Perception: From Modern Painting to the Vision in Christ

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Perception From Modern Painting to the Vision in
Christ

• Theological Art History 101
• Susie Shaefer
• May 5, 2004

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Art, should be an account of, and a meditation
upon, our relationship to what we are given. And
the given must be that against which we measure
ourselves and all of our projects, be they
theological, philosophical or aesthetic, because
any departure from what is and its presentation
to us, in the name and pursuit of what is not, is
a refusal to see, acknowledge, or fulfill the
promise of worldly creation. (220)
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The Problem of Modernity

• Apparently, for us moderns, it is entirely
  appropriate to separate ideality from reality, as
  reality has nothing of the ideal in it the
  belief being that reality presents itself to us
  outside of and apart from any transcendent
  formideality has abandoned any location or
  expression in the world, to reside only in the
  head, claiming not tolie in the things themselves
  but in the human mind. (221)

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The Problem of Post-Modernity

• The separation of reality and ideality in
  modernism, combined with Cartesian philosophy,
  has resulted in post-modern relativism and
  nilhilism - we are left with either
  self-sufficient accounts of reality or a
  self-sustaining idealism that neither requires
  nor seeks an actuality at all (221)

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How did we get from this
Michelangelos David, (image from Blufftons
website!)
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To this?

• And why does it matter for theologians?

Jackson Pollack, The Moon Woman, 1942
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Impressionism and the path form objectivity to
subjectivity
Monet, Impression, Sunrise, 1872
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Early Nineteenth Century

• The move towards modernism begins with a focus
  on realism
  
• human portraiture is abandoned in favor of
  nature and its earthly depiction as a sensate
  realm illuminated and colored by light and the
  possibility of experience

Courbet, Near Ornans, Morning, 1848 circa
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Gustave Courbet, The Grain-sifters, 1855
Importance of Light, motion, and everyday
occurences
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Joseph Millard William Turner, Shipwreck, c. 1805
Light and Color creating sensuality
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Impressionism

• Plen air - painting outdoors, the painting of
  nature was still innovative, and not respected in
  France before the Impressionists
  
• Attempting to paint the world as it is
  immediately seen - the play between light and
  color, before the human mind can place context on
  what the senses perceive
• Monet, Rouen Cathedral, Harmony in Blue, 1893-4

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An Emphasis on Perception
the Impressionistic imperative was to capture
every momentary disclosure of appearance, as
visuality reveals itself, not for itself but only
for us (224) the inability of the eye to focus
with detail on more than one point at the same
time, the inevitable blurring at the periphery of
vision (224)
Monet, The Bark at Giverny, 1887
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The ever-more attenuated attention to the
foundational primacy of perception in human
accounts of objective reality uncovered not an
account of reality but rather the great
philosophical claim of modernism- that
subjectivity constitutes objectivity and makes it
possible (224)
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Cezanne and the path from subjectivity to
objectivity

• Cezanne broke with the Impressionist School in
  1877
  
• The aim of Cezannes art is to picture that
  which is permanent in the changing world of
  appearance - to capture the objective beneath
  the perception
• Art should translate the objective reality of
  nature into a form we can understand - Art is a
  harmony which runs parallel with nature

Paul Cezanne, The Railway Cutting, 1869-70 (225)
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Cezanne and Landscapes

• Plain by Mount Sainte-Victoire, 1882 and La
  Montagne Sainte-Victoire, c. 1897-98
  
• Color and shading, an interest of the
  Impressionists, is increasingly used by Cezanne
  to separate the subjective viewer from the object
  in the painting

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Cezanne and Portraits

• though they represent people who Cezanne knew
  well- friend or relatives- something deeply
  reserved, inaccessible and alien adheres to them
  all
• Paul Cézanne. Antony Valabrèque. 1866

