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Sacred Art in a Secular Century
By Horton Davies and Hugh Davies
Collegeville, Minn., Liturgical Press, 1978. 106 pp. $13.50.

Horton Davies, a professor of religion at Princeton, and his son Hugh Davies, a Princeton-trained art historian, have combined their respective fields in a book whose purpose is to aid the viewing and appreciation of twentieth-century paintings, etchings, and sculptures-"works which have given a rebirth to religious symbolism in art." Sacred Art in a Secular Century examines the impact of two dozen "notable artists of distinction" for their relationship to the symbolic tradition of Christianity and the arts.

In seeking to discover whether it is possible to "recover appreciation of the power and meaning of traditional religious symbols" and "establish new patterns of religious symbols or new meanings, for old symbols," the book is divided into four divisions.

"Old Symbols Renewed and Revised" discusses the advent of Jewish visual arts-the use of traditional themes from both the Old and New Testaments by Jewish painters like Marc Chagall and the sculptors Jacob Epstein and Jacques Lipchitz, as well as the employment of traditional subjects like Madonnas and the Last Supper by other artists such as Henry Moore, Stanley Spencer, and the Roman Catholics Graham Sutherland and Georges Rouault.

In "Old Symbols Syncretized or Secularized," we learn how Christian and Jewish symbols are used together and how traditional images have become secularized, while "New Symbols and Emphases" illustrates how traditional stories are told in new ways.

The fourth chapter, "A New Religious Spirit and Its Signs," addresses itself to twentieth century artists' use of contemporary forms

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to express compassion, prophetic indignation,. and a celebration of joy, especially given the "difficulties artists face in a scientific age in making religious symbols relate to contemporary life."

The treatment of religious symbolism is well grounded. But unfortunately, the book's case founders upon the artists and art works chosen to support the arguments. While the authors say they are interested only in "high quality art," they never come to grips with the question of what really is religious art. To judge solely from Sacred Art in a Secular Century, one would think that religious art was only that with an identifiable biblical symbol or theme.

It may be understandable why the authors chose not to deal with popular art (it would be interesting to address the symbolism of the aspiring McDonald's "golden arches" and the place of the fast-food store as a gathering place and a "temple" of contemporary American culture), but a convincing argument that the "most impressive paintings and sculptures of our time" are inspired by religion is not made by the works of art selected by the authors.

With the exceptions of Henry Moore and Henri Matisse, the artists chosen represent literal and less than avant-garde religious interpretation. Marc Chagall, Jacob Epstein, Georges Rouault, Salvador Dali, and Jacques Lipchitz may be "high quality" artists to some, but to this art historian, at least, their religious work is closer to pure kitsch than to the height of twentieth-century artistic accomplishment.

Intention seems to count for more than aesthetics to the authors. Moore's "Madonna and Child" of 1944 is called "one of the greatest religious sculptures of this century," but it is not even one of Moore's better works. Who can say that the great British sculptor's totally abstract works are less or more religious than the ones with literal themes and subjects? To use a musical analogy, it is like saying that Leonard Bernstein's Mass is more religious because of its overtly religious subject than, say, Ralph Vaughan Williams' Sea Symphony, with its text by Walt Whitman.

Yet, the authors dismiss abstraction as a "vehicle for communicating the Jewish or Christian faiths." The only totally abstract artists mentioned are Mark Rothko and Barnett Newman (whom the authors call Abstract Expressionists when they are actually Minimalists). So that we are led to believe that religious art must be literal to be effective. To argue that Chagall is more religious because his depictions of pogroms show recognizable events, is like saying that Cecil B. De Mille's Ten Commandments offers greater religious content and deeper understanding of humanity's relationship with God than films by Ingmar Bergman or even Woody Allen.

This argument is perhaps weakest in the discussion of the artist's role in expressing profound compassion and indignation at "man's inhumanity to man." Surely, no one doubts the power of Picasso's "Guernica," but is the same artist's sentimental "Child with a Dove" or Kathe Kollwitz's "Pieta" more compassionate, more angry than the photogra-

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phy, posters, and films that came out of the Vietnam War? Are painting and sculpture still the best mediums through which to express indignation?

If we are to limit religious art to literal interpretations, are we then to ignore the religious power to be found in abstract artists like Jackson Pollock or David Smith? These questions form a labyrinth from which the authors are unable to escape.

Perhaps there are other traditional fine arts which do express religious feelings, such as music and dance, but especially architecture. Yet, the one building the book does discuss, Coventry Cathedral, is trite and uninspiring (while the nearby ruined cathedral with its simple rude altar and bomb-charred beams is one of the most moving expressions of compassion to come out of the last war).

The traditional, often literal, but artistically successful school of church architecture and decoration that developed in the United States in the early part of this century-the work of glass makers like Charles Connick or Louis Comfort Tiffany, the wood carvings of Johanness Kirchmayer, or the churches of Henry Vaughan or Ralph Adams Cram-would seem to fit the symbolic framework set out by the authors. If symbolism in architecture had been discussed, one has the feeling that it would have focused on literal interpretations of the past, like Washington Cathedral, and that designers like Le Corbusier and Alvar Aalto would have been excluded.

Something should also be said about aesthetic standards in book production. Not only does Sacred Art in a Secular Century have too few illustrations, but those that are included are not keyed well enough to the text; the captions are not dated, and the artist's name is not given, so that they are sometimes confusing. The pictures often nudge the text itself, heightening what is already a graphic disaster in terms of layout and design. The bright white paper and the type-not to mention the crowded cover-are not worthy of a scholarly endeavor of this kind; for an art book, they are inexcusable.

In sum, Sacred Art in a Secular Century is a noble attempt based on a premise that dooms it to failure. This is unfortunate, not only because books dealing with art and religion are desperately needed, but because one feels that the authors have erected a solid groundwork in the field of religious symbolism that might have provided that basis for a definitive study of religious art in the twentieth century.

William Morgan
Allen R. Hite Art Institute
Louisville, Kentucky