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Thursday, 17 August 2023

Artlyst: Jeremy Deller In Rennes And Brittany Post-Impressionism – August Diary

My August Art Diary for Artlyst is inspired by a recent trip to Brittany:

'Brittany played a significant role in developing Post-Impressionism and Pictorial Symbolism, with its Catholic culture a source of inspiration and Catholic artists among its pioneers. Several artists also contributed to reviving sacred art in Europe whilst offering or creating work for local churches. The visual arts remain significant for Brittany through collections of Post Impressionist work and contemporary exhibitions such as the current retrospective of the Turner Prize-winning British artist Jeremy Deller in Rennes.'

I told some of the story of Post-Impressionism and Pictorial Symbolism in my Artlyst review of 'After Impressionism' at the National Gallery - see here. For more on Émile Bernard see here. For more on Paul Sérusier see here. For more on Maurice Denis see here, here and here. For my Church Times review of 'Jeremy Deller: English Magic' see here.

My other pieces for Artlyst are:

Interviews -

Monthly diary articles -

Articles/Reviews -

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Medicine Head - His Guiding Hand.

Sunday, 4 March 2018

Artlyst - Giorgio Griffa: The Golden Ratio And Inexplicable knowledge

My latest article for Artlyst highlights the first solo exhibition in the United Kingdom of Giorgio Griffa, an Italian abstract painter who has been closely linked to the Arte Povera movement. The exhibition at Camden Arts Centre provides a rare opportunity to discover the breadth of the artist’s practice, incorporating works from the 1960s through to today.

The work of Griffa revives awareness of the Golden Ratio in contemporary art and, therefore, could also revive awareness of the part that the Golden Ratio has played within artistic searches for an objective, scientific approach to modern art.

My other Artlyst articles are:

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Low - So Blue.

Thursday, 6 August 2009

Airbrushed from Art History (11)

So far in this series of posts we have examined the circles of artists and influence which formed around Maurice Denis, Jacques Maritain, and Albert Gleizes, each in turn making a distinctive contribution both to the development of Modern Art and of the French Catholic Revival. Before examining the final circle of influence which affected both movements, that which formed around the Dominican Friars Couturier and Régamy, we turn to a quest which linked artists involved in the three circles of influence we have explored to date.

That quest was for an objective, scientific approach to art. This search began with Georges Seurat, who was widely believed to have developed a scientifically based understanding of colour known as Neo-impressionism or Pointillism in conjunction with the mathematician Charles Henry. This style spread across Europe with the Italian Divisionists becoming strong proponents and paving the way for the development of Futurism.

Peter Brooke, writing in the ‘Afterword’ to The Aesthetic of Beuron and other writings, notes that Paul Sérusier, a member of the circle around Denis, was “dissatisfied with Seurat’s solution, mainly because he felt it did not offer an adequate account of form in painting.” Sérusier found the science he was seeking in the work and writing of Benedictine monk Desiderius Lenz:

“who as painter and sculptor in the late nineteenth century anticipated many of the ideas associated with twentieth-century art – the rejection of naturalism and perspective and an insistence on ‘abstract’, geometrically based principles for painting. The artistic school he founded in his monastery at Beuron in Southern Germany had a great influence on ecclesiastical art and gained admirers among the European avant-garde, including Alexei Jawlensky, Alphonse Mucha and Paul Sérusier.”

Dutch artist, Jan Verkade had joined the circle of Denis and Sérusier, the Nabis, on
his arrival in Paris in 1891. He studied with Sérusier in Brittany where he converted to Roman Catholicism. After time spent in Italy, Verkade “joined the Beuron monastery as an artist-oblate in 1894.” He “worked under Lenz on St Gabriel’s in Prague in 1895 and on the refectory in Beuron in 1897” before becoming a priest in 1902. Sérusier and Denis were introduced to the Beuron School by Verkade. Sérusier visited Lenz in Prague in 1895 and becoming Lenz’s champion in France publishing his translation of Lenz’s essay The Aesthetic of Beuron in 1905 (with an introduction by Denis), on, as Brooke notes, the eve of Cubism.

