“This Great Treasure of Dreams and Inner Life”
An artist looks beyond mere technical achievement to ground artistic vocation in the lifelong journey of faith.
By Brian Prugh
It’s the week before a small Catholic Art Festival where I’ve rented a booth to show some of my work. My wife and kids have traveled there ahead of me; they’ll stay with family and help man the booth on the day of the show.
So I’m alone in the boat that we’ve been living on for the last six years. It’s less conspicuous that way. My family needed a break from looking over our shoulders at the increased police presence on the water that is slowly, steadily, working to shut down the conditions for living aboard that we’ve counted on for years. We needed some time to figure out how we’ll react to the silent imperative to “Move along, please.”
But right now, I’m frantic—frantic to get work done before the Art Festival. There’s no real hope that any of it will sell, that the work will be able to free me of the boat mechanic day job that’s paying the bills right now. But I’ve thrown myself into the making of it.
After putting in eight hours fixing boats at the boatyard, I toss a few vegetables into the pot and get to work on Thérèse, an image of St. Thérèse of Lisieux that I’m making out of nylon tulle, which I cut and layer to build up soft shadows like the Renaissance masters, but in a haptic, contemporary material.
It’s painstaking, slow, and difficult work, as I sit with my tiny scissors, cutting voids in shadows that I’ll sew together with invisible thread. And while I have mapped out every inch of this work a dozen times, still, as I finish with each layer and add it to the rest, it is a kind of miracle: the way her features emerge out of the tulle, the way a presence whispers its way into the work as I set it onto our small table, like a face looking up through water.
I work with my body eight hours, and then race through six more of some of the most demanding intellectual and artistic labor I’ve yet dreamed up for myself. It taxes me: my mind is stretched taut as a violin string. My joints ache. My legs are cramping from being in awkward positions all day.
And at some point, I become too tired to work. I look at my patterns and can’t conceive of planning another square inch. I look at my cuts, and the thought of dragging the scissors around that shape weighs more than the scissors. So I set aside my work, look regretfully at the dishes piled up on the counter, and walk around the tiny cabin to turn out the lights.
He doesn’t lay blame for the poor state of art in the modern world on “modern culture” or “profligate artists,” supposing that the resources of great and deep faith were everywhere available but that the artists of the world spitefully ignored them.
I’ve been sitting on my unmade “bed,” our salon settee that doubles as a berth at night, so it’s already warm when I crawl under the covers, a fleece sleeping bag with a lightweight puffy one on top. The only real luxury is a down throw pillow that we picked up from a thrift store. And I reach for my copy of Father Marie-Alain Couturier’s Sacred Art, because I said that I’d write an article about his thinking. And because I need it right now. I need it to make sense of what’s happened to my life.
Sometimes the experience of reading isn’t just conditioned by the words on the page. Sometimes the possibility of reading closely requires a certain kind of experience, which is why I’ve gone into the details of my week—why I’ve drawn out my exhaustion, the frenzy of work, and hinted at the despair of knowing that it has no place to go. Honestly, from the outside, I probably look a little crazy. But there is something driving me to do the work, something that becomes visible in the writing of Father Couturier, a Dominican priest and perhaps the greatest clerical supporter of serious art in the twentieth century.
Father Couturier is credited with opening the door to modern art and modernist architecture in the Church, though I have a feeling that the vast number of churches built in a “modern style” in the decades after his death in 1954 would have made his stomach turn. That’s because he’s uncompromising in his vision, and he possessed—more than anything else—a keen eye for false notes in visual art and in architecture. You couldn’t slide anything imperfect past him. And, of the many possible inroads into Father Couturier’s thinking, this is the one I’d like to pursue, because art wasn’t just decoration to him, or even what we ordinarily praise as “beautiful”—for Father Couturier, art was as true an expression of faith as alms for the poor or fasting and prayer.
The watered-down modernism that made its way into untold numbers of suburban parishes has even less to do with a vision as uncompromising as Couturier’s than it does with the “revival” styles that preceded it. The false notes sound everywhere in both movements: churches built hastily at great expense to be a comfort to their parishioners—a reminder of the old country or an extension of the living room in the modern world. Father Couturier could bear neither nostalgia nor luxury.
He wanted great churches. He wanted great religious art. And all that he saw around him was dross. But what makes him unique, I think, among Catholic critics, is that he doesn’t lay blame for the poor state of art in the modern world on “modern culture” or “profligate artists,” supposing that the resources of great and deep faith were everywhere available but that the artists of the world spitefully ignored them. On the contrary, for Couturier, the source of the poverty of Catholic art lay in the state of faith in the culture—even among professed Christians. He makes the claim in several different ways in multiple essays collected in the volume. Here are two:
My own thought is that a deeper, truer feeling for the sacred would banish from Christian life and Christian worship almost all the art we are so fond of putting into them.
