The Image of Christ in Modern Art

Richard Harries

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781409463818
• eBook ISBN: 9781317027904
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

The Image of Christ in Modern Art explores the challenges presented by the radical and rapid changes of artistic style in the 20th century to artists who wished to relate to traditional Christian imagery. In the 1930s David Jones said that he and his contemporaries were acutely conscious of 'the break', by which he meant the fragmentation and loss of a once widely shared Christian narrative and set of images. In this highly illustrated book, Richard Harries looks at some of the artists associated with the birth of modernism such as Epstein and Rouault as well as those with a highly distinctive understanding of religion such as Chagall and Stanley Spencer. He discusses the revival of confidence associated with the rebuilding of Coventry Cathedral after World War II and the commissioning of work by artists like Henry Moore, Graham Sutherland and John Piper before looking at the very testing last quarter of the 20th century. He shows how here, and even more in our own time, fresh and important visual interpretations of Christ have been created both by well known and less well known artists. In conclusion he suggests that the modern movement in art has turned out to be a friend, not a foe of Christian art.Through a wide and beautiful range of images and insightful text, Harries explores the continuing challenge, present from the beginning of Christian art, as to how that which is visual can in some way indicate the transcendent.

Chapter 1
The Break

The artist and poet David Jones said that he and all his contemporaries were acutely aware of what he called ‘The Break’.1 By this he meant two things. First, the dominant cultural and religious ideology that had unified Europe for more than 1,000 years no longer existed. All that was left were fragmentary individual visions. Secondly, the world is now dominated by technology, so that the arts seem to be marginalised. They are of no obvious use in such a society, and their previous role as signs no longer has any widespread public resonance. Their work was ‘idiosyncratic and personal in expression and experimental in technique, intimate and private rather than public and corporate’.2 ‘The priest and the artist are already in the catacombs, but separate catacombs, for the technician divides to rule.’3 There was no corporate tradition and, he argued, one could not be looked for without a renewal of the whole culture. Writing after World War II, he remarked that the situation at that time was even more pronounced and dire than it had seemed in the 1930s.4 This was a problem with which Jones wrestled all his life in both his poetry and painting, and it is arguable that his failure to resolve it to his satisfaction resulted in both his personal breakdowns and the complex strangeness of some of his work. His thought on this subject, as well as his art, will be discussed in more detail in Chapter 3.

David Jones and his contemporaries believed that this radical break with the past occurred in the nineteenth century. It is however arguable that it occurred before that. In a perceptive article in the Spectator in 1935 discussing Jacob Epstein’s Ecce Homo, Anthony Blunt thought the break occurred much earlier.5 He pointed out that in a society where religion is a natural part of life, religious art emerges with equal naturalness. But since the Enlightenment religion has not been woven into the texture of our culture, and artists who wish to convey a religious vision will almost invariably produce work which is private, out of step with the dominant culture and idiosyncratic, a good example being William Blake (1757–1827). In the nineteenth century an attempt was made to solve this problem by the revival of a medieval style, as with the Gothic Revival, or the early Italian one, as in the case of the Pre-Raphaelites. But Blunt did not think these attempts really met the challenge of the modern world, and were in fact an artifice for avoiding it. But whenever the break occurred, ‘The great difficulty which has faced religious artists in Europe for about a century is that our natural tradition for expressing religious feeling is utterly used up and dead.’

Christian art was once part of what the distinguished art critic, the late Peter Fuller, once called a ‘symbolic order’. This consisted of shared narratives and recognised images through which the deeper meaning of life could be explored. This has gone. ‘The disassociation between art and faith is not written in stone but is not easy to overcome’, as the contemporary artist Roger Wagner has observed. He writes that there are some formidable obstacles:

To begin with, there is the problem of style. The problem of how to avoid mere pastiche of what has gone before – how to bring freshness to subjects that have been treated so often that they feel used up – is not a new one. But whereas artists in the past inherited a broadly uniform language that was at any rate a starting point, contemporary artists faced with an overwhelming plurality are compelled to choose a language of their own, and, in choosing, to exclude a part of the potential audience. A private language chosen out of a competing Babel cannot speak to everyone. But stylistic problems of this kind are only a beginning. Much more formidable than the problem of finding an artistic language is the problem of finding a forum in which to speak. In an art world where novelty and shock value are highly prized, work expressive of any kind of religious commitment is unlikely to find a ready welcome. It is difficult, for instance, to imagine a conventionally religious work winning the Turner Prize.6

He goes on to say that this would not matter if the Church was commissioning art, but with a few honourable exceptions, he thought this was not happening.

