ZURBARAN : The Pain of Spirituality

Big-city America is full of decent citizens who can go from Easter to Christmas without thinking about religion. When these holidays roll around, they trigger jolly dinners and pretty presents rather than piety. Some people go to midnight masses or sunrise services with only the vaguest notion of what they are about. They like the ceremony and the lovely music. Religion as artwork.

In this culture, an education in art emphasizes history and formal and expressive vectors. When an art history prof shows the kids a slide of a crucifixion, the Buddha in meditation or Shiva dancing in a ring of flame, the instructor talks about play of light, calligraphic plasticity or rhythmic volumes rather than martyrdom, renunciation and transcendence. Even so, certain souls pick up the mythic intensity in the work and develop a fervid devotion to art for its own sake. Artwork as religion.

These days, religion is on the collective mind as never before in living memory. Cults proliferate. The Pope comes to Los Angeles. Scandal erupts around sweet-faced pastel television evangelists. Islamic fundamentalists in white beards and black robes rail against America the Great Satan. Pentecostal churches open in converted saloons on Melrose Avenue and science-fiction mass therapy groups picket for freedom from taxes under the Bill of Rights.

A thoroughly secular artnik scarcely knows what to make of it.

Familiar echoes, however. The now-entrenched artistic phenomenon of Post-Modernism with its sophisticated pastiche architecture and designy, amusing art has pretty well robbed the sphere of the aura of sometimes sanctimonious piety that mantled everything from Abstract Expressionism to International Style architecture. The new attitude is called demythification. It is cynical, nasty and self-satisfied, but it has its bitter truth which is that all surrogate religions based in human frailty are eventually going to let us down--aesthetic enthusiasm, romantic love and, yes, human institutions dedicated to religion.

That seems an inescapable bottom-line-guy kind of truth. The English philosopher Thomas Hobbes would have loved it; H.L. Mencken, too. What it leaves out, however, is the possibility that gritty reality can point to the transcendent, it can create a useful poetic illusion.

Take the painting of Francisco de Zurbaran.

Who?

Don’t be embarrassed if you don’t know about him. He is the kind of artist you discover after the basic art history survey or when you are wandering around in the south of Spain guzzling Sherry in Jerez and being a bohemian. If you ever bumble across his still life at the Norton Simon Museum in beautiful downtown Pasadena, you are unlikely to forget it. Revered as he is by insiders, Zurbaran never had an American retrospective until the Metropolitan Museum of Art unveiled about 70 of his best works in a tough, responsible show that blissfully contradicts detractors who accuse the place of pious commercialism. This show is not out to please the tourists. After closing here April 11, it will travel to Paris’ Grand Palais.

Zurbaran was, by common consent, the second-best Spanish painter in the first half of the 17th Century. That is not a bad position when you consider his competition was the towering genius Diego Velasquez, who dominated the court of Philip IV at Madrid with his reticent and aristocratic naturalism. Zurbaran painted mainly in Seville, working for great monastic orders that flourished there.

Neither his own times nor history were particularly kind to Zurbaran. After a period of grand success painting for monasteries with a large crew of assistants, he was caught in a political and financial crunch that impoverished the religious orders. Forced to paint on speculation, he sent potboilers to Spanish colonies in the new world. Fashion and ideology rolled over on him when the church promoted a more accessible and emotional art in order to stave off the threat of the Protestant secession. Zurbaran tried to adapt his austere style to compete with the energetic Francisco Herrera and the sweet Bartolome Esteban Murillo, but it was no good. In financial straits, he moved to Madrid and tried to recoup with scant success. He died there in 1664 at age 66.

Reading his biography, one is struck mainly by how pedestrian it is. One of the big events of the artist’s life was a petty wrangle with the painters’ guild in Seville, when the city fathers invited him to work there without passing the usual guild examinations. He married three times and lost a son in a plague, but the events are made to seem more dreary than tragic. Women died regularly in childbirth. Plagues were a regular part of this plain of tears. Writings in the thick catalogue give no suggestion that Zurbaran got any charge out of his success or brought any particular devotion to endless paintings of martyrs and saints. He just seems like a kind of Willy Loman, selling his wares and trying to keep up with the trends until he gets too old and dies. Just dies. No suicide, no fanfare no drama. Just plop.

