5
Modern Church Art
Just as the Roman Catholic Church saw the adoption of a modern municipal architecture as a way to claim an accepted position within British society, the commissioning of modern art for churches could also contribute to achieving a higher social and political status. Art and architecture that adhered to mainstream British culture represented cultural capital, an investment that could repay the Church through an increasing recognition in society of its importance and legitimacy.1 Acquiring cultural capital for conversion into social capital could be particularly urgent for a Church that historically had a marginal status in Britain and a high proportion of whose members were of Irish descent. Modern architects, too, wished to incorporate art in their churches. Yet the Church would only adopt modern art on its own terms, not least because church art had to be functional, satisfying the needs of devotion and liturgical use. Artists therefore also contributed to the production of the church in partnership with architects and clergy.
The patronage of modern artists was an important aspect of modernist architectural culture in this period, even in the service of the post-war welfare state. The use of fine art, and particularly high modernist art, in a public context for such buildings as schools, theatres and civic centres was espoused by architects such as J. M. Richards of the Architectural Review and much debated. It was a persistent theme at the CIAM meeting of 1951 in Hoddesdon entitled ‘The Heart of the City’, whose delegates visited the Festival of Britain, its South Bank site the subject of a comprehensive programme of artistic installations.2 There had already been discussion of the need for the ‘emotions’ of the people to be considered in modern architecture and the role that artists could play in fulfilling this spiritual need.3 It was an argument that was especially allied to the New Empiricism and was sometimes contentious within modern movement discourse. Modern architects in Britain, however, often coming from a background in Arts and Crafts design, frequently took an unproblematic approach to working with modern artists, who welcomed opportunities for collaboration. A pioneering venture in involving artists with architectural projects was established by the London County Council, which, in 1954, decided it had a social duty to provide modern art to the masses and allocated an annual budget for artworks to be provided for new schools and housing estates. Two young artists, Antony Holloway and William Mitchell, were employed to produce art for new public buildings, working with architect Oliver Cox at the Council’s Architects’ Department. It was an important model for the integration of art and architecture, and Mitchell would later undertake significant Catholic commissions in a similar vein at Liverpool and Clifton cathedrals.4 The Arts Council, established on a permanent basis in 1946 to dispense funding to arts organisations and local authorities, was likewise a product of the post-war welfare state’s desire to make high culture accessible to the masses.5 The provision of modern public art was seen as an intrinsic duty of the new socially concerned state: modern architects willingly concurred, and the Church shared in this climate of cultural benevolence.
ART AND THE CHURCH
In church architecture, of course, art had well-established historical precedents. The churches at Assy and Audincourt in France were influential models for a modern approach to integrating church art and architecture. Both were simple basilican buildings designed by Maurice Novarina. At Assy, Couturier invited the best modern artists regardless of their faith to create works of varying degrees of abstraction: Henri Matisse produced an image of St Dominic that was a faceless linear design on ceramic tiles; André Lurçat designed a tapestry depicting the Apocalypse to hang within the apse; Jewish artists Jacques Lipchitz and Marc Chagall were commissioned for further pieces in the 1950s.6 Couturier and his colleagues at L’Art sacré followed Maritain in believing that the artist had to take a spiritual stance in devotional art, but thought that the artist’s creative intelligence and willingness to adopt a Christian attitude were more important than their adherence to religious duties.7 Furthermore, Couturier argued that it was the artist’s accomplished ability to convey a spiritual message through formal composition that made religious art devotional rather than its literal content, opening the way to non-realistic and non-figurative approaches.8 Good modern art was therefore to be preferred to the conventional realism of most pious imagery.
The arguments were controversial and evoked a response from the Vatican. Pius XII’s encyclical Musicae sacrae disciplina, on sacred music, of 1955 criticised the employment of non-Catholic artists in the Church and insisted that artists had to meet the Church’s own expectations, not just the hermetic methods of art.9 The Church’s position on abstraction was more ambivalent: it could be accepted when it might be considered decorative, especially for stained glass, which contributed to a religious atmosphere rather than being an object of prayer; but it was less acceptable for images purporting to represent Christ or the saints, when the Church’s prohibition of distortion applied.10 Abstraction was especially condemned for the sanctuary crucifix, an object of devotion within the liturgy that represented the Incarnation – Christ in the form of a man.11
On the other hand, mass-produced art had long been forbidden from churches by canon law, though the rule was widely ignored. Even the most stereotyped images were frequently therefore hand-made, parishes often purchasing them from craft producers such as Stüflesser in the Italian Tyrol, a firm that specialised in a rococo style of painted wooden statuary and that was endorsed by the Vatican.12 The 1952 ‘Instruction on Sacred Art’ went further than canon law, however, also forbidding ‘second rate and stereotyped statues’ from public veneration, balancing its condemnation of excessively modern art with an equal rejection of kitsch.13 The arguments against kitsch were widely repeated. In the Clergy Review, a British magazine aimed at parish priests and edited by O’Connell, Charles Blakeman, a Catholic artist, condemned the ‘inferior, standardized article’, urging priests to trust artists and to allow them freedom.14 A decade later, when the Second Vatican Council’s ‘Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy’ of 1963 explicitly endorsed modern art for churches, J. D. Crichton, an English parish priest and liturgical writer, emphasised the sacredness of individual work in the creation of art for the Church:
A picture that is no more than a painted photograph, a statue that is poured out of a mould, made of inferior material by people who have no care for its quality or for its purpose, is incapable of arousing a response from the user, unless it be one of disgust. The Constitution … uses the expression humanis operibus which we may translate as ‘the works of man’s hands’ and we may add that it is because they are the works of man’s hands that they can give glory to God and reflect his beauty. Anything less cannot.15
Popular devotional art was criticised as being sentimental and overly feminine, a view Blakeman extended to other aspects of churches such as typical lace-adorned altars.16 Modern art, by contrast, needed to be virile, and so the ‘hieratic’ figure was advocated: recognisably human, yet sufficiently abstracted and reinterpreted as to possess symbolic qualities, severe enough to inspire devotion without arousing undue emotion.17 Emotional restraint was seen as a quality of liturgical prayer in contrast to popular devotions and was therefore advocated for liturgical art by Romano Guardini in his widely published book, The Spirit of the Liturgy.18 The ‘Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy’ continued this theme by emphasising the liturgical role of church art, as ‘signs and symbols of heavenly realities’.19 Throughout this period, therefore, the Church demanded a good quality of original art and permitted some aspects of modern styles depending on context, a desire that coincided with the interests of many modern architects who wanted to work with artists.
