William Congdon - The Sabbath of History

This comes from the latest ImageUpdate:

"If you are going to be anywhere in the vicinity of New Haven, Connecticut between now and September 16, you owe it to yourself to get to the Knights of Columbus Museum. The goal of your visit is an art exhibition of paintings by William Congdon, accompanied by excerpts from "Meditations on Holy Week" written many years ago by Joseph Ratzinger (now known as Benedict XVI).

There is an utterly fascinating story behind this show. Though he is all but forgotten now, Congdon was one of the rising stars of the art world in the mid-twentieth century, associated with Abstract Expressionism and the action painting of Jackson Pollock. To quote the exhibition materials: "His first one-man show, at the Betty Parsons Gallery in 1949, was lauded by reigning art critic Clement Greenberg who credited his paintings with having 'real painterly emotion.' In 1951, he was profiled in LIFE magazine and heralded as 'A Remarkable New U.S. Painter.'" Then he more or less disappeared from the art scene.

What happened? Among other things, Congdon moved to Italy, converted to Catholicism, and joined the Catholic lay movement, Communion and Liberation. Though he abandoned the art world, Congdon continued to paint—and his conversion did not induce him to abandon his cutting-edge style. His semi-abstract paintings were often crafted with an impasto knife, a method that created dramatic gestures and incised expressive lines within the work. His early subjects were largely urban and conveyed a sense of modern alienation and isolation, but after his conversion he turned increasingly to landscapes and religious subjects.
Congdon's rendering of traditional biblical scenes was always probing and creative, never falling back on cliché or sentimentality. The pairing of his works with texts by Ratzinger makes sense for a number of reasons, including Ratzinger's close friendship with the founder of Communion and Liberation, Luigi Giussani.

IMAGE published an essay on Congdon's work by art critic Peter Selz way back in issue 14, which we've put in its entirety on our website. This is an artist whose reputation deserves to be much greater than it is, so please spread the word.

Learn more about the exhibition here. Read Peter Selz's essay from IMAGE issue 14 here. Visit the Congdon Foundation website here."

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Jan Gaberak and the Hilliard Ensemble - Parce Mihi Domine.

Airbrushed from Art History: Peter Fuller

Since seeing the stunning Sutherland exhibition at Modern Art Oxford I've been re-reading material on the Neo-Romantics. This has meant that I have also been re-reading Peter Fuller's art criticism. Fuller championed the work of the Neo-Romantics, while also being able to see shortcomings in their work, because:

"... for all these artists, the pursuit of landscape was always something more than the quest for phenomena, or the appearances of natural and human forms. They were intent upon a transfiguration
of what they saw: often they laid claim to a religious or spiritual vision ..."

Fuller described the journey on which his art criticism had embarked in an autobiographical response to the exhibition entitled The Journey:

"I developed an even deeper sympathy for the romantic, the Gothic, and the spiritual dimensions of art ...

It seemed to me that no ‘materialist’ culture – certainly not the ‘modernism’ so celebrated by Clement Greenberg – had ever remotely approached the aesthetic glories of these churches [the great Gothic cathedrals and the medieval parish churches of Sussex]; and I was very much aware of the fact that their splendours, and their intimacies, were dependent upon a faith which I could not share and which was not shared even by contemporary Christians ...

When, in the early 1980s, I wrote the essays, later gathered together in Images of God, I felt that I was being tremendously daring and even perverse in reviving the idea that aesthetic experience was greatly diminished if it became divorced from the idea of the spiritual. What I responded to in Ruskin, above all else, was the distinction he made between ‘aesthesis’ and ‘theoria’, the former being a merely sensuous response to beauty, the latter what he described as a response to beauty with ‘our whole moral being’. My book, theoria, was an attempt to rehabilitate ‘theoria’ over and above mere ‘aesthesis’; I also tried to communicate my feeling that the spiritual dimensions of art had been preserved, in a very special way, within the British traditions. No one recognised this better that the great French poet and critic, Charles Baudelaire, who, as I have often remarked before, say in 1859 that British painters were ‘enthusiastic representatives of the imagination and of the most precious faculties of the soul’.

In my critical writing, I came to emphasise how British artists appeared to have faced up to the aesthetic consequences brought about by the spiritual dilemmas of the modern age. In particular, I became interested in the links between ‘natural theology’ and the triumphs of British landscape painting. I am still convinced that there is a close correlation between British ‘higher landscape’ and those beliefs about nature as divine handiwork which were held with a peculiar vividness and immediacy in Britain.

The experience of the ‘the long-withdrawing roar’ of ‘the Sea of Faith’ and the exposure of the naked shingles of the world’ created a great crisis for art, as for every other dimension of cultural life. The best British artists of the twentieth century, however, faced up to that spiritual crisis: I interpreted the work of David Bomberg, Paul Nash, Stanley Spencer, Henry Moore and Graham Sutherland as differing responses to the phenomenon of Dover Beach. I argued that all these artists were imperfectly modern, and that this imperfection was a source of their strength. Unlike true modernists, they did not deny the spiritual and aesthetic calamity brought about by the ever present weight of God’s absence; none the less they did not merely tease ‘aesthesis’ but struggled to appeal to ‘theoria’, regardless."

