7

MODERN ART AND CHRISTIANITY

It may seem odd to end a book about the history of modern Christianity with a chapter on fine art—even a book that accords the center of attention to images and visual practices. But the history of modern art in Europe and North America as well as far beyond turns out to have a great deal to do with religion, and particularly Christianity. Christianity has served as an important source of subject matter for modern artists, who continued to portray biblical themes, though increasingly for their metaphorical or symbolic value. The German landscape painter, Caspar David Friedrich, demonstrates this in his Cross in the Mountains (plate 10), an 1808 work that sits on the cusp of old and new. It takes the format of a framed altarpiece, designed to occupy a chapel or shrine, it carries traditional symbols of the Eucharist, and it bears the pointed form of the Gothic arch. But it is also innovative in the way it situates the crucifixion on a Northern European mountaintop seen from the rear, as the stage for contemplating not the crucifixion as much as the setting and the mood-infused moment of experiencing nature, which enshrouds a frail cross erected against an arching sky. The entire scene bears the feeling of a memory, though the broad beams of light suggest a dramatic dawn that affirms the revelation of a divine plan unfolding on a lonely peak in Northern Germany.

Modern artists have drawn for two centuries on the Christian tradition in manifold ways. Venerable theological motifs such as revelation, inspiration, spirit, soul, prophecy, purity, and veneration have been appropriated for use in the world of art. Some artists came to regard their work as pursuing a spiritual quest, and thought of the artist as prophet, pilgrim, visionary, and even mystic. On occasion, they even organized themselves in colonies or remote groups that resembled hermitages or religious communities that were willfully set off from the rest of society for the sake of their quest for a purified art. Christianity, in other words, was a topos for artistic effort, a model for valorizing artistic creation and sacralizing art as a creative act, and a source of symbolic capital that charged social commentary.

Fine art—by which I mean objects meant for display, contemplation, and collection, and the professional discourse of criticism, appreciation, and historical study that accompanies these practices—emerged historically at a time when nations began to organize themselves as autonomous, sovereign entities dedicated to the welfare of more or less discrete peoples. This meant sorting out heritage as a people, and that meant chronicling histories as well as looking to language, religion, folklore, and the arts as principal evidence of national spirit. According to the Romantic understanding of culture, which did so much to shape the history of modern nationalism, spirit was the people’s genius, their soul, an essence that took concrete shape especially within their history of music, dance, costume, literature, poetry, and the visual arts. Nation was the collective identity of the people, manifest in a range of cultural activities. The state, not to be confused with the nation, was the governing apparatus that protected and directed the nation.

From Hegel to Kandinsky, spirit was understood to manifest itself in art forms, which deserved to be carefully scrutinized for the evidence of spiritual development they incarnated. For Hegel and many after him, the German word Geist, spirit or mind, meant the inner force that animated matter and moved through time or history to realize itself progressively in national formations and artistic style. Nothing could be a clearer indication of what modernity means for the legacy of European thought than the idea of progress. In fact, many of the visual categories or themes that have organized the second portion of this book are necessary in order to understand Christianity as a modern reality and fine art as an invention of the modern age. Imagination, interiority, nationhood, and spirit-infused representations—whether they are words or paintings or songs—are fundamental parameters of modern art.

Many readings of modernity narrate a story of disenchantment, the loss of sacrality. There is much evidence against this view and much evidence for what I could call resacralization or spiritualization, rather than desacralization. For example, rather than the loss of spirituality, the nineteenth century witnessed the widespread spiritualization of art, in at least three fairly distinct, though not unrelated forms. The first form of spiritualization occurred in the experience of works of art as constituting a revelation and offering to viewers a kind of redemption, momentary but recurring. The second pertained to the social function of art, its mission to spiritualize its audience by recapturing the lost synthesis of beauty and religion imputed to have belonged to the sacred art of ages past. And the third took shape in the stature of the artist as a prophet, visionary, or martyr. I will examine each of these in greater detail and in doing so move from the nineteenth century through the twentieth in order to trace the modern legacy of art as a spiritual force. But first it is necessary to examine how the modern idea of art as a discrete mode of experience produced the autonomy of art—both separating it from religion and laying the groundwork for spiritualizing the experience of art.

The story I would like to tell in this chapter is by no means a comprehensive account of modern art, nor is it remotely inclusive. I will focus on a few important strands in the history of modern art in Europe and the United States in order to show how deeply modern art has relied on the history of Christian thought and practice. Modernity in art is obviously much larger than this geographical limit, and it is also deeply shaped by many more religious traditions than Christianity alone. But I want to scrutinize the degree to which modern art has drawn on visual motifs and paradigms at work in the history of modern Christianity.

THE ORIGINS OF MODERN ARTISTIC EXPERIENCE

Fine art in modern Europe is a product of the modern world. “Art” may be something perennial in human culture, given the appropriate circumstances. But modernity has everything to do with what we take quite for granted as art. It is necessary to define modernity if we are to understand it because fine art and modernity are fundamentally intertwined. Modernity in the sense of recent European cultural and political history originates in the confluence of sovereign nation-states, freedom of religious conscience, rapid spread of literacy, establishment of inductive science, rise of constitutional democracy, and expansive organization of capital as the medium for international and domestic markets. These are the conditions for the formation of a middle class that aspires to social mobility and uses the social medium of taste and artistic value as a fashion system for practicing distinction.1 Fine art emerges, in other words, as a social behavior of refinement keyed to upward mobility and attendant status anxiety. The enviable qualities of beauty, grace, and splendor become something to acquire for oneself, to internalize, hone, and reproduce, to adorn one’s person and domicile, to imbue in one’s children and to display in one’s social associations. They are signs of value and social worth, personal esteem and social station.

Fine art is the product of what sociologist Howard Becker helpfully called “art worlds.” By this he meant “the network of people whose cooperative activity, organized via their joint knowledge of conventional means of doing things, produces the kind of art works that [the] art world is noted for.”² The art world is the working apparatus that constitutes the social construction of art. It includes taste, imagination, critical discourse, galleries, critics, collectors, art schools, newspapers, and object makers known as “artists.” But there is another ingredient that is of great importance here: the spirituality, consecration, ritual devotion, and solemn sensibility that regards works of art as especially compelling, as able to touch souls, move the heart, reveal insights, and impress viewers with a sense of what sometimes can only be called “sacred.” This sacred sensibility may or may not be part of a formal religion. Beginning in the early modern era, taste and aesthetic discrimination acquired merit and social utility independent of institutional religion.

KANTIAN AESTHETICS AND THE SECULARIZATION OF ART

A vast assemblage known as “the art world” creates what we call modern art. Yet I do not intend to reduce art to an economic operation. Instead, I want to understand how art constantly sublimates these conditions in the creation of a mode of consciousness that we may call subjectivity. By this I have in mind a disposition that is represented in and representative of an Other—a work of art, a deity, a state, a nation, one’s small circle of fellows, one’s class, or the class to which one aspires. And this Other includes oneself. To see the work of art is to enter into relation to this Other, which includes one’s ideal self. Friedrich Schiller asserted that beauty did not simply consist of features borne by an object, but was “at the same time a state of the perceiving subject, because feeling is a condition of our having any perception of it.”3 Beauty “is at once a state of our being and an activity we perform.” Fine art engenders a form of consciousness, a distance from what the viewer contemplates, occupying a point of view that stands in relation to an Other, thus setting artistic experience apart from other kinds of experience.

I would like to suggest that at the heart of modern art and aesthetics is an experience that owes something fundamental to the history of Christianity. From Ignatius’s Spiritual Exercises to Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, from Puritan introspection to Hannah More’s “inward eye,” from Luther’s heart to the Quaker idea of the inner light, modern Christianity forged the experience of—and value of—interiority that informed the modern aesthetic conception of subjectivity. Without imagination as modernity has conceived it—as a creative faculty free from but not antagonistic to reason—modern art could not exist. The subjectivity that art requires of its viewers is rooted in the imagination, the forge of vision, that modern Christians have practiced for centuries.

