The Spiritual Reach of Christian Art

What is an artist? What is the reason an artist makes art? And what is the purpose of that art? If you have considered these questions for any substantial period of time, you know there are essential historical aspects to the answers. The definitions of both art and artist shift with social and cultural changes, and technological innovations can contribute to such shifts.

One vision of the artist and the meaning of art is particularly influential in our time. In the mid-19th century, the Bohemian emerged in France and then spread elsewhere in Western Europe. This countercultural figure defined himself in opposition to members of the middle classes — the bourgeoisie — that were then becoming dominant, politically and culturally, in Western societies. The bourgeois, in the Bohemian view, was an anti-artist, wedded to tradition and routine, uncreative and spiritually empty, unconcerned with and even unaware of the deepest aspects of human nature. The Bohemian saw himself as in constant transformation, endlessly engaged with the creative impulse of life, desirous only of drinking life’s joy and pain to the dregs. Many Bohemians produced music, literature, or paintings that endeavored to display this creativity to audiences. Gustave Courbet, for example, left a treasury of paintings widely understood as foundational to French Realism while leading a life of determined opposition to middle-class principles. But even those who did not fabricate any art in its traditional forms — there was a large collection of such dissolute figures flitting about the Parisian streets of the mid-1800s — believed their very lives to be aesthetic masterpieces that set them apart from the mundane and boring middle classes.

Bohemianism in time gave birth to all the avant-gardes in contemporary art that have by now far outdone their 19th-century ancestors in the self-obsessed narcissism that has become, almost despite itself, academic and that is now taught in most art courses as normative. Today, when most of us think art and artist, it is the Bohemian we visualize. We picture the rebel against bourgeois social order (today, typically heavily tattooed and pierced), iconoclastic, uniquely expressive, uncapturable by any moral or aesthetic norms. Bohemianism constituted a revolution in the history of art — a history that has now been entirely forgotten by the typical non-historian. Nonetheless, when I introduce students to the story of the birth of the Bohemian as artist, I know they have been deeply saturated in that trope, even if they do not know the relevant terms and history. The artist as outsider, as partisan of extreme experience and intensity both in pleasure and suffering, is what they take as given.

But, as I said at the outset, this is an historical anomaly or, it might be argued, an historical error introduced into the human activity known as art. For before the artist as Bohemian, and before the conception of the artist as Renaissance man that had just preceded it, there was the artist as Christian.