THE VATICANIZING OF AMERICAN ART:
Getlein, Frank
T HE FIRST time the Vatican had much to do with contemporary art, it THE VATICANIZING produced the High Renaissance, which, OF AMERICAN...
...He behaved exactly as a dealer ought to behave, as any entrepreneur in any field ought to behave: looking for the likeliest chance, seizing it and exploiting it to the full...
...There was a time in American museum history when many museums, even some in quite respectably sized cities, would happily accept almost any gift offered...
...T HE FIRST time the Vatican had much to do with contemporary art, it THE VATICANIZING produced the High Renaissance, which, OF AMERICAN ART while it may be, from certain special points of view, the supreme achievement of the human race, was never- FRANK GETLEIN theless a decidedly mixed value from the point of view of the sponsoring organization, the Roman Catholic Church...
...Beyond Lavanoux the country painful task of rethinking all the wrong for their sympathy with, knowledge of is studded with individuals and groups decisions of their own predecessors...
...The exWest Coast, there was the slightly fey intentioned donor to an as yet unan- penditures for the art, he assured his enterprise of Sister Corita, a charming nounced American section of Pope hearers, in no way burdened "the alartist who, like so many of her con- Paul's contemporary gallery...
...Sulpice district in Paris, as the two French Dominican priests, Vatican Museum, however, reveals the were turning out sugar-sweet statues of Fathers Regamey and Couturier, who essential shallowne...
...But free enterprise is not what religious art, or, for that matter, religion itself, is supposed to be about, despite the occasional simple-minded exhortation from ecclesiastics of all faiths to get out there and sell the message, The thing most prominently missing from the Pauline-Fleischman set-up when announced a year ago was some kind of selection process, some group of selection people, the group known in museum boards of trustees as the Acquisitions Committee, traditionally the most prestigious if not the most important of all the trustee committees museums have...
...cending from the damp savannahs to for his expertise in Western American In the old days recalled above, a be washed clean in the blood of lamb, art...
...In the face of the Kissinger," which he calls "a trial balJOHN C. RAINES, ed...
...To the north of CAQ's base in out of the art galleries that line that turn over the acquisition authority of Davenport, Iowa, theologism achieved street and inquiring whether there were a presumably non-profit, public service its supreme manifestation in the only any works on hand that might be re- art enterprise to a private, for-profit Catholic bastion of revolution to make garded as "Christian," however vaguely, art dealer...
...The strange composition of the time that now seems from another cenas in Eliot's vision, it is still accurate committee suggests that the three mu- tury, even another country, American to say, as the poet did, that "the True seum men are there chiefly because Catholics interested in art and specifiChurch remains below,/Wrapt in the they are friends or institutional cus- cally in religious art or Christian art old miasmal mist...
...in 1873 and for the next half to three- the United States who have devoted Th establishment of the American quarters of a century...
...anity and so on, the whole battle for estate was handled by the Kennedy If, like thyme or oregano, you modernization of the Church would be Galleries, a few blocks away...
...Had such a thing taken place during man immediately recognized their situAt home architectural achievements the long reign of Pius XII, American ation as an opportunity...
...knowledge we all have of tax deductiwidely shared personal attitude that Whereas most of the Madison Av- bility for gifts to religious establishthe sudden emergence of a Vatican enue dealers had turned a cold shoulder ments-the archdiocese of New York Commonweal: 481 IF YOU LIVED EACH MOMENT AS IF GO[ WAS REALLY ALIVE WHAT WOULD HAPPEN...
...Having figured that out, the student of these things will not be surprised to learn that the official American party at the Vatican opening consisted in large part of regular customers of the Kennedy Galleries...
...On the artist, by the dealer or by some well- Gallery almost a year ago...
...Because many good Catholics did key to its several levels of meaning can chelangelo or Bernini...
...BOOKS HARRISBURG: A SUMMING UP DORIS GRUMBACH Conspiracy shock of contrast...
...interested, that the best religious art the American Gallery at the Vatican The second thing missing was any might hope for from the Church was started out, in 1973, in the manner hint that the enterprise had been in what Lavanoux once called "benevocommon among American art museums touch with the numerous Catholics in lent indifference...
...What an Acquisitions Committee does is decide what to acquire and what not to acquire both in regard to purchases and in regard to proposed gifts...
