Between: gauguin

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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.

Friday, 24 May 2019

Charles Filiger: Painter of the Absolute

Charles Filiger, who was associated with the Symbolist movement, spent time with Gauguin in Le Pouldu in 1989-90. They both chose to synthesize and stylize forms after experimenting with Pointillism for a short time. Filiger developed a very personal style in small paintings of Brittany landscapes and of religious subjects, informed by his love of early Italian painting. After looking at some of Gauguin’s paintings, he said to him, “You are Gauguin. You play with light. I am Filiger. I paint the Absolute.”

Filiger’s work was shown in Symbolist exhibitions beginning right after the birth of this new aesthetic, around 1890. They included the Exhibition of Impressionist and Symbolist Painters at the gallery Le Barc de Boutteville in Paris, the Salon de la Rose+Croix at the gallery Durand-Ruel, and the Salon des XX in Brussels. His work was quickly noticed by both the critics and his fellow artists, many of whom were influenced by him. He also became friends with writers associated with this new trend. In 1894, Alfred Jarry published the longest article ever devoted to an artist in Mercure de France, and Rémy de Gourmont asked him to illustrate several of his works. The art patron Antoine de la Rochefoucauld gave him financial support for several years.

After he left Le Pouldu in 1905, Filiger became something of a recluse, wandering around Brittany and living in hotels and hospices. He was finally taken in by a kind family in Plougastel-Daoulas. Although many thought he had died, he actually continued to work even in his isolation.

The gallery Malingue in Paris is currently holding an exhibition of works by Filiger, meaning that, for the first time in nearly 30 years, art lovers and all those who are curious about the artist are able to see a wide selection of his work. Nearly 80 works by Filiger are on show, along with publications illustrated by him, all of them from either private collections or museums (in France: in Albi, Quimper, Brest and Saint-Germain-en-Laye), including the magnificent The Last Judgment from the Josefowitz Collection, on loan from the Indianapolis Museum of Art.

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The Innocence Mission - You Chase The Light.

Sunday, 13 August 2017

Beyond Airbrushed from Art History: Mystical Landscapes

Continuing the current trend of exhibitions which explore aspects of the spirituality of modern art (such as Divine Beauty: From Van Gogh to Chagall and Fontana and still small voice: British biblical art in a secular age), Mystical Landscapes: Masterpieces from Monet, Van Gogh and more was organized by the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto in partnership with the Musée d'Orsay in Paris to explore the mystical experiences of 37 artists from 14 countries, including Emily Carr, Paul Gauguin, Vincent van Gogh, Piet Mondrian, Claude Monet, Edvard Munch, Georgia O'Keeffe and James McNeill Whistler.

The years between 1880 and 1930 were marked by rampant materialism and rapid urbanization. Disillusioned with traditional religious institutions, many European, Scandinavian and North American artists searched for an unmediated spiritual path through mystical experiences.

Seeking an order beyond physical appearances, going beyond physical realities to come closer to the mysteries of existence, experimenting with the suppression of the self in an indissoluble union with the cosmos. It was the mystical experience above all else that inspired the Symbolist artists of the late 19th century who, reacting against the cult of science and naturalism, chose to evoke emotion and mystery.

The landscape, therefore, seemed to these artists to offer the best setting for their quest, the perfect place for contemplation and the expression of inner feelings.

Contemplation, the ordeal of the night or of war, the fusion of the individual with the cosmos, and the experience of the transcendental forces of nature, were stages in the mystical journey on which this exhibition invited viewers to take.

Highlights in the exhibitions included Vincent van Gogh's Starry Night over the Rhone at Arles from 1888, which prompted him to write about feeling “a tremendous need of —shall I say the word—religion...so I go outside at night to paint the stars”; Paul Gauguin's vivid Vision of the Sermon (Jacob Wrestling with the Angel) from 1888, painted during his sojourn in rural Brittany; Claude Monet's Water Lilies (Nymphéas) from 1907, which he painted after hours of Zen-like meditation beside his Japanese water garden; Edvard Munch's The Sun, created to inspire students in the wake of his well-publicized nervous breakdown between 1910-1913; Georgia O'Keeffe's Series I - from the Plains from 1919, which shows the terrifying power of an approaching thunderstorm in Texas; and a series of mystical lithographs by the recently rediscovered French artist Charles Marie Dulac, which illustrates St. Francis of Assisi's Canticle of Creation.

