number of green, blue and yellow blobs. This is the first time that Marc Chagall has conceived a subject composed entirely of small figures; it is the people in festive mood glorifying the Lord, exalting his greatness and his creation.’ The work, he suggests, communicates a ‘message of glory and praise.’ (Chagall Glass at Chichester and Tudeley, Ed. By Paul Foster, Otter Memorial Paper No. 14)

Chagall 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.’

It was Chagall’s hope that a visit to the Musée Chagall, where this talk began, would be an experience akin to pilgrimage rather than simply being a tourist destination to be visited: "Perhaps the young and the less young will come to this House to seek an ideal of fraternity and love such as it has been dreamed by my colours and my lines."

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Young Disciples - Freedom Suite.

Sabbatical art pilgrimage: Latest ArtWay report

My latest Church of the Month report for ArtWay focuses on Notre-Dame de Toute Grâce, Plateau d’Assy. 'Planned as a showcase for the value of modern church commissions, the Dominican-inspired church of Notre-Dame de Toute Grâce in Plateau d’Assy (or Assy), France, elicited diverse reactions of praise and condemnation when it was consecrated in August 1950. Many hoped it would set off a renaissance of sacred art in Europe, but others disapproved strongly of its commissioning of secular artists.'

This Church of the Month report follows on from others about Aylesford Priory, Canterbury Cathedral, Chapel of St. Thérèse of the Child Jesus and the Holy Face, Hem, Chelmsford Cathedral, Lumen, Notre Dame du Léman, Romont, Sint Martinuskerk Latem, St Aidan of Lindisfarne, St Alban Romford and St Mary the Virgin, Downe, as well as earlier reports of visits to sites associated with Marian Bohusz-Szyszko, Marc Chagall, Jean Cocteau, Antoni Gaudi and Henri Matisse.

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Paramore - Ain't It Fun.

Sabbatical art pilgrimage: ArtServe article

The latest article based on my sabbatical art pilgrimage can be found in the Winter edition of ArtServe's magazine. The article, which is entitled 'A Tale of Two Churches', uses the story of commissions at Notre-Dame des Alpes in Le Fayet and Notre-Dame de Toute Grâce on the Plateau d'Assy to explore issues raised by the twentieth century revival in sacred art. Both churches are in the French Alps, they had the same architect, are built in a similar style and are only kilometres apart yet they represent different stages of the twentieth century’s revival of sacred art.

ArtServe promotes and supports the use of creative arts in Christian worship, including music, dance and drama, visual arts, and creative writing. ArtServe magazine is published three times a year. The latest edition also features:

• A report on ArtServe's annual Festival weekend at High Leigh
• Mark Topping talking about his one-man Passion play
• Dance as a way to worship
• The labyrinth as an aid to prayer

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Martin Smith - Emmanuel.

Sabbatical art pilgrimage: Report - Part 4

I visited churches linked to three significant controversies over the commissioning of modern art: (i) a set of Stations of the Cross and an altarpiece, The Death of St Teresa, commissioned from the Flemish artist Albert Servaes for the church of the Discalced Carmelites in Luithagen, a suburb of Antwerp led, in 1921, to a decree from the Holy Office based on Canon 1399.12, which states that images may not be ‘unusual’, resulting in first the Stations and then the altarpiece being removed from the chapel; (ii) the publication of a 'Manifesto of Futurist Sacred Art' in 1931 led to a censure from Pope Pius XI in a speech given in October 1932 at the inauguration of a new Vatican Art Gallery and the rationalist design by Alberto Sartoris (who had strong links to the Futurists) for Notre-Dame du Bon Conseil in the Swiss Alps at Lourtier also created a scandal in the Swiss press in the same year; (iii) Germaine Richier’s Crucifix was removed from Notre-Dame de Toute Grâce at Assy and a subsequent instruction on sacred art issued by the Sacred Congregation of the Holy Office in 1952 was the beginning of two year iniative by the Vatican which severely constrained the modernizing programme of the French Dominicans and represented a victory for the traditionalists within the Church.