Such views seem to have little place in the contemporary art world and, as Jonathan Jones has written, "this fierce defender of figurative painting and enemy of the avant garde has now been almost erased from the history of British art. His legacy has been reduced to the career of his protegee Sister Wendy Beckett and the annual Peter Fuller Lecture ... Even Modern Painters, the magazine he founded in 1987, officially abandoned his editorial policy ... to become broadly sympathetic to conceptual art ... Fuller has disappeared from the story of British art because that story has been mythicised and thinned out."

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Sam Phillips - Reflecting Light.

Trinitarian aesthetics

In Has Moderism Failed? Suzi Gablik poses the question, ‘Art for Art’s Sake, or Art for Society’s Sake?’ Her question neatly juxtaposes the two key opposed aesthetic arguments of late modern and contemporary art.

On one side has been ‘Art for Art’s Sake’ which, in its purest form as articulated by the art critic Clement Greenberg, “rejected the notion that there is any higher purpose to art, or any “spiritual” point to its production”:

“Art only does what it does: its effect is limited and small. It is there to be aesthetically “good.” Only the “dictates of the medium” – pure paint and the flatness of the picture plane – were held to be worthwhile concerns for painting. The very idea of content was taken to be a hindrance and a nuisance, and looking for meaning was a form of philistinism. The work is a painted surface, nothing more, and its meaning is entirely an aesthetic one.”

On the other side (‘Art for Society’s Sake’), developing a direction signposted by Gablik, has been Nicolas Bourriaud, whose Relational Aesthetics is equally prescriptive. So, Bourriaud argues that relational art takes “as its theoretical horizon the realm of human interactions and its social context rather than the assertion of an independent and private symbolic space” and that a work of art, if it is to be successful, “will invariably set its sights beyond its mere presence in space” by being “open to dialogue, discussion, and that form of inter-human negotiation that Marcel Duchamp called “the coefficient of art”.”

Both sides of the argument are presented in terms which exclude the possibility of the other’s existence or validity. Gablik, in addressing the opposed positions of Socialist Art and aesthetic formalism, suggested that what “is required is some sort of reconciliation – not a fixture at either pole”; in other words, to “find a position of equilibrium between the two extremes.” I want to suggest in this article that one such ‘position of equilibrium’ can be found by applying a Trinitarian aesthetics to Art.

This should not come as a surprise as conceptions of the Trinity have often been expressed in artistic terms and Trinitarian conceptions have been helpfully applied to the Arts and other aspects of society. Both C. S. Lewis and Stephen Verney, for example, have written of the inter-relations within the Trinity as being a kind of dance. Dorothy L. Sayers, within The Mind of the Maker (1941), described the creative act itself in the Trinitarian terms of Idea (Father), Energy (Son), and Power (Spirit). A similar approach - in terms of Plan (Father), Do (Son), and Evaluate (Spirit) - was later adopted by Christian Schumacher for his creative consultancy work of restructuring workplaces.

A different approach to understanding and applying the concept of inter-relations within the Trinity was developed by Colin Gunton in The One, the Three and the Many (1993). Gunton used his theology of creation to identify three concepts that he called (drawing on the thinking of Samuel Taylor Coleridge) ‘open transcendentals’. That is, “possibilities for thought which are universal in scope yet open in their application.” Gunton’s three open transcendentals are: relationality (“all things are what they are by being particulars constituted by many and various forms of relation”); perichoresis (“all things are what they are in relations of mutual constitutiveness with all other things”); and substantiality (all things are “substantial beings, having their own distinct and particular existence, by virtue of and not in the face of their relationality to the other”).

Gunton argues that the transcendentals “qualify people and things, too, in a way appropriate to what they are.” In sum, he suggests, “the transcendentals are functions of the finitely free relations of persons and of the contingent relations of things.” These are, therefore, notions which are “predicated of all being by virtue of the fact that God is creator and the world is creation.” As such “they dynamically open up new possibilities for thought” enabling Christian theology to make “a genuine contribution ... to the understanding and shaping of the modern world.” If this is so, then art criticism would be one arena in which the concept of open transcendentals could be explored.

Exploring the substantiality of an artwork would involve describing and assessing its distinct and particular existence; what it is as, for example, pure paint and a flat picture plane. We could talk, for example, in terms of ‘truth to materials’, a phrase that emerged from the Arts and Crafts Movement through its rejection of design work (often Victorian) which disguised by ornamentation the natural properties of the materials used. The phrase has been associated particularly with sculptors and architects, as both are able to reveal, in their way of working and in the finished article, the quality and personality of their materials; wood showing its grain, metal its tensile strength, and stone its texture.

Henry Moore, for example, wrote in Unit One that, “each material has its own individual qualities … Stone, for example, is hard and concentrated and should not be falsified to look like soft flesh … It should keep its hard tense stoniness.” Juginder Lamba is one example of a contemporary sculptor for whom ‘truth to materials’ is significant. Many of his works began with the artist searching through piles of joists and rafters looking for salvaged timber that would speak to him of its creative potentialities. His sculptures retain the personality and characteristics of the salvaged wood even at the same time as they are transformed into characters and forms of myth and metaphor.

Exploring the substantiality of an artwork is to recognise that an artwork is an object in its own right once created and, as such, has a life beyond that which its maker consciously intended. Artists sometimes express this sense themselves when they talk about seeing more in the work as they live with it than they were aware of intending during its creation. For some, this is an indication of some sort of spiritual dimension or dynamic at play in the work.

