Christian Art in Vienna.
Mitterauer, Joseph
CHRISTIAN ART IN VIENNA By JOSEPH MITTERAUER CREATIVE religious art was present at the cradle of human culture. In it what was purest in reflection and most elemental in feeling...
...It was he who converted the great public room into a sacred place...
...Perhaps these few words may take the place of what would be so much more effective an introduction of the work to Americans...
...Out of this movement toward creative independence the Exposition for Christian Art, in Vienna, developed...
...As the architect for the German embassy in Petrograd, and other important structures, he earned a reputation which has been enhanced by his original contributions to the idea of church construction...
...It conveys no message to the spectator, and is a mystery to everybody excepting its creator and the few who have been initated into his world...
...The creative mind, influenced by the rationalism of the time and by philosophic individualism, lost its contact with religion and was led to naturalism, impressionism, and expressionism...
...At the opening of the Exposition I met Anton Hanak, a German-Bohemian, now a professor in the Vienna Academy of Arts...
...always it was the achievements of religious art which indicated the high-water mark of a people's cultural aspiration...
...At its disposal were placed all the energies which the bare struggle for existence, so fruitful of invention, and the primitive need for ornament could leave free...
...Nor was the distinguished patronage received without its effect upon the success of the work...
...Everywhere, however, these efforts drove human power beyond what had been so far its limits...
...Holzmeister are many creative workers of the first rank...
...It was nowhere served by men who had in their own lives made a synthesis of the present and eternity, and grown inwardly ripe in creative power...
...He feels that architecture is the greatest influence upon artistic feeling, and that through it we may arouse interest in other forms of beauty...
...Associated with Dr...
...They longed to work creatively in the mood of their own time...
...After long years of strenuous labor, he has gained a reputation as one of the most gifted sculptors of his country...
...Its products were thought pleasing—even though they did violence to the sacred dignity of the holy places and caricatured actual spiritual life—because they brought nothing overwhelming or tremendous, touched no depths of experience, but inculcated comfort by their nicely upholstered display of flabby sentiment...
...Of what pertinence are aesthetic problems and cultural programs to a concept of art such as this...
...Indeed, so stereotyped had the Christian idea of what was artistically beautiful become that it did little more than express a feigned piety in characterless, humdrum fashion, and assume a pose quite saccharine in its sweetness...
...Holzmeister remains its favorite architect...
...Christian art no longer obeyed the tempo of real life, it was no longer the higher expression of human actualities...
...This is divided into two parts—an outer room and a chapel —and is in no way reminiscent of Roman basilicas, Gothic minsters, or Barock domes...
...In the centre of the room, which is dominated by four massive square pillars, there appears, over and above the red tile floor, the aweinspiring figure of Hanak's Pieta...
...They were tired of the threadbare carpets of recent centuries...
...We find that this is true of all tjhe great nations of antiquity, but it was Christianity which for the first time overcame, with unparalleled constructive force, every resistance of a materialistic or extraneous character...
...and the chief honor must go to Dr...
...The religious spirit of today, they thought, should be interpreted in its own symbols...
...There can be only one solution: "freedom in matters of form, but constant obedience to the law and to the holy earnestness and life of the law...
...Beginning with deeply meditative symbols, it then created visionary forms for truths that transcend sense, being far less interested in presentation than in a profession of faith in timeless Being and unfathomable truths...
...Before its spiritual attack formal rules which had seemed proof against time were set aside...
...The Cardinal Archbishop of Vienna, the President of the republic, and a large number of other dignitaries honored the Exposition with their presence...
...As was expected, the Exposition has aroused both enthusiastic support and violent antagonism...
...By winning recently the first prize in the architectural competition for the great church of Saint Martin, in Nuremberg, he attracted the attention of Germany...
...Holzmeister, the famous organizer of the Exposition, I realized how many artists of impoverished Austria had given their all in behalf of a cause they believed sacred, and I knew how to account for the atmosphere of love and loyalty which seemed to hallow everything...
...The idea of art was uprooted from the popular soul when art ceased to reflect a view of life adequate to an entire people...
...This was accepted by the art of Christendom during a very long time...
...It is wholly beside the point whether or not the work done there meets the approval of the individual spectator...
...and often this detachment from all that is objective is carried so far that the artist himself must explain his work...
...It was their desire to do what the artistic ages have always done, and what to some extent modern profane art has succeeded in doing...
...Those who saw the Exposition could only answer that there was no trace of speculation nor of anything but a sacrificial desire to create beauty...
...He informed me that his personal conception of future church-building is this: on the one hand to foster modern, economic construction, and on the other hand to develop contemporary ideas of structure in harmony with the liturgical precepts of the Church and in cooperation with the liturgical movement...
