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A research essay I wrote in 2009 - 2010
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RELI 489Supervisor: Dr Anna GadeAaron Frater300002540
Images of Jesus Christ in New Zealand 1800s - Now.
Introduction.
New Zealand is often seen as having no real religious history. Nichol says that
there is a “culturally influenced form of Christianity” in New Zealand, and we can see
where it has come from and how the teaching and ritual practices of the past have led
to the pluralistic Christianity of contemporary times.1 The focus of this essay is
primarily on British, European, and American Christ imagery as it came to New
Zealand and became part of, and was shaped by, New Zealand culture. The short
history of Christianity in New Zealand makes it relatively straight forward to survey,
but the sheer volume and variety of imagery makes it a large field. This is paper is a
selection of imagery, to demonstrate the progression from imported traditional images
to the variety of locally created contemporary imagery which illustrates the processes
of production, teaching, and response. The progression from overseas traditional
imagery to local contemporary imagery shows that the production of, teaching
functions of, and response to, depictions of Christ embody the personal and cultural
beliefs, desires, needs, projections, and learned expectations of the producers, and the
responses of the viewers.2 Production and mass production of images of Christ for
1 Christopher Nichol, James Veitch, (eds) Christopher Nichol “Introduction” Religion in New Zealand (Wellington: Victoria University, 1988) p 10 2 David Freedberg (in) David Freedberg, Oleg Grabar, Anne Higonnet ,Cecelia F. Klein, Lisa Tickner, Anthony Vidler “The Object of Art History” The Art Bulletin 76:3 (Sept, 94) pp 394 / 395
1
pedagogical and devotional use began in New Zealand as British, European, and
American imported imagery. Initially the imagery from the old world of British and
European Christianity shaped New Zealand culture, only to be shaped themselves in
contemporary times to reflect a more New Zealanders imagery of Christ in stained
glass, paintings and sculpture.
The churches and art objects, of the mostly Protestant Christianity of the 19th
century in New Zealand, are a primary source of images of Christ. Settler homes and
Maori embodiment and adoption of Christianity are another source. Early
ecclesiastical art was mostly stained glass, a very religious art form, that teaches by
embodying texts and traditional iconography. In the early 20th century William
Holman Hunt’s Light of the World came to New Zealand with a message of the
culture and piety of the Britain, arriving at a time when New Zealand was beginning
to form its own identity. It is a work that left its legacy in stained glass windows, mass
produced copies, and as a feature in Christian education of its time. Warner Sallman’s
1940 Head of Christ shows how an American image of Christ translated into mass
produced versions that became Christian pedagogical and ritual icons in its own right.
Artists of the later 20th century took images of Christ from primary in the
ecclesiastical world, into their own expressive outputs and personal quests. This
modern work shifted the pedagogical, commemorative and ritual functions from
church based to individuals, galleries and the commercial world of the wider culture.
The artist Colin McCahon and Tony Fomison were painters who put Christ in the
2
New Zealand landscape, and broke from the traditional images of their times. In the
early 21st century some contemporary artists such as: Richard Lewer, Jeffery Harris,
and Brett A’Court, continued the legacy of the artists who combined New Zealand
imagery with traditional Christ imagery. They draw on the post – modern secular art
world as much as the traditions and forms of the ecclesiastical world. As O’Grady
says, mages of Christ have:
“(t)hrough the centuries … inspired … (Christians) … ,and … (have) continued to invite new
responses in artistic form. (They are a) reminder that Christian believers from every generation and all
cultures are being led to express their own confession of Christ.”3
He also points out, most people think of an image, of an embodiment, rather than
words from a sacred text when thinking of Christ.4
An art work has a power to bring the intangible within or realm of understanding
in our highly visual culture.5 Images of Christ, artistic theology, are constructed to
encode teachings and modes of worship.6 They interact with the beholder and are
reinterpreted in light of the beliefs, desires, needs, and projections of the viewers.7
This is a “Visual Culture” way of looking at both sides of an artwork, its production
3 Ron O’Grady (ed) “Introduction” Christ for All People, Celebrating a World of Christian Art. (Auckland: Pace, 2001) p 74 Ibid p 275 Aidan Nichols O.P. “Preface” The Art of God Incarnate, Theology and Image in Christian Tradition (London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 1980) p 1 6 John A. Walker, Sarah Chaplin “The Concept of ‘the Visual’ “ (chpt 2) Visual Culture, An Introduction (New York, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997 ) pp 27 – 28 7 David Freedberg (in) David Freedberg, Oleg Grabar, Anne Higonnet ,Cecelia F. Klein, Lisa Tickner, Anthony Vidler “The Object of Art History” The Art Bulletin 76:3 (Sept, 94) pp 394 / 395
3
and reception.8 The “interaction between audience, image, and often setting”,9 is
where the sacred and the profane meet.10 It is a space where the spiritual and the
material world are perceived to come together.11 This sacred space where “layers of
meaning”12 are made between physical image and viewer is a key factor in the power
of images of Christ. As the American Christian Painter Daniel Bonnell says, “My
work is only completed by the viewer”.13 He sees his paintings as, “tools to a deeper
devotion with the Christ.”14 Art is a language that can “help us to make sense of the
faith … (in) Christ, who is central to Christianity.”15
Early New Zealand, settler communities and stained glass.
Most colonists were adherents of Christianity to one degree or another.16 They
sought to replicate the ritual and imagery of the faith of the homeland, without
replicating the political connections and control over daily life and faith of England
8 S. Brent Plate (ed) “Section Two Icon: The Image of Jesus Christ and Christian Theology” (in) Religion, Art, And Visual Culture, a cross cultural reader (New York: Palgrave, 2002) pp 54 – 55 9 Leslie Brubaker “Conclusion, Image, Audience, and Place: Interaction and Reproduction” (in) (Eds) Robert Ousterhout, Leslie Brubaker, The Sacred Image East and West (Urbana, Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1995) p20510 S. Brent Plate (ed) “Section Two Icon: The Image of Jesus Christ and Christian Theology” (in) Religion, Art, And Visual Culture, a cross cultural reader (New York: Palgrave, 2002) p 6011 Alan Morinis (ed) Sacred Journeys: The Anthropology of Pilgrimage (Connecticut, London: Greenwood press, 1992) p 412 Leslie Brubaker “Conclusion, Image, Audience, and Place: Interaction and Reproduction” (in) (Eds) Robert Ousterhout, Leslie Brubaker, The Sacred Image East and West (Urbana, Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1995) p20513 Daniel Bonnell, Returning Art to the Church, Images on Christ Project : http://iconproject.com/artist.php accessed 08 Feb 200914 Ibid 15 Aidan Nichols O.P. “Preface” The Art of God Incarnate, Theology and Image in Christian Tradition (London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 1980) pp 1 – 2 16 Ian Breward “Conclusion” Oxford History of the Christian Church, A History of the Church in Australasia (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001) p 424
4
and Europe.17 The need for a spiritual centre for settlers and a connection to the
religion of the English and European Christianity they had come from is attested to by
the number of churches, and the imagery they house, built in the then harsh rural
country areas of New Zealand. That the reception of these images and teachings
within “sacredly charged space, (which) provide(s) a complex symbolic arena within
which social identities and forms of knowledge were displayed, negotiated and
reproduced”,18 is important is shown by the large number of churches. In the
Christianity that came to New Zealand with missionaries, settlers, and pioneers,
images of Christ were primarily in stained glass, alongside some sculptural and
painted imagery. Stained glass windows were produced, and reproduced, primarily to
teach the faithful.19 It was the religious art that showed gospel stories in times of few
or no books, and limited literacy. Churches were “the ‘books of the layman’”.20 Eade
and Sallnow’s idea of looking at a sacred site through the concepts of: person (Jesus
Christ), text (the New Testament) and place (church), is a way to look at these
devotional practices.21 The production and importation of this imagery would have
been primarily under church control. The selection would have been used to support
their agenda of bringing Christ and Christianity to the new land to teach the
indigenous population and replicate the Euro-centric Christianity of the early
pioneers. Thornton says the early settlers were such a mixed and diverse group that
missionary work did not find initial acceptance, but this did not stop Christianity
17 Geoffrey Thornton, Worship in the Wilderness, Early Country Churches of New Zealand (Auckland: Reed, 2003) p 1018 Simon Coleman and John Elsner, “The Pilgrims Progress: Art, Architecture and Ritual Movement at Sinai” World Archeology 26:1 (June 94) p 7519 Hilary Brand, Adrienne Chaplin “Art and the Quest for the Spiritual” (chpt 2) Art and Soul, Signposts for Christians in the Arts, ( Carlisle, Illinois: Piquant Editions, and Intervarsity Press, 2007) p 1620 Hilary Brand, Adrienne Chaplin “Art and a Suspicious Church” (chpt 3) Art and Soul, Signposts for Christians in the Arts, ( Carlisle, Illinois: Piquant Editions, and Intervarsity Press, 2007) p 2721 John Eade, Michael Sallnow (eds) Contesting the Sacred, The Anthropology of Christian Pilgrimage (London, New York : Routledge, 1991) p 9
5
spread to all sectors of 1800s New Zealand.22 Maori had had contact with all the
denominations of Christian missionary. It was largely the power of learning the
English language, and what it could do for them in terms of trade, that attracted Maori
to the missionaries. This focus of the power of language rather than Christian belief
did not alter the fact that, as Johnston writes:
“the missionaries’ message held logical contradictions, for example, proclaiming one God but
promoting a variety of competing denominations. Such intellectual doubts, combined with the inability
of the missions to prevent widespread confiscation of land, led to a rejection of Pakeha Christianity and
the establishment of new Maori versions of it”23
In a book on one of the architects responsible for many of the churches we have
both in cities and the country of New Zealand, there is an image of a seemingly
freshly built church surrounded by recently felled trees. This house of God appearing
to have been built alongside the first clearing of the land by settlers suggests the
importance to, and the determination of, the settlers and missionaries to create theses
vessels of their own faith to allow the teaching and ritual practices, that often centred
around an image of Christ, to continue in the new land.(fig1)24 The, mostly British,
early settlers still wanted “to establish a familiar Church in their new homeland, but
without the English connection to the state.”25 Despite this desire to keep faith
separate from politics, the political and ecclesiastical elites that developed in early
New Zealand exercised power through shaping much of daily and most of ritual life 22 Geoffrey Thornton, Worship in the Wilderness, Early Country Churches of New Zealand (Auckland: Reed, 2003) p 923 Alexa M Johnston,. “Christianity in New Zealand Art” (in) Headlands, Thinking Through New Zealand Art (ed) Marry Barr (Sydney: Museum of Contemporary Art, 1992) p 10024 Susan Maclean, Architect of the Angels, The Churches of Frederick De Jersey Clere (Wellington: Steele Roberts, 2003) p 5425 Brian James Thomas, Christchurch Cathedral New Zealand (1946) p 31
6
of the colonists.26 Part of these elite was Samuel Marsden’s Anglican Church
Missionary Society (CSM), first arriving in New Zealand in 1814.27 This Evangelical
Protestant form of Christianity was fairly iconoclastic, which was one reason for the
paucity of imagery in early New Zealand Christianity. The CSM did establish a link
between church and political control as that was an accepted part of the Anglican
way.28 Anglicanism and politics were close in the old country, and continued to be as
much as possible so in the new country. Methodist, Presbyterian, Lutheran, Catholic,
and other forms of Christian missionary movements and church groups followed over
the next 20 or so years. All added to the diversity of imagery, teaching and ritual
practice in the “denominational and sectarian” Christian landscape of early New
Zealand.29
British and European forms of Christianity made a huge impact on the early
development of New Zealand; missionary contact with Maori also left a legacy. This
legacy of a form of Christianity that was seen as fully Christian, but fully Maori was
aided by Roman Catholic Christianity, which arrived some 20 years after Protestant
Christianity. Davidson says that Catholicism was more icon and image centred,
allowing a more “syncretic Maori Christianity” to form from elements of church
controlled imported doctrine and imagery as well as indigenous Maori belief and
imagery.30 These Maori Christianities produced their own systems and images.