Exploring the relationality of an artwork would involve describing and assessing the many and various forms of relation by which the work was constituted. Among these could be the relationship of the artwork to: the artist who created it; other artworks formed of similar materials or with similar content; the space in which it is being exhibited (both the physical and social space); and those who come to view it.

Artists have their own intentions when creating and are aware of and use (play with) the associations and emotions evoked by the materials and images used in the making. These associations and emotions are as much a part of the work of art as the materials and images (this is particularly so in conceptual and symbolist art, as both begin with the idea or concept) and are present whether the viewer or critic responds to them or not; in the same way that Biblical allusions exist in Shakespeare's plays whether contemporary students recognise them or not. Just as Andrew Motion has argued regarding Shakespeare that our understanding and appreciation of the plays is reduced if we don't recognise the allusions, so our understanding of visual art that uses or plays with associations, emotions and ideas is diminished if we fail to respond.

The reality of the art work as an object in its own right once created and, as such, with a life beyond that which its maker consciously intended also hands a creative role to those who view it. Accordingly, Alan Stewart has written:

"An artist will of course set out to say something particular, but once their work becomes public, it assumes its own life. Therefore each fresh encounter will produce a new conversation between the art and the viewer, resulting in a whole host of possible interpretations, none less valid than the other. Appropriating our own personal meaning from another person’s work doesn’t diminish it, if anything it enlarges it. We might even want to say that in re-imagining and re-investing something with new meaning, we may in fact in some cases redeem it or re-birth it."

Interpretation, to have validity however, has to fit with and follow the shape, texture, feel, colour, images, content, associations and emotions of the work itself. Richard Davey has a marvellous phrase for the network of relationships which form around any artwork; “respect for the work of art as an object itself made by an embodied human being for embodied human beings."

Exploring the perichoresis of an artwork is to recognise what the artwork is in its relations of mutual constitutiveness with all other things. Bourriaud’s Relational Aesthetics is particularly helpful here in suggesting that “Art is a state of encounter” and that the role of artworks is that we learn “to inhabit the world in a better way” through participating in “arenas of encounter”, created by the artworks themselves, in which momentary micro-communities are formed:

“Today’s art, and I’m thinking of [artists such as Gonzalez-Torres, ... Angela Bulloch, Carsten Höller, Gabriel Orozco and Pierre Huyghe] as well as Lincoln Tobier, Ben Kinmont, and Andrea Zittel, to name just three more, encompasses in the working process the presence of the micro-community which will accommodate it. A work thus creates, within its method of production and then at the moment of its exhibition, a momentary grouping of participating viewers.”

What such artists produce, Bourriaud argues, “are relational space-time elements, inter-human experiences ... of the places where alternative forms of sociability, critical models and moments of constructed conviviality are worked out.” In other words, such artworks create “relations outside the field of art”: “relations between individuals and groups, between the artist and the world, and, by way of transitivity, between the beholder and the world.”

Critiquing artworks in terms of substantiality, relationality and perichoresis could create a unique means of reconciling formalist and relational aesthetics and could form a fascinating and distinctively Trinitarian approach to art criticism.

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Flyleaf - Beautiful Bride.

Responses to 'Airbrushed from Art History?' (4)

I'm grateful to Richard Davey for engaging in debate on these issues and for the ideas, questions and challenges that inform his second response:

1. Do you think that a comprehensive survey is possible? I think that you are setting yourself up for a fall by an ambition that sets out to be comprehensive. It seems to me a narrow focus would allow you a better chance to realise your desire to be thorough and at the same time to raise the fundamental questions that you are seeking to address. By striving to be comprehensive you are either going to have to be so broad that your project will be full of holes, or you will never finish.

Clearly this is a real issue but one that faces anyone seeking to review a period of history or a particular movement over time. All the way through there are choices to be made about what to include and where and what to leave out and why. No history or art history is ever genuinely comprehensive, so the question is then how is it realistic or appropriate to be.

I think that a survey of the main movements within Modern and Contemporary Art showing Christian influences is eminently possible for the right person. The task is, after all, not significantly different from that of any other art history covering the same period, just coming with a different or relatively undeveloped perspective. I don't think that there is any one book or exhibition that has yet done this as fully as it could be done. Rosemary Crumlin's excellent catalogue and exhibition Beyond Belief: Modern Art and the Religious Imagination would be the fullest survey that I have found to date.

The task is feasible in part because there are now a number of books and exhibitions have examined particular aspects of Christian influences of different Modern Art movements. To my mind there is now a substantial mass of such material that it would be feasible and useful to have a book that systematically summarised this material and that that could best be done as an alternative art history of the period.

I come at this as someone who is fascinated both by the way in which artists express their faith (when they consciously have one) and also by the way in which the heritage and legacy of Christianity continues to inform and influence our culture showing itself in a huge variety of ways in the work of artists who would not claim to have faith in any organised religion or to have faith per se. Encountering such artists and their works is an ongoing pleasure and, it seems to me, one that others might share if an accessible and reasonably comprehensive introduction were to be written.

Having said all that, that is not what I am setting out to do. This series is part of a personal development project, not a book project. As part of my own personal discipline of reading to feed my faith, I will be reviewing and extending my reading on these issues and posting summaries as I have begun to do. Learning from that reading and from responses to the posts is my personal aim but if in the process the value and feasibility of such a survey becomes clear then so much the better.

