Orthodoxy and music

Orthodoxy, Music , Politics and Art in Contemporary Russia and Eastern Europe was a conference and festival organized by the Centre for Russian Music and the Department of History, Goldsmiths, University of London, and the Department of Orthodox Theology, University of Eastern Finland in the Great Hall, Goldsmiths, University of London during March 2013.

The abstracts from the conference programme give an indication of the range of engagements which exist between Orthodoxy and modern or contemporary music.

Elena Artamonova spoke about the relationship between Sergei Vasilenko and the Old Believers:

‘Vasilenko has been perceived as a conformist and inconsequential Soviet composer in post-Soviet Russia. The recent discoveries of unpublished documents reveal Vasilenko to be a talented musician whose search for a niche within the culture of Soviet music forced him to keep his true musical writings secret from the public in the drawer of his desk.

Chant as an element of musical vocabulary and as a symbolic depiction of faith played an important role in his artistic expression. Vasilenko undertook a diligent practical and scholarly research on the Old Believers’ chant, znamennyi raspev, studied the kriuki notation and attended the Old Believers’ liturgies in Moscow, which were forbidden for outsiders and kept in strict confidence in spite of severe persecution. Vasilenko’s first major composition, a cantata the Legend of the Great City of Kitezh and the Quiet Lake Svetoyar op. 5 written in 1902, was composed using the authentic tunes of the Old Believers and schismatic legends from the Volga region. This work anticipated Nikolai Rimskii-Korsakov’s opera on the same subject.

Vasilenko strongly linked the ascetic simplicity and plainness of the monodic tunes of the Old Believers with the ancient icons and the paintings of a devout Russian Orthodox artist, Mikhail Nesterov. The visual and narrative aspects of his work depicted an irrational mystic world that was in harmony with Vasilenko’s musical aspirations.’

Boris Belge highlighted religious expression in the work of Sofia Gubaidulina:

‘Sofia Gubaidulina (*1932) is widely considered one of the most "religious" composers of the former Soviet Union. In fact, she believed in God since her youth. Due to this religiosity, she could not but include religious material and ideas in to her musical work. Socialized in the days of Khrushchev’s antireligious campaigns and a widespread disinterest in religion in Soviet society, her religious conviction seems to be something exceptional.’

Belge discussed Gubaidulina’s musical spirituality by analysing some of her works written in Soviet times (Offertorium, Seven Words) and by discussing questions of continuity or discontinuity in Gubaidulina’s spirituality in the Brezhnev era, as well as Perestroika, and postcommunist times.

Predrag Djokovic explored Sacred Music In The Musical Life Of Serbia In The Time Of Communism:

‘In order to understand the status of sacred music in communist Serbia, it is necessary to explain the attitude of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia towards religion between 1945 and 1990. This country treated religion as "the opium for the people" and had a negative approach to the different Christian denominations, especially to the Serbian Orthodox Church. Since the religious communities were, as well as all their activities in that period, on the margins of social, and particularly public life, sacred music was very little, if at all, present in the concert halls. Although this attitude was common throughout the communist Yugoslavia, in predominantly Roman Catholic Croatia and Slovenia situation was different to some extent. In the Orthodox Serbia, the communists completely abandoned traditional cultural values. In the course of almost 50 years, spiritual, a cappella choir music, which was a significant part of the cultural identity of the Orthodox Serbs, could not be heard publicly at all. Many pre-WW2 church choirs transformed under the influence of the militant atheism, while new, city choirs performed partisan songs glorifying the communist sacrifices and their struggle in creating the new society. However, contrary to the lack of the Orthodox Church music, in the same period in Serbia, the Catholic and Protestant church music was performed from time to time. This deliberate neglect of the Orthodox music in the musical life of Serbia lasted until 1980s. As a consequence of the weakening of the communist regime and its ideology, the status of the sacred music improved in public. One of the turning points was the celebration of the 125 years of Mokranjac’s birth. In 1981, the Radio Television Belgrade Choir performed and recorded the greatest Serbian composer Stevan Mokranjac’s most important spiritual works – The Liturgy and The Funeral Service (Requiem).’

