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Integrating: spirituality, psychology, social responsibility and the arts

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EXPERIENCING THE AGONY OF THE ARTIST IN A WORLD GONE SECULAR

Five Wednesday evenings,
October 15 to November 12, 7:30 to 9:00 p.m.
led by Geoffrey E. Wood., S.S.L., S.T.D.

The art of the Byzantine world and Medieval West made no pretense of being realistic in the sense of depicting an object or person as it "actually" is. It was rather an art that, looking at the real or at human events, saw something divine happening and therefore strove to enhance that divine element. Look at any Greek or Russian icon or at the frescos of Italian artists from 1200 to 1400 A.D. and you'll see what I mean.

However, with the dawn of our modern era dating from the Renaissance art took a different configuration. New discoveries in geography and science, a new mobility and especially the revival of an interest in Greek and Roman classical sculpture compelled artists to portray (for example) the human body in a more correctly anatomical way-so that artists since Caravaggio (1571-1609) painted ever more so in accord with what people and objects looked like to their contemporaries. They instituted realism in art. The holy nature of the reality they painted remained evident insofar as the things they painted were biblical episodes and personages-but unlike the Greek icon or Medieval fresco-these sacred persons and events and the furniture around them looked "real".

But, thanks to this new realism the Western world now began to move away from depicting the sacred at all. It now began to entertain a purely secular interest in reality. And so biblical episodes and persons or any clear signal of the divine began to yield to paintings of people, kings, soldiers, battles, shipwrecks, still life, landscapes-the objective world around us with a fidelity to objects as they are. The mystical sense of reality seemed to be passing away in favor of a down to earth vision of the world.

But the more objectively we viewed nature, the more we felt trapped by an objectivity that now seemed to stand before us mute and meaningless. And so we began either to paint our impressions of reality, letting our craving for transparency control our brush-or we got rid of our subjective impressions altogether and tried to let reality reveal itself in its most basic forms by way of cubes or spheres or squares and primary colors or in all its random contortions as in the works of Jackson Pollock.

In either case could these trends indicate that artists have been trying to recover a spiritual or theological dimension of reality such as was so clearly perceived by the Byzantine and Western painters down to the age of Caravaggio? Having lived for four centuries in a world dominated by philosophies that deny the sacred, disdain transcendence, dismiss the mystical, has art been attempting to reach once more the "beyond" that resides in all things-and having forgotten the great dogma of the Incarnation, has had to grope for it in vague, indecipherable, even escapist ways?

This course will consider these questions, using illustrations of the masters to demonstrate the trend and appreciate the agony of the artist in his and her confrontation with a concrete reality rendered devoid of the meaning once given it by the great dogmas of Creation and Incarnation.

Dr. Wood has a Ph.D. in Sacred Theology from Catholic University, Washington, D.C., and a Licentiate in Sacred Scripture from Rome's Pontifical Bible University. He has taught at Catholic University, Swarthmore and Bucknell University.

Cost: $70. (Bring a friend free.) Please make reservations.

2003

Five Wednesday evenings, October 15 to November 12,
7:30 to 9:00 p.m.