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Thursday, 17 August 2023

Artlyst: Jeremy Deller In Rennes And Brittany Post-Impressionism – August Diary

My August Art Diary for Artlyst is inspired by a recent trip to Brittany:

'Brittany played a significant role in developing Post-Impressionism and Pictorial Symbolism, with its Catholic culture a source of inspiration and Catholic artists among its pioneers. Several artists also contributed to reviving sacred art in Europe whilst offering or creating work for local churches. The visual arts remain significant for Brittany through collections of Post Impressionist work and contemporary exhibitions such as the current retrospective of the Turner Prize-winning British artist Jeremy Deller in Rennes.'

I told some of the story of Post-Impressionism and Pictorial Symbolism in my Artlyst review of 'After Impressionism' at the National Gallery - see here. For more on Émile Bernard see here. For more on Paul Sérusier see here. For more on Maurice Denis see here, here and here. For my Church Times review of 'Jeremy Deller: English Magic' see here.

My other pieces for Artlyst are:

Interviews -

Monthly diary articles -

Articles/Reviews -

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Medicine Head - His Guiding Hand.

Thursday, 1 December 2022

Artlyst: Lucian Freud And His Circle Surveyed In Two London Exhibitions

My latest exhibition review for Artlyst is of: Lucian Freud: New Perspectives; Friends and Relations: Lucian Freud, Francis Bacon, Frank Auerbach, Michael Andrews; and Bruce Bernard: Portraits of Friends.

'The exhibitions explore aspects of the camaraderie and interrelationships of these four painters whilst also highlighting the intimate relationships between artist and sitter, including artist and lover, partner, and offspring.

While figuration, existentialism, and portraiture remain significant strands within their work, the critical debate between them, within their works, seems to have been about distortion versus clarity and fine versus broad brushstrokes. Freud moves from his crisp, clear early style, which shows a debt to Neo-Romanticism, to a much more expressive use of broad brushstrokes, presumably somewhat influenced by Bacon’s distortions, Auerbach’s layers and Andrews’ mix of loose and tight passages of paint.

Bacon distorts his portraits to reveal the underlying existential angst found within, while Auerbach’s layers serve to suggest the subject’s presence more than their features. Both operate primarily in the liminal hinterland between figuration and abstraction. Andrews and Freud, while using abstract passages, remain more fundamentally figurative artists. Andrews’ use of looser and more tightly painted passages within the same painting is a way of indicating focus and creating atmosphere. Freud, who spoke of “wanting the paint to work as flesh does,” increasingly comes to paint flesh and how flesh forms and fails us as human beings.'

My other pieces for Artlyst are:

Interviews -

Monthly diary articles -

Articles/Reviews -

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Michael McDermott - Hit Me Back.

Friday, 29 October 2010

Ai Weiwei and Gauguin

Ai Weiwei is a Chinese artist, curator, architectural designer, social commentator, and activist. His Sunflower Seeds installation in the Turbine Hall of Tate Modern is made up of millions of small works, each apparently identical, but actually unique. Each seed has been individually sculpted and painted by specialists working in small-scale workshops in the Chinese city of Jingdezhen. Porcelain is almost synonymous with China and, to make this work, Ai Weiwei has manipulated traditional methods of crafting what has historically been one of China’s most prized exports.

Juliet Bingham, Curator, Tate Modern says: "Ai Weiwei's Unilever Series commission, Sunflower Seeds, is a beautiful, poignant and thought-provoking sculpture. The thinking behind the work lies in far more than just the idea of walking on it. The precious nature of the material, the effort of production and the narrative and personal content create a powerful commentary on the human condition. Sunflower Seeds is a vast sculpture that visitors can contemplate at close range on Level 1 or look upon from the Turbine Hall bridge above. Each piece is a part of the whole, a commentary on the relationship between the individual and the masses. The work continues to pose challenging questions: What does it mean to be an individual in today's society? Are we insignificant or powerless unless we act together? What do our increasing desires, materialism and number mean for society, the environment and the future?"

