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.
Showing posts with label thomism. Show all posts
Showing posts with label thomism. Show all posts
Thursday, 6 August 2009
Thursday, 9 July 2009
Airbrushed from Art History (10)
The third circle of influence which emerged from the French Catholic Revival was that which developed around the cubist Albert Gleizes.
Bruce Arnold writes in Mainie Jellett and the Modern Movement in Ireland that:
“Gleizes was well known as one of the pioneers of Cubism. The paintings of Gleizes, Metzinger, Le Fauconnier, Delaunay and Léger had created a sensation at the Salon des Indépendents in 1911, comparable to the sensation caused by Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring performed in Paris two years later. This was before the general public became aware of Picasso and Braque, whose work was only well known to a small circle of private collectors. Although he is often dismissed as a minor follower of Picasso and Braque, Gleizes claimed that it was only in the autumn of 1911, after his own reputation as a Cubist was securely established, that he first saw their work ...
Together with Jean Metzinger ... Gleizes published the first major explanation and defence of Cubism – Du Cubisme – in 1912. He spent most of the war period in New York where he was closely associated with Marcel Duchamp and Francis Picabia ... It was in New York ... that he discovered the belief in God that was to play such an important part in his subsequent thinking, though it was not until 1942 that he finally became a practising Roman Catholic ... Gleizes returned to Paris in 1919 and in 1920 he attempted a synthesis of the Cubist experience up to that point in his Du Cubisme et les moyens de le comprendre.”
Shortly after, two Irish Protestant artists, Mainie Jellett and Evie Hone, asked Gleizes to become their teacher, although he had not to that point had any pupils. Arnold writes that, “Anne Dangar, a later pupil of Gleizes and friend of Mainie’s, ... says that Mainie and Evie had seen Gleizes most recent paintings prior to meeting him, and that ‘they had a construction which reminded them of the Irish books of the seventh century in the University of Dublin’.”
Gleizes “was moving towards a way of dividing the surface of the painting and putting it into movement without organically changing its nature, without creating the illusion of a third dimension. For this to be possible, a system of deriving the forms and colours of the painting from the inherent qualities of the surface itself had to be devised. To begin with, the only shape that was inherent was that of the canvas itself, the rectangle. But by moving the rectangle to the left or right, or up and down, and perhaps more importantly by oscillating it around its own axis, two distinct and basic concepts emerged – translation and rotation.” As he explained this to Jellett and Hone, Gleizes felt that “his two Irish pupils ... exacted from him the most powerful lesson any teacher gives, which is self-knowledge ... and he admitted that this may not have been possible without their calm yet relentless insistence. ”
Gleizes set out these new ideas in the book La Peinture et ses lois where he argued that:
“the new painting is at least in part a return to earlier principles of painting – principles that were widespread before the introduction of the perspective mechanism and which achieved one of their highest realisations in the painting, sculpture and architecture of the Romanesque period ...
Gleizes’ view of history was ... cyclical. He argued that Europe had passed through a cycle when its spiritual life was based on religious principles – the relations between man and God – but that since the thirteenth century a new, materialist, cycle had begun when all our attention and highest endeavours were turned towards the appearances of the external world about us. Painting began to observe the illusion of external space; ‘science’, understood in terms of the observation and analysis of matter, became increasingly important. The new needs felt by the Cubists, Gleizes argued, indicated that man was beginning to return to a religious cycle. The Romanesque period, whose importance Gleizes had already stressed in his essay, 'Le Cubisme et la tradition', published in 1913, was to become very fashionable among French non-representational painters of the 1930s and 1940s, though the paintings of Alfred Manessier, Maurice Estève and Jean Bazaine are still very different from those of Gleizes.”
Jellett and Hone remained pupils and a circle of artists gradually developed around Gleizes – including Robert Pouyaud, and Anne Dangar, among others. Pouyaud expressed the sense that these artists had of full absorption in Gleizes’ pictorial and spiritual system when he wrote in his 1924 memoir:
“As a result of our long discussions, our discoveries, our advances and mistakes, the doctrine of Albert Gleizes was clarified. It implications in the social domain are well-known: decentralization, return to the earth, a healthy life far from the towns, the rediscovery of natural rhythm, the rediscovery of the microcosmic function of humanity. At that time, all of these ideas went unheeded in the world about us, and we knew that we would have to live on the periphery of this society that Albert Gleizes used to condemn so virulently.”
