Nancy Davenport

Paul Sérusier: Art and Theosophy

The art of Paul Serusier and that of his artist friends has been interpreted in this essay as having its roots in the Theosophical themes prevalent in an interdependent circle of authors and spiritualists in 18th and 19th century France. These mystical thinkers were less concerned with the writings and indomitable presence of the acknowledged leading light of Theosophy Helena Petrovna Blavatsky than with a more specifically French national yearning for its imagined Celtic and traditionally Roman Catholic roots, smothered, in their view, by secular and materialistic modern sensibilities. Theosophy, “the essence of all doctrines, the inmost truth of all religions” as defined by the doyenne of French Theosophy Maria, Countess of Caithness and Duchess of Medina-Pomar, led Serusier to seek elemental truth for his art in a remote inland village in Brittany where he painted for many years, to a Benedictine monastery on the Danube where formerly Nazarene artist/monks had created a system of drawing and painting believed to be based on the original design of the universe, and to the widely read text Les Grands Inities (1899) by the mystic writer, Edouard Schure. Serusiers broad-reaching search for the Theosophical roots of art was one aspect of the fin de siecle malaise that led the arts out of the world into dreams.

The Holy Spirit and the Soul as Revealed in Nature: The Ideals of John Ruskin (1819–1900) in the Art of Anna Lea Merritt (1844–1930)

The artist Anna Lea Merritt (1844–1930) was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania and spent most of her professional life in London and in a rural village in Surrey. She settled in England in 1871 and soon became a friend of the members of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood in their mature years, the art critic John Ruskin, the late Victorian artists George Frederick Watts and Frederick, Lord Leighton, and others in the London artistic and literary community. In the milieu she had chosen, her intimate and spiritual relationship with nature and her sympathy for all mankind, ingrained in her in childhood among Unitarians and Quakers in Philadelphia, developed into paintings, murals, and etchings that were at once academic, naturalistic, and mystical. In re-introducing this little known woman artist today, this article focuses on her work as one that evokes the spirit and beauty of the natural world and sympathy for the plight of the suffering, both eloquent testimonials to the ideals and beliefs of her renowned friend and contemporary, John Ruskin and to late Victorian liberal sensibilities.

William Holman Hunt’s Holy War in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem

Abstract This essay is concerned to interpret the background, meaning, and reception of a late painting by the British Pre-Raphaelite painter William Holman Hunt entitled The Miracle of the Sacred Fire in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre (1899). The painting illustrates and critiques an annual Easter Saturday miracle reported to have been experienced by believers and nonbelievers since the third century CE. During this miracle, fire descends from the oculus of the dome in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem onto the site believed to be the tomb of Christ, and impassioned pilgrims by the hundreds seek to light their candles with its flame. The painting, not well received when first exhibited at the New Gallery in London, remained in Hunt’s studio until his death in 1910. The history of the church in Jerusalem, the conflicts between the different Christian sects who guarded it, the attitude of one Victorian ecumenical Protestant traveler to Jerusalem toward these conflicts, and their resolution in his painting are the subjects used to explore this strangely overwrought and little known image.

William Holman Hunt: Layered Belief in the Art of a Pre-Raphaelite Realist

Abstract The essay is concerned with the evolving religious beliefs of the British Pre-Raphaelite painter, William Holman Hunt (1827–1910). Hunt’s faith was forged by his early connection and friendships with members and patrons of the High Anglican Oxford Movement and transformed by his repeated trips to the fraught religious environment of nineteenth-century Syria, the name generally used at the time to denote modern Israel. His contacts with urban and agrarian Jews, Christians, and Muslims, with officials in the Anglican, Byzantine, and Lutheran Churches, and with British colonial officials turned both him and his art in more universalistic directions from his former parochial British colonial/elitist global understanding.

Modernism and Mysticism in Germany: Wilhelm Worringer and Pater Desiderius Lenz

The text seeks to integrate the late nineteenth and early twentieth-century art of the traditional Benedictine community of Beuron in southwestern Germany with early twentieth-century Modernist aesthetics, particularly as the latter are expressed in Abstraction and Empathy, a Contribution to the Psychology of Style by the German Art Historian Wilhelm Worringer. The influences on Beuron art—the German Kulturkampf that set Protestants and Catholics in northern and southern Germany in opposition and placed the few remaining monastic communities in limbo, the Beuron artist monks’ inspiration from the immobile Egyptian antiquities in the museums of Munich and Berlin, and their desire to develop a universal and otherworldly Christian art which transcended the tangible, tactile, and divisive world in which they lived, worked, and prayed—resulted in a similar rejection of the visible, the real, and the tangible and an embrace of the eternal and symbolic that the Modernists sought. The text ends with a quote from the Dutch Modernist Jan Toorop, a recently converted Roman Catholic, who asked his audience the following in 1912: “Two sculptures that dominate today in the mainstream of sculpture are The Burghers of Calais by the great Rodin and on the other hand St. Benedictine and St. Scholastica by the Benedictine Father Desiderius Lenz. Where do you want to go: to Rodin or to Lenz? To Calais or to Monte Cassino near Rome? Take a look at the work and we’ll talk again?” The question asked by Toorop is the question interrogated in this text.

Pater Desiderius Lenz at Beuron: History, Egyptology, and Modernism in Nineteenth-Century German Monastic Art

The text is an introduction to the art made by a Benedictine community of artist/monks in the village of Beuron in the state of Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen in southwestern Germany in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The founder of the school, Pater Desiderius Lenz, studied art in Munich, received a scholarship to work in Rome, but discovered the source for his work in the flat two-dimensional colored drawings and prints of Egyptian art in albums published by the German archaeologist, Richard Lepsius. The iconic and non-empathetic style of Beuron art inspired by Lenzs ideas and writings is discussed with respect to its source in the Benedictine experience, bonded as it is to the church walls and to the Gregorian chanting of the monastic choirs. But at the same time, because of its rejection of the form and expression of the three-dimensional world of man and nature, it is characterized as being Modernist as well, an early by-product of that twentieth century stylistic phenomenon. Through Lenzs first architectural project, the St. Maurus Chapel above the Danube near Beuron, and his evolving exploration of the subject of the Pieta, his Egypto-Modernist religious imagery is described.

Odilon Redon, Armand Clavaud, and Benedict Spinoza: Nature as God

The enigma of Odilon Redons art and his lifelong disinterest in discussing it directly have caused his critics and admirers to range widely in their investigations across the cultural, philosophical, and mystical landscape of his time and habitats: fin de siecle France in Paris and his family home and vineyard at Peyrelebade outside Bordeaux. This essay looks closely at two lesser known aspects of his childhood and adolescence: his mystical devotion to the rituals of the Catholic faith and, contradictorily, his close friendship with an older man, the polymath Bordelais botanist, Armand Clavaud. The artists and the scientists shared devotion for Nature in its spiritual richness evident in their writing, their intense observation, their perceptive recording, and their shared interest in the pantheistic philosophy of Spinoza with respect to Nature and to God, offer insights into Redons mind and art that have not been considered together before and which seem to the author to be elemental if one is to understand its power and content.