GERHARD RICHTER, now (at 93) the grand old man of German art, put the problem succinctly in 1964: “Art is not a substitute religion. . . But the Church is no longer adequate as a means of offering experience of the transcendental, and of making religion real.”
The words — written just months after the first publication of John Robinson’s Honest to God — are harsh, but they will resonate with many. In the intervening decades, Europe has overwhelmingly turned its back on centuries of church tradition, and now prefers to look elsewhere in its search for the spiritual. Yet that search is still pursued, and with urgency.
The paintings by Richter shown and discussed here are, to my mind, among the most successful recent attempts to respond to that urge; to give visual form to the transcendental; and to make religion — or at least one of its abiding preoccupations, the mystery of suffering — real. Richter’s paintings were rejected by the South Italian church for which they were commissioned; widely admired, they now hang in the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, Texas.
FOR more than 800 years, those able to enter most completely into the suffering of Jesus through ecstatic contemplation of his Passion have been rewarded, like St Francis of Assisi, by sharing in the pains and marks of crucifixion: the stigmata. Alternatively, like St Teresa of Ávila, they have had the experience of being pierced and burned by the shafts of divine love: transverberation. In both cases, the saints’ moment of almost physical union with the divine was soon given memorable artistic expression. From Cimabue and Giotto onwards, the stigmata became a central, identifying part of Franciscan imagery in painting; St Teresa’s ecstasy was immortalised by Bernini in miraculously hovering marble.
In the years around 1920, the Italian Capuchin friar Padre Pio claimed to have experienced both phenomena. While transverberation seems to have happened to him only once, stigmatisation apparently recurred at intervals, until he died in 1968. Despite the fact that the Vatican was long reluctant to endorse any of these claims, Padre Pio, from the 1930s onwards, became the object of great popular affection and veneration, drawing large crowds to the Church of San Giovanni Rotondo, east of Naples. The numbers increased steadily after his death, and even more when he was beatified in 1999 and canonised in 2002.
To accommodate these pilgrims, a huge new shrine was designed by Renzo Piano (perhaps best known as co-architect of the Pompidou Centre, in Paris). The lofty, airy church, which can accommodate up to 16,000 worshippers, is supported by honey-coloured stone arches that radiate from a pillar above the transparent casket showing the saint’s uncorrupted body. Around this focus, Piano invited Richter to provide paintings that would accompany and enrich the worshippers’ devotions, as they prayed for the stigmatised saint to intercede for them.
WHEN it comes to church commissions, however, and especially one like this, it is easier today to be an architect than a painter. There is the artistic conundrum of how — or whether — to follow in the figurative wake of Giotto and Bernini, depicting in more or less physical detail a body decorously opening itself to ecstasy, especially given what indelicate ecstasies the modern pilgrim will have seen, many times, on film or television.
No less tricky are the psychological questions: can anybody today not wonder whether morbid sexual repression plays some part in these holy transports of pain, which often seem as disturbed as they are disturbing? And, as with the bloody images of Christ’s Passion, do we want, or need, to watch? It is easy to see why Richter chose not to attempt a straightforward illustration of Padre Pio’s moments of transcendence. “I can’t paint bleeding wounds,” he informed the commissioning committee.
© Gerhard Richter. Photo © The Museum of Fine Arts, HoustonGerhard Richter, Abstract Picture (Rhombus) (851-6) (1998), oil on canvas, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, museum purchase funded by Caroline Wiess Law in honour of Peter C. Marzio, Director, The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston
But there is, I think, another reason that he decided, instead, to paint six large, red, abstract diamond-shaped canvases. Richter was born in Dresden in 1932. His childhood and adolescence were dominated, first by Nazism, then by devastating war, defeat, and the communist tyranny that, in the eastern part of Germany, followed them.
How can you privilege the bodily experience of one person — a friar, who lived to the age of 80, in a safe and peaceful community, at a time and on a continent where millions were being murdered, tortured, or died of starvation? And when the Churches, both Catholic and Protestant, repeatedly failed to denounce unequivocally the evil of Hitler’s régime as hostile to the teachings of Jesus?
After Auschwitz, no traditional representation is adequate to explore in paint both the mystery of suffering and God’s response to it. A new pictorial vocabulary is needed. Richter attempted to find one, in which the paint itself tells the story.
FROM the size of the rhombuses in relation to the benches, you can judge the scale of the entire work. When all six are hung in the same space, they surround and dominate viewers, embracing (overwhelming?) them with their remorseless repetition of blood red. At first glance, they appear identical; but, as you get nearer, each one reveals its own complexities, because — as you can see from the detail here — every surface in fact contains many different colours, and each has been stained or damaged in a particular way.
Like a tortured human body, the paint on the canvases has been bruised, scratched, scraped, burned, and torn. The closer you get, the more tactile it becomes, until you almost feel that, like Thomas, you could put your hand into the wounds. Through the layers and the lesions, you see flashes of other colours — orange, yellow, blue: traces surviving from a time before, or perhaps still to come.
There is nothing here that is specific to any individual or community, even less to any creed. The paint — wounded, transfigured — puts us face to face with the mystery of the pain of the whole world, and the even greater mystery of how the body of all humanity may be healed, restored, made whole.
Unsurprisingly, the patrons, who had wanted a focus on the particular experience of the new saint, declined the works. Yet the struggle for a language of the spiritual which goes beyond one body — or one faith — remains. Richter returned to that challenge many times; so the last words should be his: “Abstract pictures . . . make visible a reality that we can neither see nor describe, but whose existence we can postulate. . . Art is the pure realisation of religious feeling, capacity for faith, longing for God. . . Art is the highest form of hope.”
Neil MacGregor is a former director of the British Museum and the author of Living with the Gods (Allen Lane, 2018).
