Seeing in the Spirit: On Modern Art

This article is the second in a series by Tom Break on art, modernism and modernity. The first is here and the third here.

If there is in modernist painting and its tendency toward abstraction a potential reconciliation with the old Platonic argument about why painters really had no place in the Republic, I think it’s a sign that the modernist painters pursuing this track weren’t turning their backs on their own tradition but were (consciously or unconsciously) engaging more of it, and more deeply, than perhaps ever before.

In this second installment, I would like to consider a second common trait of modernist painting: a hostility that the canvases seem to have for the people who are looking at them. Is there a precedent for this movement away from what I might call “easy beauty” in art toward the confrontational and severe—even the ugly? Toward an art that seems determined not to be loved? Impressionism and Post-Impressionism, Fauvism, Cubism, Expressionism: it’s important to remember that even if they are easy for us to look at now, the paintings we know from all these movements challenged and affronted their original audiences.  

To begin thinking through this problem, we return again to Plato’s Republic:

If a man, then, it seems, who was capable by his cunning of assuming every kind of shape and imitating all things should arrive in our city, bringing with himself the poems which he wished to exhibit, we should fall down and worship him as a holy and wondrous and delightful creature, but should say to him that there is no man of that kind among us in our city, nor is it lawful for such a man to arise among us, and we should send him away to another city, after pouring myrrh down over his head and crowning him with fillets of wool, but we ourselves, for our souls’ good, should continue to employ the more austere and less delightful poet and taleteller, who would imitate the diction of the good man and would tell his tale in the patterns which we prescribed in the beginning, when we set out to educate our soldiers (Republic 398a-b).

What I find most fascinating about this famous passage where he kicks the poets out of the Republic is that he doesn’t kick all of the poets out. Just some of them. And, in particular, the ones that are really good at pleasing an audience, willing to do anything to get a laugh. I think about them as the “sellouts” or the ad men of ancient society: they’re unscrupulous in their use of their art to flatter and please their audiences. Plato has a clever response to them: praise them, to be sure—because it’s important to truly recognize their talent and the power of their art—but don’t let them stay in the Republic.

Why not? Surely he’s worried that they would use their talent for unethical ends, planting seeds of vice or reinforcing licentiousness or moral laxity. But that can’t be the only reason. He isn’t willing to retain their services as long as they preach the party line, as it were. No, he kicks them out, retaining only the “more austere and less delightful” poets. But why would it be bad to have audience-pleasing artists at the service of the perfect republic?

Abbey Church Saint Denis

It’s a question that haunts thinking about art through the history of the western tradition and is no less with us today. As long as we’re cunning in our use of art for good ends, are they not justified? It’s a thought that’s echoed in the Middle Ages in an oft-cited reflection by Abbot Suger of Saint Denis, where the Gothic style begins in earnest with the renovation of the apse:

Thus, when—out of my delight in the beauty of the house of God—the loveliness of the many-colored gems has called me away from external cares, and worthy meditation has induced me to reflect, transferring that which is material to that which is immaterial, on the diversity of the sacred virtues: then it seems to me that I see myself dwelling, as it were, in some strange region of the universe which neither exists entirely in the slime of the earth nor entirely in the purity of Heaven; and that, by the grace of God, I can be transported from this inferior to that higher world in an anagogical manner.

Suger movingly articulates the power of material beauty to inspire spiritual reflection. But there’s also, in the Middle Ages, a sense for the danger in an insufficiently careful embrace of such power. Bernard of Clairvaux, the most influential abbot in the Cistercian order, wrote a letter that has become a key document in the development of an alternate line of thinking about reasons to distrust such hope in a pleasing and powerful art. In a letter to a fellow abbot, he too identifies the potential use of crowd-pleasing ornament:

We know that the bishops, debtors to both the wise and unwise, use material beauty to arouse the devotion of a carnal people because they cannot do so by spiritual means. 

Fosonova Cistercian Abbey Photographed by Federico Scarchilli

But his skepticism towards this approach is revealed in his adamant denial that such strategies have any place in the monastery, which holds its inhabitants to a higher standard than the typical parish church, and it is in this context that he questions the ultimate utility of beauty for engendering spiritual development:

There is more admiration for beauty than veneration for sanctity. Thus churches are decorated, not simply with jeweled crowns, but with jeweled wheels illuminated as much by their precious stones as by their lamps. We see candelabra like big bronze trees, marvelously wrought, their gems glowing no less than their flames. What do you think is the purpose of such things? To gain the contrition of penitents or the admiration of spectators?

