Narrative and Spiritual?
If you have read my piece Spiritual Art, you might recall that I am sold on the potential of abstract art to access spiritual experience and reflection. So does that rule out figurative art? And how about narrative art? Art which tells a story?
Here is a painting which I think has a profound spiritual quality, although in a markedly different way to some of my abstract examples.
Its title is variously Woman in Blue, The Letter or The Reader. It was painted towards the beginning of the 1660s by Johannes Vermeer, who worked in Delft and The Hague in the Netherlands.
Vermeer is an extraordinary artist. There are only 34 paintings worldwide which everyone agrees are by him. Many of them are quiet interiors depicting everyday life. You can find this one in the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, on a large wall with two other Vermeers. They are all small; this canvas is just 50cm x 40cm. And yet ...
Most people agree that there is a stillness about Vermeer's paintings. He seems to be able to catch a moment - a servant pouring milk, a young woman glancing over her shoulder. Here we have another young woman, obviously pregnant, beginning to read a letter she has just opened. She is alone with her letter and her thoughts. She is standing, not sitting.
It is the sort of painting about which you can easily tell stories. I spent some months in the Netherlands in 2007 and I showed a postcard of this painting to a number of different women. I asked what it was about. Several of them launched into stories about lovers who had gone to sea, lovers who had gone to war, lovers who were leaving her and those who were asking permission to return. One young woman said gravely "She is thinking 'I wish I never got pregnant' ". A religious sister (a nun) said: "This is an Annunciation".
But for me, this painting's spiritual nature does not lie in its capacity to stimulate the imagination. It can be found in Vermeer's ability to capture a moment. What he has shown us here is an instant where time has collapsed; where many things are possible and true at the same time. It has become, if you like, a Schroedinger moment where everyone holds their breath. These moments occur throughout our lives and they are immensely powerful. Playing as they do with Time and Space, they almost stand outside of ordinary existence, and yet they are also astonishingly ordinary. For Christians, this is what happens on the altar during the Eucharist but for all of us, such moments probably happen more often than we recognise.
It seems to me that engaging with this painting in a reflective and receptive way opens our awareness of this spiritual truth.
In 1996, a major exhibition of Vermeer's work was held in The Hague.
At the same time, in the same city, the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia had been in session for two years. Day after day, the court heard horrendous stories of the worst kind of inhumanities and atrocities carried out in the Balkans war. The Presiding Judge was Antonio Cassese. Soon after the Vermeer exhibition opened, he sought and obtained permission to spend an hour alone each morning with the Vermeers before the public were allowed in. In such a way, he prepared himself for what he might have to hear in the courtroom.