2. What do you mean by Christian influences? This is such a simple statement and yet so problematic. Do you mean influences that come from culture that are specifically Christian i.e.. the use of Christian iconography? Do you mean the essential themes that lie at the heart of Christianity- but what are those, and can we say that an influence comes from active 'Christian' influence or from the residual Christianity that underpins western society? Do you mean the faith of the artist? Or is it your own Christian faith that is being read into Modern and Contemporary art?

By Christian influences I mean both the way in which artists who understand themselves as having a Christian faith express their faith through their work and wider artistic practice plus the effect that the Christian heritage of the West has on shaping and/or informing the work and practices of artists that do not claim Christian faith.

An example of the former would be Maurice Denis who understood his destiny from an early age to be that of a Catholic artist. Denis was prominent and influential in the avant-garde of his day as a Nabi and a Symbolist and as an artist working for a contemporary revival of Sacred Art. As a christian artist he had an influence on the development of both Modern Art per se and also on Modern Sacred Art. His life and work seem to me to beg the question as to what was it about his faith that enabled and equipped him to be part of those movements and to have the influence that he had within his day.

An example of the latter would be the argument put forward by Andrew Spira in The Avant-Garde Icon that the Russian avant-garde from the Wanderers to the Suprematists (and Kasimir Malevich, in particular) was heavily influenced by the Russian tradition of icon painting. Spira's argument is not that many of the avant-garde were Christians or that they painted icons but that their appreciation of icons, their creation and their meaning, affected the aspects of the development of their work, their artistic practice and their philosophical understanding of the meaning and value of their art.

I think that the above is relatively clear in terms of the various kinds of influence being claimed. I am not trying in these posts to unpack the complexities of those influences but am simply seeking to flag up artists and movement where I and others think they exist.

What is far more complex, and this is where I think your question leads, is how or whether there can be a definition of Christian, Religious, Sacred or Spiritual Art in Modern and Contemporary Art. There have been a number of different attempts to do so in terms of faith commitments, themes, practices etc. and a very interesting article could be written summarising, comparing and contrasting the various approaches suggested. I wonder whether holding the questions you pose in tension is the creative place to be, as opposed to attempting to tie the expression of Christianity in Contemporary Art to a particular definition or model.

3. Do you mean British, French, Italian, Spanish, American art. This may seem a strange point since so much contemporary and modern art transcends geographic borders, but I think this is important when addressing the subject of faith and Christianity, because in reality attitudes to faith are fundamentally different across these different contexts. American attitudes to Faith and Christianity are very different to British 'secular' attitudes, where faith is on the back foot. The recent American presidential elections highlight this with their strong influence of faith, whereas in the upcoming general election in Britain will faith feature, or will we once again have the Blair effect - where faith and public life don't mix? And then on the continent Christian art is often tied into a Roman Catholic spirituality and integration into liturgy that is fundamentally different to British Anglicanism.

I will be trying to flag up national differences where this seems appropriate and don't intend to restrict my reading and summaries solely to Western Art. I fully accept your point that national expressions of Christian faith can differ in character and emphasis and that this is a complicating factor in examining Christian influences. Examples would include the differences and continuities between art produced out of the French Catholic Revival and that produced by self-taught artists from the American South. Again, in terms of the art historical survey that I think could usefully be written, this is an issue that should be faced by all who attempt to write history but also one to which sensitive historians can respond. It is also as well an issue that could add spice to and provoke interest in such a survey.

You echo Taylor's criticism of Greenberg, but I don't have a problem with Greenberg's approach - why is that? I suppose I know that when I write on an artist I am aware that I am going to be addressing it from the starting point of my own world-view, and that my reading will be coloured by that. However much I try to be open to the full range of influences that may be found in artist's work I can never achieve a truly objective stance, I will always see a spiritual perspective and this will obscure some of the secular perspectives that may equally legitimately exist in it as well.

I agree that this is an issue for all in terms of our ability to understand deeply the worldview of another but the issue that Taylor is addressing is not solely about the response of the critic or viewer of the work. His point is that there are self-confessed spiritual preoccupations of the artists whose work Greenberg analyses which his criticism obscures. If this is so, and you seem to accept that part of the argument, then the question is whether this comes from an inability on Greenberg's part, because of his secular perspective, to understand these spiritual preoccupations (which is what you seem to be arguing and which would seem to me to call into question Greenberg's intelligence) or whether it comes from a more deliberate decision not to engage with these self-confessed preoccupations and, by implication, not to encourage his readers to engage with these preoccupations either.

That, I think, is what Taylor is arguing. I think that because these were self-confessed preoccupations of artists that Greenberg admired and promoted the conscious rather than unconcious decision not to engage is the more likely in this scenario.

If that is so, the result, for me, is that, to use your phrase, Greenberg is not fully showing respect for the work of art as an object itself made by an embodied human being for embodied human beings. When the embodied human being making the work of art says that spiritual preoccupations inform the work but these preoccupations are unaddressed in criticism then it seems logical to suggest that respect is not fully shown for, at least, the embodied human being who made it, if not the work itself.

Again, in your review of Traces du sacre your implicit criticism is based upon what I take as an objection to their position that argues 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). I may not completely agree with the origin being secularisation but I think that they are fundamentally right.

