The religious art of the Pope of Pop

"Andy was a Catholic
The ethic ran through his bones
He lived alone with his mother
Collecting gossip and toys

Every Sunday when he went to Church
He'd kneel in his pew and he'd say
It's work, all that matters is work"

('Work' from 'Songs for Drella' by Lou Reed & John Cale)

"To believe the envious Truman Capote, Andy was a Sphinx without a secret. In fact, he did have a secret, one that the kept dark from all but his closest friends: he was exceedingly devout - so much so that he made daily visits to the church of Saint Vincent Ferrer on the Upper East Side of Manhattan... Although famously thrifty, he was also secretly charitable. Besides giving financial support, he often spent evenings working in a shelter for the homeless run by the Church of the Heavenly Rest. It was not soppy social consciousness or guilt that prompted Andy's good works; it was atavism as personified by his adored and adoring mother, the pious Julia." John Richardson [from "Warhol at Home" in Sacred Monsters, Sacred Masters (London: Pimlico, 2001), p. 247-8]

"What was Warhol's religious affiliation?

His family was from the Ukraine, and his mother spoke Czech only. She was extremely pious. It was a form of Catholicism, sort of between Catholicism and the Byzantine Rite church. Warhol concealed it from people, but he never left home without saying prayers with his mother.

Often, he went to the church that was near his home. I interviewed the prior there, and he told me how Warhol would come in every evening and sit in the back pew, in the shadows. He didn't want to be recognized as Andy Warhol. He just prayed and sat there. Sometimes he would come to Sunday services, too.

How did his religious practice influence his art, do you think?

Mostly it seems to have influenced his work in the last two years of life. That's when he painted many, many different versions of "The Last Supper," some of which were ravishingly beautiful. The way he manipulates the medium, the application of the paint on the silk screen so that it isn't flat but has contours to it. It's really lovely."

(Berkeley art historian Jane Dillenberger on creativity, prayer and the spirituality of Andy Warhol)

"Two images of Andy Warhol exist in the popular press: the Pope of Pop of the Sixties, and the partying, fright-wigged Andy of the Seventies. In the two years before he died, however, Warhol made over 100 paintings, drawings, and prints based on Leonardo da Vinci's The Last Supper. The dramatic story of these works is told in this book [The Religious Art of Andy Warhol] for the first time. Revealed here is the part of Andy Warhol that he kept very secret: his lifelong church attendance and his personal piety. Art historian and curator Jane Daggett Dillenberger explores the sources and manifestations of Warhol's spiritual side, the manifestations of which are to be found in the celebrated paintings of the last decade of Warhol's life: his Skull paintings, the prints based on Renaissance religious artwork, the Cross paintings, and the large series based on The Last Supper."

To what extent will these perspectives feature or inform BBC Four Goes Pop: A week-long celebration of Pop Art across BBC Four, Radio and Online?

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Lou Reed - Dime Store Mystery.

Artists valued by theologians

I've recently been reading and re-reading several theologians who write about theological aesthetics. It's interesting to note those artists that they view as having synergies with their own work. I've posted previously about Paul Tillich and Expressionism and John Dillenberger and Abstract Expressionism but these theologians - Hans Urs von Balthasar, Calvin Seerveld and Cecilia González-Andrieu - are rather more eclectic, often valuing the work of artists without significant mainstream reputations.

Aidan Nichols writes that "Balthasar's beau idéal of a Church artist was the Swiss Hans Stocker" who he claimed "as representative of a 'new Catholic art in German Switzerland'." For Balthasar, "Stocker represented a pleasing contrast to the many artists claiming to serve the Church yet producing 'kitsch' ... Stocker would do full justice to the Kingdom of the Son in its redemptive economy; to the communion of saints; to the Church, her sacraments, her functions. Balthasar sees as paradigmatic Stocker's Sankt Gallen fresco of the open Heart of Christ with, arranged around it, scenes of the Old and New Covenants, the Angels, and the 'weeping Key-bearer, Peter'. This extended image testifies to an experience of the Heilskosmos, the 'world of salvation', that is central, not peripheral, and the will and capacity to represent it in an original way."

