Art and the Christian Mind

The Life and Work of H. R. Rookmaaker

Laurel Gasque

• Publisher: Crossway
• Year: 2005
• Print ISBN: 9781581346947
• eBook ISBN: 9781433518188
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Literature & the Arts in Christianity

Hans Rookmaaker's impact on the arts in the twentieth century was enormous. His wide range of intellectual and cultural concerns led him to explore many aspects of art, music, and philosophy during his lifetime, and he made important contributions as an art historian, professor, mentor, thinker, and author.

Laurel Gasque examines Rookmaaker's life and shows how he incorporated his biblical beliefs into his teaching, writing, and interaction with the arts and individuals. She also explores the development of Rookmaaker's friendship with Francis A. Schaeffer and how each influenced the other, especially in grasping the vision that became L'Abri Fellowship.

Gasque has rich material to draw from, including personal memories of her mentor and friend, conversations with Rookmaaker's family members, and the body of work he left behind. Her careful research and engaging writing style make this book an outstanding contribution to the world of Christian biography.

EIGHT

LEGACY

The last years of Hans Rookmaaker’s life were filled with incessant activity as he met his commitments at home and traveled extensively abroad. Then in a mere moment, at the height of his influence and impact, all was suspended in an instant. At an unsuspected hour on a day beginning to bud into spring in March 1977 his earthly life was over.

In their shock and sorrow Hans’s family was inspired to choose a profoundly appropriate text from one of his favorite books of the Bible, Revelation, to announce his death. The passage reads:

“Blessed are the dead who die in the Lord from now on.” “Blessed indeed,” says the Spirit, “that they may rest from their labors, for their deeds follow them.” (Revelation 14:13b, English Standard Version)

In fifty-five years (exactly the same number of years allotted to his spiritual ancestor John Calvin), Rookmaaker’s work in this world was completed. The legacy of his labor has followed; and in many ways it is only getting underway more than twenty-five years after his death. His work continues not only to benefit believers of all denominational stripes who are active in the arts but also to honor the Calvinist tradition with which he identified himself.

Ordinarily scholars influence other scholars in their field through their research and writings. But the reach of Rookmaaker’s impact on others expands well beyond academic art-historical circles, through both his writings and personal contacts, to include artists and musicians, poets and publishers, filmmakers and philosophers, and even a few theologians and educators in other areas. While the exceptional diversity of his impact reflects Rookmaaker’s many interests, it also refracts a personality of complexity and a character not easily classifiable by convenient categories, sacred or secular. Rookmaaker did not have star attraction, as popularly understood; but he did have appeal for individuals from a wide spectrum of society. He was under no illusion about his capacity to captivate everyone he encountered. But he was aware that there were some few with whom he truly could communicate and help.

Those who possessed a desire or a capacity to nurture their imaginations toward goodness were drawn to him like bees to honey when they read his books or heard him speak. He might not have articulated his basic aim in these terms, but this was what he was after, and this accounts for the amazing diversity of individuals from different nationalities he managed to interest, his appeal across disciplines and professions, his credibility with women as well as men, and his persuasiveness with a younger generation coming along today.

For those who connected with him, he was more than a masterful teacher—he was an inspirer. He had phenomenal power to motivate. British artist and art educator Peter Smith writes: “It is no secret that, like many others, I came across Rookmaaker at a crucial time in my life. The list of those who are still active in the fields of the Arts in the broadest sense, let alone other disciplines, who would admit to some kind of debt to Rookmaaker is... long. Rookmaaker’s biblical and Reformational thinking about the Arts re-located many of us in a fuller and richer world with the freedom and responsibility to serve Christ beyond the confines of Pietism.”

“Hans Rookmaaker not only talked about history. He made history.” That is the estimation of the American art historian Rachel Smith (no relation to Peter Smith), who is too young to have known Rookmaaker personally but who discovered his writings as an undergraduate before embarking on her academic career. The history she refers to is the conversion of attitude toward the arts that he was so significantly instrumental in causing among conservative Protestants, a change that opened the way for someone like herself, coming from a Reformed church background, to take up the arts with impunity and embrace them with joy as some of God’s greatest gifts to humanity.

The change Rookmaaker helped so notably to create did not come dramatically or through any systematic agenda that he promulgated, but rather softly and steadily, through a weaving of his biblical vision and voice with his personal relationships as he pursued his profession as an art historian and his calling as a Christian to integrate his faith with his learning.

