STAFF at the Louvre, in Paris, curious about how visitors interact with their famous collection, recently timed how long people look at paintings. The average is two seconds, with a further ten seconds to read the label. When it comes to Leonardo’s Mona Lisa, which is constantly surrounded by crowds eager to see — and photograph — the woman’s mysterious smile, the time spent with this Renaissance masterpiece is far longer: 15 seconds.
What is often called “dwell time” is extremely brief. When teaching theology and art history in galleries, it can be hard to encourage students to look at a painting for 60 seconds. Five minutes would be outrageous, and a whole hour would be perplexing for many.
Yet it can be as powerful and as daunting as silent prayer. And there are people of all religious backgrounds and none who linger in their looking, spending time with art of any genre or period, and seeing something that connects with them in ways that are no less than sacred.
The medieval theologian and mystic Mechthild of Magdeburg wrote: “The day of my spiritual awakening was the day I saw, and I knew I saw, all things in God and God in all things.” Art can bring people closer to God, and it often does, but that art need not be made by a Christian artist or contain obviously Christian themes.
In the autumn of 2022, the refugee artist Iman Tajik produced an installation in the gallery at St James’s, Piccadilly. Made from silver-foil emergency blankets, which are given to people who have landed on shore after a dangerous and fearful crossing over deep and too often fatal waters, the installation consisted of two words in huge capital letters.
The material glitters and sparkles, and is strangely beautiful despite its intended function. At St James’s, Tajik displayed the words “Radical” and “Welcome”. Asked where the inspiration for the phrase came from, understood in relation to the urgent need for social justice for refugees and asylum-seekers, he said: “I found it on your website.”
The work reflected its message back to the congregation, and to any visitors to
St James’s. It displayed what the church tries to offer. It was a challenge as much as a hope and a promise. Although the installation was in church, and part of the parish’s visual-arts programme, the artist is not Christian, and it is unlikely that he would have described his work as theological.
A FEW minutes’ walk away in the National Gallery is Claude Monet’s Water-Lilies, produced during the intensity of the violent trauma of the First World War, part of a vast series that he described as his “monument to peace”. In his anguish about the war’s destruction, Monet did the only thing that he felt he could in response to pain on such a vast scale: he painted.
The monumental picture is included in the “Fruits of the Spirit” exhibition that I co-curated at the gallery with Susanna Avery-Quash (Interview, 20 January), and which was accompanied by a free catalogue and virtual gallery.
Monet’s painting is immersive, on the borderlands of abstraction and representation. It has been paired alongside Winifred Knights’s altarpiece of St Martin of Tours in Canterbury Cathedral, which is also critical of the violence of the First World War and is a feminist tour de force. The painting will feature in a series of events at the cathedral during Holy Week.
© The National Gallery, LondonOrazio Gentileschi, The Finding of Moses, early 1630s
In Monet’s Water-Lilies, thick daubs of pink represent the flowers on the surface of the pond, but there are few clues about the painting’s meaning. It is based on Monet’s own belief about the power of peace-building, standing as a symbol of what peace could be. It is also more than a symbol: it provides a space for an encounter with peace itself, and many who come to see the painting in the National Gallery find themselves overwhelmed by it for reasons that they can’t articulate.
Although Monet himself did not interpret the painting in theological terms, it would make a superb altarpiece. Taking viewers into the infinite depths of transcendence, its symbolism aligns with a yearning for, in the words of the evensong collect, the “peace which the world cannot give”.
WHAT the world can and cannot give is a question with which artists often contend in their attempts to produce works of art that display everyday life in extraordinary ways. Artists risk a great deal — at least, good artists do — in challenging dominant social assumptions and pressures, even in work that appears to be innocuous or even superficial at first glance.
Sometimes, that apparent truth is an audience’s projections about the need for peace when there is none, or very little. James Baldwin wrote uncompromisingly: “A society must assume that it is stable, but the artist must know, and they must let us know, that there is nothing stable under heaven.”
In Van Gogh’s sunflower series, every stalk, petal, and seed is different. One of the series, which is in the National Gallery, represents the theme of joy in the “Fruits of the Spirit” exhibition. It is paired with Frank Auerbach’s vivid painting of a summer morning in Camden, in the collection of the Ben Uri Gallery in London. Van Gogh’s palette of yellows with touches of blue may be restrained, but this painting’s story is anything but mundane.
When Van Gogh travelled to Arles, in the south of France, he expected a utopia filled with abundant subjects for painting and enjoyment for the senses. He also hoped that he might be able to form a new community of artists — the post-impressionist Paul Gauguin among them — and make a fresh start in a place that grounded him in the things that he loved most.
He saw hope and new life springing up in the wheat and corn. He saw divine radiance in the sun. He saw the sacred rhythms of the earth in sowers scattering seeds on to ploughed soil, with nourishment to make tender green shoots grow into nourishment for all. The earthenware pot is solid and simple. These vessels were not usually used for flowers, but for storing food.
