Book review: The Artistic Sphere
It’s an exciting time to be an evangelical Christian with an interest in the visual arts: the long slumber in which evangelicals either ignored the arts or viewed them with deep suspicion has finally ended, and there is a vast amount of quality writing, theorizing, and analysis coming from the Christian scene. Many of the people of prominence working in the field come from a Neo-Calvinist background; this book, a compilation of essays from that tradition, is a fine starting point for anyone who wants a fuller understanding of that philosophical system’s views on the arts.
This book’s whole title is The Artistic Sphere: the Arts in Neo-Calvinist Perspective. The back cover blurb says it “brings together history, philosophy, and theology to consider what this Neo-Calvinist tradition has to say about the arts.” I therefore expected it to be a comprehensive overview—a systematic discussion, heavy on general principles, of whatever the Neo-Calvinist position vis-à-vis the arts might be. I was disappointed; the book is, instead, a loose agglomeration of essays about aesthetics and visual art written by an assortment of thinkers who ally themselves with the Neo-Calvinist camp. Some of these thinkers explicitly tie their ideas to those of John Calvin or to such Neo-Calvinist philosophers as Herman Dooyeweerd; most of them do not. A more accurate title would have been Neo-Calvinist Thinkers Reflect on the Arts or The Artistic Sphere: a Neo-Calvinist Reader or something like that.
That being said, there were a few themes and tendencies I noticed in the essays and articles which make up this book. There is a strong emphasis on explaining the art in more than purely aesthetic terms; this tendency is acknowledged by some of the writers in this volume, and merely latent in others. The other theme I noticed was a poptimist one, or at least a willingness to not let the bounds of the “canon” define what these critics will think about. I’ll come back to these two themes throughout the course of this review.
I found much of value in the material offered here. Many of the chapters are excerpts from other books; at times it seemed to me that the reader would have been better served by just reading the books from which these excerpts are taken. However, the chapters in this book are excellent as aperitifs, whetting the appetite for extended forays into these thinkers’ works. Keep your Goodreads “to-read” tab pulled up because this book is a fine guide for further research.
It’s somewhat puzzling to think that the Neo-Calvinists have written so much good material about aesthetics and images when John Calvin himself was rather ambivalent toward the visual arts; he refused to allow images in the setting of corporate worship but other than that he left the field of visual art more or less alone. In Adrienne Dengerink Chaplin’s essay on Calvin’s intellectual legacy, the great reformer is quoted thusly on the subject of painting and sculpture: “If we neglect God’s gift freely offered in these arts, we ought to suffer just punishment for our sloths.” A few pages later he’s quoted as saying “those who seek in scholarship nothing more than an honored occupation with which to beguile the tedium of idleness I would compare to those who pass their lives looking at paintings.” Is this a contradiction? Not really, if we think of the visual arts as tools to an end or as one of the useful handicrafts such as blacksmithing, weaving, and the like. Calvin wanted the arts to be put to good use; he would have considered the modern practice of disinterested aesthetic contemplation to be a waste of time. This fundamental ambivalence, this lack of interest in Calvin’s part on the world of pure aesthetics, causes a sort of imbalance among the inheritors of Calvin’s intellectual tradition featured in this book, especially in reference to their practice of art criticism: I would venture so far as to say that for the typical Neo-Calvinist art critic, formal and stylistic concerns are of no interest at all. Even more troubling, though, is that, for the Neo-Calvinist critic, what the artist is trying to say is of less interest than what the critic finds in the art.
This attitude towards the arts is what John Walford, later in the book, calls the “presuppositional approach.” This approach is very common among Neo-Calvinist critics and historians of art, and can be generally understood as the belief that the doings of the artists will reflect their personal worldview and philosophy of life; and that it is a productive and worthwhile pursuit to go looking for evidences of the artists’ worldviews in their pictures. This approach is particularly evident in the chapter on Hans Rookmaaker, which is a conglomeration of the first chapter of his own book Modern Art and the Death of a Culture admixed with material from two other essays. In these writings, Rookmaaker promotes his theory that the course of mainstream art in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries is expressive of a general cultural decay incited by the abandonment of religion in public life and the development an ego-driven existentialist self-realization on the part of the artists. Certainly I agree that there are some paintings which can be interpreted in this way; but I have the distinct feeling, when reading Rookmaaker, that I’m only being shown what he wants me to see, and that he is fitting his facts to the theory instead of his theory to the facts. This tendency has been noted by other readers of Rookmaaker; Jonathan Anderson and William Dryness wrote a whole book in opposition to Rookmaaker’s idea (called Modern Art and the Life of a Culture). James Romaine, in his section of The Artistic Sphere, has this to say about Rookmaaker:
The degree to which Rookmaaker’s conception of modern art was informed by his intensive study of Gauguin is a question that needs more examination. Gauguin was one of the most narcissistic persons ever to pick up a paintbrush. Rookmaaker’s description of the modern artist as self-anointed prophet and priest is accurate of Gauguin’s quest for messianic self-fulfillment in the dual pursuits of artistic egocentrism and Tahitian girls. We can only contemplate how Rookmaaker’s attitude might have been somewhat differently formed if his principal conceptual starting point for modern art had been Paul Cézanne’s pursuit of the “spectacle which the Omnipotent, Eternal Father God unfolds before our eyes” found in the structure of local nature or Vincent van Gogh’s use of color to depict “something of the eternal, of which the halo used to be the symbol” around the heads of humble laborers.