In the introduction I indicated the importance of the sublime as an aesthetic sensibility that contributed to what Michel Foucault named “the genealogy of the modern subject.”⁴ Foucault turned from the concept of power as domination to consider what he called “technologies of the self,” by which he meant “techniques which permit individuals to effect, by their own means, a certain number of operations on their own bodies, on their own souls, on their own thoughts, on their own conduct, and in this a manner so as to transform themselves, modify themselves, and to attain a certain state of perfection, of happiness, of purity, of supernatural power.”⁵ The shift is evident in a comparison of the panopticon, which Foucault examined in Discipline and Punish, and his later, evolving lectures on technologies of the self.⁶ In the former work, he scrutinized the power exercised on prisoners as a nameless, faceless group, subject to the omnipresent eye of surveillance to such a degree that they internalize the penitentiary gaze. In his later work, Foucault turned to the subject’s own exercise of technologies of confession and penance. In the modern era, I would like to suggest, this came to include the aesthetic technique of the sublime. Consider two prisons: Foucault’s panopticon and Giovanni Piranesi’s marvelous etchings of imaginary prisons, issued in 1750.⁷ The panopticon is about the exercise of power in the pristinely ordered and uniformly lit interior of the prisons, where there is no escape from the all-seeing eye of authority, a condition that produces an ontology of guilt and punishment among prisoners. Visibility, as Foucault puts it, is a trap.8 By contrast, Piranesi regards the prison interior as a lush domain of darkness, a fantastic realm that invites the viewer’s exploration. The sublime is a tourist’s excursion: scary, intriguing, arousing, but short-lived and entirely self-determined. It ends when I turn my eyes away. But the panopticon is endless. There is nothing sublime about it in the aesthetic sense because it is all too real.

The sublime, I want to argue, was an aesthetic technique used by viewers on themselves. The sublime came to parallel or even displace Christian technologies such as confession and penance by offering the modern autonomous individual an aesthetic means of shaping the self-determined self. As such, the sublime marked a significant shift in the genealogy of the subject as drawn by Foucault in his late work. The Christian quest to redeem the fallen self—to mortify it or to quicken it—with the technologies of sacrament and devotional practice was rivaled in the course of the eighteenth century by a new conception of the self and an attendant set of technologies. The sublime offered a bracing experience of subjectivity, reshaping the subjective faculty of feeling and sensation in the imaginative experience of the work of art. It overwhelmed the conventional categories of scale, ordinary feeling, and mental range, plunging the perceiver into a dramatic recalibration and sense of the stature of the self. In 1731 the English clergyman Thomas Stackhouse described the sublime as “that which ravishes—that which transports, and produces in us a certain admiration mixed with wonder and surprise—that which elevates the soul, and makes it conceive a greater opinion of itself.”⁹ In the following decade, the Scottish theologian John Baillie expanded on the power of the sublime to invigorate the mind. He named sublime “every thing which thus raises the mind to fits of greatness, and disposes it to soar above her mother earth; hence arises that exultation and pride which the mind ever feels from the consciousness of its own vastness—that object can only be justly called the sublime, which in some degree disposes the mind to this enlargement of itself, and gives her a lofty conception of her own powers.”¹⁰ The sublime was an aesthetic experience, a range of feeling that critics and philosophers were at pains to describe and understand. This was a critical development because it defined the category of subjectivity that was fundamental for the modern experience of art, and thus contributed importantly to the discourse that was necessary for the emergence of art—since that discourse shaped taste, the market, the activities of collecting and displaying art, and the learning and conversation that spread ideas and formed social networks among artists, critics, collectors, dealers, and art lovers. So we open the discussion with consideration of some of the most important thinkers, many of whom were German, since German philosophy in the eighteenth century was actively engaged in aesthetic thought. Indeed, it was a German scholar who first coined the term “aesthetic” in 1735.

In 1793, Schiller published an essay, “On the Sublime,” in which he argued that the sublime worked by subordinating our sensuous nature in order to make us aware “of the independence that, as rational beings, we assert over nature, as much inside as outside ourselves.”11 He went on to describe the sublime as everything that makes us conscious that “there is within us a capacity to act according to laws completely different from those of the sensuous faculties, a capacity having nothing in common with natural instinct.”¹² The sublime was the aesthetic perception of human freedom. Schiller based his comments on Immanuel Kant’s epochal work, Critique of Judgment (1790), which set out to show how judgments of taste consist of intuitive, imaginative acts that are not hopelessly mired in idiomatic subjectivity, but shared by everyone and universal in scope. The faculty of taste, the recognition and evaluation of the beautiful, operated disinterestedly when it judged something to be truly beautiful. When we are gratified by something such as food or warm clothing, an interest or need is fulfilled. But when something is deemed beautiful, it is pleasing independent of any want and judged to be universally so. Its beauty does not depend on our needs. Our judgment is not compelled by anything but our pleasure in the experience of apprehending the beautiful. According to Kant, whatever satisfies the senses attends to the interest of the individual. Beauty, however, pleases independent of sensory satisfaction: “We easily see that, in saying it is beautiful and in showing that I have taste, I am concerned, not with that in which I depend on the existence of the object, but with that which I make out of this representation in myself.”¹³ The object of judgment is the form of a thing grasped in mental representation, not what the thing offers or threatens to inflict on our senses. Thus, the image of a dying person can be beautiful whereas the actual presence of someone dying is not. Judgments of beauty are disinterested, disengaged from actual circumstances. If I want to eat the food pictured in a painting, I am not having an aesthetic experience, but one driven by bodily appetite.

This putative separation was critical for Kant. In fact, it tended to drive apart art and religion since images in devotion and worship are keenly interested in such bodily matters as healing, miraculous deliverance, comfort, encouragement, and moral suasion. As the condition for aesthetic judgment or the practice of taste, disinterestedness tends to secularize art, defining it as a psychological experience that is not to be confused with nature or human need. But Kant’s approach also endorsed the clarification of modern subjectivity as the framework for aesthetic experience. As the faculty of judgment, taste was a discernment based on mental apprehensions and representation. Aesthetic form was not about sensation per se, but about imagination, the act of representation that produces what Kant called “aesthetic ideas” and did so in lieu of the rational faculty of the understanding.¹⁴ Judgment is not rational, but aesthetical, a form of intuition conducted by the imagination without reliance on a rational concept to make it universal. This distinction was critical for Kant’s understanding of the sublime, which he insisted “is not to be sought in the things of nature, but only in our ideas.”¹⁵ The sublime is the mind’s capacity for self-elevation because in confronting the idea of the absolutely great, the mind “finds the whole power of imagination inadequate to its ideas.”¹⁶ Imagination and reason conflict with one another. Reason says we must master the object by understanding it; imagination stretches to encompass it but cannot. The result is a kind of pleasing harmony.

THE SPIRITUALIZATION OF ART IN EARLY ROMANTICISM

Kantian aesthetics exerted a separation of art from the world around it and from the human body, setting art off as an autonomous activity. But for others art and artistic experience were better described as revelatory and redemptive. For Georg Friedrich Hegel, the history of art was the history of revelation of Geist, spirit or mind. Kant had separated phenomena from noumena, that is, from things in themselves, what Plato had called the ideal forms (noumenon derives from nous, the Greek word for “mind”). But Hegel rejoined them in the dialectical evolution of spirit. He posited that three principal forms of art—symbolic, classical, and romantic—designate “the three relations of the Idea to its shape in the sphere of art.” These consisted of “the striving for, the attainment, and the transcendence of the Ideal as the true Idea of beauty.”17 The symbolic affixes a concept to matter; the classical eliminates what does not belong to an ideal of the human form; and the romantic is a restive pressing toward self-transcendence. Egyptian, Greek, and Gothic art correspond to these stylistic expressions. This scheme allowed Hegel to make sweeping gestures over time. The ancient world, the golden age of Greece, and medieval Christian art and architecture were the broad canvas on which he portrayed the world-historical evolution of Geist. As such, “art liberates the real import of appearances from the semblance and deception of this bad and fleeting world and imparts to phenomenal semblances a higher reality, born of mind.”¹⁸ But for Hegel, art was an inferior and historically determinate expression of spirit. The highest manifestation of what he also called the divine, “is essentially only present to thinking, and, as in itself imageless, is not susceptible of being imaged and shaped by imagination.”¹⁹ Only philosophy can regard the divine in a pure sense. Why bother to create art at all? Hegel believed that art answered a universal need for expression that originated “in man’s rational impulse to exalt the inner and outer world into a spiritual consciousness for himself, as an object in which he recognizes his own self.”²⁰ Art was an instrument deployed to achieve human fulfillment, a kind of spiritual technology that advanced human evolution toward greater consciousness, thus revealing progressive expressions of mind or spirit, which in some sense is humanity coming to itself. Hegel proposed a Romantic humanism in which spirituality replaced the traditional religious notion of worship of a deity.