Johnston shows examples of Maori Christian imagery dating from 1890 and 1840
26 Ian Breward “Conclusion” Oxford History of the Christian Church, A History of the Church in Australasia (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001) p 42427 Allan Davidson Christianity in Aotearoa, A History of Church and Society in New Zealand (3rd ed) (Anglican Theological Education by Extension Unit) pp 1 - 528 Ibid pp 2 - 629 Ibid pp 7, 16, 50 30 Allan Davidson Christianity in Aoteroa, A History of Church and Society in New Zealand (3rd ed) (Anglican Theological Education by Extension Unit) pp 15 -16
7
respectively. The first is a woven tukutuku image of a cross, the second is a Madonna
and Christ Child in the style of a traditional tekoteko (carved figure). (fig2)31 The
Maori Madonna and Christ Child can be seen as a unification of spiritualities and a
way for Maori to make Christian imagery there own in the tumultuous time of contact
with Christian missionaries and settlers. This is an early example of the production of
an image of Christ which is fused with indigenous New Zealand art. The fact it was
rejected as pagan by the church it was originally gifted to shows the time was not
right for the reception of such a radical thing a Maori Christ image.32This
appropriation of Christianity and its images and texts, and using them as a way of
defining Maori spirituality as opposed to Pakeha Christianity is somewhat akin to The
Virgin of Guadalupe in Mexico. The situation was different in early New Zealand; the
wars over land were not to come until the 1860s, some 45 years after missionary
contact, whereas in Mexico the missionaries came with the soldiers. For the
indigenous population of Mexico, Harrington says Guadalupe was a way for them to
wrest back some control of their world taken from them by Spain.33 Spanish decedents
and peoples of mixed blood born in the New World aspired to create a new nation
(Mexico) out of the colony of New Spain used Guadalupe as a symbol. Guadalupe, as
a syncretic deity, was like them part Spanish and part Indian, and became a national
symbol to unite people to the cause of nation building.34
31 Alexa Johnston, M. “Christianity in New Zealand Art” (in) Headlands, Thinking Through New Zealand Art (ed) Marry Barr (Sydney: Museum of Contemporary Art, 1992) p 10032 Ibid p 10033 Patricia Harrington “Mother of Death, Mother of Rebirth: The Mexican Virgin of Guadalupe” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 56:1 (Spring,88) 2634 Jeanette Favrot Peterson “The Virgin of Guadalupe: Symbol of Conquest or Liberation?” Art Journal 51:4 (Winter 92) 40
8
The 1830s and 1840s were a time of settler influx to New Zealand, and an
unparalleled population movement from the old to the new world in general.35 This
population change, the 1840 treaty of Waitangi, followed by the land wars of the
1860s; meant Maori and Pakeha continued to have divergent agendas for some long
time to come, so too Maori and Pakeha Christianities.36 There was, however, always
some cross over of ideas and imagery. Many years on from early contact between
indigenous and colonial peoples, there has been a more explicit recognition of Maori
Christian imagery. An example was the 1999 Maori Christian Art exhibition at the
cathedral of the Sacred Heart in Wellington,37 which includes reference to the Maori
Madonna and child carving. This exhibition also contained paintings by Julia B.
Lynch (1896 – 1975), also known also as Sister Mary Lawrence. The paintings in the
catalogue are of The Young Christ and The Risen Christ. In both works Christ is
depicted as Maori,38 although they more resemble traditional stained glass window
iconography and images of her time rather than anything as radical or un-Eurocentric
as the carved Madonna and Child. These are some of the few depictions of a Maori
Christ by a known artist in a catalogue, let alone in an ecclesiastical space like a
cathedral. Another Maori Christ is a stained glass window, the Sacred Heart of Jesus,
in a Catholic Church in Waihi Village, Lake Taupo.39 Like Lynch’s paintings this
image also conforms to standard stained glass iconography, a haloed Christ looking
full frontally out at the viewer, but with Maori features and colouring.
35 Paul Hudson, “English Emigration to New Zealand, 1839 – 1850: Information Diffusion and Marketing a New World” The Economic History Review, 54:4 (Nov, 01) pp 36 Allan Davidson Christianity in Aoteroa, A History of Church and Society in New Zealand (3rd ed) (Anglican Theological Education by Extension Unit) pp 16 - 1837 38 Catalogue “Maori Christian Art” March 28 – April 4 1999, Sacred Heart cathedral Wellington39 Marist Messenger (Aug: 07), inside cover
9
Stained glass windows were produced mostly as a way to teach the faithful.40
They are an art form that portrays the approved story of the life of Christ to church
goers.41 The earliest British and European representations of Christ in New Zealand
are primarily stained glass and some sculpture in churches, mostly dating from after
the 1840s immigration surge. Many of the churches housing these images were rebuilt
several times on the same site. Some of them retained original stained glass through
phases of reconstruction; others have numerous artistic and architectural additions.
The earliest windows were imports, presenting only values and images of the old
world. One example is in the church of The Holy Passion in Amberley is Canterbury,
New Zealand, 42 that replicates imagery found in windows in Canterbury Cathedral,
Kent, England.43 Much of this information comes from Fiona Ciaran’s extensive
catalogue of the stained glass of Canterbury churches.44 According to Ciaran, the
earliest stained glass windows installed in this part of New Zealand is a Guardian
Angel, one of a series of windows put into the Barbados Street Cemetery Chapel in
1863.45 A later window in this series, The Risen Christ (fig3) was installed in
1868.46This Risen Christ image is one of the earliest dateable images of Christ still in
existence in New Zealand. It is of a haloed, beared white man in three quarter profile.
This is somewhat unusual as a full frontal representation with halo predominated at
that time. The facing forward looking out style of Christ image common in that time
was a way of depicting Christ that can be traced back to early Christianity. Temple
40 Hilary Brand, Adrienne Chaplin “Art and the Quest for the Spiritual” (chpt 2) Art and Soul, Signposts for Christians in the Arts, ( Carlisle, Illinois: Piquant Editions, and Intervarsity Press, 2007) p 1641 Hilary Brand, Adrienne Chaplin “Art and a Suspicious Church” (chpt 3) Art and Soul, Signposts for Christians in the Arts, ( Carlisle, Illinois: Piquant Editions, and Intervarsity Press, 2007) p 2742 Fiona Ciaran, Stained Glass Windows of Canterbury, New Zealand (Dunedin: University of Otago Press, 1998) p 3043 Fiona Ciaran, Stained Glass Windows of Canterbury, New Zealand (Dunedin: University of Otago Press, 1998) p 3344 Fiona Ciaran, Stained Glass Windows of Canterbury, New Zealand (Dunedin: University of Otago Press, 1998)45 Ibid p 2946 Ibid p 89
10
writes of The Sinai Christ, an icon painted in around AD 600.47 This icon is one of
the earliest of its kind, and it influenced both Eastern icons and Western Christ images
across many media, including stained glass. The Sinai Christ has the halo with cross
that was one of the markers of Christ’s special holiness. This too dates from early in
the Christian era, originating around AD 400 and persisting into Gothic art in the 18th
and 19th centuries.48 It is only natural then that The Risen Christ in Canterbury should
have this, as much early New Zealand imagery was Gothic Revival, a style popular in
the mid 1800s. Another feature originating around 500 years after Christ, that has
remained fairly consistent, was the depicting of Christ as bearded and long haired.
Porter links this to the influence the bearded images of Christ in the acheiropoietic, or
not man made images, of the Veil that Veronica used to wipe Christs face, the
Mandylion, and the Shroud of Turin had on artists in early Christianity supplanting
very early clean shaven Christ imagery.49 The Sinai image is not too dissimilar to
many haloed Christ’s looking out at the viewer, a style which persists down the ages.
In a similar style to The Risen Christ, the Holy Trinity Church in Littleton has a
large three panel window, The Risen Christ with St Peter, St Paul and St John the
Baptist, c.1865.(fig4)50 These two windows and The Pieta in the church of The Holy
Passion in Amberley, 1864 – 65 (fig5), 51 are in the Gothic Revival style. They draw
from English and French influences and having essentially no New Zealand input.
47 Richard Temple “The Sinai Christ” (chpt 9) Icons and the Mystical Origins of Christianity (Dorset: Element Books, 1990) pp 92 – 93 48 J. R. Porter, “Jesus in Art” (chpt 5) Jesus Christ, The Jesus of History, The Christ of Faith (London: Duncan Baird. 1994) pp 208 – 209 49 J. R. Porter, “Jesus in Art” (chpt 5) Jesus Christ, The Jesus of History, The Christ of Faith (London: Duncan Baird. 1994) p 21450 Fiona Ciaran, Stained Glass Windows of Canterbury, New Zealand (Dunedin: University of Otago Press, 1998) p 9351 Fiona Ciaran, Stained Glass Windows of Canterbury, New Zealand (Dunedin: University of Otago Press, 1998) p 33
11
These kinds of images in churches are traditionally illustrative of gospel stories, or are
images of Christ’s celestial power.52 The Pieta is an image of Christ just taken down
from the cross before he has risen. It is an image that teaches a piety of care for the
suffering Christ, owing its inspiration to a traditional depiction of Christ, the Stations
of the Cross.53 The Pieta in Canterbury, New Zealand, has some imagery in common
with windows in Canterbury Cathedral, Kent, England.54 This demonstrates a link
between the established imagery from the home countries and the imagery the church
selected for churches in New Zealand. These images of Christ from the old countries
would reinforce the link to the Christian traditions of Europe and England,
maintaining a connection to, and spiritual authority from, the old world in the
colonised new world of pioneer New Zealand. Also, all three windows were designed
and made by London firms. There is a progression of different eras of imagery of
Christ in early New Zealand stained glass, and church art, coming with the various
denominations and waves of migration.55 In Canterbury, and New Zealand in general,
these eras are initially Gothic Revival of the early churches, to Art and Crafts
Movement in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, to the work of contemporary artists
in both ecclesiastical and secular image production and display.56
St John the Evangelist church in the Canterbury area was built by a wealthy
landowner to be “the spiritual focus of the community” he wanted to build for his
52 Heather Child, Dorothy Colles Christian Symbols, Ancient and Modern (London: G. Bell and Sons, 1971) p 6453 Ibid p 7454 Fiona Ciaran, Stained Glass Windows of Canterbury, New Zealand (Dunedin: University of Otago Press, 1998) p 3055 Allan Davidson Christianity in Aoteroa, A History of Church and Society in New Zealand (3rd ed) (Anglican Theological Education by Extension Unit) pp 30 - 5056 Fiona Ciaran, Stained Glass Windows of Canterbury, New Zealand (Dunedin: University of Otago Press, 1998) pp 23 - 41
12
employees.57 Thornton writes of how John Cathcart Wason planted trees, made a town
centre to create a functional village environment, while deliberately having the church
as a main focus of the settlement, showing again how important a sacred space for
ritual, worship, and, the teaching of Christianity through texts and images was to the
early settlers.58 This small country church was finished in 1877, and consecrated in
1882. The main image of Christ is a stained glass window of Christ The Good
Shepherd. The Good Shepherd is a traditional image with a long history. It is an early
Christian image of caring and salvation. Child and Colles write of it being one of a
number of images found in one of the earliest known Christian churches, the church
“at Dura Europos dating from around AD 230”.59 Early Good shepherd images were
beardless, but became bearded as most Christ imagery did after around the middle of
the first millennium. A church of a similar era to St John the Evangelist is St
Michael’s Anglican church in the Nelson region. It was originally built in 1842 by
local land owners.60 The original was, Wells says one of the first Anglican churches in
Nelson, and possibly the South Island.61 The second version, built in 1866 has a
window of The Ascending Christ, with his upraised arms and attendant angles;62 this is
similar to other “Ascension” images in Ciaran’s survey of windows in Canterbury
churches.63 The St Michael’s window was a later addition that was designed in New
Zealand, but manufactured in England in the 1920s. It has some New Zealand
inspiration in its iconography but is still a design and a physical product of the old
57 Geoffrey Thornton, Worship in the Wilderness, Early Country Churches of New Zealand (Auckland: Reed, 2003) p 11858 Geoffrey Thornton, Worship in the Wilderness, Early Country Churches of New Zealand (Auckland: Reed, 2003) pp 118 – 119 59 Heather Child, Dorothy Colles Christian Symbols, Ancient and Modern (London: G. Bell and Sons, 1971) p 10660 Annette Wells, Nelson’s Historic Country Churches (Nikau Press, 2003) p2361 Annette Wells, Nelson’s Historic Country Churches (Nikau Press, 2003) p2362 Heather Child, Dorothy Colles Christian Symbols, Ancient and Modern (London: G. Bell and Sons, 1971) p 8163 Fiona Ciaran, Stained Glass Windows of Canterbury, New Zealand (Dunedin: University of Otago Press, 1998) p 214
13
countries. There was some shift by this time to New Zealand design of images of
Christ to be used in churches in New Zealand.
Wells writes of another church in the Nelson area and its imagery with a lifespan
similar to St John the Evangelist’s and St Michael’s. This is the Lutheran church of St
John. This church contains a centrally placed crucifix that is unusual in having its
head to the left, rather than the more traditional right. 64 Sculptural images like this are
less prominent than stained glass windows in most church imagery. Carvings and
metal work are often seen as a lesser art form, “on the boundaries of craft art and fine
art and as such tend not to be as written about as often as paintings and stained glass.65
Despite this fact, they are often central to altars, which are a main focus of ritual and
teaching in Christian churches. Sculptural works are primarily crucifixes which
generally portray Christ upon the cross, bearded slim and pain wracked. There are
examples where a crucifix stained glass image, rather than a sculpture, is a central
focus. One example is: the church of St John the Evangelist near Marton in the lower
North Island,66 designed by Frederick de Jersey Clere, who was known as a builder of
churches mostly in the North Island from the 1880s till near his death in 1952.67 The
window is placed centrally behind the altar, or sanctuary end of the church, elevated
and within an architectural structure that focuses the gaze upon the crucified Christ.
As with many windows and sculptures, its placement suggests its power as much as
the text it refers to, or the fact that it is an image of the person of Jesus Christ. Old
64 Annette Wells, Nelson’s Historic Country Churches (Nikau Press, 2003) pp 55 - 5865 Mark, Stocker Angels and Roses, The art of Fredrick George Gurnsey (Christchurch: Canterbury University Press, 1997) p 1266 Geoffrey Thornton, Worship in the Wilderness, Early Country Churches of New Zealand (Auckland: Reed, 2003) pp 93 – 96 67 Susan Maclean, Architect of the Angels, The Churches of Frederick De Jersey Clere (Wellington: Steele Roberts, 2003) pp 7 - 27
14
Saint Paul’s in Wellington also has a Christ Crucified window as its main focus in its
sanctuary.68 The Crucifixion image of Christ is a traditional image. It dates from a
medieval form of piety reflecting a relationship to Christ that focuses more on his
suffering as his way to redeem humanity, than on the more caring, nurturing
redemption of the Good Shepherd and The Ascending Christ imagery.69 Stained glass
imagery of Christ has always been a central focus of the physical church in or near its
central altar. This applies to the crucifix, whether sculptural or two dimensional, as
well. Both are tangible markers of the sacred. They convey the idea that here is the
place of Christ, the place to commune with the divine.