Rachel Jeremiah-Foulds spoke about Galina Ustvolskaya’s unexpected avenue to the Znamenny tradition through the works of Igor Stravinsky:

‘As one of the most important composers to arise in Soviet Russia, Ustvolskaya (1919-2006) opened new dimensions for Russian music by cultivating an original style in the midst of cultural and political calamity. Her indignant protests that she was ‘in isolation by choice and by geopolitical circumstance’ were reinforced by her vigorous rejection of many conventional genres and traditions and the development of her own, uncompromising voice. This paper will begin with a review of the conspicuous inclusion of characteristics of the Russian Orthodox Church’s Znamenny Raspev in her work, an approach that provided a route through which her extreme musical language could progress, and her spirituality could be explored, amidst the restrictions imposed in twentieth-century Russia.

Yet Ustvolskaya was not the first composer to be fascinated by the spiritual and cultural implications of this Orthodox chant, and to spot the possibilities its musical vocabulary presented. The thriving folk tradition of the chant, its reference to an ancient - more spiritual - Russia, along with its Modernist potential, had also made it a very attractive musical vocabulary to Stravinsky (1882-1971) half a century beforehand in an entirely different political context.’

Julija Jonane discussed the appearance of Russian Orthodox genres and composers in the revival of Latvian Sacred Music:

‘Latvia is a multi-religious country where the most prevalent are three Christian Confessions:

- Evangelical Lutheran
- Roman Catholic
- Russian Orthodox.

Although Russian Orthodoxy in Latvia has an old and rich history, Orthodox traditions in musical compositions of the Latvian music history became incorporated much later, only at the end of 20th century. As Latvia regained independence (1980s and 1990s), the traditional churches also re-established themselves. At the same time, Latvian music culture was hit by the wave of the spirituality and religious music become even fashionable. Composers became interested in music genres of the old and established religions (Roman Catholic and Russian Orthodox), such as masses, liturgies, hymns, vespers, sacred concerts, etc.

Nowadays, at the beginning of 21st, century, we have composers who are truly dedicated to sacred music and consider it to be their calling. Among them the following three are of the particular importance:

1) Jurijs Glagolevs’s/Yuriy Glagolyev’s (born in 1926) predecessors were known Orthodox priests and church choir conductors. He created sacred compositions for performance mainly in church ceremonies.

2) Musical settings by Andrejs Selickis/Andrey Selickiy (born in 1960) are also inspired by his work as a singer and choir conductor of various Russian Orthodox churches in Riga. However, often the composer’s sacred oeuvre rises above the traditions and canons of his religious denomination – towards Christian ideas in a more general sense.

3) The third composer who writes music according to the Russian Orthodox traditions is Georgs Pelecis/Georg Pelecis (born in 1926). Although he is not directly involved in church activities, his compositions are inspired by his faith. Five oratorios by him are considered to be an important contribution to Latvian sacred music history as well as intersecting with Russian Orthodox genres. The oratorio God is Love (2001) was specially composed as a dedication to Russian Orthodoxy in Latvia within the framework of the 800th Jubilee of Riga. This work, described by the author himself as "an ecumenical concert", combines the Latvian and Russian languages, thus symbolically reflecting the interaction of two different cultures.’

Ivana Medic highlighted Serbian piano music inspired by the Orthodox tradition:

‘One of the most interesting strands of Serbian musical modernism that emerged in the decades after the World War Two was an idiosyncratic intertwining of the various neo- styles (neoclassicism, neoexpressionism etc.) with Orthodox tradition. This trend was distinguished by the nostalgic/poeticised relation towards the distant past (in particular, the idealised Middle Ages), and the aim to revive the "archaic" by using contemporary (including avant-garde) artistic means. This style has proved to be extremely vital and, with some modifications, it has survived to this day.’

She discussed piano music by several Serbian composers (Vasilije Mokranjac, Svetislav Božic, Miroslav Savic, et al.) who found inspiration in the Orthodox tradition. ‘While some of them use verbatim quotations of church chants and work them into the pieces, others opt for a less direct approach, where the church music is only simulated (and often supported by the onomatopoeia of ubiquitous bells).’

