Expressionism has continued to be understood and used by artists from a variety of differing cultures as a medium and movement which is particularly appropriate to the exploration of spiritual and Biblical themes. This can be clearly seen by describing significant aspects of the work of four unrelated artists:
Graham Sutherland,
F. N. Souza,
Arthur Boyd and
Peter Howson.
Sutherland was already a significant neo-romantic British artist working in a landscape-based tradition when he was approached by
Revd. Walter Hussey, Vicar of
St Matthews Northampton , regarding a commission for a painting which would face the Madonna and Child already commissioned from
Henry Moore. In view of Sutherland’s landscape-based work Hussey suggested
The Agony in the Garden as the subject of the work but Sutherland requested that instead he paint a crucifixion.
While this suggests a need on Sutherland’s part to move beyond the restrictions of his landscape-based reputation, it was nevertheless in landscape that he initially found inspiration for the form of his
Crucifixion. Sutherland wrote, in an article for
The Listener:
“I started to notice thorn bushes, and the structure of thorns as they pierced the air. I made some drawings, and as I made them, a curious change developed. As the thorns rearranged themselves, they became whilst still retaining their own pricking space encompassing life, something else – a kind of stand-in for a Crucifixion and a crucified head.”
Sutherland combined this exploration with images of tortured bodies photographed in Nazi concentration camps which “looked like figures deposed from crosses” and with the crucifixions painted by
Matthais Grünewald.
Revd. Tom Devonshire Jones has described well the resulting work in
Images of Christ:
“All the elements worked out in the studies are present: the freely interpreted crown of thorns and the debilitated legs from the Concentration Camp photographs. But the real suffering is in the arms and hands. The fingers curl up in agony. The taut arms pull the ribcage away from the rest of the body, as if a dead stag was being torn apart. In this painting Christ is still in the process of dying. Herein lies its original and frightening power.”
For Sutherland, with his focus on the agonized death inherent in crucifixion, expressionist forms and colours were essential to the depiction of such agony and to its representation as an icon of all who suffer through the inhumanity of human beings one to another.
F. N. Souza was another for whom expressionist form and colour were essential means in depicting the agony of crucifixion.
George Melly has described well in
Religion and Erotica the savage cross-hatching and cubist fragmentation of forms which mean “that there is no overt sentimentality in the artist’s religious iconography”, indeed, Melly suggests, “he expresses no obvious belief in redemption, only in suffering” as he “seems to attack his evocations of the sacred with angry cross-hatching to the point of near obliteration.”
Melly writes:
“Every artist to be reckoned with tends to invent their own trademarks. In Souza’s case, the religious work especially it is the very small forehead ... a portrait of Christ, his neck and torso pierced by two symbolic arrows, there is hardly room to jam on the crown of thorns. The eyes too are unnaturally high in the head and in this case, as in many others blacked-out. In this drawing, for example, Jesus weeps rods rather than tears, framed by ... fish skeletons ... This comparatively common device, is used not only to represent tears, but beards and hair are quite often treated in this way. The arrows also appear elsewhere, surely a symbol of suffering, borrowed from that pincushion, St Sebastian.”
In this Souza was influenced firstly by the Roman Catholicism of his youth, he was born in the Catholic province of Goa in India, and has written of seeing “the enormous crucifix with the impaled image of a Man supposed to be the son of God, scourged and dripping, with matted hair tangled in plaited thorns.” Secondly, he was influenced by the modernist movement and the work of
Picasso in particular.
Roger Wollen, in writing of
The Crucifixion from 1962 now in the
Methodist Church Collection of Modern Art, describes this work as “overtly expressionist in style and the figure on Jesus’ left ... is conveyed in a cubist style, with four superimposed eyes, two looking at Jesus and two looking out of the painting at the viewer.” The result, in the words of Nevile Wallis, are great crucifixions; “barbaric in colour” with “scrawny jagged forms, and thorny shapes” burning in their “terrible conviction.”
As
Edwin Mullins says in
F. N. Souza:
“Souza’s treatment of the figurative image is richly varied. Besides the violence, the eroticism and the satire, there is a religious quality about his work which is medieval in its simplicity and in its unsophisticated sense of wonder. Some of the most moving of Souza’s paintings are those which convey a spirit of awe in the presence of divine power ... in his religious work there is a quality of fearfulness and terrible grandeur which even
Rouault and Graham Sutherland have not equalled in this century.”
Melly writes that Souza became a committed modernist in 1947 when he and his friends “had to rely, in the Bombay of that time, on books and magazines” for images of modernist works. “This was not unique to India,” Melly says, as “Australia, too, was full of converts and suffered, as they later admitted, from what they called ‘the cultural cringe’.” It is to Australia that we turn next to find the expressionist element in the biblically inspired work by Arthur Boyd.
Boyd’s early imagery changed dramatically through the onset of the Second World War.
