God is almost always the wrong word when it comes to modern art, and every viewer has to find her own way among the other options.
James Elkins1
Let us say this clearly: our modern, secular discourse emerges from a Christian context that contemporary discussions of art ignore because they trace the roots of the discourse on art only to Kant and to the European classification of the fine arts that emerged in the eighteenth century . . . often ignoring the broadly religious context in which even ancient sources were embedded in the Early Modern discourse.
Donald Preziosi and Claire Farago2
What use did the artist make of pictorial tradition; what forms, what schemata, enabled the painter to see and to depict? It is often seen as the only question. It is certainly a crucial one, but when one writes the social history of art one is bound to see it in a different light; one is concerned with what prevents representation as much as what allows it; one studies blindness as much as vision.
T. J. Clark3
Publishing a book that explores the religious (particularly Christian) influences and impulses running through modern art may seem an act of folly or hubris. During the rise of high modernism—which we will take to extend roughly from 1800 to 1970—the mutual influences and connections between visual art and Christianity are not obvious, at least not in most histories of the modern period. In fact, from reading the academic literature on this period, one might believe that religion played almost no constructive role at all in the development of modern art, other than as adversary and rival. Indeed, the dominant narratives of modern art portray it as achieving a progressive independence from religious influence, even as it usurped roles once confined to traditional religion. In these pages we want to contest and revise this narrative.
In part this narrative rests on a more sweeping story of secularization, which has in recent years come under attack—so it makes sense for us to begin our account there. Nearly all quarters of academia today are grappling with what appears to be a “return of religion.” In the late 1990s, the sociologist of religion Peter Berger published his repudiation of “secularization theory”—the hypothesis that modernization implies and produces a decline of religion in both social institutions and individual belief—contending that contrary to his own predictions the modern world is in fact desecularizing.4 The two exceptions he identified (the primary spheres in which the secularization thesis still holds descriptive power) were western Europe and the elite “international subculture” of higher education.5 But in the nearly two decades since Berger’s article first appeared, even these exceptions no longer align with the theory.
Much of the pressure that has challenged secularization theory has been historical and sociological: the thesis simply doesn’t describe what has happened in the world over the past few decades, nor does it square with current sociodemographic projections for the coming decades.6 So it seems that some significant blind spots were intrinsic to the theory, which have corresponded with some serious misunderstandings about the ongoing influence of religious life within modernity. As some scholars have recently argued, “whatever the causes of this scholarly inattention to religion—and they are many and varied—the consequences are clear enough: some of the most important features of modern life have been misapprehended or ignored entirely.”7Alongside this pressure from sociology, there has also been a gradual and decisive unraveling of the historical, philosophical and theoretical fabric of secularization theory.8 It has become evident that “secularization has been as much ‘a program’ as it has been an empirically observable reality”9—a program fueled by questionable premises and maintained through selective fields of vision. It is becoming increasingly the case that understanding modernity as “a straightforward narrative of progress from the religious to the secular is no longer acceptable.”10
While this does not imply a return to religious belief on the part of most scholars, it does mean that religious belief and practice are back on the table with a visibility that they have not had for decades, both as objects of study and as resources for thinking and inquiring. In January 2005 Stanley Fish recounted in The Chronicle of Higher Education:
When Jacques Derrida died [in October 2004] I was called by a reporter who wanted to know what would succeed high theory and the triumvirate of race, gender, and class as the center of intellectual energy in the academy. I answered like a shot: religion. . . . Announce a course with “religion” in the title, and you will have an overflow population. Announce a lecture or panel on “religion in our time” and you will have to hire a larger hall.11
The disciplines of art history and criticism (similarly to literary history and criticism) are still working out what this will mean. In many ways these fields remain deeply enmeshed in the secularization thesis, but things are changing. In 2003, six years after Berger’s original article appeared, Yale art historian Sally Promey published an essay in The Art Bulletin arguing that the scholarship on American art history was experiencing (and needed to welcome) the “return” of religion to its field of inquiry.12 And over the past two decades an increasing number of other scholars (from an increasing number of perspectives) have begun exploring the problems and possibilities of including religion in the study of modern art: James Elkins, David Morgan, Debora Silverman, John Golding, Andrew Spira, Eleanor Heartney, Mark C. Taylor, Daniel Siedell, Lynn Gamwell, Erika Doss, Cordula Grewe, James Romaine, Donald Preziosi, Charlene Spretnak, Aaron Rosen and many others.13
The subsequent results have tended to be noisy and confusing, taking on board a wild array of positions and interests, but there are two general ways that this return is shaping today’s art discourse. On the one hand, there is a growing sense that art history and criticism cannot adequately account for the depth and complexity of how art “means” in a given cultural context without accounting, even if only on a strictly sociological level, for the religious backgrounds and dynamics in that society. This is not a recovery of belief as much as it is the reinclusion of religious institutions, histories and practices into the relevant evidence base for historical-critical study. As Promey sees it, for example, the return of religion is a necessary part of “an effort to recuperate a closer approximation to the historical whole, to include within scholarly purview the full range of practices that make images work.”14 Thus, even from a strictly (materialist) sociological perspective, it is becoming a rhetorical question: “how much of social life can we understand if we exclude religion from our analyses?”15 But Promey has something further in mind: the long histories of art out of which modernism grows have been, for the most part, deeply religious histories, even if these have been suppressed. She argues that “time and again we encounter evidence that secular modernity in the West has not been what it has made itself out to be. It has, in fact, been shaped through a process of purging, purifying, and neutralizing, from within itself, those [religious] things most dear to it, those things most fearful: casting them out into other vessels in contrast to which it has then come to understand itself.”16 How can the meanings of modern art be sustained over the long term, when these dear and fearful roots are uniformly ignored?