The curators are entitled to their opinion and argument. Their argument has real validity but in making it they sometimes ignore and sometimes misrepresent artists and arguments that counteract their argument. I don't think that an argument is strengthened by ignoring or misrepresenting opposing views. I think strong arguments are those which take on board counter arguments and show why on their own terms the counter arguments are insufficient. If the curators of Traces du Sacré had understood the influence of the French Catholic Revival in broader terms that just the art sacré movement of Couturier and had engaged with the Christian influences on, for example, Kandinsky and Malevich as well as those influences that were non-Christian and had then shown that, while these movements and influences existed, other influences were broader and represented the mainstream of Modern Art developments, then I would not have been able to argue as I did. Again, it comes down to the respect that you wrote about in your first email. If a telling of the story of Modern Art ignores or misrepresents aspects of spirituality that were there for some artists and movements of the time then, it seems to me, that a lack of respect is being shown to those artists and movements and to that history.

In my many years of doing research in this area the majority of artists I have met say very early on 'I am not religious', and you have to accept this position. They are very rarely church goers and often stand outside organised religion. If I had used Church membership, or adherence to a specific organised religion as a criteria for inclusion I would have had a very limited pool of artists of a quality worth addressing. My reflection over the years is that for artists their engagement with their faith and spiritual impulse occurs within the loneliness of the creative process, whereas non-artists do so within the parameters of organised religious practice and membership. The artists I have met who have an incredibly deep faith and highly developed spiritual awareness support Linda Woodhead's arguments that faith in the UK is becoming increasingly implicit rather than explicit, something carried out privately rather than within the bounds of traditional associational religion. Cecil Collins was an artist of incredible faith, but very explicitly anti-religion.

Cecil Collins was an artist of incredible faith, but very explicitly anti-religion. His friend, David Jones, was also an artist of incredible faith, but very explicitly pro-religion. As above, while it may be true that the overall trend is towards faith expressed outside of the bounds of traditional associational religion, if that argument does not deal with the reality of those artists who continue to express their faith within the bounds of traditional associational religion then it is weakened to the extent that it is unable to do so. A part of what I am doing is to point out that there are actually rather more artists who express their faith within the bounds of traditional associational religion than is often assumed to be the case.

I remember Peter Eugene Ball's frustration and anger at being labelled a secret Christian by Keith Walker in his Images and Idols book. Peters' reaction was, 'I am not a Christian, and I know that I am not a Christian because I do not believe in the resurrection'. Yet Peter is a person of deep spiritual awareness and faith which shapes his life. Your comments about your friend Alan Stewart's reading of Andres Serrano bring this to mind. We should be honest in what we are doing. If we are doing theology through art lets say that, rather than trying to imply that our reading is necessarily implicit within the work. Is his reading true to the embodiment of the work? I think the work is what it is, an image of a crucifix suspended in a golden liquid, which we later discover is urine. That image says nothing more than that. The reading into that by the viewer is valid, but not embodied in the work. Similarly an image of the crucifixion is nothing more than paint pushed around a surface to make marks that depict a man on a cross. Any theological interpretation occurs in the viewer's mind not in the work. Paint cannot speak of resurrection, it can provoke emotions that can evoke a sensation of joy or despair etc, but resurrection etc and Christian theology are not emotions, they are concepts that are formed in the mind, constructs of theology. I actually am not certain that art can be 'Christian', it is the interpretation of the subject matter that is Christian.

Your argument here about works of art seems reductionist in the extreme and, to me, seems to contradict your statement in the earlier email about "respect for the work of art as an object itself made by an embodied human being for embodied human beings."

Embodied human beings making works of art are aware of and use (play with) the associations and emotions evoked by the materials and images used in the making. These associations and emotions are as much a part of the work of art as the materials and images (this is particularly so in conceptual and symbolist art, as both begin with the idea or concept) and are present whether the viewer or critic responds to them or not; in the same way that Biblical allusions exist in Shakespeare's plays whether contemporary students recognise them or not. In the same way in which Andrew Motion has argued regarding Shakespeare that our understanding and appreciation of the plays is reduced if we don't recognise the allusions, so our understanding of visual art that uses or plays with associations, emotions and ideas is diminished if we fail to respond. Again, the full work of art made by an embodied human being is not being fully respected or appreciated if these are not encountered.

As a result, I would differ from you in thinking that Christian concepts can be a part of an art work in being a part of the associations that the artist deliberately brings into play through the creation of the work, sometimes directly through imagery and sometimes implicitly through reference.

Having said that, I do think that the art work is an object in its own right once created and, as such, has a life beyond that which its maker consciously intended. Artists sometimes express this themselves when they talk about seeing more in the work as they live with it than they were aware of intending during its creation. For some, this is an indication of some sort of spiritual dimension or dynamic at play in the work.

Alan Stewart understands this sense of something more to also pertain to the viewer:

"An artist will of course set out to say something particular, but once their work becomes public, it assumes its own life. Therefore each fresh encounter will produce a new conversation between the art and the viewer, resulting in a whole host of possible interpretations, none less valid than the other. Appropriating our own personal meaning from another person’s work doesn’t diminish it, if anything it enlarges it. We might even want to say that in re-imagining and re-investing something with new meaning, we may in fact in some cases redeem it or re-birth it."

