Venus, Cupid, Folly, and Time

Venus and Cupid
on the easel this afternoon

I just came from the studio, where Trudi Ludwig has been working on her wood-cut adaptation of the mannerist painting, An Allegory with Venus and Cupid by Bronzino (Agnolo di Cosimo). The original work, now hanging in the National Gallery in London, portrays a nude Venus being kissed by an equally nude Cupid, surrounded by personifications of play, pleasure, fraud, jealousy, and other figures, including Time as an old man with wings and an hourglass. It was painted around 1545, probably as a gift from Cosimo I de’Medici, ruler of Florence, to King Francis I of France.

Dead Bob, Venus, and Cupid

Like Trudi’s visual commentaries on other famous paintings, the image slowly emerging on the large, wooden panel reduces each of these human forms to its essence, the bones. As she is fond of pointing out, the elegant poses are not only improbable, they are anatomically impossible. Cupid is especially odd – we’ve been laughing about the difficulty of connecting his head to the shoulder that tucks under the armpit of Venus, and connecting that shoulder and back to the lower torso and legs. Venus, too, has her own improbabilities – just try, for a moment, to contort your own body into that pose. Yet, somehow, with the help of Dead Bob, the artist’s skeleton, and a mirror that allows her to compare a reproduction of the original with her backwards copy, Trudi makes me believe that a body could, in fact, twist like that.

heads of Venus and Cupid,
in process

It will take many, many more hours to complete this image, drawing, erasing, redrawing each tiny bone in hands and feet, each lobe and opening of pelvis and skull, each juncture of bone to bone, until the angle is right. Then, there will be more hours of careful carving, removing just the right amount of wood so that simple black and white will read as an entire range of grays when it is finally printed. One might say that investing all this time in re-imagining a 500-year-old painting is folly, but there is a profound truth to be discovered in the gradual emergence of something from nothing, a reminder of what lies beneath all our flesh.

Art and Christ

I’ve been going through another round of angst about being an artist in a world that is filled with other expectations. This morning in chapel, the preacher exhorted all of us to feed the poor, clothe the naked, and heal the sick in the name of Jesus. At lunch, a guest speaker told us that following Jesus means standing up in the face of oppression, speaking truth to power, being in solidarity with those who have nothing. As I sit in my comfortable office, surrounded by good art on the wall and typing at a late-model computer with its flat-screen monitor, I am all too aware of the privileged life that I lead. And I find myself wondering – not for the first time – what being called to follow Christ means to me as an artist, a teacher, a leader of something called the Center for the Arts and Religion.

In the chapter on art and the world’s need in my still-unfinished book, I have written,

The world is full of problems: war, homelessness, global warming, domestic violence, AIDS, hunger, drug abuse. The list goes on and on. In a world that seems to be always on the brink of disaster, there is a seemingly endless amount of work to do the help the earth heal from pollution of every kind; to insure adequate nutrition, housing, education, and health care to every person; to bring peace among the nations and in every home and village and city. And yet, if all of this is done, and there is no art, then the world will still be a sad, sorry, joyless place.

I believe this. I believe that I am called to be an artist, to make pictures that hover on the edge of dreams, to teach others how to look and listen, to help students think about the ways that art influences our thoughts and behavior, to help other artists join their faith and their art. I believe that I am meant to use the gifts God has given me – the gifts of thinking, painting, writing, and teaching – rather than reject them as unworthy or squander them in doing other things for which I have no gift and no love.

And yet, I struggle to remember these things in the face of the unrelenting need that is all around me. I forget that I do not need to earn God’s love. I forget that as part of the always-wounded, always-risen Body of Christ I do not have to do it all – I only have to do my part. I forget that grace flutters all around me, like cherry blossom petals on a windy day.

David Jones: Art, Poetry and the Bible, by Kathleen Staudt

Jone, Human Being, 1931 (detail)

I’ve been helping to organize an upcoming conference and exhibition at Washington Adventist University. The conference will feature the visual art work and poetry of David Jones (1895-1947).  Jones is one of those rare geniuses like William Blake, who combines a unique vision as visual artist -- working as a painter, engraver, book illustrator and maker of painted inscriptions-- and poet.  Trained as a visual artist as a young man, he served in the Great War with the Royal Welsh Fusiliers, and began writing poetry after the war, when debilitating post-traumatic stress symptoms prevented him from painting.  The result was his first long poem, In Parenthesis, which brought together a mythic imagination, a painterly sense of form and texture, and an intimate sensitivity to the human experience of war as seen from those who served.  Widely acclaimed in his time (T.S. Eliot called it “a work of genius”), In Parenthesis has been recognized as one of the great poetic works coming out of World War I.

