Sacred Art 029277639X

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M.-A. COUTURIER

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Menil Foundation University of Texas Press

$35.00n

“Century after century,” in the words of M.-A. Couturier, “it was to the foremost masters of West-

ern art, diverse and revolutionary as they might

be, that popes and bishops and abbots entrusted

the greatest monuments of Christendom, at times

in defiance of all opposition . . . With the nineteenth century all this began to change. One after another the great men were bypassed in favor

of secondary talents, then of third-raters, then of

quacks, then of hucksters. Thereafter the biggest monuments were also the worst . . .” (p. 34). In reaction to the general acceptance of mediocre religious art, correlative to the Catholic hierarchy’s continual retreat from contemporary culture - it no longer knew who the great masters were, prominent Catholic writers and a few members of the clergy voiced criticism in the 1920s and 30s; but their efforts remained isolated. A breakthrough occurred in 1945 when the French Dominican Marie-Alain Couturier, who

had been in America when France was invaded and remained support of the refugee artists, took the lead: to the creation In articles and

there for four years working in Resistance and in contact with returned to France. He resolutely he brought great modern masters of church art and architecture. lectures he openly discussed the

sensitive issue of sacred art.

Within ten years

“miracles” happened: Assy (1950), Vence (1951), Audincourt (1951), Ronchamp (1955). In varying degrees, these pilgrimage churches and historical landmarks are deeply indebted to Pére Couturier. To Assy, where Pére Couturier had his first opportunity to direct the art-commissioning, he succeeded in bringing work by Léger, Bonnard,

(continued on back flap)

SACRED ART

M.-A. COUTURIER

SACRED ART Texts selected by Dominique de Menil and Pie Duployé

Translation by Granger Ryan

UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS PRESS, AUSTIN Published in association with the Menil Foundation

NOTICE

The articles by Marie-Alain Couturier, O.P., in this volume first appeared between 1950 and 1953

in the reviewL ’Art Sacré (Les Editions du Cerf, Paris), of which he and Pie-Raymond Régamey, O.P., were co-editors. After Pere Couturier’s death, these articles and others by him were republished

without illustrations under the title L 'Evangile est a I’Extréme (Les Editions du Cerf, 1970).

Pére Couturier was in charge of the issues of L’Art Sacré from which these articles are taken with

one exception, Grandes legons actuelles de Byzance (May — June 1953) for which Pere Régamey was

responsible. The layout is as close to Couturier’s as the passage from a modest publication to the present volume would permit. presentation.

Some photographs have been omitted to ensure a more beautiful

Issues of L’Art Sacré addressed specific topics, and were titled accordingly.

is compiled from the following:

This collection

Devant lart profane, January-February 1950; Le prétre et la

création artistique, May—June 1950; Au régime de la pauyreté, July—August 1950; 4ssy; September—

October

1950; L’Art sacré et son public, January—February

1951; Le douloureuz probleme des

arts missionaires, March—-April 1951; Vence, July-August 1951; Audincourt, November-December 1951; Tdches modestes I, November—December 1952; Tdches modestes I1, January—February 1953;

Grandes legons actuelles de Byzance, May—June 1953; Espagne, July-August 1953.

We would be grateful if anyone having letters or documents concerning Péere Couturier would

contact the Menil Foundation: Couturier Archives, 7 rue las Cases, 75007 Paris. Correspondence should be addressed to the archives director, Marcel Billot. In the United States, correspondence may also be addressed to Dominique de Menil, Menil Foundation, 1427 Branard, Houston, Texas

77006.

Originally published in France as Art Sacré, copyright © 1983 by Menil Foundation, Inc. This English translation copyright © 1989

Couturier, Marie-Alain, 1897-1954.

Editorial Associate, compositor: John Kaiser

Translation of: Art sacré

by Menil Foundation, Inc. Al rights reserved

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Set in Bauer Bodoni by TEXSource, Houston Printed and bound by Dai Nippon, Tokyo Requests for permission to reproduce material

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University of Texas Press

Published by University of Texas Press, Post Office Box 7819, Austin, Texas 78713-7819 First edition,

1989

Printed in Japan

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

S,

“The articles by Marie-Alain Couturier, O.P, in

this volume first appeared between 1950 and 1953 in the review Lart sacré”—Tp. verso.

" Du;lo;\;r ;lr:d lrzl(;in_on N72.R4C6213

1989

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ISBN 0-292-77639-X (alk. paper)

89-12869

CONTENTS

TO RECAPTURE THE VOICE OF PERE COUTURIER Dominique de Menil

FOREWORD

10

SECULAR ART, SACRED ART (1950)

13 14 18

Marcel Billot

For the Eyes Purity

(4.-J. Festugiere, O.P)

TO THE GREAT MEN, THE GREAT WORKS (1950)

33

WHEN POVERTY RULES (1950)

39 41 47

The Magnificence of Poverty Poverty Insulted

ASSY (1950)

51 52

SACRED ART AND ITS PUBLIC (1951)

59

THE PAINFUL PROBLEM OF THE ARTS IN MISSIONARY LANDS (1951)

65 (¢ 50 83

What Assy Teaches Us

Too late

Counterproof in Bali

A Universal Humanism VENCE (1951)

“In the late afternoon . . . The Stations of the Cross

89 90 96

AUDINCOURT (1951)

101 102 104

MODEST TASKS (1952/1953)

109 110 111 118 124 133 134 140

“If there is one thing . . . Aunque es de noche “We trust we may be pardoned . . . The Modesty of the Past Modesty, Mediocrity Four Dangers “It is clear that the architectural fantasies . . .

For Fear of Profaning Them “I suppose that what we had to say . . .

BYZANTIUM AND OUR EFFORTS (1953) BOUNDARIES (1953) RONCHAMP (1953) BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE PHOTOGRAPHIC CREDITS

143 147 153 157 160

H.

Laurens. Tabernacle

TO RECAPTURE THE VOICE OF PERE COUTURIER

Our purpose here is not to make amends for having forgotten someone,

but to

welcome a presence — specifically the presence of Pere Couturier, priest of the Dominican order and transcender of boundaries.

His reflections on sacred art, formulated in the postwar years and particularly from 1950 to 1953, brought to maturity a long process of thought and experience.

The

liberating positions that he made his own, while they had their source in his tastes and inclinations, were sustained by constant reading and countless visits to museums and galleries, but most of all by contacts with artists like Braque, Léger, Matisse, Picasso,

Miré6, Rouault, as well as with writers, theater people, museum directors, collectors, and prominent dealers — so many opportunities to absorb living material drawn into the depths of his being. One so regrets that he just missed knowing the extraordinary emergence of the new American art (Pollock, Newman, Rothko, et. al.), having left New York in 1945. And the new Americans had not yet reached France when he died in February 1954. Reading him today, however, we realize that what we have before us is not merely a chapter, somewhat “out of date,” but very simply a statement of truth. This comes to light in Couturier’s clear, uncompromising style, which, from within his personal

reflections, could only forbid him to lock the reality of sacred art into false principles

and habits of laziness. The texts we present here constitute, as it were, a rigorous, coherent discourse. But analytical reasoning in no way belies the spark of immediate perception. Art, he

tells us, when it is approached through the intuition of the senses, perpetuates and makes the spirit present. Thus it joins truth itself. For Pere Couturier, to be sure, straightforwardness, which begets clarity, was the simple and immediate principle of his personal moral stance. That precluded any surrender in his struggle against conformism, but also compelled him to reject the fallacious, the facile, the sterile. With all that sifted out, his words take on a pointed acuteness. The fervor of these words, borne by the gravity of what he had to say, transcends the ephemeral and touches us like the mark of the absolute. DOMINIQUE DE MENIL

FOREWORD

L’Art Sacré, a review founded in July 1935, was taken over eighteen months later by Les Editions du Cerf, and Dominican fathers Couturier and Régamey were

appointed co-editors. In the first issue, dated January 1937, Couturier denounced the lack of artistic culture in Catholic circles, and assigned to the review the task of education and information devoid of compromise. Assuredly Régamey agreed with this statement of purpose, but it quickly became apparent that the two editors were at odds with regard to method. Régamey’s idea was to convince by explaining, while Couturier, who was fond of quoting Baudelaire on “the awful futility of explaining anything whatsoever to anyone whomsoever,” rejected reliance on rhetoric and put his confidence in aesthetics. Couturier turned

to images and their presentation as the principal means of awakening the clergy’s responsiveness

to beauty,

the clergy being the clientele for whom

the revue was

primarily intended.

But Couturier was so busy keeping a close watch on the production of religious art and doing his best to discover any work or any artist that rose above mediocrity, that he rather lost sight of his original aim. As a result, the series of issues from 1937 to

1939 is hardly distinguishable from the earlier ones except for some improvement

in graphic presentation.

When in 1948, three years after his return from America, Couturier again took an active role in the direction of L’Art Sacré, he insisted on a less compressed, better balanced page layout and determined the permanent typography of the cover. Ten years, however, had not wiped out the differences in approach between the two editors; in fact their disagreement went on deepening. Couturier in a letter to Régamey (end of 1949): “You certainly are aware of the affection in which I hold you and of my reluctance to contradict you. But there are things on which I intend to be unyielding from now

on.

“For instance, I insist on the primacy I will give, as far as I possibly can, to ‘poetry’ over pedagogy. You tell me that the two are reconcilable; but you know perfectly well

10

that concretely that is not so: poetry is always sacrificed to pedagogy. Indeed, that precisely is the sum and substance of academicism. How can you fail to see that? In any event, for once it is going to be the other way round: pedagogy will be sacrificed to poetry.

“The goal of L’Art Sacré must continue to be first and foremost the restoration of people’s taste and specifically their sense of poetry. Anything else is spiritual

academicism. “And to that restoration I will sacrifice everything . .. The best service I can give is to go to the limit of what I believe. Even, if possible, without arguing with anyone: it is hard enough to come to entire agreement with oneself.” That letter put an end to the conflict. Couturier would be in charge of some issues

of the periodical, Régamey would be responsible for the others. From 1950 to 1954 ‘Couturier produced twelve issues, each one easily recognizable as his work:

in the

collection they are like clearings in the midst of heavy underbrush. The image holds first place. It is isolated by broad white margins, without captions and without a word of identification, clearly separated from the text that sometimes accompanies it; and in the silence of the page it finds its own voice, by which those who really look at the image are led from the surface appearance to the truth. That voice, which is all that mattered to Couturier, is the voice he recognized in the images he chose. His choice made a language out of them, and they became the terms of a discourse which he wrote by the way he organized them. Each image is

the right word, and it echoes from one page to the next, from one issue of L’Art Sacré to another, harmonizing the most diverse themes. Hence there is no separation between the Dévot-Christ in Perpignan and an African sculpture, nor between a roadside cross and a crucifixion by Matisse. And in this discourse, which is that of the restored ability to look, the rough stonework of peasant houses in the Lozére and the beaded body of an African dancer, like the honeycombed curve of a dam or the fresh, pure curve of a Sénanque capital, repudiate the basilica at Lisieux and say that beauty alone opens the heart to the inexpressible. MARCEL BILLOT

11

The Eiffel

Tower

12

SECULAR ART, SACRED ART

For the Eyes

In on a eye. elite

its effort to bring about a rebirth of Christian art in France, L’Art Sacré takes twofold task: it works both to reform ideas and to restore the sensitivity of the As to the first task, we seem to be close to making our point, at least with the among the clergy.

Experience today shows that this is not enough: even with ideas corrected and true

principles recognized, if bad taste still prevails, individual preferences will still be

bad and will ultimately dictate judgment and choice. Conceptual clarity of principle ends up by covering over the worst ambiguities.

So we must hold our ground and insist that in art it is not the intellect that judges and discriminates, it is the senses — or, to put it more precisely, the intuition of the senses and not the exercise of reason. In matters of art one judges not by what one thinks but by what one feels. In other words, by what one is. Now it must be admitted that in the Western world, over the past hundred years visual sensitivity

has been progressively corrupted.

It has been corrupted by the products of official

academicism, by assembly line production, and lastly by the senseless proliferation

of artists (mediocre ones, naturally).

“Not only must the arts not be encouraged,”

Degas used to say, “they must be discouraged.” At the present time we must recognize the fact that for all of us, or most of us, our vision has been flawed in the same sense that a man may be said to be tone-deaf. We have therefore decided that from time to time an issue of L’4rt Sacré should

be devoted exclusively to restoring the sensitivity of the eye, even if the exposition of ideas must be set aside. This restoration seems to imply two things — a purification and a liberation. Purification: by seeing forms which in themselves are pure. Purity of form, the beauty of forms as forms — independently, that is, of subjects or intentions. We must hold to the principle that in art beauty is the sole legitimate criterion — and the only

one that keeps its effectiveness.

