Faith in Art

The permutations of “deliberate ambiguity” in the title of Joseph Masheck’s book, Faith in Art: Religion, Aesthetics, and Early Abstraction, invite the reader to ponder how, and in what way, religion influenced four pioneers of abstract art. However, the “faith” to which Masheck refers is neither a vague spiritualism nor Madame Blavatsky’s Theosophy, which, frequently, is accepted as an authoritative motivation for their work. In fact, Masheck shuns the word “spirituality.” He replaces it with “religion” as defined by Emile Durkheim: belief in the sacred that is lived and practiced by a community of adherents (8).

Beginning with “An Orthodox Kandinsky,” Masheck emphasizes Vladimir Kandinsky’s (1866–1944) Hegelian view of artistic development and its analogue in the Christian message of working for the coming Kingdom of God. The outward and visible production of artwork emerges from the “inwardness” of the artist, whom Kandinsky defines as a “priest of beauty,” producing what is “beautiful . . . which springs from the soul” (28). This beauty conspires both in personal transformation and also in the contribution of art to the social, cultural, and political reality, transforming “feeling” into forms that desist from objective representation—into, perhaps one may say, shapes that feel. Masheck demonstrates this radical difference from the mimetic artistic tradition and its re-evaluation of iconic styles in a masterly analysis of two 1926 paintings, Accent in Pink and Yellow Center.

In chapter 2, entitled “Protestant Mondrian,” form dominates, but as asymmetric balance. This is evident in the immediate sense of order and, simultaneously, the unsettling estrangement that a viewer may experience when confronted by Piet Mondrian’s (1872–1944) work. The rectangular shapes and clear lines endeavor to capture and integrate perfection; yet the arrangements never degenerate into a prosaic monotony. Rather, they lead the viewer to progress beyond their frames, which, as religious works, yield to the Absolute in a vision of dispassionate clarity, a stringent beauty to behold and by which to be confronted.

Here, too, resides a social edge to Mondrian’s work, which is evident  in the relationships between his attuned proportions which predict a communal harmony that is “utopian”, and to which “the Neo-Plastic culture of equivalent relationships” point “as a Christian destination” (79). The “realism” of Mondrian’s “asymmetrical equilibrations” also bears witness to the chasm between the divine and the human, evoking the Protestant commitment of “faith” that “justifies” the sinner and establishes a right relationship between God and the believer. Mondrian’s theological interlocutor was Herman Bavinck (1854–1921), and Masheck ably shows the link between the gospel proclamation of the progressive realization of God’s Kingdom and the “compositional adjustments” and “advancements” in Mondrian’s artwork that disclose such a “successive resolution” (75).

Born seven years after Mondrian, the “Catholic Malevich” of chapter 3 was of Polish descent but lived in the Ukraine’s Kyiv. Kazimir Malevich’s (1879–1935) notebooks comprise quotes and comments, the longest of which are from and on the gospels. Masheck refers to the two religious sources of his emergent Suprematism, in which the sensations that a creative artist experiences are not evident in expressions of emotion or feeling, but form “subliminal” sensations which are cultivated. When reason is brought to bear upon these intuitions, questions arise for the artist: What next? What do I do with these sensations that I have experienced, intuitively recognized, and reasoned about (100, 134)? By examining the sequence from the (literally) iconic Black Square (1915), to White on White (1918), and then Suprematism of the Spirit (1919—the cover design of the book), the Eastern Christian influence in Malevich’s artistic creative practice that reasons about sensations in the presence of the iconic form is starkly direct and confrontational in the first, mutating to a depiction of the yearning ethereal spirit in the second, and both of which cohere in the final work: a plain white icon in the center that is “nailed” to a black, beige, and brown cross on a white background.

Turning to the Western Christian influence, Masheck, quite startlingly, reveals the “subliminal” presence of the heightened baroque of Peter Paul Rubens famous Elevation of the Cross (1610–11) in the shaded evocations of a Suprematist pencil sketch of 1916–17 (112–116). More daring is his convincing parallel between Rubens’s Saint Athanasius Overcoming Arius (1620–1) and Malevich’s Suprematist Composition: Black and Yellow of 1916 (116–118). These comparisons also bear contrasts, as Suprematism recasts the Baroque flowering of post-Tridentine apologetics into the paired down purity that considered and reasoned sensations invoke.

The final chapter returns to the founding Abrahamic faith of Judaism, and also shifts the trajectory from Suprematism to Constructivism. In their Lithuanian home, El Lissitzky’s mother instilled the religious practice of reading from the Hebrew Bible, in particular, from Ecclesiastes (138). Initially illustrating Yiddish children’s books and active in Yiddish secular culture, when the Communist, Rosa Luxemburg, was battered to death in 1919, Lissitzky (1890–1941) prepared a commemorative study that included Malevichian iconic forms and an almost palimpsestical iteration of her name (150). A later version, however, bears witness to the artist’s Constructivism: Luxemburg’s name has been erased. This work exposes his progression to construction, in which space facilitates the imposition of material forms as “volumes, planes, and lines . . . create . . .  the new composition of the real world” (165). Unusual is Lissitzky’s Abstract Cabinet (c. 1920–31), with its vertical slats and hanging artworks, which Masheck analyses as a chamber of Jewish liturgical ritual (166–169).

The conclusion reasserts the significance of religion in the artworks of the founders of abstract painting. Indeed, this is difficult to deny; although Masheck’s links may appear tenuous at times. However, he is not insistent upon a seamless confluence between either the faiths of the artists and their creative work, or his own comparative analyses of artworks. But in the case of the Orthodox Kandinsky and the Catholic Malevich, the visual and participatory power of the liturgy seems too suppressed; and the soul-making tradition of the spiritual confessor/advisor’s role within these faith traditions may not be unrelated to the “inwardness” of artistic inspiration, which is also present in the Protestant Mondrian. Furthermore, “spirituality” has acquired an academic rigor of considerable respectability in more recent years. Therefore, when reflecting upon the works highlighted in this essential and commendably focused study of four tradition-shifting and trend-setting artists, Durkheim’s communal definition of religion may be somewhat less than adequate to the task of tracing their religious faith in the artworks and their faith in the practice of art.

Frank England is an honorary research associate at the University of Cape Town, South Africa.

Frank England

Date Of Review:

April 4, 2024