Seen and Unseen: Blake, imagination and the insight of God

My latest article for Seen & Unseen is 'Blake, imagination and the insight of God', exploring a new exhibition - 'William Blake's Universe at the Fitzwilliam Museum - which focuses on seekers of spiritual regeneration and national revival:

'This exhibition demonstrates that many of great Romantic philosophers and writers were seeking just such a spiritual regeneration and national revival. In our own time of war, revolution and political turbulence, it may be that this is a prescient exhibition bringing us artists who, as [Lucy] Winkett said of Blake, have ‘a distinctively Christian voice for our time’.'

See also my article for Seen and Unseen on 'The visionary artists finding heaven down here' in which I explore a tradition of visionary artists beginning with Blake whose works shed light on the material and spiritual worlds. 

My first article for Seen and Unseen was 'Life is more important than art' which reviews the themes of recent art exhibitions that tackle life’s big questions and the roles creators take.

My second article 'Corinne Bailey Rae’s energised and anguished creative journey' explores inspirations in Detroit, Leeds and Ethiopia for Corinne Bailey Rae’s latest album, Black Rainbows, which is an atlas of capacious faith.

My third article was an interview with musician and priest Rev Simpkins in which we discussed how music is an expression of humanity and his faith.

My fourth article was a guide to the Christmas season’s art, past and present. Traditionally at this time of year “great art comes tumbling through your letterbox” so, in this article, I explore the historic and contemporary art of Christmas.

My fifth article was 'Finding the human amid the wreckage of migration'. In this article I interviewed Shezad Dawood about his multimedia Leviathan exhibition at Salisbury Cathedral where personal objects recovered from ocean depths tell a story of modern and ancient migrations.

My sixth article was 'The visionary artists finding heaven down here' in which I explored a tradition of visionary artists whose works shed light on the material and spiritual worlds.

My seventh article was 'How the incomer’s eye sees identity' in which I explain how curating an exhibition for Ben Uri Online gave me the chance to highlight synergies between ancient texts and current issues.

My eighth article was 'Infernal rebellion and the questions it asks' in which I interview the author Nicholas Papadopulos about his book The Infernal Word: Notes from a Rebel Angel.

My ninth article was 'A day, night and dawn with Nick Cave’s lyrics' in which I review Adam Steiner’s Darker With The Dawn — Nick Cave’s Songs Of Love And Death and explore whether Steiner's rappel into Cave’s art helps us understand its purpose.

My 10th article was 'Theresa Lola's poetical hope' about the death-haunted yet lyrical, joyful and moving poet for a new generation.

My 11th article was 'How to look at our world: Aaron Rosen interview', exploring themes from Rosen's book 'What Would Jesus See: Ways of Looking at a Disorienting World'.

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Michael Griffin - London.

Winefride Wilson: Christian Art since the Romantic Movement

I've recently read 'Christian Art since the Romantic Movement' by Winefride Wilson. I found the book in a secondhand library sale.

The book, which was also published a 'Modern Christian Art' begins with the Romantic Movement. Winefride surveys the turbulent spirit of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century art and shows how the expressive artists of the twentieth century owes an unrecognized debt to the traditional Christian artists of earlier centuries. She discusses paintings and sculpture, emphasizing the important figures in this century: Graham Sutherland, David Jones, Eric Gill, Sir Jacob Epstein and many others. In separate sections, the author treats architectural trends, work in metals, ceramics, textiles and stained glass.

The book covers: The downfall of reason; Nostalgic brotherhoods; The age of revivals; Preaching boxes and true principles; Religious painting and European movements; Two centuries of Christian sculpture; A fantastical Spaniard and some contemporaries; Bright pavilions; and The precious arts.

The book is one of the most comprehensive I have read and is written in a polemical style that maintains the reader's interest throughout, even when one may not agree with the stated perspective. Winefride lectured widely and was the art critic for The Tablet. A former President of the Society of Catholic Artists, she was made one of the first Papal dames in 1994. She was taught the art of silversmithing by her husband Dunstan Pruden and joined the Guild of St Joseph and St Dominic in 1975.

