The Maritains remain at the heart of a dialogue around the theme of human creativity, being uniquely well-situated to confront the problems, principles and complexities of artistry in the modern era – illuminated by the wisdom of St Thomas Aquinas.
’s belief in the artist’s mission to ‘shelter the prayer, instruct the intelligence, and rejoice the eyes and the soul,’ provides an inspiring mandate to investigate art-making in the present age, in all its depth and variety.
What is also frustrating about this denigratory attitude towards modern and contemporary art is that it was not held by the Maritain's themselves. They not only wrote about contemporary art but also deliberately met and dialogued with a very wide range of contemporary artists, drawing some into Thomistic study circles and influencing, while also being influenced by, their work.
of how poets, painters and musicians began gravitating around the Maritains, “most of whom they met in the company of
.” This journey of significant influence began for the Maritain’s with Bloy. The reading of his novel
led on to their meeting with the man himself. A period of examination by the Maritains of “the life, the doctrines, and the sources of Catholicism” ensued before, on 5th April 1906, “the couple, at the end of “long conversations” confided to Bloy their desire to become Catholics.” The artist Georges Rouault, who they also came to know, made a similar journey to that of the Maritains, first reading Le Femme pauvre before meeting Bloy. Barré writes that Rouault “seems to have come to the home of this prophet of malediction seeking for other reasons, and always more painful ones, to question himself and to set out towards the unknown.”
William Dryness writes in Rouault: A Vision of Suffering and Salvation that, “Jacques and
Raïssa Maritain met Rouault for the first time in November of 1905, and Raïssa recalls evenings when she and her husband would sit and listen to Rouault and Bloy discuss “every important question about art.”” Rouault was, for the Maritains, “the first revelation of a truly great painter” and it was in him that they perceived “the nature of art, its imperious necessities, its antinomies and the conflict of very real demands, sometimes tragic, which made up perhaps the theatre of the artist’s mind.”
Following their discovery of
Georges Rouault was, “then of Pierre van der Meer de Valcheren, a Dutch novelist who was presented to them in 1911, two days after his own conversion … Then, during the war, they met the young seventeen-year-old composer,
Georges Auric, soon a frequent visitor at Versailles …”
Barré goes on to describe how these friendships led to the formation of
Thomistic study circles at the Maritain’s home in Meuden “where close friends of the couple came together – Abbé Lallement, Roland Dalbiez, Doctor Pichet, Noële Denis, the eldest daughter of the painter Maurice Denis, Vitia Rosenblum, the brother-in-law of Stanislas Fumet.” Barré continues, “The year 1921 would see the first circle grow larger: a Romanian prince converted to Catholicism, Vladimir Ghika, a young orientalist eager to bring together the Muslim and Christian worlds,
Louis Massignon, the philosopher
Henri Gouhier, the writer
Henri Ghéon, the future Abbé Altermann, among others, joined the study group.
In the 1930s,
Marc Chagall became part of the circle around the Maritain's. The Chagalls were regular attendants at the Maritain's "weekly Sunday gathering in Meuden, where the agenda was how to return secular France to spiritual awareness." The Maritains "made their home ... a centre of spiritual enlightenment for Paris's disillusioned writers and artists such as
Rouault and
Max Jacob." "Thanks to them, many converted or rediscovered their Catholic origins, most noisily
Jean Cocteau."
In
The Maritain Factor: Taking Religion into Interwar Modernism Rajesh Heynickx and
Jan De Maeyer note that: “the French poet, writer, and
surrealist filmmaker
Jean Cocteau converted under the influence of Maritain. For the painters
Gino Severini, a pioneer of
Futurism, and
Otto Van Rees, one of the first
Dadaists-both converts - Maritain played the role of spiritual counselor. And when the promoter of abstract art
Michel Seuphor embraced Catholic faith in the 1930s, he, too, had extensive contact with Maritain. For all of them, the dictum of the Irish poet
Brian Coffey, once a doctoral student under Maritain, applied: modern art needs a Thomist conceptual framework.”