The crucifix, while present in the Anglican churches of Nelson, does not seem to
be a central focus as it does in the Lutheran churches, and even more so in the
Catholic churches. Troughton says the crucifix was a “principle ornament” in Catholic
churches, and that this devotion to Jesus’ suffering was central to Catholic
understanding of Christ’s message.70 In the Catholic approach to images of Christ an
emphasis on the sacrifice and suffering of Christ, which was how he showed his love
for humanity was taught. Revering depictions of the Crucifixion and similar imagery
was seen as the correct way to engage with images of Christ. Another ubiquitous
Catholic image is the Sacred Heart of Christ. This is an image where he bares the
symbolic heart / cross / fire symbol on his chest, which represents the spirit of Christs
love.71 The Sacred Heart image has been in New Zealand as long as Catholics have.
Bishop Pompallier, celebrated the first Catholic mass in New Zealand in January 68 Inner cover, Heritage New Zealand 102 (Spring 06)69 Heather Child, Dorothy Colles Christian Symbols, Ancient and Modern (London: G. Bell and Sons, 1971) pp 74 – 75 70 Geoffrey Troughton, Jesus in New Zealand c. 1900 – 1940, Thesis (Massey University, 2007) pp 44 - 4671 Geoffrey Troughton, Jesus in New Zealand c. 1900 – 1940, Thesis (Massey University, 2007) p 46
15
1838. One panel of his “travelling alter” was a depiction of the Sacred Heart of
Christ.72 The first Catholic church in Murchison, St Peter Chanel’s,73 has a picture of
Jesus with the flaming Sacred Heart, next to a silver and wood crucifix atop a carved
wooden alter, as its central focus.74 These and other artworks in the church of St Peter
Chanel’s, such as a statue of Mary standing on a serpent, “using her good to stop the
spread of evil”, show the more iconic and complex nature of Catholic imagery. The
reception of Catholic imagery depended to a large extent upon being taught to read
the images, to get the full message in them. This is more so in Catholic than Protestant
imagery.75 The interplay between viewer and physical art work tends to be a more
overt thing in a Catholic setting. Catholicism’s richer iconographic tradition are a
legacy of their long history reaching from the fall of Rome till around the 16th century
and the rise of the more iconoclastic Protestant traditions.76Catholicism’s more user
friendly approach to imagery meant there was always more imagery of Christ in their
early churches. This kataphatic tradition of Catholicism,77 the using of images as
analogies to teach the faithful how to relate to Christ, holds to a large degree up to
contemporary times.
Another church of a similar era to St Michael’s and St John’s in the Nelson area
is the Lutheran church of St Paul’s. St Paul’s has a crucifix centrally placed on its
altar, this one with head to the right; it also contains a celebrated painted image of
72 Michael King, Gods Farthest Outpost, A History of Catholics in New Zealand (Aucklan: Viking, 1997) p 4673 Annette Wells, Nelson’s Historic Country Churches (Nikau Press, 2003) pp 157 - 16074 Ibid pp 159 - 16075 Ibid pp 159 - 16076 Hilary Brand, Adrienne Chaplin “Art and a Suspicious Church” (chpt 3) Art and Soul, Signposts for Christians in the Arts, ( Carlisle, Illinois: Piquant Editions, and Intervarsity Press, 2007) p 2777 Barbara Mujica,” Beyond Image: The Apophatic-Kataphatic Dialectic in Teresa de Avila” Hispania 84: 4 (Dec: 01) p 741
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Christ.78 The painting is the Crown of Thorns, 1875 by Gottfried Lindauer (1839 –
1926). Lindauer came to New Zealand in 1873 and is best known for his accurate
renderings of Maori life in his time.79 Before coming to New Zealand he was a painter
of religious themes for Catholic churches in Poland and Russia.80 His Crown of
Thorns and his association with things Maori and New Zealand in general are a
precursor of sorts to McCahon and Fomison in their associations of Christ with things
native to New Zealand. The Crown of Thorns painting is akin to the harsher, piety of
the Crucifixion. The Crown of Thorns is a treasured possession of the church, and was
at one time a central image of devotion to parishioners. (fig6)81 The painting of the
person of Christ in his suffering is an illustration of “the telling of … (a) …gospel
story”,82 sited within the vessel of the sacred, a church. It is where worshiper and
image come together. This way of looking at the person of Christ and the text it
depicts to teach the viewer and the place it is shown are factors in the power accorded
to Lindauer’s work,83 and as I will argue so to in The Light of the World’s success as a
religious icon. This work shows the idea that, producers of images often have specific
agendas to promote through images of Christ, but that those messages are received in
a variety ways some intended some not.
The Light of the World and 20 th century stained glass.
78 Annette Wells, Nelson’s Historic Country Churches (Nikau Press, 2003) pp 59 - 6479 Stewart Bell MacLennan, http://www.teara.govt.nz/1966/L/LindauerGottfriedOrBohumir/LindauerGottfriedOrBohumir/en accessed 24 May 09 80 Bernard John Foster, http://www.teara.govt.nz/1966/L/LindauerGottfriedOrBohumir/LindauerGottfriedOrBohumir/en accessed 24 May 09 81 Annette Wells, Nelson’s Historic Country Churches (Nikau Press, 2003) pp 63 - 6482 Hilary Brand, Adrienne Chaplin “Art and the Quest for the Spiritual” (chpt 2) Art and Soul, Signposts for Christians in the Arts, ( Carlisle, Illinois: Piquant Editions, and Intervarsity Press, 2007) p 1683 John Eade, Michael Sallnow (eds) Contesting the Sacred, The Anthropology of Christian Pilgrimage (London, New York : Routledge, 1991) p 9
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The Light of the World’s message was intended to be both a religious, and a
Durkheimian “social unifier and moral regenerator”84 from the Protestant home lands
to the colonies.85 The Light of the World (fig7), and its subsequent use in stained glass
windows, post cards, newspaper reproductions,86 etc is a good example of a Christ
image of its time that was produced with a specific agenda, was received and
responded to as intended by some, but not all. It shows how the teaching agenda of
the work, and the ritual like viewing of it, helped create the sacredness accorded to it
by many.87 It was an image that engendered social and religious identity negotiation
akin to the process of contestation Eade and Sallnow describe for sacred spaces
(which are often themselves vessels for sacred images). They say: “the sacred powers
of a shrine are constructed as varied and possibly conflicting representations by the
different sectors of the cultic constituency as well as those outside it.”88 The Light of
the World had an effect on its intended constituency, as well as the culture in general,
both as an artwork that toured New Zealand just over 100 years ago as well as
reproductions that permeate the landscape of Christian imagery in New Zealand to the
present day.
84 John Eade, Michael Sallnow (eds) Contesting the Sacred, The Anthropology of Christian Pilgrimage (London, New York : Routledge, 1991) p 385 Geoffrey Troughton. ‘The Light of the World’ At the end of the World, 1906 The Journal of New Zealand Art History 28 (2007) p 5 86 Ibid p 1287 Geoffrey Troughton. ‘The Light of the World’ At the end of the World, 1906 The Journal of New Zealand Art History 28 (2007) pp 1-2 88 John Eade, Michael Sallnow (eds) Contesting the Sacred, The Anthropology of Christian Pilgrimage (London, New York : Routledge, 1991) p 5
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The painting was billed as both a masterwork of British, “great art”, and a
“sermon in oils”.89 Holman Hunt was a Pre-Raphaelite painter, and the work had the
idealisation and “commitment to meaningful art” that the Pre-Raphaelites espoused as
being the only “good art”.90 This is akin to Romanticism’s focus on the “holy’, or
meaningful, in humanity and nature.91 Both idealised humanity and nature feature in
the image. Others saw The Light of the World more as an example of “mawkish
piety”,92 being too idealised. The image was legitimated before it arrived in New
Zealand by both Ruskin’s famous letter to the Times lauding the work,93 and the idea
of the time that British art was “inherently superior”.94 Keith writes of the 1906 – 07
Christchurch International Exhibition, where The Light of the World was exhibited for
its longest stretch in New Zealand, as one of the markers of when the buying of
primarily British art was cemented in the early gallery and museum culture of New
Zealand.95 These artistic institutions, as The Light of the World’s showing in halls and
galleries demonstrated, would become places where images of Christ would be seen,
almost as much as churches. Up until the mid to late1900s it was primarily British
imagery like The Light of the World that was seen, until this dominance was
challenged by New Zealand artists.
89 Geoffrey Troughton. ‘The Light of the World’ At the end of the World, 1906 The Journal of New Zealand Art History 28 (2007) pp 4, 10 90 Ibid p 2 91 Hilary Brand, Adrienne Chaplin “Art and the Quest for the Spiritual” (chpt 2) Art and Soul, Signposts for Christians in the Arts, ( Carlisle, Illinois: Piquant Editions, and Intervarsity Press, 2007) pp 17 - 2092 Geoffrey Troughton. ‘The Light of the World’ At the end of the World, 1906 The Journal of New Zealand Art History 28 (2007) p 793 Mark Roskill “Hollman Hunt’s Differing versions of the “Light of the World” Victorian Studies 6: 3 (Mar, 63) p23594Geoffrey Troughton. ‘The Light of the World’ At the end of the World, 1906 The Journal of New Zealand Art History 28 (2007) p 4 95 Hamish Keith, The Big Picture, A History of New Zealand art from 1642 (Auckland: Random House, 2007) p 96
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The figure of Christ looks remarkably like the painter himself in the first two
versions of The Light of the World, of 1851 - 53 and 1857.96 Consciously or
unconsciously he seems to be making Christ in his own image. The paintings were
spurred, in the first instance, by Hunt’s “religious awakening or conversion”,97 so it
seems only natural he would place something of himself in his image. The third
version that came to New Zealand seems to resemble the artist less than the first two.
This last version of the work, produced near the end of the artists life, was made more
to be “accessible to the public at large”, rather than as a statement of personal piety.
This is possibly why it resembles the artist less than the first two paintings. Christ was
still depicted as white, bearded, and radiant, a perfect human male, idealised, and
marked as divine in many ways. The Christ in this image is haloed, robed, emanating
divine light and love. The Light of the World was a visual presentation of a human
Christ, but still an idealised Christ, not to dissimilar to the beatific risen Christ’s of
earlier stained glass windows.98 Temple says external sources of light represent the
inner / divine light, a concept so taken for granted that it is more a visual cliché or
convention than an emblem of divinity.99 Light and light sources were often used to
indicate the grace of divinity in Christian artwork.100 This seems to be the case in
Hunt’s work. The lamp and the glow it casts as the Christ figure knocks on the door of
the human is integral to the image.
96 Mark Roskill “Hollman Hunt’s Differing versions of the “Light of the World” Victorian Studies 6: 3 (Mar, 63) fig1 and fig2 97 Geoffrey Troughton. ‘The Light of the World’ At the end of the World, 1906 The Journal of New Zealand Art History 28 (2007) p 2 98 Mark Roskill “Hollman Hunt’s Differing versions of the “Light of the World” Victorian Studies 6: 3 (Mar, 63) p 23899 Richard Temple “The Sinai Mother of God: an Image of Celestial Light and Spiritual War” (chpt 10) Icons and the Mystical Origins of Christianity (Dorset: Element Books, 1990) pp 98 - 99100 Alexa M. Johnston “God talk – McCahon and Theology” (in) Colin McCahon, Gates and Journeys (Auckland: Academy Press, 1988) pp 64 - 65
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This image was of a Christ freed somewhat of tradition, but still linked to
scriptural legitimacy.101 The painting drew its imagery from Revelation 3:20, so its
textual link was obvious to the faithful.102 As well as this teaching of scripture, it was
intended to be of a personal Jesus for all individuals. This appealed to the largely
protestant Christianity of New Zealand, with its focus on individual religious
experience, rather than on the communal worship within a vessel like a church.103
Protestant piety was more centred on individual’s relationship to Christ, so this kind
of “human Christ” of The Light of the World appealed more to Protestant
Christians.104 A communal form of worship would have been more the norm in settler
times amongst most believers. Amongst the Catholic form of Christianity in the early
1900s, communal worship would still have been the norm as communal piety was
emphasised in Catholicism. The human Christ or Son of Man fitted the trends of
humanism and Darwinianism at the time, with its focus on individual knowing and
individual relating to the world.105 O’Grady says the changes and loosening of social
bonds in the secularisation and industrialisation of the 19th and 20th centuries led artists
to depict a Christ who the people could identify with, a human Christ.106 This Jesus, as
manifested in Hunt’s image, was no pioneer, nor social reformer, nor Christ on the
cross suffering for humanity, but a “gentle, pleading saviour seeking redemption and
reconciliation” in the domain of the middle class.107 Early 1900s New Zealand was a
101 Stephen Prohero, American Jesus, How the Son of God Became a National Icon, (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003) pp 11 -13102 Geoffrey Troughton. ‘The Light of the World’ At the end of the World, 1906 The Journal of New Zealand Art History 28 (2007) pp 10 - 11103 Geoffrey Troughton. ‘The Light of the World’ At the end of the World, 1906 The Journal of New Zealand Art History 28 (2007) p 11104 Ian Breward “Conclusion”Oxford History of the Christian Church, A History of the Church in Australasia (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001) p 425105 Stephen Prohero, American Jesus, How the Son of God Became a National Icon, (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003) pp 11 -13106 Ron O’Grady (ed) Christ for All People, Celebrating a World of Christian Art. (Auckland: Pace, 2001) p 25107 Geoffrey Troughton. ‘The Light of the World’ At the end of the World, 1906 The Journal of New Zealand Art History 28 (2007) p 8
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time of change, secularisation, urbanisation, industrialisation and more
immigration.108 There was a rise in white collar work, and a reorganising of blue
collar labouring and farming work.109 The rise of a middle class would certainly allow
more people the leisure to go to an art exhibition for their religion, rather than just to
churches. The early settlers would likely have only had time to go to churches, and
even then most likely only on Sundays and special events, given the rigours of the
pioneer life. Going to see The Light of the World, which came to colonial New
Zealand from the mother country like a prophet, was akin to a pilgrimage for many.110
Viewing such an image in galleries and halls was “for most … in some way a
religious experience”. Of the comments recorded from the New Zealand tour, many
are of religious and spiritual uplift, showing its power as a piece of material piety.111
The sentimental piety of this image and the largely positive reception it received
gave it great power and mystique as an icon. Dianna Hollman – Hunt describes her
grandfather’s work as “the ‘Protestant icon’ ... (e)ven during the Second World War.