Click here for the detailed presentation of this exhibition on the website of the Musée d'Orsay.

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Scott Walker - It's Raining Today.

Saturday, 22 October 2016

Modern Art and the Life of a Culture: The Religious Impulses of Modernism

As Jonathan A. Anderson and William A. Dyrness note in Modern Art and the Life of a Culture: The Religious Impulses of Modernism, I have for some time been arguing that, as Daniel A. Siedell suggested in God in the Gallery, "an alternative history and theory of the development of modern art" is needed, "revealing that Christianity has always been present with modern art, nourishing as well as haunting it, and that modern art cannot be understood without understanding its religious and spiritual components and aspirations." In my Airbrushed from Art History and Sabbatical Art Pilgrimage series of posts I have highlighted some of the artists and movements (together with the books that tell their stories) that should feature in that alternative history when it comes to be written.

In Modern Art and the Life of a Culture Anderson and Dyrness, part of IVP's Studies in Theology and the Arts, also argue that there were strong religious impulses that positively shaped modern visual art. Instead of affirming a pattern of decline and growing antipathy towards faith, the authors contend that theological engagement and inquiry can be perceived across a wide range of modern art—French, British, German, Dutch, Russian and North American—and through particular works by artists such as Gauguin, Picasso, David Jones, Caspar David Friedrich, van Gogh, Kandinsky, Warhol and many others.

Gregory Wolfe writes that this book provides a 'nuanced and sympathetic view of the religious aspects that truly did haunt modernism in the visual arts' noting that, after a couple of introductory chapters, 'the book moves into a sequence of historical surveys ranging from Van Gogh to Andy Warhol, with many stops in between.'

Dryness notes: 'Van Gogh is often recognized as a deeply spiritual artist, but usually he is pictured as having given up his childhood (Reformed) Christian faith. But closer examination shows this not to have been the case. Others, like Gauguin, who are largely regarded as irreligious, turn out to have had deep and formative experiences with (in this case) the Catholic faith. Still others, like Malevich, inherited sensibilities from their religious contexts which made deep inroads into their art. So there is no single story to be told.'

Anderson says: 'The research for this book was full of surprises for me. The religious backgrounds of these artists, as well as the ongoing theological content of their work, are sometimes buried deep in the academic literature and primary sources, but once you begin to dig you find extraordinary things. Van Gogh was actually a fascinating theologian, and his paintings were theologically oriented all the way to the end. Mondrian completed his art training in the thick of the best neo-Calvinist thinking of the day. Until researching for this book, I hadn’t realized just how deeply Kandinsky was preoccupied with the book of Revelation. Warhol’s sharp social commentaries were oriented by his lifelong Catholicism. And so on: the surprises abound.'

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Van Morrison - In The Garden.

Saturday, 16 July 2016

Artists of the last century artistically wrestling with the Crucifixion

The latest ArtWay meditation is by Sandra Bowden who has organised an exhibition centred on the work she explores in her meditation, Modern Crucifixion by Frederick Wright.

She write: "For centuries artists have imagined the crucifixion not only as a biblical narrative, but also as an event happening in their own historical context. This strategy of depicting the crucifixion in contemporary terms, both makes Christ more directly present in the time and place of the contemporary viewer and employs the crucifixion as a point of reference for critically understanding modern life. Working in the early 1930s, Frederick Wight imagined the crucifixion as happening in Chatham, MA, USA with the sea-faring folk of the town that he knew."