I agree with him that doing so enlarges the work and its significance. It also gives a creative role to us as viewers of art. However, I don't think that this means that anything goes in terms of interpretation. Interpretation, to have validity, has to fit with and follow the shape, texture, feel, colour, images, content, associations and emotions of the work itself.

So, I think that there are three different dynamics at play which overlap to some extent. The artist and his/her intentions in creating the work, the work itself as an object in its own right that is part of a network of intentional associations, and the viewer who is able to interpret the work in ways that may differ from the artist's intentions but must fit with the form, content and associations of the work itself.

I suppose I am interested in the faith that an artist has, and how this is unconsciously reflected in the sensibilities that ripple the surface of an art work. I remember being at an ACE event chaired by Marjorie Allthorpe-Guyton where she asked the panel does an artist have to have faith to use Christian iconography or work for the church. The answer has to be no, and that is important, but what gets hidden is the possibility that artists with faith may explore the subject differently and that this needs to also be recognised. But we don't want to ask about an artist's faith. We are too influenced by the de-humanising debates that Dan Siedell is currently discussing on his blog, where we are suspicious of allowing an artist's intentions into a work of art. But there is a difference for me between artists having specific agendas which they want to put into a work, and the influence of the integral world view that an artist brings into the creative process, often without conscious thought.

I think your statement that you are interested in "the faith that an artist has, and how this is unconsciously reflected in the sensibilities that ripple the surface of an art work" raises important assumptions which I would want to question. Underlying this seems to be the argument that, as Robert Goldwater says regarding the work of Bernard and Denis, conscious specific agendas are detrimental to the work while unconcious sensibilities benefit the work. This assumption can deteriorate into a simplistic good/bad measure of a work's validity and can lead to the use of traditional icongraphy and imagery from literature and religion being dismissed as literary rather than visual. I would question whether the assumption has any real validity because there seems no basis, other than the subjective, on which the critic can make a judgement as to whether the imagery, associations, emotions etc. in an art work are conscious or unconscious.

Where did this denigration of an artist's faith begin? I think one place we can discern it is in Art Sacre, and their belief that the quality of an artist is more important than their faith. We see this recapitulated in Sister Wendy and Keith Walker who both use artists for their fame rather than their faith.

I'm not really sure where this is coming from. The main argument of Art Sacre seemed to be the one that you made above (and with which I agree) i.e. that an artist doesn't have to have a faith in order to use Christian iconography or work for the church. I also agree that works using Christian icongraphy or made for the church by artists without faith would be likely to explore faith differently from artists with a faith. This could be about creative dissonance but I don't se that that then leads to the denigration of the faith of those artists who have a faith. This, I think, comes much more from an over-emphasis on the art work as an object in its own right. There are those, I think, who, in order to emphasis the significance of the art work as an object in its own right, seek to divorce it from its creator and his/her creative intentions. Where this is the case then the faith of the artist is deemed to be irrelevant. This, I think, is reductive and fails your test of fully respecting "the work of art as an object itself made by an embodied human being for embodied human beings."

Another question about the airbrushing for me is whether the airbrushing is about Christian influences themselves. Figurative art of a certain kind, abstract art of a certain kind, and other types of artistic practice and concern have also been airbrushed out. Beauty is treated with suspicion by art history and theory, the sublime has become secularised, mystery has been denigrated. Artists continue to address these themes but critical theory, which in the UK has been dominated by continental post-modern philosophy, finds them problematic. The visual has been denigrated by schools of art history and cultural theory dominated by philosophy, semiotics, psychology rather than visual aesthetics cf. Bourriaud's relational aesthetics which underpinned altermodern at Tate Britain recently. But artists exploring the spiritual tend to naturally explore these taboo territories of the sublime, beauty, wonder etc. I think art history ignores Christian influences not out of an anti-Christian agenda, but because the themes that underpin 'Christian' spiritual art, and that absorb artists intrigued by a spiritual world fall outside the themes that are dominant in the art world at present, where the world is a hyper-real, space of irony - something which is antipathetic to a perspective intrigued by transcendent possibilities.

This is interesting. Firstly, because here you are saying that airbrushing does occur whereas previously you argued that the issue was respect not airbrushing. Secondly, because I don't think I have argued (and certainly haven't intended to argue) that airbrushing of Christian influences happens because of an explicitly anti-Christian agenda. I agree with you that themes and mediums (such as, for example, figurative symbolism) which "absorb artists intrigued by a spiritual world" tend to fall outside of the themes and mediums that are dominant in the art world at present. I think too that, as you have argued previously, secularists are less likely to identify spiritual themes/imagery and, as a result, to ignore it. I also think that there is an historical issue which is the reality that Western Art was almost exclusively 'Christian' for a large part of its history and that its 'Christianness' in that period was heavily associated with illustrating the narratives of the faith. Because both of these are no longer the case, assumptions are made either that its influence has been lost altogether or that its influence only exists in figurative narratives.

An interesting challenge for those artists "intrigued by a spiritual world" would be to explore means of expressing their 'spiritual' themes coherently and with resonance in mediums which are dominant in the art world at present or to explore how Christian faith can be expressed in and through a world that is hyper-real and ironic. This latter challenge could well be one in which theologians and writers on the arts from a Christian perspective could give valuable support and ideas to artists. This, I think, is akin to Dan Siedell's intentions. The reverse would be to argue that the two are totally antithetical to each other and that artists "intrigued by a spiritual world" should continue to be counter-cultural even if this means being ignored by the present art world which would, I think, be closer to the position that Peter Fuller eventually took (although he had real success as well as opposition in presenting his arguments, including the value of the sublime, beauty, wonder etc., within the recently past art world itself). Which would you tend towards or should there perhaps be people of faith on both sides of the argument?