While Rookmaaker’s influence has developed slowly and subtly over the course of time through those on whom he has left his mark, the actual pace of his life in his last decade was very fast even by today’s electronically driven standards for speed, and this contributed to his astounding impact on people. The qualitative contribution he made to the lives of so many individuals and organizations during those years represents a stag gering emotional and spiritual investment that is still paying artistic and scholarly dividends.

From the late 1960s until his death, Rookmaaker gave massive energy to mentoring a whole host of people. Not all of them were his official students. Single-mindedly he directed his academic career in the service of his calling in a way that went beyond narrowly defined notions of professorial duty and frequently ran counter to administrative expectations at his university. He may be admired for this; he may also be criticized for this. It may have caused him at times to neglect some of his official students.

Rookmaaker’s relationship with Graham Birtwistle, one of his first foreign-born graduate students and today an associate professor in modern art at the Free University of Amsterdam, contains many aspects of the complexities of Hans’s last years as well as his authenticity of spirit in encountering the issues facing his students and dedication in sustaining personal relationships.

By the time Birtwistle heard of the name Hans Rookmaaker, “the Flying Dutchman” (a name given to him by Linette Martin) was just beginning to flit from the Netherlands back and forth to Great Britain routinely. In 1961 Rookmaaker had taken his first grand tour of North America, but the days of his comings and goings to North America regularly were still ahead of him. Birtwistle first got wind of the peripatetic professor, both by reputation of his personal appearances in the UK and by his scholarly repute, as he was transitioning from being a student in art history and English literature at Manchester University to lecturing in art history at Leicester Polytechnic.

An intellectual ride with Rookmaaker was always interesting. As with so many others, it began with a bumpy start for Birtwistle. While Birtwistle was a believer when he met his future mentor, almost by accident, on a visit to L’Abri Fellowship in Switzerland, he was not prepared to concede many of his own deeply held personal preferences in art, which tended toward a subjective Romanticism, or to assess the intellectual assumptions of his educational formation critically in light of his Christian beliefs. Rookmaaker listened to him and challenged him intellectually and spiritually on these fronts in a way that Birtwistle had never known before from his religious upbringing and never experienced in his formation afterward.

The seriousness with which he was taken and the cogency of Rookmaaker’s thinking contributed to his reassessment of his previous ideas. So much so that he decided to go to the Netherlands, learn Dutch, and study for a doctorate in art history with Rookmaaker, a decision that eventually led to his current appointment.

So the story of Birtwistle is not without its twists and turns. His initial reaction to Rookmaaker represents a pattern. Many, on first engaging Rookmaaker’s thinking, especially his utterances on modern art, did and do dismiss him and his ideas summarily. One often hears thoughtful people, many of whom are practicing artists, reject his work because they perceive that he did not understand modern art, that he hated it and wanted only to see contemporary art that looked like it was made for, if not in, the seventeenth century. In their view, abstraction was anathema for him. Rookmaaker’s provocative style and unwillingness to bow to the fashionable trends of the times only made him all the more susceptible to bracketing his views and considering him reactive and out of touch rather than seeing him as offering a broader and deeper, boldly sophisticated critique. Although it is understandable how some have stayed at this stage of engagement with Rookmaaker’s thought, it is unfortunate that they have missed his philosophical criticism of modernity and confused it with a dismissal and damnation of modern art.

For the man who formed the foundations of his thinking in the furnace of World War II, the stakes were high. Ideas reflected in modern art were not just neutral or nice, coincidental concepts. They were loaded with philosophical presuppositions as to the meaning of reality. When art institutions went out of their way to evangelize, one might say, for the cause of modern art, there was more happening than just making the general public aware of new art. In Rookmaaker’s judgment, they were preaching and making propaganda for a view of reality totally antithetical to the acknowledgement of a creational order given by a loving and living Creator. It was “[r]eality... experienced as an alien power, irrational, strange, imprisoning humankind with its laws.... They experience their own lives as meaningless accidents and feel they have been thrown into a sick reality” (CW, 1:321).

