Modern Art and the Life of a Culture

The Religious Impulses of Modernism

Jonathan A. Anderson, William A. Dyrness

• Publisher: IVP Academic
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9780830899975
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: History of Modern Art

Christianity Today Book of the Year Award of Merit - Culture and the ArtsFor many Christians, engaging with modern art raises several questions: Is the Christian faith at odds with modern art? Does modernism contain religious themes? What is the place of Christian artists in the landscape of modern art?Nearly fifty years ago, Dutch art historian and theologian Hans Rookmaaker offered his answers to these questions when he published his groundbreaking work, Modern Art and the Death of a Culture, which was characterized by both misgivings and hopefulness.While appreciating Rookmaaker's invaluable contribution to the study of theology and the arts, this volume—coauthored by an artist and a theologian—responds to his work and offers its own answers to these questions by arguing that there were actually strong religious impulses that positively shaped modern visual art. Instead of affirming a pattern of decline and growing antipathy towards faith, the authors contend that theological engagement and inquiry can be perceived across a wide range of modern art—French, British, German, Dutch, Russian, and North American—and through particular works by artists such as Gauguin, Picasso, David Jones, Caspar David Friedrich, van Gogh, Kandinsky, Warhol, and many others.This Studies in Theology and the Arts volume brings together the disciplines of art history and theology and points to the signs of life in modern art in order to help Christians navigate these difficult waters.The Studies in Theology and the Arts? series encourages Christians to thoughtfully engage with the relationship between their faith and artistic expression, with contributions from both theologians and artists on a range of artistic media including visual art, music, poetry, literature, film, and more.

Part 1

Critical Contexts

1

Introduction

Religion and the Discourse of Modernism

God is almost always the wrong word when it comes to modern art, and every viewer has to find her own way among the other options.

James Elkins1

Let us say this clearly: our modern, secular discourse emerges from a Christian context that contemporary discussions of art ignore because they trace the roots of the discourse on art only to Kant and to the European classification of the fine arts that emerged in the eighteenth century . . . often ignoring the broadly religious context in which even ancient sources were embedded in the Early Modern discourse.

Donald Preziosi and Claire Farago2

What use did the artist make of pictorial tradition; what forms, what schemata, enabled the painter to see and to depict? It is often seen as the only question. It is certainly a crucial one, but when one writes the social history of art one is bound to see it in a different light; one is concerned with what prevents representation as much as what allows it; one studies blindness as much as vision.

T. J. Clark3

Publishing a book that explores the religious (particularly Christian) influences and impulses running through modern art may seem an act of folly or hubris. During the rise of high modernism—which we will take to extend roughly from 1800 to 1970—the mutual influences and connections between visual art and Christianity are not obvious, at least not in most histories of the modern period. In fact, from reading the academic literature on this period, one might believe that religion played almost no constructive role at all in the development of modern art, other than as adversary and rival. Indeed, the dominant narratives of modern art portray it as achieving a progressive independence from religious influence, even as it usurped roles once confined to traditional religion. In these pages we want to contest and revise this narrative.

In part this narrative rests on a more sweeping story of secularization, which has in recent years come under attack—so it makes sense for us to begin our account there. Nearly all quarters of academia today are grappling with what appears to be a “return of religion.” In the late 1990s, the sociologist of religion Peter Berger published his repudiation of “secularization theory”—the hypothesis that modernization implies and produces a decline of religion in both social institutions and individual belief—contending that contrary to his own predictions the modern world is in fact desecularizing.4 The two exceptions he identified (the primary spheres in which the secularization thesis still holds descriptive power) were western Europe and the elite “international subculture” of higher education.5 But in the nearly two decades since Berger’s article first appeared, even these exceptions no longer align with the theory.

Much of the pressure that has challenged secularization theory has been historical and sociological: the thesis simply doesn’t describe what has happened in the world over the past few decades, nor does it square with current sociodemographic projections for the coming decades.6 So it seems that some significant blind spots were intrinsic to the theory, which have corresponded with some serious misunderstandings about the ongoing influence of religious life within modernity. As some scholars have recently argued, “whatever the causes of this scholarly inattention to religion—and they are many and varied—the consequences are clear enough: some of the most important features of modern life have been misapprehended or ignored entirely.”7Alongside this pressure from sociology, there has also been a gradual and decisive unraveling of the historical, philosophical and theoretical fabric of secularization theory.8 It has become evident that “secularization has been as much ‘a program’ as it has been an empirically observable reality”9—a program fueled by questionable premises and maintained through selective fields of vision. It is becoming increasingly the case that understanding modernity as “a straightforward narrative of progress from the religious to the secular is no longer acceptable.”10

While this does not imply a return to religious belief on the part of most scholars, it does mean that religious belief and practice are back on the table with a visibility that they have not had for decades, both as objects of study and as resources for thinking and inquiring. In January 2005 Stanley Fish recounted in The Chronicle of Higher Education:

When Jacques Derrida died [in October 2004] I was called by a reporter who wanted to know what would succeed high theory and the triumvirate of race, gender, and class as the center of intellectual energy in the academy. I answered like a shot: religion. . . . Announce a course with “religion” in the title, and you will have an overflow population. Announce a lecture or panel on “religion in our time” and you will have to hire a larger hall.11

The disciplines of art history and criticism (similarly to literary history and criticism) are still working out what this will mean. In many ways these fields remain deeply enmeshed in the secularization thesis, but things are changing. In 2003, six years after Berger’s original article appeared, Yale art historian Sally Promey published an essay in The Art Bulletin arguing that the scholarship on American art history was experiencing (and needed to welcome) the “return” of religion to its field of inquiry.12 And over the past two decades an increasing number of other scholars (from an increasing number of perspectives) have begun exploring the problems and possibilities of including religion in the study of modern art: James Elkins, David Morgan, Debora Silverman, John Golding, Andrew Spira, Eleanor Heartney, Mark C. Taylor, Daniel Siedell, Lynn Gamwell, Erika Doss, Cordula Grewe, James Romaine, Donald Preziosi, Charlene Spretnak, Aaron Rosen and many others.13