In the exhibition Bowden explores other modern crucifixions noting that:

"By the end of the 19th century, artists viewed the Crucifixion through the lens of the Academy and many of the works had become banal, lacking the intensity that it merited. Thomas Eakins’ Crucifixion, painted in 1880, was seen by many as an academic exercise to portray Christ as realistically as possible, but with little religious feeling. Also in the late 19th century, Gauguin’s Yellow Crucifixion places the event in the countryside of Brittany. Three women near the cross are wearing the typical peasant dress and the entire scene, including the body of Christ, are cast in yellow tones of the season’s harvest. Time and again artists have placed the crucifixion and those present at the event against a local background and dressed in the apparel of the day.

The Crucifixion continues to appear as a theme during the 20th century, but with a renewed perspective. German Expressionist artist Emil Nolde was fascinated by the expressive intensity of the Isenheim Altarpiece and created his own version with a stylistic fusion of primitive forms and the exaggerated colors of the Fauves. Salvador Dali famously painted his Crucifixion representing the cross as a hypercube. Marc Chagall, a Jewish artist, broke with his religious tradition to paint several crucifixions, one of which is in this exhibition. Stanley Spencer, an English painter, set his biblical stories in his home village with local people filling the scene much like Frederick Wight has done in his Modern Crucifixion."

This exhibition has similarities to the Cross Purposes exhibition organised by Mascalls Gallery and Ben Uri Gallery which included Santiago Bell, Susan Shaw, Maggie Hambling and Craigie Aitchison. Centering on Chagall's drawings for the windows of Tudeley Parish Church, this exhibition explored the uses of the crucifixion by a broad range of artists featuring the work of many artists including Stanley Spencer, Graham Sutherland, and Eric Gill. The exhibition addressed both meditative religious works as well as more horrific secular works and thereby demonstrated the breadth of modern treatments of the crucifixion.

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James Macmillan - Veni, Veni, Emmanuel.

Sunday, 9 March 2014

Beyond Airbrushed from Art History: Oisín Kelly and Patrick Pye

Two artists not included in Theology and Modern Irish Art by Gesa E. Thiessen but who have made significant contributions to religious art in Ireland are Oisín Kelly and Patrick Pye.

Oisín Kelly was one of the most versatile figures in Irish sculpture: "In 1949, Kelly received his first Church commission from the architect Liam McCormick. Thereafter, religious themes and motifs were a consistent element in his output. Indeed, he was arguably one of the few artists capable of producing religious artworks which had a genuine religious feeling - the result of deep but simple conviction, without rhetoric or sentimentality, though often with a touch of humour.

In 1951, Kelly became a member of the Committee of the Irish Exhibition of Living Art ... [In 1966 he] received a commission for a statue for the new Liberty Hall in Dublin. (The statue, 'Working Men' was subsequently relocated to City Hall, Cork. Another of Kelly's sculptures, 'The Children of Lir' was sited in the Garden of Remembrance, Dublin ...

In addition to religious and commemorative work, Kelly excels in studies of birds and animals - for example, his work 'Birds Alighting' - and small scale sculpture such as, 'The Dancing Sailor'. As a sculptor, he was equally comfortable with wood, stone, or metalwork like bronze and steel, and in stature he was the foremost Irish sculptor of the generation who emerged at the beginning of the Irish Exhibition of Living Art."

Patrick Pye started painting in 1943 under the sculptor Oisín Kelly. "He has completed many major commissions on religious themes, including Glenstal Abbey, Co. Limerick; Church of the Resurrection, Belfast; Convent of Mercy, Cookstown, Co. Tyrone (1965); Fossa Chapel, Killarney (1977); a triptych illustrating man's expulsion from the Garden of Eden at Bank of Ireland headquarters (1981); and Stations of the Cross for Ballycasheen Church in Killarney (1993). Recent commissions include an altarpiece, stained glass windows and roundels for a rebuilt church at Claddaghmore, Co. Armagh (1997-98); a crucifix for Our Lady of Lourdes church in Drogheda (1999); The Life of Our Lady, a six-panel painting on copper for the North Cathedral in Cork (1999); The Transfiguration, a 10-foot wallhanging for St. Mary's Oratory at NUI Maynooth (2000) and The Baptism of Christ, an oil painting for a new church at Drumbo, Belfast. The Royal Hibernian Academy exhibited Triptychs and Icons, a retrospective of his work, in 1997. Since the Millennium a large painting Theologian in his Garden has been acquired by St Thomas' University in St Paul (MN) for their Centre of Catholic Studies."

