Art: The High Road

MODERN artists find it easier to express passion than to praise God, and, except for Georges Rouault, they have generally chosen the easier course. But now a lame, grey, and perhaps great artist in Madrid has taken Rouault’s high and lonely road. His name: Francisco Cossio. His finest achievement to date: a 20-foot-high mural (opposite) for Madrid’s National Carmelite Church. While Rouault’s paintings glow with almost painfully intense devotion, Cossio’s masterpiece gleams cool and peaceful as a September dawn. Cossio, 54, spent three years on the mural, hopes to finish its companion for the opposite side of the altar in another year.

Arriving by Retiring. The son of a tobacco planter, Cossio was raised in a hamlet near Spain’s north coast. A childhood accident left him with a permanent limp. At 16 he went to Madrid to study art; at 25 he was in Paris hobnobbing with Braque. Cubism fascinated him; from it he developed a prismatic quality of composition. But the turmoil of Montmartre was no lasting fun for so indrawn a man, and after nine years he retired to his home town. There he painted in solitude, almost unknown.

His first Madrid show in 1945 made Cossio famous overnight. His second, in 1950, secured his place as Spain’s foremost living artist. The mural commission followed. Cossio took a studio atop a downtown Madrid skyscraper and established a daily routine: mornings working alone on the mural at the church, afternoons painting and resting alone in his studio, evenings chatting with friends at the Café Gijon, an artists’ hangout.

Cossio delights in explaining the subject matter of his finished mural. The crystal sphere at the bottom represents the human soul. Within it is a castle symbolizing the Church Militant. Spiraling up around the sphere are martyrs, saints and dignitaries of the Carmelite order. Borne amidst them on a shaft of light are St. Teresa of Avila and St. John of the Cross,* welcomed from above by the Madonna, and Child.

Illuminating by Removing. How does he achieve his extraordinary luminosity? “Oh, that,” says Cossio modestly, “is nothing but a trick. Most artists paint by laying on color; I do the reverse, scraping off the colors, so that the bright underpainting can shine through.” How did he arrive at his style? “Well, in the mystical world the logical order of nature can be destroyed, and this is a source of unlimited possibilities. For example, I did not feel it necessary to use clouds as supports for the figures. The musical instruments I made transparent, like plastic. And since saints radiate light, I painted them so—not just with halos.”

Cossio does not mention his chief innovation: a purely arbitrary use of perspective to create a crackling composition that shines, in Poet Gerard Manley Hopkins’ phrase, like “shook foil.” By his practice of boldness within bounds, Cossio may be opening a new chapter in the history of ecclesiastical art.

* St. Teresa (1515-82) founded the Order of the Reformed or Discalced (barefoot) Carmelites, helped reform Europe’s monastic life grown lax in the 15th and 16th centuries. The severity of the discipline she called for at first aroused opposition (she was even accused of trafficking with the Devil), but she soon found disciples, among the first being the great mystic and poet, St. John of the Cross (1542—91).