This brief epilogue marks, we hope, a pause in the conversation rather than its conclusion. We have argued that the “grain” of the history of modernist art, which has so often been interpreted from within a secularization narrative, needs to be deeply reconsidered with respect to the ways that this grain was formed within religious contexts and shaped by theological questions and concerns. This history offers many points of contact for richer conversations between religious history, theology and art criticism, and hopefully this has been borne out in the preceding chapters.
But even still these conversations feel like they are really just beginning. There is increasing openness to issues of theology and religion in modern art history, yet the scholarship still needs much more development. We have surveyed some of the artists who might be included, but many others surely could be explored. From the perspective of France, Isabelle Saint-Martin has highlighted the “re-employment” of Christian vocabulary and symbols outside of strictly religious reference.1 The very fact that these are available for use suggests an unacknowledged efficacy, even a metaphysical viability, that portends greater openness to conversation. Even in post-Christian Europe and the secular academy in the United States, there is increasing acknowledgment that images and symbols still carry the weight of their past, as Walter Benjamin insisted, even as they are made strange by the passage of time.2 And although we have ended our study at roughly 1970, the year that Rookmaaker’s famous book was published, this merely stages a host of new questions about the relationship between art and religion in an increasingly globalized and digitized context, and about how theological questioning is functioning in the arts after modernism. Contemporary art forms—installations, performances, relational art, net art and so on—are proposing and testing not just the imagery of our time but our iconology and basic value structures.3 And as this recodifying of knowledge in the face of dominant commercial ideologies takes on an expanded political and moral charge, it also inevitably raises religious and theological questions. And as Charles Taylor has pointed out, these questions might well demand deeper sources than are currently on offer.
This raises a further question that we have mostly left unaddressed: In what ways might this conversation have a reflexive influence on the religious traditions themselves? Whether artistic or religious, traditions are not fixed entities; they are always under construction. As Renato Poggioli has written, “Tradition itself ought to be conceived not as a museum but as an atelier, as a continuous process of formation, a constant creation of new values, a crucible of new experience.”4 Although Enlightenment assumptions once supported the notion that art and religion were mutually independent, in actuality the mutual influence between the two has continued, perhaps often unnoticed, throughout the past two centuries. Our study wagers on the possibility (even the hope) that these evolving traditions may still positively inform and enrich one another, as they have done so often in the past.
Within these traditions, we have written this book with a double aim, and thus with a double audience in mind. On the one hand, we are (in one way or another) intellectual children of Rookmaaker, who embrace his impulse to reread modernism as theologically significant, even as we challenge the ways he conducted that reading. On the other hand, we are also lovers of modern art who embrace much of the wonderful scholarship being done today in modern art history, even while challenging the still pervasive tendency to exclude religion and theology from its fields of questioning. As a result, this book vacillates in its audience(s), speaking simultaneously to those in religious communities who also have inherited Rookmaaker’s influence (or the influence of others like him) and to those in academic art communities who have ignored his project entirely—and perhaps ignored the question of religion in relation to modernism entirely. This double aim grows from our deep regard for both of these communities and from our dissatisfactions with the dominant discourse in each. The church and the seminary tend to have weak (or simply misinformed) understandings of modern and contemporary art history, while the museum and the art academy tend to have anemic (or simply misinformed) understandings of theology. This book is an attempt to help bring the better parts of each into more meaningful contact with the other, and to do so in charitable and irenic ways. It is of course an incomplete and inadequate effort, but hopefully it is a step in the right direction.
At the very least it should be clear by now that the diverse religious influences running through modernism should discourage any simple ways of dichotomizing what is secular from what is religious. Just as this should not discourage religious people from having critical engagements with certain themes that have driven modern movements—nihilism, surrealism, deconstruction and the like—nor should it occlude the possibility that religious traditions continue to provide aesthetic resources for both believers and unbelievers. If our study has suggested the possibility of fruitfully exploring such influences, even motivated some to do so, then it will have reached its goal.
With regard to people of faith (whether Christian or otherwise) we have had a more particular goal in mind: we wish to broaden the scope of what we look for when we stand before modernist works of art, and we wish to do so through what we called in the first chapter a hermeneutic of charity. Hans-Georg Gadamer has proposed that looking at a work of art involves the ability to “play along” with what the artwork proposes, to give ourselves to the experience with an openness, generosity and “sacred seriousness.”5 It is our conviction that inviting attention to the theological implications of modernist art and to the religious impulses that shaped its histories opens a rich and necessary space for playing along, and even the potential for deeper religious and theological insights.