Making “Sense” of Abstract Art
From the late 300s until the early 1600s, Christianity & art had a strong “marriage.” They stayed together from the mid-1600s to the late 1800s, but there was little substance to the relationship. By the early 1900s, they were divorced, sometimes fighting, sometimes civil, occasionally remembering the loving partnership they once shared.
Before the “divorce,” art was mostly “figurative,” which here means that the painting or sculpture was recognizably related to the kinds of things that were found in the “real world,” like people & objects. In the 20th century, this changed. Artists started “abstracting” forms, colors, perspectives, shapes, textures, lines, & other formal properties. Some might argue that this kind of thing began with the period known as Impressionism in the late 1800s. In this period, painting was more about impressions & emotions than about making a canvas look like something in the “real world.” But in 1906, an art movement called Cubism took abstraction to another level.
Figurative Christian art was produced in the 20th century, often to support the troops or concretize a community’s hope or faith, but most of the 20th-century art that found its way into museums was not of that type.
The rest of the 20th century was a series of new abstractions & new returns to figuration. Now, in the first half of the 21st century, artists seem to pull fragments from all kinds of art without following any one style too closely, and they are experimenting with new (electronic) forms of media as well. The recent use of Artificial Intelligence tools to create artworks adds a new set of questions to art production.
So what is a Christian to do when faced with 20th-century art and the art being made in the 21st century, especially when the artworks might have something to do with religion and might not?
For the sake of keeping this simple, we explore three trends, with suggestions on how to respond to each.
Trend 1: Some artworks were created to make visible the invisible. Emotion, for example, is invisible. Artists experimented with creating emotions through artworks that didn’t contain depictions of people experiencing the emotion, but did contain lines, forms, colors, shapes, etc. These artworks aren’t supposed to be understood; they are supposed to be experienced.
One strategy is to simply stand in front of a work and let your eyes roam over it. See what happens to you. If you feel jittery or confused, maybe that is what the artist intended. If you feel a lot of energy, maybe that was the point. You might feel heavy or depressed or any of a dozen other emotions. Trust the experience to be the “meaning.” (A Mark Rothko canvas of yellow, gold, & coral rectangles at the Art Institute of Chicago causes immense joy in me. Sometimes I go to the museum just to stand in front of it for 15 to 20 minutes and feel joyous.)
Trend 2: Some art in the 20th century (like pop art in the 1960s) did depict real people/things, though often “abstracted” or distorted in some way, to engage in a dialogue with culture. Andy Warhol’s prints of famous people & objects like soup cans were a way of getting the public to see that they had turned these famous people & objects into icons, and perhaps a way of suggesting that we were looking for salvation in them. Marc Chagall’s White Crucifixion in the late 1930s was a way to ask a question about the meaning of the pogroms against Jews in Poland. Until the 20thcentury, art had been, in some way, at the service of the culture. In the 20th century, it became another voice in the culture, able to ask questions of other aspects of the culture.
One strategy for interpreting figurative 20th-century art is to sort out who is talking to whom. Remember, for the most part, art is usually not being made to promote religion (unless of course it is in a church), so the art is doing something other than promoting. It may be questioning, challenging, or wondering, but it is probably not promoting. The religious elements might even be in the piece to hold up a critical lens on some other aspect of culture. José Clemente Orozco painted a mural of Jesus victorious over the elements of the dominant, oppressive culture. Is Christianity being questioned? Is Christianity the one doing the questioning? Is Christianity out of the conversation altogether? What does this say about the culture of the 20th century?
Trend 3: Art since the beginning of the 20th century asks life-and-death questions, questions that had previously been the province of philosophy & theology or of religion. If an artwork seems to be addressing such questions, is it religious? The answer may differ for each viewer.
Picasso was an avowed atheist. He painted 'Guernica' at the request of the Spanish Republican government for the Columbian Exposition of 1937. It depicts the horrors of war as experienced by the small Spanish (Basque) town of Guernica, which was obliterated in an intense 2-hour bombing attack by the Spanish Nationalist forces & their allies in the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939). Picasso would probably not consider it religious. Indeed it lacks any reference to hope or redemption. Yet when I look at it, I experience it as religious, perhaps because faith is my starting place. I experience it as the very human experience of death, of finality, of not knowing with certainty whether the resurrection will happen. This is the essence of faith. I can’t know. I can’t be secure, ever. I can only surrender to God’s will & hope, in spite of that radical not knowing. And what of the Rothko work mentioned above? Is the joy I experience religious? I think so. Joy is a feeling that goes with (or should go with) praise & worship of God.
One strategy with such works is to bring faith questions to them. In other words, if one believes that there is one God, that God is available to all human beings, and that God is especially present in the big questions of life & death, then how does God relate to this artwork, which is exploring a question of life or death? Whatever questions are being asked, whatever emotional response the viewer has to a piece, he or she should ask this question: Where is God in this? One response to atheism is argumentation. Perhaps a better response is to name who & how God is in the face of the real life-and-death questions that characterize human existence.
