Category: Theology and art

Guernica – the novel and the painting

Guernica, Dave Boling, (Picador)

This is a
carefully researched novel about Basque village life in the 30's seen through
the eyes of three generations, culminating in the atrocity that was Guernica.
Picasso's presence is woven throughout, and the novelist makes him neither hero nor villain, but
simply what he is; an artist who lives with the ambiguity of his own life story
and the politics of his time. His painting of the raids on Guernica (which is
brilliantly repulsive in conception and creation) is an example of art as moral
outrage and political protest – and of how the representation of human anguish
when it is well done as in Picasso's Guernica, is potent not by its power to
attract, but by its power to repel. The medium conveys exactly human recoil
from the evil the painting depicts.

It’s an interesting
thought, that art, so naturally identified with the creation of beauty, grace
and human loveliness, is equally potent in depicting ugliness, violence and
human suffering. There are some paintings that are hideous both in their
content and in their execution, and that makes them great art because they
compel attention to the human experience of that which dehumanises, degrades
and violates. In class last year when looking at artistic representations of
Jesus on the cross, there were several images which students found repulsive,
even upsetting, there was “no beauty that we should desire him”. Crucifixion is
utter unremitting cruelty, and some artists refuse to surround such inhumane
infliction with light or hope or theological concessions. Likewise, Picasso in
his painting of the atrocity of Guernica, was unsparing of the sensitivities of
the public viewers of his art. There are times when art speaks truth, the
representation of a subject contributes to its reality, the medium successfully
conveys the message, the viewer is forcibly confronted with what we would
rather not see and think, and thus moral judgement is demanded by the stark
uncompromising portrayal of moral evil.

There is no
comfortable distance from which to view Picasso’s Guernica. It is an offence,
searingly effective, and the depth of negative reaction to its images and
overall composition is precisely the intent – a jolt in the nerve centre of our
moral perceptions and political complacency. This novel doesn’t operate at this
kind of level, at least not self-consciously. But by giving human face and
character to the villagers, by drawing us into the family life of the Basque
people, and by making us care for the outcomes in the stories of their lives,
such personal and moral reactions are inevitably evoked. Near the end, there is a beautifully conceived insight into how human beings deal with loss and love. It comes as a comment on how two men coped with the violent deaths of their wives and children in the bombing raid:

"…if you lose someone you love, you need to redistribute your feelings rather than surrender them. You give them to whoever is left, and the rest you turn towards something that will keep you moving forward."

So the novel is a romance and a lament, a celebration of human courage and consolation, an affirmation of the love that humans have for each other and the finite miracle of love that survives brutal death; but all this set against the chronic capacity of human beings to hate, or worse, to not care about the consequences for other human beings of military action and political violence. And Picasso's painting, now an iconic image, an artistic monument of 25 feet by 12 feet, ensures that the name of a the small historic town of Guernica is not forgotten. And Picasso's poignant image of the dove flying over broken weapons of war is also a necessary and urgent reminder that human creatvity, industry and reason, can also be persuaders and builders of peace. This is a fine novel, about a remarkable painting, a flawed artistic genius, and an act of human barbarity that changed the nature of war.

The book ends with the following few lines. It isn't a spoiler to quote it. The opposite in fact, it's an invitation to read the book, and enter with moral imagination the experience that inspired a masterpiece of poltical protest, moral outrage and symbolic resistance to war.

Picasso is sitting in his favourite cafe in Paris. He is approached by a German officer.

"One officer who considered himself culturally advanced approached the artist as he sipped his coffee at a table beneath the green pavement awninga. The officer held a reproduction of the mural Guernica, barely larger than a postcard size.

'Pardon me', he said, holding the card out. 'You did this didn't you?'

Picasso put his cup delicately on its saucer, turned to the picture, then to the officer, and responded, 'No. You did.'

23 July 2010
The biggest book I’ve ever bought! :)) – and the artist as alternative exegete

Two books recently bought. One huge, as in mega-big. I didn't look at the dimensions when I clicked. (36x43x3). Don't care. It's a coffee table book, which could also mean put legs on it and it is big enough for a coffee table! But it is a gorgeously produced, outrageously sized, sumptuously heavy, ridiculously unwieldy, impossible to read in bed, but impossible not to read, study of Johannes Vermeer and His World. And the price is £15 from Amazon! There are 10 posters for framing included and I reckon any half decent print shop would charge you more than £15 for one of them, let alone the book and the set.

There is one painting in particular I want to spend some time with – Vermeer's interpretation of the Martha and Mary story. Of which more in a later post. But this volume is a labour of love; each of the confirmed Vermeer paintings is reproduced, with good background notes, exposition of key details, and building up to an education in the understanding and appreciation of artistic development from gift to genius. What becomes progressively clearer in studying the paintings is the way the eyes of the subjects are portrayed. How they look, the direction and focus, the use of light, each draw the attention of the viewer, and thus influence the way we look, and point us towards what we ought to see. In other words the artist is providing his own hermeneutic, and with Vermeer that includes provoking and directing emotional attentiveness "by rendering visible particular moods and feelings". One of the unmistakable responses to a Vermeer masterpiece is precisely this, the artist setting the emotional climate in which the painting can best be appropriated, and doing so by taking control of how the viewer looks and what it is the artist wants the viewer to notice.

