the iconography of the church in modernist american
art
by douglas Messerli
I am no art
historian, so I will not pretend to speak of how European art depicted
churches. I would imagine, however, given their many grand cathedrals that art
history might record that their primary images concerned these very marvelous
constructions. Certainly we can see that continuation, for example, in
German-American artist Lyonel Feininger. Although Feininger grew up in New York
City, he moved to Berlin in 1888, and painted and drew many works depicting the
grand religious constructions of the city and elsewhere, returning to the US
with the rise of the Nazis.
Early American modernists also sought out
the grand churches and cathedrals of the age. The photographer Edward Steichen
(1879-1973) photographed the beautiful Trinity
Church, New York of 1904. Artist John La Farge (1835-1910) created
stunningly large stained glass windows for various larger churches, including
Trinity Church, Boston; Judson Memorial Church in New York; First Unitarian
Church of Philadelphia; Trinity Episcopal Church
in Buffalo, New York; All Saints Episcopal Church,
Briarcliff Manor, New York; and elsewhere. His son, Christopher Grant La Farge,
moreover, built several churches including the remarkable, if yet unfinished,
Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine in New York. And, although churches
were seldom his subject, Italian born American artist Joseph Stella represented
his many futurist-like renditions of The Brooklyn Bridge as if it was also a
kind of cathedral, albeit a highly industrial one that stood, as in Hart Crane’s
long poem, for an entirely transformative age.
For the most part, however, American
artists populated their art with visions of a different kind a church: small,
often clapboard buildings painted and white or gray. At one time or another
nearly every American artist of the early modernist realist period has depicted
just such images, transforming the church through their work, into a sort of
American icon, as important as all the industrial sites and New England landscapes
and Midwest granaries they also painted.
Outsider artist Grandma Moses (1860-1961),
as well as more establishment art figures such Marsden Hartley (1877-1943),
Edward Hopper (1882-1967), Charles Demuth (1883-1935), Georgia O’Keefe
(1887-1986), Stuart Davis (1892-1964), Charles Burchfield (1893-1967), and
Andrew Wyeth (1917-2009) painted small American churches again and again.
Below, for example, are photographs of some of their works:
Grandma
Moses
Marsden Hartley
Edward Hopper
Charles
Demuth Georgia
O’Keefe Stuart Davis
Yet it was the Southern photographers who
perfectly captured the strangeness of that iconic image, the isolated churches,
built in the most rudimentary style and with the simplest of materials. These
churches, far from the more standard New England and Midwestern temples of
worship, were notably created by primitive architects with little means but
great inspiration. Beginning with Walker Evans (1903-1975) and William
Eggleston (b. 1939), that tradition has continued in the numerous church
photographs and, later, sculptures of William Christenberry (b. 1936).
Paul
Strand Walker Evans William Christenberry
Eggleston and black artists such as Jacob
Lawrence, meanwhile, took us inside those little churches, revealing the fervor
of the worshipers.
Strand
and O’Keefe, furthermore, visited ancient church constructions of the American
Southwest, revealing completely different images of what a church might look
like.
Paul
Strand, St. Francis Church. Ranco de Taos,
1931