Nicodemus

Raised a Congregationalist in New England, Winslow Homer was used to a reserved and quiet style of religious expression. His Camp Meeting Sketches, a set of woodcuts made after a visit to a Methodist camp meeting on Cape Cod in early August 1858, show hints of Homer’s wry amusement at encountering a more energetic and emotional form of worship. Commissioned and published by the magazine Ballou’s Pictorial, the woodcuts are an early example of the emerging power of images in popular media. Homer seized the new opportunities provided by illustrations in mass-media to portray and gently satirize the fervour of a camp meeting. 

The gathering Homer attended in 1858 was part of an already-long tradition of religious revivalism with its origins in England, Scotland, and the United States beginning in the seventeenth century. Although the phrase is most associated with American evangelicalism in the late twentieth century, many of the early writings and sermons of the camp meeting movement dwell on the need for people to be ‘born again’—a citation of a misunderstood part of Nicodemus’s conversation with Jesus.

The idea of being ‘born again’ carries with it a host of religious and political meanings. It can signal an implicit rebuke of the person’s prior religious experiences and traditions, and it often represents an engagement with the kind of emotional and charismatic worship that Winslow Homer was portraying in this woodcut, The Tent. Here, some attendees writhe in various states of ecstasy while others display a lack of interest. Some bow in prayer, others dance and raise hands toward heaven, and still others look on from a distance. In the centre, a man—presumably the preacher—surveys and directs the moment like an orchestral conductor, but the differing reactions are a reminder that ‘the wind blows where it chooses’, and the Spirit’s movement cannot be controlled.

References

Cikovsky Jr., Nicolai, and Franklin Kelly. 1995. Winslow Homer (New Haven: Yale University Press)

Johns, Elizabeth. 2002. Winslow Homer: The Nature of Observation (Berkeley: University of California Press)

The story of Jesus’s conversation with Nicodemus relies on a misunderstanding. Like the story of Jesus’s encounter with the Samaritan woman at the well that follows in the next chapter of the Gospel of John, Jesus’s discussion with Nicodemus turns on wordplay and obfuscation. The Greek word anothen, used by Jesus in 3:3, can mean either ‘from above’ or ‘again’, and Nicodemus wrongly assumes that Jesus means the latter. The same misunderstanding was not possible in the Aramaic language that Jesus and Nicodemus were presumably speaking; the confusion has been artfully introduced in Greek by the Gospel writer to make a theological point. 

An early Abstract Expressionist, Alfonso Ossorio was among a group of artists exploring what it might mean to make works of visual art while rejecting figurative representation. His work in Mother and Child is instructive: it suggests order emerging from an inchoate background, with patterns and shapes perceptible, but only just.

It is the title of this work as much as anything that informs its interpretation. Without being told that the painting was titled Mother and Child, it is unlikely that viewers would arrive there on their own. Ossorio, therefore, takes a familiar relationship and a common feature of Christian religious iconography and teases it apart, introducing unfamiliarity and disorientation.

So too with Jesus’s words to Nicodemus. Unless Jesus had told Nicodemus what he meant, his wordplay about being ‘born from above’ would have gone misunderstood. Some explanation is necessary to make sense of it, and most of the literal sense of the meaning resides in the explanation. In both John 3:1–15 and in Ossorio’s painting, the relationship between mothers and birth is less literal than experience and visual tradition might expect, and therefore more layered than we might have assumed.

References

Friedman, B.H. 1965. Alfonso Ossorio (New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc.)

Ottman, Klaus, and Dorothy Kosinski. 2013. Angels, Demons, and Savages: Pollack, Ossorio, Dubuffet (New Haven: Yale University Press)

Henry Ossawa Tanner’s father, an active and prominent abolitionist, was fond of the story of Nicodemus. He understood it as ‘analogous to tales of slaveholders who, in secret conversations with abolitionists, became converted to their cause’ (Bearden & Henderson 1993: 95). As one of the earliest African American painters to gain prominence in both Europe and the United States, the younger Tanner’s work frequently explored both religious themes and questions of race, often together. 

During a visit to Jerusalem in the late 1890s, Tanner painted this work, using the story of Nicodemus as a ‘canvas’ to explore a set of tensions: young and old, lit and shadowed, grey and brown, and high and low. 

In an earlier study for this painting, Tanner was more forthright in his use of light, framing Jesus’s head with a rising full moon like a nimbus (Marley 2012: 129, 210). But in the final version, Tanner brings illumination not only from the heavens but also from below, casting light up a staircase until it rests on Jesus’s chest and face. This stepwise use of light, Hélène Valance writes, ‘suggests the hesitations and gradual conversion of Nicodemus “coming into the light” of God’ (ibid 129).

By using light from both above and beneath, Tanner made the distinctions between Jesus and Nicodemus subtler than they had been in the earlier effort. But the painting is still a study in difference, and the two men’s juxtaposition invites comparison. Later in life, Tanner could recall ‘the fine head of the old Yemenite Jew who posed for Nicodemus’, one of several nods to the principles of the Realist movement in the painting (Bearden & Henderson 1993: 96). Meanwhile, the figure of Jesus could very nearly be a self-portrait of Tanner, with angular features and dark skin and hair. It’s one of several variances between Jesus and Nicodemus that are produced in the work, and one can’t help but wonder whether Tanner was painting while keeping his father’s abolitionist fondness for the story in mind.
 

References

Bearden, Romare, and Harry Henderson. 1993. A History of African-American Artists from 1792 to the Present (New York: Pantheon Books)

Marley, Anna O. (ed.). 2012. Henry Ossawa Tanner: Modern Spirit (Berkeley: University of California Press)