Stricken, Smitten, Bruised, and Afflicted

Crucified Tree Form is one of a series of paintings produced by the artist following a period of grave illness, which had instilled in him a pressing need to paint a crucifixion image (Wollen 2003: 97). In this desolate scene we see body, cross, and tree fused into a 'single, suffering whole' (Ibid, 96–97), in a manner evocatively reflecting the description in Isaiah 53 of the suffering servant, a figure so stricken by afflictions (v.4) that he incites revulsion, scorn, and horror.

The face is blackened and featureless, the arms shattered, the legs a single solid mass embedded in some unspecified, indistinct landscape. The paint is applied in a scumbled, expressionistic manner, and the range of colours is minimal, the lurid yellow background, evoking the putrefaction of death, contrasting starkly with the austere monochrome of the figure. The anachronistic addition of barbed wire deliberately presents the painting in an ambiguous light. One can read it conventionally as a crucifixion: body broken, head bowed, the spikes of the barbed wire resolving into a crown of thorns. Alternatively, it might conjure the ruined landscapes and bomb-blasted trees of the battlefield, or else the mangled corpse of a soldier, entangled in the barbed wire of no-man’s land.

This is not an uncommon analogy to draw: in times of war the crucifixion theme has often become an instrument of social criticism, the religious content perhaps supplanted but perhaps also amplified by the force of the suffering, tortured body immolated on the altar of war. As Isaiah 53 tells us, if the servant suffers and dies—led like a lamb to the slaughter (v.7), cut off from the land of the living (v.8)—he is also exalted. Thus for the modern reader parallels may be drawn with the ennoblement of the fallen soldier in the name of honour, sacrifice, and duty. But so too, as the painting’s subtitle implies, the narrative of the dutiful servant may be open to other, less generous, readings, inevitably souring this particular paean to self-sacrifice.

References

Wollen, R. 2003. Catalogue of the Methodist Church Collection of Modern Christian Art (Oxford: Trustees of the Methodist Collection of Modern Christian Art)

Central to the theme of Isaiah 53 is the expiatory power of the servant’s tribulations. We read, ‘But he was wounded for our transgressions, he was bruised for our iniquities; upon him was the chastisement that made us whole, and with his stripes we are healed’ (v.5). This verse goes to the heart of Christian interpretations in which the servant is read as Christ. It is given a potent yet simple visual representation, crossing from the Old Testament to the New, in Anish Kapoor’s The Healing of St Thomas.

As part of an installation for the church of Saint Peter, Cologne, Kapoor hung a red cloth, about a square metre and a half in size, beneath the holy water stoup. It had what appeared to be a small diagonal slit, but on closer inspection was in fact a little pouch or pocket that signified a stylized open wound. The hanging cloth had the look of a Mandylion or Veronica—a cloth or veil miraculously imprinted with the image of Christ—but one reduced to the metonym of a single gash, a kind of visual shorthand for the healing power of Christ’s wounds.

In a previous incarnation of this work a slit was made directly into a gallery wall, but for Saint Peter’s Kapoor felt this would imply too literal a response to the building (Kapoor 1997: 39)—figuratively alluding to the church building as the body of Christ—whereas, in Christian dogmatics, the ‘church’ (as body of Christ) is the people. Instead, a red cloth was chosen as the bearer of the wound, becoming a ‘site of spiritual and visual doubt’ (Kapoor 1998: 38). As the lesson of Saint Thomas teaches us, it is by way of doubt that revelation and redemption may be found, just as (with Isaiah 53 in mind) it is via piacular rites—rites of atonement—that healing comes.

References

Kapoor, Anish. 1997. Anish Kapoor (Köln: Kunst-Station Sankt Peter)

———. 1998. Anish Kapoor (London and Berkeley: Hayward Gallery and University of Chicago Press)

In the early 1950s this sculpture for the church of Notre-Dame de Toute Grâce, Assy, was at the centre of a cause célèbre known as ‘la querelle de l’art sacré’, fought over the condemnation of ‘corrupt and errant forms of sacred art’ that had found their way into Catholic churches (Pizzardo 1955: 369). The work was ordered to be removed by the Bishop of Annecy in 1951 and only properly reinstated some twenty years later (Wilson 2006: 66).

It is a cruciform bronze sculpture of a desiccated, lacerated, and near-featureless figure, whose posture incorporates the cross into the figure of Christ, his outstretched arms effectively becoming the horizontal crossbar. Germaine Richier’s uncompromising aesthetic was derided by its critics as a scandalous profanation and sacrilegious deformation of sacred art. Yet to those open to its devotional and liturgical potency, it presented a Christ ‘strong, expressive, powerful, charged with humanity, and palpitating with love’ (Rubin 1961: 51). Indeed, although denounced by the Church as offensive to ‘the faithful’ it was vigorously defended by many parishioners, principally the patients and staff of several nearby sanatoriums, as ‘this man of sorrows, so fraternal to their sufferings’ (Rubin 1961: 52).

Those responsible for its commissioning, including the Dominican priest Fr Couturier, seem perhaps to have anticipated a reactionary backlash, offering a scriptural precedent for the work on a placard accompanying the sculpture, justifying its unconventional form as the embodiment of Isaiah 53:

For he grew up…like a root out of dry ground; he had no form or comeliness that we should look at him, and no beauty that we should desire him. He was despised and rejected by men; a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief. (vv.2–3)

Writing in defence of the work, Couturier was explicit:

This tortured body, torn to shreds, rough as tree bark, twisted and bent, is the moving vision of Isaiah translated into a cast of bronze.(Couturier 1960, my translation)

References

Couturier, M.-A. 1960. Notre-Dame de Toute Grâce. (Assy: Editions Paroissiales)

Pizzardo, J. C. 1955. ‘Instruction to Ordinaries on Sacred Art’, The Furrow, 6(6): 368–372

Rubin, W.S. 1961. Modern Sacred Art and the Church of Assy (New York: Columbia University Press)

Wilson, S. 2006. ‘Germaine Richier: Disquieting Matriarch’, Sculpture Journal, 14(1): 51–70