So that by all means: a response to David Clayton
is the Provost and Dean of the Faculty of Sacred Arts at Atlanta’s Pontifex University, as well as the artist in residence at the Scala Foundation, a Princeton-based organization working (according to their website) “to restore meaning and purpose to American culture by focusing on the intersection of art, liturgy, and education.” His credentials are quite impressive; yet I was disappointed with the reasoning he displayed in an essay titled “Both the Chaos of Jackson Pollock and the Sterility of Photorealism are Incompatible with Christianity,” which he published recently on his blog Way of Beauty. This is exactly the sort of title that gets me sitting up straight and paying attention. Unfortunately I found Mr. Clayton’s arguments unconvincing, and his use of words aggravatingly ambiguous. But more than that: I believe his essay will actually do harm to the efforts of Christian artists who wish to be faithful workers in their chosen craft. Here’s why.
Clayton’s essay starts with this bold thesis: “Authentic Christian art strikes a balance between abstraction and realism, rejecting the extremes of Abstract Expressionism — where meaning dissolves into unrecognizable chaos — and Photorealism, which reduces reality to soulless or meaningless matter. Rooted in a worldview shaped by faith and philosophy, the Christian artist uses partial abstraction to blend naturalistic forms with spiritual depth, revealing the soul and invisible truths of existence.” Right away I notice a problematic ambiguity: is this essay going to be about Christian art, or Christian artists? What, indeed, is “Christian art”? Clayton leaves that term undefined, and that, I believe, is a severe weakness in his argument.
There are two possible meanings for the term “Christian art”: the connotative and the denotative. Connotatively, “Christian art” means art which suggests or implies the doctrines of Christianity, without necessarily being made by a Christian or for an explicitly Christian purpose. We could say “Art which promotes a Christian idea of the spiritual realm,” or we could connote that concept by saying “Christian art.” This is how Clayton is using the phrase: as a stand-in or shortcut to a larger concept. There is nothing wrong with this; it is an established method of rhetoric. Connotatively, “Christian art” has no limits: there are uncountable examples of critics finding some sort of resonance with Christianity in the work of all sorts of diverse artists from all kinds of religious backgrounds.
But there is no denotative meaning to the phrase “Christian art.” Since it is not possible for a work of art to be saved and go to heaven, the term “Christian art” can only ever mean art made either by Christians, for Christian purposes, or expressing Christian truths. But the essay seems to be using the term denotatively, as if to say “this art over here can be called Christian but that art over there cannot.” We can talk about individual people like that, but not works of art; artworks are open to interpretation, and as I mentioned, there is a robust tradition of finding Christian meaning in art of all styles, types, and kinds. Is this essay saying that these interpretations are wrong?
What I think he is doing is trying to discuss the idea of the appropriateness of certain kinds of art for the purposes of public, formal acts of worship. This is a very important thing to think about; evidently God himself considered it important enough to fill several long chapters of the books of Exodus and Leviticus with instructions for the furnishing and decoration of the tabernacle. Yet Mr. Clayton never defines his argument in such a way — a point which we will come back to later. Meanwhile, the lack of a denotative meaning to the phrase “Christian art” hurts Clayton’s argument immensely. His essay is, in effect, trying to create such a denotative meaning; but it fails.
In the first paragraph of his essay, he makes a rather subtle fallacy of the no-true-Scotsman type, fending off detractors in advance by talking about “authentic” Christian art. What would happen if an artist said, “I’m a Christian, and I make abstract expressionist art all the time”? Would David Clayton say, “You aren’t an authentic Christian artist”? Do you see the fallacy? He is drawing an arbitrary circle around some art and saying it is different from the art outside the circle; when counterexamples are brought up he can simply redraw the circle smaller. If he had said “The best Christian art” I wouldn’t be so upset. But his choice of the word “authentic” eliminates any need for him to defend his own aesthetic tastes; he can simply ignore what he doesn’t like by calling it “not real.” This is important: if someone says they are a Christian but they don’t believe that Jesus died to save them from their sins, I can justifiably say “No, you aren’t really a Christian.” I can say that because there is an objective standard — the doctrines of Christianity — for who counts as Christian and who doesn’t; but there is no such standard for art.
I wish Clayton had spent some time defining his terms in these first few paragraphs. As it is, his purpose — one I wholly support, by the way: to help Christians make value judgements about what they see in the world of art and in their own artistic tastes and practices — is lost in a bramble patch of ambiguity. Consider the word “bad,” for instance. What does it mean for a work of art to be “bad”? The essay’s second paragraph states this: “If a painting of a man is so abstracted that it is not recognizably what it is meant to be then put simply it is a bad painting.” But what if the artist isn’t trying to make a painting of a recognizable person (or any other aspect of visible reality)? If so, then Clayton’s argument against the Abstract Expressionists just evaporated.