Calvin Seerveld has said of Gerald Folkerts that he "has the wisdom to let his Christian faith subtly percolate in the spirit of his painterly art by showing compassion for the problematic figures he treats": "Self-portrait shows Folkerts himself startled by the viewer's gaze, pounding a nail into the wrist of Christ on the cross lying on the ground. Curled lip, furtive eyes, aggressive hammer, tensed body, all under churning nest of vipers - it is a well-drawn almost melodramatic drawing of the guilt that lodges in the best of us."

"The engravings and paintings of Georges Rouault reinvest the Byzantine tradition with a sombre, stained-glass seriousness that is definitely biblical in its horror of modern dehumanising atrocities, and is truly compassionate in composition, colour, and gritty style that bespeaks Christian art, whether the topic be kings, prostitutes, or Jesus Christ's passion. The Nobel Prize winner for poetry in 1945, Gabriela Mistral of Chile, updates a Franciscan holiness and gives it a poignant, singing voice that casts haloes of comfort around girlish hopes, forgotten prisoners, and even the nest of birds. Canadian painter William Kurelek weds a love for the Bruegel world of low life with a Roman Catholic slant on the poverty of success gained without the presence of the cross; his mark of pristine folk happiness is normally touched by an existential sense of nuclear war apocalypse, so the careful observer can never rest easy. Significant about such varied Christian art born out of Catholic sensitivities today is its unchurchy, world-wide, sorrow-sensitive aura.

A more hidden, 'autonomous', or even tangential expression of biblical faith in art of the twentieth century deserves mention: the sculpture of German Ernst Barlach articulates with rough austerity a forceful cry in wood and metal for reconciliation with God and neighbour that so incurred the anger of the Nazi government it destroyed much of the work. The New York Jew Abraham Rattner not only conceived an enormous stained-glass wall of apocalyptic emblems for a major Chicago synagogue but also grappled time and again in painting with the crucifixion of Christ, trying to exorcise both Golgotha and Auschwitz, as it were, from Jewish experience. Gabriel García Márquez of Colombia, 1982 Nobel prize winner for fiction, exposes small-town political corruption in South America with fantastic horizons that juxtapose real angels, supernatural forces, and the comic foibles of weak people.

The black spiritual song of American Civil War days takes on new evangelical fervour in the melodies and lyrics of Mahalia Jackson, whose simple Baptist roots act prophetically through the cascades of rhythmic beat and glorious sound. The paintings, prints and constructions of Henk Krijger body forth reminiscences of both Bauhaus and German expressionism muted and melded into strong, restfully honed shapes and expertly chosen colours that reveal artistry integrated by the Reformation perspective that ordinary life is a vocation to be lived directly before God and to be redeemed while sharing sadness, humour, and hope." (In The Fields of the Lord)

In Bridge to Wonder Cecilia González-Andrieu holds up as exemplars of the approaches she articulates the founder of modern Chicano theatre and film Luiz Valdés, the poet-playwright Federico García Lorca and the artists John August Swanson and Sergio Gomez.

La Pastorela, which González-Andrieu describes in the book, is performed biannually by El Teatro Campesino during the Christmas holidays, alternating with La Virgen del Tepeyac, in the historic Mission of San Juan Bautista, established in 1797. Pastorelas, or Shepherds Plays, originated in medieval Europe as religious dramas and were later brought to the new world and Alta California by the Spanish missionaries. La Pastorela recreates the long trek of those first pastores to the holy site of the Nativity.

González-Andrieu argues in Bridge to Wonder that the: "possibility of a religious reading of Mariana Pineda has been generally disallowed by Lorca scholars precisely because of political ideologies bent on bifurcating her self-sacrifice from her religious faith. Such an evasion of the complexity of Lorca's work continues even in the face of the playwright's own emphasis of the heroine's Christian identity."