...Then, in an open and honest way, Keith and Bruce will help you discoverthe difference belief in God can make in life's struggles with guilt, anxiety, fear, anxiety, loneliness, feelings of inferiority, depression and conflicts...
...many ways more receptive to advanced In the spring of 1972, a couple of Kennedy Galleries has some formiCatholicism on every level than the Roman curial officials were walking dable people on its roster: Jack Levine, East Coast-the Catholic Art Quarterly down Madison Avenue, Bishop Paul Abraham Rattner, Shahn, Philip Everof Fathers Catich and Kerrigan did the Marcinkus and Msgr...
...In Boston Celia Hubbard's various American section of the Vatican Gal- by artists represented by Fleischman's activities sparked a flame and kept it lery of Contemporary Art, it happened Kennedy Galleries and turned out to burning...
...The results are .:u: exactly Mi- days...
...crwnenge you To nna OUT m THE EDGE OF ADVENTURE pillip A, llps//Suse '4N EaPER,MENT _/N F4/7-H $3.95 AT YOUR BOOKSTORE A revolutionary new book for people who have trouble getting past the basic question of the existence of God and the reality of prayer...
...burg Trial for the democratic tradi- Robert McAfee Brown's introduction Nonetheless, as Brown and others in tion," its somewhat ponderous subtitle...
...Only this spring their lives to the cause of bringing into contemporary gallery in the Vatican was such a committee appointed and being some sort of intelligent relation- gives them no reason to change their when it was its composition was odd, ship between religion and art...
...He a period of some twenty years mounted sitorial control...
...Instead, the cen- not quite dare to speak freely then of be found in the motto of Franciscan tral figure in the Vatican's new venture some of the appalling ecclesiastical and Sister Thomasita's art studio in Milin the art of the time is a New York political aspects of Vatican pronounce- waukee, taken from the words vouchart dealer, Lawrence Fleischman, an ments and actions, they got at them by safed her order's founder in a dream: extremely competent dealer and an es- speaking of art...
...Pasquale Macchi, good, Leonard Baskin and Jose De same thing with a somewhat more Pope Paul's personal secretary...
...Somewhere along the line, the two That can only mean that the art acquiA feeling for religious art was abroad clerics were impressed by some works sitions at the Vatican have come as in the land...
...heart of the American section of the vastly vulnerable...
...The rest gently sprinkle over this situation the won...
...to the attention of the proper eccleand given the city the look and the feel The relationship, to some degree, was siastical authorities, it would be stopped that the best parts of it retain to this one of those symbolic, even Aesopian, That was the Catholic art thrust day...
...What Creeft are among them...
...as gifts to "study collections" in uni- ship of 19th century American paint- At best, such a failure even to check versities...
...member the gradual evolution of Cath- and to the religion practiced in those olic advanced thought which culmin- scenes...
...His presence at the And the official art, of course, was into ruin...
...what they paid for and then some...
...Starting before the war in Day- dawn of a new day in Catholicism, the Fleischman became the Pope's purton, Ohio, Eloise and Otto Spaeth over end of clerical obscurantism and inqui- chasing agent in the United States...
...Peter's, led directly to the Reformation...
...To the and his Liturgical Arts Society spread pected combination of naivet6 and surprise of no one but the Vatican, if throughout the land knowledge of venality in the Vatican thrust toward they ever did learn about it, the subwhatever developments in modern ec- art...
...Working capable of persuading anyone of any- America, serving under Terence Carout of New York, Maurice Lavanoux thing except of the not entirely unex- dinal Cooke as president...
...They had done it all Church...
...They learned that the Shahn mari s customers...
...In the art trast to his magnificent predecessors Bethlehem, Connecticut to Andr£ Gi- world as at your own front door, re- in the Renaissance and Baroque periods rard's remarkable kinetic drawings- quests for contributions from dubious who paid for value received and got not animation-for network religious solicitors are not happily received...
...Instead, there was a polite asAfter that, the Vatican abandoned ated in the second Vatican Council will sumption that the holyographs had its previously intense interest in conremember that in this country, as in somehow crept in by mistake...
...but also Leger, Chagall, Matisse, Jean at-large of the Washington Star-News...
...Rebuild My Church, which has fallen timable person...