… (B)ut Van Gogh’s Sunflowers had taken over in the thirties … (from The Light of
the World as) the most popular picture in the world after the Mona Lisa”.112 Not
everyone perceived the work and its message in such a rapturous manner in New
Zealand. Most notably Wellington did not receive the “religious mission” of the tour
108 Lloyd Geering, 2100: A Faith Odyssey. The Changing Face of Religion in New Zealand (Wellington: St Andrews Trust for the Study of Religion and Society, 1995) pp 15 – 18 109 Errik Olsen, Tom Brooking, Brian Heenan, Hamish James, Bruce McLennan, Clyde Griffen “Urban Society and the Opportunity Structure in New Zealand, 1902-22: The Caversham Project” Social History 24:1 (Jan, 99) pp 40 - 43110 David Freedberg, “Image and Pilgrimage” Chpt 6 (in) The Power of Images, Studies in the History and Theory of Response (Chicago, London: The University of Chicago Press, 1989) p 92111 Geoffrey Troughton. ‘The Light of the World’ At the end of the World, 1906 The Journal of New Zealand Art History 28 (2007) pp 6 - 11112 Dianna Hollman – Hunt “Introduction” Anne Clark Amor William Hollman Hunt, The True Pre – Raphaelite, (London: Constable, 1989) p 8
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as well as other centres did. Wellington was regarded even in 1906 as a more secular
city than most in New Zealand.113 Auckland, Christchurch and Dunedin recorded huge
attendance rates at its showings in halls and galleries.114 This diversity of response
showed the relaxed attitude to religious practice in New Zealand of the 1900s.115 The
veneration accorded the painting, despite the fact that not everybody saw it as an
image of piety, showed that Jesus still had a central place in the culture of the time.116
Jesus was still an important focus for: “popular religious sentiment and a locus of
moral authority. Jesus was upheld as the archetype and symbol of true religion, and
represented society’s yearning for all that was noble and true.”117 This dynamic seems
to have played out in The Light of the World’s time in New Zealand, as Morgan says
images teach and “shape the thinking and feeling of those who use them by giving
visual presence to the institutional structures that configure the public and private
worlds in which they live”.118 Reception theory puts meaning making in the hands of
the audience’s interpretation, rather than the creator’s intention.119 Both the intention
of the maker and reception of an audience still largely culturally Christian, is
important in an image like The Light of the World. Troughton citing Colleen
McDannell in reference to the tour of Light of the World says “Protestant religiosity
utilises material culture, despite its theologically ambivalent attitude toward it.”120 The
work was seen by its owner and the funder of tour, Charles Booth (1840 – 1916), and
113 Geoffrey Troughton. ‘The Light of the World’ At the end of the World, 1906 The Journal of New Zealand Art History 28 (2007) p 6 114 Ibid p 3115 Ibid p 12116 Geoffrey Troughton. ‘The Light of the World’ At the end of the World, 1906 The Journal of New Zealand Art History 28 (2007) p 12117 Ibid p 7118 David Morgan, Imaging Protestant Piety: The Icons of Warner Sallman Religion and American Culture 3:1 (Winter, 93) p 30119 Jack Ayers Reception Theory, Literacy Theory Dr. David Jolliffe http://jolliffereadingtheory.blogspot.com/2009/05/reception-theory.html Accessed 04 July 09120 Geoffrey Troughton. ‘The Light of the World’ At the end of the World, 1906 The Journal of New Zealand Art History 28 (2007) p 2
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in much of the commentary on it its reception in New Zealand, as the exemplar of
British Protestantism that Hunt intended to be.121
The legacy of The Light of the World was seen then, and still to a degree today,
in reproduction. Its popularity both in its homeland and New Zealand meant it was
widely reproduced in England and here in New Zealand.122 It is found within church
culture as stained glass windows. In stained glass, Ciaran’s catalogue lists seventeen
windows based on The Light of the World image.123 A number of these pair The Light
of the World image and The Good Shepherd image as windows, many being
memorials to dead soldiers.124 The Good Shepherd images, she says were based on
various different artists interpretations of this traditional image.125 These were mostly
from catalogues, mass produced images from England, Europe and Australia, and
later from studios in New Zealand. One of these paired Christ images is listed as the
first New Zealand made window installed in Canterbury c.1897-98.126 The Light of the
World of this pair would have been based on one of the two previous versions of the
painting, rather than the image that toured New Zealand.127 Churches in the North
Island, in Auckland and Cambridge had Light of the World windows installed from
the late 1920s onwards.128 After World War One there was a general rise in the use of
this image, alongside a rise in memorial windows.129 Ciaran says that the function of
121 Ibid pp 4 -5122 Mike Harding, A little Book of Stained Glass (London: Atrum Press, 1998) p 30123 Geoffrey Troughton. ‘The Light of the World’ At the end of the World, 1906 The Journal of New Zealand Art History 28 (2007) p 12124 Fiona Ciaran, Stained Glass Windows of Canterbury, New Zealand (Dunedin: University of Otago Press, 1998) pp 22, 35125 Ibid p 22126 Ibid p35127 Geoffrey Troughton. ‘The Light of the World’ At the end of the World, 1906 The Journal of New Zealand Art History 28 (2007) p 12128 Ibid p 12129 Ibid p 12
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the windows in Canterbury, and nation wide, were commemorative as much as
devotional and educational.130 Images of Jesus Christ used to commemorate fallen
heroes, founding fathers, wealthy patrons, etc, are a strong statement.131 This
commemorative function adds to the layers of meaning. In the space where such
images are viewed, there is the acknowledgement of the hurts of war as well as the
layers of tradition of the window form, the iconography of Christ, and any text or
moral the image may be teaching.
The Light of the World became one of the most recognisable, widely spread, and
deeply entrenched images in New Zealand religious material culture in its day.132 The
power of reproduction is important in reception of images of Christ in the modern age,
as it allows for mass dissemination of images and their messages. It allows them a life
within ecclesiastical and secular worlds that pure original ecclesiastical art does not
have. Ernest Shea’s postcards were a good example of this. They were widely sold
and allowed the image to enter private houses, shops, etc. Major newspapers Like the
Canterbury Times printed reproductions of the painting for mass consumption.133
Brubaker writes that: “although “the sacred” is culturally defined, the participation of
the audience creates its layers of meaning”.134 The Light of the World had the
Christian symbology and multi layered connotations to its viewers that created a
130 Fiona Ciaran, Stained Glass Windows of Canterbury, New Zealand (Dunedin: University of Otago Press, 1998) p 22131 Michael W Jennings,. Brigid Doherty, Thomas Y Levin,. (eds) Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility and Other Writings on Media (Massachusetts, London: Belknap Press, 2008) p 15132 Geoffrey Troughton. ‘The Light of the World’ At the end of the World, 1906 The Journal of New Zealand Art History 28 (2007) p 11 133 Ibid p 11134 Leslie Brubaker, “Conclusion, Image, Audience, and Place: Interaction and Reproduction” (chpt) 11( eds) Robert Ousterhout, Leslie Brubaker, The Sacred Image East and West (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1995) p 205
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“sacredly charged” image. This image had a large impact on its many of its viewers.135
Colleen McDannell writes of the need to look at the production, distribution, and use
of material religious culture to understand religious practice and meaning making.136
This is the “crush zone” of the tectonic plates of individuals, culture, religion and
images. As well as in stained glass, The Light of the World would have been found in
Sunday school images, postcards, and prints. To this day these reproductions can be
found in churches as framed prints, reredos panels, as well as stained glass
windows.137 It is perhaps less known as a Protestant icon, a “gentle humanist
saviour”, that toured New Zealand in the early 20th century and more like the next
example, Sallman’s Head of Christ, as an overseas made, image with a message,
amongst many found in churches of all denominations in New Zealand.
Head of Christ , Protestant imagery and ideology.
Of American origin, the image of the Head of Christ, 1940 (fig8) by Warner
Sallman is an iconic image of Christ that can be found in churches, religious
institutions, and homes in New Zealand. It is found not quite to the same extent as in
the United States, but nonetheless it is a mass produced image of Christ that has a
presence in many contexts. Like The Light of the World, the Head of Christ is said to
have a quality that gives the beholder an immediate experience of Christ, 138 it is said
135 Simon Coleman and John Elsner, “The Pilgrims Progress: Art, Architecture and Ritual Movement at Sinai, World Archeology 26:1 (June 94) p 75136 Robert A.Orsi, George Marsden, David W. Wills, Colleen McDannell “Forum: The Decade Ahead in Scholarship” Religion and American Culture 3:1 (Winter, 93) pp 24 , 27137 Geoffrey Troughton. ‘The Light of the World’ At the end of the World, 1906 The Journal of New Zealand Art History 28 (2007) pp 11 – 12 138 David Morgan “Imaging Protestant Piety: The Icons of Warner Sallman”, Religion and American Culture, 3: 1 (Winter, 93) p 34
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to “resemble the real Jesus”. It is an image responded to as iconic, both personally and
in its teaching capacity, by many Christians. The Head of Christ, along with images
like The Light of the World, and the Catholic Sacred Heart of Christ are images that
have teaching aspects, inspire reverence, and cross boundaries, to Christians of all
kind, and Western culture in general.139 The plural sectarian nature of Christianity in
New Zealand made this crossing of boundaries easier than it may have been in
cultures where one form of Christianity dominates. 140 Also, modern mass production
made it possible for both believers and the ambient culture to own texts and images of
Christ by this time.141 Images of Christ had become more accessible to all, and not
just in the teaching and ritual spaces of the church. The images teach the faithful, as
much as the beholders project their ideas onto the images. In the general culture, even
the most atheistic person has a reaction of some kind to images of Christ. Freedberg
says an image has power derived from its relations with those who behold (gaze) at
them.142 The power attributed to the Head of Christ has lead to it being: “placed in the
sanctuary of Protestant churches, (as it) is so highly regarded as a compelling portrait
of Jesus”.143 Predominantly Protestant New Zealand has prints of the Head of Christ
in its Christian material culture. One of these being a large framed reproduction of the
Head of Christ is, opposite the sanctuary in the CCCS church, Newtown,
Wellington.144 In this church it is not quite as central as the American example but it
hangs prominently over the entry way, being the last thing seen as worshipers file out
139 Nicholas Lobkowicz, “Christianity and Culture” The Review of Politics 53:2 (Spring, 91) pp 373 - 389140 Lloyd Geering, 2100: A Faith Odyssey. The Changing Face of Religion in New Zealand (Wellington: St Andrews Trust for the Study of Religion and Society, 1995) p 9141 Ibid p 9142 David Freedberg (in) David Freedberg, Oleg Grabar, Anne Higonnet ,Cecelia F. Klein, Lisa Tickner, Anthony Vidler “The Object of Art History” The Art Bulletin 76:3 (Sept, 94) pp 394 / 395143 David Morgan “Imaging Protestant Piety: The Icons of Warner Sallman”, Religion and American Culture, 3: 1 (Winter, 93) p32144 Betty Kathleen Duncan, A Hierachy of Symbols: Samoan Religious Symbolism in New Zealand, thesis (University of Otago, 1994)
27
in a heightened state after a church service. This would guarantee a strong reaction to,
and connection with the image for the congregation of this church.
