Daniel A. Siedell
Jonathan Anderson and Bill Dyrness have collaborated on a book that is a breath of fresh air for me, a specialist in the history of modern art who, as an evangelical, has often struggled to justify my vocation, not only to others but also to myself. Their book offers an alternative interpretative framework to Dutch art historian H. R. Rookmaaker’s Modern Art and the Death of a Culture, which, with its story of cultural demise and nihilism, has exerted a strong and problematic influence on evangelicals who want to care about culture and its artifacts. Anderson and Dyrness, on the other hand, show through an analysis of several key episodes in the history of modern art that religion, spirituality and Christianity are not only not banished but play an important role in the history and development of modern artistic practice. In contrast to the art of the Renaissance, Baroque and academic tradition, in which artists represented Christian subjects and themes, modern artistic practice itself becomes a religious practice requiring faith and belief. Even an atheist like Gustave Courbet, condemned by Rookmaaker because of his “realism,” was in fact an artist whose commitment to the importance of painting can be described as faith.
Well done, Bill and Jon. But the question that will emerge, the question I will ask, is, so what?
Why should anyone care but a few artists, collectors and art educators who like “modern art” and happen to be Christians or academics working in seminaries and Christian colleges who like to talk about “theology and the arts” amongst themselves, in their own journals, at their own conferences? Why should it matter that modern art receives a much more nuanced, less polemical, and a more historically and theologically sophisticated treatment by a theologian and an artist than the Dutch art historian was willing or able to offer? What if, as I firmly believe, and believe that this book affirms, that evangelicalism—out of fear or ignorance, or in its zeal to transform the world—has simply gotten modern art wrong; that in its eagerness to make modern culture safe for the gospel and Christian values (not often in that order) evangelicalism has distorted it? And if evangelicalism and the North American church have modern art wrong, then is it possible that other, more popular and perhaps more “influential” cultural artifacts, like music, film and television have suffered a similar fate? And if that is the case, which, again, I believe it is, then the North American church needs to completely rethink how it understands culture and creative cultural artifacts. This book might be helpful in this process.
In this book Anderson and Dyrness treat modern art—and a particular slice at that—on its own terms, taking seriously what its adherents, practitioners—its believers—say and do on its behalf. And they do so without drawing broad-brushed abstract conclusions about the fate of art or the fate of culture, conclusions and pronouncements that have been de rigeur among cultural commentators within the North American church since the 1960s. Armed with an understanding of culture that is neither pessimistic, nostalgic nor idealistic, Anderson and Dyrness are liberated to focus their considerable intellectual and imaginative gifts on the artists and the works of art that capture their attention. Both Anderson and Dyrness are adamant that this is just the beginning, that Christian approaches to thinking historically, philosophically and theologically about modern art can and must take place without the narrative of cultural decline that usually accompanies it and, as a life-giving cultural practice, one that does not deny tensions and conflicts but nevertheless sees God’s presence in the history and development of modern art even as it is often experienced as absence.
This book does the historical, theoretical and theological work to clear the brush that obscures the view of modern art, allowing us to see freshly, and with clearer and more sober eyes, this God-haunted creative cultural tradition as a practice imbued with profound human integrity that deserves to be understood theologically, historically, theoretically and Christianly. And such a historically astute and theologically informed study can offer a model for how evangelicals and other North American Christians can think about and interpret their own experiences and relationships with creative cultural artifacts.
The question “so what?” does not come only from those who don’t care about the fine arts or who have felt safe to remain protected by the narrative of cultural decline that shapes Christian “engagements” with culture. It also comes from those Christians who are deeply involved in the contemporary art world, who have their BFAs and MFAs and are curating and showing in exhibitions with non-Christians in such centers of the art world as Los Angeles and New York. If they are aware of it or think about it at all, they believe that the theology-and-arts conversation that takes place in seminaries and Christian colleges is simply not relevant to the questions they are asking and the decisions they are making in their studios. For many of them, the entire enterprise of connecting their Christian faith to their studio practice is irrelevant. They’re Christians, but they’ve come to the conclusion that neither Rookmaaker nor Aquinas nor Paul can offer them much help as artists. They are simply responding to the false choice that was presented to them by the church and by the Rookmaakers of their world, either explicitly or implicitly: to be theologically engaged as Christians in the visual arts means that their work has to look and or behave in a certain way, and that look or behavior is at odds with what they experience in the art world, with what probably attracted them to artistic practice in the first place.
And, given that false choice, who can blame them? I certainly felt that pressure as an undergraduate art history major in the late 1980s. Perhaps this book will help them recognize that there might be new opportunities to think theologically again about their own artistic practice that don’t require that they become “Christian artists” and talk about “Beauty,” but can help them think about their work more deeply.