Jones, Deluge (detail)

Jones was a convert to Roman Catholicism and spent some years in the artist’s and craftman’s community of Ditchling, in England - a community led by the Catholic sculptor Eric Gill in the 1920’s. Jones’s conversations with Catholic artists in those days led him to a highly original understanding of the poet’s and artist’s work as a “sacramental” activity, drawing on the work of Jacques Maritain and other Catholic theologians, but with Jones’s own particular stamp as an artist of the 20^th century, acutely aware of the cultural fragmentation of his time, and deeply connected to his Welsh heritage and to the liturgy and story of his adopted Roman Catholic tradition.

Jones, Everyman (detail)

I have spent many years immersed in what I view as Jones’s greatest work, a long poem entitled The Anathemata, published in 1952 but written largely during the second world war, including the time of the blitz in London.  W.H. Auden called this work “very possibly the finest long poem written in English in this century.”  Winding and circuitous in its form, it centers on the celebration of the mass in a London chapel during the war, at what the poem calls “the sagging end and chapter’s close” of western civilization.  In an internal monologue that opens out layer after layer of verbal allusion, the poem connects the celebration of Eucharist with the last supper and passion, with the mythologies of the west from Greece, Rome, Wales and northern Europe, and with the arc of salvation history.  It is an offering of “anathemata” -- a Greek word that means “the things set apart” for blessing or for curse.  The intersection between “things” and the acts of “sign-making” which Christ performed at the Last Supper and at the Crucifixion widens to a celebration of the “sign-making” activity of humanity, which connects us to the Incarnation and to the Logos, the Creator.  Dense in its texture and allusive in its meanings, the poem belongs to the era of high modernism, reminding one of the allusiveness of Joyce’s Finnegans Wake (which Jones admired) and of Eliot’s Waste Land.  Like those works it is challenging but rewards rereading, and it engages themes of theology and culture that are deeply relevant to our own time.  Indeed, there are ways in which Jones is well ahead of his time.  My talk at the conference will be about Jones and .H. Auden and what we can learn from them about a “sacramental poetics” in a post-Christian era.

Jones, Crucifixion (detail)

Jones was very aware of connections between text and image, and he was fascinated with the role of the artist as the preserver of “culture” and what he called “the world of sign and sacrament” in a world where economic and political empires reign, and the artist’s role becomes increasingly prophetic in what he called our “placeless cosmocracy.”  The conference on Jones, entitled “David Jones: Culture and Artifice,” will be held at Washington Adventist University in Takoma Park  March 29-30.  It will  include an art exhibit, academic papers and discussions, a poetry reading, and the North American premiere of the film "David Jones between the Wars: The Years of Achievement" a new feature length documentary by Derek Shiel and Adam Alive.  For full information and registration materials go to the conference website at http://www.wauhonorsprogram.org/davidjones2012.html or contact me at kathleen.staudt@gmail.com.

As if that isn’t enough for this lover of theology and literary art, dovetailing with the Jones conference will be the annual Keogh Lectures at Washington Adventist, featuring distinguished scholar Dr. Leland Ryken.  On Friday evening March 30, Dr. Ryken will lecture on “The Bible as Literary Classic,” and I will be giving a formal response to his talk that evening.  On Saturday March 31, Dr. Ryken will lecture on "What Makes the King James Bible Great." For more information about the Keough lectures, contact Dr. Zack Plantak at zplantak@wau.edu. 

If you’re interested in learning more about David Jones, the proceedings of conferences held in 2010 at Washington National Cathedral are available online at http://www.flashpointmag.com/index13.htm

Christ Paintings

Alexandra Sherman just finished installing a new show, Christ Paintings by Larry Deyab, in the Dadian Gallery.  These paintings are somehow both lush and spare, so raw and powerful that at first I felt physically unable to approach them. For a long, timeless moment, I stood at the door of the gallery as if transfixed, my eyes slowly scanning around the room, trying to take in what I was seeing.

With titles like The Flagellation of Christ, Crown of Thorns, Veronica Veil, and Via Dolorosa, the eleven paintings reference – but do not exactly follow – the devotion known as the Stations of the Cross. But these are narrative paintings only in the broadest sense. In each, there is only a face, a shoulder, the back of a head, the barest suggestion that we are looking at a human being. In swift, sure, broad brushstrokes, Deyab shows the raw anguish of a person who is undergoing some undefined, yet very real, sort of torture.

In several, the face of Christ is seen in extreme close up, with blobs or drips of blood-red paint obscuring the dark stroke signifying a mouth or an eye. We know it is Christ not only because of the crown of thorns, but also because of the calm that somehow pervades these violent, painful paintings. In one, a deep, sky blue seems to support Jesus’ bowed head, as if promising the resurrection to come. In another, gold gleams through what looks like it might be a chain-link fence that separates Jesus’ body from the glory that waits on the other side of death.

These paintings confront us with the reality of human suffering. I do not know if the artist calls himself a Christian, but it is clear both from the works, themselves, and from what Deyab writes about them, that they arise out of some deeply personal struggle. At once painful and beautiful, these Christ Paintings do not glorify violence, but rather invite us to walk alongside Jesus--and by extension, all who suffer--on the way to the cross. This show is a gift, an invitation to keep a holy Lent.