Sabbatical art pilgrimage: Report - Part 4

I visited churches linked to three significant controversies over the commissioning of modern art: (i) a set of Stations of the Cross and an altarpiece, The Death of St Teresa, commissioned from the Flemish artist Albert Servaes for the church of the Discalced Carmelites in Luithagen, a suburb of Antwerp led, in 1921, to a decree from the Holy Office based on Canon 1399.12, which states that images may not be ‘unusual’, resulting in first the Stations and then the altarpiece being removed from the chapel; (ii) the publication of a 'Manifesto of Futurist Sacred Art' in 1931 led to a censure from Pope Pius XI in a speech given in October 1932 at the inauguration of a new Vatican Art Gallery and the rationalist design by Alberto Sartoris (who had strong links to the Futurists) for Notre-Dame du Bon Conseil in the Swiss Alps at Lourtier also created a scandal in the Swiss press in the same year; (iii) Germaine Richier’s Crucifix was removed from Notre-Dame de Toute Grâce at Assy and a subsequent instruction on sacred art issued by the Sacred Congregation of the Holy Office in 1952 was the beginning of two year iniative by the Vatican which severely constrained the modernizing programme of the French Dominicans and represented a victory for the traditionalists within the Church.

Many church commissions are controversial because they introduce something different and therefore dissonant into a familiar building. Harmonization can, as we have seen, help to minimize this sense of dissonance and difference but with some works their value derives from the sense of dissonance they create.

This was the case with those images of the crucifixion by, for example, Servaes, Richier and Graham Sutherland which viewed Christ’s sacrifice as emblematic of human suffering in conflict and persecution. These were often controversial as they challenged sentimental images of Christ and deliberately introduced ugliness into beautiful buildings. I spoke to parishioners in both Northampton and East Acton who stated that they did not like Sutherland’s Crucifixions but who also appreciated why the paintings were as they were and the challenge that they provided as a result.

I was particularly moved to find on entering Sint Martinuskerk in Latem that the baptistery contains a Passion charcoal by Servaes. Servaes and Richier were both affected by decrees from the holy office which led to the removal of their artworks from the churches for which they had been commissioned. Servaes, with his Stations of the Cross and altarpiece for the Carmelite Chapel in Luithagen and Richier, with her crucifix for the church at Assy.

Given all that Servaes experienced in the controversy over the Luithagen Stations, including the removal of work which was a genuine expression of his faith by the Church of which he was part, I found it profoundly moving that a work of his, in the same vein as the Luithagen Stations, should be displayed in the church and area where his faith and art first fused. Richier’s crucifix has been returned to its place in the sanctuary at Assy and the church, like many other art sacré churches, is classed by the Government as a national monument and has become a significant tourist location.

It seems, therefore, that scandals of modern art, whether the reception of the works themselves or that of their challenging content, are, with time, resolved as congregations live with the works and learn to value the challenge of what initially seems to be scandalous. It is my contention, therefore, on the basis of these examples that criticism of the Hussey Memorial Commission would dissipate over time if the work were to be installed. It is a particularly ironic and inappropriate memorial to Walter Hussey that his memorial commission should be the subject of such controversy that it is prevented from being installed.   

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Luigi Russolo - Serenata.

Sabbatical art pilgrimage: St Matthew's Northampton

Arriving at St Matthew's Northampton is to arrive at the birthplace for the revival of contemporary art commissions in the UK.

The church is a large late Victorian gothic building built in 1893 for an affluent part of the town. Walter Hussey, the second Vicar of St Matthew's and son of the first, commissioned a Madonna and Child by Henry Moore in 1943 which began a revolution by reviving the tradition of the Church as patron of the visual arts and doing so with modern artists.

Prior to this commission, the primary use of a contemporary artist by the Church had been the surprising choice of Eric Gill as sculptor for the Stations of the Cross at Westminster Cathedral in 1913. As Gill's restrained and elegant Stations were criticised for being 'grotesque and undevotional', 'cold as the mind that produced them' and hideous, primitive and pagan, it is no surprise to find the commissioning of Moore thirty years later was similarly controversial. Negative comment included, ‘the Madonna has elephantiasis’, ‘she would make a good doorstop’ and ‘why is she wearing jackboots?’ That gap in time between the commissioning of one major contemporary artist by the Church and another, appears symptomatic of the disconnect that was felt at the time between the Church, the public, and the modern art avant-garde.

Figurative representation had been the main mode of art utilised by the Church in the West with the direction of travel having been towards mimetic representation and, in Britain in the Victorian period, towards a sentimentality within figurative representation. By comparison, modern art was red-raw expressive and entirely unconcerned with mimesis in its figuration, before then taking a significant turn in the direction of the abstract with the loss of the figure altogether. For all these reasons and more, many in Britain thought modern art unsuitable for churches, while some in the avant-garde saw modern art as a final decisive break with the patronage of the Church.