Undeterred by controversy and spurred by sympathetic patrons, Couturier and his colleagues in the Art Sacré movement in France were a major force in popularising modern sacred art and making it acceptable within the Church. Audincourt employed a more unified scheme than Assy: Fernand Léger designed a series of clerestory windows with recognisable but non-figurative emblems of the Passion, while Jean Bazaine created entirely abstract dalle de verre windows for the cylindrical baptistery, dark nervous lines crossing swathes of orange and grey (Figure 5.1). The use of dalle de verre as an element of the church’s modern architecture was an important aspect of this widely published building: in Anton Henze and Theodor Filthaut’s book, Contemporary Church Art, published by Catholic publishers Sheed & Ward, Audincourt’s glazing was said to be unified with the substance of the architecture, ‘technically part of the wall’, a statement of great significance for any modern architects who doubted the desirability of ornament.20 The French model of sacred artistic commissions would become highly influential in Britain in the 1950s.
5.1 Église du Sacré-Coeur, Audincourt, by Maurice Novarina, 1951. View of baptistery with glass by Jean Bazaine. © ADAGP, Paris, and DACS, London, 2013. Photo: Denis Mathieu, 2013
MODERN CHURCH ART IN BRITAIN: COVENTRY CATHEDRAL
Uniting the New Empiricism of post-war British architecture with the concept of the basilica of sacred art inspired by these French models was Coventry Cathedral. Basil Spence won the competition for this Anglican cathedral in 1951 with a design that aroused much controversy in the press for its modernism, despite his insistence on its historical basis, its conservative basilican plan and his intention to build it substantially in stone. Behind the altar Spence planned a magnificent tapestry by Graham Sutherland, while modern stained glass would line the nave and form a dramatic backdrop to the baptistery. Spence visited Sutherland in France to invite him to take on the commission, and the two visited the chapel at Vence decorated by Matisse. Significantly, the subject of Sutherland’s tapestry, Christ in Glory, was interpreted through the book of Revelation, also the source for Lurçat’s apocalyptic tapestry at Assy. Spence had thought of Sutherland because he had seen a crucifixion painting the artist had made for the Anglican church of St Matthew in Northampton, a striking commission from a patron who also emulated the Art Sacré movement, its vicar Walter Hussey.21
For Coventry’s baptistery window, Spence approached John Piper and Patrick Reyntiens around 1955. Part of the attraction of Piper for Spence was that he was a well-established modern painter, and his move into working with stained glass, sympathetically executed by Reyntiens, resembled the trajectory of Fernand Léger when the latter designed the windows for Audincourt.22 Piper and Reyntiens were also keen to emulate modern French stained glass.23 At Coventry, their baptistery window consisted of small panels of leaded glass in an abstract design of a blaze of coloured light: a similar approach to Bazaine’s at Audincourt, though more traditional in technique. Spence modelled Coventry closely on the pioneering French churches, and the cathedral aroused widespread public interest in Britain in modern church architecture and sacred art. Though Coventry was not always well received by architectural critics, it had a great impact on the architectural profession in Britain that was sustained throughout the lengthy process of its building, which only began in 1955 and was not complete until 1962.24 Spence’s concept of a basilica of modern art was adopted and imitated by many Roman Catholic architects and clergy.
