The Break

Modernism was not simply a secularizing movement in art. As Richard Harries shows in his recent The Image of Christ in Modern Art , Christ and Christian themes remained important for visual artists during from the period before World War I to the present. His richly illustrated book focuses on European artists of the period, but his chosen examples illustrate how modernist techniques were put to Christian uses.

All of these painters and sculptors worked against the background of what David Jones called “The Break”:

“By this he meant two things: First, the dominant cultural and religious ideology that had unified Europe for more than 1,000 years no longer existed. All that was left were fragmentary individual visions. Secondly, the world was now dominated by technology, so that the arts seemed to be marginalised. They are of no obvious use in such a society, and their previous role as signs no longer has any widespread public resonance. Their work was ‘idiosyncratic and personal in expression and experimental in technique, intimate and private rather than public and corporate.’” Jones summed up the situation with an analogy to the early church: “‘The priest and the artist are already in the catacombs, but separate catacombs, for the tecnician divides to rule” (5).

Roger Wagner captured the double challenge the “break” posed to artists. The first was a problem of style, of “how to bring freshness to subjects that have been treated so often they feel used up.” This was not a new problem, but “whereas artists in the past inherited a broadly uniform language that was at any rate a starting point, contemporary artists faced with an overwhelming plurality are compelled to choose a language of their own, and, in choosing, to exclude a part of their potential audience.” They have no choice but to select “a private language” from the “Babel” of competing styles.Alongside the stylistic problem is one of audience and venue: “In an art world where novelty and shock value are highly prized, work expressive of any kind of religious commitment is unlikely to find a ready welcome” (6).

Harries’s book is an introduction to artists who persisted in Christian themes after “The Break.”