Rookmaaker had come near to walking down the same road himself in the chaos of war until he became convinced of a richer and deeper way of experiencing life in Christian freedom. He longed for others to know such fullness of life. He understood the temptation of this route; and in many ways he had tremendous compassion for those captivated by their alienation and seduced by modern art as a surrogate religion. Rookmaaker took modern art with absolute seriousness. He decried Christians who dismissed it and ignored it. For him, it was a key indicator of the condition of the times. He saw value and a certain achievement in Picasso’s rejection of Enlightenment thinking, but he was not beguiled by the creed the artist went on to promote in its place. He also could appreciate modern art’s breaking down the dogma of naturalism espoused by much nineteenth-century academic art that in its own way distorted reality as much as any art of the twentieth century.

Rather than a specific style or particular spiritual pedigree, Rookmaaker was looking for evidence of the affirmation of our humanity situated in meaningful reality in contemporary art. His deep appreciation of the art of Georges Rouault’s dark, yet redemptive vision is a case in point to disabuse those who believe that he never had any appreciation for the art of the modern era. He could acknowledge the beauty in an abstract painting by Jackson Pollock. But the arrogance of willfully trashing a world still filled with evidences of God’s glory despite sin and evil incensed him. Still, he was aware that “[i]f modern art is some times oppressive and negative in direction, then we as believers [also] bear some of the responsibility” (CW, 4:370-371).

Graham Birtwistle, along with many others, learned that Rookmaaker was not an intransigent opponent of modern art but rather a critic with whom one could have a meaningful dialogue, one who could open up understanding on both sides of a conversation. Birtwistle was not sidelined into writing on some “safe” and approved area but dealt with art that Rookmaaker had little liking for or personal sympathy with, to say the least. His doctoral dissertation took up a reevaluation of COBRA (acronym for Copenhagen, Brussels, Amsterdam), a movement as well as a style of post-World War II art deriving highly charged, abstracted imagery from prehistoric, primitive, or folk sources of art. Rookmaaker took his students seriously as intellectual partners who could bring insight to him even as he sought to instruct them. He was not the kind of professor one dare not cross with a different opinion or perspective. He might not agree, but he would listen and question in a way that engendered growth and maturity in the thinking of his students. He could release his students to become who they were supposed to be. They did not have to be little clones of him.

Many students like Birtwistle became his friends. In this way much leads back again to J.P.A. Mekkes, Hans’s wise mentor who knew how to grow reciprocity and collegiality out of differences in age and status and understanding. Mekkes mediated the mystery of mentoring to him well.

In the spirit of Mekkes, Hans also became the kind of person who saw promise in people before they completely recognized their own giftedness. Mekkes wrote when Hans received his doctorate that it pleased him to address him with a title he had always seen before his name. Rookmaaker often looked penetratingly into a person’s potential in the same way that Mekkes gazed into his.

One of the most dramatic instances of Rookmaaker’s talent scouting skill was with John Walford, who presently is professor of art history at Wheaton College in Illinois. In the late 1960s Walford was a young man living in London and trying to find himself and a purpose to live for. Although he had studied law for four years out of a sense of obligation to his family, his heart was not in it. He loved poking around art galleries and antique shops and began to dabble in buying and selling paintings, though there was no particular appreciation of art in his background.

In a conversation with a friend, Walford mentioned he had just bought a seventeenth-century Dutch painting. Immediately his friend suggested that he ought to meet Professor Rookmaaker and ask him about the picture. Little did he know what he was getting himself into. Rookmaaker not only responded to him—he turned up on his doorstep unexpectedly the morning after he and his friends had had an expansive evening in his flat. The dapper Dutch professor did not seemed bothered at all by the disarray of the young man’s dwelling. As unpromising as an encounter like this might have seemed, it was the beginning of a course of care for Walford that would transform his life and give him a vocation.

By the time Rookmaaker met John Walford he was no stranger in Great Britain and knew dozens of young artists throughout the country. He frequently spoke at L’Abri Fellowship conferences at Ashburnham Place in Sussex. Meryl Fergus (later Doney), who served in the late 1960s as a traveling secretary for British art colleges with Inter-Varsity Fellowship (today UCCF) and her successor, Tony Wales, were nearly worn out from accompanying the Dutch dynamo around to speaking engagements at universities, colleges, and various conferences. After these events they would usually stay up nearly half the night with their guest speaker while he discussed ideas with students into the early morning hours over coffee or drinks in their lodgings or in some establishment that stayed open.