For others the experience of art offered a mystical perception that sacralized art. This took shape in very different ways. There were, for instance, visionary artists such as William Blake in England and Philipp Otto Runge in Germany who developed highly idiosyncratic iconographies of mythical and poetic symbolism that envisioned alternate cosmologies. They each regarded artists as being charged with keen missions to attend to their revelations with art. The figure of Los in Blake’s poem, Jerusalem, which we discussed in chapter 5 (see plate 7), was the primordial precursor of the artist/prophet, who, like Blake himself, struggled to reverse the disunity of human nature. Spectre, or the reasoning power, confronts Los, hovering over him and berating him for his longing to reunite the elements of the self into the sleeping Albion. But Los insists that reason should help him at his forge, the engine of prophetic vision:

I will compell thee to assist me in my terrible labours. To beat

These hypocritic Selfhoods on the Anvils of bitter Death.

I am inspired: I act not for myself: for Albion’s sake

I now am what I am! . . .

Take thou this Hammer & in patience heave the thundering Bellows,

Take thou these Tongs: strike thou alternate with me: labour obedient.21

Thus inspiration addresses reason—emotion and imagination enjoin union with a rationalism that is in rebellion against the rightful, unfallen unity of human nature. So speaks the artist/prophet to religious dogma and the blind authority of institutional religion. The artist’s imaginative quest is for the lost unity of human nature, and is therefore the prophetic revelation of the loftiest of religious truth.

While Blake and Runge looked through the ordinary to see its spiritual depths, some contemporaries endowed art with a spiritual power of insight and transcendence that operated as a redemption from ordinary life. Arthur Schopenhauer, German Idealist philosopher, found this separateness mystical, a momentary redemption from the teeming mass of events that form the world. He described the wonder of moments experienced before works of art or scenes of nature, when we are snatched away,

although only for a few moments, from subjectivity, from the thralldom of the will, and transferring us into the state of pure knowledge . . . . For at the moment when, torn from the will, we have given ourselves up to pure, will-less knowing, we have stepped into another world, so to speak, where everything that moves our will, and thus violently agitates us, no longer exists . . . . We are only that one eye of the world which looks out from all knowing creatures, but which in man alone can be wholly free from serving the will.²²

Schopenhauer understood will as the dark, blind force that propelled all life and matter into and out of existence, driving each being to scramble for its own interests. Aesthetic experience offered a brief respite from this swirling agony, enabling a kind of transcendence in which the self became a super-personal state of knowing, which abruptly ended as soon as pure contemplation gave way to the demands of individual consciousness. The subjectivity of artistic experience was for Schopenhauer something akin to a mystical moment of realization, an intermingling of self with a higher state of knowing. The same remained true at the end of the century for art connoisseur Bernard Berenson, who described what appears to be identical to Schopenhauer’s mystical flight of aesthetic experience:

In visual art the aesthetic moment is that flitting instant, so brief as to be almost timeless, when the spectator is at one with the work of art he is looking at, or with actuality of any kind that the spectator himself sees in terms of art, as form and colour. He ceases to be his ordinary self, and the picture or building, statue, landscape, or aesthetic actuality is no longer outside himself. The two become one entity; time and space are abolished and the spectator is possessed by one awareness. When he recovers workaday consciousness it is as if he had been initiated into illuminating, exalting, formative mysteries. In short, the aesthetic moment is a moment of mystic vision.23

For some, spirituality was clearly a signature feature of the state of subjectivity or consciousness that fine art produces.

Another kind of mystical intermingling of ego and subject-matter in art is evident in the work of the German landscape painter, Caspar David Friedrich. In 1808, Friedrich painted Cross in the Mountains (see plate 10), which was intended for the King of Sweden, Gustav IV, whose Moravian Pietistic faith and staunchly anti-French sentiment pitted Sweden against the Napoleonic invasion of Germany in 1807.²⁴ This political stance strongly appealed to Friedrich, a fiercely patriotic German who regarded Gustav IV as the defender of the realm and had intended to offer the painting as homage to the zealous monarch. But political events intervened: Gustav was overthrown by his own army in 1809. So Friedrich was persuaded instead to sell the painting and its customized frame to the count of Thun-Hohenstein in Bohemia, where the work was installed—not in a chapel, as the artist had been promised, but in the countess’s bedroom. Friedrich had produced a landscape with a crucified Jesus for the faith of a crusading king opposed to imperial aggression. The elaborate frame was intended to fit the landscape image into the tradition of altarpieces. The painter imagined the genre of landscape as an appropriate means of celebrating the sacred sovereignty of the North, protected by a Swedish overlord. But when he exhibited the painting in his studio in Dresden in 1808, its design and aesthetic were criticized by the art critic Friedrich Basil von Ramdohr, in a long essay that targeted the painting, its presentation, the artist’s taste and ability, and, beyond that, the bothersome Romantic aesthetic that the image represented.

Ramdohr’s response to Friedrich’s painting tells us a good deal about the emergence of art as something intrinsically sacred. Early German Romanticism was a transitional moment in this century-long process. Ramdohr wished to defend the mechanics of good taste, which he felt were threatened by the young Dresden painter’s violation of the aesthetic ideal of landscape. Friedrich’s error was two-fold, according to Ramdohr. He tried to allegorize landscape and thereby to make the category into religious art, placing it on an altar as the focus of the liturgical rite of Holy Communion. The result was “dangerous to good taste” since it “divides public opinion,” appeals to “the great crowd,” and “robs the essence of painting, especially landscape painting, of its own most proper traits.”²⁵ It was Ramdohr’s charge that Friedrich, and Romanticism by extension, menaced the social operation of good taste, a sensibility that artists had the duty to cultivate among the public in order to refine it.

Friedrich’s friends in Dresden rallied to his support, publishing retorts to Ramdohr. Yet Ramdohr’s observation was not without accuracy: Friedrich was making landscape do something that had previously been reserved for other genres of artistic imagery. For Friedrich the fierce German patriot, who resented the triumphant Napoleonic presence in German territory, locating the crucifixion on a German Calvary, surrounded by unmistakably German firs, was perhaps a way to recode the Roman (Latin) execution of Jesus. Or perhaps it was a way of elevating the German landscape in the hierarchy of European aesthetics, which strongly preferred the classicizing figure paintings of Nicolas Poussin and Roman landscapes of Claude Lorrain to German landscape painting. Accordingly, around 1830, viewing a collection of paintings by contemporary artists, Friedrich complained that “Our German sun, moon, and stars, our rocks, trees, and plants, our plains, lakes, and rivers no longer satisfy the art critics. Everything must be Italian to be able to make any claim to grandeur and beauty.”26 Friedrich’s intermingling of national self and native subject matter in this defense of German landscape, as in his own paintings, marks a Romantic disposition that departed starkly from the Kantian aesthetic since it argued passionately for the very interested (rather than disinterested) nature of aesthetic experience. Art was vital precisely because it was invested with the self—personal and national. Its power was to engage the self in encountering itself in the body of the national landscape.²⁷

THE SPIRITUALIZATION OF ART AFTER THE ROMANTIC ERA

We have seen one way in which art was spiritualized and how that spiritualization unfolded at the same time that the legacy of Kant tended to secularize art by stressing its subjective or mental nature. But there are two other important ways in which art, artists, and aesthetic experience were understood to manifest spiritual power and insights. In addition to fashioning the notion that art was intrinsically spiritual, Romanticism also spawned an invigoration of explicitly religious art, that is, imagery dedicated to the community of Christian believers and fully capable of being placed in the service of the church.

Artists such as Runge produced art that they felt was spiritually moving without intending it for use in formal religious worship. But for many artists in Europe and the United States in the first half of the nineteenth century, the art world had lost the truly sacred character of images dedicated to Christian holiness. This is the second clearly discernible form of spiritualizing art: artists set out to mend the rift between art and religion by bestowing on art a Christian purpose and sense of its own history. Several young art students in Vienna formed a group in 1809, calling themselves the Brotherhood of Saint Luke, after the saint who had long been believed to be a painter as well as a gospel writer. In the following year the group migrated to Rome, where for a time they took up residence in an abandoned monastery, wore robes, and let their hair grow long. The odd features of their lifestyle earned them the tag “Nazarenes,” after the ancient Israelites who vowed to separate themselves for God and did not cut their hair (Numbers 6:1–21). The Brotherhood of Saint Luke dedicated itself to purifying art and returning to the work of the young Raphael as the ideal of Christian art. But rather than simply regurgitating the sacred art of the past, the painters, as art historian Cordula Grewe has noted, endowed their work with an unmistakable minimalism and conceptual focus, the mark of their mission to change culture by deploying painting not as pictorial narrative after the model of Renaissance art, but as polemical tableaux dedicated to teaching and proselytizing. Grewe describes the work as hieroglyphs, visual texts that set out to reinfuse theological debate into modern society.28

We easily sense the artist’s discursive intent in Johann Friedrich Overbeck’s painting Christ in the House of Mary and Martha (figure 54), in which the extended finger of Jesus occupies the very heart of the painting, enacting his counsel to the disgruntled woman: “One thing is needful,” he tells her, and that is to listen to the teaching of the master. The deictic gesture draws the biblical text to mind (Luke 10:40–1), as everyone in the image listens to the exchange between Jesus and Martha. Martha gestures to Mary at Jesus’s feet, where she listened intently to him, deeply pondering what she has heard. Like a host of Northern Renaissance images, Overbeck’s picture includes a biblical scene shown through a window, where we glimpse Jesus’s parable of the Good Samaritan (which immediately precedes the account of Mary and Martha in Luke). (Compare, for instance, Jerome Wierix’s engraving of the Visitation, figure 6, for the same device.) But the clear contours, silent sense of the moment, focal unity, and the utter legibility of the entire scene all suggest a homiletic diction that the zealous Overbeck, a convert to Catholicism, brought to bear on his passionately tasked picture-making. Nothing distracts from the single purpose at hand.