In fact the history of art offers irrefutable proof that in the last century and a

14

Olympia, 5th c. B

Le Corbusier.

half not a single work has lasted except those in which the primacy of the beauty of forms has been absolute. Absolute: that is to say without the slightest concession to moral, social or pastoral intentions external to the work. As soon as such concessions intervene we leave the realm of art for the realm of propaganda, an area in which the means employed suit the needs of the moment. Hence the work is disqualified after

a few years and loses all its power, whereas pure relations of colors and lines keep forever the miraculous power of purification, pacification, and exaltation which their authors had not even thought about.

For beauty, of itself and by itself, is a genuine good: diffusivum sui (self-diffusing). Pure forms, just by being before our eyes to see, “tune ” us (as a piano is tuned) to their beauty.

Like music, they secretly impose their measure and rhythms upon us.

That is why we here present pictures that are simply beautiful, very pure images —

16

if possible without caption or explanation, so that no exercise of reason may intrude

into what should always be a simple, direct sensory intuition. And also because texts attached to images most often detract from their beauty and thus diminish the effectiveness of their action on the sense of sight.

Secondly, Liberation: Over the same hundred years because of the academic imperialism of the Art Schools and official circles, the visual habits of the public have been not only corrupted but also locked up, imprisoned in conformism with pretensions to noblesse. In order to help get rid of these curbs on our vision, we shall therefore publish

images taken from natural realities and especially from

industry,

remembering that throughout time admirable forms were born of strict calculation and a sane conception of functions and ends, with no thought for “art.”

17

Purity At the summit of things there is the One. From the One derive the numbers — lines, surfaces, volumes — which make out of the entire Universe a harmonious architecture. At the summit of things there is the Pure. And nothing that is impure approaches the Pure. These thoughts, familiar to Plato, express the essence of the Greek temple. No doubt we do not see it as the Greeks had conceived it. As we see it now,

it is more beautiful. It was decorated with figures and those figures were painted. By a sovereign grace the centuries have destroyed this decoration, thus restoring to the temple its authentic being, play of lines, accord of numbers. Since then it is wholly pure. Pure, in other words stripped. What is more stripped than numbers? They take away from matter its weight, its density: Whoever contemplates the Parthenon from a little distance hears nothing but the chant of numbers beneath the sky: The simple meeting of two planes, the soaring of a column springing from the ground itself, have, for whomever knows how to see, a purifying virtue. In order that his prayer may be naked, the Cistercian monk also banishes all obstacles, including the obstacle of vain words: he uses none. And the obstacle of vain adornment: in his churches there are only lines, broad naked planes meeting, robust pillars born out of the ground. And so this art, wholly pure, the most religious art there is, is also the most beautiful. It is the most beautiful because it is true. One plays no tricks with geometry: One plays no tricks when one has voluntarily deprived oneself of everything that could, by catching and holding the eye, keep it from recognizing the mistakes. And it is likewise true that one does not trick God.

A.-J. FESTUGIERE, O.P.

18

19

Athens, 6th c.

B.C.

20

énanque, 12th ¢

“. .. Mark well where purity has its true domain. It is far less in the subject than in the style. A clothed statue can be impure, a nude one marvelously pure. There is a kind of religious sentimentality which is impurity itself.” A-LE

22

Olympia, 5th c.

24

New Forms . . . 26

Delphi

27

28

Le Corbusier, Marseilles.

“. .. Don’t think I always take the position of accusing the Academy; for we could do without its laws if we were capable of seeing with our own eyes; but our spiritual laziness puts up with anything to save ourselves the trouble of opening them.” PICASSO

30

Bridge pier. U.S.A

31

Henri Matisse making sketches for the Vence windows.

32

TO THE GREAT MEN, THE GREAT WORKS

t was an unbroken tradition: century after century it was to the foremost masters

Iof Western art, diverse and revolutionary as they might be, that popes and bishops and abbots entrusted the greatest monuments of Christendom, at times in defiance of all opposition. From Cimabue and Giotto to Piero, from Masaccio to Michaelangelo

and Raphael, from Tintoretto and Rubens to Tiepolo, that tradition of courage and mutual confidence was kept alive. The most powerful currents of Western art had never been diverted from the Church. With the nineteenth century all this began to change. One after another the

great men were bypassed in favor of secondary talents, then of third-raters, then of quacks, then of hucksters. Thereafter the biggest monuments were also the worst (Lourdes, Fourviere, Lisieux, etc.). Within the broad range of the work done for the

Chantiers du cardinal* one hundred and twenty churches could be built around Paris without even consulting a single one of the great French architects, although they were respected throughout the world. This, then, is the situation. How can it be explained? How can it be corrected?

The real explanation is very simple: the responsible ecclesiastical circles (like the corresponding civil officials) no longer knew who the real masters were. The reasons they no longer knew can be reduced to four: [0 The rapid dechristianization of Europe and the continual retreat of the church away from every area of culture and life where the clergy could have and should have

encouraged the truly great men, who themselves had become more alienated from the Church. [0

The decline of real, not bookish, culture in ecclesiastical circles and at all levels

of the hierarchy, due both to the exhausting work of the apostolate and to increasing specialization in areas of modern cultural activity; and this decline is such that the clergy, now far below the level of the great artists — their concern, their passions, their mentality — can no longer recognize and understand them as the true masters. [ The predominant influence of the Academy on the top-ranking clergy. Academic artists form a screen and a barrier between the Church and the genuine creators, and, in addition, making sure that they themselves get the commissions.

* Cardinal Verdier, archbishop of Paris (1929-1940), launched an intensive building program. The churches built in Greater Paris became known as “les Chantiers du cardinal.”

B4

O The very rapid, and therefore disconcerting, evolution of the forms of art in the work of the Masters from 1850 onward. This evolution, moreover, tended

inexorably toward radical restoration by the Masters of the only essential esthetic values. In other words, these artists address themselves exclusively to solving the

problems of pure beauty, problems beyond the grasp of the public at large.

This

restoration, which was to save Western art, at the same time separated the great

artists more and more from the common concerns and tastes of the public in all quarters of society.

This being said, what must be done? Is it possible to work with the great modern artists? And, granted what they are and what we are, under what conditions will it be helpful to work with them? O

A preliminary measure to insure security and good health: everything coming

from academic circles (Institut, Prix de Rome, Ecoles des Beaux-Arts) must be viewed a priori as suspect; for the last hundred years opposition to real values and constant incompetence have been their mark. Until proof to the contrary is forthcoming, therefore, such groups are disqualified for any important work. 0 A positive determination: “Great men for great works.” Must a cathedral be built? We should say to ourselves, “Somewhere in the world there must be an architect who’s the greatest. He’s the one we must find. We’ll get him to do the

cathedral, because he’s the one man who’s worthy to do it and capable of doing it.” The same goes for any important work of painting or in mind that France has the greatest living painters and covered with glory and universally recognized. They are As a matter of principle. And even if they were to refuse, they must be called

only if they refuse.

sculpture. We shall keep sculptors. Today they are the ones we must turn to. upon first.

Go elsewhere

That way we shall save and maintain a tradition and a will to

greatness, which are indispensable if the salvation and honor of Christian art are to be saved. There are objections: O “Itwill cost too much.” False pretext: huge sums are collected from the faithful and thrown away on the worst mediocrities: Lisieux, Madrid, Fatima among them.

35

Besides that, even if we have no right to expect of great artists the admirable

disinterestedness that they often display (recently, for instance, at Assy and Vence), the fact remains that most of them are ready to make very large concessions when

invited to participate in a task whose eminent dignity they recognize. O “They will not do what we want.” Thank God! For too often “what we want,”

what people like, is far inferior to what great artists would do even if left to their inspiration alone. And, in any case, experience proves that even when he is left to his own inspiration, what a great artist produces out of himself is infinitely more valid

than the inevitable trash done by docile second-raters, these being generally obliging in proportion to their mediocrity. O

“They are not believers.” First of all we do not know what goes on in the most

secret recesses of the heart, nor what substitutes for faith the intuitions of genius may suddenly bring to bear. Genius does not give faith, but between the inspiration of

the mystics and that of heroes and great artists there is an analogy so profound that the presumption must be in their favor.

“Always bet on genius,” Delacroix used to

say. But, all that being said, we must still remember that we are not to make an indiscriminate choice, even among the greatest. For a given work, Rouault would be the man to choose rather than Matisse; for another, Matisse rather than Picasso, or Chagall rather than Léger. Or vice versa. And you would not ask of Perret what you would ask of Le Corbusier. And finally, even when faced with genius, the priest must never forget that at the start it is his role and his strict duty to define the task: it is up to him to supply the ideas and the themes. The greatest masters absolutely demand precise programs and have no fear of the strict requirements of liturgical rules. No one therefore can dispense the priest from providing ideas, and very exact ideas at that. The artist himself will give form to these ideas. And in this working-out of the forms we have absolutely no right to interfere. Something is being born: our role at that time is to protect its ever-vulnerable freedom, purity, and weakness, by our unfailing friendship, respect, and prayer. A final remark is called for: in what we have said here we do not intend to imply that there is no place for the more modest artist. Far from it! In every age modest talents have enriched Christian art with touching, worthy works which are among our most cherished treasures. But today as in the past it is for the greatest creators to open and show the way.

36

Ronchamp.

37

Interior of an abandoned church near Artigues, Lot-et-Garonne

38

WHEN

POVERTY

RULES

The Magnificence of Poverty There was a time, and it lasted for centuries, when extreme poverty did ish the dignity of forms. But today, in our mindless world, it seems that poverty alike have lost their proper powers, and that both of them debase they touch: the houses of the wealthy as well as those of the penniless

not diminwealth and everything are almost

invariably ugly, amazingly pretentious and unaware of their vulgarity. In these pages we have simply brought together, as we came across them by chance, the stirring proofs of what in times past Christian poverty was able to create in the realm of architectural forms. These pictures evoke a certain feeling — above all a feeling for the magnificence or, I might say, of the magnanimity that a right sense of the First Beatitude can lend to buildings when it is fully accepted. Honestly accepted.

Beati pauperes spiritu. Do not pretend to be more than you are. Do not do more than

you can do. Do not want more than is necessary. Let possessions be simply equal to

needs. For the true Christian, melius est minus egere quam plus to want less than to have more” (Rule of St. Augustine). That is also the source of the modesty of forms. The poverty of the past appears to be penetrated through and through with through in the very quality of the lines, the proportions, and

habere, “It is better of the monuments modesty; it comes the materials cho-

sen. But also in the profound simplicity of their harmonious relationship with their surroundings.

What a difference between all that and the churches we have built in the past hundred

years!

In our villages they destroy all harmony:

their harsh whiteness

splashes over the earthen walls, the old stones and the tile roofs of the humble houses around them, insulting them with the prideful coldness of lordly slate roofs and hulking bell towers. These poor houses, crowded up against the church . .. The churches of old looked different from them only in the nobility of their forms and the greater care for durable construction. Those village houses of God transfigured the forms and proportions of the houses of men, they did not stand apart. Even in this regard they stood for a Christianity one and alive. One with the unity of life itself. And it was precisely when this unity began to come undone, and the Church was drawing back in every area of life, that the clergy started to erect these imperious, aggressive monuments, proclaiming, with shrill showiness, realities the dangerous penury of which they were in fact disguising.

40

Saint-Romain-le-Puy, Loire.

41

Some years ago, when [ was in America, [ asked an architect who had lived in Japan for along time whether there were buildings in that country which everyone regarded

as masterpieces of national architecture. “Indeed there are,” he said; “they are the Imperial Villas.” He brought out a large, handsomely printed album. All I saw in it were very simple low houses, one story high, built of wood and paper, similar to the houses of peasants and shopkeepers. It did not take me long to perceive that the villas differed from the others houses by subtle variations of proportion which gave them an exquisiteness, an enchanting gracefulness all their own. But the dimensions and materials were just about the same, as simple as they could be. No luxury of any sort was to be seen, even in the interiors. I learned, however, that when in the course of time a timber had to be changed, a certain kind of rare wood was used, always the same; it was first soaked in pure stream water for ten years in order to soften the fibers . . . These are the signs, and these are the works, of a civilization in which spiritual demands and values have stayed alive and natural. Money has little to do with it. We are put to shame by such things, we who for two thousand years have so badly

neglected the lessons of the Gospel, the lessons of spiritual poverty, of detachment, of the freedom of the children of God on earth.

In the thirteenth century, when his Order and Christianity as a whole were thriving, St. Dominic halted the building of a friary because it included one story that was not needed, and he had that story, already in construction, torn down. In a like

situation at Assisi, St. Francis climbed up onto the roof and took off the tiles himself; and anyway all he wanted for his friars was huts built of branches and leaves in the woods. Today, when the Shepherds have lost three-quarters of their flocks, they build fortresses to convince those who remain of their power and of victories that cannot be verified. If only we paid attention to that long, quiet lesson from the past, we would see that poverty was often the direct source of perfection and strength. Itis their very bareness that gives the old churches like those at Jobourg and Saint-Romain their beauty and their grandeur: decorated, loaded with ornaments, they would be nothing. To be true today, a church should be no more than a flat roof on four walls. But their proportions, their volume, the distribution of light and shadow, could be so pure, so intense, that anyone coming in would feel the spiritual dignity and solemnity of the place. God is glorified not by richness and hugeness but by the perfection of a pure work. If our churches were made this way, they could begin again to teach the world that it takes very little to provide what is essential.

