The Triumph of Iconoclasm in the Twenty-First Century

This article appeared in BreakPoint's Findings Journal

In the wake of the twentieth century, artists, art critics, philosophers, and theologians alike are expressing confusion about the nature and role of art. In After the End of Art, Arthur C. Danto concludes that art has lost its ability to narrate, or to engage with history, and that, rather than having any transcendent meaning or purpose, its most basic nature is philosophical and pluralistic. An alternative view may be discovered by comparing the vision of two painters at the dawn of modernism, one of whom became a model for much of twentieth-century artistic exploration. The following paragraphs ask what might have happened had it been the other way around. Two experiences will help set the backdrop for this discussion.

The year was 1989, and the occasion was a special lecture titled "Postmortemism: Is Art Dead?" by a young art critic from Art in America.

She claimed that Western art developed a fatal flaw through its attachment to the Judeo-Christian understanding of history as progressive and purposeful. The modernist worship of the new in art, she explained, relies on the belief that history is teleological. The solution was a cyclical view of history: the law of eternal return. She surmised that the hope for art was to be found in the "profound" political movements of our age.

The year was 1995. I had just returned from Jerusalem, Israel, and had a layover in Frankfurt, Germany. My friend Nathaniel Nash was chief of the New York Times bureau there. We had not seen each other for several years. We walked to the historic district around the Dom—the seat of the old Holy Roman Empire. As we entered the cathedral, I could see a magnificent life-size sculpture of the Last Supper to the left of the altar on a dais that nearly filled the chapel area.

Nathaniel turned to me. "You know, even if you don't believe [in God], you have to deal with these artifacts that were left behind, these expressions that were made from generation to generation." After a deep silence, he looked directly into my eyes and said: "What happened in the twentieth century?"

Those were some of the last words I heard him speak. A short time later he was killed in the Ron Brown plane crash. He was the only journalist on the plane. His question has haunted me for the last seven years: What happened in the twentieth century?

ART AND THE HUNGER FOR GOD
That day Nathaniel and I witnessed a testimony to thousands of years of artistic creativity in Church history. Historian Jaroslav Pelekin writes that the early Christians thought that when Jesus claimed to be the Way, the Truth, and the Life, His claim included the fulfillment of the classical triad of goodness, truth, and beauty. The energetic artistic creation that has marked Church history resulted from the belief shared by generation after generation that Jesus' Incarnation offered an answer to the question of each age. There was an integral link between artistic narrative, real history, and the life of the people. Art history flowered with human history in real time.

In his book The Creators, Daniel Boorstin states that the Bible is the greatest contribution to the idea of creative activity the world has ever known. Though art in every time and place flows from worship, the Bible is unique in its idea of a personal creator. In Genesis, God calls the world into being. The space-time of history has been impregnated by God's voice and presence. The earth and dust that we are made of has been breathed upon by our Creator. Matter is, because it was made by God, the bearer of God's presence. Avoiding oversimplification, we could say that the history of art across the world is the effort of man to dig into matter to discover that presence of God (or gods as in pagan idols) in the fabric of our existence.

To create is to worship. A work of art interprets our feelings, insights, and larger understanding of our space-time existence. In After the End of Art, Arthur Danto observes that it is nearly impossible to see a work of art the way the viewer did in the time it was created. Yet, I would say that, while certain aspects of art from a previous era cannot be understood without contextual knowledge (and even then the actual contemporary conditions of viewing cannot be reproduced), an art piece is able to satisfy and awaken a hunger in people for goodness, truth, and beauty that transcends time and circumstance.

This hunger is essential to man's survival. For the past twenty-five years, I have served as the director of the Washington Arts Group, a nonprofit arts organization in Washington, D.C. In 1991 we were invited to contribute an exhibition of contemporary sacred art by Eastern and Western artists to a festival in St. Petersburg, Russia, for the first official celebration of Orthodox Christmas. When we arrived, bread lines stretched down the streets, and everything was in short supply. Many of our Christian friends asked us: "Why would you take art to a country that needs bread?" (We actually did bring food and medical supplies with us.) When we arrived, our Russian friends said: "We are glad that you are here. Food we will eventually get. Beauty is what we need!"

DESCENT INTO MODERNISM: GAUGUIN AND VAN GOGH
For the greater part of the last two millennia, the Christian Church realized that this hunger was ultimately fulfilled in the Incarnation. What happened in the twentieth century? A clue can be found by comparing two artists working in the 1870s—whom Danto himself acknowledges as being the first modern painters: Vincent van Gogh and Paul Gauguin. Danto merely lumps them together in a passing phrase, as if taking for granted that they worked out of the same general artistic vision.

