She describes her new book, Christian Art, as “a ‘how to use’ art book” rather than a historical work, which caters to a “post-Christian society” where “relatively few people regularly attend Christian worship or order their lives on the basis of a Christian faith.” In fact, “traditional Christianity is breaking down and there is no agreement on how to revive it.”
So Loverance, herself a British Quaker, decided it was high time to publish a book on Christian art with an evangelical flavor. “Christianity has always been a missionary faith,” she writes, “and perhaps now a missionary art is required.”
Although surely music to the ears of many evangelicals, this thesis neglects the aesthetic aspects of Christian art, and makes it clear that religion is the master and art the slave. With this newfound definition of art’s role, Loverance shows no qualms about enlisting non-Christians as Christian artists. “The criterion for choice is that the work seems to emerge from, engage with or throw light on the Christian tradition,” she writes. “The real engagement occurs at a deeper level, at the point where the Christian understanding of life, its purpose and its fulfillment becomes a personal insight of the artist.”
She cites Marc Chagall’s “White Crucifixion” (1938) as one such example. “Although the artist drew on his own Jewish childhood experiences of pogroms” and the Holocaust, Chagall “was able to convey the particular as well as the universal suffering implicit in the meaning of the Crucifixion.” One wonders what Chagall, who used the Crucifixion as a symbol of anti-Semitism and violence against Jews, would think of being dubbed a “Christian artist.”
But Loverance’s mysterious invocation of Chagall’s work aside, the book’s most interesting contribution is its Christian art narrative with a Quaker angle, which she describes as based upon personal experience rather than creedal formulae. In that light, Loverance hopes “that this experiential approach will enable readers of any faith or of none to engage on equal terms with contemporary issues of art and faith.”
Loverance explores American Quaker illustrator and writer Joseph Pennell; sign writer and Bucks County, Penn.-based Quaker minister Edward Hicks; and James Turrell, who describes his work as dealing with light “not as the bearer of revelation, but as revelation itself.” Turrell, who is converting a dormant volcano called Roden Crater near the Grand Canyon into a “celestial observatory,” was raised a Quaker and quotes his grandmother’s advice, “look within yourself and greet the light.” Loverance writes of a building Turrell designed in Houston with a retractable ceiling at the Live Oak Friends Meeting House as a collage of art and nature: “By bringing the sky right into the worship space he also provided a metaphor for the presence of the light which cannot be seen with the eye.”
Christian Art succeeds where it dwells on the details Loverance knows best—and she is to be commended for bringing deserved attention to the under-covered field of Quaker art. She is also effective in her charge of the Christian community to further embrace the arts. “Christian patrons seem to have been less interested in demanding, and Christian artists in providing, insights into ordinary human relationships: despite Jesus’ penchant for teaching through parables and examples, many of the most vivid have gone unrepresented,” she writes toward the end of the book, perhaps echoing Francis Schaeffer’s Art and the Bible or James Elkins’ On the Strange Place of Religion in Contemporary Art.
But by only choosing to address the first word in the phrase “Christian Art,” Loverance provides an incomplete investigation, which leaves room for more scholarship that could speak in both a religious and an artistic language.