Rookmaaker drew close and was particularly encouraging to a number of young artists in the British Midlands. Today most of these artists have well-established reputations. Paul Martin, painter and printmaker as well as skilled in ceramics and sculpture, teaches at the Leith School of Art in Edinburgh and regularly receives commissions for his artwork, which has taken a direction informed by his adherence to the Orthodox Church. Martin Rose is a distinguished portrait painter with work hanging in the National Portrait Gallery in London. Kate Rose, printmaker, teaches art, as does her husband, Martin, at the Birkdale School (Sheffield) and has work in the collections of The Arts Council of Great Britain and the Sheffield Art Galleries.

Meryl Doney, who also benefited greatly from Rookmaaker’s personal encouragement, has gone on to become an art impresario. With her husband, Malcolm, she co-hosts The Art Room (www.theartroom.net), a project to promote work by artists who revel in paint and to provide rich aesthetic nourishment for daily living rather than recondite ideas for cognoscenti. She has also coauthored with Malcolm The Oxford Children’s A to Z of Art (1999). Meryl has written literally dozens of books on arts and crafts, serves on the research and development team of the Hayward Gallery on London’s South Bank, and was involved in producing a major exhibition entitled “Presence: Images of Christ for the Third Millennium” (2004) at several English cathedral sites.

Superficiality was not in Rookmaaker’s vocabulary. He exhibited incredible quality in his personal relationships, even as they expanded exponentially. He did not forget about the young fellow back in London who was not an artist but who loved art—namely, John Walford. From studying law, Walford had moved to teaching school. When Rookmaaker met up with him again, he bluntly told him he was wasting his time at teaching and that he should develop his God-given interests and come to study art history with him in the Netherlands. Walford was stunned at the thought. Could he not study art history in England, in his own mother tongue? Birtwistle seems to have been the one who challenged Walford by asking whether he would be willing to study theology with an atheist. His compatriot convinced him that being taught art history based on materialist suppositions was not much different. Finally Walford braced himself to learn Dutch and submit himself to an invaluable apprenticeship of not only learning the academic requirements for a career in art history with his mentor, but a mission to cultivate a love of the arts in the church that would lead to a renewal of making art among Christians.

From Rookmaaker’s well-planted seed of insight into Walford’s talent, a thriving and fruitful tree has grown. John is the author of a major book on the great seventeenth-century Dutch landscape artist Jacob van Ruisdael (Jacob Van Ruisdael and the Perception of Landscape) (Yale, 1992) and also wrote Great Themes in Art (Prentice-Hall, 2002), an important general history of art, creatively structured thematically as well as chronologically in order to engage students in reflecting through art on spirituality, the self, nature, and the city. In turn, Walford has poured out his Rookmaaker inheritance on his talented student James Romaine, who confidently careens along writing crisp, culturally engaged art criticism even as he engages in serious art-historical research. Romaine’s Objects of Grace: Conversations on Creativity and Faith (Square Halo Books, 2002) brings together, without a whiff of self-consciousness, the dynamic interaction of faith and art in the lives of ten very different types of artists. In an essay he wrote entitled, “Creator, Creation, and Creativity” in It was Good: Making Art to the Glory of God, edited by Ned Bustard (Square Halo Books, 2000), Romaine exegetes and illuminates the power of Michelangelo’s biblical vision to be vital down to our day and to honor the Giver of all gifts even as multitudes of people mill about the Sistine Chapel viewing his magnificent art.

The legacy of Hans Rookmaaker lives on in the freshness and fidelity of work like this. Nor is it coincidental that Ned Bustard, the publisher of Square Halo Books, has been deeply influenced by Rookmaaker. Bustard says that after reading Modern Art and the Death of a Culture, for a decade he kept that tome on his nightstand, as it was one of the few credible books he could find linking being an artist and a Christian.

When Graham Birtwistle and then John Walford arrived in Holland to study with Rookmaaker, they encountered several worlds that their professor already inhabited and that they needed to discover. Hans did not have to go abroad to find an audience or following, though perhaps the prophet was not always appreciated as much as he could have been in his own land. He was a man in motion, incredibly involved in the life of his profession, country, causes, and church.

One of the first of h...

Table of contents

• COVER PAGE
• TITLE PAGE
• COPYRIGHT
• CONTENTS
• PREFACE
• ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
• ONE
• TWO
• THREE
• FOUR
• FIVE
• SIX
• SEVEN
• EIGHT
• APPENDIX I:
• APPENDIX II: