Art: Labyrinth of Kitsch

• Share

For centuries it was a habit of Popes to collect modern religious art. Up to the papacy of Urban VIII, who gave Bernini carte blanche to transform the face of Rome, the Vatican had a use for the best art of its time: magnificence as propaganda. The results, strung through exhausting miles of galleries and culminating in Raphael's stanze and Michelangelo's Sistine frescoes, fill the Vatican Museum. But this lofty tradition of patronage ebbed away, and by 1900 most official religious art was stranded in a sludge of gaudy plaster piety. With the exception of the gloomy Georges Rouault, not one significant modern artist has built his imagery round doctrinal religion and its themes. There were some fitful bouts of church patronage: Matisse's chapel at Vence, Corbusier's at Ronchamp. But on the whole, the old symbiosis was dead.

Pious Triviality. Could it be revived? The present Pope, Paul VI, hoped so. "The friendship between church and artists must be re-established," he declared ten years ago. Thus began the Vatican's collection of 20th century religious art, which is now receiving its first summer of tourists after some private viewings in 1973. About 542 works by more than 250 artists are displayed in the redecorated windings of the Borgia Apartments.

Three things can be said at once about this collection. First, it represents a decent and sincere intention. Second, it contains a smattering of respectable works of art: a set of Matisse chasubles from Vence, a cast of Rodin's Hand of God, some Rouault aquatints and so forth. Third, with such few exceptions, it is an aesthetic swamp. If some mischievous curator had been asked to as semble a study collection of rhetorical sham, displaying all the cliches of modern art at their meridian of pious triviality, he could hardly have done better.

The collection has no evident criteria of choice, for the Vatican, faced with the awkward but basic question of what a "religious" work of art may be, has been unable to find an answer. Instead, it has accepted anything that seems, however dimly or perfunctorily, to contain a religious motif—even decorous little landscapes whose views include a belfry or a church fagade.

Among the many big names represented by trivia (Braque, Chagall, Dali, Boccioni, Gauguin, Sutherland), Picasso makes an appearance with two very routine pottery plates decorated with fish; presumably someone thought the old satyr of Vallauris was ruminating on the Christian ichthus.

Moreover, the Vatican apparently believes that a portrait of a Pope is ipso facto a religious image; this illusion has stuffed the Borgia Apartments with a plethora of weak, vulgar bronzes of recent pontiffs. The only distinguished image of a Pope in the collection is one of Francis Bacon's variations on Velásquez's Innocent X. The gift of Italian Automobile Tycoon Gianni Agnelli, it sits, mouth open in a feral and silent snarl, glaring at the sacramental kitsch around it. But that it should be hung as "religious" art is unconscious black humor.

Except for the Rodin, a Matisse crucifix and some early bas-reliefs by Lucio Fontana, there is hardly a sculpture worth preserving in the whole collection.