DAVID THISTLETHWAITE is an artist who has also studied art history, researched art theory, and dealt in Old Master and Modern British art for a leading Bond Street gallery. This collection of essays contains material that spans his career and adds to the ideas explored in his earlier book The Art of God and the Religions of Art.

The essays, summarising Thistlethwaite’s main thesis regarding art, tell the story of how those ideas developed as his career played out. Thistlethwaite writes out of an appreciation for the approaches to art originally developed by Francis Schaeffer and Hans R. Rookmaaker. These aim to identify and criticise the world-view expressed through the work of artists and to encourage art that reflects a Christian world-view.

Thistlethwaite emphasises the importance of art’s connecting with reality and views modern art as focusing our view on the artist, as opposed to the world. In exploring these themes, he writes perceptively about John Ruskin, John Constable, the collector Sir Hugh Lane, and the contemporary Brotherhood of artists.

His views were developed in a period when art critics and art historians were rigorously advocating a secularist narrative regarding modern and contemporary art. The approach to art theory which derives from Schaeffer and Rookmaaker adopts this narrative and contrasts it with approaches to art derived either from scriptural interpretation or from the art of Christendom, or a combination of both. This is essentially Thistlethwaite’s approach, too: one that views modern and contemporary art as primarily relativistic and pluralist.

More recently, however, art-historical research has identified significant religious influences on the development of modern art, resulting also in a greater recognition by curators and critics alike of similar influences in contemporary art. This means that the oppositional approach that Thistlethwaite primarily advocates through his art theory may not actually offer the fullest understanding of modern and contemporary art from a Christian perspective.

In what may be the most interesting aspect of the book, Thistlethwaite, through his experience as an artist, seems to recognise the limitations of his art theory and begins to subvert it by recognising that the Holy Spirit can work in and through modern and contemporary art. His wife’s abstract art is one factor that has begun to broaden his thinking. I look forward to seeing where this new direction takes him in future.

The Revd Jonathan Evens is the Team Rector of Wickford and Runwell in the diocese of Chelmsford.

Re-Digging Art’s Foundations: Essays on gospel and art
David Thistlethwaite
Wipf & Stock £22
(979-8-3852-1814-1)
Church Times Bookshop £19.80