Incidit in Scyllam qui vult vitare Charybdim ~ Walter of Châtillon
Satan always sends error into the world in pairs that are opposites. His great hope is that you will get so upset about one of his errors that you’ll react into the opposite one, and he’s got you. ~ C.S. Lewis
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SCYLLA: L'ART SAINT-SULPICE
Colleen McDannell:
In 1862 Paris had at least a hundred and twenty-one firms that made and marketed the material culture of Catholicsm: holy water fonts, medals, statues, crucifixes, rosaries, holy cards, ex votos, religious jewelry, candles, scapulars, creches, wax Agnus Dei, lace pictures, and novena cards. Since the 1840's. Paris's Left Bank had become the worldwide center for the sale of liturgical arts (chalices, vestments, monstrances) and sacred arts (stained-glass windows, statues, church murals). The area around the rue Saint-Jacques and the church of Saint-Sulpice became synonymous with the objets de religion used in domestic worship and church art. What concerns me here is not the small objects which Catholic put in their pockets or placed in their home shrines. Rather, it is the debate over what was kitsch and what was art which originated with the domination of l'Art Saint-Sulpice in church decoration.[Material Christianity by Colleen McDannell. Yale University Press. 1995]
The shops in the Saint-Sulpice quarter sold [plaster] statues and other church furnishing made in factories outside Paris.... Plaster could be moulded and easily carved to achieve realistic images of Christ, Mary, the saints, and angels. Unlike the realistic statues of the Baroque period, l'Art Saint-Sulpice avoided the bloody and pained images of Christ and the martyrs. There was almost no decay or decomposition in l'Art Saint-Sulpice....
By the end of the 19th century, l'Art Saint-Sulpice became the international style of Catholic church art. From Ireland to Mexico to India or the United States, local art was replaced by goods either imported from France or copied from French standards. In the United States, the area around Barclay Street in Manhattan housed import firms that dealt with the French-produced religious arts and companies that made Catholic devotional goods.
Rev. Demetrio Zurbitu:
It would be said [in the future] that the artists [of the early 20th century] had ceded their posts to the merchants; it would seem that the sculptor and the goldsmith had no concern for making a beautiful object to inspire piety, but rather for making an industrial model able to be multiplied by the dozen. The noble carving of marble and wood had been laid aside before the invasion of common plaster. Lamps and candlesticks, and (infinitely sadder) chalices and ciboria were many times considered as mere hardware. And in this inundation of so many profane and vulgar objects, as wretched in form as in material, it would be useless to look for any sign of religious inspiration or even a recollection of the respect deserved by the noble destiny for which they were forged: honor to the House of God and participation in the most august sacrifice.... Everyone who desires to find in the temple surroundings conducive to the elevation of the spirit must condemn repeatedly the profanity of modern religious art.[Talleres de Arte and the Renovation of Liturgical Art by Rev. Demetrio Zurbitu Recalde, SJ. 1929]
Just about everything has been said about what is called the art of Saint-Sulpice - an ill-chosen phrase, it must be said, and one that is very insulting to an estimable Parisian parish, the more so because the scourge in question is world-wide in scope; about the diabolical ugliness, offensive to God and much more harmful than is generally believed to the spread of religion, of the majority of the objects turned out by modern manufacture for the decoration of churches.[Art and Scholasticism by Jacques Maritain. 1935]
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CHARYBDIS: L'ART SACRÉ
Alain Besançon:
L'Art Sacré stood at the center of an attempt to reconcile modern art and the French Catholic Church. Published in two series, before and after World War II, and, between 1937 and 1954, edited by two Dominicans, [Pie-Raymon] Régamey and [Marie-Alain] Couturier, it was the inspiration behind a few large-scale undertakings: the churches and chapels of Assy, Vence, Audincourt and Ronchamp. In 1950, very aggressive resistance surfaced, a consequence, in particular, of the crucifix by Germaine Richier added to the church in Assy. Fifty years from now, one article declared, who will remember Reverend Father Régamey and Reverend Father Couturier, with all their smug, naïve admiration of hideous works, some of them baroque, some monstrous, some Satanic?
[The Forbidden Image by Alain Besançon. University of Chicago Press. 2001]
TIME Magazine:
In 1925, at the age of 27, Pierre Couturier put away his brushes and became a Dominican monk. Years later, his spiritual superiors asked Pére Couturier what he thought of the present art in churches. His answer came with surprising vehemence. Our church art is in complete decay, he burst out. It is dead, dusty, academic - imitations of imitations... with no power to speak to modern man. Outside the Church the great modern masters have walked - Manet, Cézanne, Renoir, Van Gogh, Matisse, Picasso, Braque. The Church has not reached out, as once it would have, to bring them in....
Father Couturier's superiors were impressed. See what you can do, they told him....[Time Magazine. 20 June 1949]
White-robed, ascetic-looking Father Couturier... has become the light and power of a small but significant movement among French artists... In his spare time he has devoted his energies tirelessly to visiting the studios of artists everywhere and telling them that the Church is where their work belongs. In addition he founded, twelve years ago, the little magazine L'Art Sacré, which has had a measurable influence on French priests as well as artists.
