THE QUICK & THE DEAD

MANHATTAN'S staid Frick Collection last week put on display the elaborately splendid painting opposite. Begun by Jan van Eyck, and finished after his death by his disciple Petrus Christus, it has the grace and precision, the atmosphere of Tightness and relaxation, common to Early Flemish masterpieces. The picture shows the Virgin and Child flanked by Saints Barbara and Elizabeth of Hungary. Kneeling in adoration is the Carthusian prior who commissioned the painting for his church in 1441. Acquired a century ago by Paris' Baron de Rothschild, the picture has now passed to the Frick--for a rumored $1,000,000.

In museums, the great religious art of the past ceases to be an aid to worship and becomes something less: the delight of art lovers. Visiting the U.S. last winter, French Critic Andre Malraux went so far as to declare that the nation's museums have become its real churches.

Missing Spark. Meanwhile, the art of the churches, predominant in Western culture for the first 18 centuries of Christian history, lies torpid. A French Dominican friar named Marie-Alain Couturier put the situation even more bluntly. Shortly before his own death this year, Father Couturier wrote that "Christian art is dead."

Couturier went on to explain that today's sacred art is "constantly repeating the old styles of past centuries, slavishly rebuilding romanesque, gothic or renaissance churches, never utilizing modern forms until they are already outmoded--or else employing them artificially, in ... borrowings that lack any spontaneous spark of life. For more than a century, imagination--the true innovator of all new forms--has remained completely outside of, and alien to, the Church . . . The only great Christian artist alive, Rouault, had to wait until he reached the age of eighty before seeing one of his works admitted to a church."

But Couturier was a bit harsh. The very fact that Rouault was admitted (to the little church at Assy--TIME, June 20, 1949) shows that the situation has begun, just barely, to improve.

Couturier himself supervised the adorning of the Assy church, which also boasts works by Braque, Leger, Chagall and Bonnard, and he inspired Matisse to design, singlehanded, a chapel at Vence. Frank Lloyd Wright, among others, has produced radically new churches in the U.S., and Andre Girard's stained glass for a chapel at Palo Alto, Calif. (TIME, Jan. 25) is rich in ideas. The Vatican has been called, with good reason, a citadel of conservatism in art, yet it has commissioned a rugged individualist named Giacomo Manzu to design a new door for St. Peter's.

Weak Faith. These advances have followed a pattern which Couturier eloquently urged. Churches, he argued, should commission the very best artists available, and not quibble over the artists' beliefs. His reasoning: "Where traditions are still living traditions, minor artists are enough to insure the continuous production of whatever art religion may require. But . . . to effect a revival of liturgical art it would be safer to turn to geniuses without faith than to believers without talent." Couturier missed one point: the improvising geniuses of an age weak in formal faith can scarcely be expected to rival those of the distant past, who possessed both the strength of faith and the assurance of an accepted style. Though Christian art is not quite dead today, any comparison with Van Eyck's vital and assured 500-year-old masterpiece can make it seem so.

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