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Thea Gilmore - Red White and Black.

Responses to 'Airbrushed from Art History?' (3)

Richard Davey writes:

I'm finding this conversation really fascinating and helpful, particularly because I am currently trying to re-write my PhD thesis for publication, and many of these questions lie at the heart of what I was then, and am still, addressing - the taboo surrounding an artists' faith.

Fundamentally I think your project is worthwhile and important, and my comments arise on that fascinating edge where differences in nuance and emphasis can lead to development and transformation. Your considered and thoughtful responses to my own comments have provoked further reflection both about specific points and more generally.

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.

1. Do you think that a comprehensive survey is possible? I think that you are setting yourself up for a fall by an ambition that sets out to be comprehensive. It seems to me a narrow focus would allow you a better chance to realise your desire to be thorough and at the same time to raise the fundamental questions that you are seeking to address. By striving to be comprehensive you are either going to have to be so broad that your project will be full of holes, or you will never finish.

2. What do you mean by Christian influences? This is such a simple statement and yet so problematic. Do you mean influences that come from culture that are specifically Christian i.e.. the use of Christian iconography? Do you mean the essential themes that lie at the heart of Christianity- but what are those, and can we say that an influence comes from active 'Christian' influence or from the residual Christianity that underpins western society? Do you mean the faith of the artist? Or is it your own Christian faith that is being read into Modern and Contemporary art?

3. Do you mean British, French, Italian, Spanish, American art. This may seem a strange point since so much contemporary and modern art transcends geographic borders, but I think this is important when addressing the subject of faith and Christianity, because in reality attitudes to faith are fundamentally different across these different contexts. American attitudes to Faith and Christianity are very different to British 'secular' attitudes, where faith is on the back foot. The recent American presidential elections highlight this with their strong influence of faith, whereas in the upcoming general election in Britain will faith feature, or will we once again have the Blair effect - where faith and public life don't mix? And then on the continent Christian art is often tied into a Roman Catholic spirituality and integration into liturgy that is fundamentally different to British Anglicanism.

You echo Taylor's criticism of Greenberg, but I don't have a problem with Greenberg's approach - why is that? I suppose I know that when I write on an artist I am aware that I am going to be addressing it from the starting point of my own world-view, and that my reading will be coloured by that. However much I try to be open to the full range of influences that may be found in artist's work I can never achieve a truly objective stance, I will always see a spiritual perspective and this will obscure some of the secular perspectives that may equally legitimately exist in it as well. Again, in your review of Traces du sacre your implicit criticism is based upon what I take as an objection to their position that argues 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). I may not completely agree with the origin being secularisation but I think that they are fundamentally right. In my many years of doing research in this area the majority of artists I have met say very early on 'I am not religious', and you have to accept this position. They are very rarely church goers and often stand outside organised religion. If I had used Church membership ,or adherence to a specific organised religion as a criteria for inclusion I would have had a very limited pool of artists of a quality worth addressing. My reflection over the years is that for artists their engagement with their faith and spiritual impulse occurs within the loneliness of the creative process, whereas non-artists do so within the parameters of organised religious practice and membership. The artists I have met who have an incredibly deep faith and highly developed spiritual awareness support Linda Woodhead's arguments that faith in the uk is becoming increasingly implicit rather than explicit, something carried out privately rather than within the bounds of traditional associational religion. Cecil Collins was an artist of incredible faith, but very explicitly anti-religion.

I remember Peter Eugene Ball's frustration and anger at being labelled a secret Christian by Keith Walker in his Images and Idols book. Peters' reaction was, 'I am not a Christian, and I know that I am not a Christian because I do not believe in the resurrection'. Yet Peter is a person of deep spiritual awareness and faith which shapes his life. Your comments about your friend Alan Stewart's reading of Andres Serrano bring this to mind. We should be honest in what we are doing. If we are doing theology through art lets say that, rather than trying to imply that our reading is necessarily implicit within the work. Is his reading true to the embodiment of the work? I think the work is what it is, an image of a crucifix suspended in a golden liquid, which we later discover is urine. That image says nothing more than that. The reading into that by the viewer is valid, but not embodied in the work. Similarly an image of the crucifixion is nothing more than paint pushed around a surface to make marks that depict a man on a cross. Any theological interpretation occurs in the viewer's mind not in the work. Paint cannot speak of resurrection, it can provoke emotions that can evoke a sensation of joy or despair etc, but resurrection etc and Christian theology are not emotions, they are concepts that are formed in the mind, constructs of theology. I actually am not certain that art can be 'Christian', it is the interpretation of the subject matter that is Christian.

I suppose I am interested in the faith that an artist has, and how this is unconsciously reflected in the sensibilities that ripple the surface of an art work. I remember being at an ACE event chaired by Marjorie Allthorpe-Guyton where she asked the panel does an artist have to have faith to use Christian iconography or work for the church. The answer has to be no, and that is important, but what gets hidden is the possibility that artists with faith may explore the subject differently and that this needs to also be recognised. But we don't want to ask about an artist's faith. We are too influenced by the de-humanising debates that Dan Siedell is currently discussing on his blog, where we are suspicious of allowing an artist's intentions into a work of art. But there is a difference for me between artists having specific agendas which they want to put into a work, and the influence of the integral world view that an artist brings into the creative process, often without conscious thought.