Sérusier claimed to have been ‘the father of Cubism’, a remark which has generally been treated as far-fetched, but which, Brooke suggests, is understandable in the light of Lenz’s essay:

“Sérusier (and Lenz) pose the problem of form in painting. They believe it is a problem to be tackled objectively. Which is to say that the characteristics of form (straight line, curve, circle etc) interact with the human sensibility in a way that is predictable, almost, one might say, measurable ... Particular importance is attached to the most elementary geometrical figures (square, triangle and circle), to elementary symmetry and to the Golden Section.”

Brooke notes that “all these characteristics are clearly relevant to the general history of Cubism” and that when Sérusier’s later book ABC de la Peinture (setting out ideas which are very similar to those of Lenz) was published in 1921, it was “quite clearly part of the same intellectual world” as Gino Severini’s Du Cubisme au Classicisme (also published in 1921), Albert Gleizes’ Du Cubisme et les moyens de la comprehendre (1920) and La Peinture et ses Lois (1922 or 23), “and the arguments constantly repeated in [Amédée] Ozenfant and [Charles Edouard] Jeanneret’s publication L’Esprit Nouveau.” He concludes that “it would be very easy to see Sérusier as the father of the Cubism of the 1920s, or at least as the oldest participant in that particular debate.”

Brooke writes, in his introduction to Du Cubisme au Classicisme and La Peinture et ses Lois, that:

“Both Severini and Gleizes ... believed that there were objective principles behind the act of painting analogous to the laws of musical harmony; that these had been lost or had become obscured; and that Cubism was an attempt to recover them. Both were responding to one of the most dramatic moments in the history of modern painting – the moment when Cubism seemed to be losing its impetus, to be yielding the ground to other ideas.”

Severini had “turned to a numerically/geometrically based figurative painting, arguing that painting had been discovered as a science at the time of the Renaissance and that this was a progress which could not be negated by a return to the Egyptian or the Romanesque.” Severini writes in his autobiography The Life of a Painter that “many artists liked to discuss geometry and mathematics” but that he found their discussions insufficient thinking “that artists should apply, and would benefit from, strictly observed rules of geometry and mathematics which had value “beyond their constructive value” through “something strictly innate to artistic creativity.”
Severini writes that he “glimpsed the path leading to the infinite, towards absolute purity, superhuman poetry and perfect harmony, in numbers”:

“In fact, somewhere beyond a painting, a statue, a poem or a symphony, lies the art and poetry contained therein. Poetry and art belong to a profound stratum of being, common to all forms of expression, and therein is the pure source that animates everything, holds everything together, that is, the artist to the universe, the work to the cosmos, the individual to the collective soul; the measurement of all this is in numbers. This accounts for its metaphysical value, beyond human values ...”

Severini “confirmed that clear and precise rules had dominated artistic creativity in ancient times” and saw that there was, therefore, “a whole metier to be restored”, a vocation was being ignored by the academies and that only some of the artists of his generation had envisaged. Of these he specifically mentioned Denis and his references to such laws in the book Théories where he writes of the Beuron School. Severini had also read The Aesthetics of Beuron and noted that their aesthetic could be summarized in these few lines: “The simple, the clear, the typical, whose roots are in numbers and the simplest of measurements, remains the basis of all art, and measuring, counting, weighing are its most important functions. The aim of all great art is the transmission, the characteristic application of fundamental geometrical, arithmetical, symbolic forms, originating in Nature, to serve great ideas.”

Brooke notes that “soon after writing Du Cubisme au Classicisme, Severini entered into relations with the Roman Catholic Church, initially in the person of Jacques Maritain, the Thomist philosopher who had a particular talent for presenting Roman Catholic doctrine in such a way as to appeal to the intellectuals of the cultural avant garde.” Severini wrote of Maritain’s Art and Scholasticism that he “was amazed at the extent to which it agreed with the most modern goals, and at the profound sense of freedom, from what supreme heights of intelligence, the author could observe, put in order, and clarify, everything related to art.” Maritain recommended Severini for commissions as a mural painter for churches in Switzerland and Severini went on to become particularly successful at obtaining commissions for the painting of religious works.

