Magnificat

The last century saw an unprecedented number of attempts to break free of “the nightmare of history” (tradition). Understandable enough given the political and economic bloodbath that accompanied the power-struggles in Europe, Russia, the Middle East, and China. Is there any history that isn’t at least partly nightmare? Yet as a painter, I haven’t wanted so much to awaken from the bad dream of history as find a thread of meaning that might be strong enough to weather the inevitable storms that will continue to assail and undermine a robust and hopeful human vision. Meaning, after all, is always a fragile thing in the face of egregious inhumanity. But in an era wherein artists have near total freedom to make art from anything about anything (or to make art not from or about anything!); why in such as time as ours paint a predictable narrative subject like the life of the Virgin Mary? Why, in the face of the chaos all around us, resort to making art from hackneyed religious traditions that have become the bad wallpaper of our cultural patrimony? Isn’t this a recipe for irrelevance as an artist?

This body of work was my attempt at responding to a rich tradition in Italian art history and to a set of traditions in Christian iconography. To my mind, tradition is the substrate of every thought, every feeling, every work of art – whether acknowledged or not. Our very ability to communicate at all is contingent on tradition. It’s as inescapable as time and space. Those who imagine themselves free from tradition have succumbed to the most basic hubris – the worst form of which is literal meaninglessness or idiocy. Meaning is always contingent upon community and a foregoing generation’s transmission, or better, translation of a tradition or set of traditions. Failure to become cognizant of the influence and power of those traditions is what accounts in part for many cultural dead-ends – and for widespread feelings of isolation and anomy. Our history lays hold of us whether we are willing to accept it or not.

I am trying to see where the thread of history in the Christian sacred art tradition might lead in our time. Is this a living tradition or not? My honest hunch is that this tradition has barely been explored much less been exhausted, and further that the Virgin Mary has continuing relevance – maybe even especially for our times and immediate future.

Here is the entry point for me: Mary is a natural mystic – a born contemplative. That much is clear from the rather laconic texts that describe her person (“…but Mary pondered all these things and treasured them in her heart…”). A lot has been written about the need to meditate, to reflect and ponder in a culture obsessed with externals, with material possessions, with youth and social status and speed. But Mary is also a activist of sorts – initiating the first attesting miracle (Cana) that set her Son apart in the public eye and may, ironically, have precipitated his execution. Mary is an exemplar of both the interior life and the life of a community servant.

But the Virgin Mary seems such a shopworn subject in art – and one that in recent religious images often chokes us with sentimentality and kitsch. Non-religious contemporary artists Kiki Smith and Robert Gober, as well as others have made reference to Mary – examining the shards of tradition for relevance or meaning in our time, and their approach has been documented in IMAGE and other journals. But I have consciously adopted a more “traditional” narrative, figurative, pictorial approach.

Call me hopelessly retrograde, but I honestly believe that the tradition of sacred narrative figure painting is neither dead nor exhausted. That said, I cannot really think of any paintings of Mary from the recent past that I honestly feel to be compelling. Most are either saccharine or marginal at best in their ability to communicate who she is or might be for us. One needs to reach back-ward, even before the Renaissance to find powerful instances of her image: in Byzantine icons, in Giotto’s Scrovegni Chapel in Padova, in Fra Angelico’s chapter house Crucifixion mural at San Marco in Florence, in Piero’s Madonna della Misericordia. These are some of the sources for my own attempt to refresh and recover Mary’s image.

The small insights that have come to me since taking on this project hover around Mary’s toughness and steadfastness – and her obedience of faith and works, her standing and moving through grief. Perhaps this is the most compelling aspect to me personally – that of perseverance in the midst of pain.

— Bruce Herman

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