Rouault, Fujimura and Hearts and Minds

I will be honest. I had never heard of French artist Georges Rouault (1871 – 1958) before I read Rouault/Fujimura: Soliloquies by Thomas Hibbs, which includes a “refraction” or essay by Makoto Fujimura (1960 - ). Soliloquies was written to accompany an exhibition of Rouault’s and Fujimura’s art at the Dillon Gallery in New York City in late 2009. I started reading it, and felt somewhat cretinous for not knowing about Rouault.

I bought this book because Makoto Fujimura tweeted on Twitter that it was named a “best book of 2009” by Hearts and Minds. I had read Fujimura’s Refractions and posted on it in January.
What a gem this little book is. Not only do you gain a sense of whom Rouault was and what his art was about, you also learn just how important this artist was to contemporary artists like Fujimura and the idea of expression of faith and belief through art and in art.

Thomas Hibbs, who wrote most of Soliloquies, has provided what is almost a spiritual meditation on the two artists, art and the idea of “soliloquies” as almost a kind of dialogue. He reaches out to and pulls from sources as diverse as St. Augustine, T.S. Eliot, Jacques Maritain and Simone Weil.

Rouault is important in understanding Fujimura’s work because the French painter, who died two years before Fujimura was born, has had such a significant impact on Fujimura's thinking and understanding. Here is Rouault as described by Fujimura:

“Like the Rembrandts he valued and imitated as a youth, and the Cezanne he celebrated in his letters and poems, Rouault paintings capture not a mere reflective, descriptive light, but Light behind the light, Reality behind the reality. They are generative and seem to grow more and more pregnant as they age. Rouault may yet prove to be the first twenty-first century painter, bringing synthesis out of an age of fragmentation.”

Soliloquies is a small book, all of 63 pages, with reproductions of some of the paintings exhibited and photographs from the exhibition. And it is a beautiful small book, a gem that contains so much understanding that I’ve read it three times, and still find new things to appreciate and ponder.

I also feel a little less cretinous than I did before. At least I know who Georges Rouault was, and perhaps is.

An Aside:
I bought the book through Hearts and Minds Bookstore’s web site. Physically located in central Pennsylvania, Hearts and Minds’ web site is – to me – exactly what it should be. The store specializes in books about faith and Christianity, and the web site includes a blog about some of the books it sells; book reviews; and news. I suspect that visitors to the web site receive the same kind of care and attention that customers in the store do. When I placed the order, I received an email confirmation and a second email (from a real person) asking me how I had heard about their store and what I was interested in reading.

Illustrations:

Top: Christ in the Outskirts (1920-24) by Georges Rouault.

Bottom: Soliloquies by Makoto Fujimura

"Silence:" Is Christianity True or “Cultural”?

Is Christianity true for all humanity, or it is “cultural” or “geographic”? Another way of asking the question is, is Christianity universal or specific to Western culture (and in serious danger even there, especially in Europe generally and among the elites in United States)?

That’s one of the two questions posed by Shusaku Endo in his novel Silence, the story of two Portuguese priests in Japan in the 1600s during a time of Great Christian persecution. The novel was published in 1969, and is based on a true story, but the questions it poses seem even more contemporary and important today. (I’ll discuss the second question, what is the “silence” of the title, next Monday, the final of four posts on the novel.)

Knowing a persecution of Christians is underway, Father Sebastian Rodrigues goes to Japan for two reasons – to provide pastoral care for the Christians who are left and to verify the rumors that the former head of the mission to Japan, Rodrigues’ own former seminary teacher Father Christovao Ferreira, has apostatized and abandoned the faith. Rodrigues is eventually found by authorities, imprisoned but not (in the novel, at least) tortured. Instead, the local authorities attempt an array of intellectual gambits to convince Rodrigues to abandon his Catholic faith. These include conversations with the local ruler and the torture of native Japanese Christians.

The most dramatic and persuasive of these attempts is to bring Rodrigues to the former Father Ferreira, who now dresses in Japanese style, has a wife and has become something of an agent for the Japanese authorities (he at least does what he’s told to do). Ferreira attempts to convince his former student that Christianity simply will not work in Japan; it will not take root in the country’s culture. It may work in Europe, but Europe is not Japan.

Rodrigues fully understands the importance of the argument. If it is true that Christianity does not apply to Japan and can flourish only in a more hospitable culture, then it is a fraud, and a fraud everywhere, because its claims are indeed universal. It is not just a “religion for Europeans” but a faith for all humanity. And while Rodrigues finds himself slipping under the influence of his former teacher and fellow priest, there’s a more formidable question looming.

Can you renounce your faith in name only to save the lives of others? Isn’t that a kind of Christ-like sacrifice?