Brooke also writes that:

“Gleizes had converted in 1918 to a belief in God which he expressed in terms of the Christian and Roman Catholic tradition, though he initially made little effort to enter into contact with the church itself ... He took the view, which he expresses in La Peinture et ses Lois, that Christianity had manifested what was great in it in the period we now characterise as the ‘Dark Ages’, from around the fifth to the twelfth centuries, in Western Europe ... But, from the twelfth century, this Christianity, which had given rise to the art we call ‘Romanesque’, is in decline. The early Renaissance – the period Severini has indicated as the moment when painting became known as a precise science – is a symptom of this decline. Thomism – the basis of Maritain’s philosophy – is another. In this period, an understanding orientated towards time (immeasurable, immaterial, of the nature of consciousness) gave way to an implicitly materialist understanding based on space. In other words the quality that had been possessed in the early period was precisely the quality which had been rediscovered in Cubism. To go back to the Renaissance as Severini was proposing was to deny what was essential and truly (indeed, literally) revolutionary in the Cubist achievement ...

La Peinture et ses Lois represents the moment when Gleizes began to see [this argument] clearly, very probably in reaction to Severini’s book.”

Brooke notes that:

“In opposition to Thomas Aquinas, Gleizes saw Augustine as the philosopher of the Benedictine spirit ... In the immediate aftermath of the Second World War, the conflict Gleizes saw between this Augustinian spirit and the Thomist spirit took the very acute form of a public quarrel between Gleizes and Fr Pie-Raymond Régamey, a Dominican, director of the journal Art Sacré, and leading champion of the efforts to engage leading modern artists in the service of the Church ... Régamey’s hostility to the influence of Gleizes was an extension of the hostility he already felt towards the influence of the School of Beuron. And ... it was a matter of principle.”

Thomism, Brooke argues, “draws a sharp distinction between the ‘natural’ and the ‘supernatural’, and argues that there is no passage between them.” For the Thomist, humanity “lies wholly within the sphere of the natural” where the “highest faculty is reason, and reason cannot aspire to the supernatural, which can only be known by revelation.” Therefore, for the Thomist, it is impossible “that an artist should come to a knowledge of the divine through the practise of his craft.”

However, “in the early Christian writings of Augustine admired by Lenz and Gleizes ... continuity [between the human and the Divine] is stressed [by means of the spirit, the ‘noetic’ faculty, which is the means by which we enter into union with the Divine and the ‘supernatural’ becomes included in human nature in all its fullness], and the manipulation of numbers – the business of the poet, the musician, or the artist – is presented as part of it.”

Brooke, although a promoter of the issues and ideas that preoccupied Lenz, Sérusier, Severini and Gleizes, is not unaware of the weaknesses in their arguments. Each insists that “there are objective laws that are appropriate to liturgical art”, each insists that “they have found these laws, or at least elements of them” but “their laws are different” and none “succeeded in compelling those around them to accept their findings.”

So while Sérusier, Severini and Gleizes were each at the forefront of a Modern Art movement – Post-Impressionism, Futurism, and Cubism – and in their explorations of geometrical and mathematical rules for art were engaging in current debates and teasing out the implications of Cubism in particular, eventually their practises and arguments became more about theology and liturgy than the continuing development of Modern Art and the balance that was held initially between faith and art became subsumed by faith. The result was that Modern Art developed in alternative directions through different movements and the work undertaken by these artists and those around them has been overlooked, dismissed or treated as a footnote to their earlier work.

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Francis Poulenc - Ave Verum Corpus.

Wednesday, 17 June 2009

Airbrushed from Art History? (9)

So far this series of posts has summarised the first circle of artistic influence to come out of the French Catholic Revival; the circle of artists which formed around Maurice Denis and which, having been influenced by Bernard and Gauguin via Sérusier, was itself influential through the Nabis, Symbolism, and the Ateliers de l’Art Sacré.