Morgan says that this image does not offend protestant iconoclastic sensibilities
in that it is a “highly legible” image that conveys an essence of Christ, and what it is
to be a Protestant American, which should inspire all to follow its example.145 It is an
image of what was central to the American Protestant life of its time, a primarily
middle - class private affirmation of the everyday Jesus who ‘should’ be central to
Christian life.146 This is akin to The Light of the World imparting a British ideal of
Protestant piety some half a century previously. America had become as important, if
not more so, on the world stage over the time between the two images. Prothero writes
of the rise of Jesus in the 19th and 20th centuries as the central icon and focus of
veneration in American Protestant Christianity.147 In a way similar to The Light of the
World, Head of Christ showed and taught a Jesus focused, American, Protestantism to
the rest of the world. Despite the Protestant focus on text and suspicion of icons as
artefacts of Catholicism and Eastern Christianity, the Head of Christ was seen as an
acceptable image. An Eastern or Catholic icon traditionally mediated between the
human and sacred worlds; it was seen as “transparent”.148 Miles describes this
transparent translation, using unique religious art works, from mortal to spiritual
worlds, as being primarily a way of “describing humanities relationship to God
145 David Morgan “Imaging Protestant Piety: The Icons of Warner Sallman”, Religion and American Culture, 3: 1 (Winter, 93) pp 40 - 41146 Ibid pp 32 -33147 Stephen Prohero, American Jesus, How the Son of God Became a National Icon, (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003) pp 80 – 82 148 Leslie Brubaker, “Introduction, The Sacred Image” (chpt) 1(eds) Robert Ousterhout, Leslie Brubaker, The Sacred Image East and West (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1995) p 4
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through Christ”. 149 In contemporary times of mass produced images, of which the
Head of Christ is an example, it is as much “the viewer’s knowledge of what came
before and what will come after” as any traditionally taught function of the image that
affects how it is read.150 The fact that this image has a nearly 70 year history of
reception and reproduction, allows it to be both a part of Christian culture and the
general culture with connotations from both. Mass production and dissemination
allow both of these aspects of the image.
Detractors of the Head of Christ had similar objections as there had been to The
Light of the World, that it was too sentimental, sweet, and un-manly.151 In its teaching
function, Head of Christ is an image like Hunt’s that is seen as compassionate,
romantic, somewhat feminie and slightly suspect to some. Despite this it is seen as
manly in by enough Christians (men) to be acceptable to most.152 Morgan writes that,
the majority of male Christians see the Head of Christ as: “a Jesus who is both manly
and accessible”.153 This suspicion of the softer Jesus, Morgan calls a rejection of “the
domestic Christianity of Women.”154 The fact that the image has this connotation of
“intimacy” and inclusion, of the feminine and the domestic, maybe one reason the
image is so widely accepted. As well as gender barriers, the Head of Christ also
149 Margaret R. Miles, from “Image” (in) S. Brent Plate (ed) “Section Two Icon: The Image of Jesus Christ and Christian Theology” (in) Religion, Art, And Visual Culture, a cross cultural reader (New York: Palgrave, 2002) pp 64 - 65150 Ibid pp 64 - 65151 David Morgan, from “Would Jesus have sat for a Portrait? The Likeness of Christ in the Popular Reception of Sallman’s Art” (in) S. Brent Plate (ed) “Section Two Icon: The Image of Jesus Christ and Christian Theology” (in) Religion, Art, And Visual Culture, a cross cultural reader (New York: Palgrave, 2002) pp 82 - 84152 David Morgan “Imaging Protestant Piety: The Icons of Warner Sallman”, Religion and American Culture, 3: 1 (Winter, 93) pp 34 - 35153 David Morgan, from “Would Jesus have sat for a Portrait? The Likeness of Christ in the Popular Reception of Sallman’s Art” (in) S. Brent Plate (ed) “Section Two Icon: The Image of Jesus Christ and Christian Theology” (in) Religion, Art, And Visual Culture, a cross cultural reader (New York: Palgrave, 2002) p 86154 Ibid p 85
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transcends denominational and Catholic Protestant boundaries to some extent.
Troughton says that the centrality of Jesus Christ to Christianity has been used to
endeavour to unify Protestant sectarianism, and Protestant and Catholic differences.155
An example of this denominational boundary crossing is in the soup kitchen run by
the Catholic order of The Sisters of Mercy in Wellington which has a print of the
Head of Christ on its walls. Sallman’s work in its mass production and dissemination
as a print is as ubiquitous as the Catholic Sacred Heart of Christ image, which is also
to be found in the Catholic institution of the Sisters soup kitchen.
Other boundaries this image transcends are those of the categories of uniqueness
and genius that art history usually relies on.156 Sallman’s work is unknown to the art
elite, but there are over 500 million reproductions of the Head of Christ as objects of
devotion in churches and homes world wide.157 Morgan talks of images creating a
sacred space in the secular world of the home of ordinary everyday believers, and how
this appeals to Protestant individual and family focus.158 He says it is an example of a
low art, mass produced image that has an enduring life and influence due to its
reception and the response of those who use this image for supplication, veneration,
and the other ritual uses it is put to by believers.159 It does not have the aura of the
unique work of art Benjamin wrote of. Benjamin did, however, say that while mass
producing images does dissipate their unique aura; it can also substitute a “mass
existence for a unique existence. And in permitting the reproduction to reach the
155 Geoffrey Troughton, Jesus in New Zealand c. 1900 – 1940, Thesis (Massey University, 2007) p 13156 David Morgan “Imaging Protestant Piety: The Icons of Warner Sallman”, Religion and American Culture, 3: 1 (Winter, 93) P 31157 Ibid P 31158 David Morgan, “Domestic Devotion and Ritual: Visual Piety in the Modern American Home” Art Journal 57:1 (Spring, 98) pp 45 - 47159 David Morgan “Imaging Protestant Piety: The Icons of Warner Sallman”, Religion and American Culture, 3: 1 (Winter, 93) P 29
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recipient in his or her own situation, it actualizes that which is reproduced.”160 The
power of a reproduction of popular religious imagery does not lie in its original intent,
according to Morgan; it is the subsequent reception and “patterns of response”.161 It is
the reception of the produced image, as being in effect “the real Jesus Christ”: an
image of Protestant Christianity within the church, but available to all, which is one
reason it stays so potent.
Jason Knapp, writing about the collection of Sallman’s work that Anderson
University and Warner Press maintain, says that in his first year as curator of this
collection, he was astonished by the number of requests from individuals and groups
wanting to view works. He also notes how many requests were “phrased in the
language of a pilgrimage.”162 A Christian pilgrimage site is a place that has a link to
the divine, in the form of a miracle, a relic, or an image. It is a place of mediation,
where the earthly, ordinary realm meets the heavenly, divine realm. 163 Freedberg
writes of the miracles that images believers make pilgrimages to, are said to
perform.164 The images can be copies, as the Schone Maria at Regensburg which he
uses as an example of this aura of power that copies can contain. Not only was this
pilgrimage image a copy of an original, but it spawned many thousands of pilgrimage
badges, small reproductions of the copy that were said to have some of the power of
160 Michael W Jennings,. Brigid Doherty, Thomas Y Levin,. (eds) Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility and Other Writings on Media (Massachusetts, London: Belknap Press, 2008) p 22 161 David Morgan “Imaging Protestant Piety: The Icons of Warner Sallman”, Religion and American Culture, 3: 1 (Winter, 93) p 29162 Jason Knapp, MFA “Warner Sallman Collection” http://www.Warnersallman.com/ accessed 24 May 2009163 Alan Morinis (ed) Sacred Journeys: The Anthropology of Pilgrimage (Connecticut, London: Greenwood press, 1992) 5164 David Freedberg, “Image and Pilgrimage” Chpt 6 (in) The Power of Images, Studies in the History and Theory of Response (Chicago, London: The University of Chicago Press, 1989) p100
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the original. 165 The Head of Christ has a similar life, as the huge number of
reproductions attest to. Morgan records numbers of instances of the images power to
protect and comfort travelling Christians and intercede for believers with Christ. 166
The enduring comforting power of this image is seen in a 1994 National Geographic
image of a flood survivor in America clutching a print of the Head of Christ as a
prized possession saved and as a source of comfort and strength in a time of
disaster.167 Morgan also notes the image was (and still is) used to teach Christian
children how to relate to Christ. As an image of the real, American Protestant, Jesus, it
was seen as an acceptable peadagogical aid in Sunday Schools.168
A ramification of New Zealand’s sectarian Christianity was the 1877 Education
Act that made schooling secular, to avoid conflict over which form of Christianity
was the correct one to teach children.169 Teaching children how to be Christians was
still seen as important in the changing religious and political landscape of the 1930s
and 40s, where there was a fear Christianity was loosing its importance in society.170
Teaching through Sunday school used much American teaching material. The
teaching material contained: “bible lesson pictures” in which reproductions of
Sallman’s work featured strongly. This is another way this protestant Christ imagery
would have been disseminated in New Zealand. Breward says that Protestant
Christianity was highly involved in Sunday school teaching up till the 1960s in New
165 David Freedberg, “Image and Pilgrimage” Chpt 6 (in) The Power of Images, Studies in the History and Theory of Response (Chicago, London: The University of Chicago Press, 1989) p103 166 David Morgan, “Domestic Devotion and Ritual:Visual Piety in the Modern American Home” Art Journal 57: 1 (Spring 98) p 47167 “ Riding Out the Worst of Times” National Geographic 185: 1 (Jan 94) p 86 168 David Morgan “Imaging Protestant Piety: The Icons of Warner Sallman”, Religion and American Culture, 3: 1 (Winter, 93) p 34169 Lloyd Geering, 2100: A Faith Odyssey. The Changing Face of Religion in New Zealand (Wellington: St Andrews Trust for the Study of Religion and Society, 1995) p 10170 Geoffrey Troughton, Jesus in New Zealand c. 1900 – 1940, Thesis (Massey University, 2007) p 5
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Zealand.171 The American bible lessons went to Britain, Canada, Australia, New
Zealand, and other commonwealth countries according to Morgan.172. Morgan also
points out that the Salvation Army; a bastion of conservative Protestantism used
Sallman’s imagery regularly on the cover of their main publication The War Cry, and
doubtless in their teaching material as well.173
The Catholic cathedral of the Sacred Heart, in Wellington, has a set of paintings
depicting the Stations of the Cross. The Stations are a journey through the Passion of
Christ; the representations of it facilitate a close relating to it in the beholders
reception.174 Despite being Catholic, the paintings in the cathedral of the Sacred Heart
seem remarkably similar to Sallman in they way they are painted and their depictions
of the Caucasian Christ.175 They are also similar to the Stations of the Cross painted
by Julia B. Lynch, originally for a church in Wellington, which now reside in the
Good Shepherd Theological College, Auckland.176 Both these depict the bearded,
slim, beatific Caucasian Jesus, both have imagery that could be equally at home in the
Protestant inspired work of Sallman. Another depiction of The Stations, in the
traditional medium of low relief carved panels, 1926 – 27, by Frederick George
Gurnsey (1868 – 1953), shows Christ in a three dimensional form. Despite having
been made 13 or 14 years before Sallman’s painting they bare a remarkable 171 Ian Breward “Conclusion”Oxford History of the Christian Church, A History of the Church in Australasia (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001) p 425172 David Morgan, The Lure of Images, A History of Religion and Visual Media in America ( London, New York: Routledge, 2007) p 94173 David Morgan “Imaging Protestant Piety: The Icons of Warner Sallman”, Religion and American Culture, 3: 1 (Winter, 93) p 36174 George Cyprian Alston, “The Way of the Cross” The Catholic Encyclopedia Vol 15 (New York: Robert Appelton Company, 1912) http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/15569a.htm accessed 24 May 2009175 Michael King, Gods Farthest Outpost, A History of Catholics in New Zealand (Aucklan: Viking, 1997) pp 152 -153176 Julia Lynch – Good Shepherd Theological College, http://www.gsc.ac.nz/lynch.htm accessed 25 May 09
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resemblance to Sallman’s imagery.177 This and the two previous examples show the
commonality of iconography of Christ in the traditional Stations format. All these
images are culturally of Western Christianity. This Christ imagery is definitely of a
white man, not an Eastern icon Christ, nor a Maori or Polynesian Christ. They are
embodiments of how Christ was seen in the time they were made, as well as being
images made to explicitly teach of Christ’s passion. Like the Head of Christ they are
histories of their time as much as a pedagogical tool. The time and context of the
viewer and the maker are embedded in the image. The visual cultural approach that
tries to look at both sides of an image, its production and its reception apply to these
“sallmanesque” stations.178 The preconceptions of the viewer will colour the meaning
taken from the viewing, as much as the image influences the viewers experience itself.
This dialectical process can feed back into contemporary image making, which
embodies the past in the time of its production, as will be seen in more contemporary
artist’s use of such traditional forms and ideas as the Stations.
Images like the Stations and Head of Christ show interplay of internal personal
and socially culturally valued ideas in the presence of an image.179 The space between
meaning and physical art works is the zone Coleman and Elsner call the “the recursive
relationship between material culture and religious experience”,180 and as a theology
fixed in a space. This relationship between internal, social and textual realities is a big
part of the more traditional imagery of Christ in early New Zealand, and the fairly
177 Mark, Stocker Angels and Roses, The art of Fredrick George Gurnsey (Christchurch: Canterbury University Press, 1997) pp 33 - 34178 S. Brent Plate (ed) “Section Two Icon: The Image of Jesus Christ and Christian Theology” (in) Religion, Art, And Visual Culture, a cross cultural reader (New York: Palgrave, 2002) pp 54 - 55179 Alan Morinis (ed) Sacred Journeys: The Anthropology of Pilgrimage (Connecticut, London: Greenwood press, 1992) 4 - 6180 Simon Coleman and John Elsner, The Pilgrims Progress: Art, Architecture and ritual movement at Sinai, World Archaeology 26:1 Archaeology of Pilgrimage (June 1994) 73
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explicit teaching functions of them. Artists of the mid to late 20th and early 21st
centuries in New Zealand tended to express private conviction, and take Christ into
their personal space and image use. As images of Christ moved into the fine art world
and fine artist moved into the ecclesiastical world, what was being taught,
commemorated, and the forms of ritual around these images continued to diversify
and multiply, in the artists taking Christ imagery into their personal, internal journeys
and out of the more collective spaces of the church. This is very much the mindscape
idea, the internal sacred space that is visited when relating to, or imagining, a scared
image as an alternative to a physical visit in the material world to see an image.181
Hegel writes that most of what is valuable in Western art and culture comes from
Christianity, but that Christianity is superfluous in any thing other than “expression of
mere private conviction” in the modern world.182 In light of this appraisal of the place
of things Christian, O’Grady says the role of the Christian artist is to challenge,
expand, and refresh the church’s ecclesiastical views.183 This challenge to church
based imagery, within the multi - culturalism, pluralism and secularism of New
Zealand culture, was a fertile ground for images of Jesus Christ to move into the
sphere of fine art.