Gregory Myers shared thoughts on Nikolai Korndorf’s 1978 Setting of the Orthodox Divine Liturgy:

‘A work that has only recently appeared on the composer’s work list, and a composition best defined as written for the drawer, Nikolai Korndorf’s setting of the Orthodox Liturgy is an early work dating from 1978; this is music composed at the pre-dawn of a new era. The decade of the 1970s marked the beginning of Russia’s spiritual awakening; the allure of the Russian Orthodoxy crossed generations drawing many to and back into its fold, as if they were saying ‘this was once ours and let us reclaim it to make us whole’. Korndorf’s compositional approach appears to draw on earlier traditions that antedate and therefore bypass traditional 19th-century Russian sacred music trends. The composer recasts, reconnects and succeeds in re-establishing that long lost organic relationship between canonical texts and music.’

Tara Wilson argued that for Vladimir Martynov Russian Orthodoxy was a cultural and compositional aesthetic:

‘Vladimir Martynov (b. 1946) is one of Russia’s leading contemporary composers, noted for his long-term employment of minimalist techniques, as well as for his cultural and compositional manifesto, entitled ‘The End of the Composers’ Time’ (1996). Regarded as a polymath, with specialisms in Russian Orthodoxy, sacred choral music, Eastern and Western Philosophy and post-structural theory, Martynov advocates that contemporary compositional language should function as a form of ‘bricolage’; as a commentary on past cultures and musics, both secular and sacred, while connecting these to the present day. Directly influenced by Russian Orthodoxy as a doctrine, as form of ritual and as a source of archaic musical vocabulary, Martynov makes the connections between chant and Minimalism, while constructing what he terms a ‘New Sacral Space: a new type of performance ritual that aims to engender meditative contemplation within a postmodernist context.’

Tatiana Soloviova considered Stepan Smolensky and the Renaissance of Sacred Music in Russia:

‘To understand Russian sacred music, it is crucial to investigate its history. One of the most important in the history of sacred music in Russia was its renaissance, which took place at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th century. After a long period of being a marginalized area subdued by foreign domination, Russian sacred music was at that time returning to its roots, ancient chants becoming an element of the vanguard of music creativity in Russia, and the subject of admiration for foreigners. This renaissance included several simultaneous trends: historical research, composing, performing, educational issues and also public debates. For the first time in Russian history, sacred music was being discussed in leading newspapers!

A remarkable role in this renaissance was played by Stepan Smolensky (1848-1909), little known to Russians, let alone the English public. His pioneering research into medieval sacred chants, his teaching and composing were not only germane to the renaissance, but also its essential ingredient. During this directorship the Moscow Synodal School became a first class educational institution and its Choir was hailed by Europeans as an outstanding phenomenon. Smolensk greatly influenced Kastalsky, Rachmaninoff, Grechaninov and others: thanks to his guidance many masterpieces were created (it is to him that Rachmaninoff dedicated his "All-Night Vigil"). The so called New Direction in sacred music started and led by Smolensky represents one of the most glorious pages in cultural history of Russia. Discussions of that time are both relevant and enlightening for those interested in sacred music nowadays.’

Tanya Sirotina discussed the poetic theatre of Vladimir Rubin:

‘Born in 1924, Rubin served in the Red Army during the Second World War. Since the 1950s he has been active as a composer, living his philosophical and religious convictions in the medium of art. He survived the fall of the Soviet empire and the emotional turmoil, and witnessed the ensuing disruption of human souls that arose within this period.

A patriarch of the contemporary Russian compositional school who continues the line of Russian musical tradition, he took lessons from Vakhrameyev as a child, and was later a student of Goldenveyzer (1949, piano, Moscow conservatoire). Personally acquainted with Shostakovich and Sviridov, in his art he pursued the idea of poetic theatre and maintained the revival of the sacred word in his operas, choral and film music.’