Where did this denigration of an artist's faith begin? I think one place we can discern it is in Art Sacre, and their belief that the quality of an artist is more important than their faith. We see this recapitulated in Sister Wendy and Keith Walker who both use artists for their fame rather than their faith.

Another question about the airbrushing for me is whether the airbrushing is about Christian influences themselves. Figurative art of a certain kind, abstract art of a certain kind, and other types of artistic practice and concern have also been airbrushed out. Beauty is treated with suspicion by art history and theory, the sublime has become secularised, mystery has been denigrated. Artists continue to address these themes but critical theory, which in the uk has been dominated by continental post-modern philosophy, finds them problematic. The visual has been denigrated by schools of art history and cultural theory dominated by philosophy, semiotics, psychology rather than visual aesthetics cf. Bourriaud's relational aesthetics which underpinned altermodern at Tate Britain recently. But artists exploring the spiritual tend to naturally explore these taboo territories of the sublime, beauty, wonder etc. I think art history ignores Christian influences not out of an anti-Christian agenda, but because the themes that underpin 'Christian' spiritual art, and that absorb artists intrigued by a spiritual world fall outside the themes that are dominant in the art world at present, where the world is a hyper-real, space of irony - something which is antipathetic to a perspective intrigued by transcendent possibilities.

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Jan Garbarek & The Hilliard Ensemble - Parce Mihi Domine.

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.

Airbrushed from Art History? (2)

Mark C. Taylor writes at the beginning of his Disfiguring: Art, Architecture, Religion that religion and the visual arts are at war.

"Many representatives of the religious and political right," he suggests, "assume that it is their God-given mission to purge the polis of [the] catastrophic disease" that is contemporary art. In examining the roots of this situation he focusses on the theorists of art and religion.

Throughout the twentieth century, he argues, that Christian theologians and philosophers of religion have been, for the most part, either critical or dismissive of the arts. For many, this has been under the influence of the dialectical theology of Karl Barth "in which the affirmation of God presupposes the negation of nature, history, and culture."

On the other hand, he notes the influence of the art criticism of Clement Greenberg in which autonomy in art "results from a gradual process of abstraction in which everything that is regarded as extraneous to a particular medium is progressively removed":

"From this point of view, the development of modern art follows an "inexorable logic" that leads from figuration and ornamentation to abstraction and formalism. The process of abstraction reaches closure when the work of art becomes totally self-reflexive and transparently self-referential ... Painting that is essentially about painting seems to leave little room for religious and spiritual concerns."

Andrew Spira, writing in The Avant-Garde Icon, notes that "Avant-garde artists were passionate and vociferous in their denunciation of the credulity, passivity, manipulation and conservatism of conventional religiosity." Their antipathy towards religion should not be underestimated and reflects the fundamentally different points of view commonly understood as meaning that there was little in common between the art form of icons and that of avant-garde art: "the sacred versus the secular, the traditional versus the revolutionary, the faith-based versus the self-righteous, the figurative versus the abstract."

With views of this nature prevelent within modern art criticism it is easy to see how the influence of Christianity on modern art could be dismissed, denigrated or overlooked. Influential modern artists who either had a sincere religious commitment or who consistently explored religious themes had their work dismissed as sentimental or lacking in innovation. So, for example, William S. Rubin in Modern Sacred Art and the Church of Assy dismisses the work of Maurice Denis as "pale and overrefined" and that of his followers as "saccharine" while the work of Catholic converts like Albert Gleizes and Gino Severini is only "derivative modernism."

Such assessments, which resolutely ignore the influence that such artists had on their own generation, reflect the views of those on the rollercoaster ride of modern art movements where the only valid movement is the currently fashionable movement which makes everything that went before passé.

Both Taylor and Spira, like Doss and Siedell, recognise that the views summarised above are one-dimensional takes on the diversity of modern and contemporary art. Spira notes that:

"although evidence of [the] receptivity [of avant-garde artists] to icons is more hidden than evidence of their rejection of the Church and its trappings, it is arguable that the tradition of icon painting was integral to the shaping of their work. As with children who rebel against their parents but turn out to resemble them, the art of the avant-garde often showed striking similarities to icons in looks, mannerisms and even in deeper sympathies."

Similarly, Taylor argues that having "defined the terms of debate for many critics, Greenberg effectively obscures the self-confessed spiritual preoccupations of the very artists whose work he analyzes":

"All of the major abstract expressionists were deeply interested in religion and actively incorporated spiritual concerns in their work. Moreover, such involvement with religion is not limited to postwar American art. From the beginning of modern art in Europe, its practitioners have relentlessly probed religious issues. Though not always immediately obvious, the questions religion raises lurk on or near the surface of even the most abstract canvases produced during the modern era.

One of the most puzzling paradoxes of twentieth-century cultural interpretation is that, while theologians, philosophers of religion, and art critics deny or surpress the religious significance of the visual arts, many of the leading modern artists insist that their work cannot be understood apart from religious questions and spiritual issues."

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Arcade Fire - Intervention.