McCahon and Fomison: the search for a New Zealand Christ in modern art.
181 Alan Morinis (ed) Sacred Journeys: The Anthropology of Pilgrimage (Connecticut, London: Greenwood press, 1992) 4 - 6182 Nicholas Lobkowicz, “Christianity and Culture” The Review of Politics 53:2 (Spring, 91) p 377183 Ron O’Grady (ed) Christ for All People, Celebrating a World of Christian Art. (Auckland: Pace, 2001) p 26
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The personal quest using traditional Christian and modern New Zealand
imagery, seem to be the zone where images of Christ in New Zealand were in the mid
to late 20th century. A quest orientation to religion is seen by Bateson as an open
minded searching for meaning.184 Kojetin et al. say it is more an effect of personal
distress over religious questions.185 Both of these apply to a number of artists from
around the 1950s. This seeking, informed by a Modernist perspective of optimism in
human progress,186 was the teritory that Colin McCahon, a pivotal figure in that he is
one of the first fine arts practitioners in New Zealand to put Jesus in a New Zealand
landscape, worked in. McCahon’s work also helped move the production and
reception of images of Jesus Christ from ecclesiastical control to the realm of the
individual artist, and into galleries rather than churches. As fewer churches were
being built in the early 20th century, and new stained glass windows less common,
windows were no longer so pre-eminent in depicting Christ. As complete church
environment making was less, works going into existing churches and works in other
formats like paintings became more common. Fomision even more than McCahon
moved images of Christ in New Zealand into paint and from church to gallery.
Despite McCahon’s personal exploration of his religious and spiritual beliefs in
his daily life through his art, Hunter says the commission for a set of windows for the
Convent Chapel of the Sisters of Our Lady of the Missions in Auckland was of “great
importance” to him.187 She says that he saw that this art work was for an “audience
184 Brian A. Kojetin, Danny N. McIntosh, Robert A. Bridges, Bernard Spilka, “Quest: Constructive Search or religious Conflict?” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 26: 1 (Mar, 87) pp 111 - 112 185 Ibid pp 111 - 112 186 Hilary Brand, Adrienne Chaplin “Art in a Post-Modern Age” (chpt 1) Art and Soul, Signposts for Christians in the Arts, ( Carlisle, Illinois: Piquant Editions, and Intervarsity Press, 2007) p5187 Alexa M. Johnston “Christianity in New Zealand Art” (in) (ed) Marry Barr Headlands, Thinking Through New Zealand Art, (Sydney: museum of contemporary art, 1992) p 105
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with the requisite knowledge to recognise and respond to the religious symbols in his
work.”188 This shows how important the reception of his Christian message was to
McCahon, and awareness on the artist’s part of how an audience’s prior learning
affects the message they receive from an image. This desire for people to understand
his imagery was a constant quest it would seem. The artist’s son William writes that
his father:
“sought to engage his public in a visual dialogue about himself and his relationship with God. … His
paintings reflected a commited Christian perspective and his entire oeuvre is the narrative of his life of
spiritual and emotional discovery.”189
Ian Wedde sounds a note of caution, asking was McCahon wrestling with
religious faith, or is it just that such things as faith are more openly discussed now? 190
Poetry, music, and art are often used in the way faith, religion, and spirituality
traditionally have been by more secular people. This brings up the debate of is an
artist truly a spiritual seeker, or is the art world trying to find something trendy in their
work.191 Both are probably true. In asking “how religious was McCahon?”,192
Johnston, rather than debating the issue says looking at McCahon’s work in light of
theology shows The artists faith in Christs “historical and continuing” example of
what it is to be the best human one can be.193 This humanistic type Christ is central in
188 Ibid p 105189 Marja Bloem, Martin Browne, Colin McCahon, a Question of Faith (Amsterdam: Stedelijk Museum, Craig Potton Publishing, 2002) p 29190 Ian Wedde “McChaon, A Question of Faith” Making Ends meet, Essays and talks 1992 – 2004 (Wellington: Victoria University Press, 2005) pp 295 - 296191 Hilary Brand, Adrienne Chaplin “Art and the Quest for the Spiritual” (chpt 2) Art and Soul, Signposts for Christians in the Arts, ( Carlisle, Illinois: Piquant Editions, and Intervarsity Press, 2007) p 16192 Alexa M. Johnston “God talk – McCahon and Theology” (in) Colin McCahon, Gates and Journeys (Auckland: Academy Press, 1988) p 57193 Ibid p 61
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much of his imagery. Maybe it follows on from the humanistic Protestant Christ of
The Light of the World and the Head of Christ, merely being updated by McChaon for
the times he found himself in. Maybe images of Christ served to enable him to best
show the thoughts and emotions he sought to express. In an interview in 1980 (7 years
before he died), he said that he was painting “beauty and serenity”, that he was
painting “Christ”.194 Much like Vincent Van Gogh’s desire to be a missionary before
he turned to art,195 McCahon had originally wanted to be an evangelist. This suggests
that no mater how much of his art was pure self expression, McCahon had a
religious / spiritual nature he explored, and sought to expressed.196 Yule writes of
McCahon in terms of a prophetic, evangelistic artist producing a spiritual and artistic
answer to the secularity of New Zealand culture of the mid to late 20th century, whose
message was perhaps not received as the artist intended.197 These again show that a
message may be interpreted by its audience in ways the producer did not necessarily
intend and that we may not necessarily know the artists intention fully. A prophet
creates newness from, and challenges, the established order. Johnston, writing of
Brueggemann’s ideas of a prophet’s role in a modern society says a prophet:
challenges “public certainty” with a personal drive for a deeper, more spiritual,
reality.198 In this way McChaon could be said to be the prophet many have called him.
194 Murry Ball, “I Am” (in) Marja Bloem, Martin Browne, Colin McCahon, a Question of Faith (Amsterdam: Stedelijk Museum, Craig Potton Publishing, 2002) p 50195 Hilary Brand, Adrienne Chaplin “Art and the Quest for the Spiritual” (chpt 2) Art and Soul, Signposts for Christians in the Arts, ( Carlisle, Illinois: Piquant Editions, and Intervarsity Press, 2007) p 20196 Murry Ball, “I Am” (in) Marja Bloem, Martin Browne, Colin McCahon, a Question of Faith (Amsterdam: Stedelijk Museum, Craig Potton Publishing, 2002) p 46197 Rob Yule, “How the light gets in, The Christian art of Colin McCahon” Chrysalis Seed Arts 31 (Oct 08) pp 16 – 19 198 Derek Johnston, “Walter Brueggemann and the Biblical Imagination” (chpt 15) (in) A Brief History of Theology, From the New Testament to Feminist Theology (London. New York: Continuum, 2008) p 258
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McCahon’s religious paintings were first shown seven years after Sallman’s
work was produced in 1947.199 Three of the works from that time specifically of
Christ in a New Zealand setting are: Crucifixion (for Rodney Kennedy) (fig9), with its
lamp that seems to reference The Light of the World’s lamp, as much as Christ’s
divinity grace, or inner radience. Another is Crucifixion according to St Mark (fig10),
which has Christ in a very New Zealand landscape. Finally Crucifixion with Lamp
(fig11). Keith talks of these works as: both shifting the focus from British Landscape
art which had been the preeminent scenic art in colonial New Zealand to a New
Zealand landscape, and that landscape as providing a backdrop for biblical stories and
a context “to rest the Pakeha imagination (in)”.200 As Panoho says, in reference
primarily to the work Crucifixion – the apple branch (fig12) of 1950 with its depiction
of the family in differing locations looking for guidance and strength, but also
McCahon’s work in general, raises the issue of “our profound (human) need to engage
with Christ’s claim to divine right over our lives.”201 This was a Christ in a New
Zealand setting, designed and created by a New Zealander to fulfil an agenda both
personal and cultural, but received in its time with less understanding than the artist
seemed to have desired. Unlike the familiar structure of church iconography and
imagery, paintings in the art arena were able to be interpreted in various ways by
many different sectors of society. This diversity of interpretation in differing contexts
applies to McCahon’s religious imagery.
199 Peter Simson, Answering Hark, McCahon / Caselberg, Painter / Poet (Craig Potton Publishing, 2001) p 12200 Hamish Keith, The Big Picture, A History of New Zealand art from 1642 (Auckland: Random House, 2007) pp 156 – 157, 167 - 172201 Anaru / Andrew Panoho “Two exhibitions – one people” CS Arts 31 (Oct 08) p 29
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In the process of looking back on artists from the present to try and determine
what they were trying to say there is room for interpretation. As most of the artists and
their commissioners, especially in the 19th and early 20th century are dead, there is
necessarily an element of guess work in figuring out why images were produced as
they were. What the reception was can be ascertained to a greater degree, but is can
still be obscure. The complexity of a local artist, rather than the more anonymous and
traditional stained glass window making firms from America, Britain, or Europe,
creating an art work for a church is illustrated also by Bill Sutton’s Transfiguration of
Christ 1979. This window was designed for the Northern transept in the Anglican
cathedral of Christchurch. There was dispute over, and changes made by the artist to
the depiction of the face of Christ.202 The conflict of donor, church, and artist’s visions
led Sutton to describe the process as “one of the best commissions an artist could get,
but one of his biggest disappointments”.203 This difference between the various
parties’ desires and agendas during a process like this shows the complexity of the
process a seemingly simple request like creating a window depicting Christ’s image,
to commemorate a member of the donors family, can be. The artists and donor had
differing ideas about imagery in this case, showing how important agreed ideas of
what imagery to use is. This is akin to McCahon’s desire for his work to be seen in as
much a theological, as an art world context, typified by his pleasure at creating a work
that went into a church environment where people should be able to relate to the work
from a shared set of ideas.204 Again, it is debatable that this was the outcome, but
shared Christian knowledge which itself would have come from traditional images
202 Colin Brown Vision and Reality, Christchurch’s Cathedral in the Square (Christchurch: Christchurch cathedral chapter, 2000) pp 125 – 130 203 Ibid p 130204 Alexa M. Johnston “Christianity in New Zealand Art” (in) (ed) Marry Barr Headlands, Thinking Through New Zealand Art, (Sydney: museum of contemporary art, 1992) p 105
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and writings, should make the secular art of McCahon and Sutton easier to interpret to
Christians viewers.
A secular response to a resurgence of church commissioned art in the 1950s and
60s was the exhibition of religious work, the Christian art show at the New Vision
Gallery, Auckland in 1967.205 This was a group show, which contained work by
McCahon amongst others, which was of religious art and not just images of Christ.
Christian art did show the moving of images of Christ from exclusively sacred
environments of churches to the secular marketplace of gallery walls was continuing
despite the resurgence of art in churches. The upsurge, after a lull in church
commissioning, was due to such things as the Second Vatican Council opening the
Catholic faith to a wider world, and the ecumenical movement within Protestant
churches world wide endeavouring to renew faith in Christ as a unifier amongst the
denominations.206 This was a spur to artistic production, as well as to religious writing
and mission.207 Other factors in post World War Two era New Zealand to this
heightened production of Christian art were that it was both a time of memorial
creation and of economic boom in much of New Zealand. Also trade restrictions in
the 1960s and 70s virtually halted the importing of English and European made
stained glass. 208 This led to local work being designed and produced in all media by
New Zealanders for New Zealand ecclesiastical and secular markets.
205 Ibid pp 105 - 106206 Ibid p 103207 Alexa M. Johnston “Christianity in New Zealand Art” (in) (ed) Marry Barr Headlands, Thinking Through New Zealand Art, (Sydney: museum of contemporary art, 1992) p 103208 Fiona Ciaran, Stained Glass Windows of Canterbury, New Zealand (Dunedin: University of Otago Press, 1998) p 37
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An almost Asian looking Christ dates from this period, Christ Seated in
Majesty.209 (fig13) This image shows some of the crossing of English and European to
New Zealand control of images of Christ in the mid to late 1900s. Ciaran writes of
how this image was produced by the Miller Studios, Dunedin. As part of Presbyterian
Otago, Dunedin based artisans met resistance in Anglican Canterbury Even more than
this denominational suspicion, the idea of New Zealanders designing the image of
Christ was still resisted. Miller’s solved this by having the work designed by an
English artist, Kenneth Bunton.210 This meant the image still had the “traditional”
legitimacy of being designed in the “home country”, but was made in New Zealand. A
1958 window, made in England has a similar almost Asian looking Christ as Good
Shepherd with a Pioneer Family. (fig14)211 The striking feature of this window is it is
one of the first church windows to “show New Zealand symbolism overtly.”212 It is
more of an ‘add – on’ than McCahon’s completely New Zealand sited Jesus, but
shows the trend of its times. This window and its imagery come from Canterbury’s
centenary of settlement, and the rise in prosperity at the time.213 Ciaran notes,
illustrated by a 1957 Ascension window, that “(a)fter World War Two, British stained
glass studios either tried or were requested to use more New Zealand symbolism.”,
with mostly accurate depictions resulting of New Zealand flora, fauna appearing in
stained glass windows for the first time.(fig15)214 This shows that images of Christ
began to be linked to things New Zealand in ecclesiastical art around the same time as
McCahon was doing this in the more secular fine arts world.