The second of the four circles of influence that came out of the French Catholic Revival, as noted in my post summarizing where this part of the series is going, was that which surrounded the philosopher Jacques Maritain.

Jean-Luc Barré writes in Jacques and Raïssa Maritain: Beggars for Heaven of how poets, painters and musicians began gravitating around the Maritains, “most of whom they met in the company of Léon Bloy.” There was firstly their discovery of Georges Rouault, “then of Pierre van der Meer de Valcheren, a Dutch novelist who was presented to them in 1911, two days after his own conversion … Then, during the war, they met the young seventeen-year-old composer, Georges Auric, soon a frequent visitor at Versailles …”

Barré goes on to describe how these friendships led to the formation of Thomistic study circles at the Maritain’s home in Meuden “where close friends of the couple came together – Abbé Lallement, Roland Dalbiez, Doctor Pichet, Noële Denis, the eldest daughter of the painter Maurice Denis, Vitia Rosenblum, the brother-in-law of Stanislas Fumet.” Barré continues, “The year 1921 would see the first circle grow larger: a Romanian prince converted to Catholicism, Vladimir Ghika, a young orientalist eager to bring together the Muslim and Christian worlds, Louis Massignon, the philosopher Henri Gouhier, the writer Henri Ghéon, the future Abbé Altermann, among others, joined the study group.

In The Maritain Factor: Taking Religion into Interwar Modernism Rajesh Heynickx and Jan De Maeyer note that:

“the French poet, writer, and surrealist filmmaker Jean Cocteau converted under the influence of Maritain. For the painters Gino Severini, a pioneer of Futurism, and Otto Van Rees, one of the first Dadaists-both converts - Maritain played the role of spiritual counselor. And when the promoter of abstract art Michel Seuphor embraced Catholic faith in the 1930s, he, too, had extensive contact with Maritain. For all of them, the dictum of the Irish poet Brian Coffey, once a doctoral student under Maritain, applied: modern art needs a Thomist conceptual framework.”

This journey of significant influence began for the Maritain’s with Léon Bloy. The reading of Bloy’s novel Le Femme pauvre led on to their meeting with the man himself. A period of examination by the maritains of “the life, the doctrines, and the sources of Catholicism” ensued before, on 5th April 1906, “the couple, at the end of “long conversations” confided to Bloy their desire to become Catholics.” Rouault made a similar journey to that of the Maritains, first reading Le Femme pauvre before meeting Bloy. Barré writes that Rouault “seems to have come to the home of this prophet of malediction seeking for other reasons, and always more painful ones, to question himself and to set out towards the unknown.”

William Dryness writes in Rouault: A Vision of Suffering and Salvation that, “Jacques and Raïssa Maritain met Rouault for the first time in November of 1905, and Raïssa recalls evenings when she and her husband would sit and listen to Rouault and Bloy discuss “every important question about art.”” Rouault was, for the Maritains, “the first revelation of a truly great painter” and it was in him that they perceived “the nature of art, its imperious necessities, its antinomies and the conflict of very real demands, sometimes tragic, which made up perhaps the theatre of the artist’s mind.”

Their initial approach, Barré writes,“to this “true and great artist” in his imperious confrontation with the first demands of the creative act … then took form and developed into a reflection which ended with the publication in 1920 of Art et Scolastique.” Art and Scholasticism:

“set itself to demonstrate the autonomy of the creative act, the particular responsibility that falls to artists. Directed to beauty as to its very own absolute … art has “an end and a set of rules and values, which are not those of men, but of the work of art to be produced.” … Nor does the nature of art consist in imitating the real, but rather in “composing or constructing” by delving into the “immense treasure of created things, from sensible nature as from the world of souls.” In this way the creator becomes “an associate of God in the making of beautiful works.” … In praise of pure art, Art et Scolastique can be read as the manifesto of a new classicism, founded on “the simplicity and purity of means,” aspiring to nothing more than the veracity of the work itself. In modern art Maritain disclosed the first steps of search in this direction and noticed in cubism “the infancy, still toddling and screaming, of an art that is once again pure.” … it contained a kind of call, inviting philosophers and artists to enter into a “conversation” that would lead to an escape from “the immense intellectual disarray inherited from the nineteenth century.””

