GERHARD RICHTER, now (at 93) the grand old man of German art, put the issue succinctly in 1964: “Art shouldn’t be a substitute religion. . . But the Church is not any longer adequate as a way of offering experience of the transcendental, and of constructing religion real.”
The words — written just months after the primary publication of John Robinson’s Honest to God — are harsh, but they are going to resonate with many. In the intervening many years, Europe has overwhelmingly turned its back on centuries of church tradition, and now prefers to look elsewhere in its seek for the spiritual. Yet that search remains to be pursued, and with urgency.
The paintings by Richter shown and discussed listed here are, to my mind, amongst probably the most successful recent attempts to reply to that urge; to present visual form to the transcendental; and to make religion — or a minimum of one in every of its abiding preoccupations, the mystery of suffering — real. Richter’s paintings were rejected by the South Italian church for which they were commissioned; widely admired, they now hang within the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, Texas.
FOR greater than 800 years, those capable of enter most completely into the suffering of Jesus through ecstatic contemplation of his Passion have been rewarded, like St Francis of Assisi, by sharing within the pains and marks of crucifixion: the stigmata. Alternatively, like St Teresa of Ávila, they’ve had the experience of being pierced and burned by the shafts of divine love: transverberation. In each cases, the saints’ moment of just about physical union with the divine was soon given memorable artistic expression. From Cimabue and Giotto onwards, the stigmata became a central, identifying a part of Franciscan imagery in painting; St Teresa’s ecstasy was immortalised by Bernini in miraculously hovering marble.
In the years around 1920, the Italian Capuchin friar Padre Pio claimed to have experienced each phenomena. While transverberation seems to have happened to him just once, stigmatisation apparently recurred at intervals, until he died in 1968. Despite the proven fact that the Vatican was long reluctant to endorse any of those claims, Padre Pio, from the Thirties onwards, became the article of great popular affection and veneration, drawing large crowds to the Church of San Giovanni Rotondo, east of Naples. The numbers increased steadily after his death, and much more when he was beatified in 1999 and canonised in 2002.
To accommodate these pilgrims, an enormous recent shrine was designed by Renzo Piano (perhaps best often called co-architect of the Pompidou Centre, in Paris). The lofty, airy church, which may accommodate as much as 16,000 worshippers, is supported by honey-coloured stone arches that radiate from a pillar above the transparent casket showing the saint’s uncorrupted body. Around this focus, Piano invited Richter to offer paintings that may accompany and enrich the worshippers’ devotions, as they prayed for the stigmatised saint to intercede for them.
WHEN it involves church commissions, nevertheless, and particularly one like this, it is less complicated today to be an architect than a painter. There is the artistic conundrum of how — or whether — to follow within the figurative wake of Giotto and Bernini, depicting in roughly physical detail a body decorously opening itself to ecstasy, especially given what indelicate ecstasies the trendy pilgrim may have seen, over and over, on film or television.
No less tricky are the psychological questions: can anybody today not ponder whether morbid sexual repression plays some part in these holy transports of pain, which regularly seem as disturbed as they’re disturbing? And, as with the bloody images of Christ’s Passion, do we wish, or need, to look at? It is simple to see why Richter selected not to try an easy illustration of Padre Pio’s moments of transcendence. “I can’t paint bleeding wounds,” he informed the commissioning committee.
© Gerhard Richter. Photo © The Museum of Fine Arts, HoustonGerhard Richter, Abstract Picture (Rhombus) (851-6) (1998), oil on canvas, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, museum purchase funded by Caroline Wiess Law in honour of Peter C. Marzio, Director, The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston
But there’s, I feel, one more reason that he decided, as an alternative, to color six large, red, abstract diamond-shaped canvases. Richter was born in Dresden in 1932. His childhood and adolescence were dominated, first by Nazism, then by devastating war, defeat, and the communist tyranny that, within the eastern a part of Germany, followed them.
How are you able to privilege the bodily experience of 1 person — a friar, who lived to the age of 80, in a protected and peaceful community, at a time and on a continent where tens of millions were being murdered, tortured, or died of starvation? And when the Churches, each Catholic and Protestant, repeatedly didn’t denounce unequivocally the evil of Hitler’s régime as hostile to the teachings of Jesus?
After Auschwitz, no traditional representation is adequate to explore in paint each the mystery of suffering and God’s response to it. A recent pictorial vocabulary is required. Richter attempted to seek out one, during which the paint itself tells the story.
FROM the scale of the rhombuses in relation to the benches, you’ll be able to judge the dimensions of your complete work. When all six are hung in the identical space, they surround and dominate viewers, embracing (overwhelming?) them with their remorseless repetition of blood red. At first glance, they seem equivalent; but, as you get nearer, every one reveals its own complexities, because — as you’ll be able to see from the detail here — every surface the truth is comprises many various colors, and every has been stained or damaged in a selected way.
Like a tortured human body, the paint on the canvases has been bruised, scratched, scraped, burned, and torn. The closer you get, the more tactile it becomes, until you almost feel that, like Thomas, you can put your hand into the injuries. Through the layers and the lesions, you see flashes of other colors — orange, yellow, blue: traces surviving from a time before, or perhaps still to come back.
There is nothing here that is particular to any individual or community, even less to any creed. The paint — wounded, transfigured — puts us head to head with the mystery of the pain of the entire world, and the even greater mystery of how the body of all humanity could also be healed, restored, made whole.
Unsurprisingly, the patrons, who had wanted a deal with the actual experience of the brand new saint, declined the works. Yet the struggle for a language of the spiritual which matches beyond one body — or one faith — stays. Richter returned to that challenge over and over; so the last words ought to be his: “Abstract pictures . . . make visible a reality that we are able to neither see nor describe, but whose existence we are able to postulate. . . Art is the pure realisation of non secular feeling, capability for faith, eager for God. . . Art is the best type of hope.”
Neil MacGregor is a former director of the British Museum and the writer of Living with the Gods (Allen Lane, 2018).