In 1927, Bruce Adams writes in Rustic Cubism: Anne Dangar and the Art Colony at Moly-Sabata, Pouyaud sought Gleizes’ assistance to start a “normal life” on the land. Gleizes was “already considering the need for a spiritually satisfying retreat for his followers” and in October 1927 secured Moly Sabata, a disused old building at Sablons, for which the Pouyauds left Paris on 1st November in order to establish an artists’ commune. Soon, the Pouyauds were joined by the writer François Manevy and his wife, composer and violinist César Geoffrey and his wife, Mido, a pianist, and Anne Dangar, an Australian artist seeking tuition from Gleizes. The commune existed by means of agriculture and art (initially pochoirs – stencil prints – of Gleizes’ paintings and, later, Dangar’s development as a potter) and established a quasi-monastic Rule of Moly-Sabata which determined the daily division of labour among its members.
Communal life at Moly Sabata was, however, far from paradisal and in 1930 both the Pouyauds and Manevys left Moly Sabata making Dangar, by default, the primary source of support – through pochoirs and her pottery – for the commune as a whole. Adams’ book, Rustic Cubism, documents Dangar’s dedication “to the colony’s aims by working in the region’s village potteries, combining their vernacular elements with Gleizes’ design methods to arrive at a type of rustic Cubism.” Adams places Dangar “at the heart of Moly-Sabata’s alternative art movement” and argues that her work there was ultimately rewarded as “her pieces can today be found in the Musée Décoratifs in Paris, the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, the Museo Internazionale delle Ceramiche in Faenza, the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, and many other museums.”
Arnold argues that:
“Jellett revolutionized art in Ireland in the twentieth century. She became the central figure of the modern movement in Ireland and dedicated her life to promoting and developing a vital and positive attitude to art during the country’s difficult period of isolation and political instability.
... she became one of the chief exponents of an art concentrating on rhythm and movement, colour and form. Although her art was misunderstood and ridiculed for many years, she regularly exhibited in Dublin, London and Paris years before the work of such artists as [Ben] Nicholson and [Barbara] Hepworth was recognized in London. She was also a founder member of the group of avant-garde artists, Abstraction-Création.”
Arnold writes that with Gleizes “Mainie was able to develop a painting comparable in its intellectual complexity and human, spiritual, depth to the masterpieces of Celtic art.”
Hone, although loyal to and supportive of Jellett, “shunned the public eye and played no significant role in the leadership and education of a public trying to understand what modern art was about.” In 1933 she joined An Túr Gloine, a stained glass workshop set up by Sarah Purser, and later that year produced her first public work, three panels incorporated into a single window for Saint Naithi’s Church in Dundrum, County Durham. This initial commission was followed by many others, including windows at Blackrock College Chapel, King’s Hospital Chapel, Eton College Chapel, and Kingscourt Church, County Cavan. Peter Harbison writes, in The Crucifixion in Irish Art, that she became, with Harry Clarke, “one of the most outstanding Christian artists of her generation in Ireland and, indeed, in Europe.”
“She toured widely in Ireland, sketching a number of old stone carvings that, along with the art of Rouault, were to find echoes in her subsequent work.” Arnold notes her as saying “that stained glass demanded ‘an altogether different approach’ [which] she summarised ... in Matisse’s words: ‘Stained glass is coloured light, it is a luminous orchestra. There is no need of stories. If stained glass becomes again a symphony of colours it can find its place in any architecture’.”
Gleizes, as noted by Peter Brooke in his Afterword to The Aesthetic of Beuron and other writings, came to see his search for values, both in painting and society, as a return to “the spirit of the Benedictine order ‘which filled the greatest of the Christian centuries, from the fifth to the thirteenth’.” Gleizes argued that in the thirteenth century, the Benedictines had given way to the Dominicans and “a different spirit had entered the Church and into Western civilisation as a whole.” Gleizes viewed the Thomism of the Dominicans as representing “the intellectual values of the urban university” in contrast to the order of St Benedict which is “exclusively based on theology and for that reason preserving the order of life, at the scale of the individual, work with the hands as the necessary complement to intellectual work, authority of the agricultural countryside and restoration of monastic schools where culture and technique are clearly defined in the two categories of the trivium and the quadrivium.”
Yet, as has been noted in the ninth post of this series, many intellectuals at this time, “who had some intuitive feeling of the need for religion,” were turning to the teachings of the thirteenth century, to Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas. Arnold notes that, by the 1930s Gleizes “was becoming increasingly aware of a marked tendency to underplay or ignore his contribution to the history of modern art.” Gleizes had remained developing Cubism as a movement when the interest of art critics and historians was in a succession of modern movements rather than the development of any one movement to its fullest potential and was also out of kilter with developments in the French Catholic Revival by emphasising the Benedictine rather than the Dominican tradition. Brooke writes that, 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 Régamy, 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.”