In an interesting deviation from the main theme Arnold McMillin explored the reflection of religion in Modern Belarusian Literature:

‘Belarus was dominated by its neighbours from the mid-17th century onwards, and its history has taught it to be tolerant to the point of passivity, albeit not in religion where for centuries Belarusians have striven to retain their religious identity, despite opposition from within and without the country.
Poland and Russia attempted to impose Catholicism and Orthodoxy, respectively, but Uniate beliefs remained, and have been adopted by many contemporary writers.

In the 1920s in Western Belarus several clerical poets, whilst preaching the Catholic faith, defied the government by espousing nationalist ideas. Many such ‘bourgeois priests’ were to suffer murder and exile.

During most of Stalin’s time religion was banned in Belarus. Since the collapse of Communism, however, it became a prominent theme in literature, especially poetry. In the 1910s and following decades, a number of writers had written about the pull of Russia on the one hand and Poland on the other, leaving Belarus in the middle, trying to remain politically and spiritually independent. This theme has was taken up again by several prominent contemporary poets

Religious controversy, never far away, also entered scholarship, through falsification of the name of the enlightenment figure of Francis Skaryna.

Contemporary Belarusian literature contains myriad responses to God, from pious verses to angry challenges, particularly following the Chernobyl disaster. Notable are many lively dialogues with the Deity, who often seems to be rural and local, offering protection from the world around.’

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Galina Ustvolskaya - Symphony No. 5 Amen.

Ai Weiwei and Gauguin

Ai Weiwei is a Chinese artist, curator, architectural designer, social commentator, and activist. His Sunflower Seeds installation in the Turbine Hall of Tate Modern is made up of millions of small works, each apparently identical, but actually unique. Each seed has been individually sculpted and painted by specialists working in small-scale workshops in the Chinese city of Jingdezhen. Porcelain is almost synonymous with China and, to make this work, Ai Weiwei has manipulated traditional methods of crafting what has historically been one of China’s most prized exports.

Juliet Bingham, Curator, Tate Modern says: "Ai Weiwei's Unilever Series commission, Sunflower Seeds, is a beautiful, poignant and thought-provoking sculpture. The thinking behind the work lies in far more than just the idea of walking on it. The precious nature of the material, the effort of production and the narrative and personal content create a powerful commentary on the human condition. Sunflower Seeds is a vast sculpture that visitors can contemplate at close range on Level 1 or look upon from the Turbine Hall bridge above. Each piece is a part of the whole, a commentary on the relationship between the individual and the masses. The work continues to pose challenging questions: What does it mean to be an individual in today's society? Are we insignificant or powerless unless we act together? What do our increasing desires, materialism and number mean for society, the environment and the future?"

William S. Rubin writing in 1961 noted that Catholic critics were retroactively citing Paul Gauguin as an important precusor of the revival of sacred art. Rubin thought this inappropriate as, although Gauguin made a number of paintings with manifestly religious subject matter (many of which are included in Tate Modern's current Gauguin exhibition), they were conceived from the point of view of the nonbeliever. There are many paradoxes and ironies surrounding Gauguin's sacred themes, as they are catagorized in the Tate exhibition, some of which are noted in the exhibition guide.

Firstly, in his conversation and writings, Gauguin presented himself as fiercely opposed to the Christian Church. Nonetheless, his art was pervaded by religious themes and imagery, frequently drawing upon the Old and New Testaments for source material as well as the myths and belief systems of other cultures. Gauguin began to address sacred themes when he was working in Brittany, possibly influenced by the Catholic artist Emile Bernard. Among the distinctive qualities of the region that he wanted to capture was its deeply ingrained Catholic faith. The Vision of the Sermon (Jacob Wrestling with the Angel) 1888 powerfully conveys the faith of the women experiencing the vision through Gauguin's painting style, with clearly defined outlines and bold colouring that resembles stained glass (an approach known as 'Cloisonism' after a medieval technique for decorative enamel work) which means that the painting cannot be experienced simply as a quasi-anthropological study.

Secondly, Gauguin often paints Christ as having his own features in order to suggest that he has experienced suffering and betrayal at the hands of critics and artists that is in some fashion synonymous to the suffering of Christ. While there is undoubted arrogance and challenge in this stylistic technique, the genuine emotion that it calls up in Gauguin and which he translates onto canvas genuinely offer insight into the Agony in the Garden.

