Paul Nash and James Ensor

Paul Nash opens at Tate Britain on 26 October. Paul Laity has an excellent piece in The Guardian on Nash and his work:

'Nash’s transformations of reality were the product of a visionary sensibility that harked back to William Blake and Samuel Palmer; he searched for inner meanings in the landscape, what he called the “things behind” ...

he was caught up, as ever, in looking at the world and seeing patterns and mysterious “things behind”. An artist both full of wonder and wonderful, knowing the end was near, painted pictures that were stranger than ever.'

Paul and Margaret Nash practiced Christian Science, and Paul shared a Christian Science practitioner with Barbara Hepworth and Ben Nicholson. Hepworth, Nicholson and Winifred Nicholson were profoundly influenced by Christian Science (a faith that was of great importance to Stanley Spencer’s wife, Hilda Carline).

For Intrigue: James Ensor by Luc Tuymans at the Royal Academy of Arts from 29 October 2016 — 29 January 2017, Tuymans, a fellow Belgian and admirer of Ensor, will look back at Ensor’s singular career through a selection of his most bizarrely brilliant and gloriously surreal creations.
Astrid Schenk has written that

'It was 1888 when James Ensor began work on his monumental painting Christ's Entry into Brussels in 1889. The painting would become one of his most iconic and eagerly analysed compositions, and is now regarded as a milestone in the history of modern art. Not surprisingly, perhaps, it has also encouraged art historians to take a closer look at the representation of religious subject matter in Ensor's oeuvre in general. The focus of this scholarly attention has been mainly on Ensor's various approaches to the Crucifixion (especially the grotesque or sinister elements in some of his renderings), as well as on the series entitled The Aureoles of Christ or the Sensitivities of the Light, which Ensor first exhibited in 1887, and on different versions of The Temptation of Saint Anthony, Abbot of Egypt ...

The size of his religious oeuvre, the great variation in religious subject matter, and the fact that he continued throughout his life to produce religious work are strong indications that, to Ensor, religious sources of inspiration were key to achieving his artistic goals. This relevance went well beyond the supposed identification of the artist with the suffering of Christ and the exploration of particular visual effects. Ensor borrowed from the Christian iconography in order to be able to visualise his ideas in a recognisable idiom and to conduct visual experiments in his quest for exaltation.'

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Gungor - You.

Modern Gods: Religion and British Modernism

Great to see that The Hepworth Wakefield is holding a one-day conference, accompanying the exhibition Stanley Spencer: Of Angels and Dirt, that draws on recent research to demonstrate that many influential British modernists, working in a variety of mediums and styles, were motivated by spiritual ideals.

Scholarship on British Modernism has traditionally portrayed artists like Spencer and Eric Gill as religious eccentrics; stalwarts clinging to the fading spirituality of a pre-modern era. ‘Modern Gods: Religion and British Modernism’ will investigate the religious beliefs of a variety of British artists and critics who were active during Spencer’s lifetime in relation to their work.

Clive Bell described art as a point of access to ‘the God in everything’, while Barbara Hepworth, Ben Nicholson and Winifred Nicholson were profoundly influenced by Christian Science (a faith that was of great importance to Spencer’s wife, Hilda Carline). Paul and Margaret Nash also practiced Christian Science, and Paul shared a Christian Science practitioner with Hepworth and Nicholson.

Perhaps the greatest champion of British modern art, Herbert Read, reflected at the end of his career: ‘All my life I have found more sustenance in the work of those who bear witness to the reality of a living God than in the work of those who deny God’.

Increasingly we are beginning to discover that, in many ways, British Modernism represents the natural outgrowth of Victorian spiritual idealism, rather than a radical reaction against it. This one-day conference, at which Dr Sarah Turner (Deputy Director for Research at the Paul Mellon Centre) and Dr Sam Rose (Lecturer at the University of St Andrews) will give the keynote addresses, aims to complicate oppositions between ‘modern’ and ‘non- modern’ art by examining the common threads of religious belief that ran throughout twentieth century aesthetic discourse.

Last year I reviewed still small voice: British biblical art in a secular age at The Wilson in Cheltenham which provided an exclusive opportunity to see major works by many of those influential 20th century British artists who will be discussed at this conference, including Stanley Spencer, Eric Gill, Jacob Epstein, Barbara Hepworth, Edward Burra and Graham Sutherland. 

That exhibition was based on the Ahmanson collection "which begins with the Nazarene and Pre-Raphaelite styles of William Dobson and William Bell Scott, and continues, with Eric Gill as the bridge between Modernism and the earlier Arts and Crafts movement, through the inter-war period of the 1920s and 1930s, the Second World War, the post-war era, and the later 20th century, into the early 21st century. Its closest equivalent in the UK is the Methodist Art Collection, which, while broader in the range of artists collected, has less depth, particularly in the focus that the Ahmanson Collection has on the middle years of the 20th century, with its renewed interest in religious art." 