The Thomism of Régamy draws a sharp distinction between the ‘natural’ and the ‘supernatural’ which leaves artists free to develop their personal expression of the spiritual to the maximum of their powers and leads Régamy to argue that the Church should commission “the best artists of our time” asking them to “treat those subjects which best correspond to their temperament.” The early Augustinianism of Gleizes, however, stresses the continuity between ‘natural’ and ‘supernatural’ leading to a search for “objective laws that are appropriate to liturgical art.”
Both positions will be explored more fully in subsequent posts in this series although it should be noted that neither of the circles of influence or the ideas around Régamy (together with his colleague Fr Marie-Alan Couturier) and Gleizes have provided a sufficient foundation on which subsequent artists, art critics or theologians could build a substantial body of art commissions, theories or works.
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Francis Poulenc: Salve Regina.
Bruce Arnold writes in Mainie Jellett and the Modern Movement in Ireland that:
“Gleizes was well known as one of the pioneers of Cubism. The paintings of Gleizes, Metzinger, Le Fauconnier, Delaunay and Léger had created a sensation at the Salon des Indépendents in 1911, comparable to the sensation caused by Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring performed in Paris two years later. This was before the general public became aware of Picasso and Braque, whose work was only well known to a small circle of private collectors. Although he is often dismissed as a minor follower of Picasso and Braque, Gleizes claimed that it was only in the autumn of 1911, after his own reputation as a Cubist was securely established, that he first saw their work ...
Together with Jean Metzinger ... Gleizes published the first major explanation and defence of Cubism – Du Cubisme – in 1912. He spent most of the war period in New York where he was closely associated with Marcel Duchamp and Francis Picabia ... It was in New York ... that he discovered the belief in God that was to play such an important part in his subsequent thinking, though it was not until 1942 that he finally became a practising Roman Catholic ... Gleizes returned to Paris in 1919 and in 1920 he attempted a synthesis of the Cubist experience up to that point in his Du Cubisme et les moyens de le comprendre.”
Shortly after, two Irish Protestant artists, Mainie Jellett and Evie Hone, asked Gleizes to become their teacher, although he had not to that point had any pupils. Arnold writes that, “Anne Dangar, a later pupil of Gleizes and friend of Mainie’s, ... says that Mainie and Evie had seen Gleizes most recent paintings prior to meeting him, and that ‘they had a construction which reminded them of the Irish books of the seventh century in the University of Dublin’.”
Gleizes “was moving towards a way of dividing the surface of the painting and putting it into movement without organically changing its nature, without creating the illusion of a third dimension. For this to be possible, a system of deriving the forms and colours of the painting from the inherent qualities of the surface itself had to be devised. To begin with, the only shape that was inherent was that of the canvas itself, the rectangle. But by moving the rectangle to the left or right, or up and down, and perhaps more importantly by oscillating it around its own axis, two distinct and basic concepts emerged – translation and rotation.” As he explained this to Jellett and Hone, Gleizes felt that “his two Irish pupils ... exacted from him the most powerful lesson any teacher gives, which is self-knowledge ... and he admitted that this may not have been possible without their calm yet relentless insistence. ”
Gleizes set out these new ideas in the book La Peinture et ses lois where he argued that:
“the new painting is at least in part a return to earlier principles of painting – principles that were widespread before the introduction of the perspective mechanism and which achieved one of their highest realisations in the painting, sculpture and architecture of the Romanesque period ...
Gleizes’ view of history was ... cyclical. He argued that Europe had passed through a cycle when its spiritual life was based on religious principles – the relations between man and God – but that since the thirteenth century a new, materialist, cycle had begun when all our attention and highest endeavours were turned towards the appearances of the external world about us. Painting began to observe the illusion of external space; ‘science’, understood in terms of the observation and analysis of matter, became increasingly important. The new needs felt by the Cubists, Gleizes argued, indicated that man was beginning to return to a religious cycle. The Romanesque period, whose importance Gleizes had already stressed in his essay, 'Le Cubisme et la tradition', published in 1913, was to become very fashionable among French non-representational painters of the 1930s and 1940s, though the paintings of Alfred Manessier, Maurice Estève and Jean Bazaine are still very different from those of Gleizes.”