Finally, Gauguin was bitterly disappointed to discover on arrival in Tahiti that missionaries had been successfully converting the islanders to Christianity for more than a century, leaving little trace of the old traditions. He set about reconstructing the lost myths in his art, devising imaginative references to deities such as Hina, the goddess of the moon, and Tefatu, the god of the earth. He carved his own wooden idols and included them in his paintings, in which they resemble time-worn artefacts. In his art, at least, the Tate guide argues, ancient myth becomes part of everyday Tahitian life. However, the reality that ancient myth was not actually part of everyday Tahitian life lends these paintings an air of unreal ideality which differs from the real force and power of the Catholic faith which he depicted in Brittany.

As such, Gauguin's paintings with Christian subject matter continue to excite and inspire artists working with such themes, dspite Rubin's reservations.   

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James MacMillan - Veni Veni Emmanuel: III. Dance - Hocket.

Airbrushed from Art History? (5)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Airbrushed from Art History? (4)

Michael Gibson argues, in Symbolism, that the movement was a product of Catholic and of industrial Europe. A significant part of Symbolist art, he notes, “is tinged with a religiosity of a Catholic, syncretic or esoteric kind.”

The Catholic influence on Symbolism was itself part of a wider revival of Catholicism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, known as the French Catholic Revival. Marian E. Crowe has written in Aiming At Heaven, Getting The Earth that the militantly secularists ideals of the Third Republic - materialism, naturalism, scientism, and determinism - were perceived by many to be “choking off vitality and beauty” and “actually made people feel less free and less in control of their own lives.” The result, Gene Kellogg has argued in The Vital Tradition, “was the “decadence” of the period eventually to be known as the “fin de siècle,” a period which by curiously convoluted processes ended by giving way to a revival of Catholicism in France.”

John House writes in Post-Impressionism that the suitability of a return to Roman Catholicism had been outlined in two books published in 1889, Charles Morice's La Littérature de toute á l'heure and Georges Vanor's L'Art symboliste:

"Morice made the equation between the Idea and God when he declared that 'Souls which are the externalization of God, seek to return, through a book, Art, a musical phrase, a pure thought, to the metaphysical realm of Ideas, to God. Truth resides in the harmonious laws of Beauty.' Vanor pursued this equation further. There was a specific and logical link to be made between Ideas, God, Symbols and Christian Symbolism, and, since France was Roman Catholic, it was to Catholic art that all Art should return. The impact of this programme during the 1890s was extensive and profound. Books were published on religious topics, plays about religious subjects proliferated in the theatres of Paris, fringe religions such as Theosophy, Occultism and Satanism were highly popular, conversions of prominent writers and artists to Roman Catholicism multiplied and the walls of the Salons and the avant-garde exhibitions blossomed with religious paintings."

Crowe notes that “an impressive number of intellectuals and cultural figures ... having abandoned their childhood faith and become atheists in their youth, ... reconverted to Catholicism in their adulthood”:

“Among them were Paul Claudel, who wrote poetry and plays stressing sacrifice, chivalry and nobility; Léon Bloy, whose novels expressing the doctrine of the communion of saints called attention to the poor as an integral part of that communion and depicted poverty as both a social evil and source of sanctification; and Charles Péguy, an early socialist, who, like Bloy, stressed the importance of the poor and seemed to embody the best ideals of both the republican and religious traditions of France. Bloy’s novels made a strong critique of the hypocrisy and materialism of many nominal Catholics, a theme that would be repeated in many Catholic novels. Jacques Maritain, who was raised as a liberal Protestant, converted to Catholicism under the influence of Bloy and interpreted the philosophy and theology of St. Thomas Aquinas for the modern world.”

William S. Rubin writes, in Modern Sacred Art and the Church of Assy, that:

“Léon Bloy attacked the complacency of French bourgeois life with the fury of an Old Testament prophet; Charles Péguy, a Republican, tried to reconcile the struggle for social liberty with the French medieval heritage. Paul Claudel, François Mauriac, Georges Bernanos, and Jacques Maritain all broadened what had become a lay Catholic revival.”

