Communications
October 23, I929 THE COMMONWEAL 647 COMMUNICATIONS REFLECTIONS UPON ART which they find in common with all great art. This devastat- Berkeley, Cal. O the Editor :--In regard to Ralph...
...These moderns have within them the potentialities that will make the Catholic revival of art possible...
...We must not leave God out--He does not work that way...
...This same is true of all the great...
...and the movement that produced Bach had numerous mediocre composers whom we never hear...
...What season...
...There is much "ugly art," as Cram would have it...
...but their quarrel is not with the Church...
...Truculent attitude," while high-sounding and catchy, only faintly expresses the contempt of the majority of American citizens for this piece of pharisaism and hypocrisy...
...There has been much harm done in the Church by those zealous bigots with the gift of words who make it appear anti-Christian to do anything in a modern way...
...This intense age has great religious potentialities, capable of breaking the bounds of preconceived forms and styles...
...Short for its "truculent attitude toward the Eighteenth Amendment, and the crusade which ushered it in...
...New York, N. Y. O the Editor :--In my article, Massachusetts, There She Is], in The Commonweal of September 25, I gave Senator David I. Walsh a vote of 448,ooo at the last election...
...This large subject he quickly dispatches without raising the slightest suspicion of a knowledge on his part of the extremely complex forces at play, or of an understanding of what has been accomplished in the movement...
...THE DEARTH OF RELIGIOUS CARDS Washington, D. C. the Editor:--I once read a pamphlet which foretoldO a deliberate campaign to withdraw all religious greeting cards from the market with the purpose of diverting the mass consciousness from the real meaning of Christmas and Easter...
...An identical situation exists today in Ireland, where the republicans--really martyrs to their beliefs---are refusing the sacraments of the Church...
...And this is being universally recognized at present here in America...
...What we must do is to open our minds, make room for these authentic moderns who inevitably seek the spiritual, but who are repelled by such ill-advised nonsense as appeared in Mr...
...when the studios themselves no longer furnish the incentive...
...We will break our pigeonholes and the hearts of our professorial experts...
...As to the "crusade" which ushered in the "noble experiment," the less said about that disgracefui lobby the better for the country's fair name...
...Cram would have us reject the fact that we are aware now of the inherent movement of color in painting which is capable of imparting far greater reality to form conceived on canvas...
...But to put all that appear to be modern into one category and say that they "deny a fundamental law" is grossly wrong and should not be tolerated editorially...
...It is not that people are irreligious," one proprietor explained to me, "but you see they just send greetings for the season...
...But in two very small shops I saw what I was looking for...
...I should like to hear the opinion of some of your readers on the subject...
...Short may find the "why," the "just why," of the attitude of many periodicals toward the thing that some humorists call prohibition...
...It closed the public saloon only to open the private doggery, which is infinitely worse...
...And may not God expect new joys when American Catholics become really Catholic--new joys, new intensities of devotion...
...The moderns of today have a far deeper understanding of the ancients, because they have as a group rejected the nicely gotten up theories of the academics and lived into the past first hand...
...Walsh's vote totaled 818,o55...
...It seems that one almost has to be in league with the devil to produce works involving original thought and presentation...
...All its heroes are modernists--radical in the intensity with which they realize their orthodoxy in comparison with the surrounding world...
...We have many mediocre modernists...
...It simply will not stay dismissed...
...I asked if they were selling and the owner said, "Splendidly...
...There has been going on for some time a return to the inspiration of religion in the arts...
...Cram is not careful he will impugn the Bible...
...A vision of icicles and sleigh bells rose before me and I wondered if the remark was any more pathetic than it is for Catholics to send Christmas greetings with the Christ Child left out...
...Cram's article...
...It makes one blush, after telling of the Church's broadness, and that she is organic, and that The Commonweal is really the spokesman for the Catholic revival in art, to find writings so erroneously informed...
...REV...