42

Jobourg, Manche.

43

Evening prayer in the desert

The lesson of the poor in spirit in Islam . . . 44

Courtyard of the Temple at Rydan-ji, Japan

... and in Japan

Rucqueville-en-Bessin, Calvados.

Deconsecrated church

46

Poverty Insulted A Christian society that allows its sacred monuments to fall into ruin and transforms its holy places into stables is a Christian society in process of disintegration.

Can we imagine what the societies of antiquity would have thought of such things?

I am not talking here about the vast old ruins that are like immense disasters:

they retain so much majesty in their distress that they still seem permeated with mystery, and thus still bear witness to the eternal realities to which in solitude they remain consecrated. What I am thinking of is rather the thousands of small, very

poor sanctuaries, now abandoned, whose poverty everything insults.

Everything. And first of all the very fact that they are abandoned, and that people

have forgotten that these things, poor as they are, are sacred, so that most of the time this contemptuous disregard — the abandonment itself — is sacrilegious.

And then . . . all the indignities heaped upon them because they are poor. They are used, without a second thought, for the public’s convenience — cluttered with electrical equipment, power lines, public telephones, posters, urinals . . . + And inside . . . As long as any religious service at all is conducted in them, the

merchants fill them with pious junk after carefully stripping them (for the benefit of

the antique dealers) of the humble treasures of the past — old statues, candelabra,

lecterns, seventeenth- and eighteenth-century altarpieces, all the things that were

madeof mere wood, and that get sold off precisely because . . . because it is only wood. Think of those admirable wooden vaults, which were so numerous fifty years

ago and have been pitilessly done away with in northwestern France: it ought to weigh on the conscience of the clergy in that area that so many such vaults have been allowed to collapse or have been demolished. “Because they were built of pine . . .” Because a strange alteration of the sense of Christian worship and its dignity leads people only to what looks rich. As if the most natural things were not also the closest to God. Other treasures of the poor . . . The nineteenth century, which had no great glassworkers, often put modest colored windows in the churches. The colors were bright, the designs geometric, and the windows were simple, charming things, and most of the time in very good taste. Now, rather than repair them, those in charge take them out everywhere, and replace them with hideous modernistic images of

saints supplied by the trade. All this was too poor, too modest — and of course there is some money left over.

47

But what good does it do to wring our hands? What can be done? What can the clergy do for these thousands of little sanctuaries in their abandonment? First, they can refuse to resign themselves to abandonment. Next, they can reawaken in the minds of parishioners the thought that these places are sacred, that they are holy things.

Then they can make a serious effort to use them for religious services.

France the people from the past, a genuine life, and done by the local

In rural

still cherish these traditional sites: once or twice a year a ceremony pilgrimage restored, would be enough to revive some degree of this would save them. Often a little maintenance, a few repairs people on these small buildings, could easily be carried out without

costing a lot of money. And, once the necessary — the indispensable — precautions

had been taken, would this not be a really noble task, out in our country areas, for teams of J.A.C.s [Young Christian Farmers] ?

Lastly, and at the very least, the strictest vigilance should be brought to saving these buildings from the many indignities we mentioned in the beginning — humiliations which municipalities, highway departments, and various administrations everywhere think it quite normal to inflict on churches that are too poor.

Notre-Dame d’Estrées, Calvados.

Deconsecrated church.

48

Abbey of Hambue, Manche

But there is also a poetry of irremediable destitution: great ruins speak to the soul more than monuments indiscreetly restored by pedants.

49

G.

Richier.

Crucifix for the sanctuary.

ASSY

What Assy Teaches Us Now this little church* is finished. And even before it was finished, it had been talked about in every country in the world. That has not happened for any church

for well over a century: the largest and most sumptuous basilicas have been built without attracting the slightest attention in artistic circles, nor even, let it be said, among genuinely cultured people. Then why this sudden, worldwide acclaim for a church way off in the mountains?

Because it is a masterpiece? No: because it was born of a sound idea.

That is what has impressed people everywhere — the very simple idea that to keep

Christian art alive, every generation must appeal to the masters of living art. Today

as in the past, for religious art as well as for profane art. Art lives only by its masters — the living masters. Not by its dead masters, precious as their legacy might be. Nothing is born or reborn except from life — not even tradition. Therefore at Assy everything academic (Ecoles, Prix de Rome, Institut) was ruled out, because in those circles there no longer is any sap, any seed of genuine rebirth.

If the greatest of the independent artists were called upon, it was not out of snobbery

(i.e., because they were the most famous or avant-garde), but because they were the

most alive — because in them life abounded with its gifts and its greatest possibilities. That is what impressed the minds of men, wherever the news reached them: was

this exuberant life, this violent, wildly generous life of modern art, about to be welcomed and blessed by the old, holy, motherly Church . . . and offered to Christ as the best possible homage? That is the real lesson of Assy, its only lesson. But there is also the risk: one takes life where one finds it and as it is. But the life of independent art was, on the whole, not very Christian either in its customary themes or in its inspiration. What could be expected of it that might be truly sacred? Yet we decided to “bet on genius.” We thought: “Every true artist is an inspired person, prepared and predisposed by nature and temperament for spiritual intuitions: why not then for the coming of the Spirit himself, who blows, after all, where he wills? ‘And you hear his voice . . . but you do not know whence it comes nor whither it goes . . . > 2

* The church of the plateau of Assy, Notre-Dame-de-Toute-Gréce, was consecrated on August 4, 1950.

52

The facade illuminated.

53

54

Lipchitz

History also seemed to be on our side. If the principles that prevailed at Assy regarding the choice of artists had guided the French clergy and episcopate during the last hundred years; if the decoration of churches had been entrusted to Daumier, Van Gogh, Gauguin, Cézanne, Seurat, Degas, Monet, Rodin, Maillol, and if they, who

certainly had no such thing in mind, had been appealed to persistently; if there had been priests and bishops in France who believed in them and dealt with them in friendship and confidence, as we have done; if there had been some feeling or respect for their heroic adventure and their unyielding integrity; if those in charge had bet on genius . . . imagine what our French churches would be today —

these same

churches, which are now crammed with and dishonored by all the sorry mediocrity of official art and by the shame of the worst kind of commercialism.

But after all, this is only dreaming: everything in fact went the other way round, in the world as in the Church. Let us not be too critical: how could we expect from

the clergy what governments, municipalities, all the powers of the State were so incapable of, so unaware of? At least let us be alert from now on: let us remember

what we are and what we ought to be in every realm of the spirit. The church at Assy is not a masterpiece. It is far from perfect; faults can be found in its architecture as well as in its decoration and its stained glass. We should have

preferred more severity. In spite of the outstanding works marvelously, miraculously brought together here —

as nowhere

else in the world —

we still regret certain

absences and certain weaknesses. If we were to start over again . . . Well, if we were to start over again, we would go still further. We would be still tougher, still more absolute. But it would be in the same direction. With no regrets. Without a shadow of hesitation. Here we have Léger. We have Lurcat. We have the first Rouaults ever allowed in a church. Here in the semi-darkness, is Pierre Bonnard. Here is the altar of the Blessed Sacrament where Christ receives the combined, silent homage of Braque and Matisse. Were there others even more worthy whom we might have offered him in this setting? Despite all the uncertainties and all the lapses possible, life is here, abundant, generous, magnificent. Father Devémy did exactly what he ought to have done. Let the dead bury their dead.

56

SACRED ART AND ITS PUBLIC

Madrid

(above).

Lisieux

What the public likes... and is given.

60

hat we want to do here is to make our readers keenly aware of the profound

misunderstanding that separates Christian art from its public. To begin with, there is the painful fact that the Christian people have indeed become a “public” for

their art — passive or distrustful onlookers in the presence of these sacred works. Yet these works should be born out of the Christian people, should spring fully alive

from them, from their life, from their desires: their art should be both the face and

the mirror of the Christian soul. That is what sacred art always was in the ages of living faith, and what it no longer is. The divorce is complete: the Christian people have become a “public.” And this state of affairs casts a revealing light on a fact that otherwise is hidden under countless disguises, namely, that there is no longer enough

spiritual vitality in the great mass of Christians to make them capable of producing

a genuine sacred art. Thus the falsehoods of art bear witness to the unconscious falsehoods of life. For here is another aspect of the problem: there is, after all, a Catholic art that

is very much alive, universally alive — what is called l'art de Saint-Sulpice or bondieuserie. Make no mistake about it: the popularity of the sentimental “devotional” art is due not to the abilities of hard-sell merchants, but to the fact that the Christian people, with the clergy in the lead, unconsciously recognize themselves in it and are pleased with what they see.

That is what people like, because at a certain level that is what people are. That

art is the only spontaneous Christian art, in other words the only art that is born

straight from the spontaneous wishes and preferences of people and clergy alike and remains in communion with the vast majority of priests and laity. We clamor for a

“living” art: there we have it. And not only living, but flourishing, triumphant the world over from Rome to the farthest missions. We must see things as they are; and to do that we need only open our eyes in any Catholic church in Europe, America,

or Asia. Or simply look at the “holy pictures” carried around in prayer books.

This art is a shame, and a corruption of all that is purest in the Gospel and in the faith. To say this, it seems to us, is no longer our responsibility. When things have

reached this degree of universality it is up to theology, and perhaps to the hierarchy — guardians of the deposit of faith, responsible before the world for the authenticity of its expression — to speak out. That is why it is so important to analyze these problems of Christian art correctly: they are inexorable signs of the real condition of Catholicism. They reveal a reality within Christians which chanceries, congresses, and statistics never touch, and which pastoral ministry itself can discover only through chance encounters and confidences. What we like judges us. Secretly at first. Then, one fine day, for all the world to see.

61

What the Church gave the People in the ages of faith

62

“The ‘holy pictures’ carried around in prayer books.”

64

PAINFUL PROBLEM OF THE ARTS IN MISSIONARY LANDS

THE

66

Too Late God keep us from confusing the treasures of Heaven with those of Earth. But at least we must remember that there are goods that we have no right to sacrifice lightly, even in God’s name. In the native arts there were things which we have wrecked and which are now

irremediably lost. Lost by ouraction. Some of them were connected with sinister rites and base debauchery; but in other respects, namely by the perfection of their forms,

these works expressed the dignity of the native soul itself, the ingenuousness, the

astonishing innocence of childhood, which in certain primitive races is so profound and so pure that neither moral decay nor aberration of beliefs can contaminate it. Of course we must not make hasty generalizations. In many cases — in Africa and South America — poverty and human degradation have gone so far that no art or

concern for art can even be imagined. Moreover, the arts, even in important centers of native styles, were already in decline when the Europeans arrived. It is still true, however, that among most primitive peoples, when they are not degenerate, their inborn sense of pure forms and strict proportions, their feeling for poor, common materials and respect for their humbleness and the limits of what could be done with them, and, at the heart of all this, the atavistic instinct for the sacred and its transcendence, are nothing less than admirable. Faced with such unconscious gifts and miraculous refinements, the personal tastes and sensibilities of colonizers and missionaries were decidedly too far below these strange perfections to perceive their value. These people could only wreak havoc in their ignorance. In any event, they were concerned with other tasks. We are not arguing: it may be that the faith could not be spread except at that price. But it is important that we know and declare the value of what we forced these peoples to give up. Treasures of the poor,

true treasures of the native soul, they were the witness and warrant of its dignity — its astonishing and pure flowers.

When these native arts made their appearance in Europe in the early 1900s, the most knowledgeable and discriminating among us, the best of our poets and painters

— Apollinaire, Picasso, Braque, Matisse — were spellbound. When the missionary

clergy in turn woke up to what was being lost, it was too late. It is now too late. But

before a cultivated world that watches us and judges us and has a right to call us to

account, the least we can do is to admit our mistakes.

67

Guro mask.

68

69

16th-century destruction in Mexico

We are not questioning the admirable generosity of the missionaries, nor their boundless charity, nor their daily dedication to their work.

