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incarnation may be said to have for Its object the drawing of men from
misery to happiness. Being the act of God It is the greatest of all
rhetorical acts and therefore the greatest of all works of art. And
as from the fatherhood of God all paternity is named in heaven and earth,
so from His creative power all art is named. In the Incarnation we
do not only know a fact of history or a truth of religion; we behold a
work of art, a thing made. As a fact of history It is the most interesting
and illuminating of all historical happenings. As a truth of religion
It is of primary and fundamental importance. But it is as a work
of art that It has saving power, power to persuade, power to heal, poser
to rescue, power to redeem. (from Last Essays, 1942.)
God's work of creation
was gratuitous. Man also is able to make gratuitously. He is
able to make things simply because it pleases him so to do, and things
such that they are simply pleasing to him. Such things are works
of art pure and simple. They leave the world better than they found
it, but that is not their raison d'etre; their reason of being is the pleasure
pure and undiluted of the rational being who made them. They do not
set out to serve him; they add to his physical well-being only by accident.
(from
Art Nonsense and other Essays, 1929)
The word art
first all meant skill, and it still means that first of all. And
it means human skill, the skilful doing which results in making, so that,
in its full meaning, the word art meant, and still means, the power
in the mind of man so to direct his acts that the result of his thought
and actions is a thing made. But though that is the original meaning
of the work, and though that meaning is still the true one, we have nowadays
almost completely forgotten it, and have come to think of art as though
the word did not mean all human works whatsoever, from drain-pipes to cathedrals,
from paper-wights to statutes of saints or politicians, from street cries
to songs and symphonies, from sigh-boards to Royal Academy paintings, but
only the special works of the special people who paint pictures, carve
or mould statutes, write books and poems, and design buildings to be looked
at. (from
Christianity and the Machine Age, 1940)
The artist is not a
special kind of man, but every man is a special kind of artist.* This
is a true saying; but we no longer believe it. (from Christianity and
the Machine Age, 1940)
The artist is the
person who actually has the skill and actually uses his skill to make things,
to make, to bring into physical existence the things which abides in his
mind. An artist is not simply a person with ideas. He is a
person who has the skill to make his ideas manifest. He is not even
a person with fine ideas or even fine skill; such a person is simply a
better artist than others. Art itself is neither good nor bad; there
is every kind of art, from the silliest and most inept to that which embodies
the most refined sensibility in the most perfectly precise form. (from
Art
in a Changing Civilization, 1934)
|
 Eric
Gill (1882-1940) was a well known British sculptor, engraver, typographer,
painter and artist. He was also a religious and social philosopher for
whom life was more than art, because it was the highest art, the art of
being human.
Self-portrait, wood engraving
All the best art is religious.
Religious means according to the rule of God. All art that is godly, that
is, made without concern for worldy advantage, is religious. The great
religions of the world have always resulted in great artistic creation
because they have helped to set man free from himself - have provided a
discipline under which men can work and in which commerce is subordinated.
(from Art Nonsense and other Essays, 1929)
Art which is not propaganda
is simply aesthetics and is consequently entirely the affair of cultured
connoisseurs. It is a studio affair, nothing to do with the common life
of men and women, a means of 'escape.' Art in the studio becomes simply
'self-expression,' and that becomes simply self-worship. Charity, the love
of God and your neighbour, which, here below, every work of man must exhibit,
is lost. If you say art is nothing to do with propaganda, you are saying
that it has nothing to do with religion - that it is simply a psychological
dope, a sort of cultured drug traffic. I, at any rate, have no use for
it. For me, all art is propaganda; and it is high time that modern art
became propaganda for social justice instead of propaganda for the flatulent
and decadent ideals of bourgeois Capitalism. (excerpt from a letter
to The Catholic Herald, 28 October 1934)
(*Ananda K. Coomaraswamy, The Transformation
of Nature in Art, 1935).
Also see > Prints
by Eric Gill
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