But “so what?” also comes from the contemporary art world, for which the modern tradition of artistic practice is often considered antiquated or worse, dead, entombed in crypts in public or private collections, and thus largely irrelevant to contemporary practice. Why care about modern art when so much contemporary artistic practice over the past several decades after modern art (call it postmodernism if you like) has rendered irrelevant the very history and tradition that this book labors to restore, including the tradition of museum artifacts like painting and sculpture?1
I would suggest that the problems that face the contemporary art world, including the various creative cul-de-sacs it has found itself trapped in, are the result of not plugging into the depth of the modern artistic tradition. Like the rich kid who relies on his vast inheritance while at the same time claiming to ignore it as irrelevant, the refusal or inability of the contemporary art world to drink deeply from the modern artistic tradition has had the result of transforming artistic practice into simply a more precious form of entertainment and creative decoration with no historical context and cultural memory.2 And without that memory, without its capacity to live deeply into a living tradition that modern art has given them, artists, critics, dealers, curators and collectors are too often trapped in the ceaselessly turning wheel of the entertainment cycle, an ever recurring “now” that makes it impossible to think about artistic practice as a lifelong arc, to think about the past and future in any meaningful way, or following Augustine, as quoted by art historian Terry Smith, to think about “a present of things past, a present of things present, and a present of future things.”3
Is it possible that scholars who are thinking theologically might be able to offer a more compelling history of modern art, one that can show the contemporary art world that the modern tradition of artistic practice is not a progression of stylistic innovation but a belief system, a way of understanding the self and its relationship to the world that continues to be viable and can address the present situation in the art world, and connect with them as human beings? (As an important aside, nothing I have said or will say in my argument for the importance of the modern artistic tradition has anything to do with or makes any presumptions about subject matter or medium. It is not about a nostalgic or reactionary return to previous styles, content, working methods, media or institutions. It is so much deeper than merely those superficial external manifestations. Can I say that it is not about behavior but about the heart?) Artists working in the modern tradition understood or believed their studio practice to be inextricable from and an outgrowth of their belief about who they were or could be in the world. It was enlisted in their attempt to become more human, to understand or clarify who they were in relationship to the world, and to address what they experienced to be their world’s deep injustice and pain.
In smearing pigment along scraps of canvas, and doing so outside the established institutional frameworks of the academy, the church and the state, these artists were making their artistic gestures bear the incredibly heavy burden of their vocations, not just as painters but also as human beings. Hence, their passion, their urgency, their arrogance, their pain and suffering, their inflated optimism, and their faith that those scraps of canvas actually do something. The history of modern art is an aesthetic practice of faith that can be recovered by the contemporary art world.
From where I stand, and I must admit that I stand on the margins of both the theology-and-the-arts conversation and the contemporary art world, I would like to offer one possible future direction of the many paths that will no doubt come into view from the cleared-out vista that Anderson and Dyrness have provided.
The history and development of modern art cannot be understood fully unless the history and development of writing about it is explored in all its depth and complexity. I would suggest that this history begins with Gustave Courbet’s “Realist Manifesto” (1855), written to offer the interpretive context for his independent solo exhibition, which he called “The Realist Pavillion” as a protest to the Salon exhibition that was on view during the Universal Exposition in Paris.4
Artists have written about their work in the past—Michelangelo and Delacroix come quickly to mind. But until Courbet’s protest exhibition, no artist wrote a public document from the need of offering an alternative interpretive context for his own work. For artists like Michelangelo and Delacroix, the context of the commission or the context of the Academy offered sufficient interpretive and institutional context. From Courbet onward, what artists say about their work becomes an increasingly important part of their interpretive context. To step outside the established interpretive and institutional framework of the Academy was not merely to break from the past or to be freed from the shackles of tradition. It deprived Courbet, and every artist working in his ideological wake, of a stable interpretive and experiential context for their paintings. And so not only statements by artists but also essays and reviews by sympathetic writers-turned-apologists were crucial for providing new interpretive contexts for experiencing these seemingly awkward, violent or incompetent paintings that appear to violate so many of the artistic values of the Academy. Throughout the development of modernism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the words of artists and critics will be inextricably linked and associated with the works of art, especially as the shifting, changing and competing contexts in which these works were offered demanded more and more explanation.
Those in the church who have commented on the visual arts have, to a person, viewed the increasingly visible and important role that these words have played in the history of modern art as a negative development. This is pointed to as one of the primary evidences of its invalidity, its incompetence—that works of Courbet’s, Manet’s, Cézanne’s, Picasso’s, Duchamp’s or Pollock’s can’t “stand on their own” but require what the artist says about them or what an authoritative critic tells us about them to give them significance. This response ignores the fact that artists working in the Academy or within the patronage structure of the institutional church did not need to talk about, explain or justify their work; the intricate and stable institutional frameworks within which they worked did the “talking” for them.