Pollock wasn’t trying to paint pictures of anything recognizable; neither was Rothko. Yet their paintings are verbally thrashed by Clayton, who claims they would fail the “five-year-old” test: “We can present people with these paintings to a hundred people and ask the question that only 5-year-olds dare ask . . . what is it? In my experience, few, not even the critics who promote their work, seem to see what the artists hope to portray.” Note that I’m not saying the paintings of Pollock, Rothko, et al. are good for anything other than decoration. If that’s what you want, then that’s okay. But Clayton is holding them to the standards of representational or figurative painting; standards which are not applicable in their case.
When Clayton says “There is no Christian photorealism,” I assume he does not mean that it is impossible for a Christian artist to make a photorealist painting — which would be a patent falsehood — but rather that it is impossible for a photorealist painting to express a Christian perspective on reality. Indeed, he does claim that is what he means: the previous sentence of his essay states that photorealism “reflects an attitude that says there is no meaning or spiritual dimension in what we are looking at, only matter.” I must ask, then, what Clayton would think about paintings such as Millais’ Christ in the House of His Parents or Holbein’s The Body of the Dead Christ in the Tomb? The former painting was excoriated by the critics of the time because it was “too realistic.” But as many people have noted, the picture is rich with theological significance.1 Holbein’s painting is masterfully expressive of the despair that Christ’s disciples felt after the crucifixion. Dostoevsky has one of the characters in The Idiot say that a person could lose their faith from looking at it. That is indeed what some of the disciples did, for a time. Doesn’t the painting do a good job of expressing that spiritual feeling?
Perhaps these examples are unfair: neither Holbein nor Millais was attempting the reproduce the effects of photography (Holbein wasn’t even alive at the right period of history to do so). I’m not aware of any statement by any of the Photorealists which indicate they were trying to reduce reality to mere matter and to deny the existence of a spiritual realm. Perhaps Clayton knows of such statements; he may be more conversant with their views than I am. But if he is claiming that the attempt to exactly reproduce the material reality seen by the painter is a false and invalid pursuit, I must disagree. Throughout history painters have sought to capture, with their skill, the world as they see it. Sometimes this means they seek to precisely copy the image on their retinas. Vermeer used an optical device to do so. Landscape painters are frequent practitioners of this style. There is no reason why a painter couldn’t be saying, with their art, “God’s grandeur is so great in his creation that the best I can do as an artist is to study it closely and reproduce it.”
Mr. Clayton might not object to that; perhaps he only takes issue with the urban-centric photorealism of such artists as John Baeder (whose 2007 painting John’s Diner with John’s Chevelle Clayton singles out for special criticism). But is there not still a human — even a spiritual — element in the artist’s choice of scene to depict? My friend Timothy Henze, a photographer, likes to talk about the non-objectivity of the camera — how the camera, pointing only where the photographer wants it to point, is subservient to the subjectively evaluative eye of the photographer. The same is true of photorealist paintings. Baeder only positions the frame of his canvas around what he wants the viewer to see.
Besides, there is a beauty of color, line, and form which any art, abstract or realist, is able to express. By refusing to let Christian artists engage with the whole school of twentieth-century artistic thought that is encompassed by the word abstraction, Clayton is restricting their ability to explore the kind of beauty that would be difficult to emphasize in, for instance, a realist painting of a human figure; the subject, demanding to be interpreted, would interfere with the painter’s true intentions.2
There is one important point of Clayton’s with which I absolutely and fully agree. “A painter’s artistic choices are not made in a philosophical or theological vacuum. Rather, an artist’s ‘worldview’—his ‘personal philosophy’ or understanding of reality that combines philosophical and theological truths—profoundly shapes what he paints and how he depicts it.” Quite true. But as Christian critics — mandated by our faith to interact charitably with all people at all times — both Clayton and I, and others, must look first to the artists’ own statements when we seek to interpret their art. Did the artist intend for the art to express such-and-such a philosophy? If we don’t have explicit statements from the artist agreeing with our interpretation of a given work, then our interpretation can only ever be subjective; only the result of what we are bringing to the work. I’m rather sure that Clayton would disagree with me about that. He seems to be finding quite a lot which I’m not sure is actually in the paintings — specifically in his censure of the photorealists. To my knowledge no photorealist painter ever set out to say “there is no meaning or spiritual dimension in what we are looking at, only matter” which is what Clayton claims their pictures are saying. If that is what Clayton sees in this kind of painting, he is free to dislike them; but he oughtn’t prohibit Christian artists from exploring the style and making it speak the truths of their faith. Clayton might say such an endeavor is condemned to failure from the start; but the history of art is full of examples of artists who have taken the styles, genres, and forms given to them by their discipline’s history and made them speak in new and unexpected ways.