On the other hand, the return of religion has also begun functioning on more personal and philosophical levels. Numerous scholars—many who still self-identify as resolutely secular—are voicing their own personal “disenchantment with modern disenchantment,”17 and they are beginning to conduct their scholarship from this position, exploring the possibilities for fostering “reenchantment” in the visual arts. This body of literature pushes past many of the sociological concerns that drive the reconsideration of religion in art and actually brings religion, spirituality and theology into the interpretative encounter with the work. In his recent book Arts of Wonder, Jeffrey Kosky argues precisely along these lines:
In denying themselves recourse to religious vocabulary or theological conceptuality, modern art critics give up what would be advantageous to a profound encounter with the works in question. Religion and theology has [sic] let me name what the art critic often names and addresses with only limited vocabulary. In this sense, it lets me prolong the encounter with the work of art, deepening the event of its coming intimately over me and bringing its strangeness to light.18
Kosky’s aim is not to revive religion but to enchant secularity: he wants to “break the necessary connection between secularity and disenchantment,” thus opening “a future for a more appealing secularity, one full of charm.”19 As he sees it, the reigning narrative of art cannot sustain its value without recourse to religion, or at least to a discourse that borrows heavily from religious tradition.
Daniel Siedell has similarly argued that religious vocabulary and theological conceptuality are uniquely capable of naming an important level of meaning in modern and contemporary art, but by contrast he pursues this kind of critical engagement from a position that inhabits religious belief. He argues that “a critical perspective nourished by the Nicene Christian faith can contribute to the understanding of contemporary art” by expanding our sensitivities to “the sacramental and liturgical identity of human practice” within the arts.20 Siedell takes his lead from Paul’s discourse in the council of the Areopagus about “the unknown god” (Acts 17:16-34), and he orients his criticism in its terms: “Altars to the unknown god are strewn about the historical landscape of modern and contemporary art. They are often remarkably beautiful, compelling, and powerful. But they have been too often ignored or condemned out of hand.” Siedell’s critical method is thus “the result of choosing the way of St. Paul: to take the cultural artifacts and to reveal and illuminate their insights into what they are only able to point to, not to name. But point they do, and they should be examined and celebrated as such.”21 From a wide array of positions, both secular and religious, there are increasing examples of modern art criticism becoming a realm of theological thinking.
This does not mean that religious belief enjoys any kind of pride of place in the discourse of art, but it does mean that religious histories, practices and theological traditions have a renewed relevance and weight in the discussion. It is probably most accurate to say that the scholarship of modern art is becoming increasingly “postsecular,” emerging into an indeterminate space beyond the lifespan of the secularization thesis. As Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor makes clear, this postsecular space doesn’t necessarily entail a return to traditional religious faith; rather (1) it is “a time in which the hegemony of the mainstream master narrative of secularization will be more and more challenged,” and (2) this will be accompanied by “a new age of religious searching, whose outcome no one can foresee.”22 In other words, if one effect of modernity was the possibility of envisioning the secular without any recourse to the sacred or transcendent, then the discourse of postsecularity throws open a wide range of possibilities for envisioning the modern without recourse to a reductive secularism.23 At any rate, simply the openness of this condition invites the reintroduction of religious questioning back into the conversation.
However, there are still numerous problems that must be faced in the midst of this widening conversation. First, there are historical problems. The postsecular turn is not only shifting the conditions for the production and interpretation of art in the present and near future; it also begs for a rereading of the recent past. The canonical texts of modern art history were extensively shaped (sometimes explicitly so) by the secularization thesis, and as this thesis is called into question so too are the narratives that have been structured by it. The histories of modernism will be increasingly opened to reconsideration along religious and theological lines of inquiry, but this must be done carefully and with historical rigor. The theological content of modernist artworks and the religious contexts that shaped them are complex and sometimes deeply conflicted, and the most helpful scholarship in this discussion will be that which brings greater clarity to these complexities without neatly smoothing them out for ideological convenience. Second, there are theoretical problems to deal with here: namely, it is unclear how theological reconsiderations of modern art are to proceed in terms of interpretive method. Rereading modernist history in a postsecular setting places new demands on one’s critical theory, and it is immediately evident that there are significant deficits in the available critical methods with regard to conducting sustained theological thinking about modern art. Though each of these problems requires further treatment beyond what we are able to offer here, in this book we will need to wrestle with the problems of both history and theory.24
As should be clear, none of this implies that the postsecular turn simply dissolves the links between modern art and secularity, nor does it sidestep the truly conflicted relationships that developed between modern artists and the church. It does imply, however, a reconsideration of how we understand these links and these relationships. The title of our book, Modern Art and the Life of a Culture, subtly gestures toward this kind of reconsideration: we want to reopen the meanings of modernism—and its secularity—in relation to the conditions of cultural (and religious) life within which it emerged.