Jellett and Hone remained pupils and a circle of artists gradually developed around Gleizes – including Robert Pouyaud, and Anne Dangar, among others. Pouyaud expressed the sense that these artists had of full absorption in Gleizes’ pictorial and spiritual system when he wrote in his 1924 memoir:
“As a result of our long discussions, our discoveries, our advances and mistakes, the doctrine of Albert Gleizes was clarified. It implications in the social domain are well-known: decentralization, return to the earth, a healthy life far from the towns, the rediscovery of natural rhythm, the rediscovery of the microcosmic function of humanity. At that time, all of these ideas went unheeded in the world about us, and we knew that we would have to live on the periphery of this society that Albert Gleizes used to condemn so virulently.”
In 1927, Bruce Adams writes in Rustic Cubism: Anne Dangar and the Art Colony at Moly-Sabata, Pouyaud sought Gleizes’ assistance to start a “normal life” on the land. Gleizes was “already considering the need for a spiritually satisfying retreat for his followers” and in October 1927 secured Moly Sabata, a disused old building at Sablons, for which the Pouyauds left Paris on 1st November in order to establish an artists’ commune. Soon, the Pouyauds were joined by the writer François Manevy and his wife, composer and violinist César Geoffrey and his wife, Mido, a pianist, and Anne Dangar, an Australian artist seeking tuition from Gleizes. The commune existed by means of agriculture and art (initially pochoirs – stencil prints – of Gleizes’ paintings and, later, Dangar’s development as a potter) and established a quasi-monastic Rule of Moly-Sabata which determined the daily division of labour among its members.
Communal life at Moly Sabata was, however, far from paradisal and in 1930 both the Pouyauds and Manevys left Moly Sabata making Dangar, by default, the primary source of support – through pochoirs and her pottery – for the commune as a whole. Adams’ book, Rustic Cubism, documents Dangar’s dedication “to the colony’s aims by working in the region’s village potteries, combining their vernacular elements with Gleizes’ design methods to arrive at a type of rustic Cubism.” Adams places Dangar “at the heart of Moly-Sabata’s alternative art movement” and argues that her work there was ultimately rewarded as “her pieces can today be found in the Musée Décoratifs in Paris, the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, the Museo Internazionale delle Ceramiche in Faenza, the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, and many other museums.”
Arnold argues that:
“Jellett revolutionized art in Ireland in the twentieth century. She became the central figure of the modern movement in Ireland and dedicated her life to promoting and developing a vital and positive attitude to art during the country’s difficult period of isolation and political instability.
... she became one of the chief exponents of an art concentrating on rhythm and movement, colour and form. Although her art was misunderstood and ridiculed for many years, she regularly exhibited in Dublin, London and Paris years before the work of such artists as [Ben] Nicholson and [Barbara] Hepworth was recognized in London. She was also a founder member of the group of avant-garde artists, Abstraction-Création.”
Arnold writes that with Gleizes “Mainie was able to develop a painting comparable in its intellectual complexity and human, spiritual, depth to the masterpieces of Celtic art.”
Hone, although loyal to and supportive of Jellett, “shunned the public eye and played no significant role in the leadership and education of a public trying to understand what modern art was about.” In 1933 she joined An Túr Gloine, a stained glass workshop set up by Sarah Purser, and later that year produced her first public work, three panels incorporated into a single window for Saint Naithi’s Church in Dundrum, County Durham. This initial commission was followed by many others, including windows at Blackrock College Chapel, King’s Hospital Chapel, Eton College Chapel, and Kingscourt Church, County Cavan. Peter Harbison writes, in The Crucifixion in Irish Art, that she became, with Harry Clarke, “one of the most outstanding Christian artists of her generation in Ireland and, indeed, in Europe.”
“She toured widely in Ireland, sketching a number of old stone carvings that, along with the art of Rouault, were to find echoes in her subsequent work.” Arnold notes her as saying “that stained glass demanded ‘an altogether different approach’ [which] she summarised ... in Matisse’s words: ‘Stained glass is coloured light, it is a luminous orchestra. There is no need of stories. If stained glass becomes again a symphony of colours it can find its place in any architecture’.”