What Hussey did in a parish church in Northampton was therefore genuinely revolutionary for the Church in Britain and, as we have seen, attracted criticism. The work of Moore continued to attract criticism in a church context with his altar at St Stephen Walbrook, measuring 8ft across and weighing several tons, resulting in a court case as a result of objections which was eventually resolved by going to the highest ecclesiastical court of the land, the Court of Ecclesiastical Cases Reserved, where the judges ruled that the Moore altar was acceptable as an altar for the Church of England. Many of the key commissions of contemporary art in the Church of England - such as those at St Michael and All Angels Berwick and All Saints’ Tudeley - have faced some sort of challenge through the Diocesan Advisory Committee system. Hussey seems to have been particularly adept at guiding his commissions through these processes.

He added a further controversial commission in 1946 with Graham Sutherland's Crucifixion. Subsequently, a third commission has been added, Malcolm Pollard's Risen Christ completing the narrative of Christ's birth and death with his resurrection. It is this image which is first apparent on entering the church. The earlier commissions are hidden from view in the two transepts. The hanging of a Risen Christ or Christ in Glory above or from the chancel arch has become fashionable in church commissioned, with Peter Eugene Ball becoming a particular exponent of this image. Pollard's jetulong wood figure with its raised arms relates visually and theologically to the pre-existing Victorian ironwork cross which remains in place behind it.

Kenneth Clark spoke at the unveiling in 1961 of Graham Sutherland's Noli Me Tangere, another Hussey commission, this time at Chichester Cathedral, and reflected on the situation when Hussey first began to commission contemporary artists: ‘... when in 1944, a small body of artists and amateurs made a bomb-stricken journey to Northampton for the unveiling of Henry Moore's Virgin and Child, Canon Hussey had lit a candle, which is still very far from being a blaze ... The artists commissioned by Canon Hussey were ... little known outside the company of those directly interested in art. I think that even then collectors - both private and public - were shy of their work, and to put it in a church was a wonderful act of vision, courage and persuasive skill.’

It is fascinating to reflect that Moore and Sutherland were little known outside the company of those directly interested in art at the time they were commissioned by Hussey. In view of Sutherland’s landscape-based work Hussey suggested The Agony in the Garden as the subject of the work but Sutherland requested that instead he paint a crucifixion.

While this suggests a need on Sutherland’s part to move beyond the restrictions of his landscape-based reputation, it was nevertheless in landscape that he initially found inspiration for the form of his Crucifixion. Sutherland wrote, in an article for The Listener: ‘I started to notice thorn bushes, and the structure of thorns as they pierced the air. I made some drawings, and as I made them, a curious change developed. As the thorns rearranged themselves, they became whilst still retaining their own pricking space encompassing life, something else – a kind of stand-in for a Crucifixion and a crucified head.’

Sutherland combined this exploration with images of tortured bodies photographed in Nazi concentration camps which ‘looked like figures deposed from crosses’ and with the crucifixions painted by Matthais Grünewald.

Revd. Tom Devonshire Jones has described well the resulting work in Images of Christ: ‘All the elements worked out in the studies are present: the freely interpreted crown of thorns and the debilitated legs from the Concentration Camp photographs. But the real suffering is in the arms and hands. The fingers curl up in agony. The taut arms pull the ribcage away from the rest of the body, as if a dead stag was being torn apart. In this painting Christ is still in the process of dying. Herein lies its original and frightening power.’

The painting shows a bloody and haggard Christ whose body bears witness to the ‘continuing beastliness and cruelty of mankind.’ The expressionist forms and colours essential to the depiction of the agonized death inherent in crucifixion and to its representation as an icon of all who suffer through the inhumanity of human beings one to another, mean that it continues to retain its original and frightening power.

On arrival at St Matthew’s I was made very welcome by the two ladies on duty that Saturday, one of whom later confided that, ‘The Sutherland frightens me because it shows the anguish that Christ must have felt. Also the pain that Sutherland experienced going through the Second World War.’ This lady also shared that she sits where she can look through the first arch at a Crucifixion in stained glass so that when she loses focus in the service she looks up there and finds that it always brings her back to life. It is of interest that it is the less agonized image of the Crucifixion that has this effect for her.

