Panel at the 88th Annual Conference of the College Art Association, New York, February 23-26, 2000. Convener: Cordula A. Grewe (GHI). Participants: Alicia Craig Faxon (Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts); Brian Grosskurth (York University, Toronto); Maria E. Di Pasquale (University of Texas at Austin); Joyce C. Polistena (Pratt Institute, New York).
In 1841 the Young Hegelian art critic Friedrich Theodor Vischer condemned the making of religious art as an attempt to revive a historical corpse. He claimed that religious art, like religion itself, was outmoded and retrograde in character, and thus should be abandoned. This judgment on the anachronism of religious belief was an early expression of what became an orthodoxy equating modernity with secularization and secularization with the bourgeois project. Thus, the paradigm of secularization, or, as Max Weber called it, the "disenchantment of the world," came to dominate twentieth-century (art) historical scholarship.
Over the last two decades the publication of a number of studies by historians, sociologists, anthropologists, and theologians has challenged this concept. Scholars have called for a new awareness of the continued social and cultural significance of both organized religion and popular religiosity in the nineteenth century.
Engaging this broader revisionist project, the session on rewriting the historiography of nineteenth-century religious art addressed the consequences of such revisionism for assessments of the era's religious art. In this context, the questioning of the conventional understanding of the process of modernity as an antagonism between religion and secularism formed the overarching theme of the presented papers, whose topics ranged from the German Nazarenes and the British Pre-Raphaelites to French avant-garde painting of the fin-de-siècle. Collectively, they attempted to draw attention to the ongoing process of constructing compromises among dichotomous systems of meaning, the paradoxes in religious art, and the often unmediated clash of modernist, historicist, and antimodern elements.
In her paper "Art/History: Competing Narratives of Re-Christianization, De-Christianization, and Secularization," Cordula A. Grewe pointed to a certain resistance in art historical scholarship to take part in the broader re-evaluation of religion's role since 1800. She appealed for a more rigorous historical understanding of the period's religious art. Stressing the profound element of crisis as an important constituent element in the artists' relationship to religion and religion's role in the modern age, Grewe stressed the contemporaneity of nineteenth-century religious art. For greater insight into the struggle over religious art we have to accept the notion that not only the modernists but also the antimodernists were genuinely modern in their specific Gestalt.
An example of this modernist/anti-modernist fusion is Nazarene medievalism. Beside strong elements of anti-modernism, this escapist search for an undivided society not haunted by industrialization or corrupted by modern civilization also implied a yearning for origins and the original, the homogeneous, the whole that became the foundation for the moderns' taste for the primitive. Thus, the medieval primitivism of Nazarene art can be placed within modernist primitivism. It is one of many characteristics of Nazarene art that in a different context came to typify modern art movements per se, such as the avant-gardist secession of the Brotherhood of St. Luke from the academy or the development of anti-illusionistic, abstract pictorial strategies. Like their turn toward religion, the Nazarenes's emulation of the old masters as reflections of significant aspects of the zeitgeist. This project of emulation was genuinely modern because the Nazarene artists attempted to modernize religion through historicism, which itself represents a fundamental, constitutive phenomenon of modernity (O. G. Oexle, 1986).
In her paper on "Revising Eugène Delacroix's Religious Oeuvre: Romantic Painting and Its Reintegration with Theology," Joyce C. Polistena emphasized the need for a more nuanced conception of nineteenth-century art that addresses the hybrid, conflicted, and often contradictory nature of that modernity. She contested perceptions of Eugène Delacroix as a radical nonbeliever who, in the tradition of the Enlightenment, thought religion irrational. Providing a profound analysis of the religious sources for Delacroix's religious paintings, such as German radical systems of theology (Johann Adam Möhler) and social Catholicism (R.-F. Lamennais), Polistena traced the artist's sympathetic and sustained interest in Christianity. By demonstrating that Delacroix's emphasis on Jesus's human/divine nature was deeply rooted in certain religious movements of his time, she sought "to balance distortions concerning Delacroix's religious oeuvre as merely commissions and remote from his personal tastes or experience." Polistena's paper pointed to the lack of any essential relation between style and meaning, that is, between a specific stylistic idiom and a certain religious orientation. She exemplified this contingency by comparing Delacroix with Ary Scheffer, Theodore Chasseriau, and Hippolyte Flandrin, whose works are similar in spirit but drastically different in style.
This contingency also emerged from a juxtaposition of Delacroix with Maurice Denis, the subject of Maria E. Di Pasquale's paper on "The Crise Catholique: Avant-Garde Painting and Catholicism in Fin-de-Siècle France." Although both artists pursued a modernist trajectory, they engaged in opposing religious trends. Whereas Delacroix championed partisan theological systems that were to be crushed by the official church prior to 1850, Denis embraced Neo-Thomism, the very essence of mainstream Catholicism at his time.