To do this, we need to clarify the terms we will use to address these conditions. As is typical, we will use the term modernity to refer to the sociocultural conditions of modernization—especially the complex transformations associated with industrialization, urbanization and democratization—which profoundly reshaped the attitudes, presuppositions and patterns of life fitted to those conditions. In his definitions of modernity, Charles Taylor refers to a threefold “historically unprecedented amalgam” of (1) new institutional forms and practices, which are centralized in cities and organized by science, technology, economics and industrial production; (2) new values and attitudes that privilege individualism, democracy and instrumental rationality; and (3) new forms of malaise that include alienation, meaninglessness and a sense of impending social dissolution.25
Art historian T. J. Clark summarizes the meaning of this cultural amalgam by arguing that the primary identifying experience of life within modernity is contingency.26 On many levels this experience is simply integral to living within the mechanized speed of the modern metropolis;27 but more profoundly it also refers to a “distinctive patterning of mental and technical possibilities” by which a society becomes generally persuaded that all things might be otherwise. Chiefly through the powers of rational scrutiny, technological innovation and social-political organization, the various facets of human life, history and cosmos have become unprecedentedly malleable. As Clark argues, this has fundamentally reorganized human orientations toward not only space but also time, creating a social order that has turned from forms of worship and sources of authority organized and stabilized by what has happened in the past “to the pursuit of a projected future—of goods, pleasures, freedoms, forms of control over nature, or infinities of information.”28 This turning entailed “a great emptying and sanitizing of the imagination” by which the horizons of what is collectively considered possible and plausible across the many spheres of human life were thrown wide open. And while this has had some enormously liberating and empowering effects, it has also fostered a deeply unsettling sense that
we are living a new form of life, in which all previous notions of belief and sociability have been scrambled. And the true terror of this new order has to do with its being ruled—and obscurely felt to be ruled—by sheer concatenation of profit and loss, bids and bargains: that is, by a system without any focusing purpose to it, or any compelling image or ritualization of that purpose.29
According to Clark, “‘Secularization’ is a nice technical word for this blankness.”30
Even if the sweeping claims of secularization theory are defunct, modernity is still by all accounts deeply associated with secularity. However, as already touched on, we must have greater clarity about what this really does—and does not—entail. Clark identifies his descriptions of this “new form of life” with what the German sociologist Max Weber (1864–1920) famously called the “disenchantment of the world.” Adapting the phrase from Friedrich Schiller (1759–1805),31 Weber used it to characterize a general comportment toward the world within North Atlantic modernity: “The fate of our times is characterized by rationalization and intellectualization and above all by ‘the disenchantment of the world,’” whereby “we” find ourselves generally persuaded that “there are no mysterious incalculable forces that come into play, but rather that one can, in principle, master all things by calculation.”32 This formulation does not remove God from the world—indeed, Weber believed that disenchantment was primarily attributable to the development of Judeo-Christian (especially Protestant) theology.33 But it does generally detach divinity from our explanations of the everyday functioning of the world and eradicate “magic” from the field of explanatory possibilities—a field that is reconceived in terms of contingent mechanical causes that are calculable, manipulable and manageable through technological innovation. This detachment and eradication might be understood as a secularizing process but, according to Weber, not in the sense that religious belief collapses. Rather, he believes that religious belief gets pressed into the more private realms of human life: “The ultimate and most sublime values have retreated from public life either into the transcendental realm of mystic life or into the brotherliness of direct and personal human relations.”34
In his remarkable study of modern secularity, Taylor helps to clarify what this means by carefully distinguishing between at least three ways of defining modern “secularity.”35 The first, which he designates secularity1, exists in the Weberian differentiation between (public) secular space and (private) sacred space as the basic realms or orders of human existence. This secularity consists in the privatization of religion. Secularity2 refers more specifically to the loss of religious belief and practice: a turning away from God, an incredulity and denial at both social and individual levels that there is any need to postulate a transcendent order. This is the secularity of theological renunciation. Though both of these describe major aspects of what it might mean to identify the age of modernity as “secular,” Taylor argues that neither of these frames the issue quite correctly. Rather, he proposes a third designation—secularity3—to refer to a profound pluralizing that has occurred in the conditions of belief, whereby we have transformed “from a society where belief in God is unchallenged and indeed, unproblematic, to one in which it is understood to be one option among others, and frequently not the easiest to embrace.”36 In other words, if we associate secularity1 with privatization and secularity2 with renunciation, secularity3 refers to a “mutual fragilization” of many different religious (and irreligious) beliefs and practices such that there is no longer one that functions as axiomatic.37 Though secularity1 and secularity2 are often presumed to be definitive in discussions of modernization (it is precisely this presumption that the “postsecular” discourse calls into question), Taylor contends that it is actually secularity3 that carries far more explanatory power for understanding the modernity not only of the past but also that of the present (which might be considered a hypermodernity as much as a postmodernity). Modern secularity has much less to do with disbelief in God than with a shift in “the whole background framework in which one believes or refuses to believe in God” and therefore “in the whole context in which we experience and search for fullness.”38 And as such, modern secular society cannot be characterized simply in terms of its unbelief but in terms of the widely diverse forms of belief and unbelief that have become possible: it is an open field in which all of these forms are rendered optional, contestable and contingent.39
Taylor’s distinctions are also extremely helpful for understanding the art of modernity. And here we encounter a vital distinction that shapes our study: within the arts, modernism is generally understood as a response (often a revolt) from within and against the culture of modernity. Modern art is not simply any work made in the modern age; rather it is artwork that is self-consciously responsive and critical with respect to its own social situation and its participation in the (aesthetic) operations of modernity. Properly speaking, modern art is modernist art. And of course the range of responses and critical gestures within modernist art encompass a wide variety of (sometimes widely divergent) artistic movements and positions. For T. J. Clark, the defining characteristic that draws all of these modernisms together is that they attempt to stand and face the disenchantment of the world and the insolvency of tradition as directly and consciously as possible: “Modernism,” he writes, “is the art of these new circumstances. It can revel in the contingency or mourn the desuetude. Sometimes it does both. But only that art can be called modernist that takes the one or other fact as determinant.”40
Modern art was (is) a profoundly secular enterprise but not, we contend, in the narrow sense of secularity2. Modernism often foregrounded radical unbelief and outright rejections of God, church and transcendence, but to totalize these into a characterization of the whole—or to regard them as determinative of the essential grain of modernism—is to skew the history. The primary feature of modernist art was not its secular2 unbelief but its wrestling with the conditions of a deeply secular3 contestability of belief. The artworks (and art histories) under consideration in this book emerged amidst a cultural scrambling of theological concepts and religious practices, and they embody an extremely variegated range of positions, convictions and sensitivities within this highly uncertain, though ideologically pressurized, space. In this context, the fact that modernists challenged or left the church (or that they were sometimes unsavory characters) is not enough to warrant collapsing the theological content of their works into the register of secularity2. Modern art is not principally an art of unbelief; it is an art of fragilized belief. It is an art of doubt and searching and, above all, of heightened sensitivity to the contingencies of modern secularity3. And to take it seriously—to really enter into its discourse and the social “art world” through which it circulates—often involves (or reveals) the fragilization of one’s own belief. As Taylor puts it, we modern people develop (or discard) our beliefs while looking over our shoulders.41
In this context, consider one of modernism’s defining characteristics: its oppositional stance toward established norms and traditions.42 On the one hand, this opposition was directed toward the dominant artistic establishments. Consistently flowing from the mouths and pens (and canvases) of the modernists were bitter protests against the “moldy vault”43 of nineteenth-century academic art, of which the Académie des Beaux-Arts in Paris and the Royal Academy in London were most representative (though influential academies flourished in most major European cities). The academies enshrined subjects and styles from an idealized past in artworks that appeared to modernist eyes to be escapist affectations of the privileged classes, following conventions designed to be deliberately insulatory from the contemporary energy and dysfunctions of urban life. In contrast, the “new generation of creators and spectators” held that an art that is truly new and life-affirming must be attuned to the meanings of the present moment and must be willing to disentangle itself from whatever geriatric and outmoded forms have been held in place by history and convention—regardless of whatever vitality they may once have had.44 Central to modernism was an ambition (sometimes calculated, sometimes wildly desperate) to be more fully and freely “alive” in the face of and in resistance to all that was deadening and dehumanizing about modern life.