In matters of art they

were no better and no worse than their contemporaries, the military, the colonists, the civil servants of the State. They were totally unprepared to discern what needed to be discerned. There, as elsewhere, the Church simply fell in with the common condition of Western civilization, sharing its ideas, its benefits, its good and its evil, its unconscious injustices toward the colonized peoples. What had happened in the sixteenth century happened again in the nineteenth and twentieth: colonists, soldiers, professors, and missionaries, all of us in our different ways have been dismantlers, unconscious vandals, despoilers of the poor. Let each one therefore judge

himself. But for us, Christians and priests who brought the Gospel to these people, it is heartrending to think that we made them pay such a price — the utter destruction of their humble, wonderful treasures. Such destruction could perhaps have been avoided. If our missionaries had been more sensitive and better prepared, they could

have treated these things with mercy, could have welcomed and protected things

that, in their kind, were infinitely superior to the trash they brought to replace them. Indeed, that is what they are doing now, when all is lost. And we ourselves lost so much! Many a masterpiece was smashed, burned, thrown into the swamps. Out of all those arts nothing is left but fragments that are hunted in

haste by ethnologists and traders. When we look at them today in our museums, our

70

Ubangi-Shari

7

eyes, opened at last, marvel at their prodigious diversity, their strange and somber grandeur, the incorruptible mystery of their forms. Why not face the fact? Here we also find a manifestation, an almost unbearable presence, of the pagan supernatural. No doubt this is what missionaries and new

converts instinctively wanted to get rid of. Who can then be surprised at their destructiveness? But by this very fact these arts of fetishists and witch doctors could also, from the depths of their spells and their darkness, have taught us a certain lesson: they could have made us realize that this is a truly sacred art. In other words,

this is an art in which,

with no care whatever for beauty or for realistic

representation, the character given to forms and deformations had as its exclusive purpose the expression of the sacred mystery and its direct action upon the senses and the imagination. We, being surrounded by sordid bondieuserie, accustomed to it, contaminated by it, were totally incapable of heeding such lessons. Those are things which the pagan and naturalistic Italian Renaissance, by liquidating the Middle Ages,

banished completely from the Western Christian world.

And what is to be done now? The onward movement of civilizations is irreversible: everything is against the continuance of the native forms. In most cases they are dying out. To save them would have required and would still require great

clearsightedness and infinite precaution: only the rarest of specialists are equipped for the task, and very few are Christians. We cannot expect such care from missionaries, for whom, after all, such problems are secondary. Besides that, the spread of our secular, technological civilization is not going to be stopped, nor, for that matter, will the world-wide expansion of our Western art. It may be after all that the spell cast by Matisse and Picasso will dissipate more radically than anything else what little is left of the primitive arts. We must have no illusions. We know all too well that every art is only the expression, the flower and the fruit, of a general condition of life, and that once this is destroyed or corrupted, art too is lost or compromised. The only hope we have for the resurrection of Christian art forms lies in a rebirth of the Christian life itself. And this is as true for the Missions as for the mother countries. Truly living Christian societies will always invent living forms through which to express themselves. Such forms are entirely unforeseeable. To tie their emergence to an artificially preserved folklore is a vain and therefore dangerous undertaking. What must be done is to save all that can be saved out of the past of peoples, and to give special care to all that is still alive. Honestly, fraternally. But for the future what we must strive to save is the possibility of a freedom that will know no limits.

72

Mpongwe mask. Equatorial Africa

73

Oceania.

Complex realities in which everything is mized together, the Sforms of art with those of belief and of life, and beauty with eyil. Confused realities, in which truly good things are everywhere present amid the disorder of thought and mores.

74

New

Hebrides.

Ancestor totem.

African evil spells

76

Benin,

78

Bobo dance. Upper Volta

79

Counterproof in Bali Here is one of the last places — perhaps the last — where a “sacred art” is truly a living art, so intimately mingled with the people’s life, in their joys and sorrows

and desires, that even today it would be spoiled if this vital unity were impaired. “In Bali,” Madame Ratna Cartier-Bresson tells me, “the whole of life is a liturgical celebration of existence.” Here, as in Java, even the designs printed on fabrics woven for clothing, or engraved on jewels, are symbols: everyone knows what they mean.

All the dances, though they celebrate popular or family events, are sacred dances. There is almost no secular art, and in any case the same brush that painted the myths of religion also paints the scenes of everyday life in the same style.

Sculptors and

painters — there are large numbers of them — are craftsmen like the rest, and work

at other trades such as farming or shopkeeping. There has been no disintegration of the native unity of sensibility and imagination. I see religious paintings and sculpture that are excellent, temples whose archi-

tecture is delicate and strong and would do honor to any art in any country; and these things are not more than ten or fifteen years old, the oldest less than forty. The world-wide deterioration of religious art, which can be seen in every country and every religion, has not touched this island. Here religious beliefs, social order,

philosophy of life and the life of every day constitute a single, integral reality. In its vivacity and freshness, in all its childlike graces, this reality is a sacral type, from which a sacred art emerges spontaneously. Here a native art is a living art because it

is a sacred art. And this may be the last example of such a phenomenon that we can find throughout the world. We must, however, make no mistake here: this unity, so simple and is a fragile unity. Touch one or the other element composing it and the crumble. Right here is the counterproof: Bali has been completely preserved, and influences carefully kept out. The Dutch government has been extremely its relations with the island: Western civilization was not allowed the free its attractions and its ravages culturally, commercially, or politically. By

80

so fecund, whole will European discreet in exercise of virtue of a

Bali.

tacit but very firm agreement, Protestant missionaries have had only strictly limited access to Bali, and Catholic none at all. Today it is clear that such a situation will not last long. Political emancipation, military needs, the tourist influx, all occasion innumerable contacts and temptations: where soldiers, merchants, and curious visitors go, the missionaries will soon be able to go as well. And it will even be their duty to move in without delay. Thus we will be faced with an already compromised situation, the compromise being the work of

others. Our own action perforce will go to the heart of things, to the roots of the unity I have described. We must face the facts squarely. Once again our responsibilities lie before us. The preaching of the Gospel will necessarily entail the disintegration of this harmonious world, so tightly closed in upon itself. May those who bring the Gospel bring it in hands so brotherly, so gentle, that the changes may take place without useless loss and injury. Maybe this is not too much to ask of those who come in the name of the Lord and are the servants of the poor.

81

Tahiti

82

A Universal Humanism

What we must promote from now on is not an African, nor an Oceanic, nor a Chinese “style”: we must save or reawaken the uniquely human gifts and abilities

of every race. And once these gifts are reawakened and brought back to full life, contact with Christian realities and Western cultures will spur the invention of new forms corresponding to the genius of each race. The effort to go on forever preserving

and protecting will be in vain:

the world is too small.

No barrier can hold.

The

only fecund, vigorous African art at present was born in the slums of large American cities and Southern plantations, with no thought of ancestral Africa. The black soul

reacted to the painful but fruitful contact with American life by creating dances,

jazz, and spirituals of a style so imposing that the whole world has made them its own. Cannot hope and faith do what want and despair were able to do? And shall we always be reduced to the role of caretakers that life itself laughs at?

It seems to us that this humanist policy for the arts in mission lands, while it is

hard to formulate, in any case suggests the following particulars:

The native arts must be protected from the tawdry products of commerce and academicism. Both of these infest the colonies and the colonial mentality (and with it the missionary mentality). But, on the other hand, in all peoples the dignity of the human spirit demands that knowledge of the real Masters never be withheld: any native traditions that might be dissipated by contact with them would be amply compensated by the renewal they would stimulate. True values and true greatness do not kill each other. They make each other grow, they ennoble each other by

association and exchange.

Indeed we already know, from what the discovery of

African art meant to our Western masters, how marvelously fruitful such exchanges

are and how that fruitfulness springs from the indivisible unity of human nature.

Correlatively, in the pressing matter of native craftsmanship, what we must save is

not such and such forms, noble and pure as they may be, but the human gifts that assure this nobility and purity and would still assure them in entirely new forms.

What lends grace, beauty, and technical perfection to Samoan or Banda dwellings is

the wondrous refinement of the people, and this is what has to be preserved, come what may.

83

Borobudur.

84

Borobudur.

85

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Samoan bungalows.

87

88

VENCE

In

the late afternoon, 25 June 1951, when the wave of visitors and friends had receded, the doors were closed, and only two or three nuns remained at prayer in their stalls, it was possible to feel the spiritual blessings that permeate a place like this. It is idle to hope that words or pictures could evoke the atmosphere created there

silently, by the whiteness of the walls, the pure colors, the noble proportions. Those of our friends who are still doubtful about what the dignity and spiritual power of forms can be should go to Vence. There they will see with their own eyes what the beauty of the things in the midst of which one lives can bring to the soul and

the heart.

The fact remains that many of our readers who are not about to take

off immediately for Vence, and many of those who do visit here, being ill-prepared and coming to the chapel at times when the public is admitted and is filing through

helter-skelter, will want “explanations” to enable them to “understand” what at first baffles and shocks them. To all these we must do our best to offer explanations, but only with the reservation that in such matters the essential is never “explained”: it is never reached except through one’s own intuitions — in the end, that is, through

a communion wherein what the viewer sees depends on what he is, and what he receives on the degree to which he gives himself.

Ideas do not help much:

most

often it is not one’s ideas but one’s innermost being, one’s very life, that would have to change before one could open oneself with reawakened sensitivity to these very simple, very pure things.

I think that Matisse must have been fascinated all through his life by what is in

fact the true magic of painting — its power to transform space by the play of colors

and lines. He often takes a sheet of paper and draws some figures on it: “You see, don’t you . . . the white is no longer the same on the right side; you see that the proportion has changed.” I think he also said one day, “I don’t work on the canvas but on whomever looks at it.” No sleight-of-hand there, but an incomparable instinct for the plastic mediums and their spiritual power. Four years ago it was no longer merely canvas or paper that he could thus transfigure, but a monument. He defined his objective at once — “to take a closed space of very limited proportions, and, by no other means than the play of colors and lines, give it infinite dimensions.” Go to Vence and stay there, in silence, during the hours of solitude: you will feel that in this very small chapel the real dimensions do not count at all: the perfection of the forms abolishes the dimensions of the space. That is accomplished by the perfection of certain relationships and balances. Two luminous walls, intensely colored, balance two other solid white walls covered only

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with large black line drawings; and, at certain times of the day, the reflections from the colored windows in the black lines of the gleaming ceramic tiles enliven this balance and break up what might otherwise be too static. Here the entire effect

comes from the relations of one thing to the other and from the diversity of their proportions and their harmony. So one should not linger over this or that element for itself: it is there only for the whole. Therefore it is usually sacrificed to the whole. Hence it is normal that any one element may disappoint those who pause over it. Everything here is sacrifice, and to

a much greater degree than one might imagine: by the very essence of its forms the chapel is already, in this sense, a “sacred” place. When the work was finished Matisse

could say to us, “What I have achieved in the chapel is the creation of a religious space.” And so it appears that Matisse, seeking spaces without limit, and prolongations into the infinite with which to crown his life’s work, could find them only in a monument open to the spiritual expanses where the life of man knows no limits either in space or in time — in other words a sacred, a religious monument. But it would be a mistake to see in all this no more than a lofty exercise of the mind: “It is said that all my art comes from the intellect. That’s not true. All that I've done, I've done out of passion.” Here again a deep inner feeling has brought everything, down to the smallest detail, to fulfillment. Matisse said another thing: “All my life, my only strength has been my sincerity.” Sincerity producing the whole strength of a life and its work, and thereby touching the secret recesses of the hearts of millions from one end of the earth to the other — what a lesson! ... So true is it that the sincerity of one lone man, if it goes deep enough in him, reaches, for all other men, a universal substratum of truth which nothing else can ever penetrate. Anyone who knows how to look will find borne out here what was Matisse’s constant law: he never did anything without first impregnating himself body and soul with what he wanted to paint, identifying with the object he wished to represent, then expressing it in one outpouring, rapid and in a way uncontrolled, so he might give himself to it whole and entire, without reticence or precaution, as he himself had become transformed by that other life within him. “What I make I must grow in me like a plant in the earth™: or again, “From a certain moment on it isn’t me any more, it’s a revelation; all I have to do is give myself.” And, speaking of his Way of the Cross, he told us, “Things like that, you have to know them by heart so well that you could draw them blindfolded.” Needless to say, these working principles are precisely the ones that should govern all religious art.

92

Study for the door of the tabernacle.

93

It is clear that this absolute sincerity, in which the present moment contains all the accumulated riches of a long, laborious past, cannot tolerate any stopping to linger over incidental details. It therefore explains, on the one hand, the hundreds of preliminary drawings, the endless fresh starts, the anguish suffered in sleepless nights, and, on the other, the disconcerting simplicity of the finished work. Yet there

it is: out of so many sketches, so many studies, out of all that enormous toil spread over four years, nothing can now be seen but the three pure colors in the windows

and the abrupt black strokes, that look so rapid, so terse, on the white walls. All the rest was ruthlessly abandoned, week after week, all along the way, sacrificed to an

imperious inner truth that was brought to life at once. This is what the loose-tongued and the scatterbrained and the people-in-a-hurry have not the slightest chance of ever perceiving here. This place is not for them.

