Idea dzieła sztuki sakralnej w latach dwudziestych i trzydziestych XX wieku

Abstrakt

It was in 1918 when Eric Gill (1882-1940) founded in Ditchling Common the Guild of St Joseph and St Dominic, a community of Dominican Tertiaries. This religious fraternity was affiliated to the parent order and living in its spirit but the members remained lay people. For Gill, a convert to Roman Catholicism since 1913, the belief in God became the major impulse to creative work as a stonecarver of inscriptional lettering, a sculptor, a wood engraver and a typographic designer. The fraternity complied with the rule of a medieval guild and uncompromisingly respected high quality craftsmanship; it thus found itself in the wake of the Nazarenes' tradition and continued the principles of the Arts and Crafts Movement. Gill's concept of the artist as an honest workman produced a style that sought impersonality and subservience to the job in hand. Gill's assumption was that mysticism implies asceticism. This concept is best reflected in the synthetised and simplified form of his works referring to the 13th-Century idiom of sculpture. In 1918, Gill completed fourteen carvings in low relief presenting the Stations of the Cross in the new Catholic cathedral at Westminster. The compact static figures, deprived of any individualised features and clear expression, that were crammed against a neutral background in a limited compositional space, as well as a dense rhythm of geometrized folds of attire covering their anatomy unequivocally pointed to Romanesque models. The means of expression employed by Gill were not to generate emotion and imply a narrative based on the Holy Scripture, but to promote religious devotion and contemplation.

David Jones (1895-1974) was for a number of years closely related with Gill's family. Upon his visit to Ditchling in 1921 he recognized in Gill a master, „a true master” in the sense that Morris was a master. Consequently, Jones joined the Ditchling Guild and in a due course became a Tertiary of the Order of St. Dominic. Coming under the influence of the Romanesque stylization of Gill's reliefs and sculptures executed in the 1920s he produced several wood-engravings of archaic form, devoid of illusive spatial depth and based on a sharp contrast between homogenous black and white planes. The stylistic of these prints reflects the Gill's concept of a work of sacred art being a sign representing metaphysical reality, a sign whose mystical denomination should be fathomed in an act of contemplation. Gill implemented the idea of a sign in both carving and graphic art. Holding in such high esteem manual work and crafstmanship he contributed greatly to the wood-engraving revival in England. Thus, while drawing and cutting wood-engravings Gill aimed at grasping the structure of the depicted image, of its objective and essential features, independent of the individual visual perception, as well as an emotional reaction of the beholder. On the other hand, the stylistic formula employed by Gill proves that he was interested in modern tendencies in art, both those originating in cubism, and those continuing the tradition of the „Renaissance primitives”, propagated by Maurice Denis. The illustrations and initials, which he designed in the late 1920s and early 1930s, betray neo-Romanesque simplification and additivity of form which harmonize with decorative rhythm, radical flattening of shapes and slendered canon of a human figure, all these being aesthetic qualities typical of Art Déco.

Gill's book illustrations significantly influenced the artistic attitude of Wiktoria Goryńska (1902-1945), a Polish printmaker who spent her childhood in England. In 1927, the artist graduated from the Warsaw School of the Fine Arts where she had studied graphic techniques under Władysław Skoczylas, the creator of the Polish school of woodcut. Next year she went through a printing training at Samuel Morison's printing house in London. Gill's works must have appeared most appealing to her not solely for their technical and stylistic values, but also due to their religious contents. Goryńska was a devout Catholic. When searching for means of expression that best reflected her own artistic vision, she referred to various stylistic conventions and sought inspiration in Gill's illustrations as well as the Quattrocento painting and German Renaissance art. Goryńska's works were highly appreciated at the exhibition Maria Vergine vista dalla donna in Florence in 1934, where she won a gold medal for her wood-engraving Pietá (1929). In the print, which was a paraphrase of the famous Vatican sculpture by Michelangelo, Goryńska blended a number of iconographic motifs, namely the traditional Pietá compositional scheme, the scene of the Lamentation and the motif of bestowing the care of Mary upon the youngest disciple by dying Christ. Whilst abandoning the traditional Biblical narrative sequence Goryńska faced the challenge formulated by Gill in his concept of a „heraldic sign” which engenders contemplation of complex mystical meanings. A similar approach can be seen in the devotional apotheosis of Joan of Arc (1929) lifted into the abstract eternity space by the Archangel Michael. The most accomplished concept of the devotional image, and at the same time the closest to the style of Gill's illustrations, is Goryńska's wood-engraving The Crucifixion (1934). Here the artist once again harmoniously synthesized several iconographic motifs. A minute figure of kneeling Mary Magdalene, belonging to the sphere of worldliness, echoes the motif of pain, representing all those who followed Christ.

Also in Antoni Michalak's (1902-1975) and Adam Bunsch's (1896-1969) paintings, the two being eminent representatives of sacred art in inter-war Poland, the figure of Mary Magdalene takes on a symbolic dimension becoming the personification of suffering and sins of the mankind redeemed by the Savior. In both Michalak's Crucifixion with Mary Magdalene (1931) and Bunsch's At the Cross (1929) one can trace the attempt to find the most expressive formula of a devotional image opening to mystical meanings – an attempt undertaken by Gill and Goryńska – to find the symbol of Christianity free from historical conditionings and the context of the Biblical narrative. To this end the artists applied stylization, compiled pictorial conventions borrowed from various epochs and artistic schools, as well as introduced some elements of contemporaneity which are meant to emphasize universality of the relationship between God and man.