"Art Under Attack" at Tate Britain: Under Attack

Art Under Attack: Histories of British Iconoclasm opened this week at the Tate Britain, and reviews are not totally positive. Not having seen the exhibition of course, I can still see what the reviewers are concerned about: the exhibition equates the destruction of Catholic art and heritage with deconstructionist art:

From The Guardian:

Art Under Attack: Histories of British Iconoclasm wants to make us think, but I found myself asking the wrong questions and drawing the wrong conclusions. The exhibition fumbles with ideas about "iconoclasm", or the deliberate destruction of art: can art vandalism be art? Is there a perverse humour or truth or beauty in a suffragette slashing Velázquez's Venus or the IRA blowing up Nelson's Pillar in Dublin?

But seeing the Chapmans' glib attacks on old art in the same show as that unforgettably moving Dead Christ, which resurfaced under the Mercers' Chapel in London in 1954, invites grim thoughts about what art is now. The Chapmans' disfiguring of portraits could only happen in a cynical moneyed art world that has no soul. They have the cash to buy oil paintings in order to trash them. Their clients find that kind of thing amusing.

I go back to the Dead Christ: a passionate work of art made to help ordinary people contemplate the biggest realities of life and death. The contrast damns the Chapmans to hell.

Tender depictions of the Virgin Mary and harrowing visions of the sufferings of Christ abound in the first few galleries of this show, in stone and wood and stained glass. All have been damaged, many almost beyond recognition. There are illuminated manuscripts with pages torn out. A painting of the inside of Canterbury Cathedral in 1657 looks innocuous until you see little Puritans patiently, precisely smashing out its stained glass windows.

These rooms offer a truly eye-opening revelation of how much great art was lost when the Protestant Word erased the Catholic image – sometimes literally, as when a painting of the Man of Sorrows had a Biblical text written over it.

But none of this has anything to do with the studiously ambivalent, pretentious way the rest of the show explores modern attacks on art. The casting down of Catholic art in the Reformation did not make that art more "interesting": it is loss, pure loss. Countless things have gone forever. Others survive as battered husks. Their destruction is tragic, to be mourned.

Metro publishes a similar review about how the exhibition confuses the viewer. The New York Times review is more positive but still a little ambivalent. The Guardian, which is the "media partner" of the exhibition, provides this slideshow of images. One of those images was featured on the cover of Eamon Duffy's great The Stripping of the Altars paperback edition.

A.W.N. Pugin, March 1, 1812

Augustus Welby Northmore Pugin was born on March 1, 1812 in London--200 years ago!His parents were emigres from the French Revolution and his father, Augustin Pugin was an architect. He set his son to drawing Gothic buildings. His interest in Gothic architecture led him to study the Catholic faith and A.W. N. Pugin joined the Catholic Church in 1835.

On the Continent, Eugene Viollet-le-Duc's career is roughly coterminous with Pugin's and both contributed to the revival of Gothic architecture. Viollet-le-Duc was more interested in restoration of Gothic cathedrals, churches, and castles throughout France. Pugin was convinced that Gothic was THE style for Christian buildings. He wanted not only to design churches and cathedrals in the Gothic style but to furnish them and decorate them throughout--designing every aspect of the building. Unfortunately, his patrons did not always have the money necessary to complete all that work.

When the Catholic hierarchy was restored in 1850 after emancipation in 1829, of course, Catholics had to build a new infrastructure: churches, cathedrals, convents, monasteries, schools, and seminaries--there was a lot of work to do! In collaboration with John Talbot, the sixteenth Earl of Shrewsbury, Pugin designed and built 14 chapels, schools, etc between 1836 and 1848 in Staffordshire. He also worked in Ireland, especially in County Wexford in the late 1830s and throughout the 1840s. He travelled on the Continent, visiting France and the Netherlands, but did not go to Rome until 1847--where the Renaissance and Baroque architecture of the churches disappointed him. (I think there is only one truly Gothic church in Rome, Santa Maria Sopra Minerva.)

He was only 40 years old when he died. He suffered from mental illness and tremendous stress--and perhaps syphilis, according to his major modern biographer, Rosemary Hill. His sons Edward Welby and Peter Paul continued his work in their partnership, Pugin and Pugin. E.W. Pugin also died at the age of 40, in 1875 and Peter Paul finished several of his works in progress and maintained the family style.

More about the bicentennial celebrations here, and some notes about the home, church, and abbey he designed, built, and planned at Ramsgate here, including this delicious insight into Pugin's artistic work:

But he was also devout in a way that would strike us now as extreme. A Catholic convert, he believed that everything had been wrong with England since Henry VIII changed the national religion. He longed for a return of the great pre-Reformation Age of Faith, when monasteries dispensed charity to the poor, lords welcomed travellers beneath the hammer-beamed roofs of their halls, and church spires, not factory chimneys, soared over towns. He tried to realise his vision in, of all places, Ramsgate.

Not only did Pugin build a house, The Grange, at Ramsgate – note the monastic name – but, incredibly, given that he had to pay for every penny of the construction himself, a church. It is, as you would expect, one of his finest works, hard on the outside (it is built of the local material, flint) but, as its priest Fr Marcus Holden puts it, “a revelation of God’s glory within”. It is enriched with delicate stained glass, beautiful carving and a font that was originally made for the Medieval Court of the Great Exhibition. . . . Together, The Grange, St Augustine’s Church and St Augustine’s Abbey form the completest expression of what Pugin believed a revived Middle Ages could be – an inspiring testament to his genius, faith and hard work. Unesco should celebrate this anniversary by making them a World Heritage Site.

Sunday Shrine Series: A National Gallery Exhibition

Thanks to The Catholic Herald on facebook, I noticed this article about an exhibit at London's National Gallery on "Devotion on Display: Italian Altarpieces Before 1500".

Father Anthony Symondson, SJ comments:

"London has become the centre for exhibitions of Catholic art this summer. There are the relics at the British Museum [Treasures of Heaven] and this equally outstanding show at the National Gallery. Both are complementary and are recommended without reserve."

According to the Gallery website:

As part of a programme of summer shows focusing on the National Gallery’s collection, ‘Devotion by Design’ explores the function, the original location, and the development of altarpieces in Italy during the late Middle Ages and the early Renaissance.

Altarpieces in context
These objects furnished altars in churches and were not originally intended to hang in a gallery as we see them today. Instead, they were created for a specific sacred context, forming the focus of devotion for worshippers.

Using the Gallery’s own collection, this exhibition investigates the development of altarpieces, looking at changes in form, style and type. It examines not only the evolution of their physical structure but also their relationship to their frames and to the monumental architecture that surrounded them.

And Father Symondson describes the effect:

"Devotion by Design" progresses by examining different types of altarpieces such as the polyptich (a picture, or relief, made up of several parts) and pala (a large version used only for a single picture). This is followed by a room devoted to how they came into being: commissioning, choices and contracts. In the section devoted to sacred space an attempt is made by way of explanation to reconstruct an altar. Over time many altarpieces have been dismembered and their fragments dispersed and evidence of that is found in a part devoted to dislocations, notable for the work of Fra Filippo Lippi. It concludes with a final room obscurely entitled “a question of definition”. The result is a total immersion in the subject represented by paintings of great beauty.

These two exhibitions do sound like great pilgrimage destinations.

(the illustration above is The Ghent Altarpiece, downloaded from Wikipedia)