Other members of the group, including Wilhelm Schadow, Peter Cornelius, and Julius Schnor von Carolsfeld, joined Overbeck in producing elaborate paintings for use on altars in churches, frescoes of biblical subjects, illustrated Bibles, and devotional panels for ecclesial use. In France, where the state remained an active patron of the arts, sponsoring annual salons in Paris and purchasing a great deal of work that was then placed within churches around the country, religious art remained a familiar subject among fine artists. A number of major artists produced significant work for churches, including Ingres, Delacroix, Hippolyte Flandrin, and Ary Scheffer, to name only a few very prominent painters. The hope of a renewal of modern religious art affected many French artists. The resulting work looked to a range of artists from the Renaissance and Baroque periods for inspiration, from Raphael and Nicholas Poussin to Velasquez, Zurburán, and Peter Paul Rubens.²⁹

Delacroix’s Christ’s Agony in the Garden of Gethsemane is a good example of a brilliant modern painter’s religious work (figure 55). On a large scale, measuring more than eleven feet wide, the scene conveys high pathos: Christ leans on one arm and appears to hold the grief-stricken angels at bay with the other in a dramatically magnanimous gesture that prefers heroic and manly pain to feminine succor. In the dark distance to the left, firebrands light the way of the armed company coming to arrest Jesus. The lazy disciples sleep soundly to his right in stark contrast to the operatic abeyance of the angelic company, which has just arrived on a cloud of heavenly light. According to Luke, an angel intervened to comfort the anguishing Jesus (Luke 22:43). But Delacroix’s Christ demurs, the better to heighten his valor in the face of dark fate. Casting a tragic gaze downward, refusing to receive their ministrations on this, the darkest night of his life on earth, Jesus strikes a Promethean solitude as the helpless female angels look on. It is an image designed to invoke a gendered sentiment of reverie in the viewer, awe at the heroic act of endurance and the refusal to forego it. It may also recognize in the distinction of male and female the rigor of heroic (masculine) spiritual vocation, an ideal that came increasingly to describe the sacred stature of the avant-garde artist in the nineteenth century. As one later critic observed, “One can dispute the religious value of the Agony, and every Catholic will regret that the angels here are but weeping spectators when they should be helpful consolers, but none would think to deny the painting’s tragic grandeur and artistic character.”30 Exhibited at the annual Salon of 1827–28 in Paris, where it was both criticized for its artist’s lack of faith and praised for its religious fervor, the painting was placed in the Church of St. Paul and St. Louis in the city.

FIGURE 54

Johann Friedrich Overbeck, Christ in the House of Martha and Mary, 1815, oil on canvas. Courtesy of BPK, Berlin / Nationalgalerie / Jörg P. Anders, photographer / Art Resource, NY.

FIGURE 55

Eugene Delacroix, Agony in the Garden of Gethsemane, 1826, oil on canvas. Courtesy of Bridgeman-Giraudon / Art Resource, NY.

In England, the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood formed a few decades later with a goal similar to that of the Nazarenes: to correct the debilitated artistic trends of the present by rediscovering the Christian inspiration of Renaissance art. But the result looked very different from the art of Overbeck and his companions. In fact, Pre-Raphaelite work was closer in visual character to Caspar David Friedrich’s than to Raphael’s or Fra Angelico’s. The same profusion of symbols composed of legible natural objects that characterized the latter painters appealed to William Holman Hunt, whose Light of the World (figure 56) also indulges in the hushed twilight and intense coloration that were Friedrich’s signature. Hunt was fascinated equally by the pictorial language of crisply limned contours, lavish surfaces, and closely observed, meticulously drawn detail work. Light of the World reads like a loquacious text, a wordy visual field in which every object speaks in the allegorical diction of a pious naturalism. Each leaf and thistle, rendered with botanical accuracy, is also drawn from a lexicon of theological symbolism. And the entire scene is a somnambulant allegory of the quiet redemption of the self-sequestered soul called from its solitude by the midnight rapping of a wordless savior. The picture triangulates redeemer, soul, and viewer in the sparkling gaze of Jesus who knocks on the door, but looks at us. This direct appeal and the infinite legibility of the picture were fondly received by Victorian viewers. The image leaps from a gnomic utterance of Jesus at the end of the New Testament: “Behold, I stand at the door and knock; if any one hears my voice and opens the door, I will come in to him and eat with him, and he with me” (Revelations 3:20). The pictured savior speaks in the glowing cast of his eyes, promising the intimate communion of a soul fondly reconciled to the one who calls for him. The picture appeals for its layers and layers of meaning, working like a puzzle whose message is put together by careful rumination on the telling fit of word and image. It is not a reflection on meaningless suffering or pointless agony, but the Evangelical promise that Jesus makes the world make sense. Meaning is abundant and stands just outside the door that is, as the artist said, “the obstinately shut mind.”31

FIGURE 56

William Henry Simmons, stipple engraving after William Holman Hunt, The Light of the World, 1853. Courtesy of V & A Images, London / Art Resource, NY.

Both Hunt and Friedrich reflect the Protestant tradition in their treatment of a meticulously legible natural world whose forms and details operate as Holy Writ, a kind of lexicon revealing the glory of God. John Calvin did not hesitate to affirm the testimony of the natural universe to the existence of God. Calvin put the matter in bold terms when he insisted that God had been pleased “so to manifest his perfections in the whole structure of the universe, and daily place himself in our view, that we cannot open our eyes without being compelled to behold him . . . . on each of his works his glory is engraven in characters so bright, so distinct, and so illustrious, that none, however dull and illiterate, can plead ignorance as their excuse.”³² Calvin drew on the Book of Psalms and Paul’s Letter to the Romans to proclaim that as the author of nature, God was evident in his work. Most strikingly, nature was a visual register that revealed God’s presence—a remarkable assertion for the Protestant divine who took one of the strongest stands against the visual arts as a source of religious knowledge: “None who have the use of their eyes can be ignorant of the divine skill manifested so conspicuously in the endless variety, yet distinct and well-ordered array, of the heavenly host; and, therefore, it is plain that the Lord has furnished every man with abundant proofs of his wisdom.”³³ Even Reformed Protestantism was therefore able to endorse art and imagination in its own way, and it is certainly no mistake that one of the most important traditions of landscape painting in Europe arose in the Netherlands during the seventeenth century, where Calvinism reigned as a powerfully intensive religious culture.³⁴

The third form of the spiritualization of art that I want to describe developed in tandem with the artist’s separation from the traditional patrons of church and state. The artists who most enthusiastically espoused the rhetoric of art’s intrinsic sacrality during the final third of the nineteenth century did so by presenting themselves as priests, prophets, or visionaries. It is noteworthy that they were arguably those who faced the greatest distance from state patronage and official recognition in venues such as the annual salon exhibitions in Paris: rather, these avant-gardists of the final decades of the nineteenth century defined their work in opposition to both the official academic work favored by the state and academy and to the increasingly popular naturalism that arose on the margins of academic taste. Instead, they relied on the rising commercial gallery and dealer market for locating patrons. Art as a spiritual good, possessing an intrinsic value, art with a mystique or aura that might confer on its owner a desirable distinction, was part of an economic strategy in a privatized market.