Brian McAvera argues in Patrick Pye: Life and Work that "Pye ... far from being on the periphery, is central to the Irish tradition and that he, along with a number of other English-born artists long resident in Ireland such as Camille Souter, reinvigorated the Irish tradition." McAvera also reviews Pye's influences:

"[Paul] Gauguin is ... a clear source, especially in a religious painting like Jacob Wrestling with the Angel with its flat areas of pure colour which are used non-naturalistically, whether for symbolic or expressive purposes. Gauguin, well aware of the decorative effect of colour - and Pye is a frankly decorative painter in terms of colour - also used strong outlines which, because of their patterned rhythms, often suggest the compositional structure of a stained glass window. Pye, who has been producing stained glass since the mid-1950s, and for whom luminosity is central, also structures in terms of patterned rhythms and strong outline shapes.

Gauguin, under whose influence they were formed, leads inevitably to the Nabis, and the Nabis are central to Pye and his use of colour. 'I am influenced by the Nabis. They are quite a concern of mine. I don't want to describe. I want to give a wholeness to the story. It is colour that is important. It's always directed towards the whole of our experience. Colour is what makes space. Line draws out from space. For me it's quite appropriate that Christian art should be abstracted, rather than descriptive'. That combination of the use of colour (symbolic, expressive, flat and often saturated), and abstraction rather than description, is of course precisely what marks out Gauguin's manner in his religious work, or, for that matter, other Pont-Aven artists such as Émile Bernard. It is also the hallmark of so many of the Nabis ... and the Irish artist sees a strong connection between abstracted art and Christianity, citing the tradition of Icons, El Greco and the Nabis, especially Maurice Denis, [Pierre] Bonnard and [Félix] Vallotton.

Denis, whose early work was very influenced by Gauguin, was, like Pye, a devout Catholic who wanted to re-invigorate contemporary religious painting ... his work often used pale, somewhat muted colours, but he emphasized flat patterning and was a markedly decorative painter ...

While Pye has always evinced a distinct liking for the English mystical tradition, the dominant English influence on him as a very young man was that of Neo-Romanticism. Of the nine artists featured in Malcolm Yorke's seminal study The Spirit of Place, five were mentioned by the artist: Paul Nash, John Piper, Graham Sutherland, Robert Colquhoun and Keith Vaughan. Of these Nash and Sutherland are the key figures, 'Paul Nash was quite an influence on me; the little tiny photograph in the early volume [i.e. Penguin Modern Painters] of The Dead Sea. I still love Nash's sensuous quality of painting ...'

Graham Sutherland is probably a deeper influence ... The artist, noting that Sutherland 'converted [to Catholicism] in my childhood, being of my mother's generation', did a copy of The Blasted Oak, 'made a pilgrimage' to see the Northampton Crucifixion at St Matthew's Church, and also saw the tapestry at Coventry Cathedral and the Noli Me Tangere altarpiece at Chichester ...

Of the contemporary mystical painters both Cecil Collins and David Jones, visionaries who are sometimes considered Neo-Romantics, were of interest, But Stanley Spencer, in terms of impact, is probably close to Sutherland ... the artist's visionary quality of bringing the Bible into the present ... provide a parallel to Pye's work ...

Like so many of the twentieth-century European painters he admires, such as [Marc] Chagall, [Georges] Rouault or [Henri] Matisse ... he is a colourist who has created religious works which function equally well for the religious and the non-religious alike ...