Many church commissions are controversial because they introduce something different and therefore dissonant into a familiar building. Harmonization can, as we have seen, help to minimize this sense of dissonance and difference but with some works their value derives from the sense of dissonance they create.

This was the case with those images of the crucifixion by, for example, Servaes, Richier and Graham Sutherland which viewed Christ’s sacrifice as emblematic of human suffering in conflict and persecution. These were often controversial as they challenged sentimental images of Christ and deliberately introduced ugliness into beautiful buildings. I spoke to parishioners in both Northampton and East Acton who stated that they did not like Sutherland’s Crucifixions but who also appreciated why the paintings were as they were and the challenge that they provided as a result.

I was particularly moved to find on entering Sint Martinuskerk in Latem that the baptistery contains a Passion charcoal by Servaes. Servaes and Richier were both affected by decrees from the holy office which led to the removal of their artworks from the churches for which they had been commissioned. Servaes, with his Stations of the Cross and altarpiece for the Carmelite Chapel in Luithagen and Richier, with her crucifix for the church at Assy.

Given all that Servaes experienced in the controversy over the Luithagen Stations, including the removal of work which was a genuine expression of his faith by the Church of which he was part, I found it profoundly moving that a work of his, in the same vein as the Luithagen Stations, should be displayed in the church and area where his faith and art first fused. Richier’s crucifix has been returned to its place in the sanctuary at Assy and the church, like many other art sacré churches, is classed by the Government as a national monument and has become a significant tourist location.

It seems, therefore, that scandals of modern art, whether the reception of the works themselves or that of their challenging content, are, with time, resolved as congregations live with the works and learn to value the challenge of what initially seems to be scandalous. It is my contention, therefore, on the basis of these examples that criticism of the Hussey Memorial Commission would dissipate over time if the work were to be installed. It is a particularly ironic and inappropriate memorial to Walter Hussey that his memorial commission should be the subject of such controversy that it is prevented from being installed.   

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Luigi Russolo - Serenata.

Sabbatical art pilgrimage: Late work

In an excellent Guardian article from earlier in the week, curator Sam Smiles explored the phenomenon of artists' late work. He noted that until the early twentieth century late work was routinely considered inferior. He argues that this view has changed to the extent that today late work is often considered profound per se:

"It is often proposed that the proximity of death stimulates artists to turn inwards and concentrate on the essence of their practice at the expense of public understanding. Late works are often radical works, incomprehensible as far as contemporary opinion is concerned. Is the late work a crowning finale to a life's work, a creative last will and testament for the benefit of subsequent generations?"
In the reading I did on the artists whose work I saw during my sabbatical art pilgrimage, I found the reverse to be the case. The speed with which new movements formed within modernism meant that artists engaging with church commissions in their later career could easily be portrayed as no longer being cutting edge and as having declined in the quality of their work. The reputations of many of those who were commissioned by the Church in the twentieth century (e.g. Jean Bazaine, Maurice Denis, Albert Gleizes, Jean Lurçat, Alfred Manessier, Graham Sutherland, John Piper, Georges Rouault, Gino Severini) have declined following their deaths. The same is likely to be so for those receiving contemporary commissions (i.e. Brian Clarke, Stephen Cox, Tracey Emin, Christopher Le Brun, Adrian Wisniewski). The pace with which modern art moved from one movement to next in the twentieth century quickly and, often unfairly, condemned as passé what had previously been avant garde.

Fashions and reputations in the art world (as elsewhere) change considerably with time. In their own day and time Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse were considered unassailable as the giants of twentieth century art while now, in terms of continuing influence on contemporary artists, Marcel Duchamp is generally considered to be the most influential twentieth century artist. Lurçat’s tapestry provides the central focus for the Church at Assy, where those artists commissioned were considered current masters, but his reputation has not been sustained into the current day.