Artists such as Odilon Redon, Paul Gauguin, Vincent van Gogh, Fernand Khnopff, Edvard Munch, and Paul Sérusier, and the critic Albert Aurier produced and discussed work that was not calculated to operate in the academic system nor to appeal to broad, popular tastes of naturalistic styles of painting.35 In fact, they commonly derided realistic art and cultivated instead a visual language that flattened, ornamentalized, intensified, exoticized, abstracted the appearance of objects. “The goal of painting,” Aurier insisted, “. . . cannot be the direct representation of objects. Its end purpose is to express ideas as it translates them into a special language.” Aurier hailed the art of Gauguin and Van Gogh as attuned to the expression of “Ideas,” by which he meant Platonic verities. To that end, the artist was not to regard objects as the aim, but to see “them only as signs, letters of an immense alphabet that only the genius knows how to read.”³⁶ The immaterial Idea stood in sharp contrast to matters of the body. Rising above all sensual interests amounted to a spiritualization of the aesthetic of disinterestedness. The quest for purification from base materialism sometimes focused on women, as in the following comment by Albert Aurier in an essay on art criticism:

It is even easier to have true love for a work of art than for a woman, as in the work of art materiality barely exists and almost never lets love degenerate into sensualism. Perhaps this method will be ridiculed. Then I shall not answer. Perhaps it will be considered mystical. Then I shall say: yes, without a doubt, this is mysticism, and it is mysticism that we need today and it is mysticism alone that can save our society from brutalization, sensualism, and utilitarianism. The most noble faculties of our soul are in the process of atrophying.³⁷

Aurier was unapologetic about the vaunted stature of the artist, who belonged to the class of latter-day philosopher-kings described by Plato in The Republic: “Do not those who neither see the idea nor believe in it deserve our compassion, like the unfortunate, stupid prisoners of Plato’s allegorical cave?”³⁸

A major aspect of the sacralization of art in the later nineteenth century articulated a sense of alienation from modern life, from the reigning systems of social authority, from materialism. This is evident in the urge to purify art of realism and traditional subject matter, and to relocate the artist to remote colonies like those that Gauguin and Van Gogh struggled to create in Pont-Aven and Le Pouldu in Brittany. Or to far-flung locales like Tahiti, where Gauguin would soon go, in search of new beginnings, where the artist would be influenced by indigenous culture and liberated from Western civilization. Gauguin described how misunderstood he was, but took hope in the prospect of fleeing to the tropics as an opportunity for regeneration and artistic rebirth:

Yes, we are destined (we pioneer artists and thinkers) to succumb to the blows of the world, but to succumb so far as we are flesh. The stone will decay, the word will remain. We are in the dismal swamp, but we are not dead yet. As for me, they won’t even have my skin. If I manage to get what I am now trying for, a snug berth in Tonkin [the northernmost region of Viet Nam, under French colonial rule since 1885], I can work at my painting and save money. The whole of the East—lofty thought written in letters of gold implicit in all their art—all this is well worth studying, and I feel that I shall be rejuvenated out there. The West is corrupt at the present time and whatever is herculean can, like Anteus, gain new strength in touching the soil of the East. And, one or two years later, we can return solvent.39

It was a scheme for achieving financial stability that would, however, rely on critics and new kinds of patrons back home to provide the necessary reception and support for the artist as prophet, mystic, and martyr.⁴⁰

A brazen sense of the artist’s specialness informs Gauguin’s Christ in the Garden of Olives, 1889, in which the figure of Jesus is also a self-portrait of the painter (figure 57). Sulking in the lush night of the garden, Jesus leans away from the fleeing disciples to sink into dejection and a pathetic sense of betrayal. The high pathos of Delacroix’s Promethean hero has dwindled to sullen self-pity. Cut off from his errant followers by the dark silhouette of a tree, Gauguin’s Jesus occupies an entire half of the picture. As Debora Silverman has aptly pointed out, when he produced the work Gauguin had not in fact been betrayed by his “disciples,” but shared the company of fellow artists on the western shores of France, where he painted the image in the fall of 1889.⁴¹ But he did feel increasingly isolated from the success and attention that he believed his work merited. Gauguin lacked the support that benefited Delacroix, who enjoyed state patronage. Delacroix’s Agony had been purchased by the state for placement within a Parisian church. Gauguin, on the other hand, had to rely on appeals to private collectors to grasp his genius. The sense of betrayal his picture enacts may derive from the resentment he felt toward art dealer Theo van Gogh who forbade his brother, Vincent, to participate in an exhibition in Paris that summer consisting of works by the group of artists in Brittany, organized by the ever-impoverished Gauguin. The venture turned out to be a commercial flop, only intensifying Gauguin’s financial woes.⁴² He conveyed his sense of frustration in grandiose religious terms: in a letter to an artist friend written at the time he was painting Christ in the Garden he complained, “I am toiling up the steps of a rugged Calvary. From Paris I am deafened by the cries my latest pictures have provoked.”⁴³

Gauguin’s portrayal of himself as misunderstood martyr, abandoned and victimized, echoed Aurier’s own sentiments about the artist, as expressed in his own poetry—which one art historian has suggested may even have inspired Gauguin’s painting.⁴⁴ Aurier regarded this painting by Gauguin in particular as a provocation to ponder more than what the Gospel of Luke had to say about Jesus’s state of mind. He praised the picture as “sublime” and remarked that Jesus (and Gauguin), “seated in a desolate site, seems to convey through his tears the inexpressible sorrows of the dream, the agony of the Chimera, the betrayal of contingencies, the vanity of the real and of life, and perhaps, of the beyond.”45 Clearly, subjectivity was becoming increasingly self-referential.

FIGURE 57

Paul Gauguin, Christ in the Garden of Olives, 1889, oil on canvas. Courtesy of Kharbine-Tapabor / The Art Archive at Art Resource, NY.

SUBLIMITY AND TRANSCENDENCE

The elevation of the artist to sacred office continued into the twentieth century, and became closely associated with the development of abstraction in the thought of Russian painter and art theoretician Wassily Kandinsky. Kandinsky inherited the Symbolist critique of naturalistic painting, which he applied to the dematerializing of artistic style. He understood the artist to be a spiritual leader of humanity, a prophet who was misunderstood, recalling Gauguin’s portrayal of himself as Jesus in Gethsemane. In his major theoretical statement, Concerning the Spiritual in Art (1912), Kandinsky characterized the spiritual life as a progressive expansion of artistic genius that would gradually embrace the entire society. The artist was an unappreciated prophet whose work went unnoticed by the people in spite of his manifold gifts for their spiritual wellbeing: “Invisible, Moses comes down from the mountain, sees the dance round the golden calf. Yet he brings with him new wisdom for men.”46

Kandinsky felt pressed to account for the difficulty of progressive art, for its incomprehensibility and for critical hostility among audiences who wanted simpler spiritual food than the most advanced artists were inclined to offer. Kandinsky’s metaphor acknowledges both that audiences have always considered avant-garde art to be difficult and that the fashion cycle eventually makes the new and difficult into the familiar and popularly acclaimed. The movement of taste is progressive. Yet the most progressive artist is a scorned prophet, a Man of Sorrows whose suffering appears as unavoidable as it is unjust. He suffers for truth, sacrificing himself for the slow but sure advancement of society.

Kandinsky regarded the comprehensible art that the masses adored, the artistic language they understood, as using line, plane, and color to do no more than describe mere appearances. Naturalism, the descriptive celebration of familiar objects, entertained the masses and failed to push them spiritually. “The path upon which we find ourselves today,” he proclaimed, “and which is the greatest good fortune of our time, leads us to rid ourselves of the external, to replace this basis by another diametrically opposed to it: the basis of internal necessity.”⁴⁷ For Kandinsky as artist and theorist, this meant recognizing what he considered the intrinsic capacity of line, plane, and color for visual expression. He devoted a long section of The Spiritual in Art to presenting this vocabulary in the elements of the visual arts, describing the inherent properties of different colors and noting the interrelations of sound and color, which allowed him to sketch a rich psychic life within words, forms, and colors. Emotions are keyed to colors and words as well as to spiritual sensation: “The deeper the blue becomes, the more strongly it calls man toward the infinite, awakening in him a desire for the pure and, finally, for the supernatural. It is the color of the heavens, the same color we picture to ourselves when we hear the sound of the word ‘heaven.’”⁴⁸