As Barré notes the book “was closer to Jean Cocteau and Erik Satie than to Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas” and, as a result, in the 1920s and 1930s, Maritain’s cultural criticism (Antimodern, 1922, Religion et Culture, 1930) and his reflections on aesthetics in Art and Scholasticism enjoyed wide interest in artistic and intellectual circles.

One example of this response can be found in Gino Severini’s The Life of a Painter. Severini writes of his encounter with Maritain as marking an important point in his life, in part because Maritain loaned him money to set up his own art school. During his initial meeting with Maritain it was clear to him that he was being submitted to a thorough examination on the part of those present (which included Ghéon, as well as the Maritains) and that his every word was significant to them. As he left, Maritain put a book into his hands, “saying: “Take a look at it when you have the time.”” On the electric train back to Paris, Severini discovered that he had been given a first edition of Art and Scholasticism and “was amazed at the extent to which it agreed with the most modern goals, and at the profound sense of freedom, from what supreme heights of intelligence, the author could observe, put in order, and clarify, everything related to art.”

Severini continues:

“… what a great sense of joy I felt upon discovering, in Maritain, the confirmation of certain thought patterns, certain ways of clarifying these to myself and to others, and, what I considered most important, of discovering a friendship and human comprehension of the most profound sort. Later the formidable significance of Art et Scolastique became clear to everyone, as did the caliber of the author, the transparency and clarity of whose soul recalls the purest of rock crystals.”

It was at Maritain’s prompting, via Alexandre Cingria, that Severini began working on Church commissions eventually becoming in the words of Denis, “the most famous decorator of Swiss churches.”

Severini writes that Jean Cocteau was chief among the “somewhat atheist poets” that Maritain transformed into Christian artists but notes too that this period “was all too brief.” Similarly, Rowan Williams considers in Grace and Necessity that “Maritain’s relations with Cocteau … constituted an important if inconclusive episode in the lives of both.”

Although Cocteau’s subsequent life seemed, from the perspective of Maritain, to be “going deeper “into the caves of death” and to be dealing with the “powers of darkness”, the influence that Maritain and Catholicism had had on Cocteau was not altogether lost. Something of this can be sensed in the church decorations that Cocteau undertook.

In 1960 he painted murals in one of the chapels of Notre Dame de France, London. According to eye witnesses, he always began by lighting a candle before the statue of Our Lady of Lourdes and spoke to his characters while he worked on the mural. For instance, he is reported as telling the virgin of the Annunciation, “O you, most beautiful of women, loveliest of God’s creatures, you were the best loved. So I want you to be my best piece of work too… I am drawing you with light strokes… You are the yet unfinished work of Grace.” Cocteau is buried at the chapel of Saint-Blaise-des-Simples, where he had also painted decorations. Before his death, he had also been making sketches to paint a chapel in Frejus which was actually decorated, after his death, by the gardener that Cocteau had trained as an artist shortly before he died.

The failure of Maritain's relationship with Cocteau came at a time in which more than one of those whose conversions he had won wandered away from their regained faith and in which he became suspect in the eyes of Catholics in general. He questioned whether he had been wrong and mistaken to bother himself with all these literary people. Reflecting these new problems confronting him, Barré writes that new and different friendships formed around him with his network becoming “more open to philosophers, professors, French and foreign religious.”

Maritain’s greatest influence on an artist was perhaps not on one of those that was a part of his immediate circle. Art and Scholasticism was important, as Jonathan Miles and Derek Shiel write in The Maker Unmade, to the thinking in Eric Gill’s establishments at Ditchling, Capel-y-ffin and Pigotts as well as to David Jones’s thinking about art. Rowan Williams writes in Grace and Necessity that:

“Jones’ exposure to Maritain came through his participation in Gill’s project. After demobilization in 1919, Jones studied first at the Westminster School of Art, where it appears that a catholic friend introduced him to Fr. John O’Connor. He became a Roman Catholic in 1921 and, prompted by O’Connor, joined Gill at Ditchling later that year … Thus, he was alongside Gill and Gill’s colleagues … during the crucial period during which they were all reading Maritain; and it is very clear that for Jones … this made sense of what he had assimilated at the Westminster School of Art.”