Irish art begins to establish its own identity through the confluence of Northern Irish artists like [Colin] Middleton, [Gerard] Dillon, F.E. McWilliam, William Scott and George Campbell, alongside Southern ones like Louis le Brocquy, Jack B. Yeats, Brian Bourke, Nano Reid, Camille Souter, Mary Swanzy, Norah McGuiness and Evie Hone. Pye, like Bourke, le Brocquy and all of the previously mentioned female artists, is particularly interested in Modernism, especially in the abstracting elements and in the non-naturalistic use of colour. he builds on the foundations first established by these female artists, and then reinforced by Doreen Vanston, Elizabeth Rivers and many others, and like Bourke, Souter and Reid in particular, he develops an art whose taproots delve deeply into modernism."

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Van Morrison - Spirit.

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.

Saturday, 16 May 2009

Airbrushed from Art History? (5)

William S. Rubin dismisses, in Modern Sacred Art and the Church of Assy, the attempt by some Catholic critics of his day to “retroactively cite Paul Gauguin as an important precursor of the revival of sacred art.” Rubin dismisses this view because “although Gauguin made a number of pictures with manifestly religious subject matter, they were conceived from the point of view of the nonbeliever.”

This latter point is supported by Robert Goldwater in Symbolism who notes that Gauguin’s Vision after the Sermon has “a double vision, the religious vision of the Breton women and the monk on the right, and the artist’s own inspired view of them and the power of the faith by which they are inspired.” Gauguin has been inspired, not by any faith of his own, but by “his idea ... of the sincerity and purity of a simple people.” His starting point is “an object of faith,” a symbol, “which in itself already concentrates the mood (idea) he is seeking to depict.” He is therefore “twice removed from nature” and “is free to create an ideal scene.”

Rubin then continues his argument by suggesting that Gauguin’s work “was really isolated from the development of a modern tradition in religious art except indirectly, through his influence on the symbolist esthetic of the Nabis, of which group Maurice Denis was a member.”

There are several issues with this statement. First, one of the distinctive differences in the engagement of Modern and Contemporary Art with religion and spirituality is that many artists explore and are fascinated by issues of faith without explicitly holding a religious faith themselves. As a result, art becomes observation rather than explication of faith for many modern and contemporary artists and Gauguin is possibly the first example of this significant trend.

In Coming Home: Self-Taught Artists, the Bible and the American South Erika Doss gives a more contemporary example of an artist revealing and negotiating issues of faith and spirituality. Assemblage artist Ed Kienholz often employed Christian symbols in his work in order to question and appraise Christian belief by scrutinising its assumptions and practices:

“The installation sculpture 76 J.C.s Led the Big Charade ... features seventy-six framed icons of Christ, mounted on the handles of children’s toy wagons and bearing the arms and feet of baby plastic dolls. Kienhloz admired faith but detested its abuse; he was profoundly cynical, as he said, about “the hypocrite who prays in church on Sunday and then preys on his neighbours and associates the rest of the week.” Made from recycled materials and found objects, Kienholz’s installation clearly calls into question the meaning and practice of religious faith in everyday life.”
Second, if Gauguin did influence Denis then that, by itself, was a major impact on the revival of sacred art, as Denis went on to become arguably the most influential figure of that revival. Finally, it may be that Rubin is viewing the argument from the wrong perspective. In order to see the influence of Christianity on the development of Modern Art in this period it is necessary to look not so much at the influence of Gauguin but at the artist that was himself an influence on Gauguin.

When we ask ourselves why it is that this period finds Gauguin painting pictures that are positive observations of the faith of others, we find that he had a “catalytic encounter” with the fervent Catholic artist Émile Bernard in Pont-Aven during the summer of 1888 which led on to the recruiting of Paul Sérusier in the autumn and then the conversion of the Nabi group in Paris to synthetism. Bernard rediscovered his Catholic faith through visits to Brittany, writing in 1886:
“I returned a devout believer ... Brittany has made a Catholic of me again, capable of fighting for the Church. I was intoxicated by the incense, the organs, the prayers, the ancient stained glass windows, the hieratic tapestries and I travelled back across the centuries, isolating myself increasingly from my contemporaries whose preoccupations with the modern industrial world inspired in me nothing but disgust. Bit by bit, I became a man of the Middle Ages. I had no love for anything save Brittany.”