And in fact there was much to resist. In the increasingly industrialized and urbanized patterns of modern life, the fragilizing space of modern secularity3 was further pressurized by real suffering and ethical outrage. Alongside everything that is ennobling and liberating about modernity, it has also been a period of enormous cruelty and suffering—sweatshops, world wars, revolutions, gulags, death camps, nuclear warfare, postcolonial civil wars, genocides, environmental catastrophes and so on—all of which have been given increasing and historically unprecedented visibility through photographic media and international news coverage. Indeed, many of the artists who were most central to the modernist project were people “whose modernism was tempered by the worst kinds of experience.”45 And in the face of such experience what became tempered was a persistent faith that the ever-newness of the present moment (and the potential futures it might give way to) might be the realm of something more just and more truly “living” to stand over against the received (often calcified) forms of life that persist from the past. This does not necessitate the rejection of religion, but it does imply a fragilized relation to its traditions.
On the other hand, however, modernist opposition also was directed specifically toward religious institutions and doctrines. For people who care deeply about the health of Christian orthodoxy, this is the aspect of modern art that generally appears most problematic and threatening. Its doubtfulness, its obscurity, its testing of norms and conventions, its eclectic and sometimes unmoored will-to-searching have often been seen as antagonistic to religious belief—or at least as clearly indicative of the erosion of religious tradition in the social imagination. For this reason, when modern art is allowed a theological voice in the writing of art history, it is often represented as (either heroically or belligerently) heterodox, or sometimes as openly nihilistic. The story is much more complex and interesting than that, even among those artists and movements most commonly portrayed as nihilistic, but this is not to deny the remaining deep tensions and difficulties, which must not be simply sanitized or redecorated. The episodes of irreverence and blasphemy must not be handled reductively or dismissively, taking them only in their most superficial or silly forms. Nor must we overlook the extent to which modernism was confronting some real theological failures on the part of North Atlantic churches. All these difficulties must bear on the argument that follows.
The fact is that mutual incomprehension between religious leaders and modern artists prevailed in the modern period, often amounting to an impasse. On the one hand, it is well known that church officials during this period, from a variety of Christian traditions, were notoriously conservative about artistic developments. As a result, some of the most famous artists, even those working with deeply religious motivation, were spurned by the leadership of their communions. Rachmaninoff’s famous All-Night Vigil, or Vespers (1915), was meant to serve the Orthodox liturgy, though it was never officially accepted by the church. Georges Rouault was not given any formal recognition by the Catholic Church until a few years before his death. And so on.46
Meanwhile, artists, for their part, have been notoriously diffident about their relationship to formal religious structures. Many modernists were famously allergic to all formal structures and affiliation, whether social, religious or political; but this too says little or nothing about the religious significance of their work. Pablo Picasso provides an interesting example. Critics on the left have been quick to claim Picasso and his famous Guernica painting as a distinctly leftist protest against the awful injustices of the Franco regime. The painting certainly was a protest, but as John Richardson has shown, Picasso’s political affiliations were not at all settled.47 And Richardson goes on to liken his unresolved politics to his lifelong struggle with Catholicism, which he tried (Richardson thinks unsuccessfully) to repudiate. Indeed, Picasso himself likened his conflicted politics to his conflicted religion, telling Kahnweiler: “My family . . . they have always been Catholics. They didn’t like the priests and they didn’t go to mass, but they were Catholics. Well, I am a Communist and I . . .”48 The moral outcry of the iconic Guernica was strongly politically charged, even if Picasso’s particular political commitments were unresolved, in much the same way that the painting is also extremely theologically charged, despite (or in light of) the fact that the artist’s religious commitments were deeply conflicted. The imagery draws heavily on traditional religious imagery—including paintings of the crucifixion (particularly Grünewald’s Isenheim Altarpiece), the Pietà, the massacre of the innocents, the penitence of Mary Magdalene and so on—indeed, several theologians have claimed this as “one of the most powerful religious pictures” of the twentieth century.49
So it is possible to suggest that the iconic Guernica, widely interpreted as a political statement, may just as easily have been a response of religious compassion as it was a political commitment. In any case Picasso’s paradoxical affiliations, which are shared by many artists in the modern period, make it hazardous to correlate the ecclesiastical (non)commitment of the artist with the religious significance of his or her work.