The Church cannot, and probably should not, seek to keep up with the fickle nature of fashion and instead should value both artists with significant mainstream reputations wishing to receive occasional commissions plus artists with less significant mainstream reputations who receive commissions which form a more significant part of their practice. Commissions should be judged on their own merits and not on the reputation of the artist(s) involved. Reputations change over time meaning that those who are viewed as contemporary ‘masters’ may not be considered as significant by future generations while artists who do not have national or international reputations in their day may nevertheless produce high quality and/or visionary work. 

As Smiles makes clear in his article, the quality of work produced by artists does not in any sense necessarily diminish with age or a change of style (or even when Church commissions are accepted), although the reputation of an artist or the perception as to whether they are or are not cutting edge may be affected by such considerations. It may, however, be that age causes some artists to think more deeply about legacy and reputation in some cases making them more open to commissions which would endure in public settings, such as the opportunities provided through church commissions, than would be the case earlier in their career. 

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Leonard Cohen - Almost Like The Blues.

Sabbatical art pilgrimage: Notre-Dame de Toute Grâce du Plateau d'Assy

William S. Rubin writes in ‘Modern Sacred Art and the Church of Assy’ (Columbia University Press, New York & London, 1961) that, 'In August 1950, the Dominican-inspired church of Notre-Damede Toute Grâce at Assy was consecrated amid great jubilation and even greater hope that it represented the commencement of a "Renaissance" of sacred art. The appearance there of religious works which, in power and purity, recalled those of the great ages of faith, certainly seemed symptomatic of a genuine religious revival.’

Yet, as my sabbatical art pilgrimage has been demonstrating, a renaissance of sacred art had been underway from the beginning of the century. The decoration of St. Paul Grange-Canal in Geneva by Maurice Denis, Alexandre Cingria and others in 1913 – 1915 had served as a manifesto for this renaissance and led on to the founding in 1919 of the Ateliers d’Art Sacré by Denis and Georges Desvallières as well the Group of St Luke and St Maurice by François Baud, Cingria, Marcel Feuillat, Marcel Poncet and Georges de Traz. Both groups produced significant work for a significant number of churches in subsequent years.

In 1935 the Group of St Luke secured the decoration of the new church of Notre-Dame-des-Alpes Le Fayet in the French Alps by means a tender process assessed by a panel which included the philosopher Jacques Maritain, the Catholic art critic Maurice Brillant and the director of the Ecole des Beaux Arts in Geneva Adrien Bovy. The process and the resulting work was therefore set up to be a showcase for the renaissance of sacred art in France and Switzerland during the first half of the twentieth century in which Denis, Maritain and Cingria had played key roles. It was this stage of the revival that was challenged by the commissions for Notre-Dame-de-Toute-Grâce.

Rubin continues, ‘For the first time in centuries, great artists had directed their efforts towards church art. Bonnard, Chagall, Léger, Lipchitz, Lurçat, Matisse, and Rouault had all contributed significantly.’ The Dominican Friars Marie-Alain Couturier and Pie-Raymond Régamey had argued in the journal ‘L’Art sacré’ that they edited that ‘each generation must appeal to the masters of living art, and today those masters come first from secular art.’ Couturier worked with the parish priest at Assy, Canon Jean Devémy, to commission those modern masters who contributed work to the church of Assy.

Interestingly, Couturier himself and the commissions at Assy had begun within the earlier phase of the renaissance of sacred art. On the basis of his work at Le Fayet, Devémy selected Maurice Novarina as architect. Novarina used his regional style at Assy with a chalet-style pitched roof and locally sourced materials. The chalet style is intimate and warm while the wooden carved beams suggest a Nordic hall. The interior is dark, as a result, but this tends to sets off the work well. While appropriate to Alpine setting in terms of aesthetics and practicalities, Novarina was not, at this stage of his career, working in the modernist style first exemplified by Alberto Sartoris’ design for the church at Lourtier and subsequently further developed by Le Corbusier at Ronchamp, La Tourette and Firminiy. Couturier had trained at the Ateliers d’Art Sacré and had worked on schemes of stained glass with artists at the Atelier and others, such as the L’Arche artists. Several of these artists, included Couturier himself, received commissions for the nave windows. Rubin comments that this was Couturier allocating some commissions to the ‘family’ of artists ‘active in modernist circles of Church decoration before the war’ before he then moved on to ‘the more radical aspect of the decorative plan for Assy.’