St. Bernard of Clairvaux by El Greco

That last question is a critical one, because, from the outside, it might be hard to tell which was happening to a visitor of a church caught up in rapt attention before one of the beautiful, pleasing works to be found in the sanctuary. Is it a transportation to a spiritual realm, like that detailed by Abbot Suger? Or is it something less holy, the bedazzlement of wealth? Bernard is worried about why there are such extravagant things in the churches, and he raises his primary concern, that such visible wealth more reliably generates donations, down payments on future splendor, than genuine compunction and spiritual contemplation. Unlike Abbot Suger, for whom the colored light reflecting off of the jewels transports him to heavenly thoughts, Bernard seems to think that jewels are more likely to turn one’s thoughts to money—that it distracts and deters visitors to the church from their ostensible reason for going there.

And this is where Bernard’s analysis really shines, especially when taken together with other aspects of his thought. Bernard’s worries about the potentially distracting and misleading effects of sumptuous works of art dovetails snugly into his theory of contemplation, the true and proper activity of the soul in the sanctuary. For Bernard, and he’s not alone here, contemplation isn’t an activity like going for a walk or making dinner. It’s a gift. In the words of A. A. Milne, like poetry, “it isn’t something you go out and get, it’s something that gets you.”

This is important for making sense of the kind of experience compatible with the genuine religious experiences churches are designed to foster. It is only sensible to adorn churches with work that supports such an end and doesn’t detract from it. On Bernard’s view, because contemplation is a gift, the role of the soul seeking contemplation is to prepare itself to receive it. To quiet the mind, listen, attend. You have to wait in the right kinds of ways; then contemplation will find you.

Thomas Merton, a Cistercian like Bernard, writes eloquently about Bernard’s concept of contemplation in his essay “Action and Contemplation in St. Bernard.” As it happens, Merton owned a painting by a friend from college, the modernist painter Ad Reinhardt. Reinhardt’s work is a textbook example of modernist painting that doesn’t invite you in or present the viewer with a pleasing surface. And it is precisely in this refusal that the work accomplishes visually what Bernard says about how contemplation works spiritually.

Ad Reinhardt, Blue, 1952

Reinhardt’s work relies on the phenomenon of “delayed perception,” which is what happens when your eyes take a little while to get used to the dark. At first, when you enter a dark room or look at one of Reinhardt’s mature paintings, you see nothing but darkness. But after a while your eyes adjust, and you begin to see things in the dark. In the dark room, you might begin to make out a table or chair; in the painting it is a cruciform shape that emerges, the corners falling away into an uncanny field of great depth, the whole thing held tightly together by the simplicity of the pictorial logic.

Visually, you have to wait. Attend. Quiet your mind so that you can receive what the picture has to show you. It’s a structure of visual experience common to much modernist painting—for instance, in the work of Mark Rothko, Piet Mondrian, Agnes Martin, Ellsworth Kelly, Jack Whitten, among many others—and it would become de rigueur for paintings in that vein that a severe or confrontational outward appearance should give way to a deeper vision after prolonged attention.

The experience of finding the vision in this kind of painting is the inverse of looking at an outwardly pleasing one: instead of catching your attention immediately, the initial movement is to turn the attention away—to present nothing, or less than nothing, to look at. Like the poetry Plato valorizes, it’s the “austere,” the “less delightful” work that does this, that begins with repulsion instead of attraction. As an initial movement, it serves a critical function: the viewers are not curious or distracted, or being led by the image; they are being repelled. What looking you do, then, is intentional, conscious, and void of distractions. Making oneself look at the painting becomes a forcible quieting of the mind. And because the work requires looking with attention, what you see, at the end of the looking, you see consciously.

Ad Reinhardt, Collage, 1940

It’s easy these days to dismiss the terrific seriousness with which modernist painters approached their work, and the intensity of experience that they sought from works that were more “austere” and “less delightful” than those to which they had become accustomed. It’s the place that Plato wants to take you—and he knows that it’s a steep, unforgiving path—which is why he reaches out for the “austere,” the “less delightful,” those training grounds in humility that strengthen the soul.

Tom Break is an artist, critic and editor at In the Wind Projects.