Even so, it is no surprise then that for the bulk of the twentieth century many Christians opted to retreat to the sanctuary—or even to Shakespeare’s “bare ruin’d choirs”50—leaving the art world to its own devices. Some have attempted to mount an offensive, criticizing the tenets of modern and contemporary art that they regard as most anti-Christian. These efforts are aimed at changing minds and redirecting the art discourse, but generally they come from the margins of that discourse and simply drive a deeper wedge between the worlds of Christianity and those of the arts—a wedge that most acutely affects Christian artists and Christian intellectuals and is ignored by almost everyone else. Many others, on the more liberal end of the theological spectrum, have followed Alfred Barr in celebrating modern art as an embodiment of spiritual yearning, “a visible symbol of the human spirit in its search for truth, freedom and perfection.”51 A fairly large body of literature, emanating mostly from a mainline Protestant perspective, has represented this more hopeful view of modernism, seeing artistic innovations as expanding the languages of art and increasing its ability to open (spiritual) worlds of meaning. One of the more perceptive scholars to take this view, Jane Dillenberger, has argued that the separation of art from religion has in fact increased its religious potential: “The more the work of art is separated from the religious drama of worship and liturgy, the more it has to carry a religious totality in itself. . . . By entering into the dynamics of art of this kind, we find a new form of celebration takes place.”52 This celebration, she thinks, offers new potential for evoking an interior reality that can be deeply religious.
What all these approaches get right is the intuition that theological meanings are in play (and at stake) outside of the territory generally marked as religious. Modern art generated a discourse packed with anthropologies and cosmologies, eschatologies and protologies, meditations on goodness and evil, meaning and meaninglessness, yearning and lament, immanence and transcendence, eternality and ephemerality, Being and Nothingness. And it begs for further interpretation along these lines. However, Christians have often allowed a fairly narrow set of critical gestures to determine and constrain their postures as viewers of art.53 Because this discourse is so diverse and complex, a wide range of responses might well be legitimate at various points, so we do well to foster a greater agility and creativity in our critical posture toward modern art, allowing for the wide range of responsive gestures between resistance and celebration.
Perhaps in a postsecular context the question stands forward in different relief, but it still persists: these two worlds—call them MoMA and Jerusalem—what have they to do with each other? As we hope to show, these worlds have actually had quite a lot to do with each other, despite the profound confusions and conflicts that have often marked their relationship. Consider the example of Alfred H. Barr Jr. (1902–1981), the first director (from 1929 to 1943) of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) and a leading figure in the New York art world between the wars. Barr is a particularly interesting case because his father and grandfather were Presbyterian ministers and he was a faithful Presbyterian lay elder throughout his life. In 1943 he published an influential book in which he sought to address the question What Is Modern Painting? for a public mystified by its “bewildering variety” and difficulty. He argued that “artists are the sensitive antennae of society”: at one level their work helps to disclose the “vanity and devotion, joy and sadness” of “ordinary life” in modern society, while at another level they aid us in struggling with “the crucial problems of our civilization: war, the character of democracy and fascism, the effects of industrialization, the exploration of the subconscious mind, the revival of religion, the liberty and restraint of the individual.”54 And in light of all of this, Barr argued that we must recognize that “the work of art is a symbol, a visible symbol of the human spirit in its search for truth, freedom and perfection.”55
Written during the darkest days of World War II, these words make an ambitious claim for the role of this new art, which seemed to carry distinctly religious undertones. Barr himself probably did not mean to posit art as alternative to religion, or to set art over against religion; rather, he wanted to identify modernism as articulating concerns and drives that might be recognized as deeply consonant with religious concerns and drives. Indeed, one comes away from his argument wondering what role traditional religion played in his understanding of art’s ability to reveal, to disturb, to “lift us out of humdrum ruts.” In what ways is this human search for “truth, freedom and perfection” coextensive with religion’s claims toward these same ends? Barr seems to have had his own thoughts on this, but he did not widely publish on the matter and this aspect of his thinking has not yet received sufficient attention.56 He recognized that in a world where religion has, for many, lost its appeal, art has become a domain for “the human spirit” in its searching, even taking on qualities that once characterized religion; and he thought that this might be named for what it was. We will revisit Barr’s influence in chapter six, in our discussion of American art.
Further examples of this kind of intersection and mutual influence between modern art and religion recur throughout modernism—a number of which will be explored in part two of this book. Indeed, as we will see, much of the modernist discourse prior to World War II was explicitly preoccupied with theological problems and structured in terms of spiritual crises and strivings. However, by the second half of the twentieth century the dominant texts about the history of modern art were regularly constructed without reference to faith or spirituality of any kind. Operating under a powerful form of secularization theory, art historian and critic Rosalind Krauss had by 1979 taken the mutual exclusivity of religion and modern art to be a matter of fact:
Given the absolute rift that had opened between the sacred and the secular, the modern artist was obviously faced with the necessity to choose between one mode of expression and the other. . . . In the increasingly de-sacralized space of the nineteenth century, art had become the refuge for religious emotion; it became, as it has remained, a secular form of belief. Although this condition could be discussed openly in the late nineteenth century, it is something that is inadmissible in the twentieth, so that by now we find it indescribably embarrassing to mention art and spirit in the same sentence.57
Thus not only did Krauss collapse the range of discernible theological content in modern art to “secular” forms of belief, but she then proceeded to seal off even this range—or at least the legitimacy of openly discussing this range—as academically “inadmissible.” While this synopsis may only have been intended to carry descriptive weight at the close of the 1970s, it would exert prescriptive force well into the 1980s and 1990s.
The book that is perhaps most directly (and irenically) addressed to understanding this condition of inadmissibility is James Elkins’s 2004 meditation On the Strange Place of Religion in Contemporary Art. Early in the book he offers an aerial view of the situation: “Contemporary art, I think, is as far from organized religion as Western art has ever been, and that may be its most singular achievement—or its cardinal failure, depending on your point of view. The separation has become entrenched.”58 The historical narratives one might tell to account for this separation are complex and contestable, and there are numerous points of entry through which one might begin such a telling. For his part, Elkins largely sidesteps these difficulties and instead argues that the entrenchment is a function of the historical narratives themselves, which have structured the academic discourse of modern and contemporary art: “Art that sets out to convey spiritual values goes against the grain of the history of modernism,” such that “to suddenly put modern art back with religion or spirituality is to give up the history and purposes of a certain understanding of modernism.”59 This may seem dogmatic, but he intends it to be purely descriptive of the canonical literature of modern art history and the normative processes of enculturation in major academic art programs (his personal experiences in educational contexts provided the primary impetuses for writing his book). And as a descriptive (rather than prescriptive) statement, it is fairly easy to agree with: both in theory and in practice, the normative “grain” of the discourse of twentieth-century art history—and collegiate art education more generally—has generally run, often explicitly, counter to that of (devout) religious thought and practice.