It is for those who will make a long stay here, and let themselves be penetrated and impregnated, little by little, by what the place enfolds in its silence. Letting themselves be slowly transformed by it, they will discover, in themselves and in this

transformation of themselves, what Henri Matisse, during four long years, faithfully

put into it out of his thought and his genius. When he said, “I want those who will come into my chapel to feel purified and

relieved of their burdens,” he was thinking no doubt of the character he intended to give the chapel. It was not to be a place where stained-glass windows and paintings would describe and teach complex things that people already knew anyway, but a place which by its beauty would change their hearts — a place where souls would be purified by the purity of its forms. But by that very fact the true goal of the work and of life comes clear. Those of whom Matisse never stopped thinking as he built his chapel are those same unknowns, with their burdens and their troubles, like the old woman who said one day, “It’s a lot better that the Blessed Virgin has no face, so that each one can see her the way he wants to.” When people no longer come here to admire or criticize but simply to pray and to find here, in the silence, the peace of heart and the little bit of joy needed for each day; when many a sorrow has been consoled and many a hope renewed; then indeed the chapel will take on its full meaning, and Matisse will, for all time, have found his reward and crowned his work.

94

The Stations of the Cross

I want to try to say, as simply as I can, what I think of this work of art: I think

it is the most important and most beautiful thing in the chapel. I also think that it is what will most deeply disturb the public of our time. I say “of our time” because I already see the youngest among us, the twenty-year-olds, accepting and living it readily. It belongs to their world. It speaks a language they understand. But I also

see people as different as Picasso and Bazaine appreciating it just as the young do. As the years roll on we must recognize that real contact with a work of art is always «a secret thing, born of a mysterious relation the two terms of which lie well below

the conscious zones of our being, and, no doubt, well beyond what our eyes perceive in the work. And the explanations we may try to give to those who question us are

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100

AUDINCOURT

f there is one thing that Audincourt ought to teach us, it is the lesson of hope. At a time when so many possibilities seem to be threatened and already compromised, a third church building, a good example of what we have so long looked for, is brought to completion. This time not as a result of fortuitous circumstances, nor by the bold action of free-lancers, nor by the almost omnipotent will of some very great man, but in a regular, normal way — a fervent parish entirely united around its pastor for this large undertaking, and the diocesan authority, fully informed, assuring the

necessary supervision, then coming to crown and consecrate the whole effort. The future will mark this date, 20 January 1951, as a red-letter day in the history of the renewal of Christian art; for on that day, in a Diocesan Commission for Sacred Art meeting presided over by the archbishop and his auxiliary, seventeen sketches by Fernand Léger, the layout of a large mosaic by Bazaine, and Le Corbusier’s plans

for the church at Ronchamp were approved together and unanimously.

When such

projects, representing what is purest and strongest in living art, can be accepted

by high ecclesiastical authority, we can be sure that something has changed in the Church of France. Furthermore, in those avant-garde circles where ten years ago no one among us

could yet see any spiritual possibilities, great artists have been found, and these artists, without compromise and without forcing their talent, have created deeply

religious works which, going beyond the pagan Renaissance, instinctively return to our most vigorous medieval traditions. This surely is more than hope: it is life itself and its marvelous resources for all to see.

102

In Fernand Léger’s studio.

103

Aunque es de noche’ I would like to give our reasons for what some have called our “temerity.”

If we

have chosen to go as far as we possibly could in a direction defined clearly enough by the names of Léger, Bazaine and Mird, it was not for the vain wish to be or to appear to be “progressive.” It was simply that we were trying to reach a certain height, because below that height our effort seemed to us less worthy of the One for whom

we undertook it — less worthy, too, of the men who had asked us to help them in a very wearing task. This, the essential, being said, a few explanatory statements may suffice.

If we have insisted so tenaciously that no concession was to be made, and that on the contrary these sacred works were lordly, reserved, and in a sense difficult works, it is because we thought that in that way we would get more truth and simple honesty. To put ourselves “on the people’s level,” if to do so meant lowering the quality of the works, would be a betrayal in every way. It would first of all betray the works themselves (for which one is responsible once it is in one’s power to produce them) and with and in them the spiritual values that pure works alone can convey. It has been our thought that such concessions, such lowering of standards, would be less legitimate in the realm of the sacred than anywhere else. Before being intended for people, even for the very people who would build them and pay for them with their labors and sacrifices, churches are made for God, for his presence in our midst. That being so, nothing in them will ever be pure enough, exalted enough, sufficiently removed from compromise of any sort. And was it not wonderful that after so many years of dishonor and adulteration we had at last come to the moment when the demand for the absolute, indeed the hunger and thirst for the absolute, which since Cézanne and Van Gogh have been the anguish and the greatness of modern art, could be offered to the Peace of God and could surround the mysteries of his Dwelling within the walls we build for him? It seemed to us that everything else must yield to the dignity of such an encounter.

It may be that our conception of religious art will be judged to be a little too “sacred.”

Maybe we are not making sufficient allowance for what the people want.

*“Although it is night,” the refrain of a poem by St. John of the Cross, written in prison.

104

And it is true that what the people want is consolation, and consolation they can feel.

Alas! for a hundred and fifty years we have been seeing all too clearly what that can lead to in art, and in theology as well. In such debasement everything is lost, and the works of the saints themselves show the dangerous inroads of this unintentional degeneration. The fact that the paintings done by a saint as straightforward and sound as Thérése of Lisieux have no value whatever, either artistic or religious, is a warning to be heeded. Some may say that this makes too much of what was an innocent pastime. Perhaps. But who can fail to see that what begins with these harmless paintings inexorably leads to the colossal basilica at Lisieux? It is still no less true that the task of Christian art is a twofold one —

the glory of God, of course, but also to serve our neighbor.

to serve

The sermon that goes

over the heads of the congregation is useless. True. But first of all, in an age when everyone can read, the primary role of sacred art can no longer be (if indeed it ever

was) to instruct.

On the contrary, if the same age is precisely the time when the

most confining, most crushing servitude weighs upon working people, would not the primary role of art be to create places of enchantment, poetry, deliverance? Please God, may his churches become such places for those who, even though they may not he aware of doing so, still come to the church to find what the bitter world never gives them in its houses, its factories, and its barracks! But, the argument continues, why choose, for people who are totally unprepared for them, the most taxing and difficult “poetic” forms of our time?

To that argument our answer is this: first of all these forms were not chosen because they were the most difficult (although in their difficulty and harshness there is an almost certain power of purification and discipline that is sorely lacking in

contemporary “piety”). They were chosen because these difficult forms were also the most precious. Diamonds, whose purity required that very hardness about which we complain. To give the best, even if it were not understood, not recognized — this, I repeat, seemed to us to show more respect for those who put their confidence in us.

Furthermore, obscurity and lack of comprehension are only temporary. Pure works

have a kind of radioactivity. Their action may be slower, more silent, but it does not stop. We have seen the truth of this hundreds of times. True forms, figurative or non-figurative, are living forms. In the semi-darkness where such things dwell, their

energy builds up, and there comes a day when children and grandchildren draw life from the treasure that their fathers, to their credit, had accepted in faith.

I do not deny that there might be other possibilities and other paths to follow. To

105

be sure, I have little liking for the new Socialist Realism of the Communist Party painters, yet I do not feel in the least disposed to despise them or even simply to judge them. There is a moral grandeur in their submissiveness, in the sacrifice of their personal preferences to the immediate demands of political action. And I am even less disposed to despise them since there is not the shadow of a doubt that in the Church itself more than one cleric and more than one prelate would, even today, be inclined to follow a similar way of thinking — by which I mean that they would ask Christian artists, for the sake of the apostolate, to stick closer to the

immediate needs of the people, and therefore to their preferences and tastes.

But

for our part, we will continue to maintain in this review that in the field of religious

art the spiritual mission of the Church implies a more uncompromising, more easily offended freedom, the only freedom which, in the life of forms, measures up to the rights and duties of our freedom as children of God and respects its dignity in others. I remember what Braque once told me: “Once sacred art is lowered to put it at the people’s level, it is no longer an act of faith, it is propaganda . . .” > But if we are to keep to this height, then other equally rigorous duties are laid upon us. We shall give the people things which they will not “understand,” and which will be foreign to them, perhaps for a long time. How can we do this if we ourselves continue to be strangers to the people — if they have no confidence in us? By what

right will we ask them to give us their trust — a trust difficult in any case — unless in return we give them what guarantees any trust, namely the evidence worthy of the witness and the testimony? Therefore you have to go and live with the people you are working for. Let them

see with their own eyes that into these strange works which they do not yet appreciate

you have put all your love and the best you have and are: let them come to know this anguished quest for perfection. There is no holding out against such an experience.

It generates strong friendships and mutual confidence, which ambient malice, envy, and stupidity cannot corrode. Bazaine and Mir6 both understood this, and wanted to go and live in Audincourt. Miré was determined to spend several weeks there before starting on his work: “I'll go eat and drink with the folks at Audincourt,” he said. And in fact the trust and friendship shown him while he was there in July almost persuaded him to overlook the problems on account of which, in the end, he reluctantly withdrew. As for Bazaine, whose admirable mosaic is obviously the hardest for people to accept, he could see how much his presence did to win them over and break down prejudice. The evening the church was blessed, as the artist, worn out by pointless

106

discussion, was taking his leave, a very simple old lady came up to his wife and said timidly, “Madame, please tell your husband not to be bothered by the things he’s hearing. We’ll understand, we’re sure of it. Please tell him we’ll understand . . .” Léger’s immediate and unanimous popularity teaches another lesson, but one that

confirms this point.

His friendships, personal convictions,

and tastes had always

shown his solidarity with working people and their lot; and here, the first time he was offered the chance to work in a church, instinctively he found a language the people understand. Not

so very

long ago there was no one around

us who

could

believe

in such

a

success as Léger’s. And now things are moving a lot faster than anyone expected. There is the constant tendency to underestimate the public and the power of truth. This low estimate, which always reveals a certain obscure baseness of heart, should simply not be tolerated when our concern is directed not toward the “public” in a theater, but toward the Christian people and the images of their faith.

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108

MODEST

TASKS

e trust we may be pardoned for the freedom and bluntness of what we say here, even if we may seem to be going too far. Really these are ideas tossed into the wind of worries and wishes: let each reader take whatever he finds useful. Christian art is passing through a very grave crisis. It’s hard to be sure of anything. We at L’Art Sacré face scorn and rejection from those outside the faith, and we see all too clearly that their strictures are well-founded (and therefore helpful): we also face the suspicion and faintheartedness of those who ought to be our comrades and our Fathers. We live in the half-light of constant doubt about our own choices. In such circumstances what could be surer than these frank thoughts freely proposed to the world at large? Time after time we have welcomed priests to our office.

Until they stood in the

doorway we did not know their names nor their parishes nor the villages they came from, but their faces were the faces of friends, and their first words conveyed a clear and profound understanding of what we are trying to do. This went beyond any question of painting or sculpture: clearly they shared and share our anxieties, and we recognize in them the fraternity of the many who “seek first the Kingdom of God and his justice.”

It is for them first of all that we write — for them, the isolated, whom everything sets apart. In haste, qguoniam advesperascit, “for the shadow of the night comes on”

(Luke 24:29). They are the ones we are thinking of as we put these pictures together, even while we deal cautiously, as we must, with the authorities, and make concessions out of sheer weariness. It seems to us that they, isolated and unknown as they are, are the ones who will be most sensitive to what we have to expose — the deterioration and decline of Christian thought and feeling in the Church of France, revealed in the debasement of forms. Something must have given way in the Christian heart, something must have gone wrong, to let us come down from the proud forms seen in our poorest villages of the past to the vulgarity we witness today. We must face this situation and try to see it clearly. We must stop accepting it as if nothing could be done about it. It may well be that what you are about to and confusion. But anything is better than be accepted: there are so many people who disorder when everything stays as it is. No and situations that still allowed a gleam putrefaction. When

we speak

of “modest

tasks”

read is of a nature to increase uncertainty to let the present disorder settle in and are convinced that there cannot be any disorder indeed! Except that problems of hope are showing increased signs of

it is clearly understood

110

that we mean

works

whose size and importance are relatively minimal.

But at the same time we mean

to describe a certain quality in these works — a spiritual quality coming from the

modesty of heart of those who do the works and are qualified by this very modesty of heart to do them. Obviously this raises questions. That the relative unimportance of a work immediately implies modesty in its style and its forms, this modesty in turn being assured

only by the modesty of the people who do the work, supposes a state of order, and, therefore, a state of Christian civilization, from which we are perhaps far removed in our day. Modesty of the tasks to be accomplished, modesty of forms, modesty of the Christian heart . . . all this holds together by an essential linkage, and in the last analysis

tells something just as essential. However pure and however simple the most ancient

small Doric temples may be, they are not modest: a certain modesty of things was born of the Gospel and bears witness to it. This is what matters to us. “Let your

modesty be known to all: the Lord is nigh” (Phil. 4:5).