I suggested then that "if the Ahmanson and Methodist collections were exhibited together with a judicious choice of contemporary work, this would offer a relatively comprehensive review of modern British religious art."

My Airbrushed from Art History and Sabbatical Art Pilgrimage posts also document much that this conference will discuss as it explores the common threads of religious belief that ran throughout twentieth century aesthetic discourse.

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Gungor - Upside Down.

Barbara Hepworth: linking the numinous with the real

Barbara Hepworth: Sculpture for a Modern World at Tate Britain includes mention of Hepworth's spirituality.

'In 1931, [Barbara Hepworth] made a sculpture in pink alabaster (destroyed in the war), which she pierced for the first time. This “irrational, inorganic piercing of the closed form”, as AM Hammacher describes it, “entailed a literal and spiritual breakaway from the tradition of the closed volume”.

Hepworth said: “I had felt the most intense pleasure in piercing the stone in order to make an abstract form and space; quite a different sensation from that of doing it for the purpose of realism.” The technique became integral to her art, expressing not just her sculptural creed, but – as Lucy Kent points out in the Tate catalogue – giving expression to her spiritual beliefs, allowing her, as a Christian Scientist, to find a way of expanding the inner life of her sculptures beyond their physical limitations, of linking the numinous with the real.' (Sarah Crompton)

Pam Twiss notes that, 'Although Ben [Nicholson] was clearly interested and gained much from Christian Science - and Barbara [Hepworth] toyed with its teachings - neither were fully committed Christian Scientists. Of the three, only Winifred [Nicholson] was a Christian Scientist in the sense of being a member of The First Church of Christ, Scientist, in Boston, Mass.(The Mother Church) and active in local branch churches.'

Henry Myric Hughes writes that 'Winifred, whose own talents were considerable, seems not merely to have given Nicholson confidence in his artistic mission, but to have provided him with a rationale for continuing to work. Through her, he came into contact with the teachings of Christian Science, and the author argues, plausibly enough, that these strengthened his belief in the spiritual value of his art and its enduring ability to communicate values of universal significance.'

In an essay written for The Christian Science Monitor in 1965, Barbara Hepworth wrote: `I believe most strongly that any sculpture made now should be valid in its form and ideas a thousand years hence. A sculpture should be an act of praise, an enduring expression of the divine spirit.'

As Chancellor of Salisbury, Moelwyn Merchant acknowledged Hepworth's success in expressing the divine spirit by accepting from Hepworth, his friend, the gift of a large bronze Crucifixion which he controversially had placed near the door of the cathedral. To him it was an important expression of faith by a major contemporary artist; to some conservative Salisbury residents, it was threatening and sacrilegious.

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Patti Smith - Tarkovsky (The Second Stop Is Jupiter).

Expressing what was possible but not yet realized

William Nicholson's latest novel 'The Lovers of Amherst' tells the story of an affair between Emily Dickinson’s brother Austin and the wife of a colleague, seen alongside a contemporary story, also involving a love affair. Nicholson says, 'Austin Dickinson’s passion for Mabel Todd is fascinating because it was so defiant of all convention – so much so that in order to justify what he was doing he concluded that his love must come from God. Tracking his affair, and Emily’s part in it, led me to reflect on Emily’s own attitude to sex and passion; and from there to my own attitudes. The result is a many-layered meditation on passionate love, with all its self-generated delusions as well as its glories.'

Speaking about Emily Dickinson in The Observer, Nicholson says: 'I’ve always loved her poems. I’ve always been interested in religious subjects and relationships, and here was a woman struggling with issues of loneliness, meaninglessness, value and beauty, excitement and wonder, all in such a tiny compass. A lot of people in this country don’t know her and I felt quite missionary about it.'

The novel is in some ways: 'my love letter to the poet Emily Dickinson, who I first encountered over forty years ago. Her poems shock and thrill me as much today as they did then. She herself is so unfathomable that I’ve been shy of writing about her, though over the years I’ve accumulated a great deal of knowledge about her, as well as a first edition of her poems, published in 1890. Then when Polly Longhurst published her edited edition of the letters and diaries of Emily’s brother Austin, relating his passionate adulterous affair with the wife of a colleague, I became fascinated by the world of the Dickinsons. The result is my new novel.'

'A poet who took definition as her province, Emily Dickinson challenged the existing definitions of poetry and the poet’s work. Like writers such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and Walt Whitman, she experimented with expression in order to free it from conventional restraints ... To make the abstract tangible, to define meaning without confining it, to inhabit a house that never became a prison, Dickinson created in her writing a distinctively elliptical language for expressing what was possible but not yet realized.'

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Emily Dickinson - I'm Nobody! Who Are You?