However, there is a lot of subtext packed into Elkins’s claim, and in order to achieve clarity about why and in which way it may or may not be accurate, the terms of the discourse need to be unpacked and submitted to scrutiny. The core of Elkins’s argument is that there are at least two factors now in play that make it difficult to interpret religious content in art made since the nineteenth century.
The first of these factors is that over the course of the development of modern art overtly religious themes became problematized or simply disappeared altogether. In a short chapter titled “A Very Brief History of Religion and Art” he offers a whistle-stop history that hinges on the observation that “gradually, the most inventive and interesting art separated itself from religious themes.”60 This doesn’t necessarily mean that artists stopped thinking about art in religious, spiritual or theological terms, but it does mean that this thinking became generally dislocated from traditional religious subject matter, format and patronage. Elkins recognizes that this does not in itself imply a secularization story: after all, if modernism has taught us anything, it is that the meanings of an artwork are not reducible to or circumscribed by its “themes.” But his point is that this thematic shift does produce a conundrum for “reading” the religious content of the work: If religion doesn’t have any salient thematic presence in modern art, then on what basis can we say that it really has any common purchase on our critical discussions about it? Without the thematic handholds that have historically demarcated religious content, what can we interpretively grab on to as being particularly “religious”? Elkins wonders whether coherent religious content simply lives or dies by the quality and clarity of its thematic presence. In one sense, this suggestion that religious meaning might be constrained to overt religious imagery is intensely problematic, not only as critical theory—this is no more defensible than similarly constraining sociopolitical meanings to their overt thematic presence—but also as a historical account. This calls for a response that we will offer in more detail in chapter four in our discussion of German and Dutch modernism, but here we simply note that Elkins’s account needs to pay more attention to the role of Protestantism in this development, wherein artists turned away from traditional religious “themes” for overtly theological reasons.61 In another sense, however, Elkins’s questions about the waning of religious imagery do serve to highlight some pervasive critical deficits regarding the (narrow) range of theological thinking in modernist art criticism: without recognizable themes such thinking is rendered essentially inoperative. And thus if we take it only as indicative of the thinness of theological thinking in modern art criticism, then Elkins is right to suggest that the degree to which we confine religious content to religious themes is the degree to which we have at least one (presumably nonsecularist) explanation for why religion seems to have wasted away in the writing of modern art history.62
The second and more significant factor that Elkins identifies is that modern artworks and the critical methods developed to interpret them became severely self-critical, so that even where religious themes may be present they cannot be taken at face value. Elkins acknowledges several examples in which major twentieth-century artists did engage religious subjects in their work (the numerous religious paintings by Emil Nolde or Barnett Newman) or accept commissions for religious contexts (the chapels by Henri Matisse or Mark Rothko), but he rightly notes that these works hardly encourage straightforward interpretation. He insists that at most we can conclude that “such art is about religion; it doesn’t instantiate religion.”63 Or more to the point: even if any of these artists were earnestly attempting to “instantiate religion,” that kind of content would be uninterpretable in the discourse of modern art. As Elkins says: “Contemporary art in its most serious and ambitious forms is a matter of the philosophy and theory of art and visuality. The idea is that religion is not only beside the point of contemporary art, but that it has actually become inaccessible to art.”64 Central to the critical methods that have been primarily responsible for writing the histories of twentieth-century art is an intense suspicion, a doubtfulness, a hermeneutical doubling back that dismantles the kinds of signification (and sincerity) that religious content generally requires. Thus Elkins persuasively argues that within the discourse of modern art “it is impossible to talk sensibly about religion and at the same time address art in an informed and intelligent manner”: where religious content is clear it will be pulled to pieces in the machinery of critical method; where it is implicit it simply becomes functionally invisible.65 In short, intentional religious content cannot survive the interpretive processes of modern or postmodern art criticism.66
Elkins’s study is essential reading on this topic, and in its light one can understand why the prospect of “suddenly put[ting] modern art back with religion or spirituality” seems dubious: their respective modes of visual meaning appear structurally incompatible. However, stating the matter in terms of putting two structures back together again might confuse the issue from the outset, and at any rate it is not the only way to understand or respond to the current situation. Rather, we are interested in rereading the “grain of the history of modernism”—an enormously complex and layered organism—by questioning the ways in which its narratives already bear theological structures, formations and textures. What do these grains look like under the light of theological inquiry or when considered in the context of religious practices? Are there always already theological axes of meaning running through the very grain that Elkins is referring to, even if they are difficult, convoluted and underinterpreted? And if submitting modern art to this kind of religious and theological questioning might force us to “give up the history and purposes of a certain understanding of modernism,” what exactly would be given up? And what would remain? Is it only a certain kind of interpretive constriction that would be given up, or would there be heavier costs? Is it viable to traffic in a rather uncertain understanding of modernism, one for which theological questioning is well suited and even necessary?
In what follows we are frankly much less interested in “art that sets out to convey spiritual values,” or in art made for a specifically religious setting, than we are in deciphering the ways that “spiritual values,” even theological values, are already in play and at stake throughout modern art, even (perhaps especially) in artworks that do not set out to convey any such thing. Our aim is to draw out and interpret the religious contexts and theological concerns that run through the developments of modernism. Or rather: it is an attempt to draw out the ways that modern art takes up and wrestles with human experience within contexts that were already religious and in terms that are unavoidably theological. The argument of this book is that the crises and labors of modernist art were, among other things, theological crises and labors.
