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Art and Religion in the Modern West: Some Perspectives

Scholars writing about ‘art and religion’, and especially about art and Christianity, tend to have difficulty relating the two in meaningful ways from the era of the modernist avant-garde onwards. After all, since that era nearly all significant developments in painting, sculpture and architecture have taken place mainly outside the religious sphere—and in some cases have been deeply opposed to the church. So, how—and at what level—to relate the two worlds? Survey books on the subject concentrate on the same individual works by Moore, Sutherland, Aitchison, Viola—plus, outside church buildings, works by Salvador Dali and Stanley Spencer. Given the richness of European and American art since the onset of modernism, this is a notoriously thin list, mainly clustered around the twenty years of 1942-1962. These two Tanner Lectures explore some of the reasons why. Focusing on eight case-studies—Bishop Bell in Chichester, 1929; Henry Moore and Graham Sutherland in St. Matthew’s Church Northampton, 1942-1946; Francis Bacon and religious imagery, 1933-1953; the artistic programme of Marie-Alain Couturier in Assy, France, between 1946 and 1950 and its aftermath, and the equivalent programme in Coventry Cathedral, 1958-1962; Kandinsky’s Concerning the Spiritual in Art (1914) and Mark Rothko; Eduardo Paolozzi and British Pop Art; neo-conceptual artists of the 1980s and 1990s and their responses to the history of art—the lectures examine, with support from primary sources, how modernist and post-modernist visual artists have reacted to/against traditional iconography in subjective ways and created different ‘dimensions of depth’—and how the Christian church has reacted to/against them.