While living in Princeton in the 1990s, I sometimes resorted to a telephone service that offered succinct sketches of current movies, from Catholic commentators. This, both to help determine which films might be suitable for family viewing, and for my own guidance. I wasn’t looking for religious instruction per se (this was prior to my own baptism), but knowing that the reviewers stood on firm moral ground was reassuring, e.g. in learning whether an “R” rating had been bestowed owing simply to a naughty word (no obstacle in my view), or in light of a production’s cynicism, nihilism, or depravity (which themselves might not suffice, in the teeming marketplace, for that monitory majuscule). Such distinctions were not guaranteed from purely secular critics: my favorite in the ‘60s and ‘70s was Pauline Kael; but some of her raves sent me to movies I walked out of with a shudder. (As, “Last Tango in Paris”, which she praised as the best movie in a quarter-century.)
Later, something like such concerns formed a (subsidiary ) part of my appreciation for Sister Wendy’s The Story of Painting. Her perceptive appreciations and graceful style are a perfect fit for art produced during the high Christian centuries; more problematic are the effluvial emissions of our own time, which yet find praise among the arty crowd, and high prices from oligarchs at auctions. These I shun like dreck on a sidewalk, and think of them no more; but was curious to see how Sister Wendy would deal with them: her history begins with the cave-paintings of Lascaux, and it would be structurally awkward to simply lop-off developments since the Dadaists et ilk. She gamely wades into this boggy terrain; but prefaces her chapter on the twentieth century thus:
It has been calculated that there are more artists practicing today than were alive in the whole Renaissance. But … there is no mainstream. The stream has flowed into the sea.
Accordingly, “The story of painting now loses its way.”
We find a similar assessmen from the later critic Peter Schjeldahl, lamenting having to review a prestigious retrospective exhibition of the egregious Francis Bacon (in The New Yorker for June 1, 2009): “Francis Bacon has long been my least favorite great painter of the twentieth century.” Yet Bacon’s postumous reputation continues to swell (to become more swollen), and Schjeldahl must acknowledge:
But I’m aware that the scorekeeping applies to a game not won or lost, but called on account of rain: proliferating points of view that have swamped all would-be authoritative accounts of art history, along with those of history, period.
~
Yet nota bene: Precisely because Sister Wendy understands what is sacred and central to human life, she is not in the least prudish. As, she presents a canvas from ca. 1537 by Lucas Cranach the elder, depicting a recumbent nude. In the upper left corner is a superscription “Fontis nympha sacri”; in the lower right, next to her feet, a couple of birds. And behind her, a cavern releasing a thin stream from a rather urethral-looking aperture towards its upper arch. That caught the attention of the Old Adam, for which I somewhat blushed.
Not so the Sister. The section is titled “The seductive nudes of Cranach”:
These coy creatures have the rare distinction of fitting in with modern tastes, being slender, free-spirited, and even kinky. A distinctly diaphanous wisp of silk draws attention to her loins by ‘covering’ them. She is clearly only pretending to be asleep.
Seeing more than I had, she identifies the birds as “a pair of partridges (the birds of Venus)”; and as for that problematic micturating cavern, she names it plainly, as a symbol of “the female hollow”.
~
A term I learned from her discussion of Braque: papiers collés, meaning the art of collage -- scraps of this and that, assembled and recontextualized. That is basically what I have been trying to do, with far-sought sentences or phrases, rather than with images, in the “found poetry” posts on the blog. And lo, her own can contribute some snippets to that effort:
http://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/2025/08/sister-wendy-fiat-lux.html
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