To claim that religious traditions are alive and well in modern art would be claiming too much. However, some more modest—though significant—claims might be advanced. First, religious traditions have had deep shaping influence on the social and imaginative development of many important modern artists and movements, despite whatever ambivalence artists may have felt toward those traditions. Can the work of Picasso, for example, be thoroughly understood apart from his own Catholic childhood? What about the Catholicism of Paul Cézanne or of Andy Warhol? The importance of Russian Orthodoxy to Vasily Kandinsky or Natalia Goncharova? Or the influence of Protestantism on Vincent van Gogh, Piet Mondrian or Robert Rauschenberg? Could it be the case that some central aspects of these religious traditions—the Catholic sacraments in France, the Orthodox icon in Russia, and Protestant spirituality in northern Europe and North America—have played a decisive role in modernist artistic innovations? And if so this raises a further possibility that might be explored: perhaps these innovations may in turn have an influence on these religious traditions. Traditions, after all, are not fixed entities; they are always in process.
Second, aside from arguing that a background “religious imagination” was operative in the lives of particular modernist artists and in the construction of particular artworks, we also want to argue that modernism is, in itself, a theologically meaningful project, whether or not religion played a conspicuous role in the biography of this or that artist. When interpreted through and in relation to the traditions of Christian theology, modern artworks are often able to sustain a remarkable degree of theological intelligibility and meaning. This might be stated in three different ways: (1) The primary concerns that shaped and developed modern art included concerns that are essentially theological (i.e., seeking to understand life in relation to the presence or absence of God), whether or not particular artists articulated their concerns in these terms; (2) modern art functions in ways that are akin to and resonant with the problems that also preoccupied modern theology; and (3) modern art has something to contribute to theological inquiry, offering unique sites and modes of thinking for encountering and wrestling with theological questions, intuitions and conceptualizations. Fully addressing each of these lines of inquiry is beyond the scope of this book, but we hope that our investigations in the pages that follow will stimulate further thinking along these lines. Modern art has many stories to tell, and some of those stories are theological.
However, as Elkins reminds us, there are serious challenges that need to be addressed if we hope to really sustain this conversation: “The pressure of history is crucial: it has to be decided before it can be possible to seriously weigh academic and non-academic descriptions of religion and art.”67 The requirement to “decide” the history before a serious weighing of the issues is possible is overstated, but Elkins is certainly right to argue that the discourse of religion and art will always remain inept and irrelevant until it can be shown to have compelling explanatory power with respect to “the pressure of history” in terms of (1) what actually happened in art over the past two centuries and (2) the primary discourses that have been used to understand it up to this point. And this explanatory power has surely been lacking in both respects.
Daniel Siedell has claimed that “a history of modern art can be written that reveals that Christianity in all its myriad cultural and material manifestations is never absent from the modern artist.”68 But, as Jonathan Evens has remarked, Siedell didn’t undertake that task in his book, nor has anyone else to date.69 Where serious Christian engagements with modern art have appeared, they have tended to betray a relative ignorance of and nonparticipation in the most important theoretical and historical work being done in the field. While we don’t presume to decide anything here (or presume to span these tremendous gaps in a single leap), this present volume is an attempt to occupy more informed, conversant and sympathetic positions within the discourse of modern art and to exegete and decipher some of the theological dimensions of its histories. Or perhaps we might say that this is an attempt to explore the ways in which these histories were shaped by significant theological “cross-pressures,” to borrow a term from Charles Taylor, 70 some of which demand a more careful accounting of the religious contexts that produced these pressures. Our argument is that these are deeply significant to the formation of modern (and contemporary) art, despite their general neglect in the literature (and especially in the teaching) of the discipline.
And, as alluded to earlier, we might as well raise the ante even further: the religion-and-art discourse must account not only for the pressure of history; it must also (perhaps primarily) account for the pressure of criticism. If religion—or more precisely, theology—is to have anything of relevance to say about modern art, then it ultimately needs to be able to say it while facing (or standing inside of) specific works of art. And such a saying needs to persuasively interpret the ways these works present themselves as particular objects in particular contexts.71 It may well be that nineteenth- and twentieth-century art is a field rich with theological thinking (far more than has been articulated up to this point), and as such it stands to be renarrated along theological axes of meaning. But the measure of such claims will be the degree to which the critical and historical analyses produced are able to persuasively account for the artworks themselves. Christian scholars of art, alongside all other religious and postsecular scholars interested in this discussion, must make themselves accountable both to history and to thick personal encounters with artworks. We hope to do this in the chapters that follow, which are structured partly as a historical argument and partly as a series of critical engagements.
This objective places this book in at least two different contexts simultaneously and demands that it function persuasively in both. On the one hand, this is to some extent a modestly revisionist account of the history of modern art. This account is not in any way comprehensive, but it does attempt to trace some long and significant threads of religious and theological thinking that run through the past two centuries of Western art—threads that have been neglected or quietly taken for granted. Rather than presenting a full history, this book might be understood as a series of partial interventions into existing histories. We are not introducing an alternative set of obscure artists or attempting to overhaul the canon. Indeed, for this particular project we have specifically chosen to focus on familiar artists and artworks, those already central to the “grain” of the modernist art discourse. This effort is thus revisionist only to the extent that once these interventions are accounted for, the warp and woof of the history begin to hold together somewhat differently.
On the other hand, this book is also positioned in the context of previous attempts by Christian scholars to theologically interpret the histories of modern art. Christian engagements with modern art history have generally populated an alternative subcultural discourse of its own over the past few decades, one that has been generally ignored in the mainline academic art discourse(s). This book acknowledges, engages and inevitably participates in this subculture. Specifically, our title places this study in direct relationship to Hans Rookmaaker’s Modern Art and the Death of a Culture (1970), a book that has deeply influenced the course of (particularly Protestant) Christian thinking about the visual arts for more than four decades. We wish to recover some of the virtues of Rookmaaker’s project while also identifying its weaknesses and attempting to move beyond them. We explore this relationship in some detail in the following chapter.