Bernard expressed this essence or Idea that he held to be a truthful representation of Brittany in the painting Breton Women at a Pardon, a painting that combines a synthetist style with a religious subject matter. Bernard was later to cite this painting as proof of his claim to have introduced Gauguin to the ideas that resulted in the Vision after the Sermon.

The debate over who influenced who has revolved around whether the cloisonnisme developed by Bernard and Louis Anquetin the previous summer influenced the synthetism used by Gauguin in these paintings. Regardless of the whys and wherefores of that argument, it would seem clear that Bernard’s Catholicism influenced the subject matter of Gauguin’s paintings. For instance, Michelle Facos, in Symbolist Art in Context, notes that Gauguin painted Vision after witnessing a Pardon (including its wrestling match, which may have "evoked for Gauguin the biblical episode of Jacob wrestling with the angel") and asks whether Gauguin was "struggling with his own agnosticism in the face of Breton peasant piety and that of the Bernard siblings."

Bernard’s goal was “to create a ‘spiritual meaning’ to match the styles of the past – Byzantine, Egyptian or Gothic, and which, like them ‘collective and religious’, would express the whole epoch.” Bernard aimed to “achieve stylisation and significant harmony” in order to “more profoundly convey the underlying ideas” because that was “where the symbol began.”

Everything was nourishment for this symbolism, Bernard wrote, “nature, the Breton Calvaries, the images d’Épinal, popular poetry ... In sum, symbolism did not paint things, but “the idea of things”.”

Bernard’s writings actually support Rubin’s view of the influence of Gauguin on the revival of sacred art, in that he believed Gauguin to be incapable of spiritual meaning “since he lacked true Christian belief.” As a result, “his work was only a simulacrum, ‘a symbolism without symbol’, and his religious themes, painted only at Bernard’s instigation, were a mere pretence.”

Goldwater contests this claim by using Bernard’s faith to argue for the relative weakness of his work in contrast to that of Gauguin. He claims that Breton Women has no sense of symbolism and remains only a Breton genre scene “concerned with purely visual harmonies.” As a result, he then argues that “Bernard’s work, in comparison with Gauguin’s, does not bear out his philosophical contention that only a formal religious belief can infuse symbolist art with true meaning.” But in arriving at this conclusion Goldwater has to overlook the religious subject matter of Breton Women, something attested to in “an inscription in Bernard’s hand on the verso of the canvas.”

It seems then that his view that “a clear religious message, conceived more in traditional than personal terms” leads Bernard close to a ‘literary’ art, may reflect more of Goldwater’s prior expectations than the synthesis between art and faith that Bernard actually achieved. This is further suggested when Goldwater makes similar criticisms of the effect of Denis’ faith on his art but only on the basis that Denis’ art is focussed on peaceful resolutions rather than struggle and mystery.

In Bernard’s work the idea or symbol – the soul of the Breton people – is intended to emerge simply from the depiction of the women themselves at the Pardon. In this sense he is actually using less traditional Christian imagery than Gauguin in the Vision after the Sermon. The fact that Goldwater can either overlook or ignore this to describe Breton Woman simply as a market genre scene with no symbolism, intended or otherwise, suggests too that Bernard’s symbolic synthesis was not fully realised in this painting.

Bernard’s paintings never achieved the influence of Gauguin’s and his writings never achieved the level of influence of Denis who went on to draw deeply on the ideas and approaches shared between Bernard and Gauguin during the summer of 1888 in Pont-Aven. Nevertheless, Bernard’s influence on Gauguin and through him on the Nabis and the wider development of symbolism was significant and one which came from and through Christianity. So much so, that symbolism itself can be seen as tinged with a religiosity that is, in part, Catholic and Bernard can be understood as a father of symbolism.

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James MacMillan - Veni Veni Emmanuel: V. Gaude Gaude.