Van Gogh was a Christian, and his imagery of seeds and cycles of life made strong connections with Jesus’s parable of the sower, and with the sunflower’s traditional symbolism. In painting dead and dying flowers alongside blooming, lively ones, Van Gogh’s work reflects Jesus’s words about his death and resurrection in John 12.24: “Unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains just a single grain; but if it dies, it bears much fruit.”
© The National Gallery, LondonJoseph Mallord William Turner, Rain, Steam, and Speed — The Great Western Railway, 1844
The sunflower was often perceived as an image of Christ and his followers, because the plant’s large blooms are heliotropic, turning to follow the sun throughout the day. Van Gogh’s still-life — one of the most popular paintings in the National Gallery, and one of the most beloved of all works of art in the world — both is and is not an image of Christ.
It’s unlikely that most people who visit this painting see it in this way, but this theological interpretation would not have surprised Van Gogh, who also described the whole series as a symphony in paint and a homage to stained-glass windows.
The sunflower series is the result of Van Gogh’s joy in being an artist, and in finding a home among the simple cycles of nature which are a sign of God’s sustaining all life in creation, human and non-human. The image is, as Nicholas Bartoli puts it, encouraging us to “patiently rest in the presence of the seeds lying within the ground of our own being”.
JOY is very different from happiness. Tiffany Watt Smith describes joy as a “refusal to sit quietly within the bounds of the ordinary and understood”. Joy can be a form of resistance, too, defiance in the face of suffering. A young poet recently described joy in an exhibition at the Wellcome Collection in London, which was part of a project, “Joy is a Protest”. These are her words:
It slips into the places we least expect it
It squeezes itself into cracks and small places. . .
The sound of joy beats to the rhythm of your pulse
It is in your blood
It has written its name on your DNA
Joy is your birth right
The British artist J. M. W. Turner, who scandalised the 19th-century art world with his unique approach to colour, form, and politics, would not have identified himself either as a theologian or a climate-change activist. And yet his paintings are windows into both of these fields, and more.
In Rain, Steam, and Speed — The Great Western Railway, a train races along its dark track, cutting diagonally through the landscape. A hare, whose top speeds rivalled the state-of-the-art 1844 train, darts ahead of it — only just — and poses the question whether it will be overtaken by the industrial smoke-belching metal, or outrun it and survive. The train had an apt name, too: Greyhound.
Mass transport granted people unprecedented access between packed cities and growing towns, but it came at a cost to the environment. Turner’s train forces its way headlong through a cloudy atmosphere, impervious to the weather and yet constrained by its tracks.
In the 1840s, an MP complained of the environmental devastation caused by train travel. He wrote of the intemperate loss in the pursuit of speed: “Mountains were to be cut through, valleys were to be lifted . . . the earth was to be tunnelled.” His phrasing is an ironic reference to God’s glory, celebrated in Isaiah 40.4: “Every valley shall be exalted and every mountain and hill shall be made low.”
Perhaps this is the perspective of two figures in the painting, on the lower left, in a little boat, with an umbrella at one end and a pole at the other, reminding us of the differing rural and urban interactions with the environment.
In Modern Painters, the artist and writer John Ruskin wrote uncompromisingly about the need for fresh, new perspectives by British artists on classic subjects. This included Turner: “If we are to do anything great, good, awful, religious, it must be got out of our own little island and out of these very times, railroads and all.”
MORE than a century later, on the other side of the Atlantic, the Los Angeles-based nun Corita Kent found theological inspiration in another product of capitalism and mass production: cheap bread. Her 1960s pop art included Beatles lyrics, e. e. cummings’s poetry, quotations from Martin Luther King, Jr, and Vietnam War protesters, alongside slogans from petrol stations and supermarket shelves.
She was particularly captivated by the polka dot plastic packaging for Wonderbread, a fortified, highly processed white bread marketed as nutritious and affordable for mothers with children to feed.
For Sister Corita, the blue, yellow, and red dots were eucharistic hosts. The company strapline, “Builds strong bodies 12 ways”, was, for Sister Corita, less about artificially inserted vitamins and minerals, and more a biblical commentary on the plastic that surrounded cheap carbohydrates, in the light of the sacred mission of Christ’s disciples. As one of Sister Corita’s silkscreen prints proclaims: “God’s not dead, he’s Bread”.
Whether people go in search of peace, climate justice, joy, or something else entirely, it can be found in the visual arts, where God meets us in word and sacrament.
The Revd Dr Ayla Lepine is Associate Rector of St James’s, Piccadilly, in London. In 2021-22, she was Ahmanson Fellow in Religion and Art at the National Gallery. The Gallery’s “Fruits of the Spirits” exhibition can be viewed online at: fruitsofthespirit.moyosaspaces.com.