...None but a moron, however, will claim that the Eighteenth Amendment has lessened intemperance...
...There are, no doubt, many eager souls without who would welcome the haven of Catholicism if they could only see that the Church is not reactionary, in spite of the many essayists and pamphleteers who make it appear so...
...This return cannot be accomplished with obvious ceremonious movement and attendant publicity...
...The present dispensers regard neither age nor sex...
...All authentic modern painters, likewise, are radical in the absolute devotion they have for the fundamentals of their arts, ing concern for the truth has always appeared to superficial observers as terrible...
...O the Editor :--The Catholic Church owes neither apology nor explanation to Mr...
...They will fight to their last breath, because they believe that Ireland should be a republic--and they are excommunicated because of their politics...
...After this first wave, the next generation rightly begins to urge indigenous ideas...
...We are all aware of how the Church in France got tangled in the people's minds as Royalist on account of good Catholics, really able to write, who were profoundly convinced of the Royalist cause...
...In this Mr...
...We will do it right...
...but nevertheless it is true that once a creative artist has mastered his medium enough to cease being excited at his discoveries in that medium and the work produced under this stimulus, experimental and tentative as most of it is...
...And haven't we better tools...
...WHY...
...When the Church goes to China, the first wave of missionaries may import and impose Gothic or Roman ideas...
...It is in the depths of the heart that He works...
...We do not today use color merely as decoration imposed on line drawing, but as an art in itself, obeying still the same fundamental laws as revealed in Giotto, Michelangelo, E1 Greco and C6zanne (he, the giant of our day, and a daily attendant at Mass, a Catholic who "leant on the Pope...
...If there is a studied direction behind the dearth of religious cards, are we not at least partly accountable for its success...
...The lqgures were given me by one whom I believed to be the highest authority on that subject...
...WILLIAM C. KELTY...
...We will go the limit and seek to praise Him as He has never been praised before...
...These men are doubly martyrs who lay their lives down without the consolation of the sacraments...
...We are no mean people...
...O the Editor :--In regard to Ralph Adams Cram's Reflections upon Art, I wish to make a few observations on his attitude, particularly in reference to the so-called "modernism...
...According to this authority Mr...
...One had a table filled with lovely scenes of the Nativity...
...The Church Militant is essentially modern...
...How bitterly astounding to Catholics who had been lead to believe erroneously that the Royalist party was the Catholic party, to find an abb~ starting a republican newspaper and making it clear to everyone inside and outside that the Catholic Church was really Catholic...
...What many call the "spiritual life" may be amusing enough to those who have never had to search for the answer...
...October 23, I929 THE COMMONWEAL 647 COMMUNICATIONS REFLECTIONS UPON ART which they find in common with all great art...
...A youth recently gave as reason for not taking the total abstinence pledge that he could not attend the high school dances without bringing whisky...
...Here, too, the all-suffering Church has to bear the odium of the stupidity of a Royalist hierarchy...
...That art will be American of American...
...There is now budding in the hotbeds of modern art a realization among many of the most sensitive painters, of the necessity of a so-called "religious" life...
...Today it is quite the fashion...
...Our widespread search after spiritual method and our study of the heroes of the past, their relation to their metier and their day--these accomplished, they will be our stepping-off place, or point of departure...
...after the artist has accomplished his preliminary trials...
...Let us not continue to make the mistake in, apparently, the only vehicle, The Commonweal, in which it can be rectified, of letting it appear that the Catholic art movement is reaction648 THE COMMONWEAL October 23 , 1929 ary...
...Yet he was very radical in his day...
...And free verse--if Mr...
...When Catholics can stand before a modern work of art and not feel as though it were an occasion of sin, we may produce a consciousness that will demand a great Catholic art...
...Cubism no longer exists as such, but the fundamentals utilized to produce cubism every old master utilized, and every art student knows that today---everyone but the academician...
...And the consciousness of this is actually developing before our eyes daily among those actitely concerned with art...