The intrinsic or interior quality of the formal elements of art could be accessed and liberated by the artist’s recognition of what Kandinsky called “inner necessity,” the driving force in artistic creation. Abstraction freed the work of art from the drudgery of describing surfaces, aping appearances, by penetrating the exterior, by turning line and color from description to introspection, from surface to depth, from exterior to interior, from result to cause. Kandinsky saw this at work in children’s art, in so-called primitive art, in decorative motifs, in devotional imagery, and in the work of untrained, folk artists. In every case, the impulse was not to reproduce appearances, but to indulge the artist’s personality, to articulate the language of style, or to portray objects as a way of making them expressive of the driving force that led image-makers to their work. Abstraction went further, severing the tie to appearances altogether, and giving to the elements of art an autonomy that might allow them a purely expressive function. Or at least that was the tendency around the time that Kandinsky composed and finally published his book. In fact, it took him a few years to eliminate all reference to external matters in his own painting.49

For example, one sees details and fragments lingering in Improvisation 26 (Rowing), a characteristic example of Kandinsky’s work at that time (plate 11). At first glance, the image may appear as no more than nebulous auras of color overdrawn by arcing lines. But the more one looks, the more one sees the remnants of recognizable motifs: in the upper center appear the minimal dark contours of two or perhaps three figures, from whom descend several dark lines, the oars of the title’s reference to rowing. Kandinsky has abstracted, but not finally extinguished the basic visual information of figures in a boat with oars. Six “oars” might be counted, but that would suggest a boat with twelve oars in all, far more than there are figures to operate them. So perhaps we see a repetition of fewer oars. Rather than describe them, the artist plays with form and line. The edge of each oar becomes a form in itself, arcing, vibrating, dissolving. Clouds of color undulate about the “boat,” which has vanished, leaving only the partial contours of the figures. Given the important role that religious iconography and biblical themes played in Kandinsky’s work at this time, as Rose-Carol Washton Long has shown, one wonders if the subject of this painting might be Jesus approaching his disciples on the Sea of Galilee (Matthew 14:25–6), when he appears to them walking on the water and they do not recognize him, thinking he is a ghost.⁵⁰ But there is nothing in the image or in the documentary record to confirm such a reading. More to the point, the image operates like a riff in jazz, shapes and forms rhyming with one another, repeating and varying one another until anything recognizable fades into diffuse color and brushwork that spread over the surface of the canvas and nearly forget the descriptive purpose they once had. The “inner necessity” driving Kandinsky’s visual play is a kind of stream of consciousness that engages in a playful metamorphosis with water, boat, oars, figure, landscape until it is on the verge of pure ornament. Abstraction, the painting makes clear, is a process of dematerialization that engages both play and the intrinsic characteristics of the medium. Inner necessity is a creative logic that indulges the subjectivity of maker and viewer, but does so by dismantling the sureness of an objective world in order to set loose the creative possibilities of resonance, riffing, free association, and metamorphosis. For Kandinsky, this was the opposite of materialism. It was the spiritual in art.⁵¹

ABSTRACTION AND THE SUBLIME IN POSTWAR AMERICA

The narrative of the engagement of religion and modern art is far more varied and complex than one chapter can convey. I am selecting for consideration a single strand of artistic developments, in part for the cultural capital that strand has commanded as representative of the canon of the avant-garde. But there are others and I can do no more here than cite a few of them.⁵²

FIGURE 58

Barnett Newman, Stations of the Cross, 1958–66, magna and oil on canvas. Installation photograph from The Robert and Jane Meyerhoff Collection: 1945–1995, on view at the National Gallery of Art, March 31—July 21, 1996. Courtesy of National Gallery of Art, Washington, Gallery Archives / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

What might be called the two characters of German Expressionism, represented by the lyrical resonance of Kandinsky and Franz Marc, on the one hand, and the raw brutality of Ernst Ludwig Kirchner and Georg Grosz, on the other, achieved a momentary integration in the work of some mid-century American painters like Mark Rothko, Barnett Newman, and Jackson Pollock. Religious themes sometimes appear in their work—as in Rothko’s Chapel in Houston, in Pollock’s mythic imagery, and in Newman’s Stations of the Cross (figure 58). The synthesis of the two faces of German Expressionism occurred when the legacy of Kandinsky was masculinized and invigorated. Abstraction came to encompass both the desire for raw emotion—treated in the vigorous application of paint among artists such as Pollock and De Kooning—and a longing for monumental scale, mythic grandeur, the majesty of the immemorial in Newman and Rothko, among others. For these so-called Abstract Expressionists, European painting had failed. De Kooning dismissed Kandinsky’s understanding of artistic form as offering “a kind of Middle-European idea of Buddhism, or, anyhow, something too theosophic for me.”53 Newman looked to Native American art for the precedent to contemporary American work, and in doing so sounded the familiar tone of masculinization. In a statement that Newman authored for an exhibition he organized around the theme “The Ideographic Picture,” he compared contemporary abstract painters to the hide painter among the Kwakiutl, Native Americans on the Northwest coast: “The abstract shape he used, his entire plastic language, was directed by a ritualistic will toward metaphysical understanding. The everyday realities he left to the toymakers; the pleasant play of nonobjective pattern, to the women basket weavers. To him a shape was a living thing, a vehicle for an abstract thought-complex, a carrier of the awesome feelings he felt before the terror of the unknowable.”54 In an influential early work on the beautiful and the sublime (1757), Edmund Burke had gendered the beautiful as female and the sublime as male.⁵⁵ Newman clearly regarded the sublime as masculine and as the proper aesthetic aim for American artists of his day.

Newman saw American painting as emerging to command the field in lieu of the long dominance of Europe. European art and aesthetics, he claimed, had been preoccupied with the idea of beauty inherited from ancient Greece. The “natural desire in the arts to express [humankind’s] relation to the Absolute” had become confused with the quest for perfect form, or beauty.⁵⁶ Inspired by Burke, Newman regarded the history of art as the history of struggle between the sublime and the beautiful, the masculine versus the feminine.⁵⁷ Newman insisted that European art had failed to achieve the sublime because it never severed its relationship to the Renaissance ideal of beauty in the human figure. Whereas late medieval Christianity had achieved a “Gothic ecstasy over the [Christ] legend’s evocation of the Absolute,” Renaissance art had revived the Greek figurative ideal of “eloquent nudity” and consigned subsequent art on the continent to the aesthetic of beauty. Only now, in the triumphal age of the postwar United States, could matters shift in favor of the sublime: “I believe that here in America, some of us, free from the weight of European culture, are finding the answer, by completely denying that art has any concern with the problem of beauty and where to find it. The question that now arises is how, if we are living in a time without a legend or mythos that can be called sublime, if we refuse to admit any exaltation in pure relations, if we refuse to live in the abstract, how can we be creating a sublime art?”⁵⁸ Newman ended his short statement by answering the question he posed, pressing his contemporaries to transcend history, even as American art would complete modern art’s quest to destroy beauty:

We are reasserting man’s natural desire for the exalted, for a concern with our relationship to the absolute emotions. We do not need the absolute props of an outmoded and antiquated legend. We are creating images whose reality is self-evident and which are devoid of the props and crutches that evoke associations with outmoded images, both sublime and beautiful. We are freeing ourselves of the impediments of memory, association, nostalgia, legend, myth, or what have you, that have been the devices of Western European painting. Instead of making cathedrals out of Christ, man, or “life,” we are making it out of ourselves, out of our own feelings. The image we produce is the self-evident one of revelation, real and concrete, that can be understood by anyone who will look at it without the nostalgic glasses of history.⁵⁹

The outmoded legend was of course Christianity, and its props, the art and aesthetic of beauty. Yet Newman himself drew on that very legend in his Stations of the Cross. No figure, no signs of splendor or grace or ornament grounded in the Renaissance tradition of figural beauty are visible in the stark series of canvases, whose minimalism is so extreme that the paintings cannot be thought of as distillations of the subject nor as an abstract cinema progressing toward Jesus’s death on the cross. If the traditional stations mark the pious viewer’s pensive march toward Calvary on Good Friday during Holy Week, modeled on the pilgrim’s trek along the Via Dolorosa in Jerusalem, what may be said of Newman’s canvases lining the walls of an art gallery (see figure 58)? They surround the viewer and enact a decisive denial: this is not about beauty. But neither is the death of Jesus in the theologies that foreground his suffering. His agony is a meeting point, a dark, empathic encounter with those who share failure and pain with him. Newman’s series may be a proposal for transcending the figurative fetish of artistic beauty, exchanging it for a new visual language suited to ineffability. The life-sized canvases replace the body of Jesus making his weary way to death, substituting in his stead a grim vocabulary of life-sized compositions whose black tone and linear austerity, whose raw canvas and looming silence direct the viewer toward that which cannot be embodied. The severe rhetoric of the images urges the viewer not to turn these compositions into symbols or bodies or allegories, but to struggle with their difficulty and to experience in doing so the incommensurate stature of a human life in the face of what Newman called only “the Absolute.”