I will grant that some styles of art are more apt for communicating certain ideas and beliefs. The style of the icons — of which David Clayton himself is a competent practitioner — is quite appropriate for the ideas and sense of spiritual significance which Clayton promotes. But that doesn’t mean it is the only way that such concepts can be expressed in painting.
Clayton’s essay is full of unfounded claims. He says at one point that “the tension in all art” is this: “how do we describe the relationship between the spiritual and material worlds, especially when painting people, between body and soul?” I simply can’t accept that all art must be about this one specific problem; can’t we have paintings which say “here is a pretty bowl of fruit” or “This is what my family looks like” or even “look at these cool shapes and colors”?
A little later, he claims that the “element of human artifice” is “necessary”: it is a requirement for an image to look as if a person had made it. Why, though? Who decided this? If it is indeed “necessary,” what about photographs? In fact, I asked David Clayton that question, and he told me this: “Photography can be art if it is partially abstracted so that it communicates invisible realities, as well-painted images do. Skilled photographers use great artifice to imbue the photograph with meaning. Photographers today can manipulate the image using Photoshop techniques, and even traditional photography used an ordinary camera and the development process of printing the photo so that what they produced was more than a simple flat visual record. The rule of thumb here is that when we look at the image, does it communicate a sense of human artifice, which has given the image the capacity to communicate invisible truths through visible means?” He is doubling down on his principle that, for art to be good, it must not slavishly copy the reality in front of the artist. Yet he never supports his thesis; it remains his preference, nothing more.
Later in the essay, he asserts that the portrait artist “must communicate through his art that the person is alive and has thoughts and feelings.” He recommends that portraits contain “vigorous gestures and facial expressions from which we can read moods and emotions.” Again I must ask: who decided this? What about paintings like Watteau’s Pierrot or Manet’s Olympia or A Bar at the Folies-Bergère? What about Piero della Francesca’s diptych-portrait of Battista Sforza and Frederigo de Montefeltro? What about Holbein’s Christ that we mentioned earlier? Do these blank and placid faces convey nothing at all about the sitters’ inner states? If a Christian had made these paintings, would Clayton claim they had somehow betrayed their faith? Who made this rule? If Clayton were merely saying “This is what you have to do if you want to paint in the Icon tradition” I would calm down; but he says that he is speaking about all art. By what authority is Clayton making these claims?
He does indeed invoke an authority near the end of his article: Pope Pius XII, who in his encyclical Mediator Dei wrote this:
Nor is it to be admitted that sacred images and pictures should imitate nothing of the realism of nature, or that they should be distorted into an extreme symbolism which is hardly intelligible to the Christian people. For sacred art ought to express the mysteries of the faith and the examples of the saints in such a way that the faithful may be moved to veneration and imitation, and may understand more easily the truths of religion. Hence the more recent custom of depicting sacred subjects in a manner that is alien to the traditional practice of the Church is not to be approved where it departs from this norm; yet neither is an excessive realism to be commended which debases the dignity of sacred persons or renders the mysteries of faith less noble and sublime.
Was the Pope speaking only about the kind of art that is appropriate for Roman Catholic religious use? No, Clayton says: “He was writing about the criteria for art in churches, but drawing on principles that apply, for the Christian, to all art.” Clayton is claiming that these views are both normative and imperative for any and all Christian artists.
And I can’t accept that. As an Evangelical Christian I don’t accept the authority of the Pope in the way that David Clayton does. So if he is speaking only to Roman Catholic Christians, that is fine. But he repeatedly uses the wording “Christian art” and “Christian artists” in his essay. He never attempts to rest any of his principles on an authority which all Christians would agree to recognize, namely, the Bible.
Again: if David Clayton is actually only speaking about art used for the purposes of Catholic worship, I applaud his effort to cast a vision for what that art should be. But he needs to be more clear is his argument. As it stands, I am afraid his essay will be an arbitrarily restrictive influence on artists who wish to honor God with their art. If his words are heeded, artists will abandon many styles which would benefit from a Christian presence. Ought Christian artists to retreat from any of the multitude of styles, genres, and isms available to choose from in the pursuit of excellence in their craft? I don’t think so. Is it wise to say of any style of art that it cannot be used to promote a Christian message? I don’t think so. Shouldn’t Christian artists seek to communicate by any means possible the truths of the faith? I will let the Apostle Paul have the last word:
I have become all things to all people, that by all means I might save some.
(I Corinthians 9:22)
See, as one example among many, ’s carefully detailed two-part description of the painting, published on her Art for the Liturgical Year blog.
Such is the case with James Whistler’s paintings of Joanna Hiffernan; they are often interpreted as being about feminine beauty but Whistler himself claimed they were about the color white. If he had been working in an abstract expressionist style, his point could have been made more clearly.