William S. Rubin writing in 1961 noted that Catholic critics were retroactively citing Paul Gauguin as an important precusor of the revival of sacred art. Rubin thought this inappropriate as, although Gauguin made a number of paintings with manifestly religious subject matter (many of which are included in Tate Modern's current Gauguin exhibition), they were conceived from the point of view of the nonbeliever. There are many paradoxes and ironies surrounding Gauguin's sacred themes, as they are catagorized in the Tate exhibition, some of which are noted in the exhibition guide.

Firstly, in his conversation and writings, Gauguin presented himself as fiercely opposed to the Christian Church. Nonetheless, his art was pervaded by religious themes and imagery, frequently drawing upon the Old and New Testaments for source material as well as the myths and belief systems of other cultures. Gauguin began to address sacred themes when he was working in Brittany, possibly influenced by the Catholic artist Emile Bernard. Among the distinctive qualities of the region that he wanted to capture was its deeply ingrained Catholic faith. The Vision of the Sermon (Jacob Wrestling with the Angel) 1888 powerfully conveys the faith of the women experiencing the vision through Gauguin's painting style, with clearly defined outlines and bold colouring that resembles stained glass (an approach known as 'Cloisonism' after a medieval technique for decorative enamel work) which means that the painting cannot be experienced simply as a quasi-anthropological study.

Secondly, Gauguin often paints Christ as having his own features in order to suggest that he has experienced suffering and betrayal at the hands of critics and artists that is in some fashion synonymous to the suffering of Christ. While there is undoubted arrogance and challenge in this stylistic technique, the genuine emotion that it calls up in Gauguin and which he translates onto canvas genuinely offer insight into the Agony in the Garden.

Finally, Gauguin was bitterly disappointed to discover on arrival in Tahiti that missionaries had been successfully converting the islanders to Christianity for more than a century, leaving little trace of the old traditions. He set about reconstructing the lost myths in his art, devising imaginative references to deities such as Hina, the goddess of the moon, and Tefatu, the god of the earth. He carved his own wooden idols and included them in his paintings, in which they resemble time-worn artefacts. In his art, at least, the Tate guide argues, ancient myth becomes part of everyday Tahitian life. However, the reality that ancient myth was not actually part of everyday Tahitian life lends these paintings an air of unreal ideality which differs from the real force and power of the Catholic faith which he depicted in Brittany.

As such, Gauguin's paintings with Christian subject matter continue to excite and inspire artists working with such themes, dspite Rubin's reservations.

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James MacMillan - Veni Veni Emmanuel: III. Dance - Hocket.

Wednesday, 17 June 2009

Airbrushed from Art History? (9)

So far this series of posts has summarised the first circle of artistic influence to come out of the French Catholic Revival; the circle of artists which formed around Maurice Denis and which, having been influenced by Bernard and Gauguin via Sérusier, was itself influential through the Nabis, Symbolism, and the Ateliers de l’Art Sacré.

The second of the four circles of influence that came out of the French Catholic Revival, as noted in my post summarizing where this part of the series is going, was that which surrounded the philosopher Jacques Maritain.

Jean-Luc Barré writes in Jacques and Raïssa Maritain: Beggars for Heaven of how poets, painters and musicians began gravitating around the Maritains, “most of whom they met in the company of Léon Bloy.” There was firstly their discovery of Georges Rouault, “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 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.”

This journey of significant influence began for the Maritain’s with Léon Bloy. The reading of Bloy’s novel Le Femme pauvre 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.” Rouault 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.”

Their initial approach, Barré writes,“to 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.”

It was at Maritain’s prompting, via Alexandre Cingria, that Severini began working on Church commissions eventually becoming in the words of Denis, “the most famous decorator of Swiss churches.”

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.

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”.

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Peter Case - Who's Gonna Go Your Crooked Mile.

Sunday, 24 May 2009

Responses to 'Airbrushed from Art History?' (2)

In his comments about the 'Airbrushed from Art History?' series of posts, Richard Davey wrote firstly that:

"You contradict yourself from the start. Christianity and religious influences have not been airbrushed from art history, as the books and exhibitions you cite demonstrate."

The books and exhibitions that I have cited to date in this series constitute a miniscule proportion of those that address Modern and Contemporary Art as a whole. None of the books and exhibitions that I have cited so far comprehensively address Christian influences on Modern and Contemporary Art and I am unaware of any book or exhibition that seeks to do so.