Yet the Stations do not leave one wafting in a sublime ether of void, or Void. The Other they evoke is not God, at least, not according to the artist. He commented that he “tried to make the title [of the Stations] a metaphor that describes my feeling when I did the paintings. It’s not literal, but a cue. In my work, each station was a meaningful state in my own—the artist’s—life. It is an expression of how I worked. I was a pilgrim as I painted.”60 The comment recalls the Romantic Geist and its evolution toward consciousness, portrayed by Hegel as the history of art. Stations of the Cross therefore might be regarded as the long trek or pilgrimage of the artist engaged in a creative journey of self-creation. This is not a therapeutic self-actualization, but the quest or errand of the modern autonomous self. Newman told the magazine ARTnews that Stations was not commissioned by any church: “They are not in the conventional sense ‘church’ art. But they do concern themselves with the Passion as I feel and understand it; and what is even more significant for me, they can exist without a church.”⁶¹ One reason they don’t need a church is because their exhibition together in a single gallery space takes the place of a church interior. Stations may have appealed to those Americans at mid-century who felt liberated from a determinative past and looked to themselves to create their national future. Art and the art gallery became the venue for engaging in the culture of the autonomous self, the subjectivity fully realized as the spirit unfolding in America’s coming of age. The result, as Newman put it, was a “revelation” and the source material was “our own feelings.” Nationhood, progress, pilgrimage, imagination, and subjectivity intermingle in the mid-century American aesthetic of the sublime.

And yet, Newman kept a Jewish frame around the project. When asked what his aesthetic was and how it might offer guidance for understanding his art, he replied, “My entire aesthetic can be found in the Passover service. At the Passover seder, which was also Jesus’s last meal, the blessing is always made to distinguish between the profane and the sacred: ‘Blessed be thou, O Lord, who distinguishes between what is holy and what is not holy.’”62 The ritual meal of Passover is the place where holiness happens. On the same occasion, Newman remarked that “to my mind the basic issue of a work of art . . . is first and foremost for it to create a sense of place, so that the artist and the beholder will know where they are.”⁶³ This is perhaps just what he intended to do with Stations, which were to be exhibited together in the nonreligious space of an art gallery. Their unity mattered to him: “The Passion is not a protest but a declaration. I had to explore its emotional complexity. That is, each painting is total and complete by itself, yet only the fourteen together make clear the wholeness of the single event.”⁶⁴

CONTEMPORARY ART AND RELIGION

Newman’s remarks implied that modern American art would be spiritual without being explicitly religious. It is certainly true that many artists have embraced what can be called a “spiritual” approach to art.⁶⁵ Yet there is no shortage of religious, biblical, and explicitly Christian iconography and subject-matter in the work of some of the most celebrated and internationally recognized artists in the late twentieth century.⁶⁶ However, the religious themes and motifs are often used with a sense of irony and social commentary that sharply distinguishes such work from anything usually created for an explicitly religious purpose.⁶⁷ There is clearly a break between the worlds of modern fine art and modern religion. Yet the boundary is uneven and in some cases not as clear as many in the art world would like to believe. Critics and theorists have a difficult time with the relationship, but some artists appear to have less of a problem with it.⁶⁸ Why should there be a deep tension between the worlds of art and religion in the modern age? Disinterestedness certainly introduced a secularizing tendency, although there are spiritual versions of dispassionate contemplation sometimes characterized as forms of detachment. But religion is something different. Religious imagery is made for purposes that modern art has no use for. Religious art often is devoted to beauty, and beauty as traditionally defined has been less important than other goals for many modern artists.⁶⁹

But even when it is not about beauty, contemporary religious art serves a purpose that the art world finds despicable, likely for two very different reasons. In the first case, many insist that art should cultivate a radical critique of traditional values, which are often integral to the pious art displayed in churches. And second, for those who have insisted that art for art’s sake is the ideal, art is not supposed to have a purpose beyond itself, that is, beyond its own interest in artistic problems. Participation in the art world relies on taste, understood as a sensuous knowledge of allusions and references to works of art, organized in a genealogy of styles, personalities, content, and technical innovations. Thinking and feeling in the discourse on art works in different idioms—producer, connoisseur/collector, historian/critic, aficionado, and casual or “cocktail conversant.” All of these, regardless of the intricacy of their understanding, are formed around the linear structure of the genealogy because art is a fashion system stretching from old to new, predecessor to present, follower to original, convention to innovation. This system is why art and religion are not identical and often conflict with one another. Conventional religious worlds have little to do with the art world’s fashion system. Faith and religious authority are not among the criteria for effectively performing the discourse’s idioms, on the one hand, or delivering a proper political critique of bourgeois values, on the other.

Taste cultures are driven by criteria that matter very much to their practitioners. Age, class, ethnicity, race, gender, sexuality, religion, political leaning, education—whatever characterizes the group readily becomes integral to its style, the shared features of dress, cuisine, lifestyle, entertainment, or art that set the group apart. If faith, rather than opposition to social conventions, drives artistic taste, taste is no longer experienced as sovereign, no longer the organizing element of activity. Connoisseurship, the process of making informed distinctions about taste, is undermined as a political act. Critical acumen is compromised as a free act because participants in the discourse make judgments using “extraneous” normative guidelines. The art connoisseur distinguishes “good art” from “bad art” by judging it according to a repository of examples and a genealogy of good and bad predecessors. The faith connoisseur distinguishes “good art” from “bad art” on the basis of moral criteria, liturgical function, devotional appeal, or the relevance of its subject matter to religious narrative or scripture. Clearly, the two are relying on widely variant criteria. They serve different ends. Religious art must satisfy the norms of faith; secular art committed to progressive or to radical political ideals must conduce to political change or revolution. For example, it must promote freedom of sexual expression, the end of capitalist hegemony, or opposition to authoritarian politics. But is it possible that certain kinds of religious art might embrace radical values of transformation of the social order and thereby count as “good art” according to the criteria of secular art?

James Elkins has asserted that this is not possible: “As a rule: ambitious, successful contemporary fine art is thoroughly nonreligious.”70 Why? Because artistic quality is generated by the internal criteria of fine art, as well as by the artist’s efforts to identify problems within the medium and within the history of the medium’s treatment by other artists. Faith violates the integrity of that project. “Art that sets out to convey spiritual values,” Elkins asserts, “goes against the grain of the history of modernism.”⁷¹ That means that when artists like Kandinsky and Piet Mondrian praise theosophical and mystical ideas, their opinions are best ignored in favor of their progressive abstract art. The genealogy of good art is not a repository of “spiritual values,” but the curated record of recognized problems or topoi of artistic performance. When believers laud the power or effect of a religious painting as moving, it is unlikely that they are responding to the artist’s work solely within the sanctioned archive of the medium. They are probably registering how that painting moves their religious sensibility, that is, how the truth of their religion is affirmed by a particular characteristic of the work. By contrast, it would seem that when an art critic or other art world denizen is moved, it is not toward religious conviction nor is it fueled by religious values or by membership in a religious community. Artistic taste does not need to avail itself of those in order to render judgments that will be readily affirmed by other informed viewers, even if they exercise different preferences of taste.

And yet Elkins’s claim seems overdrawn, even if we consider only art from the late nineteenth century to the present. As Bernard Berenson and Arthur Schopenhauer show, there is no reason that experiencing art cannot be a spiritual or mystical experience. And as we saw, Barnett Newman framed his aesthetic ideal and artistic aims within an affirmation of his own Jewishness. But it is difficult not to sense some ambivalence in Newman. Did he assert his Jewish identity in order to parry the suspicion of art critics that he was making Christian art? Certainly religious believers can acquire and practice informed artistic taste and apply it to works of art that involve religious subject matter. But many will feel that art that sets out to promote a political, religious, or moral issue runs the risk of becoming propaganda. Perhaps the artist who believes, but makes successful art, is one who splits his or her consciousness, behaving as an artist in one world and a believer in another.