Those in the church who want to think theologically or Christianly about modern art need to devote attention to these words and their relationship to the artifacts from which they come. What an artist says about his or her work as well as what a critic says about the work before which he or she stands, and how that critic contextualizes it in the larger narrative of their artistic worldview (as well as the critic’s own worldview), is almost entirely unnoticed or unremarked on by Christians.
And yet this is a theologically rich subject, given the importance that Christianity and the church places on the word and on language, whether from Orthodox, Catholic or Protestant theological perspectives. Can the exploration of the history of artists’ statements and utterances about their work as well as what others (critics, writers, poets, politicians, dictators) have said about them benefit from theological work that has reflected on the Word as event, that human language is a creative response to being addressed by God?5
Let’s get one thing straight. There is no pure visual experience. Every experience before a work of art is always already inextricably connected to language, emerging in and, then, perhaps for the briefest of moments, as a flash, out of it, only to return into the flux of discourse. The task of language, of words, is to give an account of the experience of this “flash” or to create the space in the reader’s or hearer’s imagination for that “flash” (call it an “image event”?) to occur, to dwell and take root and begin to grow. And so, although language is everywhere present in and through the visual, the task of language is, however, to bear evocative witness and to grow that flash, that moment in which the visual does something to us that defies language. This responsibility does not lie only with art critics but with all who use language around works of art, whether in the seminar room, comment section of a blog post or art gallery.
The study of the words in, around and under works of art has important consequences and implications, both inside and outside the church. In a remarkably insightful literary dialogue, “The Critic as Artist” (1890), Oscar Wilde’s Gilbert says, “More difficult to do a thing than to talk about it? Not at all. That is a gross popular error. It is very much more difficult to talk about a thing than to do it.”6 Wilde’s observation should ring true for those in the church who recognize that the tongue is a source of both blessings and curses and who recognize the ninth commandment’s prohibition against bearing false witness against our neighbors. The church has often been more comfortable using words to judge, limit, categorize and sometimes dismiss culture and its creative artifacts—especially those of modern art—rather than use words that give such works life and a space to breathe, to give them grace. The history of the words around modern art shows the life-giving power of words, offering other ways in which words have been used by critics who believed in the beauty of an artist’s work and used language to express that belief, an expression that can still captivate, if not instruct us, and give us more productive and creative models for talking and writing about our relationships with works of art.
Before he achieved success as an artist, Henri Matisse bought a small painting by Paul Cézanne titled Three Bathers (1879–1882), paying much more than he could afford at the time. (In fact, his wife pawned a cherished ring she had received as a wedding present in order to pay for it.) Over thirty years later, well after Matisse had become “Matisse,” he donated that little painting to a museum in France and felt obligated to send a note to the curator about what that little painting meant to him:
If you only knew the moral strength, the encouragement that his remarkable example gave me all my life! In moments of doubt, when I was searching for myself, frightened sometimes by my discoveries, I thought: “If Cézanne is right, I am right.” And I knew that Cézanne had made no mistake.
Matisse continued, “It has sustained me morally in the critical moments of my venture as an artist. . . . I have drawn from it my faith and perseverance.”7 The history of modern art is the history of the impact of such works of art on artists (and critics) who are searching for works of art and words that can sustain them morally and give them faith and perseverance as artists.
This episode reveals one of the most important yet often overlooked realities in the history and development of the words associated with modern art—whether on the part of the artist or the critic: that works of art are vulnerable, fragile artifacts, easily susceptible to condemnation, distortion, censorship and destruction.8 Artists in the modern tradition recognized that their works needed help. Abstract expressionist Mark Rothko once said that it’s a risky business to send a work of art out into the world. A crucial part of the history of modern art is the history of art’s vulnerability and fragility and its need for words—words that give space to breathe, to fan the flame of life in them and to give their makers strength and confidence.
So what?
Whether or not the world needs “Christian artists” as a response to the nihilism and “death” of modern culture as Rookmaaker (and Francis Schaeffer) believed, I am coming to believe that the world just might need Christian artists and cultural critics who think theologically about their experience before works of art, who through their language, the words they use, give life to those works of art in which they believe and with which they have relationships, giving “faith and perseverance” to those who read or hear their words.
This book is a gift to those whose lives as Christians have been shaped by modern art and culture. It reveals the authors’ love for their subject. Their words are nothing if not life-giving.
Thank you, Jon and Bill.
Daniel A. Siedell (PhD, University of Iowa) is Presidential Scholar and art historian in residence at The King’s College, New York City, and associate professor of Christianity and Culture at Knox Theological Seminary in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. He is the author of God in the Gallery: A Christian Embrace of Modern Art (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2008) and Who’s Afraid of Modern Art? Essays on Modern Art & Theology in Conversation (Eugene, OR: Cascade, 2015).