As in Delacroix's case, the religious aspect of Denis's production has generally been underemphasized in favor of an analysis of his place in the development of modernism. Di Pasquale, however, showed that the very religiosity of this leading member of the Nabis played a crucial and indispensable part in his artistic formation. In contrast to most scholars who have focused on Symbolist artists' interest in unorthodox religious practices - for example, occultism, mysticism, and primitive religions - as an expression of individualism and revolution, she emphasized that the avant-garde also entailed expressions of orthodox religion that played an important role in France in the 1890s. The search for avant-gardist formulations of Catholic religiosity thereby resulted from the desire to overcome the so-called crise catholique, that is, the perceived incompatibility of faith and reason. Denis's modernism directly responded to this task, attempting to harmonize seemingly irreconcilable values. By merging religious themes with a Neo-Impressionist divisionist technique that was associated with science at that time, Denis sought to reconcile nature and the ideal and thus to create a visual "rhetoric of reconciliation." Because devout Catholicism marked Denis's whole artistic career, Di Pasqule rejected interpretations that hold an increasing religiosity on Denis's part responsible for the stylistic differences between his early, more avant-garde period before the Dreyfus affair, when he wrote the "Definition of Neo-Traditionism," and his later, more traditional idiom.
This retroactive "secularization" of modernist artists, as Alicia Craig Faxon phrased it, has not been restricted to the historiography of French art. It has also dominated the evaluation of early Pre-Raphaelitism. Thus, scholarship on Dante Gabriel Rossetti, John Everett Millais, and William Holman Hunt, three of the best-known Pre-Raphaelites, has mainly focused on either biographical or literary aspects of their work. Interpretations of Pre-Raphaelite art predominantly centered on formal composition, artistic antecedents, and avant-garde characterizations, a strategy that resulted in "Writing Religion Out: On the Secular Revision of the Pre-Raphaelites." Opposing this secular revision, Craig Faxon inquired into the religious roots of early Pre-Raphaelitism, such as the Oxford movement of the 1830s and 1840s with its influence on new Anglo-Catholic liturgy and art. Like with Delacroix, German theology and religious art movements also played a significant role in the development of these English artists, who gained intimate knowledge of German Nazarene art through Ford Madox Brown. It was Brown who had personally met two of the leading figures in Nazarism, Johann Friedrich Overbeck and Peter von Cornelius, both members of the Brotherhood of St. Luke, in Rome in 1845. Craig Faxon concluded that even though Rossetti, Millais, and Hunt later discontinued their early religious subjects because of savage contemporary criticism, which scented a Roman Catholic conspiracy in the initials P. R. B., their art cannot be understood without an account of its religiously inspired beginnings.
The history of nineteenth-century religion is thereby marked by remarkably fierce, often hostile debates. This hatred, as well as its predominantly negative reputation in twentieth-century historiography, has less aesthetic then genuinely political reasons. Hence Friedrich Theodor Vischer's devastating critique of the Nazarene enterprise was as much an expression of his distaste for medievalist historicism as it was an attack on conservative politics. His claim that religious art was a historical corpse articulated a great deal of wishful thinking, as the alliance of "throne and altar" was very much alive in 1841. Only seven years later, the German states would witness the suppression of a revolutionary upheaval that sought, among other things, to create a democratic nation-state.
Despite its fundamentally different history, the French nation faced a similar divide, as Brian Grosskurth elucidated in his paper on "Resurrecting the Dead: Death, Art Criticism, and Religious Painting at the Salon of 1819." The political situation in France after the Congress of Vienna (1815) and after the restoration of the Bourbon monarchy made the Salon of 1819 a decisive moment in the construction of a critical model that rejected religious art as a viable and vital enterprise. In charting this emergence, Grosskurth argued, one must place emphasis on politics above all else. Images of death thereby formed an especially active battleground for these issues, as death foregrounded the question of the existence or nonexistence of religious transcendence beyond social, emotional, and physical ties. In the aftermath of Napoleon's defeat, both liberals and conservatives engaged in fierce polemics concerning the politics of death. Around the deathbed, around the coffin, the close alliance of throne and altar insisted that divine judgment awaits us all and ensures a cohesive social order. At the opposite end of the political spectrum, liberals argued that the gaping skull and open grave were mere props put into play by priests and reactionaries, empty bogeymen to browbeat the citizens of France into the meek submission of frightened children.
Subscribing generally to this image of a divide between conservative religious forces and liberal, democratic, as well as socialist thinkers who grew increasingly alienated from the Christian endeavor, the papers nevertheless cautioned us against overlooking the complexities of these alliances. For example, the alleged association of the German Nazarenes with the restoration powers of their homelands cannot withstand close analysis. Only Ludwig I of Bavaria immediately embraced the movement. Prussia and the Vatican, however, never supported the movement in any major way, and Austria only endorsed the second generation of Nazarene artists, who distanced themselves from the dream of a united Germany held by the Brotherhood of St. Luke.
In sum, the revisionist agenda of the panel aimed to draw attention to what has famously been called the "simultaneity of the unsimultaneous," a phenomenon that challenges teleological notions of modernity as a sharp temporal divide between one world and another that supercedes it. The overall goal of the session was neither a radical inversion nor a simple falsification of the existing canon. Instead, it sought to expose the canon to a more nuanced and comprehensive picture of modernity, a picture that embraces the very essence of modernity: the diversification of styles, the destruction of an overall unified cultural paradigm, including aesthetics, the essential particularism of all forms of cultural expression, the multiplication of voices and thus of the multiplication of art's functions. Questioning the persistent influence of an unexamined and unquestioned tradition of secular (and politically secularized) art criticism on our understanding of nineteenth-century art, the session understood itself as a prolegomenon for a broader discussion of a field in art history that has been widely neglected.
Cordula A. Grewe