If so, that suggests there is not, strictly speaking, a purely aesthetic mode of judgment to attain. Rather than purging oneself of all matters of politics, faith, morality, class, and social identity in order to render artistic judgment, one must instead practice compartmentalizing. The ideal of disinterestedness works only in the sealed space of what might be called “the art game.” Schiller’s concept of aesthetic freedom prepared the way for this experience of subjectivity in art. This domain of experience operates with a sovereignty of its own. Thus, Goethe once called the opera “a little world,” and one begins to understand why. “When the opera is good,” he wrote, “it freely makes for us a little world unto itself, in which all things proceed according to certain laws, will be judged according to their own rules, experienced for their own properties.”72 This quest for formal integrity, for inner or organic unity persists today—indeed, it may constitute the arch principle of modern art. James Elkins contends that the art world derives its power from focusing both on the history of a medium’s treatment and on the genealogy of a discourse’s chosen problems, thus forming a capacity for judgment or taste that participants develop by attending to art and its discourses. Moreover, it is a social world structured by gatekeeping mechanisms that reward certain performances and disallow others. Those who profess religion as a principal aspect of their art are far less likely to exhibit in the most important exhibitions, be collected by the most elite collectors, or be handled by the most prestigious dealers. Art critics will tend to ignore them, the best museums will be less inclined to collect or show them. The art world plays by a different set of rules. Having religion does not count among the criteria for valuing great art in the modern era.

It is certainly true that the enclave of the art world focuses intently on its own history and discursive norms: artists tend to make art about art. As a result, the art world readily produces the dream that it operates within a neutral space of pure judgment, the domain of the exercise of taste, unbound from controlling ideologies like religion or the state. But the ideal of art for art’s sake is commonly compromised for the sake of whatever values of the day have come to matter to art world denizens. The real issue, it seems to me, is what interpretive community the viewer wishes to belong to when regarding a work of art. Judgments of taste will follow that commitment. In the end, taste is not as sovereign or autonomous as art lovers would like to imagine: they repress, over-determine, and project what they want or do not want to see.

In fact, artists remain very interested in religious motifs, myths, rituals, and symbols. In particular, many important artists have made use of biblical themes and Christian subjects. One thinks, for instance, of works such as Andy Warhol’s late series of paintings of the Last Supper, 1985–86; Andreas Serrano’s Piss Christ, 1987; Kiki Smith’s female saint figures such as Virgin Mary, 1992, and Mary Magdalene, 1994; Chris Ofili’s, The Holy Virgin Mary, 1996; Anselm Kiefer’s, Cain and Abel, 2006; and a number of video installations by Bill Viola, dating from the 1980s to the present and including Room for Saint John of the Cross, 1983, or The Greeting, 1995, based on a Renaissance painting of the New Testament theme of the Visitation. Some of these works were launched into stardom by controversy concerning conservative political opposition (Serrano and Ofili); some are instances of artists using themes with no discernible attempt to affirm any religious claim (Smith, Warhol, Kiefer). But perhaps others, such as Viola, use religious imagery because its sacred, mythic, or ritualistic character enables it to deliver impact, plumb depths of feeling, and spawn self-reflection. Some viewers take exception to that genre of use. Art critic Thierry de Duve observed that “when I deal with art that comes from a culture where faith or belief seems to be still functioning, I don’t have the wincing reaction I have to Andres Serrano, for example, or Bill Viola.”73 For this critic, the arch boundary separating the art world from a religious world is violated by artists who seem to him to insist that the viewer share their spiritual disposition.

The sociological outline that I have offered in this chapter suggests that there is a clear and significant difference between work that wrestles with a religious theme and work that seeks to preach a message to viewers, compelling their assent. But for De Duve, the operative distinction is between a secular culture where religion no longer exists and one that remains religious. Presumably, as long as he is a visitor in the latter world, he can stomach the religion. But in his own modern, Western society, where religion is supposed to be properly defunct, there can be no hesitation in rejecting the work of artists who take religion as a matter of faith in their art, since its presence can only mean they wish to force it upon their viewers.

Perhaps matters are not so simple as that. Religion did not die in the West. The two worlds of art and religion, as different as they may seem to many of their respective inhabitants, are not so sharply sealed off from one another. Working with religious themes and the tug of their appeal when provocatively engaged in art is very subtle and powerfully seductive. If it were not so, many artists probably wouldn’t be interested in religion. We can see the intricate intertwining of art and religion in a recent work by Viola, Ocean without a Shore (plate 12), a video installation first presented at the Venice Biennale in 2007. Viola chose to stage the piece in the deconsecrated Renaissance church of San Gallo. The choice was not random, given that the work is about the dead and their haunting proximity to the living. Viola achieved this spectacle by mounting video screens on three altars. Pictured on the screens were figures he’d filmed moving from darkness into bright light as they passed through a thin sheet of falling water. The result is captivating and eerie. Viola operates in the art world, to which he brings questions shaped by reflection on many different religious traditions. But he is not creating his work intentionally for a religious community. His art is not about Christianity or Buddhism per se, nor is it made for the edification of church or sangha, though he would no doubt be happy if Christians, Buddhists, and others were able to connect with his treatment of myth, ritual, and spiritually moving ordeals like dying and mourning. Viola addresses the art world, but uses visual vocabularies and aesthetic sensibilities that draw from religious traditions.

Ocean without a Shore was inspired by a poem by Senegalese poet and storyteller Birago Diop. The poem was about, in Viola’s words: “the spiritual as center of our lives and the idea of bringing it back to the domain of the self.”74 In a statement about the work in 2007, he wrote:

Ocean Without a Shore is about the presence of the dead in our lives. The three stone altars in the church of San Gallo become portals for the passage of the dead to and from our world. Presented as a series of encounters at the intersection between life and death, the video sequence documents a succession of individuals slowly approaching out of darkness and moving into the light. Each person must then break through an invisible threshold of water and light in order to pass into the physical world. Once incarnate however, all beings realise that their presence is finite and so they must eventually turn away from material existence to return from where they came. The cycle repeats without end.⁷⁵

Religion, literature, poetry, mythology, dream, ritual, and sacred art all share the use of motifs that address experiences of tragedy, rapture, ecstasy, loss, transformation, illumination. The list goes on. The artist’s autobiographical statement on his website states the range of influences and interests in his art: “His works focus on universal human experiences—birth, death, the unfolding of consciousness—and have roots in both Eastern and Western art as well as spiritual traditions, including Zen Buddhism, Islamic Sufism, and Christian mysticism. Using the inner language of subjective thoughts and collective memories, his videos communicate to a wide audience, allowing viewers to experience the work directly, and in their own personal way.”⁷⁶ Viola took the title of this piece from the Sufi mystic and philosopher Ibn al’Arabi (1165–1240), who wrote “The Self is an ocean without a shore. Gazing upon it has no beginning or end, in this world and the next.”⁷⁷ For Viola, subjectivity unfolds to infinity, where the self may intermingle with the divine. And he looks to the work of art to launch a quest, which is what some viewers adore about his work and what others find unbearable. Ocean without a Shore posits a thin membrane separating life and death; the wall of water through which figures slowly pass is the medium of the spectral encounter of the living and the dead. It recalls a Catholic sensibility we have noted in chapter 1: the next world is not far off, but poignantly near. Memory, elegy, funeral, portrait painting, letter, or a rustle in the wind can make us aware of those we’ve lost. There is solace in the prospect of recovering them in an act of memory, and comfort matters to the artist in this piece. Viola mentioned in an interview that after his father died, preceded a few years by his mother, he struggled with the feeling of being orphaned. But instead of resorting to religion for the spiritual care or therapy it might provide, the artist remarked “I turned to my art to find not only comfort and meaning, but also to keep moving, keep going forward and keep searching.”78 The result was Emergence, 2002, a video of a nude young male, a Christ-figure, arising from a sarcophagus bearing the sign of the Cross, embraced by the guiding arms of two women, surely meant to allude to the Marys who were reported in the New Testament to have gone to the tomb of Jesus on Easter morning. Five years later, Ocean without a Shore enacts a liminal experience of resurrection, a kind of somatic memory that resists the mortality of the self.

Metaphor and mythic allusion abound in Viola’s art as he stages sublime moments, numinous passages intended to lift viewers from the smallness of their busy lives and whisk them away to the hoary heights of myth, where they may ponder in the sensations of their flesh what Newman called their “relation to the Absolute.” Is this mystification? Seen from within the opaque walls of the art world, it may appear so. But seen from the world of soaring cantatas, thundering choirs, looming vaults, and mystical rites, it may do the job—at least for those whose sense of religion is strong enough to welcome the poetic resonance, or mild enough to appreciate the theatrical propping. In Venice, Viola brought art back to the church, literally. But couched in the cathedral of the self, which knows no boundaries, there is little reason for art to stay in the church. It would seem that religion and art are partners in search of something deeper, more mysterious, something that neither one is fully equipped to grasp by itself. The two worlds are not simply separate, they are each incomplete, and so they seek out one another. For Viola and many others, art and religion are collaborators in the project of being human.