Centre of all things

BY HELEN?NTABENI

As last month’s controversy over the painting “The Spear” showed, art can sharply divide opinions. HELEN?NTABENI reflects on another painting which in its time drew both protest and admiration.

The excessive media exposure of Brett Murray’s “The Spear” and the misdirected debate it generated last month, in word and in paint-throwing deed, recalls the controversial and equally violent history of a far greater painting by the Catholic surrealist artist Salvador Dali.

“Christ of St John of the Cross: Nuclear mysticism”, painted in 1951, hangs in the Kelvingrove Art Gallery in Glasgow. Bought in 1952 for the then enormous sum of £8200, it was met with an outcry from both thrifty politicians and art critics who, heady with modernism, saw Dali’s Renaissance-like style to be of little artistic merit.

The painting is now much loved by Scots, voted the nation’s favourite painting in 2005. It is valued in the tens of millions.

But things were not smooth in the beginning. Its sin was that it stirs strong emotions. The viewer has an aerial view of Christ, suspended on a cross in mid-air. Christ in turn is gazing down upon Dali’s home town, Port Lliagat, with fishermen and their boats. It invokes John 12:32: “And I, if I be lifted up from the earth, will draw all men to myself.”

To the faithful this conveys our ascent from earth to the heavens through faith in Christ. Conversely, when I stand before this painting I experience the dizzying exhilaration of plummeting down to earth by means of the Cross.

The “nuclear mysticism” of the title is described as the philosophical interpretation of quantum mechanics. The painting was Dali’s vehicle of exploration of how science proved the existence of God.

Dali cited the genesis of “Christ of St John of the Cross” as coming from a “cosmic dream” he had about the nucleus of an atom. The nucleus took on a metaphysical air, causing him to relate to it as though it were the “very unity of the universe”, a role fulfilled in his mind by Christ.

A Carmelite friar named Fr Bruno had led Dali to the image of a suspended Christ painted by the fellow Carmelite, the mystic St John of the Cross, in the 16th century. This immediately inspired Dali to compose his unifying Christ within the geometry of a circular and triangle form, derived from Lucca Paccioli’s “Laws of Divine Proporzione”.

The centreing in the image signifies God’s Salvation, at the centre of the universe, not where the action took place upon Calvary, so making the image transcend its earthly confines to convey the fundamental importance of the Crucifixion to all of creation, before and since.

The figure of Christ is bare and blemish free. He does not wear a   crown of thorns, his hands are not nailed nor does he show any signs of the violence inflicted upon his body from his arrest up to his death on the cross. Dali stressed that he wanted his Christ to be beautiful, using Hollywood stunt actor Russ Saunders as his model, strapping him to a cross with binding and using a series of ropes and pulleys to induce the gravity defying angle.

Born to a devoutly Catholic mother and a stridently atheist father who forbade his son a Catholic education, Dali initially shunned his faith. An early work—titled “Sometimes I spit with pleasure on the portrait of my mother (The Sacred Heart)”—ridiculed both his mother’s faith and the devotion to the Blessed Mother of Christ. However, after World War II he was drawn back to Catholicism.

In 1949 Dali had an audience with Pope Pius XII who gave his “The Madonna of Port Lligat” a papal blessing. His wife portrays the Madonna in a reverent way, no spitting in evidence.

Very soon thereafter he publicly declared himself “a Catholic who lacked complete faith”. He once said: “I believe in God but I have no faith. Mathematics and science tell me that God must exist but I don’t believe it.”

Dali died on January 23, 1989 at the age of 84, having received the last rites of the Church.

I often wonder if those who are lucky enough to have the gift of faith understand those who, despite their good intentions, do not have such a gift. And also what does it mean, or what is the purpose of lacking in faith in a good person? I take comfort in the fact that when the archangel announced the birth of Christ he said he brings joy to people of good will, not only to the faithful.

The most powerful aspect of Dali’s painting, what makes it iconic, in fact, is that Christ is shown in a transcendent, metaphysical sense, already shaken free of the confines of all human physical deformity. Christ instead radiates the divine inner peace, grace and love in God’s eternal heart on that most violent and darkest of days.

I have always been drawn to the calmness and the support for others Christ exhibited by his life, which has struck me to represent his certainty that the pain of life, of the Crucifixion, is a temporal inconvenience, to that which he knew to be coming thereafter, which is much greater and overwhelming, rendering the immediate pain irrelevant (in human terms, similar to the fading in the mind of labour pains when one knows the baby is almost here).

In the early 1960s, a visitor to the Kelvingrove Gallery set about slashing the canvas of Dali’s painting on account of it being a work of blasphemy. The painting was painstakingly repaired. The gallery has even uploaded the video of this on to YouTube, and now only a faint scar persists, noticed only by those who know where to look. The painting was further shot at with a pellet gun in 1980.

A Glasgow-based Baptist minister, Jim Gordon, has said that to his mind the now scarred work echoed “one of the great theological mysteries, of created beauty, damaged and restored, having the power to subdue our worst and renew our best”.

Its scars now are testimony of its driven life, perhaps in which manner the risen Christ chose to come back with the scars of his crucifixion to convince us of God’s invincible love for us.

The art critic Jonathan Jones in 2009 described Dali’s painting as, “for better or worse, probably the most enduring figure of the Crucifixion of the 20th century”.

Something about it haunts us, like the eye of God in the nucleus of creation. I sometimes think this is what it meant by Christ being the Alpha-Omega-point of creation.