209 Ibid p 49210 Ibid pp 49 - 50211 Ibid pp 8 - 9212 Fiona Ciaran, Stained Glass Windows of Canterbury, New Zealand (Dunedin: University of Otago Press, 1998 p 8 213 Ibid p 8214 Fiona Ciaran, Stained Glass Windows of Canterbury, New Zealand (Dunedin: University of Otago Press, 1998) p 81
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Bett writes of McCahon, and a group of artists who followed him in expressing
the “spirit … of an era”,215 the 1960s, 70s, and 80s. Amongst artists she lists are
Jeffrey Harris, Nigel Brown, Philip Clairmont, and Tony Fomison.216 All of whom
have depicted Jesus Christ in New Zealand contexts, and as Bett puts it: “(all) have a
moralistic, aggressive view of life and seek the spiritual uplifting of society through
their art.”217 This Modernist, humanist type sentiment of the individual seeking the
ultimate can be seen in their work. Fomison and McCahon both had a prophet like
personal appearance and message in their work. Both artists and their near
contemporary the poet James K. Baxter who wrote of a Christ centred in New
Zealand218 shared not only an interest in spiritualty, (Catholicism in the case of
McCahon and Baxter) but lives affected by alcoholism and drug addiction. These all
add to the mystique of the outsider, the lone prophetic artist. Like McCahon it is hard
to say how much of these later artists work is driven by veneration of Christ, a quest
orientation to life, and / or just using a symbol that has power and is common in
Western visual culture, or if it is a mixture of both. After his death, McCahon’s
mantle falls on Fomison Bett says. Bett says that Fomison:
“has followed an uniquely individual and solitary way …in his monochromatic handling of a low-key
palette and depiction of the human figure. ... (he is) speaking a new and prophetic tongue. …Whearas
McCahon offers hope, however, Fomison is existential…. (with an) eschatology (that is) of New
Zealand”. 219
215 Elva Bett, “The expression of an era” chpt 9 New Zealand Art, A Modern Perspective (Auckland: Reed Methuen, 1986) pp 94 – 102 216 Ibid pp 94 – 102217 Ibid pp 95 -96218 James K. Baxter “The Body and Blood of Christ” The Flowering Cross (Dunedin: The New Zealand Tablet Company Ltd, 1969) pp 175 – 182 219 Elva Bett, “The expression of an era” chpt 9 New Zealand Art, A Modern Perspective (Auckland: Reed Methuen, 1986) pp 96 - 97
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Even though Fomison’s figures are set in New Zealand landscapes, his Christ
figures are mostly renditions of European master works, or quirky self portraits.220
Study of head of Christ by Morales, 1969 (fig16) resembles the Christ of Lindauer’s
Crown of Thorns. Another, (Untitled) Study of Holbein’s ‘Dead Christ” (fig17)is an
image Fomison painted more than once in the early 1970s.221 It is almost a return to
the dead Christ of such earlier images like The Pieta in the church of The Holy
Passion in Amberley, or the traditional, near dead figure of the crucifix image. It harks
back to a worship of the Christ who has died for humanity, a move away from the
sentimental Christ of The Light of the World, and even McCahon’s minimally detailed
Christs, like Crucifixion – the apple branch, where Christ, although central, is
similarly rendered to and less aloof from the human participants. Brunt says McCahon
clearly said Jesus was the answer to the problems of human life, whereas Fomison
sought a wider answer of which Jesus was just part.222
Fomison’s monochromatic Christs in New Zealand do have an eschatological,
end of times feel.223 Brunt says New Zealand of the 1970s was a nation with a
“liminal” kind of culture.224 A nation, like a shrine or image, 225 can be seen as being a
220 Ian Wedde (ed) “Tracing Tony Fomison” What shall we tell them? (Wellington: Wellington City Gallery, 1994) pp 25, 28221 Ibid p 28222 Peter Brunt “Framing Identity” (in) Ian Wedde (ed) “Tracing Tony Fomison” What shall we tell them? (Wellington: Wellington City Gallery, 1994) p 65223 Elva Bett, “The expression of an era” chpt 9 New Zealand Art, A Modern Perspective (Auckland: Reed Methuen, 1986) pp 96 - 97224 Peter Brunt “Framing Identity” (in) Ian Wedde (ed) “Tracing Tony Fomison” What shall we tell them? (Wellington: Wellington City Gallery, 1994) p 65225 John Eade, Michael Sallnow (eds) Contesting the Sacred, The Anthropology of Christian Pilgrimage (London, New York : Routledge, 1991) p 9
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complex site of multiple meanings, especially in times of social change.226 Fomison
produced paintings that are, according to Brunt, images for a liminal nation
negotiating change, with his images of caves that could be tombs or wombs,
nakedness that could be death or birth, Christ dead ready to be reborn, all images of
transition.227 Turner says the liminal is the phase between “well-defined states …
(and) unprecedented, even antithetical conditions.”228 New Zealand was in a time of
great change when Fomison was making art. Such things as the decline of the welfare
state, the beginnings of liberal economics, and the shift to multi-culturalism were
hallmarks of the 1960s – 70s.229 This great shift in New Zealand cultural space may be
why Fomison’s Christs are dead, bemused, or closed eyed. The Christ of 1979 is a
combination of all Fomison’s preceding images of Christ, (fig18) it could also be
taken for a Maori, or Polynesian Jesus, it is a complex yet simple image. During says
Fomison’s images of Christ became more autobiographical, like Christ, 1976(fig19)
which is essentially a self portrait, this blend of artist and Christ is akin to Hunt’s
seeming self portrayal in The Light of the World. Like McCahon, Fomison seems to
have died still seeking and expressing that search to his last artistic output. In a
photograph taken in the studio in 1989, a year before Fomison’s death, Brunt says the
artist is seen as still not having escaped the liminality of his state between trying to
produce some kind of solution to the world he experienced, and the chaos of life, as
he lived it.230 This dialectal interplay of worldly and spiritual life becomes more
226 Peter Brunt “Framing Identity” (in) Ian Wedde (ed) “Tracing Tony Fomison” What shall we tell them? (Wellington: Wellington City Gallery, 1994) p 65227 Ibid pp 63 - 65228 Victor Turner, Edith Turner, “Introduction: Pilgrimage as a Liminoid Phenomena” Image And Pilgrimage In Christian Culture, Anthropological Perspectives (New York: Columbia University Press, 1978) p 2229Simon During “Here’s Trouble: some comments on Tony Fomison and his work” (in) Ian Wedde (ed) “Tracing Tony Fomison” What shall we tell them? (Wellington: Wellington City Gallery, 1994) pp 42 – 43, 48 – 49 230 Peter Brunt “Framing Identity” (in) Ian Wedde (ed) “Tracing Tony Fomison” What shall we tell them? (Wellington: Wellington City Gallery, 1994) p 71
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pronounced in the imagery of contemporary artists. The post – modern openness to
multiple meanings and pluralism allows for a greater cross over of secular and sacred
imagery.231 Images of Christ in New Zealand have become the province of the artist,
as much as the church.
Contemporary images of Christ.
Contemporary imagery of Christ such as: “Station to Station, The Way of the
Cross” at the Auckland city art gallery in 1994 shows how production of images of
Christ is the domain of both the secular and religious worlds in contemporary society.
The depth of penetration of words and images of Christ in Western culture are shown
by this exhibition and “Stations of the Cross”, Auckland 2008.232 This later exhibition
was a show in a private gallery in Auckland that contained almost as many well
known New Zealand artists as the 1994 Auckland city art gallery show.233 In both
shows a number of the artists were practicing Christians, a number were not. Those
inside “the church culture”234 and those without were both responding to an example
of a devotional ecclesiastical form, The Stations of the Cross, and then showing the
results in the secular gallery world. This moves a traditional depiction of Christ into a
more contemporary, modern, abstract context. In the contemporary post - modern
world, grand – narratives like the Christian “creation, fall, redemption”235 story was
231 Derek Johnston, “Walter Brueggemann and the Biblical Imagination” (chpt 15) (in) A Brief History of Theology, From the New Testament to Feminist Theology (London. New York: Continuum, 2008) p 261232 Esther Hansen “Stations of the Cross, Group Exhibition” CS Arts 31 (Oct: 08) pp 40 - 41233 Ibid pp 40 - 41234 Ibid p 40 235 Hilary Brand, Adrienne Chaplin “Art and an Integrated Worldview” (chpt 8) Art and Soul, Signposts for Christians in the Arts, ( Carlisle, Illinois: Piquant Editions, and Intervarsity Press, 2007) p67
46
once the province of the ecclesiastical world and its churches, rituals, and images.
They are now seen as open to all forms of depiction and interpretation.236 This appears
to be so in such exhibitions as these. Brand and Chaplin point out that post –
modernism’s insistence on no grand – narrative is in fact a grand – narrative, or world
view, itself. It is a world view that allows for plural narratives. The secular world
holds mostly rational scientific beliefs, Christians hold to their grand – narrative, of
which stories and images of Christ are a central part.237
The Stations is a way to see multiple images of Jesus and as such is a good way
to see, on mass, how contemporary versions differ from older, more traditional
depictions. The ubiquity of The Stations in ecclesiastical, folk, and fine art contexts
shows the enduring power of Christ and his life, death, and resurrection as a force in
Western, artistic culture. Even in the Catholic Cathedral of The Sacred Heart in
Wellington, there is a contemporary, fairly abstract low relief sculptural version of
The Stations of the Cross underneath each of the more traditional painted images. The
curator of “Station to Station”, William McAloon cites Freedberg in saying the
Passion is a “paradigm of the empathic response to visual images … the potential of
(the Passion’s) visual representation to incite in the viewer an emotional response.”238
McAloon says that the contemporary artist has the power to ‘move’ modern day
viewers with the mysteries depicted in The Stations, much as:
236 Ibid p 5237 Hilary Brand, Adrienne Chaplin “Art in a Post-Modern Age” (chpt 19) Art as a Twenty-First Century Calling, ( Carlisle, Illinois: Piquant Editions, and Intervarsity Press, 2007) p 180238 Station to Station, The Way of the Cross, 14 Contemporary Artist. (Auckland: Auckland City Art Gallery, 11 March – 8 May 1994)
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“medieval devotees of the Stations responded, … (to) … images of … the Stations, that is, depictions
of suffering … death, … (and) mystery of the resurrection. (And that they) … might recreate for a
contemporary audience the effect of the Stations, without actual representation.”239
Artistic projects in New Zealand are numerous. There is an on-going artistic
project called the Stations Collective that stage regular contemporary art events using
the Passion as inspiration and stimulus over Easter in Hamilton.240 Richard Lewer, an
award winning New Zealand artist, did a Stations of the Cross series while artist in
residence in the residency in Auckland that bares McCahon’s name in 2008.241 Lewer
cites his Catholic upbringing as having contributed to his way of looking at life, and
as motivation for his work.242 Lewer’s Stations reference the traditional iconography
in the position of Jesus and the cross, but the figures are very abstracted and in blank
white backgrounds, rather than being situated in landscapes and around architecture.
They are still unmistakably images of Christ’s Passion despite being pink and red
slashes with a brown cross; one knows what one is looking at. This shows how
imagery of Christ is legible to people from within and without church culture.243
Another contemporary Stations of the Cross is from an exhibition at the Anglican
cathedral of St Paul’s in Wellington. This exhibition shows that Anglicans do use the
stations as a teaching and ritual device, just in a series of 15 rather than the 14
traditional to Catholicism,244 and that amateur, as well as professional artists still see
239 Ibid 240 www.stations.org.nz accessed 24 May 2009241 Dan Chappell “Weather watch in the Waitakeres” Art News New Zealand, (summer, 08) pp 112 - 114242 Ibid p 112243 Esther Hansen “Stations of the Cross, Group Exhibition” CS Arts 31 (Oct: 08) p 40 244 George Cyprian Alston, “The Way of the Cross” The Catholic Encyclopedia Vol 15 (New York: Robert Appelton Company, 1912) http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/15569a.htm accessed 24 May 2009
48
Jesus Christ as a bearded white man on the whole.245 There are some abstract and
multi cultural images in this show, but predominantly the white Jesus features in this
Anglican presentation by amateur and professional artists.