The subsequent results have tended to be noisy and confusing, taking on board a wild array of positions and interests, but there are two general ways that this return is shaping today’s art discourse. On the one hand, there is a growing sense that art history and criticism cannot adequately account for the depth and complexity of how art “means” in a given cultural context without accounting, even if only on a strictly sociological level, for the religious backgrounds and dynamics in that society. This is not a recovery of belief as much as it is the reinclusion of religious institutions, histories and practices into the relevant evidence base for historical-critical study. As Promey sees it, for example, the return of religion is a necessary part of “an effort to recuperate a closer approximation to the historical whole, to include within scholarly purview the full range of practices that make images work.”14 Thus, even from a strictly (materialist) sociological perspective, it is becoming a rhetorical question: “how much of social life can we understand if we exclude religion from our analyses?”15 But Promey has something further in mind: the long histories of art out of which modernism grows have been, for the most part, deeply religious histories, even if these have been suppressed. She argues that “time and again we encounter evidence that secular modernity in the West has not been what it has made itself out to be. It has, in fact, been shaped through a process of purging, purifying, and neutralizing, from within itself, those [religious] things most dear to it, those things most fearful: casting them out into other vessels in contrast to which it has then come to understand itself.”16 How can the meanings of modern art be sustained over the long term, when these dear and fearful roots are uniformly ignored?

On the other hand, the return of religion has also begun functioning on more personal and philosophical levels. Numerous scholars—many who still self-identify as resolutely secular—are voicing their own personal “disenchantment with modern disenchantment,”17 and they are beginning to conduct their scholarship from this position, exploring the possibilities for fostering “reenchantment” in the visual arts. This body of literature pushes past many of the sociological concerns that drive the reconsideration of religion in art and actually brings religion, spirituality and theology into the interpretative encounter with the work. In his recent book Arts of Wonder, Jeffrey Kosky argues precisely along these lines:

In denying themselves recourse to religious vocabulary or theological conceptuality, modern art critics give up what would be advantageous to a profound encounter with the works in question. Religion and theology has [sic] let me name what the art critic often names and addresses with only limited vocabulary. In this sense, it lets me prolong the encounter with the work of art, deepening the event of its coming intimately over me and bringing its strangeness to light.18

Kosky’s aim is not to revive religion but to enchant secularity: he wants to “break the necessary connection between secularity and disenchantment,” thus opening “a future for a more appealing secularity, one full of charm.”19 As he sees it, the reigning narrative of art cannot sustain its value without recourse to religion, or at least to a discourse that borrows heavily from religious tradition.

Daniel Siedell has similarly argued that religious vocabulary and theological conceptuality are uniquely capable of naming an important level of meaning in modern and contemporary art, but by contrast he pursues this kind of critical engagement from a position that inhabits religious belief. He argues that “a critical perspective nourished by the Nicene Christian faith can contribute to the understanding of contemporary art” by expanding our sensitivities to “the sacramental and liturgical identity of human practice” within the arts.20 Siedell takes his lead from Paul’s discourse in the council of the Areopagus about “the unknown god” (Acts 17:16-34), and he orients his criticism in its terms: “Altars to the unknown god are strewn about the historical landscape of modern and contemporary art. They are often remarkably beautiful, compelling, and powerful. But they have been too often ignored or ­condemned out of hand.” Siedell’s critical method is thus “the result of choosing the way of St. Paul: to take the cultural artifacts and to reveal and illuminate their insights into what they are only able to point to, not to name. But point they do, and they should be examined and celebrated as such.”21 From a wide array of positions, both secular and religious, there are increasing examples of modern art criticism becoming a realm of theological thinking.

This does not mean that religious belief enjoys any kind of pride of place in the discourse of art, but it does mean that religious histories, practices and theological traditions have a renewed relevance and weight in the discussion. It is probably most accurate to say that the scholarship of modern art is becoming increasingly “postsecular,” emerging into an indeterminate space beyond the lifespan of the secularization thesis. As Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor makes clear, this postsecular space doesn’t necessarily entail a return to traditional religious faith; rather (1) it is “a time in which the hegemony of the mainstream master narrative of secularization will be more and more challenged,” and (2) this will be accompanied by “a new age of religious searching, whose outcome no one can foresee.”22 In other words, if one effect of modernity was the possibility of envisioning the secular without any recourse to the sacred or transcendent, then the discourse of postsecularity throws open a wide range of possibilities for envisioning the modern without recourse to a reductive secularism.23 At any rate, simply the openness of this condition invites the reintroduction of religious questioning back into the conversation.

However, there are still numerous problems that must be faced in the midst of this widening conversation. First, there are historical problems. The postsecular turn is not only shifting the conditions for the production and interpretation of art in the present and near future; it also begs for a rereading of the recent past. The canonical texts of modern art history were extensively shaped (sometimes explicitly so) by the secularization thesis, and as this thesis is called into question so too are the narratives that have been structured by it. The histories of modernism will be increasingly opened to reconsideration along religious and theological lines of inquiry, but this must be done carefully and with historical rigor. The theological content of modernist artworks and the religious contexts that shaped them are complex and sometimes deeply conflicted, and the most helpful scholarship in this discussion will be that which brings greater clarity to these complexities without neatly smoothing them out for ideological convenience. Second, there are theoretical problems to deal with here: namely, it is unclear how theological reconsiderations of modern art are to proceed in terms of interpretive method. Rereading modernist history in a postsecular setting pl...