Books and exhibitions on particular movements will reference Christian influences, as with the books on Symbolism that I have cited thus far, but this is generally as part of a sub-set of influences and usually in terms that are somewhat disparaging e.g. Robert Goldwater's argument that the "clear religious message" of Émile Bernard and Maurice Denis is deterimental to the art or Michelle Facos' statement that the "Catholic revival in art and literature ... frequently descended into xenophobia."

Several of the authors that I have cited make the argument that I have summarised in the phrase 'Airbrushed from Air History.' For instance, in the second post I quoted Mark C. Taylor as arguing that the way in which the influential art critic Clement Greenberg defined the terms of debate "effectively obscures the self-confessed spiritual preoccupations of the very artists whose work he analyzes." In the third post of the series, I reviewed the Traces du Sacré exhibition at the Centre Georges Pompidou, an exhibition about the exploration of spiritual themes within most of the major movements in Modern Art but one which argued that the secularization of society delivered artists from their subordination to the Church and that, as a result, the traces of spirituality found in both Modern and Contemporary Art are ones that stand outside of organised religion (and Christianity, in particular). As Greenberg and Traces du Sacré tell stories of Modern and Contemporary Art in ways that obscure or ignore the Christian influences on the artists whose work they discuss, it seems legitimate to describe this as airbrushing Christian influences out of art history.

Other writers cited in the initial posts make essentially the same argument and I could cite a wider range of writers to support my point. James Elkins in On the Strange Place of Religion in Contemporary Art may well be the author who has made this argument most strongly:

"Sooner or later, if you love art, you will come across a strange fact: there is almost no modern religious art in museums or in books of art history. It is a state of affairs that is at once obvious and odd, known to everyone and yet hardly whispered about ... a certain kind of academic art historical writing treats religion as an interloper, something that just has no place in serious scholarship ... Straightforward talk about religion is rare in art departments and art schools, and wholly absent from art journals unless the work in question is transgressive. Sincere, exploratory religious and spiritual work goes unremarked. Students who make works that are infused with spiritual or religious meanings must normally be content with analysis of their works' formal properties, technique, or mode of presentation. Working artists concerned with themes of spirituality (again, excepting work that is critical or ironic about religion) normally will not attract the attention of people who write for art magazines ... An observer of the art world might well come to the conclusion that religious practice and religious ideas are not relevant to the art world unless they are treated with scepticism. And that's odd, because there is a tremendous amount of religious art ..."

For these reasons I think it is legitimate to write of Christian influences as having been airbrushed from art history. To do so does not mean that there are no books of exhibitions where that influence is acknowledged but to say that particular ways of telling the story of Modern and Contemporary Art do underplay or ignore the extent of those influences.

"The problem is not that Christianity has been airbrushed out but that it has been understood and read from outside the parameters of faith."

The initial posts in this series reference the argument that the way in which the story of Modern Art has been told has had a secularising agenda. This is highlighted particularly in the first post where I quote Sally Promey writing that the "strongest determinant in this "modernist divide" regarding art and religion is the lingering paradigm of the secularisation theory of modernity."

I make use of this argument to explain why Christian influences have often been airbrushed from art history while Davey uses it to argue "that the recognition of these influences has come from a particularly secular and disengaged position." The two do not, however, need to be mutually exclusive. It is true that there are books and exhibitions which recognise these influences and I have cited several in these early posts but this does not negate my argument that there are others (of significance and in significant numbers) which ignore or downplay these influences.

Where books and exhibitions do recognise these infuences, as with Goldwater or Facos, I agree with Davey that "the interpretations of works which are informed by a position of faith, or employ christian iconography are largely made from a position of secular theology, which seems to offer a contradictory sensibility to the one the work itself seems to embody, or we feel before a work."

"Theology has airbrushed art out of its history as well. There are any numbers of books including David Brown, George Pattison, Richard Harries etc., which engage with art and use images to offer insights and reflections on theology and biblical studies, But what they engage with is iconography, they do not allow the work of art to be a sensuous embodied thing which offers its own knowledge of the world; providing a natural theology that may not sit comfortably within the confines of theological method and praxis."