If what Jones called ‘the break’ was the main reason for the disassociation of the church and modern art, the church itself must accept responsibility for its own role in this cleavage. This responsibility is one of the major themes of Keith Walker’s book Images or Idols? He has written:

Whilst the cultural thrust of the times has had something to do with the estrangement between sacred visual art and the Church, blame must lie with the Church, both in clinging to an outdated theology and being unwilling to venture into an aspect of cultural life where once it claimed authority and admiration.7

One result of this situation is that the last 100 years of art have been characterised by radical and rapid changes in style. So the question behind this book is: how did artists who wished to relate to traditional Christian themes in some way do so whilst retaining their artistic integrity? How could they be fully of their time yet also standing in a tradition that goes back to the art of the catacombs in the third century? How could they find their own voice in a way that enabled them to be at once an authentically modern artist, and recognisably one belonging to all Christian time?

If that challenge is not formidable enough, there is an even greater one, which belongs not just to our own time but which has been there from the beginning of Christian representation and which remains in every age. How can what is invisible be rendered by what is visible, what is infinite by what is finite, what is transcendent by what is human and limited? The answer of Islam and Judaism in most ages is that it cannot be so rendered. Islamic art at its best, for example in the mosques of Sinan in Istanbul, conveys to the visitor an overwhelming sense of Tawhid, the unutterable, transcendent unity of God, which is way beyond anything that can be seen by the human eye or conceived by the human imagination. Christians want to affirm that truth, whilst suggesting it is not the whole truth. John of Damascus, the great standard-bearer of Orthodox Christian belief in the East in the eighth century, said that what God is in himself is totally incomprehensible and unknowable. That is why there is no attempt in Orthodox art to depict God the Father. And that is why it has always been such a crude mistake when this has been done in the Western tradition, as for example in the depictions of God as an old man with a white beard. Of course we do not try to represent the invisible God, said John; but the invisible has been made visible. That is why we must have an iconic art. This means that art is not just an optional extra to the Christian faith, but is essential to it. We are called to try to convey, through the material of paint and canvas and stone, the fact that the invisible has been made visible; the Word has been made flesh.

The challenge remains: how to do this? How can an assemblage of paint or a carved stone indicate that other dimension which has become part of our world of space and time? The problem is further compounded by the Christian conviction that in taking our humanity upon himself Christ lived a truly human, and indeed an essentially hidden life. It was not one that drew attention to itself through shock and awe. It did not overwhelm. A recent magnificent exhibition of bronzes at the Royal Academy had one room given over to images of gods from all ages and cultures. As I entered the room I reflected on what I felt about this. How could God be represented? Surely it would not be right for Jesus – whom Christians believe to be ‘God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God’ as the Nicene Creed puts it – to be included in a room as just one more god in a category of gods? Some of the images were very beautiful, like the Buddhas of the Gandhara and Gupta periods; others were very striking, such as the dancing Nataraja Shiva of Hinduism. What could possibly distinguish the one and only true God of Christian belief? Then, there he was: a thoroughly human Jesus – Seated Christ by Adriaen de Vries (1556–1626), with nothing to distinguish him from any other human being.8 God is revealed in a truly human, largely hidden, life; a life like the rest of us.

The problem for the artist wanting to depict the Christ of this truth is not essentially different from that of the theologian wanting to use words to understand who he is. It was the problem that preoccupied the Christian Church and its councils for nearly eight centuries. Jesus is completely human, and completely God. How can he be both and at the same time one person? It was this issue that lay behind not only the paradoxical formulations of the church councils, but also the gradual emergence of an officially endorsed system of Christian iconography in what we term icons. It is easy, we might say, to depict Jesus as a human being of his time, essentially anonymous in the midst of other human beings. So, in early Christian art he can be seen as a Roman youth with a sheep on his back; or, to give a modern example, a frail human being, as in Mark Wallinger’s ‘Ecco Homo’. But what is there about that ordinary anonymous figure that makes us think that he is also ‘God of God, Light of Light, Very God of very God’? The temptation is to make the scene highly theatrical as in Baroque art, or highly emotional and dramatic as in the art of the Counter-Reformation. But this misses the point, that the divine has to be recognised in and through the essentially hidden, as Kierkegaard insisted. Yet there has to be something about that hidden figure that makes a difference to what we see and how we see not only him but life itself. As Rowan Williams has put it:

Some of the history of Christian art is about the tension between recognising that the change associated with Jesus is incapable of representation and recognising that for the change to be communicable it must in some way be represented.9

Williams suggests that the element of irony is one way in which this divine difference is suggested, and that when this is lost, we get the banalities of so much Christian art, particularly in the nineteenth century, when Jesus is depicted as ‘robed and radiant, calm and stately’. In this banal art the style is the very opposite of ironical or transforming; ‘it renders visible the obviousness of religious sentiment of a certain kind, and so makes practically unthinkable any perception other than that already familiar’. Such art can act as a ‘ casual reinforcement of shared piety’ but cannot bring about the reference-changing character of Jesus’.

Any genuine artist helps to change the way we see things, and so for the artist seeking to respond to Christ there will be something of ‘almost paradigmatic seriousness’ in the challenge. So:

We watch expectantly as the artist searches for the appropriate form of the uncanny, waiting to see if our world becomes strange as a result of having this particular stranger, Jesus, introduced into it.

The church has sought different ways of responding to this challenge. In the Catacombs and the carvings of the fourth and fifth centuries artists drew on the features of both Dionysius and Apollo on the one hand, and Jupiter on the other, in order to bring out different aspects of his divinity. Looking for a literal likeness of Jesus, we find this contradictory. They evidently did not. The most obvious and long-lasting response was a very simple one, the adoption of the halo. The halo indicated an aura of divinity – divine status in the case of Christ and holy status for his devout followers.

This most fundamental challenge of all, how to indicate the transcendent through the mundane, has of course remained with artists in the period covered by this study. But, as I shall suggest towards the end, it may be that modern art, for all the difficulties it has posed to artists who wanted to reflect Christian imagery in some way, has at least delivered them from the twin tyrannies of literalness and pastiche. Modern art has opened up new ways of indicating that there is something more going on in the picture than straightforward depiction.

1 David Jones, The Anathemata, Faber, 1952, p.15.

2 David Jones, ‘Religion and the Muses’ (1941), in Epoch and Artist, Faber, 2008, p.98.

3 Ibid., p.103.

4 David Jones, ‘Notes on the 1930s’ (1965), in The Dying Gaul and Other Writings, Faber, 2008, p.49.

5 The article was printed in The Spectator on 15 March 1935.

6 Roger Wagner, ‘Art and Faith’, in Public Life and the Place of the Church: Reflections to Honour the Bishop of Oxford, ed. Michael Brierley, Ashgate, 2006, p.133.

7 Walker, Images or Idols?, p.45. The record was particularly bleak until post-World War II, but now, as will be explored in the last chapter, the situation is much more promising. Walker offers practical as well as theological guidance for the commissioning of art by churches.

8 Bronze, ed. David Ekserdjian, Royal Academy of Arts, 2012, pp. 205 and 272.

9 This and the next quotations are from a characteristically brilliant essay by Rowan Williams in Presence: Images of Christ in the Third Millennium, Biblelands, 2004, pp.5–8.

Chapter 2
The Explosion of Modernism

German Expressionism

Leaving aside the special category of art that sought to depict a biblical scene or Christian image, most art before the end of the nineteenth century was understood in terms of a response: a response to people in the form of portraits or a response to nature depicted in landscapes or still life. Expressionism is a term used to describe the move away from art as a response, to art as the expression of powerful personal emotion through the use of colour and line. Although its antecedents lie in the late nineteenth century, especially in the work of Van Gogh, as a movement it is p...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Dedication
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• About the Author
• Introduction
• 1 The Break
• 2 The Explosion of Modernism
• 3 Distinctive Individual Visions
• 4 Catholic Elegance and Joy
• 5 Post-War Recovery of Confidence
• 6 Searching for New Ways
• 7 A Vibrant Contemporary Scene
• Index