This is, of course, a meta-analysis which shows that the presuppositional approach can even be deployed towards the Neo-Calvinist critics themselves! But despite his flaws, I value Rookmaaker because he is a fundamentally humble critic, unwilling to succumb to any elitist impulses, ready to let any kind of art become a valid witness to his theories. Within the context of easel pictures the range of his pictorial examples is especially wide (and I found it amusing, in Modern Art and the Death of a Culture, how often he uses quotes from Dylan and Beatles songs in his chapter headings). This tendency to consider all kinds of art, even that outside the bounds of the “grand narrative” of artistic development begun in Italy and proceeding via Paris to London and New York, is a feature common to all the Neo-Calvinist art critiques I’ve encountered over the years. The Neo-Calvinists are much more willing to extend a critical acceptance to art which might not be considered cutting-edge or mainstream.
Nicholas Wolterstorff’s chapter “Rethinking Art” brings the book full circle, as it amplifies the message of Calvin that the arts find their highest calling when they are put to useful purposes. Wolterstorff provides a new philosophy of the meaning of art in our current society, rejecting the idea that art has marched inexorably onward along a grand trajectory of progress, with the avant-garde of every age setting the tone for all that is valuable in painting of any era, and with disinterested aesthetic contemplation being the only legitimate use for art. It is the best and most important chapter in the book. It cements for me the idea that within Neo-Calvinist philosophy lies the justification for all kinds of theorizing and opinionating on the full variety of images in our image-saturated culture; in my mind the Neo-Calvinists are truly potimists, since I’ve never found a Neo-calvinist critic claiming that only “high” or “elite” art is worthy of attention. many Catholic art critics will say that only certain styles of art are worthy of attention; many secular critics still believe in a canon (although this view seems the be centered more in the field of literary studies than in that of visual arts). But the principles and analytic methods of Neo-Calvinism can be applied to advertisements, graphic novels, music videos, children’s books, road signs, memes, any any other kind of visual artistry imaginable.
Victoria Emily Jones ends the book with a summary of developments within Christian scholarship in the past half-century since Rookmaaker wrote Modern Art and the Death of a Culture. This chapter is an excellent resource for anyone who wants to read more from the Neo-Calvinist camp; maybe, even, for those who want to jump into the deep end and start getting involved on their own. The only improvement I could suggest for future printings would be some sort of contact list—personally, I want to get in touch with all of these writers and organizations, and ask them what I can do to help the cause. And this leads me into my next point.
Inkwell, the artsy auxiliary of Christianity Today, recently initiated an editorial series on the state of Christianity and the arts. The first editorial in this series has not yet been published; but when it is, I expect it will dwell on how much is being thought, said, and written about the arts from a perspective of rigorous and committed Christianity. The situation seems to be the exact opposite of what James Elkins described, in 2004, in his book On the Strange Place of Religion in Contemporary Art: Elkins, looking at the mainstream critical scene, could find no way for religion to be competently or adequately examined as a crucial factor in the doings of artists. In the intervening two decades, however, the situation has developed with a marked emphasis on religion in the arts, to the point where it’s hard to find a contemporary art critique which does not mention the role of faith, religion, or spirituality in the working lives of the artists.
Much of this thinking has been done by writers working from within the Neo-Calvinist tradition. And although this book feels at times to be arranged rather haphazardly, with a pronounced unevenness in the tone or rigor of the chapters, I like to think this book’s lack of focus means the editors saw a real and immediate need and did the best they could, however hurriedly, to meet that need. Having such a need is a good thing, and I’m happy to see my own tribe—the Neo-Calvinists—exercising their skills in the field of art criticism.