As Rene Hague later wrote, ‘the Post-Impressionist attitude to the arts fitted in very well with Maritain’ and ‘Thomism’.

Miles and Shiel write that:

“The philosophy of Maritain explored two related questions that are of importance for David Jones: signification and epiphany. By rigorous habit, the artist would not only be able to reveal this or that object under the form of paint but also make an epiphany, make the universal shine out from the particular. Thus, what is re-presented also becomes a sign of something else and if that something else is significant of something divine, then the art can claim to have a sacred character or function, a sacramental vitality.”

Similarly, Williams argues that what preoccupies Jones from the beginning is “precisely what so concerns Maritain, the showing of the excess that pervades appearances.” As his work develops, Jones comes to see that you paint ‘excess’ by:

“the delicate superimposing of nets of visual material in a way that teases constantly by simultaneously refusing a third dimension and insisting that there is no way of reading the one surface at once. As in the Byzantine icon, visual depth gives way to the time taken to ‘read’ a surface: you cannot construct a single consistent illusion of depth as you look, and so you are obliged to trace and re-trace the intersecting linear patterns.”

Williams notes that in several respects Jones takes Maritain a stage further. Firstly, in that “the half-apprehended consonances of impressions out of which an artwork grows has to be realized in the process of actually creating significant forms which, in the process of their embodiment, in stone, words, or pigment, uncover other resonances, so that what finally emerges is more than just a setting down of what was first grasped.”

Secondly, in “the way in which a life may become a significant form – as, decisively and uniquely; in the life of Christ.” He:

“illustrates a point Maritain does not quite get to. Jones implies that the life of ‘prudence’, a life lived in a consciously moral context, however exactly understood, is itself an act of gratuitous sign-making; moral behavior is the construction of a life that can be ‘read’, that reveals something in the world and uncovers mystery.”

Both are exemplified by Jones’ life and practice as he turns away “from one mode of representation in which he excelled in order to include more and more of the interwoven simultaneous lines of signification and allusion” in “an attempt to embody a more radical love in what he produces, a love that attends to all the boundary-crossing echoes that characterize the real, which is also the good.”

In doing so, he embodies in his art Maritain’s view that “the joy or delight of a work of art is in proportion to its powers of signification”:

“the more there is of knowledge, or of things presented to the understanding, the vaster will be the possibility of joy; this is why Art, in so far as ordered to Beauty, does not, at least when its object permits, stop at forms or at colours, nor at sounds, nor at words taken in themselves and as things, but it takes them also as making known other things than themselves, that is to say as signs. And the thing signified may itself be a sign in turn, and the more the work of art is laden with significance … the vaster and the richer and the higher will be the possibility of joy and beauty”.

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Peter Case - Who's Gonna Go Your Crooked Mile.

Saturday, 16 May 2009

Airbrushed from Art History? (5)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thursday, 26 June 2008

Radical Light

Italian Divisionist painters of 1891-1910 suggests fairly estoteric fare and yet this modest exhibition (Radical Light: Italy's Divisionist Painters 1891-1910, National Gallery, 18 June - 7 September 2008 ) yields much that will be of interest both to those who seek to express faith through art and those who are appreciative of art that is expressive and symbolic.

Divisionism, the application of pure colours to canvas in dots, lines or threads, was an expression of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century search for a scientifically based understanding of colour and form. The most well known instance of this search was the Pointillism or Neo-Impressionism of Georges Seurat which initially influenced the Italian Divisionists.