5.2 St Aidan, East Acton, London, by Burles & Newton, 1959–61. View of nave: frieze of the Stations of the Cross by Arthur Fleischmann; painting of the Crucifixion by Graham Sutherland, c.1964. Courtesy of the Estate of Graham Sutherland. Photo: Robert Proctor, 2009
FROM COVENTRY TO CATHOLICISM
Coventry’s connections to subsequent Roman Catholic church art were often literal, as two case studies will show. In Lancaster, the church of St Bernadette, designed by Tom Mellor, was opened in 1958, a New Empiricist building of brick, stone and steel. Shortly after the church was opened, the timber panels of its reredos were daringly painted with an outline figure of Christ in Majesty, flanked by angels and overlaid with bold patches of primary colours, commissioned from John Piper. The church also included artworks by well-known Catholic sculptors Peter Watts and Michael Clark. At St Aidan at East Acton in London, meanwhile, a basilican reinforced-concrete church designed by Burles & Newton was opened in 1961 and subsequently filled with works of art, most of which were planned from the beginning. Behind its high altar was a bright red canvas of the Crucifixion by Graham Sutherland with an emaciated, tortured figure of Christ, while more conventional works adorned the church throughout (Figure 5.2, Plate 5).
Sutherland’s Crucifixion at East Acton was similar to his canvas at Northampton: red, instead of blue, but the same gaunt figure; and it was in fact his third, since another similar scene was woven into the base of the Coventry tapestry. St Aidan’s Crucifixion was the most overtly modern of the three: over the cross was an electric light and at its base a chain-link fence, references to the prison camp that had been only implicit in his previous images, a frequent theme of post-war Crucifixions, including that of Germaine Richier at Assy. Significantly, Sutherland was a Roman Catholic convert, and his work for St Aidan was his first for a Catholic church, answering a complaint that architectural critic Joseph Rykwert had made in France that Sutherland had so far been overlooked by Catholics.25
Sutherland’s appointment at East Acton was eagerly endorsed by the parish priest, James Ethrington, who evidently wished to assume the role of enlightened patron of modern art in emulation of Hussey at Northampton and, later, Chichester Cathedral. Around 1964, when his church’s artistic commissions were complete, Ethrington published a booklet on St Aidan’s artworks, inviting an art critic for a national newspaper, Terence Mullaly, to contribute an endorsement. Ethrington noted that the booklet was intended to reach beyond Catholics, ‘to draw attention to features of St. Aidan’s Church likely to be of interest to the general public’.26 Its purpose, and therefore also one purpose of the artworks, was to bring this church to a certain level of elite appreciation and to raise awareness of a Catholic artistic culture. Sutherland was here claimed for Catholicism, lending his credentials to the other more conventional artists whose work was placed alongside his: Kossowski, already well known and requested by churches across Britain; Arthur Fleischmann, a Hungarian artist who had made work for the Vatican at its 1958 Brussels Exposition pavilion; Roy de Maistre, an Australian painter who had earlier completed a series of Stations of the Cross at Westminster Cathedral; Philip Lindsey Clark, an eminent sculptor; and several others.27 Mullaly emphasised the importance of this original sacred art in transforming the reputation for kitsch that adhered to Christian and especially Roman Catholic churches: ‘during rather more than the last 150 years religious art has plumbed the depths of sentimentality and triviality’, he wrote; ‘St Aidan’s has broken with this bad old tradition’.28
This was exactly what the Vatican’s ‘Instruction on Sacred Art’ demanded. Had Sutherland’s Crucifixion painting at East Acton been made in the 1950s, it might have tested the limits of acceptability, but by the time of its unveiling in 1963 modern religious art was tolerated by Church and public alike, and the painting was well received. Catholic weekly The Tablet explained its purpose in relation to the new modern architecture and atmosphere of Catholic churches: ‘Clean lines, unpainted wood, and beauty unadorned are the order of the day. Gone are the wedding-cake altars, the sugar-plum statues and sad-eyed madonnas, and many heaved a gusty sight of relief at their departure’.29 Another writer, however, questioned Sutherland’s emphasis on suffering at the expense of other interpretations of the Crucifixion and, interviewing teenage parishioners, thought its devotional purpose not wholly satisfied.30 Yet the fact that such a work could be commissioned without substantial controversy was no doubt largely thanks to Coventry Cathedral. Coventry made modern sacred art acceptable and desirable, motivating Catholics to participate in modern high culture and to welcome it into their churches.
The collaboration of Piper and Reyntiens at Coventry was equally significant to Roman Catholic church architecture. At St Bernadette, Lancaster, the choice of Piper was exceptional, since he was not Catholic (Plate 6, Figure 5.3). The impact of his work in suburban Lancaster must have been potent, though, significantly, it was a young parish. A reporter for the Daily Express, attempting to whip up a scandal, found only praise for Piper: ‘We should feel honoured that an artist of Piper’s quality has been able to paint it for us’, said a ‘church committee man’; the parish priest who commissioned it, Christopher Aspinall, was said to have ‘loved the painting’; and a 29-year-old ‘churchgoer’ added: ‘Some people around here are too old-fashioned. They seem to think no one could pray properly with such a “loud” painting above the altar. But times are changing.’31 Like Sutherland at East Acton, Piper’s mainstream renown lent cultural credibility to the Church. His painting, dominating Mellor’s building though integrated with it, was an act of faith by the parish in the capacity of the artist to speak to modern people about Christian themes in a new way that also inspired devotion.