Just prior to the artistic experiments of van Gogh and Gauguin, in the latter part of the nineteenth century, the Impressionists made an attempt to escape the exhaustion of the academy and the art establishment by joining art to the life of their age. The Industrial Revolution had changed everything, and the prosperity it offered encouraged experimentation. The Impressionists often included factories and trains in their landscapes to indicate their sense of the glowing material future and the establishment of the middle leisure class.

The invention of the camera should not be underestimated as a factor in this development. Speaking to the American situation, Frederick Douglass claimed that photography was the first truly democratic art form. Now former slaves could own a portrait of their family. As the age of capital wealth blossomed, the Church turned away from the traditional gospel toward an emphasis on Hellenistic conceptions of abstracted goodness and morality. Religion retreated to the realm of "higher thought," and the art establishment was the product of rich and powerful states fueled by progress.

It is a curious phenomenon that at the end of the nineteenth century, artists and intellectuals simultaneously turned to nonmaterial spirituality. In England the aristocracy dabbled with spiritualism, and séances and many occult practices filled the outwardly Christian society. An illustration of this interest is found in the fact that at roughly the same time in Berlin, Paris, and New York, artists were attempting to photograph spirits.

Although Danto dismisses many of the theories of writer George Steiner as idealistic, in his book Real Presences Dr. Steiner pierces to the core of this transformation in thought and culture during the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century. Prior to this time, he maintains, thinkers were committed to the intelligibility of language. In the decades following the 1870s, however, Steiner sees an effort to divorce the word from reality:

Thus, in reaction to the materialism of their time, artists and intellectuals divided language from meaning. Symbolist poets like Baudelaire attempted to create a new suprareality by divorcing words from their ties to objects in the observable world. Similarly, art separated the image from narrative, moving toward an increasingly self-referential mystical vision. This debate over representation in the late nineteenth century confirms the claim of Hans Belting in Likeness and Presence that "the subject of iconoclasm clearly transcends the boundaries of a history of the icon as a pictorial genre." In the iconoclastic debates that raged in Christendom in the 800s, many defenders of images claimed that since God revealed Himself to man in Christ, we may portray the very image of God, and thus visual representation, just as written Scripture, is a way of revealing the nature of God. The position supporting icons "took the image to be part of the created nature that was redeemed by the Son of God; it therefore understood the reality of the image as a guide to the reality of redemption by the God-man." The eye and the ear, the image and the word, were equal in rank.

The Reformation and Calvin continued the argument against images when the Genevan theologian privileged metaphor as the only way to God. This stripped-down encounter with God became a stripped-down encounter with art in the twentieth century. The Soviet artist Kaszimir Malevich provided a striking example of this in the early part of the century. In 1906, the Czar had released ancient icons for an international exhibition. It was the first time that many Western eyes witnessed the iconographic tradition of the Russian Orthodox Church. Malevich abstracted the spiritual content of the icon in 1915 with his Black Square that "acquired the force of a magic formula" for his contemporaries. This painterly depiction of what is not seen, a clear field with no defined future, was Malevich's attempt to describe "non-objective reality." In many ways, the Black Square was the seed of the modernist narrative that Danto describes as stating that "art progressively strives to achieve identity with its own material basis." Cut from history, artistic modernism sought transcendence through matter it declared had no meaning other than itself.

Aware of the movement toward this eventual abstraction in their own age, van Gogh and Gauguin each made an attempt to find a new artistic vision that related spirituality to matter. Without delving into a comparison of personalities and the many myths regarding both artists, I would posit that the violent rupture between van Gogh and Gauguin was a result of their radical disagreements over the nature and purpose of art.

Van Gogh and Gauguin longed to be part of the avant-garde, and both of them quickly moved past the Impressionists in their own way. Like the Impressionists, van Gogh and Gauguin would often paint each other or the same subject and trade paintings. For a brief period, they lived and worked together in Arlés. While in Paris, both Gauguin and van Gogh were introduced to the Symbolists. The Jewish philosopher and artist Meyer de Haan emphasized the role of the artist as prophet and seer. De Haan had a significant impact upon Gauguin, as seen from Gauguin's 1889 portrait of him that openly displays Gauguin's homage to the occult and modernism. Gauguin denied any transcendence other than that which he could manufacture. His Yellow Christ (1889), a harmonious composition of yellows, reds, and blues, reveals Gauguin himself on the cross.