...pects of the new Vatican drive into con- faced was the fact that if this GodThe last time the Vatican was a temporary art, or at least contemporary awful, so-to-speak, art of holyographs leader in the sponsorship and patron- American art, can only be appreciated and spun sugar starlets was to be seen age of contemporary art, the result fully in the light of a kind of cultural- everywhere, in churches and cathedrals, was Roman Baroque, another interna- spiritual-historical precis of American in the pages of pious magazines, in tional style that flowed from the genius Catholicism in the middle years of the rectories and in domestic devotions, of Gianlorenzo Bernini to every part century...
...It was to raise funds for the great one more demonstration is needed, the vious fact that this huge commercial church, after all, that the special in- truth of Hegel's one-liner: "History al- production could not have survived a dulgences were hawked in Germany ways repeats itself-but as farce...
...At least two of them, Mrs...
...It is minds...
...Barclay Street in New Abroad, there were such phenomena Contemporary Art Gallery of the York, the St...
...tomers of Fleischman and Kennedy, without exception took it for granted Without a thoroughly professional which has always been the leading that their Church was not in the least Acquisitions Committee at the helm, New York dealer in Western art...
...John's Ab- works might be contributed by the VI when he opened the Contemporary bey in Collegeville, Minnesota...
...ready strained budget of the Holy See" temporaries, eventually leapt over the It will surprise no one familiar with nor diminished funds available for wall...
...Details are were perhaps less spectacular, but there Catholic reformers-by no stretch of unrevealed, but it is not difficult to were enough to give those interested language could they have been called guess at who's quid and who's quo in the feeling that things were moving for- radicals-would have hailed it as the the arrangement that was worked out...
...Jean walls to reappear with the names of son, .long of the Detroit Institute of de Menil of Texas, have imposing crelesser artists than they formerly bore, Art and more recently at Winterthur, dentials of their own in the larger inor vanishing altogether in exchange or are both towering figures in the scholar- stitutional art world outside the Church...
...substitutions of one thing for another which, having its sources in England, Whatever the reasons for its long so familiar to members of any abso- France and Germany around the turn indifference to contemporary art, the lutist system, such as Soviet Commu- of the century, hit America big in the Vatican has now secruingly reversed nism or Roman Catholicism in those years following World War II...
...In America's heartland-in like this: vary from superb to less than mediocre...
...plea for a handout, Lawrence Fleischat Ronchamp...
...The itself...
...for the present time, the unpleasant kidnapping or citizen's arrest of Henry Writes Brown: "There must be no re...
...That's what free enterprise is all about...
...That can only mean but still important artistic efforts rang- the two ecclesiastics got short shrift that the American paintings are costing from a Clare Boothe Luce-sup- and an early exit from most of the ing the Pope nothing, in sharp conported Benedictine establishment in galleries they dropped into...
...have been quietly vanishing from the Whitney Museum, and E. P. Richard- Spaeth of New York and Mrs...
...It could be maintained that the central Roman event of the Renaissance Innocents on Madison Avenue in art, the planning and building of St...
...That isn't the theological, less engagingly personal, they were doing was drifting in and point...
...stantial majority of the American paintclesiastical art Lavanoux found in his As far as a reasonably alert observer ings and sculptures in the Pope's Conendless reportorial and evangelical trav- can reconstruct the creation of the temporary Gallery turned out to be els...
...The reasons why have France, Germany and England, an in- hadn't been watching at the door and never been precisely determined-per- volvement in art somehow went along the next thing we knew, Deanna Durhaps simply because when Bernini and with an involvement in the emergence bin as the Virgin Mary was everywhere...
...itself known to the greater American and whether it was possible that such The key phrase here is that of Paul world, The Benedictine St...
...programs...
...Lloyd Goodrich, long of the work...
...You owe it to yourself to read ADDITIONAL RESOURCES AVAILABLE So that you may share this experiment with friends or neighbors, Keith and Bruce have also prepared leaders and participants study guides and cassette tapes for use with the book...
...Here are fresh insights and practical steps that can help you DISCOVER A CLOSE, CONFIDENT RELATIONSHIP WITH GOD_ , , and A WHOLE NEW DEEPER DIMENSION TO LIFE...