I experienced a sense of frustration in finding this book as Winefride is not someone I have seen referenced previously despite having being widely read on the topic of Modern Christian or Sacred Art. The fact that her book is more comprehensive than many on this subject demonstrates the extent to which institutional memory is commonly disregarded in this field.

Eric Newton, for example, was another excellent earlier writer in this field who is relatively rarely cited. Newton's 'The Christian faith in art' is well worth a read. Like Winefride Wilson, Newton was also an artist. In a similar vein and from a similar period, 'Christianity in Art,' published in 1959, by Frank and Dorothy Getlein is also worth reading. 

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Bob Dylan - Caribbean Wind.

Kehinde Wiley at the National Gallery - 'Saying Yes to Us'

My latest review for Church Times is of Kehinde Wiley at the National Gallery The Prelude:

'Mountains have often been depicted as places for encounter with God, and the film, as also the paintings based on Friedrich’s images, frequently reference the Romantic wanderer figure in search of spirituality or self-discovery.

The title of the film refers to William Wordsworth’s autobiographical poem The Prelude, and his “Ode: Intimations of Immortality” is quoted, together with Thoreau’s Walden and Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Nature. Emerson’s line that “We are as much strangers in nature, as we are aliens from God” sums up much of a film whose character are, by turns, overwhelmed by snow, and subsumed by whiteness, so that they almost disappear in the landscape.

In this way, Wiley achieves a dual focus, reflecting the overwhelming reach of white supremacy, while also acknowledging humanity’s fragile relationship with nature, currently and most significantly regarding climate change.'

Other of my pieces for Church Times can be found here.

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The Staple Singers - The Gardener.

Romantic Moderns

I recently saw an episode of Escape to the Country where the mystery house was of a modernist design. The reaction of mother and daughter to this interior was typically British in that they loved its clean lines and open spaces but couldn’t see themselves feeling at home living within its spotless minimalism.

In her Afterword to Romantic Moderns, Alexandra Harris tells a similar story of visiting the V&A for its landmark exhibition on Modernism and moving:

"past cabinets full of competitively patterned tributes to man’s ornamenting instinct, and then – silence. A heavy mahogany door swung shut and I was in an immaculate world of suspended spirals, steel tubes, and slick, shiny architectural models. Manifestos, neatly typed, occupied the walls in orderly agreement about the aims of design in the twentieth century: ‘espousal of the new’, ‘rejection of history and tradition’, ‘embrace of abstraction’, the desire to ‘invent the world from scratch’.

There were few English contributions on display because the curator saw Englishness and modernism as being antithetical; modernism was cosmopolitan and English art was pastoral.

Harris’ book is a sustained plea for a more nuanced look at English responses to modernism than was the case in the V&A’s exhibition. The book is an expansive overview of architecture, art, conservation, cookery, criticism, gardening, literature, music, religion, restoration, topography and tourism which enlists modernists such as T.S. Eliot, John Piper and Virginia Woolf in a modern English renaissance celebrating the particularity of the English climate, localities and homes.

The career of Piper in some senses is illustrative of this story with an early milestone being his involvements with the modernist 7 and 5 Society and Axis, the modernist journal edited by his wife Myfanwy. Yet he moves from the creation of purist abstracts to celebrate and record, in forms that are both romantic and modern, an English provincial world of old churches and stately homes. Harris’ book provides the wider context into which Frances Spaldings’ magisterial biography of John and Myfanwy Piper sits and the reading of both will illuminate this fascinating period of English cultural life.

Ultimately, Harris’ book reads more as an elegy for a passing period of privilege than as a manifesto for a national engagement with modernism. The continuing influences of the English renaissance which she documents seem primarily to lie in the fields of conservation, restoration and tourism while not all the initiatives she notes are followed into their present manifestations.