...One or two said, "We have Madonnas...
...The same applies to the "crusade" of enforcing the Volstead law...
...As a life-long total abstainer, I have only condemnation for intemperance...
...It might mean the forfeiting of the license...
...In others I found about three of those I sought among fifty to one hundred specimens of comic, scenic or gastric greetings, and in one place in three books of samples there were just four religious pictures...
...Seemingly that Church allows herself to be spoken for by stuffy, learned individuals who have a gift of words but who have bigoted hearts...
...Crafton, Pa...
...All this has been threshed out so conclusively ten or twenty years ago, that to find it here is very disconcerting to one who sees in the Church no musty impositions...
...there comes the awful period when he must discover himself...
...it won't be fitted into a theory obviously developed for the art lecture platform...
...Futurism was rejected by the men who originated it as not suitable for an opaque medium like paint, and now has found its true field in the cinema where there can be negatives imposed upon one another to produce the effect of simultaneous movement...
...But the heart of the Church is really modern, it is ever young...
...Before prohibition, carrying a flask by high school boys and girls was unheard of, and unthinkable...
...But Catholicism is very free...
...An oracle should at least be conversant with the situation today, and not rely on the acceptance of an evaluation of academic forces of twenty or thirty years ago or more...
...Ribera was an old Spanish painter...
...that great paintings were painted for divine eyes...
...He searches the past to find what the motifs were, and the conclusion of an ever-increasing number of artists is that all great art has been produced in the spirit of prayer...
...Please forgive me--I am intensely interested: the name of the Mexican painter is spelled Diego Rivera, not Ribera...
...Since then I have received different lqgures from a still higher authority, and must believe them to be correct...
...ANNE SQUIRE...
...In three of them the answer was, "No, there is no demand for them...
...Can one not praise God with color without being damned as a "modernist...
...One store had just~two expensive models $.50 and $I.OO each...
...And with forethought, the subsequent bishops get many grants from a very willing Pope in matters of importance to their own determination...
...With this in mind I visited ten shops last December and asked at each one, "Have you any 'religious' cards...
...And that Catholic art will not be Gothic, but will be produced by a consciousness very far removed from that which flowered under the Gothic or any other influence...
...he does not comprehend the fact that our color sense has advanced slightly over that of the old masters...
...We are no mean people...
...One man said, "We have religious calendars but no cards...
...The hand must be on the pulse of the past, to be sure, but the stiff neck must lean in the other direction...
...We must seek out those engaged in modern pursuit of the arts--the sound judgment must have the tang of the studio and the workshop in preference to the learned stuffiness of the classroom...
...He should not catalogue contemporary activity once for all and dismiss the subject...
...In passing, it is of interest that Rivera, who is due in San Francisco soon, although ardently anti-clerical, nevertheless recommends a study of the saints for artists...
...and everyone seems so glad to find them...
...Under the old law it was hard for minors or women to obtain liquor...
...CHARLES WILLIS THOMPSON...
...It was conceived in iniquity, born in sin, and it thrives on lies and false pretenses...
...This devastatBerkeley, Cal...
...Obviously busy people take what comes easily and many fall under the lure of snow scenes and jolly groups of merrymakers...
...Outside this world we have a Church...
...Bach survives and is beloved...
...So, in America, this first wave imposed Irish ideas and visions, or German, or Italian, or French...
...Well, one can only say that any real search always produces strange products which, coming in a period of inanity, seem shocking in comparison...
...JOHI~ EMMETT GERRITV...
...God has called us to far greater heights than these, and, although we have done badly by Him so far, when we really get under way we won't be so ungrateful as to pin our efforts into a convenient diaper labeled beforehand, "Gothic" or this or that...
...MASSACHUSETTS, THERE SHE IS...
...All our Catholic periodicals are still secure in the hands of these reactionaries (possibly because there has been but little done in the arts by Catholics who also can write...
Vol. 10 • October 1929 • No. 25