...and all the naivete and intoxication of the Romantic movement were needed to canonize Gothic as "the only true ecclesiastical style...
...Indeed, after my conversation with Dr...
...The spirit had become master of all flesh...
...The architect of the new Benedictine university in Salzburg, to which important contributions were made by American Catholics, was also represented...
...Whether this can be accomplished seems doubtful, however, in view of the financial poverty which now afflicts Austria and the difficulty of getting aid...
...The old city, proud of its place in the history of music and other arts, was considered an ideal habitat for leadership of the Catholic German people...
...Attention was drawn, first of all, to the achievement of Dr...
...His compositions often deal with the struggles and cares of human life, about which his own experience has taught him much...
...Social-democratic though the present government of Vienna is, Dr...
...Yet, in its simple architectonic harmony, it induces a mood of holy awe...
...but they knew that as a step toward synthesis, toward beauty fashioned according to the vision of modern Christian feeling, their endeavor could not go unnoticed...
...We need not wear the masks of the dead...
...and mere triumph over material substance became meaningless...
...This art was unable to span a bridge to the peace and clarity of Christian faith...
...Gradually a number of Catholic artists—men of profound feeling, earnest thought, conscientious effort—took up the opposition to the prevailing view of Christian art...
...Upon this the Austrian Society for Christian Art, which sponsored the Exposition, may well congratulate itself...
...These four artists, with their pupils, are responsible for the success of the Exposition...
...Those who fos' tered it understood that they could not immediately place upon the scene a new and self-sufficing art...
...The lack of agreement is, however, the very thing that is needed if Christian art, permitted to lie dead for decades, is to be resurrected...
...It became imitative of another age and another spirit, so that only very seldom does it overawe the inward soul of modern man...
...What really matters is this: is the Exposition a gesture of professional egoism, or does it reflect sincere, enthusiastic artistic effort...
...Meanwhile it was futile to expect from official ecclesiastical art anything like an expression of life, some solution of the torturing questions of existence or the awful tragedy of the modern spirit...
...Often its art is barbaric, indeed, but ultimately this is merely the accurate reflection of a humanity quite as appallingly in disarray as itself, and so, perhaps, more valuable than mimicry of antiquated forms...
...His fame as an artist is international...
...A contemporary artist is always interested in voicing his own subjective feeling...
...At the Exposition one saw reproductions of a noble portal, a door, and an ornamental grille, as designed for the Salzburg university...
...Peter Behrens is of German ancestry but resides in Vienna...
...Manifold as life itself were the endeavors to give the shape of reality to the mysterious and unfathomable...
...Although liturgy is the noblest of art creations, it has been put in the shadow for scores of years...
...For the movement toward Christian art in Austria is simply part of the more general effort to revive liturgical feeling, and to realize once again that art is not a specialty for wealthy connoisseurs but a vital need which a people must satisfy if it wishes to avoid spiritual death...
...Out of it there grew the wonderful communality of achievements individually different—the harmony that no sensitive person who visited the Exposition could help noticing...
...We can speak our own language, interpretative of our own thought—not of wisdom borrowed elsewhere...
...Eight niches harbor as many side-altars with appropriate pictures...
...Although born in Brazil and still a Brazilian citizen, he grew to manhood among the mountains of Tyrol and completed his studies in Vienna...
...They said to themselves: "We, too, are permitted, or, rather, are forced by the very nature of our craft, to show our own faces...
...It is the hope of the artists and their friends that the entire Exposition may be brought to Chicago for the Eucharistic Congress...
...In it what was purest in reflection and most elemental in feeling sought expression...
...Of particular interest was his Pieta—a design of remarkable simplicity and beauty, which is believed to be the masterpiece of his career...
...But the total effect given, the evident strong will to work in behalf of Christian art, the effort which, in view of how lame the past has been—these things are great and deserving of notice...
...A large number of impressive creations in stone and bronze represented him at the Exposition...
...Profane art, already isolated, continued on its separate way...
...Holzmeister...
...I do not wish to convey the impression that the Exposition is above criticism, or that all its details are artistically successful...
...Holzmeister...
...Religious art was born in the moment when the self-consciousness of man urged him to give form and voice to his sense of the relationship between himself and Divine Infinity...
...In such things as massive altars and gruesome, commercialized devotional articles the dearth of spiritual life is manifest...
...nor can it be coffined while human nature remains what it has always been and is...
...They do not indicate a complete break with the past, but rather a desire to live by it...
...Of course the plan was unusual and, if properly realized, could be of far-reaching influence...
...It is a loyalty which only those can feel who work in common for an ideal...
...And the reason why these things are so...
...Naturally 632 THE COMMONWEAL April 14, 1926 enough, this dictum had a deadening effect...
Vol. 3 • April 1926 • No. 23
