Books in Brief
The Bible as a Wellspring of Art
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A number of recently published books demonstrate the Bible’s remarkable power to inspire great art, For reviews of other new art books on biblical or religious themes, see our
August 2000 issue.
Wonders to Behold: The Visionary Art of Myrtice West
Ed. by Carol Crown
(Memphis, TN: Mustang Publishing, 1999) 144 pp., 87 color illus., $50.00 (hardback)
To order, contact the press at 901–684-1200.
“I’d like to say I’m not much of an artist,” quips unschooled contemporary artist Myrtice West. “Yet there is a love and guidance there [in my work]. There is an unseen hand in this work.” In the 1970s, as she tried to cope with the murder of her only daughter, West set out to illustrate the Book of Revelation: “I started my Revelation series to keep from going crazy. I turned to God rather than let Satan drag me down.” She has now completed 13 paintings that cover, sequentially, all 22 chapters of Revelation. Each of the 13 chapters in Wonders to Behold is devoted to one of the paintings; the text is written by a leading art historian, artist or curator involved in the burgeoning field of religious folk art. One of the most arresting images, entitled Satan Takes Over (shown at right), features a gigantic malevolent face, semi-transparent, hovering before a placid rural scene that includes a church and the U.S. Capitol. (For more on West and other so-called visionary artists, see Ginger Young and David Vintinner, “That Ol’ Time Religion,” BR 13:05.)
Seeing Salvation: Images of Christ in Art
Neil MacGregor with Erika Langmuir
(New Haven and London: Yale Univ. Press, 2000) 240 pp., $35.00 (hardback)
To order, contact the press at 203–432-0964 or www.yale.edu/yup.
This attractive volume accompanied last year’s millennial exhibition Seeing Salvation, at the National Gallery in London and a BBC television series of the same name, both of which surveyed representations of Christ over the last 2,000 years. Its principal author, Neil MacGregor, who is also director of the National Gallery, argues that Western art is in essence Christian art that can nevertheless speak powerfully to non-Christians, because it conveys basic human truths that transcend denominational differences.
“Making an image of God who has become man is, as we shall see, a tricky business,” the authors tell us in the first chapter. In unaffected prose they describe the contradictions that beset artists who would depict Jesus. The innocent and helpless babe must also give hint of a king among kings; the vulnerable sufferer is also God eternal; the exhausted martyr is to arise, immortal. Crisscrossing through the history of text and church, western civilization and art, they offer convincing and at times poignant insights about portrayals of the Christ figure that remain compelling, generation after generation. About Christ and Mary Magdalene in Titian’s Noli me tangere (c. 1510, above) they write: “With a Mozartian subtlety of movement, the two figures express a perfect equivalence of yearning. Mary’s gesture concedes that what she loves is now unattainable in the terms familiar to her, that the fulfilment of her love will be not physical, but spiritual. And her anguish of a few minutes before is resolved; because a lord who cannot be touched is a lord who can never be taken away.”
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A Journey into Christian Art
Helen de Borchgrave
(Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2000) 223 pp., 74 color illustrations, $35.00 (hardback)
To order, contact the press at 800–328-4648.
This book at its heart is a meditation on Christianity, although Helen de Borchgrave offers not spiritual guidance but a tour of two millennia of European history through art, not all of which is patently religious. Although her commentary frequently focuses on the spiritual meaning and impact of the art, as a fine art conservator de Borchgrave also presents telling details about the lives of the artists, the conditions in which the art was created and displayed, and who looked at it. Regarding a Gothic altarpiece in the pilgrimage church at St. Wolfgang in Austria, she writes “[Michael] Pacher paints vulnerable, expressive faces. These are real, not ideal, people and Christ understands their weaknesses and wants them to receive his love…What a solace such altarpieces must have been.”
De Borchgrave weaves together sacred narrative and secular history. Her book contains much of interest to any art lover, although some may be put off by her unabashedly religious reading of art and text.
The Illustrated Torah
Paintings by Michal Meron; edited by Alon Baker
(Jerusalem: Gefen Publishing House and the Studio in Old Jaffa, 2000) 248 pages, $60.00 (hardback)
To order, contact the Jewish Publication Society at 215–832-0613.
A delightful collaboration between artist and text, this volume in many places resembles an exquisite illuminated medieval manuscript. Here, however, instead of the studied motifs of the Age of Faith we see a friendly and informal presentation that recalls the inspired “visionary” work of self-taught artists. In some instances Michal Meron offers serial images in service of a narrative, like modern comic strips that tell a story frame by frame, but with grace, vision and individuality rarely seen in that art form.
Structured like a synagogue
Sister Wendy’s Nativity
Sister Wendy Beckett
(New York: HarperCollins, 1998) 96 pp., 74 color illustrations, $24.95 (hardback)
To order, contact the press at 212–207-7000.
Sister Wendy looks at religious art and tells what she sees. For each image in this mistitled volume (only half the images depict the birth of Jesus—the rest portray his life, death and resurrection), Sister Wendy retells the relevant biblical story, describes how the artist has conveyed the psychological state of the figures and, sometimes, spells out what she believes is the moral of the story. In her descriptions of 35 medieval and Renaissance paintings, there is an honesty that can be refreshing (“It is not, here, a very wonderful heaven, since the artist is not a very wonderful artist,” she writes of a 15th-century manuscript illumination of Jesus in paradise) or, for some, disturbing (“For the Christian everything in the Old Testament foreshadows events in the New”).
A number of recently published books demonstrate the Bible’s remarkable power to inspire great art, For reviews of other new art books on biblical or religious themes, see our August 2000 issue.
Wonders to Behold: The Visionary Art of Myrtice West
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