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With the Impressionists and Cezanne, reality and
ideality have been separated, the objective and
the subjective are no longer joined. We are left
with two potential tracks Relentless Objectivity
and Unfettered Subjectivity
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Unfettered Subjectivity Kandinsky
Black Lines, December 1913
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The What of Art

• No longer that material objective what of the
  former period, but the internal truth of art the
  only fidelity art owed was to itself and its own
  internal necessity (228)
• Reinforced the loss of the world - the only
  perception that mattered was internal, rather
  than connected to the senses and the external
  world

Kandinsky, Improvisation 30 (Cannons),1913
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Relentless ObjectivityMondrianMondrian evolved
an extreme abstract language to evoke the unity
and order of nature by reducing natural forms to
their purest linear and colored
equivalents-Chicago Art Institute Diagonal
Composition, 1921
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Universality and Equivalence

• Cezannes refusal to mediate the universal
  through its particular acts of reception and
  perception, became in time a wish to depict the
  unmediated form of the universal itself (228)
• Extreme objectivism also results in a loss of
  the world, separating us from reality, as
  Mondrian comments Only when the individual no
  longer stands in the way can universality be
  purely manifested

Mondrian, Composition No. lll , 1935
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The Nihilism of Modern Art

• Modern art has become the depiction and
  celebration of nothing whatsoever- nothing, that
  is, but the fluctuation between a subjectivity
  without recongnisable objects and an objectivity
  whose pursuit renders it uncognisable for
  subjectivity.

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Another possibility

• If the aesthetic negation of the world that I
  have been describing has been pursued from both
  sides of the subject/object divide, and if these
  traditions have culminated in the nihilistic
  enthronement of nothing over the God-given
  reality that we inhabit- the reality that is of
  something- then are there artists who express and
  paint the glorious filliation of the universal
  and the particular that alone creates a world?
  (229-231)

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Real in Ideal, Ideal in Real

• Not painting his world as one which is mundane,
  but rather as one which is inundated with the
  color of the transcendent light itself (230)
  
• Van Gogh, The Sower, 1888

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Malevich and Iconography

• The Black Square, 1915 a totally bare icon with
  no frame.
  
• In terms of theology what should a bare icon
  disclose- save the inability of nothing to be
  anything at all (230)

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Malevich and Portraiture

• Even where the face of a human figure is left
  blank, the colors surround it edge around and
  mark out in the absence of a face the shape of
  what might fulfill such a request
• Malevichs work was indeed iconic, a visible
  testament ot the presence of the ideal in the
  real - open to possibility while working with
  the given of creation

Sportsmen, 1928 (231)
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Enter the Incarnation!

• The answer has already been provided by Christ,
  for he and he alone teaches us that te Most High
  and the most ideal has been incarnated here in
  our world as the most explicit account of the
  union of ideality and reality that we have ever
  been given. (231)

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Main Concerns for Blond

• Incarnational theology
• Goodness of creation
• Creation as revelatory of God- natural theology
  in tradition of Scotus, where God and humanity
  are compared to some super-reality, but after
  Aquinas
• An explicit and utterly evident love of
  creation, the kenotic love of a God who wholly
  gives himself to that which he has created, so
  much so that he makes himself manifest in it.
  This, of course, does not mean that that which is
  seen or shown ins itself wholly expressive or
  exhaustive of God

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Theology it seems should take seriously the
issue of the senses, not only because these
senses were once expressed to divinity but really
and rather because the nature and message of the
Son is that all creation can and does participate
and share in this grace and can itself be
similarly so ordered. (234)
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Questions for Reflection

• Do we buy this premise? Does the Incarnation
  require us to intertwine reality and ideality,
  subjective and objective?
  
• Blond is using theology to comment upon, and
  nearly define, aesthetics and art. Does theology,
  as a discipline, have authority to order other
  disciplines? If we want to say that Christian
  theology can only by people of faith, what does
  theology have to say those outside the faith? Do
  our thoughts on this change when we think about
  the world of art and natural theology as
  presented in this chapter?