I agree fully with both statements made here and don't see these arguments as invalidating the basis of my series, based as it is in art history rather than theological history.

In relation to Davey's first statement, in my second post I highlighted Mark C. Taylor's argument that throughout the twentieth century Christian theologians and philosophers of religion have been, for the most part, either critical or dismissive of the arts. Taylor places the blame for this on the influence of the dialectical theology of Karl Barth.

Davey's second point that, where theologians engage with art, what they often focus on is iconography rather the work as a whole is, I think, also largely correct. This is, I think, the major focus of Daniel A. Siedell too when he suggests in God in the Gallery that contemporary culture does not need the “Christian artists,” for which Protestant writers such as Francis Schaeffer and Hans R. Rookmaaker have argued, instead it needs “critics and curators who have a rich vocabulary from which to revive the sacramental and liturgical identity of human practice and to demonstrate that this identity finds its most complete and profound embodiment in the Nicene Christian faith.” His book was written to offer "a way to do a Christian approach to modern and contemporary art that could accommodate urinals and dripped paint on canvases and chocolate cubes." In other words, to engage as Christians with all art holistically and not just in terms of iconography.

"... just as we need to be careful of approaches that read a secular theology into works that are informed by a metaphysical theology, so we need to beware of reading our own faith into works that are essentially 'secular' [whatever that means]."

I think that this statement holds good in relation to my intentions in this series i.e. that in writing what is essentially art history I should beware of reading Christian influences into works where no evidence exists of such influences being a factor for the artist(s) concerned. However, if we are talking about the work of interpreting art for contemporary culture (the task that Siedell outlined above) then I would argue that interpreting essentially 'secular' (whatever that means) artworks in ways that inform our faith is legitimate as such interpretation is as much about the viewer's response as it is about the artist's intentions providing it responds to the "work of art as a sensuous embodied thing.".

My friend, Alan Stewart, has spoken of this in his 'Icons or Eyesores' presentation which ends by examining responses to Andres Serrano's Piss Christ. He notes Serrano's motivation for the work of critiquing mass produced Christian icongraphy before suggesting that reflecting on the submersion of a crucifix in urine can lead to a profound reflection on the incarnation and crucifixion as a submersion in the detritus of human existence. This reflection is not based on the artist's intention but is nevertheless true to the embodiment of the artwork itself.

"... the real problem, the lack of attention to the work of art itself as something made by an individual with their own subjective space within the world. The issue is not airbrushing, but respect - respect for the work of art as an object itself made by an embodied human being for embodied human beings."

I think that this paragraph shows that what Davey and I are debating are nuances or emphases rather than fundamental differences. I would agree that where airbrushing occurs (and I continue to maintain that there are many examples, both by art historians and theologians) this shows a lack of "respect for the work of art as an object itself made by an embodied human being for embodied human beings"

My intent in this series is to respond to the lack of respect shown to those works and their embodied human creators which are informed by a position of faith, employ christian iconography or are influenced the heritage of Christianity, when these influences/positions are ignored or downplayed. In seeking in a modest fashion through this project to carry that out, I agree that it is also vital that the same respect is shown to works and their interpretation which are essentially 'secular.' I agree that respect is the broader agenda but continue to think that responding to airbrushing where it has occurred is a necessary and legitimate task.

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U2 - Moment Of Surrender.

Friday, 22 May 2009

Airbrushed from Art History? (6)

Vincent Van Gogh wrote that he wanted “to paint men and women with that something of the eternal which the halo used to symbolise, and which we seek to convey by the actual radiance and vibration of our colouring.”

This introduces a new means by which the spiritual is to be encountered in modern art. Those aspects of emotion, spirit and soul that previously had been conveyed by symbol are now to be found in colour and line alone. Van Gogh continues in this letter to his brother Theo:

“I am always in hope of making a discovery there [in the study of colour], to express the love of two lovers by the wedding of two complementary colours, the mingling and their opposition, the mysterious vibration of kindred tones. To express the thought of a brow by the radiance of a light tone against a sombre background.

To express hope by some star, the eagerness of a soul by a sunset radiance. Certainly there is no delusive realism in that, but isn’t it something that actually exists?”