Gradually he has won the interest of scoffers and agnostics among the painters, even including a few Communists (e.g. Picasso). Father Couturier welcomes them all, whatever the state of their faith. We start, he explains, with the assumption that artists are men and therefore sinners. If their sins are sometimes startling, it is because they are men of imagination, artists. But all spring from our culture and even our religion.... When some think themselves communist, it is as artists are communist, out of love for the poor. We must free them to work for us, give them the right to paint on our walls, and they will tell our great story as it has not been told in 500 years.
Father Couturier has several projects in various stages of completion. Sometimes they are delayed by ecclesiastics who have strenuously differing views about how a church should be decorated. But the work of Father Couturier is finding growing support among his fellow churchmen and also among such anticlericals as Henri Matisse, the grand old man of French painting.
In our day we are witnessing a peculiar outbreak of ugliness and brutality in the domain of art; yes, even in the field of Christian art. This morbid epidemic has the character of a deforming arthritism or elephantiasm or leprosy in art.... The late Cardinal Constantini, chairman of the Pontifical Academy of Art, speaks of visual blasphemies and figurative horrors in modernistic art, arousing a sense of repugnance and disgust. Our Lord, the Blessed Virgin Mary, the saints are pictured with cretinic faces and with hands and feet affected with elephantiasis. Christ, on the Cross, is portrayed as degraded and almost animal-like. We meet saints with monkey faces and in attitudes that remind one of a mental hospital or an institution for abnormal diseases. Many suspect - and not without reason - that we are face to face here with the infiltrations of Communism seeking to make religion ridiculous and repulsive, especially to the children.
[Msgr. Rudolph G. Bandas, Modernistic Art and Divine Worship. The American Ecclesiastical Review, 1960]
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A man who wants to understand the strange and frightening rise of Modernist art in the Catholic Church must first understand the state of Catholic art at the turn of the 20th century. L'Art Saint-Sulpice was the first Catholic art to be mass-produced and mass-marketed. It was cheap, uniform and sentimental; unhallowed by artisanal labor; not made to endure nor to live with / but made to sell and sell quickly.
To eyes looking from the other side of the Modernist crisis, the plaster statues of 1900 no longer look so bad; they are at least recognizable by subject and capable of fostering some sort of piety; for American Catholics, they are often the only familiar examples of old Catholic art.
But at the time of its manufacture, L'Art Saint-Sulpice was undoubtedly the very worst art that the Catholic Church had yet produced. Among those knowledgeable about the demands that history, liturgy and theology make on the Catholic artist, it was universally, and rightly, deplored. Nobody imagined that a worse style - so depraved that it would make even L'Art Saint-Sulpice look good by comparison - would later emerge.
In this context, the improbable rise of L'Art Sacré is more easily understood. Rev. Couturier and his friends argued that the only way for the Catholic Church to escape the banality of L'Art Saint-Sulpice was to embrace Modernism of the sort practiced by Picasso and LeCorbusier. This is the sacred equivalent of the Trotskyite art critic Clement Greenberg's famous contrast of kitsch and avant-garde.
The fallacy of Couturier's absurd argument (those are the only two options? really?) is obvious in retrospect, but many men of his time, appalled by the low standards of L'Art Saint-Sulpice, read it with sympathy. It is less understandable that some people today still take it seriously, now that its disastrous results are known.
Most of Catholicism fell into one artistic error in the late 19th and early 20th centuries: cheapness, sentimentality, mass production. It then rashly followed a man who, promising escape, drove it as quickly and determinedly as possible into a worse error: iconoclasm, nihilistic abstraction, subhuman monstrosity. The great irony, of course, is that the simplified forms of early 20th century modernism lend themselves to mass-production and kitschification even better than the forms of the historical styles bastardized by L'Art Saint-Sulpice. Thus we arrive at the ubiquitous style of contemporary Catholic art that somehow manages to be iconoclastic, nihilistic, sentimental, cheap and mass-produced all at once. Sacred art in the past century has followed a sort of satanic dialectic: thesis, antithesis, dysthesis...
When Couturier shouted that it was either avant-garde or kitsch, the following generations enthusiastically declared for both. Those of us who are forced to live with the disastrous consequences would do well to remember that it was always possible to declare for neither. Desiring to revive the dignity, sacrality, popularity and symbolism that sacred art possessed in the ages of faith, let us look to the art of those ages themselves for inspiration - not to the profanities of the contemporary vanguard, nor to the kitsch of the immediate past.
And let us remember that the late 19th and early 20th centuries did produce great sacred artists. These artists understood the flaws of L'Art Saint-Sulpice very well, and sought to revive an art Christian in its inspiration and manufacture - without embracing the iconoclastic and secular principles of Modernism. These artists were not simple copyists, but men of profound creativity whose work, while attempting to continue the best traditions of the Church, was fresh and exciting. It is here we ought also look; to the Gothic Revival, to the religiously-minded members of the Arts and Crafts movement, to the Abbey of Beuron and its school, to Felix Granda and the Talleres de Arte in Madrid, and to the deceptively named Modernisme of Barcelona.