It is an account that prepares us for part of Zurbaran. There is a barren asceticism about the work and a resignation in its realism that anybody hanging on a subway strap couldappreciate. Your arm aches. The weight of your own body is oppressive.

But then there is the weirdness and magic that glued the artist to modern taste and the surprise of the character that emerges out of an ensemble.

It turns out there are three or four Zurbaran personality variations. One was a competent pro painting in a roughly Italian Renaissance style, but awkwardly. Once he was called to Madrid to paint for the king. The results were so strangely off he was never asked back. Another Zurbaran would have been perfectly happy painting anecdotal domestic scenes like the one implied by “The Virgin and Christ in the House of Nazareth.” At another moment, he seems a kind of borderline naif painting “St. Hugh in the Refectory” with the eccentric innocence of an artist about to forget his training. The schizophrenic combination just doesn’t wash as the efforts of a detached craftsman trying to please a client. The rest makes his best pictures look like he had a real emotional stake in them.

Zurbaran at best handled big shadowed volumes with the same dignity as the French painter Georges de La Tour, but the Spaniard cut them up more so that La Tour’s powdery air becomes caustic. Zurbaran is said to have based his work on sculpture and he had the same capacity for making solids exist in space as Caravaggio, but the Italian’s movement looks almost bombastic next to Zurbaran’s tense, wound-up stillness.

And perverse. At least by secular standards. The virgin martyr St. Agatha stands in a billowing costume holding her severed breasts neatly on a silver platter. Other virgin martyrs are done up in contemporary finery: St. Margaret of Antioch wears rustic chic and a look of seething prissiness that makes you feel sorry for the dragon she holds at bay like a naughty dog.

St. Peter Nolasco kneels beside St. Peter, who is crucified upside down. The image is as riveting as a bad Dali. You want to laugh, but horror curdles the giggle in your throat.

Zurbaran didn’t need props or oddity to make the point. His hallmark painting of St. Serapion shows the martyr suspended by his wrists. His head lolls in the folds of his white cassock like an apple on a tablecloth. Only its odd angle suggests his neck has been broken. It’s a superb piece of fool-the-eye drapery painting, but tricky illusionism serves the point that the death of the flesh is inevitable. That is Zurbaran’s leitmotif: “You are going to suffer and die. Think about that. What makes it worth the terrible pain?”

Even the most cultivated modern detachment cannot avoid Zurbaran’s religious tract. The art uses the most intense realism to strong-arm the viewer into thinking about death more terrible than most people actually suffer. What makes the saints endure ghastly martyrdom? The promise of paradise seen in those specters of the Virgin of the Immaculate Conception floating on a crescent moon (which the artist did not paint with great conviction).

The picture of St. Francis kneeling in his rough brown cassock, meditating on a skull, is so intense it blows you halfway back across the gallery. The saint’s hooded face looks maniacal and you remember a scene from Warner Herzog’s film “Aguirre: Wrath of God.” Aguirre has mutinied against the aristocratic leader of a conquistador search party sent into the Amazonian jungle. It it clear he is about to murder the hapless fellow. In desperation, the prisoner’s wife appeals to the expedition’s priest as her last hope. The monk says something like, “My child, the church is always on the side of the strong.”

The man feels like he’s got a crack in his brain half a mile wide, and the only thing that keeps him going is the belief that God is going to sort this all out somehow. Zurbaran’s painting taps into those same whirling currents of worldly battiness testing the faithful to the point of desperation and death, but never to the point of futility.

There are moments you don’t want to look at Zurbaran because he sucks you in personally. Lemme outta here. I want a nice peaceful Bonnard, a rip-snorting Veronese with lots of dancing girls. This is no fun. Right, but you can’t walk out believing that art has no capacity to point to the spiritual, even when it hurts.