The struggle to keep faith in the Blake Prize.(appreciating religious painting)

IN A MODERN WORLD overwhelmed by secular pursuits, few now pay much attention to the way in which religious imagery manifests itself on canvas. It was a different story in Medieval and Renaissance Europe, when the church depended on mosaics, frescoes, illuminated manuscripts, stained-glass windows and canvases to tell their story. The ecstatic finale of this tradition found expression in the Counter Reformation, where stragglers were given a powerful lesson in the attractions of the Catholic faith and the pitfalls of straying from it into the Protestant camp. The Catholic Church had been wounded--but not mortally--by the Reformation, and it was marshalling miscreants back into the fold with every visual trick in the book. There would be sacrifices, flagellations, beheadings and, of course, ecstatic visions, creating the same sensory revelations that are today delivered by the cinema.

To some it might seem perverse that the fundamental image of Christianity is one of cruelty--the nailing of a human figure to a wooden cross. And we have only to visit art galleries and museums around the world to see how well this scarifying imagery multiplied in paintings which illustrate--in hair-breadth detail--flayed, dismembered, broiled and punctured humanity. This might prompt the modern viewer to muse how differently religious sensibilities were expressed in the East, where it was mostly serene chaps sitting cross-legged with their hands in their laps; or indeed the Middle East, where figurative imagery was ultimately proscribed and religious themes found expression in the endlessly graceful arabesques of Islamic scripts.

In 1949 a very particular art prize--the Blake Prize for religious painting--was established in Australia by Father Michael Scott, a Jesuit priest and the principal of Riverview Preparatory School in Point Piper, Sydney. At a time when a fissure between the religious world and the secular world was opening up, the prize was seen as a vehicle for drawing them together again. It was named after the artist and poet William Blake, who conveniently opined around 1808: "The Man who never in his Mind and Thought travel'd to Heaven is No Artist." A contemporary practitioner might be inclined to the view that to hell and back is a more realistic proposition.

A publication by Rosemary Crumlin (a former director of the National Pastoral Institute of Religious Education) surveying the first twenty-five years of the Blake Prize outlined its genesis (if that be the most appropriate word). It came about in a fortuitous fashion, with the European Sacred Art Renewal Movement providing a subliminal template for discussions. Father Scott had been talking to Richard Morley, a Jewish lawyer and businessman, about "the hopeless state of religious art in Australia" and Morley replied: "Let's do something practical about it. If you will undertake to get a committee together to organise a competition, I will put up 100 guineas as a prize. I'll serve on the committee myself, but I don't want my name to be known as the donor ... " Both men were dismayed at the prevailing "types" of religious art in Australia, which tended to the florid and sentimental.

Scott and Morley were alert to recent Continental developments which, thanks to the fertile collaboration between priests, architects and painters, produced some works of breathtaking originality and modernity. One was Notre Dame de Toute Grace at Assy in the French Alps, whose art works by Georges Rouault, Marc Chagall, Pierre Bonnard, Georges Braque and Jean Lurcat had been commissioned by French Dominicans as an expression of the revival movement of sacred art in the twentieth century. A few years later, Le Corbusier would be commissioned by the Dominican Father Couturier to design a church which would become a supreme emblem of the modernist movement in architecture--as singular as the Parthenon, and as laden with ritual significance as Stonehenge: the Chapel of Notre Dame de Haut at Ronchamp (1955). Yet another church, the Chapel of Our Lady of the Rosary at Vence (often referred to as the Matisse Chapel) was built for Dominican nuns and yet, there is the flesh breath of paganism in the choice of colours for the stained-glass window design: yellow for the sun, green for vegetation and blue for the Mediterranean.

These dazzling developments were not encouraged by the official church in France. And here in Australia, in the years to come it would be clear that both Catholic and Protestant churches, even with the splendid Georgian or neo-Gothic examples before them, would be supremely indifferent to aesthetics when it came to architectural extensions. Sydney Boys' Grammar School and St Mary's Cathedral College are just two singularly depressing examples.

As it is unlikely that religion will soon occupy centre stage in the Western world's psyche once more, nor determine how precisely each day will be calibrated in the hope of the ultimate heavenly reward, what future for the Blake--a prize which once flourished in the belief that the viewer might be moved to contemplate the mysteries and wonder of the Christian faith, and that modernity need not be the enemy of Christianity?