Robert Hughes proposed in a 1964 article on Boyd and
Sidney Nolan for the
Nation, that “the war convulsed Boyd’s arcadian plein-airism into ... wider expressionist images.”
Barry Pearce has written, in
Arthur Boyd, of Boyd projecting his personal sense of pessimism “against the world at large through a powerful series of biblical paintings” (which include
The Mockers and
The Mourners of 1945) and cites
Franz Philipp as saying in 1947:
“Boyd is not just telling a story. He is saying ... how he feels about his time, about the state of the world ... Why the Crucifixion and not the Concentration Camp? Mine (and perhaps the artist’s reply) would be that the factual statement is apt to remain merely documentary, whilst the symbol of the Crucifixion enables the artist to stress the universal – one might almost say – the metaphysical aspect of the event ... the subject of ‘The Mockers’ is orgiastic hatred, the St Vitus dance of a possessed humanity.”
This use of biblical narrative was to be repeated later in Boyd’s career with the
Nebuchadnezzar series of paintings. Pearce notes
Ursula Hoff’s suggestion that:
“... it was not insignificant that the
Nebuchadnezzar works were made at the height of the Vietnam war. As the 1960s moved towards the end of the decade, nations became divided by images of horror that confronted them in the mass media: villages incinerated, men and women tortured and killed, children screaming from the pain of napalm. Self-immolation in protest actually took place on Hampstead Heath near Boyd’s house, and once more a biblical subject by him was seen to be an allegory of the descent of humanity in a conflicted world; except this time instead of grotesque masses sliding into a hell of their own making, the focus was on the crisis of an individual.”
The major war reflected in the work and life of
Peter Howson was the Bosnian conflict which he observed as an official War Artist but conflict and suffering have featured in his work from its earliest appearance, again with biblical references.
Robert Heller writes in
Peter Howson that “many of Howson’s mature works are deeply influenced by apocalyptic thoughts and biblical references.”
Heller writes that:
“Howson is hard to place in the current British art scene, where his taste for the heroic, the poignant and the violent is not widely shared. Taking the longer view, he still remains a difficult fit. Sources and masters can easily be found for the apocalyptic paintings, the series, the caricatures, the narratives, and so on. But nobody covers the same great range – though
Goya, the past master, who makes the most intriguing comparison, with his phenomenal output, passion for drawing and genius at caricature, comes very close. The two artists, two centuries apart, have even tackled the same subject –
Blind leading the Blind.
The Biblical passage concerned has inspired other artists, including
Hieronymus Bosch,
Pieter Breughal (Howson’s inspiration for this motif) and
Cornelis Massys, whose 1540 etching is very Howsonian in composition and style. Howson’s work, though, is not a single picture, but a series of ten powerful paintings, each depicting different forms of morally bankrupt humanity, and culminating in a frenzied crowd scene whose brilliant composition focuses on a sexually threatening girl in a skimpy dress.
The series makes two important statements about this painter: first, it establishes his artistic lineage, that of a young master who stands on the shoulders of giants; second, it sets out his ethical standpoint, that of a moralist who is uncompromising in his depiction of human failure and folly, but who paints them with a deep underlying respect for life itself. To these two statements, the rehabilitated Howson has added a third dimension: that of a power greater by far than man, but freely available as the sole source of man’s redemption.
The series which was heading for completion as I wrote these words was a commission from an inspired collector – inspired because
The Stations of the Cross coincided so deeply with Howson’s own spiritual needs and preoccupations at this time. In the related and very powerful series of drawings,
The Man of Sorrows, Christ is reminiscent of the tortured down-and-outs who figure so powerfully in Howson’s portrait gallery; but the drawings also contain passages which recall some of the self-portraits that run like a sub-theme through the painter’s oeuvre. The idea of suffering humanity being redeemed through the suffering of the Son of God at once subjects the individual to God and releases the individual into a saved life.
The crucifixion is the ultimate symbol of this theology ... The saved drawings on which the painted Stations are based have both delicacy and power, ranging from brilliantly composed crowd scenes to to a Christ attended only by two grieving women; from savage brutality to keening tenderness; from the dramatic (a massively strong man lifting the Cross beneath whose weight Jesus has fallen) to the matter-of-fact (two non-threatening workmen hammering in the nails – ‘just doing me job, mate’). At every station, the viewer is haunted by the infinitely sad face of the condemned Christ.”
Heller concludes that:“Howson is a thinker, and his thoughts illumine his work. Yet the seemingly raw emotion in his paintings is what, above all, has constituted his image and aura. The emotions, like the characters who project them, are generally ugly ... A certain fascination with violence has informed a considerable amount of Howson’s art ... Howson paints life through painting people, sometimes as straight portraits, but mostly as imaginary members of the vast population which inhabits his teeming canvases. He can be justifiably excused for the violence in these faces and figures, because violence lurks somewhere in everybody – as it does in Howson himself.”
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