The Maritain's initial approach, Barré writes,“to [Rouault] this “true and great artist” in his imperious confrontation with the first demands of the creative act … then took form and developed into a reflection which ended with the publication in 1920 of
Art et Scolastique.” Art and Scholasticism:
“set itself to demonstrate the autonomy of the creative act, the particular responsibility that falls to artists. Directed to beauty as to its very own absolute … art has “an end and a set of rules and values, which are not those of men, but of the work of art to be produced.” … Nor does the nature of art consist in imitating the real, but rather in “composing or constructing” by delving into the “immense treasure of created things, from sensible nature as from the world of souls.” In this way the creator becomes “an associate of God in the making of beautiful works.” … In praise of pure art, Art et Scolastique can be read as the manifesto of a new classicism, founded on “the simplicity and purity of means,” aspiring to nothing more than the veracity of the work itself. In modern art Maritain disclosed the first steps of search in this direction and noticed in
cubism “the infancy, still toddling and screaming, of an art that is once again pure.” … it contained a kind of call, inviting philosophers and artists to enter into a “conversation” that would lead to an escape from “the immense intellectual disarray inherited from the nineteenth century.””
As Barré notes the book “was closer to Jean Cocteau and
Erik Satie than to
Aristotle and
Thomas Aquinas” and, as a result, in the 1920s and 1930s, Maritain’s cultural criticism (Antimodern, 1922, Religion et Culture, 1930) and his reflections on aesthetics in Art and Scholasticism enjoyed wide interest in artistic and intellectual circles.
One example of this response can be found in
Gino Severini’s
The Life of a Painter. Severini writes of his encounter with Maritain as marking an important point in his life, in part because Maritain loaned him money to set up his own art school. During his initial meeting with Maritain it was clear to him that he was being submitted to a thorough examination on the part of those present (which included Ghéon, as well as the Maritains) and that his every word was significant to them. As he left, Maritain put a book into his hands, “saying: “Take a look at it when you have the time.”” On the electric train back to Paris, Severini discovered that he had been given a first edition of Art and Scholasticism and “was amazed at the extent to which it agreed with the most modern goals, and at the profound sense of freedom, from what supreme heights of intelligence, the author could observe, put in order, and clarify, everything related to art.”
Severini continues: “… what a great sense of joy I felt upon discovering, in Maritain, the confirmation of certain thought patterns, certain ways of clarifying these to myself and to others, and, what I considered most important, of discovering a friendship and human comprehension of the most profound sort. Later the formidable significance of Art et Scolastique became clear to everyone, as did the caliber of the author, the transparency and clarity of whose soul recalls the purest of rock crystals.”
Severini reconverted to Catholicism in the 1920s. He claims that his thinking on this decision began prior to the conversions of the poets
Jean Cocteau and
Pierre Reverdy and before meetings with
Maurice Denis and
Jacques Maritain. He highlights the writings of the Benedictine
Desideratus Lenz as an influence of the direction of his work but not his conversion. The most significant influence on his decision seems to have been the Abbé Sarraute who Severini met at Denis' home and who conducted the Severini's marriage ceremony.
These artists and other French-speaking ecclesiastics were in touch with and inspired by the writings of
Jacques Maritain and the practice of
Maurice Denis. "Maritain played a part in the next stage of Severini's career by suggesting that the Swiss painter
Alexandre Cingria visit Severini and encourage him to enter a competition for the decoration of a Church in the Fribourg Canton of Switzerland. Severini did so, won the competition and went on to work on several Swiss churches over the latter period of his career. So much so, that Denis spoke of him as "the most famous decorator of Swiss churches."