Alan Bowness sums this up in Post-Impressionism when he writes that:

“... for Van Gogh deeper and more universal meanings emerged from his study of reality, by a process of association. In his colour and brushwork, he harnessed the effects which he found in his subjects to expressive ends, using certain colour relationships and patterns of natural forms as metaphors for emotional and religious experience, as in the Night Café, whose red-green contrasts were meant to express the ‘terrible passions of humanity’, and in his canvasses of the asylum garden and olive orchards of Saint Rémy.”

Robert Rosenblum in Modern Painting and the Northern Romantic Tradition sees Van Gogh as being engaged in “a Romantic search for a new kind of religion in the scrutiny of nature” and “perpetuating in his own art many metaphors of divinity that were first invented in the visionary landscapes of [Caspar David] Friedrich, [Philipp Otto] Runge, and [Samuel] Palmer.”

He notes, for instance:

“Van Gogh’s recurrent image of the sun as something almost sacred, a connotation that can often become explicit. Even in a thoroughly secular scene like that painted in Arles in June 1888 of a sower in a wheat field, the sun, blazing on the horizon, has an almost supernatural power. Its location, in exact centre and just over a high horizon, is that which, in earlier art, one might have associated with a symbolic representation of an omnipotent deity; and its form and colour, a pure disc of golden yellow from whose clearly incised circular periphery radiate symmetrically ordered spokes of golden light, suggest that this is, in effect, the pantheist’s equivalent of a golden halo.”

Contemporary visionary artist John Reilly frequently bases his works on a central circle (often, the sun) from which facets of colour emanate, like ripples on the surface of a stream. The painting’s imagery is then set within these facets, each figure or object being embedded in the overall patterning of the painting and related to the environmental whole that Reilly creates. By these means fragments of form and colour (the facets of the painting’s patterning) and the images that they contain are united to circle harmoniously around and within God, the central life and intelligence which is the light of the world. Reilly’s use of the sun as a central organising symbol in his work may well reflect the influence of Van Gogh.

Van Gogh wrote of needing something greater in his life, although he is clear that this is not God:

“Oh, my dear brother, sometimes I know so well what I want. I can do very well without God both in my life and in my painting, but I cannot, ill as I am, do without something which is greater than I, which is my life – the power to create.

And if, frustrated in the physical power, a man tries to create thoughts instead of children, he is still part of humanity.”

Such comments reveal a need for transcendence of or in ordinary life, even when standing outside of the framework of institutional Christian faith. So, Rosenblum writes that Van Gogh’s:

“... complaint about Émile Bernard’s Christ in the Garden of Olives – that it would be better simply to paint real olive trees – is a clear avowal not only of Van Gogh’s personal dilemma but of that of so many artists who inherited the problems of those Northern Romantics who tried to create, consciously or unconsciously, a religious sentiment in things observed that would be far more truthful to their personal experience of the supernatural than the perpetuation of traditional Christian iconography.”

James Elkins in On the Strange Place of Religion in Contemporary Art suggests five categories for contemporary religious art, one of which is art that sets out to create a new faith. Van Gogh could be an early example of such artists.

Although Van Gogh lost the ardent Christian faith of his youth, he nevertheless retained a love of Christ. To Émile Bernard he wrote:

“But the consolation of that saddening Bible which arouses our despair and our indignation – which distresses us once and for all because we are outraged by its pettiness and contagious folly – the consolation which is contained in it, like a kernel in a hard shell, in a bitter pulp, is Christ ... Christ alone – of all the philosophers, Magi, etc. – has affirmed, as a principal certainty, eternal life, the infinity of time, the nothingness of death, the necessity and the raison d’être of serenity and devotion. He lived serenely, as a greater artist than all artists, despising marble and clay as well as colour, working in living flesh. That is to say, this matchless artist, hardly to be conceived of by the obtuse instrument of our modern, nervous, stupefied brain, made neither statues nor pictures nor books, he loudly proclaimed that he made ... living men, immortals.”

Here Van Gogh connects himself to Christ through the work of creation; he brings thoughts to birth while Christ brings “living men, immortals” to birth. While Christ is so much greater - “a greater artist than all artists” – all artists are, therefore, connected with him through the act of creation.

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Jonathan Richman and the Modern Lovers - Vincent Van Gogh.