Rejected by the institutional church for his decision to give away his salary to miners in need when he served as a minister in the poor and squalid region of the Barange, Belgium, van Gogh was inspired by the new movement in art history promoted by artists such as Delacroix, the Symbolists, and writers like Zola. Following the lead they provided, he turned to images of contemporary life to express his convictions. Unable to find sufficient vocabulary within the institutions of the church and contemporary art world, van Gogh used cypress trees, wheat fields, sunflowers, and workers to express his passionate conviction that the natural world and this life had meaning beyond themselves.

Starry Night is the summation of van Gogh's encounter with God through nature. He wanted to uncover the shimmering beauty, goodness, and power in matter impressed by God's presence. For van Gogh, this revelation depended upon the disciplined intellectual effort to perceive and record the depths of what he saw in nature rather than a self-reflexive mythology. As he once wrote to his friend Amice Rappard in 1884, "I believe the more one has intercourse with nature itself—the more deeply one penetrates her—the less one finds any attraction in the tricks of the studio." In his Raising of Lazarus (1890), van Gogh put himself in the place of Lazarus, with Christ symbolized by the powerful sun in the background. His art responded to a life and reality sustained by one other than himself.

The difference in the spiritual motivation of their work strongly impacted the artistic visions that Gauguin and van Gogh each developed. Unlike van Gogh, who believed it was that which was within and behind nature that gave it beauty and life, Gauguin transformed the real world into an extension of his own imagination. This is especially evident in his The Grape Harvest at Arlés: Miseres Humaines. The landscape in the background almost looks like the closed interior of a skull. The face of the worker in the foreground is inhuman, almost animal-like. His figures reveal his own confusion about his identity and place in the world.

Gauguin substituted the self and will for God. Through his constant adoration of the primitive, Gauguin attempted to contact a spiritual power that he could direct through his powers of imagination. Likewise, Picasso was drawn to African masks to find the spiritual power they contained. There were liturgies for their tribal use. Like Gauguin, Picasso was only interested in contacting that power for his own purposes. The displaced self was the object of veneration.

Clearly, both van Gogh and Gauguin believed that the artist had a prophetic mandate. Yet, while Gauguin fashioned himself as a seer who could manipulate reality into a self-oriented myth, van Gogh believed the artist had a duty to communicate with his viewers. Words and communication were at the heart of painting. In a letter to an artist colleague, van Gogh explains:

Intensely aware that he was "living in a period in which everybody seems to be talking raving nonsense, and everything seems to be in a tottering state," van Gogh was determined to create a narrative instinctive to man through his paintings. In much the same way as the early Church, van Gogh saw the images he created as a means to reveal the message written throughout nature and human life. Vision was revelation. For van Gogh, artistic revelation depended upon a source deeper than both himself and the nature he observed: "Art is something which, although produced by human hands, is not created by these hands alone but something which wells up from a deeper source in our souls." There is a great irony in comparing van Gogh's and Gauguin's approaches to art. Gauguin, regarded by most historians as the more rational and normal, focuses his life toward an underworld of occult spirituality. Van Gogh, considered mad by history, consistently and methodically plows an artistic vision filled with light. His artistic endeavor is an act of intellectual discipline that observes the created world as it is, attempting to decipher the message it reveals of the eternal beauty, goodness, and truth within and behind it.

Unfortunately, it was Gauguin's vision that dominated the twentieth-century narrative that Danto unfolds in his essays. Gauguin's denial of transcendence and pursuit of self-created spirituality through a material world devoid of any purpose but that which the artist gave it prefigured what amounted to an iconoclastic attack on the ability of the image to reveal God's presence (much less anything else) throughout the twentieth century. Gauguin, along with the Symbolists, believed that Richard Wagner epitomized the integration of myth, music, literature, and art. As a young art student, Hitler studied Wagner's works, which claim that the artist is above the laws of society, able to create his own myth and beauty totally separate from morality. It is said that Hitler later concluded that the idea of the conscience was a Jewish invention.

On the other hand, Van Gogh's paintings and writings offer a different vision: one that celebrates the beauty of human life and nature, no matter how common. He believed the purpose of art was to narrate this message and that the artist must take his vocabulary from the history and people of his time. Van Gogh felt keenly the difficulty to directly connect an image with its meaning in an age when "artists no longer know what to say to each other," and in this way he anticipates the difficulties Danto speaks of concerning the pluralistic nature of contemporary art.