Modesty of the heart, modesty of things, where God is near. So what we need to rediscover in and through these works of the past, as we undertake the modest tasks of the present, is a certain spirit in the forms, a spirit

born of the heart, which in turn protects and quiets the Christian heart. Otherwise why bother to worry about these things?

The Modesty of the Past These poor houses in a very poor hamlet in the Lozere have a gravity and dignity of form that relate them to the masterpieces of their time and of all times. They are

of the same family, the same race. In the proportions, volumes, and outlines of these humble farmhouses and poor churches we begin to see the volumes and proportions of the noble Cistercian abbeys: they have neither the perfection nor the incomparable grandeur of these latter, but the state of grace is already there. The same virtue, the same decorum. This dignity in modesty is the tone set by Sénanque and Le Thoronet so long ago. A prodigious masterpiece like Le Thoronet, built by a man of genius, impresses even the most heedless by the rigorous perfection of its forms, but it does not flaunt them. There is no ostentation here: it is great because it is great, period. But what men of genius build in perfect order and unfailing grandeur, other men build modestly and in good

1l

heart on their farms; and both are saying about the same thing, are telling the same secret of the heart — the secret of integrity, uprightness, and restraint. I said “other men.” The profusion of these modest works of the past, in the most prized monuments and in the oldest hamlets, is astonishing. When we carefully study their character we discover in them the evidence of gifts that evoke admiration — strength and vitality, and the sobriety natural to the humility of routine tasks. Then we perceive, in the quality of the forms instinctively preferred, that in the now abolished past these modest tasks were performed by men whose names today would be Henri Rousseau, André Bauchant, Caillaud, or Bézard.

There we have precisely the men and the style of the modest tasks of the past. There too we have the sort of men we must make every effort to find in our villages and cities, if we are to restore to our churches, by the modest works they call for, some measure of human and Christian truth.

2

Pg ]

113

114

115

Look closely at these pictures and see the nobility of this poverty: Here is what came as a matter of course from the hands and hearts of the people. Here is what they made and here is what they loved. We know how things are now. Confronted with these works of the past, you would have to gouge your eyes out not to see the problems they pose. And that this is a moral and spiritual problem.

116

117

Modesty, Mediocrity We think it may be useful to state some harsh truths. We said: “to the great men, the great works” (and with God’s help that has produced some results), and back came the answer: “Fine! And now the average tasks — the countless modest tasks — can go to modest talents.” To this we must reply that it is not at all that simple, and that in a way it could even be disastrous at a time when, it seems, there

are forty thousand painters living in France, most of them out of work.

For what

must immediately be added is this: “Yes, the great men must do the great works, but mediocre artists can’t handle even the modest ones.”

Everyone agrees, indeed, that nothing good or even passable, and above all nothing modest, is ever produced by mediocre talents. What they are least capable of is modesty. And furthermore we must say that in a time like our own, modest talents, all of them and always, are in danger of becoming mediocre talents. The sad fact is, therefore, that the modest tasks, urgent and multitudinous as they are, must not be entrusted to mediocre artists, numerous and eager as they are. The truth is that the talent available at present is even less qualified for modest tasks than for great ones. Admirable works like the Unité d’Habitation in Marseilles or those of Donzeére-Mondragon, or the prodigious renewal in the plastic arts brought about by Matisse, Picasso, Braque and Léger are still possible in our day; but this is because it is still possible for men of genius to live and work in spite of the disintegration of culture and the disorder under a government as liberal and weak as ours is. The initiatives and resources peculiar to individualism and anarchy can still be put to use, working their way through the meshes of a loose, unraveling fabric. Thus, modern art sometimes possesses the marvelous, poignant look of those tall, strange flowers that push up through the rubbish strewn in vacant lots. The great men will always make their way. Even Daumier, Van Gogh and Soutine found means to express themselves. But let us remember that what is modest is, by that very fact, fragile and endangered; and the modesty of the heart, and of the gifts it protects, is the most threatened of all. Of course in L’Art Sacré we have always carefully distinguished between art and morality and between creative gifts and the impulses of the heart. But this inner dissociation, this release of creative freedom, can be wholly achieved only by very

118

great artists, whose gifts are so pure and efficacious as to assure the integrity of the

work, though the heart may be desolate and life in disarray. In the case of the less gifted, less powerful artists whose talents are modest, the work they do is always

more closely bound up with what they are, and thus depends on the nature of their thoughts, their desires, their way of living. Everything acts on them. The honesty of a modest work of art, or simply good craft work, is still very close to the honesty of

the artist’s life. It is almost always conditioned by the thousand human bonds and obligations from which, on the contrary, genius frees itself, putting them all aside.

So what becomes of modest talents, whether they be primitive or more sophisticated, depends largely on the conditions imposed by the milieu and the time. We cannot close our eyes to the fact that today these conditions are deplorable. They cre-

ate, as it were, a slope on which everything goes downhill, and modesty, inexorably, turns into mediocrity.

119

In Lozére.

120

Le Thoronet.

121

Matisse

Vence.

122

Sculptor unknown. 1912.

123

Four Dangers I beg pardon for saying this and it hurts me to say it, because I know it will hurt

men whose character and dedication I respect. But facts are facts, and the fact is that aside from exceedingly rare exceptions, nothing good comes out of the Academy. Probably the source itself is bad and the Academy should be closed. “Anything that can be taught is not worth learning,” says the Tao. What we really ought to save for the heart and the imagination is non-knowing, ingenuousness, the candor of modesty. That is not possible in the Academy, nor At any rate, what is wrong with the Academy is that it perhaps in any group.

does away with all mystery, takes precautions against the miraculous — or, alas,

organizes it. One learns how things should be done — how to do a figure, a tree, an Annunciation. From there on all is lost; it’s like the Garden of Eden, where, in order

to live there, one might not touch the Tree of Knowledge.

Once outside, the gates

are shut for good. The dangers that constantly threaten modest talents can, it seems to me, be reduced to four:

O

The all-powerful influence of the Masters. This has always been so, but in our

day this despotic influence imposes a style on the creation of forms which is so dom-

ineering and audacious that the qualities and candid initiatives of modest artists get

irretrievably lost in it. The style of Picasso or Matisse, of Braque or Rouault or Léger, is not a modest style: it is a style for great men. The natural grandeur that reigns at the Cistercian abbeys of Sénanque or Le Thoronet could exist compatibly with the modesty of the peasant because it fitted into a homogeneous human milieu, and because it rose above the ordinary without violence or rupture. But the imperious, shattering grandeur of today’s great Independents could not possibly set the tone for more modest artists. Attempting it, their voice hardens, then goes false. Soon it is lost in “imitations,” and can no longer be heard. [J Theteachingin the Ecoles des Beaux-Arts. We are sure, and experience (countless experiences!) proves that we can no longer expect anything from the Academy in the way of renewal of Christian art. In the end we are always disappointed, and that is all there is to it . . .

“Cost what it may, what is needed in order to create is pure candor,” said Dullin.

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“Get rid of every memory,” Matisse said one day. [0 Third threat to modest talents: specialization in religious art.

I think that

herein lies a grave and costly error, given the way things are at the present time.

Concretely, such specialization is first of all an arbitrary attitude toward the artistic

life of our day. Lifeis all one. Ina world in which the sense of life is no longer religious, living art cannot be religious either. Hence anyone who isolates himself from the main current (now entirely secular) of art always runs the risk of cutting himself off

from its vitality and putting artificial limits to his own gifts: they will quickly be

exhausted. Today, no one should “dedicate himself to religious art” unless the call is irresistible. Like the call Rilke prescribed for anyone who wanted to write poetry:

“Would you die if you were forbidden to write?”

Without such motivation it would be a serious imprudence for any of our friends to isolate themselves from the broad current of contemporary art, from its experiments and confrontations, its successful efforts and its perpetual self-questioning. And this is all the more to be avoided since by so doing they would be committing

themselves to a closed group, the “church clientele.” This is not a clientele made up of knowledgeable amateurs, but, on the contrary, one that is put off by any

experimentation or attempts at renewal; and this is precisely because what they are

looking for in a work of religious art is not art. From the point of view of this clientele

that is perfectly normal, but it weakens an artist endowed with no more than average talent. He will be more and more inclined to repeat himself, and less inclined to raise any question about what constitutes “his manner” and makes for his popularity. Thus an artistic and spiritual mannerism takes hold, and this, in our day, is the

bane of Christian art and the common form its mediocrity assumes everywhere.

[

The lure of commercialism: the so-called art trades. On this point we must be

free of and firm against compromise.

If the modest artist wants to keep the qualities

and gifts inherent in modesty, he must lead a modest — a materially modest — life. He cannot become a millionaire and at the same time continue to produce modest work. The man of modest talent who becomes a millionaire will no longer produce modest works for the reason that everything in his life will go against this modesty,

psychologically and materially — his life-style and its demands, his expanding market and increasing commissions, the accelerated, relentless rhythm of production needed to maintain regular output, the inevitable enticements of success. So the only modest artists who will be “saved” from mediocrity are those saved by the modesty of their hearts and their way of life. They will be humble folk, not quite middle-class. If they’ve heard of Matisse or Picasso at all, these men will seem to them

125

Roziers-C Cote. -d Aurec.

126

Qousea H. Rousseau.

127

Bauchant.

1928,

128

A. Caillaud.

1952.

129

to belong to a world of fable. They will not have gone through the Academy.

They

will not read L’Art Sacré. They will not be“specialists,” and very likely will have a job on the side: Henri Rousseau was a customs employee, Bauchant a nurseryman, Caillaud is a grocer, Bézard made fishes because he was so fond of fishing . . . That is the kind of man we must find for the humble works needed in our churches. ‘We must find men who can build walls like the walls of Chateau-Miral, or who can

carve crosses like the cross at Bédouens, carved around 1910 by a shepherd who came

from no-one-knows-where, or who can paint an “Entombment” like Caillaud’s. And by the way, just to assure us that all is not lost, the Bédouens cross resembles Matisse’s

cross at Vence: the inspiration is similar, the work equally strong. Thus, at a certain depth of truth, the continuity and homogeneity of the very modest and the very great

are perpetuated among us. Are such talents as numerous as they used to be?

I am going to say exactly what I think about this: I believe these talents abound, and that they can be found everywhere in our villages and our cities. The lack of interest and recognition that

protects modesty also hides it and its gifts. It is not possible that the countless enchanted gifts of childhood could be entirely lost. Yes, I know, they disappear like runlets of rain in the sand, but I believe that in many people they keep a kind of

subterranean life. And sometimes they flower in dream, orin drink, or associated with some derangement. But sometimes, too, favorable circumstances let them express themselves normally, revealing the freshness of their sources — a chance encounter, a marked aptitude for a technique, or simply the love of working with one’s hands.

I repeat, I believe there are men like this, and in any event we must seek them out everywhere. In the end they are the best, if not the only, hope for the modest tasks of Christian art. We will have to be extremely careful not to disturb or spoil them when we employ them in our churches. There will be many failures. But the truth is there. Away with the Academy, away with commercialism, away with spiritual and artistic mannerism! Let us return to the basic human conditions for all religious art. Perhaps we do not even see how far removed we are from these conditions; but unbelievers, and particularly those who still feel a bitter nostalgia for the Church and resent whatever is unworthy of their stubborn respect and their disappointment — they see how far removed we are, and they turn away. What they want is a candid, pure Christian art. Our “exhibitions of sacred art,” with their affectations of modernity and mystique, almost always scandalize these people. At bottom we know that they are right, and that if this candor and purity are really and truly lost, it would be better to have no art at all.

130

Roziers-Cote-d’ Aurec.

131

e pn Ao

The tomb.

132

e

prl

West facade of the palace. It is clear that the architectural fantasies of Cheval the postman derive from an

inspiration totally different from that of the modest tasks we have been talking

about. Still the man himself, who worked as a letter-carrier, was as “modest” as he could be. So we have decided to show these works of his because at their mysterious

source they have much in common with the work of all native artists. In them we have evidence that creative gifts persist beneath the artificial hard shell of modern life. "This surprising outburst of the gifts of memory and imagination, this flamboyant, baroque turn of mind, prove that certain persons preserve throughout their lives those inner treasures of poetry which, in other civilizations, would bloom and flourish on all sides. (That is how it was in the Western world before the Renaissance.) As for ourselves, we are convinced that an immense and marvelous Middle Ages still survives in modest hearts, unaware of itself, rebuffed, suppressed, despairingly timid. This great treasure of dreams and inner life is wounded and wasted due to the eternal distrust of oppressive families, but also to the omnipresence and onmipotence of that prolific organization, at once academic and frightfully elementary, which is brought into being by the bureaucratism and official teaching of the Beaux-Arts. That enormous machine never questions itself, and every sort of mediocrity conspires

to make it still more ponderous and unyielding. Generation after generation, the real Masters may scorn and despise its institutions and its people, yet it continues to put

down anyone who tries to do something new. And nothing proves that we will ever succeed in stemming this ridiculous torrent of abuse and absurdity. If we have mentioned Henri Rousseau the Douanier in connection with modest talents, it was certainly not in order to belittle him: we regard him as being on a level with the greatest. All we want to say is that the “style” of the modest works of

the past is of a class with his. And that means a lot.

