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Dec. 22--The timing of the Museum of Biblical Art's newest show couldn't be better. With the holidays upon us, and Bill O'Reilly's war on the "war on Christmas" rattling our serenity, the exhibit thoughtfully examines the fate of religious imagery in a secular century. Does it have a place, and if it so, what is it?
At one time, Christian iconography operated as a lingua franca. Illiterate peasants could read the windows of medieval cathedrals instead of the Bible. The pictures formed a symbolic shorthand that everyone understood. There was no need to spell out the story behind an Annunciation, a Last Supper, a crucifixion, a Piet ... or a deposition.
But as religious life fragmented after the Enlightenment, artists could no longer take for granted that biblical scenes would resonate. As painter Georges Rouault, a devout Catholic and early 20th century modernist, remarked: "We can do something else, but we cannot re-create what the collective, spontaneous efforts of generations built with the faith that was theirs."
Much art of the past century updated, universalized or deeply personalized the visual language of the Bible. Kathe Kollwitz, who lost a son in World War I, used the motif of the Piet ... to express her grief. She updated Michelangelo's grieving Madonna, coarsening her features into a self-portrait and broadening her frame, transforming her into suffering everywoman who grieves for a perpetual loss.
Barbara Hepworth, who also lost her eldest child, expresses tender longing with a "Madonna and Child" drawing. Its delicate lines immortalize a moment of mutual comfort, as a mother brushes her cheek against an infant's tiny mouth, and the baby reaches up toward her neck with his plump arm.
Sculptor George Segal used the story of Abraham and Isaac as the raw material for a memorial commemorating the shooting deaths of four students by the National Guard at Kent State University in 1970. His college-age Isaac looks blindly at his father, who wields a blunt knife in one hand. Segal captures the moment before God's angel intervenes, when the son turns, bewildered, toward the murderous patriarch. The sculptor explained his intentions: "A father does have life or death power over his son. Doesn't a father have to stop and think about declaring war and sending his son to be killed?" Kent State rejected the work as too violent.
Some artists modified biblical source material so radically as to change the meaning of it altogether. Stanley Spencer's rendering of the "Angels of the Apocalypse" changes a scene of terror from the Book of Revelation into a scene of pastoral bliss. Admitting that he couldn't conceive of God's angels spreading pestilence, he equips his heavenly creatures -- who look like plump rural housewives sporting fluffy, feathered wings -- with bags of seed which they sprinkle across the green countryside.
Spencer paints the Bible as he would like it to be, which is his inalienable right in a time and a country that offers as many spiritual options as it does variations on mouthwash.
BIBLICAL ART IN A SECULAR CENTURY: Selections, 1896-1993. Through March 11 at the Museum of Biblical Art, 1865 Broadway at 61st Street, Manhattan. For exhibition hours and admission price, call 212-408-1500 or visit mobia.org.
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Copyright (c) 2006, Newsday, Melville, N.Y.
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