The artist Jeffrey Harris also produces contemporary depictions of Christ in
New Zealand. Harris uses the image of Christ in ways both very personal and
referencing art and ecclesiastical history.246 Harris’ Head and Cross, 2008 has a
Christ on a cross that is very similar to Lewer’s abstract figures, with a McCahon type
landscape and a self portrait looking out at the viewer.247 (fig20) Jesus has become an
abstract symbol, a signpost almost. The artist is almost his own icon, in the traditional
form of self portrait, in a landscape which is also traditional but in this instance
references McCahon’s acknowledged spiritual seeking. This self portrait icon, with
symbol of Christ, in a McCahoneaque landscape is perhaps a seeking for place and
purpose. Bett calls to Harris’ work as “a personal and emotional narrative of his
strivings for self-knowledge.”248 She sees Harris’ work as integration between
influences of “European art and the antipodean experience.”249 This is similar to
McCahon and Fomison’s siting of traditional European imagery of Christ in their
native New Zealand, in pursuit of a personal quest. There are a number of earlier
works of Harris’ that are of a cross on its own, a figure and an empty cross, and more
traditional crucifixion images.250 The 2008 image seems to combine much of his past
245 Stations of the Cross – Wellington Cathedral of St Paul, http://cathedral.wellington.net.nz/index.php/Stations_of_the_Cross accessed 24 May 2009246 Biography, Jeffrey Harris http://www.nz-artists.co.nz/harris/harris.htm accessed 14 April 2009247 Jeffrey Harris, Art News New Zealand, (Autumn, 09) p 65248 Elva Bett, “The expression of an era” chpt 9 New Zealand Art, A Modern Perspective (Auckland: Reed Methuen, 1986) pp 100 - 101249 Ibid p 101250 Jeffrey Harris, painter. NZ artists, an independent guide to contemporary New Zealand art, http://www.nz-artists.co.nz/harris/harris.htm accessed 14 April 09
49
imagery. It seems to be a personal meditation on the self and Christ, whether
acknowledging Christ’s dominion as McCahon is said to have, or as part of a solution
to a crazy world as Fomision seemed to be looking for is hard to say. Harris possibly
draws on both influences. This combining of past and contemporary ideas and
imagery in a personal spiritual quest in the world can be seen in other contemporary
artists work.
One such contemporary image of Christ that combines different times and
cultures in an image of Christ is by Nigel Brown, one of the artists linked to McCahon
by Bett, is a modern stained glass window commission for the Holy Trinity cathedral
Auckland in 1998.251 It is described as: “a Resurrected Christ inspired by Renaissance
art and set in front of a blaze of Pacific-inspired colour … (with) … a theme of racial
harmony”.252 As well as this “cultural fusion” of imagery, the window also has a
wounded soldier, linking it to commemorative war memorial windows of the past.253
MaGuire says the commemorative and narrative form of the window link it more to
the 19th century stained glass, rather than 20th century, more contemporary New
Zealand Christian art as seen in exhibitions like the various Stations shows and the
more post – modern Christian work of artists like Brett A’Court.
A’Court’s contemporary Christian mysticism in paint sites him in the prophetic
heritage of McChon and Fomison according to Crothall.254 A’Court explores his
251 Hugh Macguire “All Things Bright and Beautiful, Nigel Brown and Glassworks at Auckland’s Holy Trinity Cathedral.” Art New Zealand 90 (Autumn: 99) pp 45 – 47 252 Ibid p 45253 Ibid p 45254 Peter Crothall “Presence, not pictures” CS Arts 30 (June: 08) p 14
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personal beliefs in his art, using images of Christ and McCahon like landscapes He
also uses the Sacred Heart image, and more traditional depictions of a bearded
Caucasian Christ, essentially the same as any settler church stained glass window, in
his work.255 This shows the persistence of such old images along with contemporary
and personal ways of using them in depicting Christ. A’Court says he is looking at the
place where post modernisms openness to all which can be an:
“unstable & insincere .. position … (is contrasted with the) … sincerity … belief & use attached to
certain (more traditional) religious images (which) issues a challenge. … I have not wanted to divorce,
the use of emotion being the window to a deeper level of power. I have wanted to explore this with the
personal element of struggle & doubt, which is part of human existence, & anchor it within a
contemporary context”.256
A’Court says he has found that religious art can “produce the miraculous”,257 but the
image should not be propaganda, as much early imagery of Christ in New Zealand can
be seen as. A’Courts collage type approach and use of traditional imagery in 2009, is
a fusion of traditional with contemporary imagery and process. Collage as an art form
is strongly linked with post – modernism by Derrida.258 A’Court works with this very
post – modern technique and process to find “sincerity”, which is more akin to the
Modernist focus on the authentic, on human progress, he does seem to bridge the gap
of older traditional imagery and contemporary image use quite effectivly.259 Two of
A’Courts images visually, if not theologically, bring the nearly 200 year history of
255 Satellite Gallery – Brett A’Court http://www.satellitegallery.co.nz/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=86&Itemid=109 accessed 14 April 09 256 Ibid 257 Peter Crothall “Presence, not pictures” CS Arts 30 (June: 08) http://www.cs.org.nz/index.cfm/Magazine/June-08/BaCourt (accessed 14 April 2009)258 Hilary Brand, Adrienne Chaplin “Art in a Post-Modern Age” (chpt 1) Art and Soul, Signposts for Christians in the Arts, ( Carlisle, Illinois: Piquant Editions, and Intervarsity Press, 2007) p 15259 Ibid pp 8 - 9
51
Christ’s image in New Zealand from first missionaries to contemporary artists
together well. (figs 21, 22)
A different blending of imagery that a contemporary post – modern, anything
goes, world view, allows is a recent work by Sister Annette Hanrahan. Her work, Cor
Unum, (fig 23) is a combining of iconographies. It is a:
“figure of the Risen Christ, holding up a transperant cross, … painted in an eastern posture for prayer,
and his features have a hint of the South Pacific – an indication that, in Christ, all things are one.”260
This is similar to the collage pick and mix approach of post – modernism typified by
A’Court. It seems, however to be a more painterly and wide ranging solution to
meaning making, collecting up the Christian great story alongside others, like
Buddhism, and presenting it as a unified image for all in New Zealand. Like A’Courts
imagery, and perhaps even more so, it is “an unexpected return to overt reference,
iconography, and symbolism … work for which “narrative” may be a key formal
term”.261 A’Court’s imagery is presented and received in the gallery world,
Hanrahan’s in the ecclesiastical world. Both show aspects of contemporary Christ
imagery, and how it has changed from narrowly defined ecclesiastically dominated
sources of teaching how to be uplifted, in awe, relate to life; to personal expressions
of faith, life, etc, through images of Christ. Geering writes of how God and Christ
have become symbols for human aspirations, goals and values in the secularised,
260 Personal communication from the artist. 13. May. 09261 Hilary Brand, Adrienne Chaplin “Art in a Post-Modern Age” (chpt 19) Art as a Twenty-First Century Calling, ( Carlisle, Illinois: Piquant Editions, and Intervarsity Press, 2007) p 177
52
contemporary, Western world.262 Veitch and Nichol ask “where to” for Christ as the
embodiment of Christianity in secular New Zealand?263 One answer may be in Christ
as saviour in the contemporary world through art, as much as through the church.264
Conclusion.
.
Images of Christ in New Zealand started as imported phenomena and up until
the time of McCahon and Fomison, continued to arrive with specific, overseas set,
agendas in their production. The progression from imported to New Zealand
contemporary imagery involves production, teaching, and response. The ritual,
commemoration, and teaching function these images have been made and used for is
always a two way thing, both influencing believers and societies ways of being, and
being changed to meet the needs of the culture. 265 The fact that the intentions of
makers and commissioners and the end users are not always the same, has added to
the complexity and deeply entrenched nature of images of Christ in New Zealand’s
visual culture. These images came to New Zealand with Christianity, and as the first
non-Maori religion of New Zealand Christianity and its imagery, ritual, and doctrine,
had a huge impact on the religious and political scene as New Zealand developed as a
nation.
262 Lloyd Geering, 2100: A Faith Odyssey. The Changing Face of Religion in New Zealand (Wellington: St Andrews Trust for the Study of Religion and Society, 1995) p 21263 Christopher Nichol, James Veitch (eds) Religion in New Zealand (Victoria University, 1983) pp 10 – 11 264 Lloyd Geering, 2100: A Faith Odyssey. The Changing Face of Religion in New Zealand (Wellington: St Andrews Trust for the Study of Religion and Society, 1995) pp 22 – 23 265 S. Brent Plate (ed) “Section Two Icon: The Image of Jesus Christ and Christian Theology” (in) Religion, Art, And Visual Culture, a cross cultural reader (New York: Palgrave, 2002) pp 54 – 55
53
The importance of churches to early settlers was as a stable reminder of old
country values and history, as much as spiritual centres. Both worldly and sacred
needs were served by the spaces and their imagery. Over time examples of British,
European, and American value laden icons such as The Light of the World, and the
Head of Christ came to New Zealand to teach their message, but became part of the
visual culture in church circles, as well as the secular art world. Imagery of Christ in
New Zealand gained emancipation from ecclesiastical control with the likes of
McCahon. As images of Jesus Christ have become part of the fine arts culture and
artist’s personal quests, and as the traditional forms of Christianity have waned
imagery of Christ has become a contested space, 266 where meaning is constructed and
debated within the varieties of denominations, sects, and cults within New Zealand’s
pluralistic secular culture. Visual culture is part of every day life in the 21st century.267
It is part of the wider culture, and thus is open to many different interpretations. This
diversity of New Zealand culture both religious and secular and the fact Jesus Christ
has always been in both, allowed this crossing of boundaries. Physical, material
images of Christ are related to in many ways, as reminders of the spiritual, as
teachings, as a spur to being a better human, in almost as many ways as there are
viewers. As Christianity becomes part of the “religious supermarket”, alongside
secular ideologies, New Age religions, Eastern religions, etc,268 images of Christ are
found in traditional and contemporary art, in churches, galleries, homes, and shops.
Images from stained glass, to Head of Christ, to the modernist Christ in the landscape
266 S. Brent Plate (ed) “Section Two Icon: The Image of Jesus Christ and Christian Theology” (in) Religion, Art, And Visual Culture, a cross cultural reader (New York: Palgrave, 2002) pp 54 – 55 267 Paul Duncum “How are we to understand art at the begingin of a new century?” (chpt 2) (in) Paul Duncum, Ted Bracy (eds) On Knowing Art and Visual Culture (Christchurch: Canturbury University Press, 2001) pp 15 – 16 268 Lloyd Geering, 2100: A Faith Odyssey. The Changing Face of Religion in New Zealand (Wellington: St Andrews Trust for the Study of Religion and Society, 1995) p 28
54
of McMahon, to Harris’ Christ as symbol, to the post - modernist personal mysticism
of A’Court and Hanrahan all function to bring the intangible within or realm of
understanding, or at least our realm of relating to, in our visually oriented culture.269
Images of Christ, as a theology fixed in a space,270 encode teachings and modes
of worship.271 Art communicates Gods word as much as any clergy’s sermon. An
image demonstrates a readily understandable form of the sacred presence.272 The
“interaction between audience, image, and often setting”,273 is where the sacred and
the profane meet.274 This meeting place is akint to a pilgrimage, in which a journey to
the image is often undertake, “it is the image that is central, that is regarded as
effective and treated as if it were perpetually and transcendently capable of remaining
so. We travel to the painting or sculpture … they mediate between ourselves and the
supernatural”275 The relationship between the material culture and religious
experience means the image becomes internalised in mindscape of personal and
cultural human psychology,276 as much as it is a real image in the material world.277
Real world and internal pilgrimage and worship was controlled by the church in early
269 Aidan Nichols O.P. “Preface” The Art of God Incarnate, Theology and Image in Christian Tradition (London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 1980) p 1 270 Simon Coleman and John Elsner, The Pilgrims Progress: Art, Architecture and ritual movement at Sinai, World Archaeology 26:1 Archaeology of Pilgrimage (June 1994) 73271 John A. Walker, Sarah Chaplin “The Concept of ‘the Visual’ “ (chpt 2) Visual Culture, An Introduction (New York, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997 ) pp 27 – 28 272 Cynthia Hahn, Seeing and Believing: The Construction of Sanctity in Early-Medieval Saints Shrines, speculum 72:4 (October 1997) 1080-1081273 Leslie Brubaker “Conclusion, Image, Audience, and Place: Interaction and Reproduction” (in) (Eds) Robert Ousterhout, Leslie Brubaker, The Sacred Image East and West (Urbana, Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1995) p205274 S. Brent Plate (ed) “Section Two Icon: The Image of Jesus Christ and Christian Theology” (in) Religion, Art, And Visual Culture, a cross cultural reader (New York: Palgrave, 2002) p 60275 David Freedberg, “Image and Pilgrimage” Chpt 6 (in) The Power of Images, Studies in the History and Theory of Response (Chicago, London: The University of Chicago Press, 1989) p 92276 Simon Coleman and John Elsner, The Pilgrims Progress: Art, Architecture and ritual movement at Sinai, World Archaeology 26:1 Archaeology of Pilgrimage (June 1994) 73277 Alan Morinis (ed) Sacred Journeys: The Anthropology of Pilgrimage (Connecticut, London: Greenwood press, 1992) 4 - 6
55
New Zealand in the images chosen and places (churches mostly) they were displayed.
Images of Christ and how the faithful were to relate to them were controlled in early
settler time’s.278.In Modernist and Post – Modern contemporary times, the quest
orientation to religion, and personal search for meaning seem to predominate.279 This
brings the more controlled and regulated form of pilgrimage type relationship
believers have with images of Christ into the more personal and eclectic form of
contemporary art that allows for a much more internal image relation and creation.
Where ever in time and place, a central theme of Christianity is the relationship to
Christ.280 Images are one way this has always been done, and still is in all cultures that
Christianity has helped shape, New Zealand is no exception.281
278 Hilary Brand, Adrienne Chaplin “Art and the Quest for the Spiritual” (chpt 2) Art and Soul, Signposts for Christians in the Arts, ( Carlisle, Illinois: Piquant Editions, and Intervarsity Press, 2007) p 16279 Brian A. Kojetin, Danny N. McIntosh, Robert A. Bridges, Bernard Spilka, “Quest: Constructive Search or religious Conflict?” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 26: 1 (Mar, 87) pp 111 - 112 280 Geoffrey Troughton, Jesus in New Zealand c. 1900 – 1940, Thesis (Massey University, 2007) p 1281 Ibid p 1
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