Hussey, as noted in his Pallant House biography, “was responsible for commissioning some iconic works of twentieth century music and visual art, first as Vicar of St Matthew's Church Northampton and subsequently as Dean of Chichester Cathedral, from likes of William Albright, Leonard Bernstein, Benjamin Britten, Henry Moore, Graham Sutherland and William Walton”:

“It was while he was Vicar of St Matthew's that Hussey decided to celebrate the church's 50th anniversary by organising a musical concert. Seizing the opportunity given by CEMA (Council for the Encouragement of Music and the Arts), the forerunner of the Arts Council, he invited the BBC Symphony Orchestra to play and commissioned 'Rejoice in the Lamb' from Benjamin Britten. Despite a great many obstacles and in the face of reactionary opposition his tenacity of vision enabled him to get his way. He went on to organise a concert by the great soprano Kirsten Flagsted, and commission Henry Moore's 'Madonna and Child' sculpture, which was unveiled in February 1944, a 'Litany and Anthem for St Matthew's Day' from W.H. Auden in 1945, Graham Sutherland's 'Crucifixion' in 1947 and in 1949 'The Outer Planet' from the poet Norman Nicholson.”

“He then became Dean of Chichester Cathedral, an appointment that may well have been influenced by the fact that the Bishop, Dr George Bell, was also a great patron of the arts, and obviously made the appointment with a view to preserving the artistic continuity. Bishop Bell retired in 1958, but Hussey remained as Dean until his retirement in 1977.”

Hussey was guided by the principle that, ‘Whenever anything new was required in the first seven hundred years of the history of the cathedral, it was put in the contemporary style.’ For his commissions at St Matthews and Chichester Cathedral, Kenneth Clark memorably described him as 'the last great patron of art in the Church of England.'

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Benjamin Britten - Rejoice In The Lamb.

Picasso, Duchamp and Craig-Martin

The blurb for Picasso and Modern British Art at Tate Britain states that Picasso remains the twentieth century’s single most important artistic figure, a towering genius who changed the face of modern art. This, in a sense, is stating the blindingly obvious and that the exhibition demonstrates this through the variety and vitality of the art which Picasso created.
The particular focus of this exhibition is on the reception which Picasso's work received in this country and some of the key artists influenced by that work. This is where the current status of Picasso's influence becomes less clear. All of the modern British artists in the exhibition, with the exception of David Hockney, are dead. Generally, the reputation and influence of these artists is (often undeservedly) not what it once was (particularly during their lifetimes). Again, Hockney with his recent and popular exhibition at the Royal Academy is to some extent an exception. But where this is leading is to question the extent to which the artists featured in this exhibition, including Picasso, are actually influencing contemporary art.

While Picasso and Matisse were the towering figures in twentieth century art and the principal influences on much modern art, in terms of influence on contemporary art they would appear to have been superceded by Marcel Duchamp who, by challenging the very notion of what art is with his readymades and by his insistence that art should be driven by ideas, became the father of Conceptual art.

In 2004 Duchamp's Fountain came top of a poll of 500 art experts to be named as the most influential modern art work of all time. Simon Wilson commented: "The choice of Duchamp's Fountain as the most influential work of modern art ahead of works by Picasso and Matisse comes as a bit of a shock. But it reflects the dynamic nature of art today and the idea that the creative process that goes into a work of art is the most important thing - the work itself can be made of anything and can take any form."

Michael Craig-Martin is one of those who have followed the logic of Duchamp’s concept of the ready-made by seeing everyday objects as models for works of art. Interestingly, and through a work (An Oak Tree) which can also be seen currently at Tate Britain, Craig-Martin asserts that this form of artistic creation equates to religious faith:

"An Oak Tree is based on the concept of transubstantiation, the notion central to the Catholic faith in which it is believed that bread and wine are converted into the body and blood of Christ while retaining their appearances of bread and wine. The ability to believe that an object is something other than its physical appearance indicates requires a transformative vision. This type of seeing (and knowing) is at the heart of conceptual thinking processes, by which intellectual and emotional values are conferred on images and objects. An Oak Tree uses religious faith as a metaphor for this belief system which, for Craig-Martin, is central to art. He has explained:

I considered that in An Oak Tree I had deconstructed the work of art in such a way as to reveal its single basic and essential element, belief that is the confident faith of the artist in his capacity to speak and the willing faith of the viewer in accepting what he has to say. In other words belief underlies our whole experience of art: it accounts for why some people are artists and others are not, why some people dismiss works of art others highly praise, and why something we know to be great does not always move us.

(Quoted in Michael Craig-Martin: Landscapes, [p.20].)"

It is interesting to note that, while the stylistic innovations of Picasso could be utilised to depict the central image of Christianity (i.e. the crucifixion, as in the work which Graham Sutherland painted for St Matthew's Northampton), it was through the innovations of Duchamp that the religious nature of artistic creation itself was deconstructed and demonstrated.

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M. Ward - Clean Slate (For Alex & El Goodo).