"Even though his works are part of art collections from the Vatican to the Smithsonian, John August Swanson (American, b. 1938) routinely admits to feeling like an amateur, even after four decades as an artist. In one of his early works, the beautifully rendered visual story Inventor, he summarizes the work of the artist and the humility he feels every time he works. The eight panels present an artist, as the newspaper headline announces, who claims to have invented a machine that transforms junk into beauty. Juxtaposed between this claim and the last panel, Swanson presents the young inventor working and draws the beauty that emerges as swirling colors, spheres, concentric circles, and stars. The last panel reports, this time through an old radio, that “an amateur is someone who doesn’t know something can’t be done, so he does it.” ... In Inventor ... Swanson calls into question the image of artists as geniuses and of art as an elite pursuit." (Bridge to Wonder)


González-Andrieu has written that "Gomez's works also act like modern icons opening windows and doors into the depths of Spirit, where death never has the last word and the sacred beckons. In his passionate and passion-making art Sergio Gomez tells a community's story, raises a cry of pain, mediates a vision of hope, and points with care and reverence toward that eternal Other whose love the very beauty of these works brings into relationship with a thankful world."


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Mahalia Jackson - How I Got Over.

Seeing in new and different ways

John Dillenberger's A Theology of Artistic Sensibilities: The Visual Arts and the Church remains a significant contribution to our understanding of the visual arts and faith with its summaries of the engagement that the Church and theologians have had with the visual arts throughout church and art history.
'Since the church has had little regard for the visual arts as such and only a partial interest in architecture, the result has been that the arts and architecture have not had the nourishing spirit of the church. They have been left to themselves - indeed, to the creation of their own spiritual perceptions, whether nourished within or without the church. The artists did not desert the church; the church deserted the artists. this means, of course, that those in the church believe that fundamental realities are expressed elsewhere, namely, in its verbal, word-forming, defining, and naming activities.'

'... language lost its powers of imagination and became that which declared, defined, set limits. In contrast, painting is a suggestive, showing-forth modality, which in the light of what we know, wrests nuances of meaning.'

He quotes Langdon Gilkey: 'Art makes "us see in new and different ways, below the surface and beyond the obvious. Art opens up the truth hidden and within the ordinary; it provides a new entrance into reality and oushes us through that entrance. It leads us to what is really there and really going on. Far from subjective, it pierces the opaque subjectivity, the not seeing, of conventional life, of conventional viewing, and discloses reality."' 

Similarly, he quotes David Tracy: 'In a genuine work of art, "'caught up' in its world, we are shocked, surprised, challenged by its startling beauty and its recognizable truth, its instinct for the essential ... We recognize the truth of the world's disclosure of a world of reality transforming, if only for a moment ourselves: our lives, our sense for possibilities and actuality, our destiny."'

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Jan Garbarek - Molde Canticle.

Arts in Religious & Theological Studies

I've just received a complimentary copy of the current edition of ARTS journal which includes my review of Rowena Loverance's Christian Art (incidentally, it's interesting to discover where your blogs later end up - technorati search enables this; this blog was noted at Iconia, while my series on Maltese Sacred Art was picked up at Wired Malta).

The Arts in Religious and Theological Studies (ARTS) is the journal of The Society for the Arts in Religious and Theological Studies published by the theology and arts program of United Theological Seminary of the Twin Cities. Edited by Wilson Yates and Kimberly Vrudny, the journal treats broadly the intersections between theology and the arts. I met Wilson Yates at last year's ACE International Conference (briefly reviewed in ARTS) and have recently come across him again in the pages of John Dillenberger's From Fallow Fields To Hallowed Halls which I've read since Dillenberger's death.

This edition of ARTS has an excellent article entitled 'Reimagining Religious Art' by Virginia Maksymowicz, a sculptor from Philadelphia, reflecting on responses to the Stations of the Cross she created for St Thomas Episcopal Church, Lancaster and responding to a quote from James Elkins which claims that "the word 'religion' is a toxin in serious talk about art."

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Septimus - Jesus Loves Me.

John Dillenberger RIP

At Good Letters Greg Wolfe has posted his tribute to John Dillenberger who passed away on February 7 from complications of Parkinson’s Disease. Dillenberger was a Professor Emeritus of Historical Theology at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, California. He was the author of many books, including Benjamin West, The Visual Arts and Christianity in America, and Images and Relics: Theological Perceptions and Visual Images in Sixteenth Century Europe.

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John Prine & Nanci Griffith - Speed of the Sound of Loneliness.