This ‘radical aspect’ of Couturier’s plan was to prove 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. The violent polemics on both sides involved not only the French Church, but also the Vatican, usually through the voice of the Congregation of the Holy Office. As its destiny was linked to the fortunes of the entire liberal religious movement in France, the Church at Assy and its decorations were vehemently attacked and defended by an army of critics, most of whom had seen only a few photographs of the works in question.'

The polemic against the Assy commissions was centered on the crucifix created by Germaine Richier but this was used as a focus for a wide-ranging attack by traditionalists on the desire of French Dominicans for a Christianity that was engaged with the secular world. As a result, they argued that priests should not live in ‘Christian ghettos’ but should join with the citizenry ‘to establish a new, spiritually inspired system of social justice’ - the worker-priest movement – and, with artists, to preach a ‘new gospel of sacred art’ that could help these artists come to ‘Christian awareness.’ These initiatives were representative of ‘a new evangelical spirit’ which was concerned with contextualized mission.

Richier’s bronze crucifix resembles ‘craggy and weathered wood’ in its surface and the undefined figure has a cruciform shape, the combination conveying a ‘tortured and sacrificial appearance.’ It is a stunning image of the effect which suffering has on human beings by reducing a person to mere flesh and bone. Couturier related the image to the ‘root out of dry ground’ of Isaiah 53. Richier’s crucifix therefore connects with the strand in modern sacred art, exemplified by Albert Servaes and Graham Sutherland, which viewed Christ’s sacrifice as emblematic of human suffering in conflict and persecution. Works in this vein were often controversial as they challenged sentimental images of Christ and deliberately introduced ugliness into beautiful buildings. The crucifix was described by those who opposed its inclusion in the church as a caricature of a crucifix in which it was no longer possible to ‘recognise the adorable humanity of Christ’ making it ‘an insult to the majesty of God’ and ‘a scandal for the piety of the faithful.’

Servaes and Richier were both affected by decrees from the holy office and saw their artworks removed from the churches for which they had been commissioned. The instruction on sacred art issued by the Sacred Congregation of the Holy Office in 1952 was the beginning of two year iniatiatve by the Vatican which severely constrained the modernizing programme of the French Dominicans and represented a victory for the traditionalists within the Church.

Richier’s crucifix has, though, subsequently been returned to its place in the sanctuary at Assy and the church, like many other art sacré churches, is classed by the French Government as a national monument becoming a significant tourist location – the secular state recognizing the value of sacred commissions. As a similar level of acceptance and understanding has also evolved in relation to other controversial commissions, including those by Servaes and Sutherland, it would seem that scandals of modern church commissions, whether the reception of the works themselves or that of their challenging content, are, with time, resolved as congregations and communities live with the works and learn to value the challenge of what initially seemed to be scandalous.

Notre-Dame de Toute Grâce was planned as a showcase for the value of contemporary church commissions with Couturier taking on the primary role of curator but, as most of the commissions included were on the basis of his friendships with the artists involved, the decisions he made or did not make illustrate the tricky balance required to succeed in commissioning. Couturier criticized the Ateliers d'Art Sacré for being a 'world closed in on itself, where reciprocal indulgence, or else mutual admiration, quickly becomes the ransom paid to work as a team and maintain friendship.' Yet Couturier's scheme of work at Assy suffers from the opposite problem, as work by individual masters produced in isolation from each other, with work assigned on the basis of what they could with integrity contribute, results in a decorative scheme with no cohesiveness or focus. Couturier, here, fails to be sufficiently decisive as a curator. As Rubin states, 'the subject was almost as often picked for the man as the man for the subject.'