...of th- Vatican sa.n::, .rd angc'.s, of Christ and the managed to bring into existence a whole effort and demonstrates once more, if Virgin that could be easily shown to series of small churches with decorabe total falsifications of the Gospels, tions by some of the leading artists of FRANK GETLEIN, author of Playing Soldier the Fathers, Scholastic Philosophy, the School of Paris: Rouault, of course, -A Diatribe, and other books, is critic- what you will...
...It is against this history and this is history, or ought to be...
...One result of that policy was to cover the walls of American museums with inferior works, fake works and misattributed works and the result of that, of course, was to blur the idea of art history in the minds of any students or museum visitors who depended upon what they found on the walls to instruct their knowledge and sharpen their taste...
...Anyone old enough to re- then it clearly related to those scenes of the European world...
...extraordinary, felonious Watergate tales loon" leading to a trial which never and all the activities of the Adminis- justified its promise as "the political Harper & Row, $6.95 tration which brought the Harrisburg 7 encounter of the...
...The point is that you do not flavor...
...Never quite nunciation by Martin Luther...
...Alas, it is so late, and also became vice president of the a series of instructive exhibitions of so little, that the new gallery is in- Committee of Religion and Art of contemporary religious art...
...Never quite alluded to was the ob- Lurgat and, in the climax of the art6 September 1974: 480 mission of the two Dominicans, Le Gallery of Contemporary Art must be to the ecclesiastics' thinly disguised Corbusier in the extraordinary chapel seen...
...someone temporary art...
...However much the instincts of 6 September 1974: 482 will surprise n bandits and graverobbers may or may to say the least...
...minute without approval, explicit or bringing on their repudiation and de- Speaking of history, the farcical as- implicit, from the top...
...The adventure begins for you as you try to live your whole I ifefor a certain period-as it you believed totally...
...museum has indeed taken wing, as- Fort Worth is, like his museum, known At worst, it was insulting...
...basement...
...century...
...There was the belief that by Ben Shahn, as well they might have gifts from artists, gifts from dealers, if the art struggle could be won, if only been, for Shahn is certainly one of the chiefly Larry Fleischman, or gifts from the Holy Father could be shown that strongest American painters of this private collectors, chiefly Larry Fleischmodern art expressed modern Christi- century...
...starts wherever you are, encourages you to believe that God is real and that it is possible to communicate with him through prayer...
...for people on the grow PUBLISHER, WACO, TEXAS 78703 rather than the foreign pope of Rome -you don't have to be an accounting genius to figure out how an astute dealer can make money himself and pass along the opportunity to make money and accumulate prestige to some of his favored customers...
...He quotes to trial, the events of those days in 1972 Sheldon Smith's comment that it was Conspiracy is an in-depth study by a seem almost comic...
...or appreciation of contemporary Amer- of Catholics who have engaged in that For a couple of decades now, pictures ican art...
...notes that in his view, the facts of the volume point out, it was not the Well edited by John Raines, who sees Watergate have not reduced Harris- relatively foolish, naive letters on which the trial as an understandable striking burg: "Watergate italicizes the impor- a substantial part of the case was built back during the Vietnam war by "a tance of Harrisburg, while pointing out but that the conspiracy charge was, and White House which felt itself assaulted the trivial, even comic elements: the still is, a means of stopping free assemby its moral critics," this book offers, 'impractical and implausible' notion of bly and free expression of opinion...
...Urban VIII had finished with Rome, of the new Church, or what those con- It was all a case of mistaken identity nothing remained to be completed, let cerned with it thought of as the real and certainly as soon as it was called alone planned...
...ward...
...nothing less than a scandal that Maunot still flourish among museum trustees The three members are distinguished rice Lavanoux, for one, was never conand directors, they have at least taken art historians and museum people, but sulted, never even rung up on the teleon the enormous and institutionally they are not distinguished in the least phone...
...Now, nothing in this analysis should be taken as derogative of Larry Fleischman or the Kennedy Galleries...
...ing, while the third member, Mitchell in with such long-established profesBut if the hippopotamus of the art Wilder of the Amon Carter Museum in sionals in the field was short-sighted...
...it is as though a "something like being promised the number of serious and concerned writ- holocaust had been preceded by a game apocalypse and winding up with a leaky ers "of the implications of the Harris- of cops-and-robbers...
...Commonweal: 483...
...And there were less influential Madison Avenue dealers to learn that charitable works...
Vol. 100 • September 1974 • No. 20