133

For Fear of Profaning Them My own thought is that a deeper, truer feeling for the sacred would banish from Christian life and Christian worship almost all the art we are so fond of putting into them. I have long been struck by these texts of Genesis and Exodus. “Jacob rose early in the morning, took the stone on which he had laid his head, set it up as a sacred

pillar and poured oil on the top of it . . . Thereupon Jacob made this vow: ‘If God

will be with me . .. on my journey . .. this stone . .. shall be a house of God” ” (Gen. 28:18, 20-22). “You shall make an altar of earth for me . . . If you make an altar of stones for me, you must not build it of hewn stones, for if you use a chisel on it you will profane it” (Exod. 20:24-25). There we have the beginnings of sacred art. Exactly: and there is no art. These are real things that God and man may consecrate by an agreement, a contract, making them so sacred that they are scarcely to be touched, as profane hands must not touch a consecrated chalice. We have lost the sense of these things, but it seems that the present situation should call us back to this austere, elemental realism. We are very poor — poor in money and poor in artists whom we might seriously expect to do work that would be of spiritual benefit to us. Then why not return to a more radical conception of the sacred and of sacred things? After all, what do we absolutely need in any church? An altar, a cross, a tabernacle . . . Then let us have the village cartwright make a sturdy wooden table, one of those noble, massive farmhouse tables, long, low, with deep drawers in it. Even today, in our remote rural areas, the wooden ploughs, yokes, and big farm wagons have a style beyond compare — as strong and beautiful as the style of African sculptures. Or else, if there is stone in the countryside and the people prefer a tomb altar, have the local stonecutter make a real vault like the ones we bury the dead in, and we will celebrate the mass on the slab. In either case, whether it is the table we eat at or the tomb of the dead, everyone will understand right away. If it turns out that in fact the rural craftsmen can no longer produce what we want, then why not Jacob’s stone or the stones of Exodus which the chisel must not even touch “for fear of profaning them”? In our fields and woodlands there is no dearth of such big stones. They would be brought into our churches. They would be left as they are except that the top

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Carnac, Brittany.

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nt-Emilion.

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would be leveled to these stones, and let Petra erat Christus, mysterious and the

support the missal and the chalice. them be surrounded with real respect “the Rock was Christ” (1 Cor. 10:4). sacred, the sense of the presence and

Let the bishop consecrate and with genuine worship. By degrees the sense of the incarnation of God in the

world he created, would penetrate the liturgies, the sources of the imagination, the

depths of the heart. And art? It would be talked about again a hundred now. Idle dreams? Not so idle as you might think. For nearly fifty years our and Girl Scouts have been building altars out of branches, and they find in them than in our carved and painted altars. The priest-worker* says

years from

Boy Scouts more truth his mass in

the evening in his hotel room, on the table where he will have his supper, with a few

comrades grouped around him. In the concentration camps, the priests, in constant danger of being found out, sometimes pronounced words of consecration over a piece of bread held in their pocket. So we see, right before our eyes, that what is purest and most alive is on the way toward simplicity and austerity, and not toward the old excesses of the Renaissance. But if we looked at things from the other side, we would be aware of a strange

convergence:

from Picasso’s and Braque’s collages (about 1912) to the art brut of

recent years, a route is traced which would lead us back to Jacob’s stone. At Varengeville, Braque goes down through a gap in the cliff, by a narrow, plunging path, to the pebbly beach: he collects the round pebbles and beautiful bits of white

limestone found there. He leaves their shape untouched. He puts them together with great care . .. and suddenly he has a strange, wonderful object that might have come from another world, very mysterious yet also very close to us. When there are things like branches and stones, whose form is so pure that it makes them appear to be magical and somehow haunted, why do we go looking for “artists” whose inventions prove unable to take us out of ourselves for a single moment?

* Some priests (prétres-ouvriers) worked in factories, etc., in order to share the life of working people and bring them to the Church.

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Braque on the beach at Varengeville

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suppose that what we had to say last month in these pages will have struck I our readers as somber indeed: but what have we seen in the past thirty years that might have been encouraging? Does anyone think we are naive enough to find comfort and promise in having to call on masters who do not profess the Christian faith, in order to assure some degree of vitality in works of religious art? We Catholics have no idea of the extent to which we live and think in a vacuum. Why not ask the men who look at Christian art from the outside with a clear eye what

they think of its present state and future destiny? The answer would be that they expect very little for us, either from our present or from our future. André Malraux recently wrote: “Every day we see more clearly how incapable modern civilization is of giving forms to spiritual values. Even Rome itself. The fact that Christianity cannot give its churches a style that would allow Christ to be present in them, and

cannot unite a sense of communion with artistic quality in its images of saints —

that is something worth thinking about . . .” As for us, we shall state again our most profound conviction: outside of the faith

nothing allows us today to foresee a genuine rebirth of Christian art. We say “outside of the faith” to emphasize that a really living Christianity forever keeps within itself (for art as for everything else) the unpredictable resources of life. But this we can affirm in the faith alone and in the faith entirely pure: outside of it there is nothing that justifies any hope. Everything is too distorted, too garbled. In a world whose

economic, intellectual, and social structures — and for the most part the religious

structures as well — are in direct opposition to the poetic and the mystical, how could a living sacred art be reborn except by a miracle? And when we say that we can no longer count on anything but miracles, what we have every intention of conveying is that Christian society, in its present state in the Western world, can hardly produce anything but a sacred art that has no purity and no life. To state this even more precisely: as long as we leave the religious orders and ecclesiastical organisms to their regular functioning, what normally comes out of this regular functioning is Lisieux, Lourdes, Orval, Fatima . . . And this is indeed so normal that nobody in the Church is surprised by it. Nor, alas, outside the Church. Finally, if people reproach us for doing nothing other than being upsetting, we will say again that the strict duty of a review like this one is to be extremely “upsetting.” By doing so, it works to dislocate the preconceptions and prejudices that give truth and life all too little chance of surviving.

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St. Sophia. 6th-c. mosaic

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BYZANTIUM AND OUR EFFORTS

t is clear that Assy, Vence, and Audincourt are poles apart from Byzantium and Iits spirit. But this is a time when the Church lives primarily in diaspora, and no longer has any influence in large sectors of social and cultural life; or, to say the least, the status of her institutions and her men is in constant decline. In such a time, ideas,

doctrines, and velleities of the Byzantine type could only be fallacious.

In certain

areas like art and science (admittedly of secondary concern to the Church), we need

the world, its life and its efforts, too much to lock ourselves up in a world of thoughts and activities exclusively our own. Such a world would be nothing but a ghetto; and in the end nothing is more foreign to the Church than the ghetto mentality. Immanence, transcendence, to forget either one of these always damages some truth or essential action in the church. Noli me tangere* . .. but first, you shall find

the infant wrapped in swaddling clothes and laid in @ manger (Luke 2:12). ‘We must not exaggerate the importance of what was done at Assy and Audincourt

and even at Vence.

These were extraordinary accomplishments made possible by

particular and fortuitous circumstances. They are not prescriptions: no one is compelled to follow them. Nevertheless it is true that in retrospect they reveal a certain spirit, or at least a certain tendency of the spirit, without which they would have been

impossible. Very likely it is the freedom of that spirit that our opponents resented:

their perspicacity was infallible and perhaps dangerous, their hostility bitter. Our perspicacity was less keen when we started, for we were thinking only of the work to be done in the given circumstances. We are well aware, even outside of Byzantine perspectives, of how abnormal our procedure was. Indeed we would almost say that there was something “scandalous” in our calling in Masters “from the outside,” T since there were no Christian artists of equal stature. We would even say that there was something doubly scandalous. But the first scandal, and in the circumstance the more serious of the two (for there is a sinister side to it), was precisely that with the sole exception of Rouault, ¥ who was totally misunderstood, the Church no longer had any great artists in her bosom nor in her life. There, in this whole affair, is the real scandal. Having said that emphatically, we willingly admit that secondarily (and to offset this lack of confidence in Christian artists) it was still, at a certain level, “scandalous”

* Do not cling to me (John 20:17). + But to say it once again, today the Church everywhere is outside, and the walls of Jerusalem have fallen [Couturier’s note].

+ Bazaine also was a practicing Catholic, but in 1950, when Couturier wrote these lines, Bazaine was not yet widely recognized as meriting the title of Master.

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to put “unbelievers” to work for our churches.

Something indispensable would

inevitably be lacking. But would it be better, then, to do without good painting and good sculpture, or even just to get along all the time with second- or third-rate things for the Church as long as they emerged from more pious hands? State the concrete problem as plainly as this, and you know that it was not the right solution either. So we had to make a choice. Our thinking ran contrary to that of our adversaries — and surely to that

of the Byzantines.

It was simply this: that it was better to accept the facts and the

truth which they always bring with them.

Naively we say to each other:

“Too bad,

we’ll offer Matisses and Braques and Légers and Bonnards and Chagalls to God as the most beautiful flowers we can find right now . . .” Even though they did not grow in blessed ground, he would still see them as real flowers. Anyway, we thought that that

was the way people would see what we offered and would be touched — beautiful wild flowers offered to God.

Now really, was there any reason for so much outcry

from the pious, who still shed tender tears (in retrospect, of course) at the thought of the Jongleur de Notre-Dame? And yet we had to hurry. These flowers would soon be late blooms, coming out at the very end of autumn.

Bonnard died without seeing

his St. Francis de Sales in place. Dufy died before we could find any work to entrust

to him. Obviously all this was hardly Byzantine. Yet it seemed to us that a certain spirit of the Gospel was not lacking in it. It was St. Francis, who, with his huts in the woods and his birds, saved everything in the thirteenth century. Naturally that could not

last, as he found out. They made his sons Inquisitors. It is all too certain that such options will not solve “the problems of sacred art.” We never pretended that they would. But the passing of time teaches many things. After several years we come to see the situation clearly: we will not solve the problems of sacred art. We will not, and nobody will. Let us repeat one thing frankly: the problems of sacred art are the problems of Christianity itself. Once that is understood,

what is essential has been grasped. The ills of sacred art are the ills of Christianity,

made visible like the sores that break out on a face. “The Church does not need Reformers; the Church needs saints,” Bernanos wrote. And so the present state of religious art concerns us and judges us, all of us, jointly, indissolubly. It is a living

reality to which we are all bound body and soul, from the Sovereign Pontiff down to

the last priest and baptized Christian.

Thus we come back to the Byzantine situations. A people always has the artists it deserves. The rebirth or death of Christian art is not primarily a question of art.

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BOUNDARIES

oundaries ought to be crossed. National boundaries, of course; but first of all the boundaries of the imagination and sensibility, which wall us in when we think we are so free. These boundaries we ought to call in question constantly, getting back to their causes — and we, as Catholics, to their peculiarly religious causes. Here is one,

for instance: we neither see nor feel how from century to century, and member by member, the Mystical Body has become nothing more than the maimed and mangled body that it now is. An old trunk, its broken branches scribing tragic signs against the sky. One after the other our branches have fallen. First the Greek world; then the Slavs; then the Germanic world. Soon the Anglo-Saxon world. Each time we prided

ourselves on victories over heresy or schism. Sad victories indeed, that accompanied

these immense debacles. What illusions! Does what we gained by becoming so Latin

suffice to compensate for the disastrous disruption of these indivisible realms of the spirit? Are they not like a vulnerable body, in which life lost at the extremities does not flow back toward the heart? On the contrary, it is impoverished there too.

If these things are true from the viewpoint of strictly theological intuitions, how much more so from that of art! What is most precious in art is always born of diversity, of singularity;

and the greatest works of art are invariably the fruit of

uncontrollable spontaneities, themselves issuing from what is most secret and most constant in races, lands, and climates.

Therefore it is all too clear that a Christian art cut off successively from Greek, Slavic, Germanic, and Anglo-Saxon art is in danger of no longer being sufficiently catholic art. (For it is never true that minorities, fervent and faithful as they may be, can long suffice to provide the ethnic resources that the living unanimity of a nation normally assures. ) Partially due to these losses, as well as the marvelous Italian flowering in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries and the supremacy of Roman art (which, by excluding all the rest, proved to be ruinous), the strange idea arose that the art issuing from the pagan Renaissance, the work of Raphael and Michaelangelo, was the peak of

Christian art (and of art as a whole).