Too much work was commissioned for Assy from too many artists making the resulting iconographic scheme muddled and esoteric. There are inappropriate clashes of style (e.g. the Lipchitz sculpture dominating the Rouault windows or the different styles used in each of the nave windows), inappropriate positioning of some works (e.g. stained glass by Bazaine and reliefs by Chagall which can barely be seen), commissions which do not work in the space (e.g. the intimiste style of Bonnard is not suited to being viewed from a distance) and central commissions with esoteric symbolism (e.g. the Lurçat tapestry). Couturier, presumably to sustain his friendships with the artists involved, seems not to have exercised sufficient control regarding the overall scheme which therefore means that the whole is not greater than the sum of its parts.

The overall lesson of Assy would seem to be that simplicity is of the essence. The most effective works are those which are simplest, clearest and most pared back i.e. the work by Léger, Matisse, Richier and Rouault. The Rouault windows, in particular, are luminous, effective translations of his paintings into stained glass combining beauty and sorrow. The floral windows seem a strange choice initially but function as memento mori. Chagall created a wonderful 'Exodus' mural on ceramic tiles which was an inspired choice for the baptistery. He depicts a crucifixion in the top right hand corner; the act of Exodus for Christians which is symbolised by baptism. Although he was uncertain about undertaking this first commission for a church, his work here shows clearly the suitability of his vision and practice for churches and led to many subsequent commissions.

The Lurçat tapestry, by contrast, seems particularly ineffective both in itself and as a central focus. Its imagery is undeniably personal and esoteric. It provides visual focus through its size but, although intended as an apocalyptic evocation of the conflict between good and evil, fails to convey menace or threat. The beast seems funny and friendly in a way which could suit it to a walk on part in Teletubbies or In the Night Garden, while the female figure that opposes it is a non-entity as a realized, dynamic creation. The work of Adam Kossowski at St Benet Mile End and St Mary Leyland provide much stronger examples of apocalyptic imagery put to devotional rather than esoteric use. That said, Lurçat’s work is by no means fundamentally unsuited to an ecclesiastical context as his vibrant ‘Creation’ tapestry for the Chapel at Bishop Otter College ably demonstrates.

The artists Couturier commissioned were his friends but the work of his friends was not always suited to this particular sacred environment and scheme as some were clearly working outside their comfort zones and were not able to solve the inherent issues either of engaging with the space i.e. Bonnard’s intimiste style lost in the space and Lurçat’s esoteric apocalyptic imagery.

As noted earlier, Couturier and Régamey argued that "each generation must appeal to the masters of living art, and today those masters come first from secular art." However fashions and reputations in the art world (as elsewhere) change considerably with time. In their own day and time Pablo Picasso and Matisse were considered unassailable as the giants of twentieth century art while now, in terms of continuing influence on contemporary artists, Marcel Duchamp is generally considered to be the most influential twentieth century artist. Lurçat’s tapestry provides the central focus for the Church at Assy, where those artists commissioned were considered current masters, but his reputation has not been sustained into the current day, and the same is also true of Lipchitz.

The reputations of many of those who were commissioned by the Church in the twentieth century (e.g. Bazaine, Denis, Gleizes, Lurcat, Manessier, Sutherland, Piper, Rouault, Severini) have declined following their deaths. The same is likely to be so for those receiving contemporary commissions (i.e. Clarke, Cox, Emin, Le Brun, Wisniewski). The pace with which modern art moved from one movement to next in the twentieth century quickly and, often unfairly, condemned as passé what had previously been avant garde.

The Church cannot, and probably should not, seek to keep up with the fickle nature of fashion and instead should value both those artists with significant mainstream reputations wishing to receive occasional commissions and artists with less significant mainstream reputations who receive commissions which form a more significant part of their practice. In practice, that combination is what we find at Assy and it also there in the contrast between the commissioning practices at Assy and Le Fayet.

As a result, in my view, setting up dichotomies between artists with significant mainstream reputations versus those without and between secular artists and artists who are Christians represents an unnecessary division often advocated on the basis of subjective quality criteria. The reality is that both have happened simultaneously in the story of modern and contemporary church commissions and both have resulted in successes and failures. What is warranted and rewarded is sustained and prayerful attention to each and every artwork in order to discern what is good and of God in and through it.

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Young Disciples - As We Come To Be.