There is no longer enough spiritual vitality in the great mass of Christians to make them capable of producing a genuine sacred art. Thus the falsehoods of life bear witness to the unconscious falsehoods of art.
And, when quoting the artist André Malraux, he hears a true critique in a voice hostile to the faith:
“Every day we see more clearly how incapable modern civilization is of giving forms to spiritual values. Even Rome itself. The fact that Christianity cannot give its churches a style that would allow Christ to be present in them, and cannot unite a sense of communion with artistic quality in its images of saints, that is something worth thinking about…”
For Couturier, the problems with the sacred art of his day can’t be isolated from the problems of faith: the painful sacred art filling the new churches springing up around him was a sign that the faith of his generation wasn’t alive. That it was sick, diseased.
He doesn’t mince words. But one of the remarkable things about his arguments in Sacred Art is that he uses images as effectively as the words that accompany them. The two-page spread after the essay “Sacred Art and its Public”—which ends with the striking claim, “What we like judges us. Secretly at first. Then, one fine day, for all the world to see” —is a remarkable argument in itself:
Couturier is a rare voice in the world that places the stakes high enough for art to be worth suffering for.
Walk into any Christian bookstore in the United States, and there’s pretty convincing proof that not much has changed since Couturier was writing.
What drives me to work out my own vision, then, even when I’m exhausted and with precious little hope of financial solvency, is the gravity of this accusation. When the art in a church embarrasses me, my faith embarrasses me. How can I evangelize when the shallowness of our collective faith is on view everywhere I turn? Father Couturier lays down a gauntlet for Christian artists; he sets upon their shoulders responsibility for the depth of our faith, or at the very least an expression of that depth.
But that isn’t just a near-impossible imperative, it’s a validation of the nobility of the search—the search for a vision is the artist’s vocation even if it doesn’t amount to a career. Couturier is a rare voice in the world that places the stakes high enough for art to be worth suffering for.
I don’t know of any contemporary voices—even (and perhaps especially) among sacred artists and Christian critics—that acknowledge in any way that such a difficult, noble search exists. That suffering might be a part of the artist’s work. At most they’ll talk about mastering craft. No one seems to think that what problems are there (if they acknowledge any at all) are a matter of faith. Or that what vision is to be won must somehow be suffered for.
Which is why, when I laid my head on the pillow at the end of the day, my body exhausted, my mind near a breaking point, the space around me growing more disordered each day, reading Couturier was like eating a hearty stew: it was humble and poor but nourishing and deeply satisfying. It was the nourishment I needed to keep going.
Couturier’s positive answer for what is needful for a true sacred art of the future is fitting to consider in Francis’ pontificate: modesty and poverty are his grandest aspirations. What he means by those things are highly specific. He’s not interested in what’s cheap. A pre-fab house isn’t going to speak to him. It’s a more ancient poverty that holds Couturier’s interest—that of the medieval farmer who builds his own stone house, for instance. It is the poverty of cultures living closer to the earth, infused with the modesty of tasks undertaken with your own hands, not farmed out to the cheapest contractor.
For Couturier, as for so many of the avant-garde artists working at the time, one of the biggest problems with the contemporary Catholic visual culture around him was the Renaissance. Combined with the great schisms which cut off the Catholic church from large geographies that once fed its artistic culture, something about the way the Renaissance consolidated a visual culture produced a strangely myopic standard by which all Catholic work has continued to be judged:
Partially due to [the losses of Greek, Slavic, Germanic, and Anglo-Saxon art as meaningful influences], as well as the marvelous Italian flowering in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries and the supremacy of Roman art (which, by excluding all the rest, proved to be ruinous), the strange idea arose that the art issuing from the pagan Renaissance, the work of Raphael and Michelangelo, was the peak of Christian art (and of art as a whole). At the very most it was the peak of the tradition of classical Italian realism, a tradition which, in the totality of human art, represents only a particular current, historically rather narrow and today completely run dry. Those developments also explain the unjustified contempt for national arts, and especially for medieval art, which is common in the Western Christian world. A natural consequence is Rome’s failure to appreciate the values of modern art, whose sources are entirely different and much closer to the Middle ages than to the Italian Renaissance.
I don’t know what it is about the Renaissance achievement that closes people off to other kinds of artistic exploration. It was certainly something of an achievement, one made ubiquitous when it became mechanically available to the masses with the invention of photography. Perhaps the precise optical realism flatters our eyes because it shows us what we think we see. Maybe our cult of technology appreciates human achievement only when it approaches the precision attainable by a machine. Whatever the case, the prejudice is as prominent today as it was in Couturier’s time, and it is just as narrow and still completely run dry.