Gleizes, as noted by Peter Brooke in his Afterword to The Aesthetic of Beuron and other writings, came to see his search for values, both in painting and society, as a return to “the spirit of the Benedictine order ‘which filled the greatest of the Christian centuries, from the fifth to the thirteenth’.” Gleizes argued that in the thirteenth century, the Benedictines had given way to the Dominicans and “a different spirit had entered the Church and into Western civilisation as a whole.” Gleizes viewed the Thomism of the Dominicans as representing “the intellectual values of the urban university” in contrast to the order of St Benedict which is “exclusively based on theology and for that reason preserving the order of life, at the scale of the individual, work with the hands as the necessary complement to intellectual work, authority of the agricultural countryside and restoration of monastic schools where culture and technique are clearly defined in the two categories of the trivium and the quadrivium.”
Yet, as has been noted in the ninth post of this series, many intellectuals at this time, “who had some intuitive feeling of the need for religion,” were turning to the teachings of the thirteenth century, to Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas. Arnold notes that, by the 1930s Gleizes “was becoming increasingly aware of a marked tendency to underplay or ignore his contribution to the history of modern art.” Gleizes had remained developing Cubism as a movement when the interest of art critics and historians was in a succession of modern movements rather than the development of any one movement to its fullest potential and was also out of kilter with developments in the French Catholic Revival by emphasising the Benedictine rather than the Dominican tradition. Brooke writes that, 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 Régamy, 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.”
The Thomism of Régamy draws a sharp distinction between the ‘natural’ and the ‘supernatural’ which leaves artists free to develop their personal expression of the spiritual to the maximum of their powers and leads Régamy to argue that the Church should commission “the best artists of our time” asking them to “treat those subjects which best correspond to their temperament.” The early Augustinianism of Gleizes, however, stresses the continuity between ‘natural’ and ‘supernatural’ leading to a search for “objective laws that are appropriate to liturgical art.”
Both positions will be explored more fully in subsequent posts in this series although it should be noted that neither of the circles of influence or the ideas around Régamy (together with his colleague Fr Marie-Alan Couturier) and Gleizes have provided a sufficient foundation on which subsequent artists, art critics or theologians could build a substantial body of art commissions, theories or works.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Francis Poulenc: Salve Regina.
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”.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Peter Case - Who's Gonna Go Your Crooked Mile.
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”.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Peter Case - Who's Gonna Go Your Crooked Mile.
Friday, 25 April 2008
Two difficulties multiplied
In Art and Scholasticism Jacques Maritain writes that Christian art is not impossible but is:
"difficult, doubly difficult - fourfold difficult, because it is difficult to be an artist and very difficult to be a Christian, and because the total difficulty is not simply the sum but the product of these two difficulties multiplied by one another: for it is the difficulty of harmonizing two absolutes."
He says that the "difficulty becomes tremendous when the entire age lives far from Christ, for the artist is greatly dependent upon the spirit of his time" and then asks "whether courage has ever been lacking on earth."
'Two difficulties multiplied' would, I think, make a great title for a survey of modern and contemporary Christian Art. Maritain, and his wife Raïssa, helped generate that courage in many artists, musicians, poets and writers. Jean-Luc Barré writes that:
"They invented "a style of full freedom in the faith," based on friendship, on "person-to-person influence," on chance encounters, "what each one brings, in the depths of his heart, from his coming and going in a house where he was loved, from the peace of God that he felt there, but of which he had no idea ..." What took place there [in Thomistic Study circles at the Maritain's home in Meuden] was derived from no institution and hearkened back to no known model, and became the target of multiple conversions and a prey of just as many qui pro quo's and misunderstandings."
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Erik Satie - Gymnopedia No 1.
"difficult, doubly difficult - fourfold difficult, because it is difficult to be an artist and very difficult to be a Christian, and because the total difficulty is not simply the sum but the product of these two difficulties multiplied by one another: for it is the difficulty of harmonizing two absolutes."
He says that the "difficulty becomes tremendous when the entire age lives far from Christ, for the artist is greatly dependent upon the spirit of his time" and then asks "whether courage has ever been lacking on earth."
'Two difficulties multiplied' would, I think, make a great title for a survey of modern and contemporary Christian Art. Maritain, and his wife Raïssa, helped generate that courage in many artists, musicians, poets and writers. Jean-Luc Barré writes that:
"They invented "a style of full freedom in the faith," based on friendship, on "person-to-person influence," on chance encounters, "what each one brings, in the depths of his heart, from his coming and going in a house where he was loved, from the peace of God that he felt there, but of which he had no idea ..." What took place there [in Thomistic Study circles at the Maritain's home in Meuden] was derived from no institution and hearkened back to no known model, and became the target of multiple conversions and a prey of just as many qui pro quo's and misunderstandings."
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Erik Satie - Gymnopedia No 1.
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