Art: Labyrinth of Kitsch

For centuries it was a habit of Popes to collect modern religious art. Up to the papacy of Urban VIII, who gave Bernini carte blanche to transform the face of Rome, the Vatican had a use for the best art of its time: magnificence as propaganda. The results, strung through exhausting miles of galleries and culminating in Raphael’s stanze and Michelangelo’s Sistine frescoes, fill the Vatican Museum. But this lofty tradition of patronage ebbed away, and by 1900 most official religious art was stranded in a sludge of gaudy plaster piety. With the exception of the gloomy Georges Rouault, not one significant modern artist has built his imagery round doctrinal religion and its themes. There were some fitful bouts of church patronage: Matisse’s chapel at Vence, Corbusier’s at Ronchamp. But on the whole, the old symbiosis was dead.

Pious Triviality. Could it be revived? The present Pope, Paul VI, hoped so. “The friendship between church and artists must be re-established,” he declared ten years ago. Thus began the Vatican’s collection of 20th century religious art, which is now receiving its first summer of tourists after some private viewings in 1973. About 542 works by more than 250 artists are displayed in the redecorated windings of the Borgia Apartments.

Three things can be said at once about this collection. First, it represents a decent and sincere intention. Second, it contains a smattering of respectable works of art: a set of Matisse chasubles from Vence, a cast of Rodin’s Hand of God, some Rouault aquatints and so forth. Third, with such few exceptions, it is an aesthetic swamp. If some mischievous curator had been asked to as semble a study collection of rhetorical sham, displaying all the cliches of modern art at their meridian of pious triviality, he could hardly have done better.

The collection has no evident criteria of choice, for the Vatican, faced with the awkward but basic question of what a “religious” work of art may be, has been unable to find an answer. Instead, it has accepted anything that seems, however dimly or perfunctorily, to contain a religious motif—even decorous little landscapes whose views include a belfry or a church fagade.

Among the many big names represented by trivia (Braque, Chagall, Dali, Boccioni, Gauguin, Sutherland), Picasso makes an appearance with two very routine pottery plates decorated with fish; presumably someone thought the old satyr of Vallauris was ruminating on the Christian ichthus.

Moreover, the Vatican apparently believes that a portrait of a Pope is ipso facto a religious image; this illusion has stuffed the Borgia Apartments with a plethora of weak, vulgar bronzes of recent pontiffs. The only distinguished image of a Pope in the collection is one of Francis Bacon’s variations on Velásquez’s Innocent X. The gift of Italian Automobile Tycoon Gianni Agnelli, it sits, mouth open in a feral and silent snarl, glaring at the sacramental kitsch around it. But that it should be hung as “religious” art is unconscious black humor.

Except for the Rodin, a Matisse crucifix and some early bas-reliefs by Lucio Fontana, there is hardly a sculpture worth preserving in the whole collection.

Yet the 20th century has been one of the great periods in Western sculpture, a circumstance that indicates the problems with which the papal collection must contend. Nearly all the major sculpture of our age has been secular in content; its spirituality, though abundant, cannot be explained either in terms of Christian dogma or traditional religious iconography. One may regret this or not, but the fact is that to set up a museum of modern religious art in the hope of stocking it with works that are both aesthetically rich and doctrinally recognizable is a doomed enterprise.

One might as well build a zoo on a fossil bed and wait for a live stegosaurus to waddle into it, resurrected by good intentions. So the only alternative is to play down the “religious” side, substitute “spiritual” where possible (though that too is close to a waffle), and go for works of art which are dense with meaning and experience. There are still quite a few about, and they are among the masterpieces of the 20th century.

But one cannot be a patron while extending the cap—or in this case the tiara —for crumbs, and such is the Vatican’s posture. Its declared policy is to spend as little money on the modern collection as possible, depending mostly on gifts from artists and philanthropists.

This in turn reflects the Pope’s unwillingness to seem extravagant in Italy’s present economic crisis. The effect has been to promote mediocrity, especially since the Pope’s chief advisers on the collection (Monsignor Pasquale Macchi, his personal secretary, and Bishop Paul Marcinkus of Chicago) appear to have no special expertise in modern art.

Uninspired Choices. The only full-fledged outside organization for getting art into the Vatican is at present the Committee of Religion and Art of America, a tax-exempt body based in the U.S., whose vice president is an art dealer named Lawrence Fleischman. So far, the committee’s choices, all religious in theme, have been uninspired: the works of Ben Shahn, Leonard Baskin, Abraham Rattner, Philip Evergood and Jack Levine—all of whom, by the smallest possible coincidence, are handled by Fleischman in his other role as director of New York’s Kennedy Galleries. Thus the U.S. is represented in Vatican City by a lightweight and clumsily anecdotal group of works that indicate nothing of the real power of the past 30 years of American art. Fleischman, who sees the Vatican collection as a great opportunity for the promotion of U.S. painting, enthusiastically predicts that “15 out of the 65 galleries in the Vatican are going to be full of American work.” At that level of quality, it is a dank prospect.

Unless the Vatican collection of modern religious art gets better advice, finds a coherent policy and either de-accessions most of its contents or defenestrates them into the Tiber, it will probably remain more of a curiosity than a museum: an embarrassing document of religion’s inability in recent years to provoke aesthetic responses.