The language and thought of art historian Katie Kresser are by turns painterly and poetic, then sharply penetrating in their logic and analytic edge. Unlike the rather dry rhetoric one sometimes encounters in scholarly art historical studies, The Art and Thought of John LaFarge is brimful of surprising turns, metaphysical reaching, and fresh insight into an American artist and a time that are both neglected nowadays —thought passé or irrelevant to our contemporary moment. Kresser creates a striking portrait of LaFarge (1835-1910) and his era, the so-called Gilded Age, and clears the way for a robust reassessment of a very rich period in American art history—one that may have new relevance to our changing international art scene, which—in some quarters, at least—is seeking relief from a century of ceaseless experimentation and transgressive aesthetic shock tactics.

The late 19th century in the United States is known for its economic growth, tumultuous industrial change, and social unrest—and in artistic circles for a paradoxical mixture of uncertainty and academicism; for beauty and high decorative form in painting, architecture, and applied arts but also for stylistic wandering and lack of focus. LaFarge was one of a small number of prominent artists whose work was publicly celebrated and who enjoyed many major commissions for murals and stained glass: for churches, state house buildings, libraries, universities and the like.[1] But the artist also sought in his theoretical and personal work to investigate perception itself, as a kind of early artist-phenomenologist. In her study of the artist, Kresser is able to conjure the atmosphere of the Gilded Age in compelling prose that evokes the polarizing effect of rapid change and growingly sophisticated global awareness—revealing that LaFarge was far from the stereotype often applied to him in modern art circles (where he is sometimes seen as a mere church decorator).

On the contrary, under the eye and pen of Katie Kresser, LaFarge is revealed to be ahead of his time on many fronts—in his late theoretical writings, his sometimes daringly compressed pictorial space, and in his insistence on a certain epistemic humility before his painterly subjects. Kresser suggests that LaFarge, himself a believing Roman Catholic, anticipated the thought of Catholic philosophers Jacques Maritain and Etienne Gilson, both of whom worked at a high view of artistic making as a fundamental mode of being on par with the human capacity to know or to communicate. Kresser discusses LaFarge's stubborn decision to forego certainty or stylistic brand in favor of steadfastly beholding the mystery of being, as uniquely manifest in the fragile humanly wrought thing. In LaFarge's view, the artist participates in the wildness and unpredictability of the Creation itself by becoming a servant of the work of art—itself now become a further extension of Being.

In his book Real Presences, George Steiner discusses at length the concept of intellectual hospitality and the need for the reader to freshly submit to the "presence" communicated in a given text or work of art—to achieve an unguarded gaze and receptivity that allows the work to do its work. Steiner goes on to say, "It takes uncanny strength and abstention from re-cognition, from implicit reference, to read the world and not the text of the world as it has been previously encoded for us"—in other words, to submit to the thing seen, not to its culturally conditioned simulacrum. The LaFarge that Kresser paints for us is just such a receptive soul who persistently attempts to achieve that unguarded gaze.

LaFarge's expansive intellect would not let him seek a facile stylistic brand. His paintings are exploratory even as they participate in traditional idioms—and therefore occasionally seem weak or unfinished. It is as though the artist says, "I am a servant of the form, of the tradition, and of this passing moment of looking. I cannot simply invent myself whole cloth; neither can I default to a ready-made style or finish." Kresser writes, for example:

In LaFarge's work, to borrow a phrase from W. B. Yeats that foreshadows the thought of Jacques Derrida, "the center cannot hold." But this relinquished harmony, this absent center, is a product of purposeful self-abnegation. The work, renouncing a rhetoric of self-completeness that might imply a separate world of "ideals" (or more darkly, counterfeits), became an effect of the Real—vexed, complex, part willed and part accidental, pushed, shoved and pummeled by something external to the structures of human thought.

And Kresser goes on to stress LaFarge's innate Thomist bent—i.e., his insistent attempt to achieve what Steiner calls "uncanny strength and abstention" and to get past the conceptual grid that we painstakingly construct as we name and categorize and cage the world around us.[2] Yet as she points out later in the book, LaFarge was aware of the impossibility of literally attaining anything like innocence of perception, free from the trammels of "previously encoded" concepts of the world:

What LaFarge sought, but what he knew was impossible, was the primitive rune—the perfect, economical symbol that carried the reality of its object within itself, and that therefore became an object in turn—a rich and dense evocation of thingness whose only allegiance was to the thing it evoked—not to a frame, or to institutional expectations.

Kresser presents a LaFarge who, like Martin Buber in I and Thou, confronts us with an elemental choice in his art: encounter the world as being, as real presence—or objectify and reduce it to your selfish ends, where every tree is only and always potential lumber. The author goes on in succeeding chapters to discuss LaFarge's distinction from contemporaries who sought to "brand" American art with a kind of consensus aesthetic, enforced by an academic credentialing system. She contrasts painters like Kenyon Cox with LaFarge by showing their reliance on a supposed "common sense" appeal rather than the authenticity of the unguarded gaze.

LaFarge therefore, per Kresser, moved away from the mainstream, becoming a man at the margins—a "figure," as his friend Henry James described him. And in fact, like his French contemporary Paul Gauguin, LaFarge did travel to Tahiti and Japan and Asia more generally in an attempt to investigate further his theory of immediate, pre-conceptual perception in art. Yet LaFarge rejected Gauguin's primitivism as "wild and stupid." There was no going back, no innocent or noble savage. There was only the forward gaze of ceaseless presence, submitting to the Muse of Painting. And the figure of Painting, personified in LaFarge's work by that same title, sits eyes closed and palette empty before the Subject—the Real world—practicing the heroic abstention that Steiner alludes to.

Kresser seems to want us, her readers, to encounter her own work in much the same way as she presents the artist LaFarge—she wants us to become witnesses to the impossible act in which the author foregoes a strictly academic rendering and offers a felt and sensed portrait as opposed to the conceit of objectified biography. The frank admission of the impossibility of accomplishing objectivity frees the writer and the reader to enter into honest encounter (as opposed to preconceived evaluation and categorization) with an artist who emptied himself in the same way. LaFarge, in Katie Kresser's account, is an artist who knows his limitations and understands that these are of the essence, not simply a sign of his own failure, but rather the baseline humility required of the honest inquiry which alone can yield hope for culture.

It is this sense of quixotic hope that seems hover over The Art and Thought of John LaFarge in a poignant and telling way. As a reader, I not only felt the presence of the nominal subject of the book but also "heard" the author in genuine conversation with the dead artist and with the living reader. This is a refreshingly honest and vulnerable stance—and reveals the author's posture, namely that all art historical writing, like painting itself, is a gaze into the irreducible mystery of the Real and will always be provisional, contingent—a gesture toward authentic encounter.

1. There are 56 public buildings across the United States that sport LaFarge stained glass and many restored public murals that are treasured by local communities.

2. Thomas Aquinas (as quoted in LaFarge): "We cannot understand things … unless they are united to our intellect in such a way that the knower and the known become one."

Bruce Herman, a painter whose work has been widely exhibited, is Lothlórien Distinguished Chair in the Fine Arts at Gordon College. He collaborated with G. Walter Hansen in Through Your Eyes: Dialogues on the Painting of Bruce Herman (Eerdmans).

Copyright © 2014 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.
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