However, the wider search had a strongly spiritual underpinning; one that is revealed in the interest that Paul Sérusier and Gino Severini showed in the writings of the Benedictine painter, Desiderius Lenz, with his insistence on the use of elementary geometric forms in the construction of paintings and also in the cubism of Albert Gleizes who located his scientific formulations for art in the Romanesque Art of the early Middle Ages.

Italian Divisionism also had a strongly spiritual element expressed primarily in symbolist images drawn from Christian iconography but also in the still luminosity of landscapes and the expressive movement of the social realist works. This in turn found its way into the Futurist Art movement which was built, as this exhibition demonstrates, on the achievements of the Italian Divisionists and which, through the work of Gerardo Dottori and Fillia, developed a strong strand of Futurist Sacred Art.

Gaetano Previati sought to develop a contemporary Christian Art which used the Divisionist technique of evoking the luminosity of light through the application of repeated lines of pure colour to suggest the spirituality of his subjects. The exhibition includes his first major work using these motifs entitled Motherhood and depicting a Madonna and child surrounded by angels. This image, which now appears to verge on the sentimental, stirred up considerable controversy when first exhibited at the 1891 Brera Triennale, an exhibition which marked the public debut of Divisionism and Modern Art itself in Italy. Contemporary critics expressed bafflement at the combination of contemporary techniques with a traditional religious image and failed to see the way in which Previati’s evocation of light spiritualised his image of maternal love.

Other Divisionists, such as Giovanni Segantini, also worked with symbolism which was mainly Christian in origin while Giuseppe Pellizza da Volpedo created realist works which often depicted aspects of Christian ritual and ceremony. The Procession depicts a Catholic procession in his hometown of Volpedo where the bright radiance of the sun envelopes the participants and, as with Previati’s work, creates a spiritual luminescence. The curve which defines the upper part of the painting and the gold border of the canvas recall the format of Quattrocento religious painting and are typical of another means by which the Italian Divisionists commonly create links to the great religious works of Italian art, even when the subject of their work appears entirely secular.

Most of the Italian Divisionists displayed an interest in the great social movements of their day as the unification of Italy resulted in turbulent social and political conditions. Some of the most forceful and vibrant Divisionist paintings are those which depict aspects of the political and social struggles of their day, such as Emilio Longoni’s immense figure of The Orator of the Strike or his poignant Social Contrasts depicting a homeless man observing an affluent couple in a restaurant. In works such as these, divisionist technique is used to created a sense of movement and it is this that is developed by the later Futurists in works such as Carlo Carra’s The Funeral of the Anarchist Galli and Umberto Boccioni’s The City Rises where the intensity of the layered lines of colour suggests the agitation and pace of urban life and social change.

The Italian Divisionists therefore provide contemporary artists with an example of how to be on the cutting edge of society with an art that is both socially engaged and spiritually uplifting.

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Lou Reed - Strawman.

Thursday, 12 June 2008

Sociality & spirituality - reassociating the Arts & the Church (2)

Bell’s achievement, complemented and continued as it was by Walter Hussey, set the standard for Anglican engagement with the Arts but needs to be set in this context of the remarkable flowering of Christian culture that also occurred across Europe in the same period. Three recent exhibitions – Maurice Denis: Earthly Paradise, Piety and Pragmatism: Spirituality in Futurist Art and From Russia have shed new light on this phenomenon.

France incubated a flowering of Catholic culture which developed firstly through a literary revival spearheaded by the development of the Modern Catholic Novel. The movement blossomed when fervent young Catholics like Émile Bernard, Paul Sérusier, Maurice Denis and Georges Rouault played key roles in the development of Post-Impressionism, the Nabis, 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 art in Belgium, Italy and Switzerland. Denis became a major reference among Russian Symbolist painters within which the expression of a Russian Orthodox spirituality was most apparent. In the expressive abstraction of Kandinsky and the minimalist abstraction of Malevich, Russian spirituality for a short period led the Modernist stampede towards new artistic movements.

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. Religious themes also featured strongly in the work of German Expressionist artists such as Emil Nolde and Christian Rohlfs.

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.

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Robert Plant & Alison Krauss - Sister Rosetta Goes Before Us.