This isn’t the work that I once wanted to make. It doesn’t look like what I want sacred art to look like. It’s just the work that’s been given to me, and that I have to make because no one else will.
But Couturier’s “medievalism” isn’t a call for a revival. He is quick to perceive that his contemporary Matisse is “indeed a man of the middle ages, as Braque and Bazaine are still Gothic and Léger is Romanesque.” His proposals for an honest sacred art appeal to the vestiges of more ancient forms of making still living in his contemporary moment. For instance, he proposes that for an altar,
have the village cartwright make a sturdy wooden table, one of those noble, massive farmhouse tables, long, low, with deep drawers in it. Even today, in our remote rural areas, the wooden ploughs, yokes, and gin farm wagons have a style beyond compare—as strong and beautiful as the style of African sculptures.
For Couturier, the humility of the middle ages still resides in honest work (although the places where that is to be found are becoming more and more dispersed by factory production and mechanical fabrication), and possibilities for a genuine renewal are everywhere around us:
As for ourselves, we are convinced than an immense and marvelous Middle ages still survives in modest hearts, unaware of itself, rebuffed, suppressed, despairingly timid. This great treasure of dreams and inner life is wounded and wasted due to the eternal distrust of oppressive families, but also the omnipresence and omnipotence of that prolific organization, at once academic and frightfully elementary, which is brought into being by the bureaucrats and official teaching of the Beaux-Arts [the French Academy of Couturier’s time, which is no more nor less doctrinaire than the cabal of graduate art programs in the United States or their academic reactionaries among “traditional” sacred artists]. That enormous machine never questions itself, and every sort of mediocrity conspires to make it still more ponderous and unyielding.
I’ve got academic credentials to certify my “mastery” of art, but I understand Couturier’s hope in the creative lives of people practicing more straightforward crafts. The imperatives of my work in the boatyard are very different from those that I encountered in the classrooms of the academy: our work on vessels has to be sturdy enough to stand up to all of the forces that the sea can muster. The work must be strong, and unquestionably solid. So we give it our attention. We’re also working on things that other people use, so it must be presented neatly and cleanly in a way that’s easy to access. And there ends up being a certain kind of beauty to the work. It’s a simple, utilitarian beauty, but that’s a crack in the tough mechanic’s armor: there’s beauty in the work in addition to the toughness, and we take pride in an elegant solution.
It’s an ethos I bring to the artistic work I do at night: the imperative that the work stand up to all of the spiritual forces a soul can muster, so that not a false note should ring from it that could break the spiritually distressed. And it must be simple and clear and true, so that any honest seeker who approaches it won’t get lost in distractions. This isn’t the work that I once wanted to make. It doesn’t look like what I want sacred art to look like. It’s just the work that’s been given to me, and that I have to make because no one else will.
It seems like I should have been able to arrive at this work more quickly and less existentially. But I can’t find a part of my journey—something that I read or did, time in the studio or life-stresses outside of it—that doesn’t in some way contribute to what it is. It is strange how art works, and strange to say that I needed to deepen my faith to make my art truer. But I think that the two cannot be separated.
And that’s the most fertile river running through Couturier’s thought, a river that could feed a true renaissance of great sacred art if only the artists could hear it, could feel it. That the mountain an artist must climb isn’t the mountain of art, but the mountain of faith—of suffering, of despair, of hopelessness—of the vision from the cross—and of hope, and faith, and true charity received as gifts. The great thing about climbing that mountain is that even if the work never gets anywhere, the journey isn’t a waste.
Couturier has more hope at the beginning of this collection than he does as he nears his death at the end of it, but the nobility of the artistic task is equally vivid in both places, as is its supreme importance:
We will not solve the problems of sacred art. We will not, and nobody will. Let us repeat one thing frankly: the problems of sacred art are the problems of Christianity itself. Once that is understood, what is essential has been grasped. The ills of sacred art are the ills of Christianity, made visible like sores that break out on a face. “The Church does not need Reformers; the Church needs saints,” Bernanos wrote. And so the present state of religious art concerns us and judges us, all of us, jointly, indissolubly. It is a living reality to which we are all bound body and soul, from the Sovereign Pontiff down to the last priest and baptized Christian.
Brian Prugh, who has also used the name Tom Break, is a visual artist and writer, as well as an associate editor at Dappled Things and a contributing editor for Convivium. His work with his family, including videos about off-grid living on a small sailboat, is available through In the Wind Projects.