Within these two frames of reference, we are modestly challenging the standard histories of modern art, which have largely excluded religion from their accounts, while also challenging many of the attempts by Christian scholars and commentators to (re)engage these accounts.
Elkins reminds us that the theory one deploys in understanding modernism “constitutes a choice that implies very different objects, artists, and movements, and strongly affects what is taken to be worth saying about a given painting, period, or problem.”72 The wager of this book is that “what is taken to be worth saying” about modern art includes discussion of its religious influences and its theological content and implications. However, rather than insisting on very different objects, artists and movements as our object of study, this project will more or less stay within the bounds of a canonical history of North Atlantic modern art while offering a rereading and restaging of artists, artworks and events within that history.
Consequently, we are imposing limits to the scope of this project that may seem ill-advised in at least three ways: first, given the recent breakdown and dispersion of these canons into “global histories,” to once again take up the problems of specifically Euro-American art seems an admittedly shortsighted way to structure this project. This study would certainly benefit from following this dispersion into cultural locales throughout the Global South in which the old antagonisms between art and religion appear narrow and irrelevant. It would make enormous sense to call these Western histories into question by turning toward a variety of non-Western modernisms, many of which have even stronger threads of religious and theological content. However, in limiting the focus of our questioning to the Western canon, we hope to address some contested ideas on familiar territory in order “to chase a single insight through material that we already know all too well.”73 Rethinking the meaning of North Atlantic secularity is of primary concern here, and thus this study is structured as a rereading more than as a search for new texts.
Second, modernism itself is an extremely contested and internally conflicted category within the arts today, and it is by most accounts now over, having unraveled into a tangle of competing postmodernisms, hypermodernisms, remodernisms, altermodernisms, postpostmodernisms, etc. If modernism is where the problems originally lie, then it would seem advisable to just abandon the old edifice and concentrate on building something new. However, not only are we doubtful that the West really is so cleanly beyond modernism (or modernity); we also believe that, in any case, it is vital to more clearly understand the ways that the (religious) pressures of modernist history have been formative to contemporary identities and conceptualities.
As art historian Stephen Bann argues, “the very concept of Postmodernism is fated to be a fragile one in historical terms, to the extent that the postmodern is defined as existing in a relationship of exclusion vis-à-vis the modern, and not in a dialectical relationship to the past that would take into account the multiple determinations to which Modernism itself was heir.”74 Borrowing from Nietzsche’s metaphor of historical study as a ladder, Bann warns that “standing on the ‘utmost rung of the ladder’ is not a recipe for clear-sightedness, but rather for becoming off balance (perhaps fatally so). . . . Taking ‘A few steps back,’ in Nietzsche’s terms, is not just a matter of straightforward historical procedure, but the best way, in my opinion, to keep a clear head in the contemporary period.”75 Indeed, the entire point of taking these steps backward into the history of modernism is to more securely “look out over the upmost rung of the ladder” in order to more wisely “contribute to the development of the critical discourse of the present day.”76 The aim of this present book is to back up and reconsider some of the stories we have used to define the religious and theological dimensions of our artistic heritages, which have for better and worse provided significant framing for “the critical discourse of the present day.”
Third, our considerations of religion and theology in relation to modern art will be primarily concerned with Christianity (in its various forms). There are of course many other religious perspectives that would be very relevant to include here—Judaism, Buddhism, Islam, Native American spirituality and so on, all deserve much deeper investigation with respect to modern and contemporary art than they have yet received—but limiting our scope to Christianity allows for greater coherence to our investigations and a more rigorous (self-)searching on the part of the authors, both of whom are Christians. The Western secularity of modern art grew out of Western Christianity, and there are still strong roots, connections and resonances that will serve as the foci of our investigation. However, in orienting our study in this way, we are not attempting to colonize or Christianize modern art. Our project is not to dig up marginal, overlooked Christian artists in an attempt to repopulate the history books with artists more suitable to our cause. Nor would we want to retroactively coerce artists into affirming some preordained set of orthodoxies that we want them to affirm. Were this project to err in either of these directions the result would be intellectually dishonest and unhelpful. Nor is this a rearguard attempt to undermine or overthrow modern art. Daniel Siedell has rightly complained that Christian commentators on modern and contemporary art have tended to show “a remarkable lack of interpretive charity” and have too often resorted to “a shrill polemics in public discourse that has grown immune to subtleties, qualifications, nuances, and ambivalences.”77 We have no interest in following that pattern.
Rather, our aim in this book is to employ a more charitable hermeneutic. We believe that part of what this means is being willing to pay attention to artists as spiritual beings, and to attune our sensitivities to (among other things) the theological subtleties, qualifications, nuances and ambivalences of their work. And this arises from the pressure of artworks themselves. As Charles Harrison and Paul Wood argue: “To consider the extensive history of modern art is inescapably to feel the force of questions raised in practice”78—questions that include, at least for us, difficult theological questions. Our account of modern art is generated by a series of interpretive problems that arise from encounters with particular artists and artworks. We are lovers of modern art, and when we submit ourselves to open and honest encounters with the works, we cannot help but experience them as grappling with questions and concerns that strike us deeply. Perhaps more than anything, this book grows out of our efforts to articulate how these works are meaningful for us.
Our intent, then, is to recover at least two of the untold stories about modern art: first, Western art still carries the mark of its religious roots, often in ways that go unacknowledged, and, second, in its articulation of deeply felt human concerns modern art is always already doing theology at some level. Charles Taylor has recently asked why it is that the artifacts that consistently move contemporary people are connected to religion—the Gothic cathedrals, the music of Bach or Handel. Is it possible, he wonders, that “the old religion has not been fully replaced in a supposedly ‘secular’ age?”79 This possibility, still largely unexplored in the literature on modern art, is what we hope to develop.