At the very most it was the peak of the tra-

dition of classical Italian realism, a tradition which, in the totality of human art, represents only a particular current, historically rather narrow and today completely

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run dry. Those developments also explain the unjustified contempt for national arts, and especially for medieval art, which is common in the Western Christian world. A natural consequence is Rome’s failure to appreciate the values of modern art, whose sources are entirely different and much closer to the Middle Ages than to the Italian Renaissance.

Meanwhile, misunderstandings exist at the very heart of the narrow Latin enclave that we have become!

While it is true that the Italians have generally been unable to appreciate the power of renewal that for over a century has animated French art for the benefit of the whole world, how can we fail to see that the French, on their side, show very little understanding of what is not their own? They are scandalized, for instance, by the liberties (the “nudities”) of Italian religious art. All Frenchmen see Bernini’s Saint

Uriz. Navarre

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Theresa as Barres did; decidedly her foot is too pretty, and her angel is suspect. We are still Gothic and Romanesque. “I have never felt out of touch with the Middle Ages,” said Matisse; and he is indeed a man of the Middle Ages, as Braque and Bazaine are still Gothic and as Léger is Romanesque. Such divergences become even more noticeable when one considers (as here in the case of Spain) not only the forms of art in themselves, but the living affinity between

a people and that people’s art and the forms they demand of their art — the forms

which do or do not move them to prayer. Wonderful problems, but, to the foreigner, insoluble.

Everyone knows that despite their Arab masters and their greatest geniuses, the constant aspiration of the Spanish people and of Spanish art has been toward identification — well beyond realism — of the representation with reality. What Salvador

Dali found “fascinating” in Meissonier was this artist’s desire to make things “truer than reality.” Such unconcern for the beauty and music of forms startles us. But in Spain everything tends toward these impassioned confusions — identification of

art with reality, identification of the people with the figures they cover with their own clothes and jewels and hair. These things may shock us, but in them there is a realism of the sacred that commands respect. The fact that on the other side

of the Pyrenees a whole people can still be overcome by the sight of those painted, tearful, diamond-spangled Virgins in their streets ought to stand as a reproach to the

abstractions of our liturgists and a lesson for our amateurs with their interminable disputes. Yet other thoughts will come to mind, and with them an uneasiness which we must also take into account, even though it goes against what we have just written. Recently we have been talking about the disturbing weight of the enormous, Byzan-

tine structures; we have expressed our thoughts about that fearsome nostalgia for the

earthly power of the Roman Empire which made its appearance so early in the life of the Church. Does what we have said not apply also to this bitter, obstinate taste for self-denial, for secrecy, for the night? This darkness pierced only by the gleam of candles, these masked crowds around the mysteries of faith — how can they be related to the clear light of the Gospel and its freedom? So our thoughts go on . . . in zigzags. Not because we are tipsy, but because the light shines now from one side of our course, now from the other. And we advance

toward these lights, finding and abandoning things at each bend of the road. review, you see, is not dogmatic.

This

It is a review of uncertainties and disengagements.

It is like life.

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RONCHAMP

Ronchamp*

Le Corbusier:

At first sight one will be surprised by the extreme originality of these forms. But it will quickly be seen that plans and forms are developed here with the suppleness and freedom of living organisms, and at the same time with the exactness that their purpose and function demand. The sacred character can be felt throughout, and first of all in the originality itself, the unusualness. Analysis of the building brings out all the elements essential to this sacred character, among them the particular relation of the proportions, the curvature of the surfaces (which appears to extend the interior

space indefinitely, an effect that Matisse achieved at Vence by very different means),

and the precise distribution of areas of light and shadow.

Our thought is that in such edifices as this one we approach the superior type

of architecture that goes beyond pure functionalism — architecture in which the dignity of the functions is manifested directly, and operates directly, through the beauty of the forms.

In religious buildings these things achieve their full meaning.

A truly sacred edifice is not a secular one made sacred by a rite of consecration or by the eventual use to which it is put; it is sacred in its very substance, made so

by the quality of its forms. Naturally this passage from the secular to the sacred in the forms themselves is brought about by minute and unformulable variations, but

these are nonetheless perfectly perceptible to the soul (all the masterpieces of the past bear witness to this fact), because these marvelous purifications, these priceless advances, are not effected by engineers’ calculations or exact logic: they come from the soul itself. From the soul of the creators, although often enough they are unable

to explain how this happens, as they are also unable to make it happen simply by willing it. These spiritual gifts, this instinct for the sacred, are purer and more exacting in “masters from the outside” than in many artists who profess the faith, and even, sad to say, in many members of the clergy. This fact may well be irritating, but at the present time it is undeniable. “The Spirit breatheth where the Spirit will . . .”

* M.-A. Couturier died without seeing Ronchamp. Yet he visited frequently Le Corbusier and followed closely the development of plans as seen in the maquettes. Unable to write, he dictated this last article shortly before he died February 9, 1954

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BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

The true, the good and the beautiful are inseparable attributes of the Divinity. Thus it is somehow scandalous that the Church, actively engaged in propagating truth and goodness, and for centuries in patronizing the arts gloriously, should have become

so impervious to beauty in recent times. into the statues, reached Lisieux

Throughout the nineteenth century and

twentieth century the Catholic Church commissioned and accepted murals, stained-glass windows and architectural designs in poor taste. The scandal monumental proportions with the building of basilicas such as Lourdes, and Fatima. Among Catholics only a few like Paul Claudel and Jacques

Maritain denounced it, and nonbelievers, largely uninterested, paid little attention to it. For most religious people the pretentious ugliness of such monuments was of little importance when compared to the popular devotion surrounding them. Nevertheless there were attempts at renewal, like the Ateliers d’Art Sacré founded by Maurice Denis "and Georges Desvallieres, which attracted young Catholic artists, but these attempts were of little significance. A first ray of hope came in March 1939 when Abbé Devémy decided to leave the beaten path and asked Pere Couturier to direct the decoration of the church of Assy, a city sanatorium in the Alps.

Pére Couturier was indeed an inspired choice. He was a man of deep spiritual life and great courage. Though not particularly gifted he had, nevertheless, loved to paint and he hoped to devote his life to religious art. He had joined the Ateliers d’Art Sacré at the end of 1919. About five years later, on a famous February 2, 1925 he felt a sudden call to religious life and entered the Dominican order at the end of the same year, renouncing the career of an artist. His superiors thought otherwise and they encouraged him to continue painting. Thus, he was not cut off from his previous life nor from those who were concerned about religious art. Quite naturally he was asked in 1937 to become co-editor with Pére Pie-Raymond Régamey, an art historian and a Dominican, of a newly-founded review, L °Art Sacre. But despite their best efforts nothing of importance could happen at that time. Pére Couturier was still dominated by the notion that Christian art had to be representative. This excluded abstract art and the plastic distortions of modern art, which he otherwise admired greatly.

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Pére Couturier’s involuntary exile in America during the war years was to provide the salutary shock that forced him to rethink the question of religious art. In contact with the artistic and literary intelligentsia that had taken refuge in new York, particularly with Fernand Léger, he came to revise his previous position: forms and colors

could have intrinsic beauty and abstract art could have religious potentialities. Anyhow, the masters of modern art had to be approached because they, and they alone,

had received the creative gifts from which a living art could flow. And, as Couturier wrote, “One baptizes only life.”

On his return to France after the war Couturier resumed the decoration of the church at Assy and boldly put into practice his new conviction. He decided to put Fernand Léger in charge of the large facade of the church. This was a quantum leap. Around the same time another quantum leap happened when Henri Matisse, responding to Brother Rayssiguier, a young Dominican and follower of Couturier, decided to build and decorate the chapel needed by Dominican nuns in Vence. Pere Couturier soon assisted Matisse with the stained-glass windows and served both as an indispensable public relations person and as a liturgical advisor. Assy and Vence, these two sensational departures in religious art, were consacrated respectively in August 1950 and June 1951. Another major event followed in September 1951: the stained-glass windows by Léger in the little church of Audincourt, a parish of Peugeot workers. Alfred Barr considered the Audincourt stained glass to be Léger’s masterpiece. In the following months the Ronchamp Chapel was entrusted to Le Corbusier. Shortly before Pere Couturier died he was able to get the Dominicans of the “Province de Lyon” to commission Le Corbusier to build the convent of La Tourette. Pére Couturier considered these achievements as miracles. He had insisted that in a de-Christianized world no Christian art could flourish. Ony here and there a miracle could happen when a master, open to spirituality — and potentially all were — was willing to take up a religious challenge. Mir6 had been willing; he would have decorated the baptistry at Audincourt had it been built with solid walls instead of glass. Pere Couturier had hoped to find him an appropriate chapel. He was even confident that he might also convince Picasso to decorate a chapel. At the same time as he pursued these activities, Pére Couturier’s clear and vigorous writings were both defining the theoretical basis of this new vision and anticipating many aspects of the cultural and spiritual renewal of the Church. The renewal actually followed some years later: a sense of freedom, the personal responsibility of lay people, the concrete and open universality of the community of believers.

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When he died on February 9, 1954, new perspectives had been opened both for artists and for the Church. Artists had found fresh sources of inspiration and the possibility of expanding their work to monumental scale. The Church had received the most precious gift: true living art. The barrier that had existed for so long between modern art and the Church had been removed. This was Pére Couturier’s legacy. DdeM

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PHOTOGRAPHIC CREDITS

All photographs reproduced in this book appeared in the issues of L’Art Sacré.

H. Adant: pp. 96,99, 122; Louis Bernard: pp. 126 (top), 131; Paul Bony: pp. 38, 46; Pierre Bony: p. 48; P. Borie: pp. 54,64; H. Cartier-Bresson: pp. 81, 84, 85;

A. Cauvin: pp. 69, 76; T. Ciolkowski: p. 74; M. Cocagnac: p. 45; R. Doisneau: p. 4; Galerie Charpentier:

pp.

128, 129; Le Goubey editeur: p. 49; Gilles de Pélichy:

p- 86; Girardet: p. 82; L. Hervé: pp. 12, 16, 30, 32, 37, 100, 102, 103, 112-117, 120, 121, 123; Hoyningen-Huene: p. 20; Jahan: pp. 21, 24, 62; Ken-Harris: pp. 26, 27; H. Laurens: p. 8; Musee de 'Homme: p. 71; Musuem fiir Volkerkunde, Waldtraut Schneider Schiiltz: p. 78; P. O’'Reilly: p. 87; Photographie industrelle du sud-ouest: p. 29; Rogi: p.50; J. Roubier: p. 58; Roger-Viollet: p. 70; P. Verger: p- 79. All other photographs: D. R.

(continued from front flap) Matisse, Rouault, Lipchitz, Braque, and Chagall,

artists he chose regardless of their faith or ideology. Around this time also, Matisse, responding to

a young Dominican follower of Pére Couturier,

decided to assume the responsibility for the chapel needed by the Dominican nuns at Vence. Pere Couturier soon assisted Matisse with the stained-glass windows and served as liturgical

advisor. Assy and Vence were both recognized as

extraordinary departures in sacred art. Another major event followed: the stained-glass windows by Léger in the church of Audincourt, which Alfred Barr considered Léger’s masterpiece. In 1950 Ronchamp was entrusted to Le Corbusier. Pere Couturier’s articles, translated and published here from issues of the French review L Art

Sacré, recall the problems he confronted and the

opposition he had to overcome. They also reveal the depth of his spiritual life, as well as his indefatigable quest for artistic sincerity and original beauty.

Texts selected by Dominique de Menil and Pie Duploy¢ Translation by Granger Ryan

160 pages, 101 illustrations (duotone) Jacket illustration: Henri Matisse. Drawing of a Ritual Gesture Chapelle de Vence

UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS PRESS AUSTIN

Jacket printed in Japan

IN PRAISE OF M.-A. COUTURIER “Pere Couturier was our friend, the friend of what is most sacred to us—faith in our art.” — Le Corbusier “There is no disputing the fact that it was he who brought modern artists and their creative potential into contact with church architecture.” — Léger “With him everything was love.” —

Braque

“Father Couturier was one of the authentic heroes of modern culture. Largely through his efforts, the early 1950s saw a unique, if temporary; rapprochement between the ‘vanguard’ within the Catholic Church and many of the leading European modern artists of the day: The churches of Audincourt and Assy—to which, among others, contributed the Communist Léger and the Jew Chagall, as well as Catholics of varying degrees of faith from Braque to Rouault—Matisse’s Chapel, and the religious buildings of Le Corbusier are difficult to imagine without Father Couturier’s encouragement and enterprise. If this rebirth of religious art died with him, its monuments nevertheless show that, given leadership and will on the clerical side, inspiring modern art can be made.” —

William Rubin, Director Emeritus of the Department of Painting and Sculpture of The Museum of Modern Art, New York;

author of Modern Sacred Art and the Church of Assy:

Write for a catalog of books on art.

UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS PRESS POST OFFICE BOX 7819 AUSTIN, TEXAS 78713-7819 ISBN 0-292-77639-X