Denis first worked with some of these artists when he was commissioned to work on the renovation of
Notre-Dame Geneva and also became artistic director for the construction of
Saint-Paul Grange-Canal, also in Geneva. Together they dreamed of "creating a movement of rebirth of religious art in France and in all Catholic countries." This ambition resulted in 1919 in the formation by Cingria of
The Groupe de Saint-Luc et Saint-Maurice in Switzerland and also of the
Ateliers d'Art Sacré by Denis and
Georges Desvallieres in Paris.The Groupe de Saint-Luc et Saint-Maurice which he founded, built, restored and decorated more than 70 churches in Switzerland during the interwar years.
Severini writes that Jean Cocteau was chief among the “somewhat atheist poets” that Maritain transformed into Christian artists but notes too that this period “was all too brief.” Similarly,
Rowan Williams considers in
Grace and Necessity that “Maritain’s relations with Cocteau … constituted an important if inconclusive episode in the lives of both.”
Although Cocteau’s subsequent life seemed, from the perspective of Maritain, to be “going deeper “into the caves of death” and to be dealing with the “powers of darkness”, the influence that Maritain and Catholicism had had on Cocteau was not altogether lost. Something of this can be sensed in the church decorations that Cocteau undertook.
In 1960 he painted
murals in one of the chapels of
Notre Dame de France, London. According to eye witnesses, he always began by lighting a candle before the statue of Our Lady of Lourdes and spoke to his characters while he worked on the mural. For instance, he is reported as telling the virgin of the Annunciation, “O you, most beautiful of women, loveliest of God’s creatures, you were the best loved. So I want you to be my best piece of work too… I am drawing you with light strokes… You are the yet unfinished work of Grace.” Cocteau is buried at the
chapel of Saint-Blaise-des-Simples, where he had also painted decorations. Before his death, he had also been making sketches to paint a
chapel in Frejus which was actually decorated, after his death, by the gardener that Cocteau had trained as an artist shortly before he died.
Jacques and Raïssa Maritain moved to Meudon in 1924, where Jacques started his famous Thomistic Study Circles. Peter A. Redpath writes, in a
review of
The Very Rich Hours of Jacques Maritain, that:
‘Their fifteen years there were tumultuous. Maritain attempted to rival the negative literary influence of
André Gide in French culture and came into public conflict with Jean Cocteau. Among the things that [Ralph] McInerny tells us caused conflict among Gide, Cocteau, and Maritain was Gide’s celebration of homosexuality in the book
Corydon, and Cocteau’s flamboyant lifestyle as a homosexual drug addict and his overall character as “an enfant terrible of artistic innovation”.’
One result of this period was
Art and Faith, the book which Maritain published in 1926 as a treasury of insights on the broad and interrelated topics of art and faith revealed in the correspondence of letters between he and Cocteau. Maritain wrote, ‘We merely claim that these two can love each other and remain free.’ Cocteau went on much later in his life to decorate several churches and chapels, including the chapel of Saint-Blaise des Simples near his home in Milly-la-Fôret where he was buried amidst the murals he had prepared for this purpose himself. His self chosen epitaph was 'Je reste avec vous' or 'I remain with you'.
His chapel murals, including those at
Notre Dame de France in London, are, perhaps, a late flowering of the French Catholic Revival within which Maritain had played such a key role. These murals,
newly restored and protected behind a glass screen, are unique examples of the art of the French Catholic Revival within the UK.
Robert Fallon has also written about this same connection in an essay entitled
Composing Subjectivity which explores Maritain 's poetic knowledge in
Igor Stravinsky and Messiaen:
'Maritain and Stravinsky first met after a concert on 10 June 1926, at the time that Stravinsky was writing his first work with a religious text, a Pater Noster for four-part chorus. That year,
Cocteau published his
Lettre a Jacques Maritain and Maritain his
Reponse a Jean Cocteau; both volumes are dedicated to Stravinsky. By the end of April 1927, Stravinsky had returned to the Orthodox faith that he had abandoned in his youth. He later wrote that "Jacques Maritain may have exercised an influence on me at this time [ 1926]. "Though Stravinsky denied that Maritain played a role in his conversion, his assistant Robert Craft says that Maritain did exert some influence on his return to the Church. In May 1927, Stravinsky's opera oratorio
Oedipus Rex, a collaboration with Cocteau, premiered in Paris.
