This past weekend–on Easter no less–I went to the Philly art museum with my family. I was particularly struck by Monet’s  painting, Poplars, which is stunningly simple: it’s just three trees and their reflections in a pond, each forming a continuous pink line for the entire height of the painting with the three lines divided in the middle by the ground-line. The work, I think, perfectly anticipates abstract expressionism as there is only a vague commitment here to actually presenting real physical objects. Monet seems much more concerned with how color and shapes work with each other. Now, of course, visual art has always been about color and shapes, but you see an increasing movement represented in Monet from representations of “reality” in some form all the way to someone like Rothko who wants to figure out how shapes and colors work on their own.

The Church has a reputation for not liking a lot of modernist stuff for some of these reasons–it’s supposedly more committed to representation than abstraction. I’m not sure if that’s true, but I do understand the attraction to art that is not quite so abstract. It’s not that I don’t like or appreciate abstraction. I do. But too much of it feels like a thought experiment, a means of making a point more than making art (if that distinction is worth anything). A perfect example of this is the difference between Picasso’s early super-Cubist stuff (like the Guitar Player) and the raw power of Guernica. Nobody would deny that Guernica is cubist, but its figures and narratives make much more of a visceral and not simply rational connection. You could say the same for Leger’s The City. My thoughts on a lot of contemporary art generally mirror what some critics say about secular modernity: it’s interesting, it’s important, but it’s not particularly meaningful. It’s, as Weber might say, disenchanted.

So what does all of this have to do with the Church? There’s been a lot written about the resurgence of religion, or the idea of post-secularity. I think that a lot of the new commitment to stories in art is dealing with the same societal trends, a reaction to the potential “emptiness” of a secular world. But here’s the thing: stories don’t work so well in abstraction. They need figures, and those figures need bodies and a certain physicality. And while there are certainly tremendous precedents for visually representing the body in other parts of the world–think of various tribes in Africa and traditions in South Asia–I think that Roman Catholics are the best bet we’ve got in terms of Western Europe and the U.S (at least once the pagans all got pulled into Catholicism). (For more on how this relates to modern art, see this link on the Catholic sources of four major artists).

So our world really needs Catholicism, or at least a Catholic sensibility, and it needs Catholics to remind us that the sacred is not just out there, or is not just something to be found once the world is rejected. It is interesting how the extremes of Protestantism and Buddhism– real life is outside this world or real life is suffering–both are so opposed to the Catholic insistence that grace works here, now, and that God’s grace only functions via the human body and the oil and water and ash of this world. (Yes I know those are gross caricatures of Protestant and Buddhist rejection. However, my point is that there is space for those rejections in those traditions, while such a rejection would be impossible for Catholics).

Anyways, while we worry about Obama and Notre Dame, I’d like for us to worry a bit about making sure that the Catholic artistic tradition no longer produced the maudlin, er, stuff that will turn up if you do a google search for Catholic art.

PS–Of course, I’m aware of the psychological power of a landscape or a still life. Yes–especially for landscapes and something like Van Gogh’s Room at Arles. So you don’t need physical figures. But there’s something about landscapes, or in Van Gogh’s case, a room–that make a narrative implicit. And anyways, I’d say that a lot of still life paintings are more impressive than they are moving–and when they are emotionally powerful, its because of some sort of obvious symbolic connection–think of the difference between when Cezanne paints fruit and when he paints skulls.