This is certainly true of the revival of the commissioning of art for churches where in the chapter entitled ’Parish News’ Harris summarises the achievements of George Bell and Walter Hussey. Their legacy, however, does continue into the present as has recently been documented by the Commission exhibition and book; an engagement with contemporary art which still to some extent negotiates between the romantic and modern.

At the end of the ‘Parish News’ chapter Harris quotes Stephen Spender as saying that Piper and Eliot among others were linked in their commitment to the ‘idea of the sacred’. This perception is not developed further, however, meaning that a mystical strand of Romantic Modernism, as seen for example in the exploration of spirituality through imagined landscapes and worlds (which can be found in the paintings of Cecil Collins and David Jones and in the writings of C. S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien and Charles Williams), is not explored.

More surprising still in terms of omissions are the minimal references to the Neo-Romantics with no mention at all of the work of Michael Aryton, John Craxton or Keith Vaughan, among others. Neither is there mention of the major Church commissions undertaken by Piper and Graham Sutherland, perhaps because these tended to result in more obviously modernist creations as, in Piper’s case, where such commissions facilitated his return to abstraction.

Nevertheless, Harris largely succeeds in making an expansive and original case for an English renaissance in this period. However, in making the case that this renaissance valued the local and particular, it would seem that she also succeeds in confirming the modernist belief in the provincialism and pastoralism of English art.

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OMD - Maid of Orleans.

Absence of God - Raqib Shaw

Raqib Shaw’s paintings in Absence of God are sublime in all senses of the word.

In their scale and content, they reference the sublime apocalyptic works of the Romantic artists, John Martin and Francis Danby, which miniaturised human beings emphasising our powerlessness in the face of God and Nature as part of their exploration of the sensations of immensity, darkness and terror. Shaw uses similar methods – densely populated scenes set against backdrops of classical ruins – to engage similar sensations of decline and fall.

But Shaw’s paintings are also sublime in their technique and beauty. Working with metallic industrial paints, Shaw creates a marbling effect through use of a porcupine quill and outlines each detail of his compositions in gold. When glitter and gemstones are added to the mix the whole shimmers in a riot of colour, which although slightly kitsch, nevertheless is harmoniously blended towards beauty.

When combined with the monstrous content of Shaw’s works - the intense violent and sexual nature of its manga-like imagery – a bitter-sweet paradox is established which, in light of the exhibition’s title and his anthropomorphic imagery, could reflect a world of harmonies and beauty formed with intricacy and inter-connectivity yet red raw in tooth and claw.

Shaw draws on the works of Hieronymus Bosch in depicting the monstrous beauty found in the absence of God. He finds there a similar paradox; Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights also being Hell. Nowhere is this more apparent than in his sculpture Adam, which features a human figure with a bird’s head, its mouth and genitals swarming with parasites, mounted by a large, bejewelled lobster. Adam removes the monstrous from the beautiful and represents the fall of humanity into the bestial.

Shaw’s work in its focus on the monstrous and its referencing of past masterpieces has parallels with the Goya-based installations and vandalisations of the Chapman Brothers. However, the paradoxes that Shaw establishes through the beauty of his violent compositions seem to avoid the double negatives of, for example, the Chapman Brother’s Insult to Injury series where their defacing of Goya’s Disasters of War etchings seems to revere desecration and thus reverse the intent of Goya’s work.

Shaw’s paintings counter many of the stereotypical critiques of contemporary art. They are conceptual works requiring traditional painterly skills in terms of composition and technique. They are figurative narrative paintings which form abstract harmonious visual wholes. They are iconoclastic while referencing a broad multi-cultural art history. In short, they are sublime.

Absence of God, Raqib Shaw, White Cube Hoxton Square, 20 May – 4 July and Kunsthalle Vienna, 19 August – 27 September 2009

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David Byrne - Road to Nowhere.