INTO THE NEW CENTURY: THE ANACOSTIA PROJECT AND THE RECOVERY OF TRANSCENDENCE
Danto also suggests that art ought to bypass "museum structures altogether in the interests of engaging the art directly with the lives of persons who have seen no reason to use the museum either as a tresorium of beauty or sanctum of spiritual form." For the past five years, the Anacostia, A Place of Spirit project sponsored by the Washington Arts Group has attempted to find connections between art and life in the twenty-first century similar to those explored by van Gogh. The project is an artistic investigation of faith, family, and community in the Anacostia neighborhood of our nation's capital, and according to one resident leader, the most important endeavor for Anacostia in the last one hundred years.

Divided from the rest of the federal city by the Anacostia River, Anacostia is an economically disadvantaged neighborhood in Washington, D.C., known mostly for its crime and social problems. Anacostia has an integral tie to the history and conscience of our nation. It has been both a major slave trade port and home to the abolitionist Frederick Douglass. In the spirit of Vincent van Gogh's vision, nearly sixty local artists from both sides of the river revealed the dignity and beauty in the lives of ordinary people. Paintings were exhibited in a church, café, tent, and abandoned buildings in Anacostia in November 1998 while local musicians performed in each of the venues for an audience that gathered from across the nation. The artwork and presentations revealed that the same spiritual force of the Judeo-Christian faith that freed slaves in the nineteenth century is at the heart of Anacostia's beautiful cultural life and compassionate community outreaches today. Drawing upon the concrete life and artistic dialect of a community usually outside the interests of the art establishment, the exhibition translated a universal narrative of faith and hope that crosses cultural and national barriers.

The officials at Union Station were so impressed with the project that they invited us to bring an expanded version, Hope in Our City: Anacostia, A Place of Spirit, to their halls for Black History Month in February 1998. According to their estimates, more than 1.4 million people saw the artwork, and news coverage exposed nearly 2 million viewers to the beauty and hope written into the life of Anacostia. The Library of Congress selected these two exhibitions as the sole representations of cultural life in the nation's capital at the turn of the millennium for its nationwide Local Legacies project in March 2000. Official documentation of these projects is now a part of the Library's permanent collection.

In November 2000, the Anacostia, A Place of Spirit project convincingly demonstrated its universal relevance when we responded to an invitation to display a selection of pieces at The Hague in conjunction with a seminar on van Gogh's spiritual vision at the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam. The favorable reaction to the work by representatives from more than twenty-seven different countries led to an invitation from the Director of Museum Pedagogy at the State Russian Museum, along with six other cultural and educational leaders in St. Petersburg, Russia, to bring the exhibition to their city in May 2003 for its three-hundredth anniversary celebrations.

Anacostia, A Place of Spirit gives narrative to painting and connects life to art. The disconnect between image and word we experience today in the West originated from within the Church after the Reformation. In Russia, however, iconoclasm was imposed from outside the religious establishment by the intellectual elite and later an atheistic government. A symbol of Russia's spiritual and cultural heritage, which was (ironically) saved by the Communists, offers insight for a possible integration of image and word in this century. Though constructed to commemorate the assassination of Czar Alexander II in 1881, the Church of the Spilt Blood (St. Petersburg, Russia) holds within its walls clues to a great civilization.

In the center dome is the face of Christ the Logos, triumphant and ascended. Supporting the dome are four arches with the four Gospels in the hands of their authors. The Gospels bracket four images. On the east is the cross with the spear and the gall sponge over the ark of the covenant with two angels. Opposite is an image of the Holy Cross. On the north is the Theotokus, the icon of the mother and Child attributed to St. Luke. On the south panel is the image of Christ's face on St. Veronica's veil. The piers beneath the dome and the interior walls of the sanctuary are filled with historical paintings of the stories of Christ's life in real time.

There is an implicit hierarchy within the Church of the Spilt Blood. Christ the Logos transforms language, the image, and history. The Incarnation and the Gospels representing it give meaning not only to images, but also to history. Image and word work seamlessly together to interpret time and eternity. The message of this vision is an open one. Rather than limiting, it is liberating. This hierarchy liberated Vincent van Gogh to do as a painter what he could not as a preacher. He decided not to create his own universe, choosing instead to open up what he saw of transcendence in this world. He heard the message and passed it on. Perhaps the heavens do declare the glory of God. The task of the twenty-first-century artist is the same: to hear the message and pass it on.

Jerry Eisley became founder/director of Foxhall Gallery, Washington, D.C., in 1976, and in 1978 of the Washington Arts Group, a nonprofit organization committed to encouraging the relationship between faith and art. He is currently curating the exhibition Down By the River: Anacostia, A Place of Spirit, which will be shown in St. Petersburg, Russia, in May 2003.