CHRIS GOLLON : STATIONS OF THE CROSS On View at The Church of St. John on Bethnal Green

After a two-year hiatus, The Church of St John on Bethnal Green, designed by Sir John Soane, opens its doors for the Good Friday service. Once again, visitors may view Chris Gollon’s acclaimed Fourteen Stations of the Cross, a fine example of contemporary sacred art.

The Church of St John on Bethnal Green is a Grade I-listed church designed by Sir John Soane from 1826-28, and one of the East End’s most admired buildings. In 2000, Father Alan Green commissioned leading British, and London-born, artist Chris Gollon (1953-2017) to create 14 Stations of the Cross paintings for the church.

The sequence of paintings took eight years to complete. Father Alan Green, as Rector of the church, collaborated with Gollon on the project. Gollon used his son as the model for Jesus, and his daughter as Mary; he cast Father Alan as Nicodemus.

Upon the site-specific artworks’ unveiling – in 2008 on Good Friday – Gollon’s Fourteen Stations of the Cross were blessed by Richard Chartres, Bishop of London, and permanently installed in the church in 2009. They were also chosen as Critic’s Choice in both The Times and the Financial Times, featured on BBC TV News and Chris Gollon was interviewed by Ed Stourton about his Stations for Radio 4’s Today Programme.

Jackie Wullschlager, in the Financial Times, said: “It was a bold, inspired decision of Father Alan Green to commission Chris Gollon.” She noted: “Like [Stanley] Spencer, he dramatizes the everyday in contemporary images, depicting our clumsy, ridiculous ordinariness, bringing alive for a modern audience the ghastly dissonance of this story of good and evil, sacrifice and humanity, answering on its own terms a 21st-century culture that regards the heroic as absurd.”

One painting from Gollon’s Fourteen Stations of the Cross was also shown in Presence: Images of Christ for the Third Millennium in St Pauls Cathedral, alongside works by Bill Viola, Tracey Emin, Maggi Hambling and Craigie Aitchison.

The Church of St John on Bethnal Green will open for the 10am Good Friday service on April 15 2022. Fourteen Stations of the Cross may once more serve both as an aid to worship and as a visitor attraction.

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John Stainer - God So Loved The World.

Airbrushed from Art History (24)

Albert Houthuesen has been described by Souren Melikian in the International Herald Tribune as a "virtually unknown master." Melikian wrote in the same article that he suspected that "Houthuesen will come to be seen as one of the great figures in post-World War II Western art." Jackie Wullschlager, Chief Art Critic at the Financial Times, wrote in a listing of the best books of 2008 that "Houthuesen was a Dutch-English modernist, whose life story forms one of the most sensational, offbeat, affecting artist's biographies I have encountered."

Melikian suggests that one of the reasons for the "deafening silence surrounding Houthuesen’s oeuvre" was that he "found his way to modernity in isolation, without ever trying to fall into line with any group." Although he met "Henry Moore, Edward Burra and other future luminaries on the contemporary scene" at the Royal College of Art, as a loner, "he did not keep in touch." Houthuesen expressed this sense in his view that the artist and the poet were inseparable in spirit from the clown, who he often portrayed as philosopher and saint.

A further reason for the wall of indifference towards his work may have been the visionary nature of the work. Melikian writes that Houthuesen, "transcribed visionary scenery, remote from material reality" where "movement is conveyed in masterly brushwork and color applied with a rare sense of harmony."  "A kind of explosive exultation" comes out in some of these "mental landscapes" where his "sophisticated brushwork is as complex as are the harmonies."

In Rocks and Storm, for example, "a hurricane seems to be blowing apart primeval elements, disintegrating into colored shreds" while in Invocation, "a red hot sun disc shot through with yellow is framed in a swirl of black. The sky, too, is ablaze in shimmering red with faint yellow streaks. The sea could be a torrent of lava springing up from a volcano." His ambition was "to paint things which are so rich and intense that they will annihilate what has gone before."

Houthuesen "was a profoundly religious man" who once said, "Today, for many artists, it’s ‘out’ to be interested in these things." Yet, "going to the moon for instance – this incredible thing that has happened in our time – doesn’t make the Bible any less wonderful. If anything, it makes it more marvellous." He remarked to his biographer Richard Nathanson that, ‘We walk in mystery’ and Nathanson has written, in the introduction to Walk to the Moon, that Houthuesen introduced him to the notion of ‘an inner journey’; "that an enquiring, ‘seeing’ imaginative mind could, without travelling the globe, gain an understanding of the underlying, universal elements that link all living things and Nature, regardless of time or place."

Houthuesen said, "I used to like going to church. Most of it I didn’t understand but I always had this feeling that there was a great and profound mystery which had tremendous meaning. When you are a child and you read in the Bible of miracles, you wonder very much. Later all that changes and it becomes an amazingly imaginative idea of the world, based on truth, and written by great poets. Man, through this poetry, is trying to express about his life what is so terribly difficult to understand. He stands in mystery and through it he is trying all the time to understand. At certain times, one may begin to make drawings and paintings of biblical things. The Bible is full of these tremendously imaginative ideas. They are profound symbols. The richness of the Bible is terrific. It is the greatest stuff that has ever been written."

The secret, he thought, is that some men and women (like Christ) are born with an intense imagination; "this imaginative power gives their thinking great clarity" and "that is why their thoughts carry on and on and become a universal thing, of all time and for all time."