Following Oedipus Rex, however, Stravinsky's attitude toward Maritain became ambivalent. In 1928, he wrote to one of his patrons, Victoria Ocampo, that Maritain's entourage nauseated him. In another letter he describes Maritain as:
"one of those people of superior intelligence who are lacking in humanity, and if Maritain himself does not deserve this judgment, certainly it applies to a great deal of his work.
Maritain is still attached to the nihilism of his youth, and this can be sensed in all of his books, despite the great value of his work in Christian and Thomist thought."
Stravinsky's famous Norton Lectures of 1941, delivered at Harvard University and later published as
Poetique musicale, refer several times to Maritain and borrow his neo-Thomistic definition of a composer as a medieval artisan who orders and disciplines his craft. The book's considerable debt to Maritain includes quotations from the very same passages from
Baudelaire,
Poussin,
Bellay, and
Montaigne that Maritain had used in Art et Scholastique two decades earlier ...
Unlike Stravinsky, Messiaen never met Maritain, though by his own account he did read one book (probably Art et Scholastique) by him in 1927. He said it was "a book of high philosophy that seemed very difficult to me," but admitted having benefited from it. Maritain's influence is suggested in Messiaen's views on artistic imitation, his skeptical attitude toward science, his apparent interest in
Emmanuel Mounier's personalist movement, and his rhetorical use of terms such as "poetic intuition."
Among Messiaen's early works,
La Nativite du Seigneur (1935) most strongly suggests Maritain's influence in its Thomistic theme of truth. Like Oedipus Rex, La Nativite opens a window onto Messiaen's epistemology. Comprised of nine movements for solo organ lasting twice as long as any composition he had yet written, La Nativite quickly entered the organist's repertoire and remained one of his favorite works. Though it bears no dedication, Messiaen later said it was written in homage to his teacher
Paul Dukas.'
Fallon also notes that 'Olivier Messiaen's father,
Pierre Messiaen, did know Maritain, whose books quote English Romantic poetry in the father's translations.'
Stephen Schloesser's '
Jazz Age Catholicism offers an original, insightful, and penetrating analysis of an important moment in the cultural history of modern France. It argues that pervasive collective bereavement in the aftermath of World War I prompted a profound cultural shift in elite French society that made Catholicism—dismissed only a few years earlier as retrograde, essentially out of step with the modern world, and archaic—a vibrant and consoling cultural option for many of France's most innovative and creative minds ... prominent French Catholic thinkers and artists embraced modernity not by wholesale rejection of the past but by effecting a synthesis of medieval and modern philosophical principles and artistic forms. At the forefront of this experiment in Catholic renewal and redefinition were
Jacques Maritain,
Georges Bernanos,
Georges Rouault, and
Charles Tournemire. Refusing to abandon the philosophic and aesthetic traditions of the Catholic past—whether Scholasticism in philosophy (in the case of Maritain) or Gregorian chant in music (as was Tournemire's striking accomplishment)—each of Schloesser's subjects "formulat[ed] traditional Catholic ideas in modernist guise" ...
Schloesser's ... willingness to think about how sexual modernity (epitomized in the 1920's by homosexuality) often coincided with a deep respect for cultural order—most evident in
Jean Cocteau's abiding friendship with, and respect for, Jacques and
Raissa Maritain—offers us a new way to understand the modernist initiatives of inter-war Catholicism: "la main tendue,"once understood only as the outstretched hand that hoped to bring Catholics and Communists together, emerges here as another form of cultural rapprochement, equally unexpected by the standards of the pre-war era, by which Catholics and homosexuals could find common ground.