Silence is a provocative read, and it’s meant to be.


Shusaku Endo’s Silence is the book under discussion in the month of January by the Reader’s Guild of the International Arts Movement.

The book is also being filmed as a movie by Martin Scorsese and stars Daniel Day-Lewis, and is set for release late in 2010. For more information about the book, visit its entry on Wikipedia. And artist Makoto Fujimura talks about the book in an IAM podcast.

Makoto Fujimura’s “Refractions”

Makoto Fujimura is an artist, a writer and the founder of the International Arts Movement, and has been a member of the National Council on the Arts. And what he has written in Refractions: A Journey of Faith, Art and Culture has led me to understand that my job is like a work of art, a partially finished canvas, and the artist's brush is in my hand.

This is a surprise, because Refractions isn’t about work or the workplace, at least directly. It’s a series of essays about faith, art and culture, and the subjects range from living and working near Ground Zero in New York City when it became Ground Zero on Sept. 11, 2001, to the death of an artist friend, an exhibit of the works of Fra Angelico and even rating college tour guides with his soon-to-be college freshman.

But Refractions is most of all about art, because Fujimura is an artist and art is indeed about life. All of life, because life is a creative act. “Art,” Fujimura writes, “is an inherently hopeful act, an act that echoes the creativity of the Creator.” And that idea of hope applies to the artist, the architect, the poet, the choreographer and all the other creators who reach out “in hope to call the world into that creation.”

The essays, and the faith and mind that shape them, are quietly and profoundly stunning.

Nowhere is that more evident than in Fujimura’s writings on Sept. 11. The evil that led to the destruction of the Twin Towers and the deaths of thousands of people is juxtaposed against the good of the firefighters climbing up the stairs because saving lives was important, an affirmation of good. The ash that covered the trees and bushes, and his own then-10-year-old son, whose school was four blocks from Ground Zero, is set against the beauty of a night sky and the canvas upon which Fujimura would seek to affirm life and faith. As he says, it’s not sufficient to run from evil; one must run toward something good, toward “the tower of Jesus, which stands beyond and through our own ground zero experience.”

Each essay is a kind of meditation, and needs to be read slowly and carefully, with pen in hand for notes, because there is so much to absorb and ponder in each. More than once I was brought near tears, not any less so when I understood that I could consider my work, my day-to-day job, as a canvas, a canvas for me to create and paint an affirmation of life.

What an incredibly fine thing Makoto Fujimura has done here.

Shusaku Endo’s “Silence”

I’ve followed artist Makota Fujimara through his web site and blog. His art is stunning, and he has heaps of well-deserved accolades and accomplishments, including having served on the National Council on the Arts. He is also an author, a founding elder of his church in New York City, and the founder of the International Arts Movement (IAM).

IAM has a mission: to “gather artists and creative catalysts to wrestle with the deep questions of art, faith and humanity in order to inspire the creative community to engage the culture that is and create the world that ought to be.”

I became much more familiar with IAM when my friend L.L. Barkat told me that IAM was publishing her book of poems, InsideOut. I immersed myself in IAM’s web site, and found myself in a world of art, faith and culture, a world I felt immediately at home in. And I discovered that IAM has a Reader’s Guild, and it would be hosting book discussions on selected books each month of 2010, including works by Flannery O’Connor, Wendell Berry, Marilynne Robinson, C.S. Lewis, Italo Calvino, Annie Dillard and – Shusaku Endo.

I was not familiar with Endo. OK, so I’m part cretin. But I learned. He’s considered one of Japan’s finest novelists, if not the finest, a member of the so-called “Third Generation” of writers who emerged in Japan after World War II. He was born in 1923 and died in 1996, and he was a lifelong Catholic. He wrote numerous novels, but his most famous work was Silence. And it is Silence that is the first book the IAM Readers Guild will be discussing.

These discussions are generally being hosted in small groups in different locations; there isn’t one listed for St. Louis but I was intrigued enough to buy the book and read it, and I’ll be “participating” by blog posts here for the Mondays in January. If this works, I’ll continue this for the succeeding months.

Silence is the story, based largely on historical events and people, of two Portuguese priests who slip into Japan in the 17th century during a time of persecution of Christians. They have determined to go to Japan to minister to the faithful and to learn if the stories of the apostasy of the leading missionary – and their former teacher in seminary – are true.

The story is told by one of the two priests, Father Sebastian Rodrigues. And it is a story about faith and apostasy, how thin a line there is between the two, and whether one can remain true to faith even through apostasy. I found myself challenged on almost every page. Would I respond this way? Would I do this? Do I really understand what my faith is and isn’t? Is the difference that clear?

It’s an astonishing read.