Wullschlager brings both the isolation and spirituality together by writing of Houthuesen's "isolated but luminous imaginative world" as seen in the painting Walk to the Moon which has "at once a lightness of being – art’s escape into interiority – and a sense of painting as a tragic language that never left Houthuesen." In Walk to the Moon:

"a strange, elongated figure in a tight-fitting white costume, legs twisted like a gauche ballerina, face like a mask, emerges from a translucent blue ground, bearing a single flower. It is a figure out of time, one who might have walked off the moon, yet carries long art-historical echoes: the heart-breaking pathos of Watteau’s white-robed “Pierrot”; almond-wide, still, sad Modigliani eyes; the religious intensity of George Rouault’s clowns."

Ultimately, Houthuesen said:

"One can only paint anything at all, whatever the subject, through knowing it. And one must love it and be moved more than one can say."

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Low - Witches.

Chagall & the French Catholic Revival

I've posted before on the (generally unacknowledged) effect that the French Catholic Revival had on the development of Modern Art. More evidence of this influence can be found in Jackie Wullschlager's excellent biography of Marc Chagall, Chagall: Love & Exile.

There we find that, through the collection of the Morozov family, Maurice Denis was viewed by Leon Bakst, Chagall's art tutor in St Petersburg, as being one of the artists of the future. As a result, Chagall was taught "to simplify form, enhance colour and liberate brushwork."

On his arrival in Paris, Chagall was swept up by the throng that crowded the cubist room of the spring 1911 salon. He reflected later that it was there that he came to believe too much in Albert Gleizes, seeing in him "a sort of Courbet of cubism."

Later, in the 1930s, Chagall became part of the circle around the Catholic philosophers Jacques and Raissa Maritain. The Chagalls were regular attendants at the Maritain's "weekly Sunday gathering in Meuden, where the agenda was how to return secular France to spiritual awareness." The Maritains "made their home ... a centre of spiritual enlightenment for Paris's disillusioned writers and artists such as Rouault and Max Jacob." "Thanks to them, many converted or rediscovered their Catholic origins, most noisily Jean Cocteau."

Later still, Chagall was wooed by Father Marie-Alain Couturier who "wanted him to decorate the baptistry for his modern church, Notre Dame de Toute Grâce, on the Plateau D'Assy in Haute Savoie." "Thanks to Couturier's enlightened vision of modernist religious artists ... the church already had work by half a dozen artists who were Communists, Jews, atheists, or all three, as well as a dark stained glass window by the devout Catholic Rouault." Chagall eventually accepted the commission but did not complete the work until after Couturier's death. Following Couturier's approach Chagall returned to religious paintings and this in turn led on to his "more public art of stained glass windows and murals."

I list these contacts not to suggest in any way that Chagall was or became a Catholic artist but simply to demonstrate again the extent to which those artists, philosophers and monks who were a part of the French Catholic Revival had a significant influence on visual artists throughout the first half of the twentieth century. The extent to which this was the case has not been fully recognised and its detailed examination would form an interesting study or exhibition.

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Tracy Chapman - All That You Have Is Your Soul.

Chagall's Bible: Mystical Storytelling

The Museum of Biblical Art (MoBiA) currently has an exhibition exploring Marc Chagall's use of biblical narratives in his art. Entitled Chagall's Bible: Mystical Storytelling the exhibition runs from October 7, 2008 - January 18, 2009:

"No other modernist painter melded the traditions of Jewish Hasidism, eastern Orthodoxy, and western catholic tradition into such dramatically rich and personally significant expressions of biblical narratives. From his White Russian youth in Vitebsk to his professional life as a painter in Paris, Chagall recorded in his graphic works and paintings symbolic elements derived from each of these religious traditions. The intersection of Hasidic and Christian iconographies in Chagall's representations of biblical heroes, prophets, or scenes of the Crucifixion yields an intriguing dynamic tension, which has never been adequately addressed in a major museum exhibition. This exhibition will identify salient details in Chagall's oeuvre that demonstrate the intersection of his fascination with Jewish and Christian traditions, as well as, the interaction between his cultural roots in Russia and his fondness for France."

The exhibition booklet, written by art historian Tom Freudenheim, is a musing on the theme of transgression in Chagall's work and specifically in his use of Russian, Jewish, and Christian symbols. The illustrated text explores Chagall's unique iconography and continuing influence today. This is MOBIA's second volume in its new "Art and the Bible" series of exhibition brochures. Volumes in this series will continue to expound upon themes in art inspired by the Bible and will be produced for future MOBIA exhibitions.

A new and well-reviewed biography of Chagall has also recently been published:

"In it, Jackie Wullschlager explores in detail Chagall's complex relationship with Russia and makes clear the Russian dimension he brought to Western modernism. She shows how, as André Breton put it, "under his sole impulse, metaphor made its triumphal entry into modern painting," and helped shape the new surrealist movement. As art critic of the Financial Times, she provides a breadth of knowledge on Chagall's work, and at the same time as an experienced biographer she brings Chagall the man fully to life; ambitious, charming, suspicious, funny, contradictory, dependent, but above all obsessively determined to produce art of singular beauty and emotional depth."

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Deacon Blue - I'll Never Fall In Love Again.