Schloesser also notes that, 'Maritain's extended argument in Art and Schlasticism made two principal points: first, religion and the avant-garde are eminently compatible as they meet in the artistic and aesthetic arenas; second, there is no particularly "religious" form of art.' As a result, 'Maritain gave a Catholic artist licence to jettison received external forms and set out on an avant-garde path. One thing alone mattered: the eternal formal principle that radiated clarity ... from within and gave unity and meaning to the organic whole.'
The failure of Maritain's relationship with Cocteau came at a time in which more than one of those whose conversions he had won wandered away from their regained faith and in which he became suspect in the eyes of Catholics in general. He questioned whether he had been wrong and mistaken to bother himself with all these literary people. Reflecting these new problems confronting him, Barré writes that new and different friendships formed around him with his network becoming “more open to philosophers, professors, French and foreign religious.”
Maritain’s greatest influence on an artist was perhaps not on one of those that was a part of his immediate circle. Art and Scholasticism was important, as Jonathan Miles and Derek Shiel write in
The Maker Unmade, to the thinking in
Eric Gill’s establishments at
Ditchling, Capel-y-ffin and Pigotts as well as to
David Jones’s thinking about art.
Rowan Williams writes in Grace and Necessity that: “Jones’ exposure to Maritain came through his participation in Gill’s project. After demobilization in 1919, Jones studied first at the Westminster School of Art, where it appears that a catholic friend introduced him to
Fr. John O’Connor. He became a Roman Catholic in 1921 and, prompted by O’Connor, joined Gill at Ditchling later that year … Thus, he was alongside Gill and Gill’s colleagues … during the crucial period during which they were all reading Maritain; and it is very clear that for Jones … this made sense of what he had assimilated at the Westminster School of Art.”
As
Rene Hague later wrote, ‘the
Post-Impressionist attitude to the arts fitted in very well with Maritain’ and
‘Thomism’. Miles and Shiel write that: “The philosophy of Maritain explored two related questions that are of importance for David Jones: signification and epiphany. By rigorous habit, the artist would not only be able to reveal this or that object under the form of paint but also make an epiphany, make the universal shine out from the particular. Thus, what is re-presented also becomes a sign of something else and if that something else is significant of something divine, then the art can claim to have a sacred character or function, a sacramental vitality.”
Similarly, Williams argues that what preoccupies Jones from the beginning is “precisely what so concerns Maritain, the showing of the excess that pervades appearances.” As his work develops, Jones comes to see that you paint ‘excess’ by: “the delicate superimposing of nets of visual material in a way that teases constantly by simultaneously refusing a third dimension and insisting that there is no way of reading the one surface at once. As in the
Byzantine icon, visual depth gives way to the time taken to ‘read’ a surface: you cannot construct a single consistent illusion of depth as you look, and so you are obliged to trace and re-trace the intersecting linear patterns.”
Williams notes that in several respects Jones takes Maritain a stage further. Firstly, in that “the half-apprehended consonances of impressions out of which an artwork grows has to be realized in the process of actually creating significant forms which, in the process of their embodiment, in stone, words, or pigment, uncover other resonances, so that what finally emerges is more than just a setting down of what was first grasped.”
Secondly, in “the way in which a life may become a significant form – as, decisively and uniquely; in the life of Christ.” He: “illustrates a point Maritain does not quite get to. Jones implies that the life of ‘prudence’, a life lived in a consciously moral context, however exactly understood, is itself an act of gratuitous sign-making; moral behavior is the construction of a life that can be ‘read’, that reveals something in the world and uncovers mystery.”
Both are exemplified by Jones’ life and practice as he turns away “from one mode of representation in which he excelled in order to include more and more of the interwoven simultaneous lines of signification and allusion” in “an attempt to embody a more radical love in what he produces, a love that attends to all the boundary-crossing echoes that characterize the real, which is also the good.”