Exegesis of a text requires, and is inevitably accompanied by, a set of hermeneutical assumptions, strategies, principles – which are themselves influenced by the capacity of the text to speak for itself. There is an equivalent process, when the text is not in words but in image. Visibility, seeing and reading the non-verbal text, is with an eye to apprehending the truth, the is-ness made visible and comprehensible not in words but in that emotional and spiritual intuition of the viewer that recognises the rightness, the fittingness, the yes factor in what is being viewed.

This is an important resource for theological nourishment, as well as a crucial insight for theological understanding. Much hermeneutical activity which surrounds the exegesis of words composed into texts, strongly focuses on meaning and truth. The equivalent hermeneutical activity in art focuses on the response of the viewer to beauty, and the search to understand the process by which the apprehension of beauty opens the mind to truth of another order. This painting is a pictorial exegesis of a gospel incident that has been deeply influential in the development of Christian spirituality, especially the unhelpful distinction between the active and the contemplative life. Vermeer portrays both women as having Jesus' attention, and there is little sense of one being preferred to the other. The active and the contemplative, the kitchen and the prayer stool, food and conversation, Martha and Mary, are equally disciples, and feeding the hungry Jesus is as important as listening to Jesus' words. Dag Hammarskjold, that surprisingly perceptive Christian and Secretary General of the UN, understood the given and creative tension of Christian obedience, that "the way to holiness lies through the world of action".

And Thomas Merton, who to my knowledge didn't write on this gospel incident, though one of the greatest apologists for the contemplative life in silence and solitude, nevertheless linked these spiritual disciplines of passive waiting (Mary) to the richer textured realities of active obedience in the world (Martha), and to demonstable Christian practices which embody and enflesh the virtues of peacemaking, love and social compassion. His finest writing is found in the collision, or perhaps the conflation, of contemplative and political theology, the fusion in his spirituality of prayer and protest, the insistence that true communion with God and love for the world are to be found both in the inward cohesion of a contemplative community, and in the outreaching and scattering of that community in Christian witness to a broken God-loved world. And it is not unimportant that some of his most telling statements are not in words, but in photographs, poems and calligraphic art. And some of his most piercing images are literary and in his best known essays. For Merton, word and image are equally effective conduits of those truths that shape and inspire patterns of behaviour and practice that are demonstrably Christian.

16 July 2010
Incarnational Theology and the Conceits of Art

The recent visit to Edinburgh and the National Galleries I was looking for nothing in particular except the Botticelli mentioned in a previous post. But I came across a couple of other paintings including this one, a work by the enigmatic and mysterious artist (or artists) known as the Master(s) of the Embroidered Foliage.

Close inspection shows why the name has become attached to paintings in this style. The foliage is painted to make it look like embroidery, and the effect gives the work a depth and texture that sets the central figure in what looks like a living landscape, and yet which is so different in style the human figures are made to appear more real, more immediate. The landscape intentionally appears as a human contrivance, embroidered foliage, a conceit that depicts the miracle of natural growth as the natural response of an organic creation to the One who gives life, calls to life, indeed is born as living flesh into the world.

But then, by placing the Virgin and child in the centre, on a bench with a richly embroidered back, and set against a landscape painted also in embroidered patterns, the realism of the mother and child, captured in subtle delicacy of colour and expression, is further emphasised in a way that carries profound incarnational implications. The real natural world is depicted through an artificial conceit, and the supernatural birth is depicted with realism and a degree of artistic sensitivity that it forces a contrast, and thus compels attention to the living centre of the painting.

The child's hand turning the page, pointing to the text, suggests the child and mother in a joint act of reading, interpreting, fulfilling. But it seems it is the child's hand turning the page, an act of precocious, even authoritative guidance – and the mother is looking at the child, not the book. Perhaps to the mother the child is the real text, the subject of whom the book speaks. The developed theology of the incarnation wrestles with immense and complex questions of humanity and divinity coinciding in the birth of Jesus. Nicea and Chalcedon stand as formulaic and historic statements, as the best the tradition could offer in words, reconciled to the limitations of language and vocabulary, and recognising that intellectually construed concepts always fall short of the divine realities expressed in the central doctrines of Christian faith. Incarnation and Christology, the relations of the Triune God, the initiating and inviting grace of God reaching out in a love impassioned purpose, eternal and yet scandalously specific in historic occurence. "The word became flesh and dwelt amongst us….God was in christ reconciling the world to himself…but when the fullness of time had come, God sent his son, born of a woman…."

13 July 2010