This revival, although it encountered significant opposition, was both creative and fruitful resulting in the development of the Catholic Novel, the revival of Sacred Art, and the beginnings of the worker-priest movement.

In the visual arts, fervent young Catholics like Émile Bernard, Paul Sérusier, Maurice Denis and Georges Rouault played key roles in the development of Post-Impressionism, the Nabi’s, and Fauvism. Denis founded the Ateliers de l’Art Sacré or Studios of Sacred Art and went on to exert a particular influence on the development of religious and symbolist art in Belgium, Italy, Russia and Switzerland.

A later recruit to the Nabis, Jan Verkade, linked both Denis and Sérusier with the Beuron monastery in Southern Germany where Father Desiderius Lenz was the Benedictine theorist anticipating ideas associated with twentieth-century art. Sérusier and Denis were joined by Alexei von Jawlensky and Alphonse Mucha in admiring the theories of the Beuron School, while Verkade became an artist-monk at Beuron.

Rouault helped theologian Jacques Maritain with the formulation of the ideas published in 1920 as Art and Scholasticism and, at their home in Meudon, Jacques and Raissa Maritain created a Thomistic study circle that influenced an increasing number of artists, writers, philosophers and theologians. Maritain played a significant role in the conversion to Catholicism of the futurist Gino Severini, the Dadaist Otto Van Rees and abstract art promoter Michel Seuphor.

Through Severini’s contact with the Futurist Fillia, Maritain’s movement for a renewal of sacred art influenced the development of Futurist Sacred Art while Severini, himself, left a legacy of sacred art in Swiss churches. In England, those involved with the establishment at Ditchling of the Guild of St Joseph and St Dominic, a Catholic community of work, faith and domestic life which included Desmond Chute, Eric Gill, David Jones and Hilary Pepler, were strongly influenced by Maritain.A further Catholic artistic community formed around the cubist artist Albert Gleizes who tutored an international selection of artists and was hailed by some as having laid out the principles for a renewal of religious art. Two of Gleizes’ pupils, Evie Hone and Mainie Jellett, played a significant role in introducing Modern Art to Ireland and in produced a major body of Irish sacred art.

From the Ateliers d’Art Sacré came the Dominican, Father Marie-Alan Couturier, with a mission to revive Christian art by appealing to the independent masters of his time. Churches, he argued, should commission the very best artists available, and not quibble over the artists' beliefs.

Couturier put this belief into practice by attracting major artists such as Fernand Léger, Georges Braque, Henri Matisse, Marc Chagall, Jacques Lipchitz and others for the decoration of a new church of Assy in the south of France before going on to work with Matisse on the chapel for the Dominican nuns at Vence. In the years which followed, with Father Pie Régamey in the pages of the journal Art Sacré, he explained and further encouraged the breakthrough of twentieth century art that had been initiated in the decoration of Assy and Vence.

The influence of the French Catholic Revival on modern art is often entirely overlooked or described as a nostalgic reaction to militant secularism; the expression of what was felt to be absent in industrialised Europe i.e. the ‘transcendent’ or ‘otherworldly’. As such, it is seen as reactive and nostalgic; “the negative imprint of a bygone age rich in symbols and the expression of yearning and grief at the loss of an increasingly idealised past.” Symbolism, for example, has been viewed as the refuge of the decadent who chose to stay behind and reject the modernist idea of progress. The argument then goes that those who were symbolists were confronted with the paradox that, while the “underlying Symbolism of culture” which they wished to preserve had “constituted the common ground on which the cohesion of society as a whole was built,” now, in clinging to it, they themselves became lonely, isolated souls.

However, when the achievements of the French Catholic Revival are seen in full and its influence around the world understood, it becomes much more difficult to characterise it in terms of reaction and nostalgia. Instead, there is a need to understand what it was about the Catholicism of this period that influenced and inspired so many artists and intellectuals and which empowered them to be at the forefront of developments in their chosen fields.

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Olivier Messiaen - Turangalîla Symphony.

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.