In doing so, he embodies in his art Maritain’s view that “the joy or delight of a work of art is in proportion to its powers of signification”: “the more there is of knowledge, or of things presented to the understanding, the vaster will be the possibility of joy; this is why Art, in so far as ordered to Beauty, does not, at least when its object permits, stop at forms or at colours, nor at sounds, nor at words taken in themselves and as things, but it takes them also as making known other things than themselves, that is to say as signs. And the thing signified may itself be a sign in turn, and the more the work of art is laden with significance … the vaster and the richer and the higher will be the possibility of joy and beauty”.
Gene Kellogg notes, in
The Vital Tradition, that the development of the Catholic Novel involved "the appearance of an entirely new kind of fiction in French, English and American literature":
"... metaphysics, ontology, and particularly the power of the historic Roman Catholic apocalyptic "matrix" of heaven, hell, and purgatory as deeper realities framing, enclosing, and terminating ostensible "reality" were never the touchstone of novels until the time of
Bernanos and
Greene. And all the long complex development from the time of
Barbey d'Aurevilly was required before the work of Greene and Bernanos became possible. The work in aesthetics of
Maritain,
Claudel, and
Mauriac was necessary to establish the critical premises of such a radically new form. Maritain made his distinction between an "individual," a human being as a social or political unit, and a "person," a man or woman with a soul to save or lose. Claudel asserted the possibility of dramas concerned with ontological problems and developmas for the stage. Meanwhile Mauriac claimed that the "romanticism" of stories about "individuals" was exhausted and declared that writers should examine the "eternal Tartuffe" or the "eternal Harpagon" to create a gallery of spiritual "types," as in his own fiction he proceeded to do."
In
Art and Scholasticism Jacques Maritain writes that Christian art is not impossible but is: "difficult, doubly difficult - fourfold difficult, because it is difficult to be an artist and very difficult to be a Christian, and because the total difficulty is not simply the sum but the product of these two difficulties multiplied by one another: for it is the difficulty of harmonizing two absolutes." He says that the "difficulty becomes tremendous when the entire age lives far from Christ, for the artist is greatly dependent upon the spirit of his time" and then asks "whether courage has ever been lacking on earth."
'Two difficulties multiplied' would, I think, make a great title for a survey of modern and contemporary Christian Art. Maritain, and his wife
Raïssa, helped generate that courage in many artists, musicians, poets and writers.
Jean-Luc Barré writes that: "They invented "a style of full freedom in the faith," based on friendship, on "person-to-person influence," on chance encounters, "what each one brings, in the depths of his heart, from his coming and going in a house where he was loved, from the peace of God that he felt there, but of which he had no idea ..." What took place there [in Thomistic Study circles at the Maritain's home in Meuden] was derived from no institution and hearkened back to no known model, and became the target of multiple conversions and a prey of just as many qui pro quo's and misunderstandings."
Jacques Maritain's Art and Scholasticism includes an appendix describing the banning, by the Roman Catholic Church, of Stations of the Cross created by the Belgian artist
Albert Servaes. Servaes played a significant role in a renewed interest in ecclesiastical art in Belgium. This renewal also had links to the revival of religious art in France in which
Maurice Denis played a significant role. Maritain's comments can be read, together with background information on Servaes, at this blog -
idle speculations: The Banning of the Stations of the Cross.
Servaes' banned Stations are reproduced in
Ecce Homo: Contemplating the Way of Love together with meditations by Titus Brandsma. The publisher's state that: "Albert Servaes (1883-1966) is the leading representative of Expressionism in Belgian painting. Here we have a great piece of Flemish art matched with the spiritual thoughts of Brandsma. Titus meditating on the passion of the Lord, and calling attention to the place of the cross in prayer. These meditations on the passion stand wholly in this tradition of the vivid use of the imagination in order to evoke the reality of Jesus' sufferings. The details of his thoughts are determined by the artist's black on sepia drawings and are completely understood only by reference to them. No doubt the grim expressionist statement of the theme brought home with extra force to Titus' mind the frightful nature of the crucifixion."
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