Hiram Williams:

the return

to the image

of

man In

contemporary

art

Art in recent years has worked with the human figure in distortion. Hiram Draper Williams of the University of Texas Art Department, working through a research grant from the Texas Research Institute, has endeavored to develop the image of man simply as contorted, overcoming the distortion.

This commentary is an excerpt from Williams' lecture-discussion at one of the Friday Evening Programs of the College House. The intention of the dinner programs is to create a living dialogue between the Church and the culture in which we live, with the conviction that such dialogue enables us to grasp the meaning of being a person of faith in the new world of the twentieth century and contributes to our ability to articulate the Christian faith to ourselves and other people.

Hiram Williams has lately received the highest award in the D. D. Feldman Competitive Invitational Exhibition. In the past, he has received two Texas Fine Arts Association awards, two former D. D. Feldman awards, and has twice surpassed the Ford Foundation's six state regional exhibitions.

T HE FRENCH MASTER. Braque has said that the wonderful thing about paint is that when applied to a surface. it becomes something other than paint. Picasso. when told that people that his painting of Gertrude Stein was not a true likeness, said, They will.'' And Picasso was right. To the world the greatest likeness of Gertrude Stein? and this includes photographs, is the Picasso portrait of her. This picture is reproduced the most frequently as the image of Stein. The artist projects his vision of the word upon the world and upon the body of Art.

According to some psychologists, the subconscious paints the picture. It is my opinion that consciousness at least picks up the brush. Indeed, I beleve that consciousness pays a great part in the creation of a painting.

The making of a novelty, or a strangeness is nothing. It is easy. But the creation of a new vision concerning the fundamental things in man's interaction with the objective world is something else. For true art deals with the stuff of life - our emotional relation to it - and is an invention intended to visualize and heighten our perceptions of life - an understanding of experience.

An exciting feature of the creative process is the way the artist's personal experience of thought and environment appears in his art product. The artist himself may work in the firm belief that he is dealing only in art, only in material and technique and formal or descriptive idea, and yet when the thing is done his reaction to the experienced environment is there. Let me illustrate. Without knowing a great deal about the movement I find that philosophically I am some kind of existentialist. As I encounter existential ideas I find that I am in agreement. When evolving a way to present total configuration, I was consciously concerned only with the problem. I tried to visualize, and I diagrammed all sorts of combination views of the human figure. I chose to do the male image. I chose to clothe this image in ordinary business dress, the anonymous costume of a great share of our American male population. I sought methods of dealing with shape that would not be in violation of our current notion of the formal nature of the picture. Slowly I came to realize the overtones evolving. I began to see that I was making statements about man's situation as I feel it. My paintings began to embody my philosophy, and, of course, this is the important factor. My argument is clear. The paintings pivoted upon an idea for representing image; the overtones, the meaning, followed my engagement with this problem.

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Dear Everybody:

A breakthrough is a gift that we acknowledge when we have been broken through. Ask those who have returned from the valley of the shadow in mental illness, alcoholism, family disruption, business failure and other personal or social crises.

Man seeks and seeks and seeks, saying to himself that he is seeking after some "good" and hiding from the necessity to look at his real situation where he is escaping from decision. If he will not look, will not decide, breaktdown inevitably follows. If he decides before, during, or after the breakdown, there is instead a breakthrough. He discovers himself discovered, he finds himself found, he accepts his acceptance. And this enables him to accept his situation, whatever it may be, in all the "is-ness" of life. Is this not what the Church has always meant by judgment and redemption ?

What is true of life is always equally true for the Church, if not more so, for the Church is the people who are kept in constant awareness of judgment and redemption.

These are exciting times, urgent and demanding, as new men seek to relate themselves to a new era in history and as the Church seeks to recover her role as mission to a new world.

What is this new world? Who are the new men ? What is the new image of the Church and how did it come into being? In this issue of Letter To Laymen, the corporate ministry of the Christian Faith-and-Life Community presents a compact review of the movement toward the long hoped-for recovery of the ministry of the laity, and of the Austin Experiment as one expression of the Lay Movement.

If you will look over the chart of the programs conducted in the Experiment by the Christian Faith-and-Life Community, you will not be surprised that it takes an annual budget of $121,000 to conduct this corporate research.

To raise this amount of money, we have no one . . . no group . . . to turn to but you Dear Everybody. As I have reported to you in this column before, we forged ahead in program expansion both because of the many people who wanted to participate in the lay training and because of the overwhelming requests from denominational agencies, lay centers, church congregations, pastors, college chaplains, etc., who were seeking the results of the research to adapt in other areas and in other programs.

We added three new theologically trained staff members, purchased new property for married students' apartments, added programs for Seminary Interns and International Interns, initiated the Parish Ministers' Colloquies, the Laic Theological Studies, the Parish Laymen's Seminars, and stepped up the publications, all only with the hope that you would undergird the work financially.

Read this issue carefully. You will see that your contributions have initiated experimental programs that are revitalizing the Church in her ministry to the man of the modern age. Then, assure us that you will sustain this research by sending as much of the $121,000 as you can now along with a promise of regular support.

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the image of man

A work proposing to be art can be superficial and insignificant, but no work becomes art apart from the insight and judgment of the artist - the work is that judgment, and it is idle to talk about technique apart from subject matter which that technique forms. Together, subject matter and technique express an artistic concept which itself implies a world view, an attitude toward man.

In order that you may understand the analogy to my work, I must say something concerning an artist's philosophical position today. Much recent welded sculpture reveals nature as a cruel, selfabsorbed organization quite uncomprehending of man. In some versions man is excluded and becomes a spectator, a witness, and in others he has become one of the innumerable elements of that blind, unthinking nature. The symbols are there in metal - jagged, crusty organisms personifying the senseless twisting motions of aimless creatures, or plans capable of endless crushing movements over the countless bodies of living men. In instances the image of man is made an absorbed symbol - absorbed into these sculptured organisms having become one of them.

In 1849, Asher Brown Durand painted "Kindred Spirits," a landscape depicting a Catskill gorge with two bluffs of sedimentary rock topped by ash trees and overlooking a rock-strewn brook which pours through a vista of evergreen foliage. A painter and a poet, Thomas Cole and William Cullen Bryant, stand in gentle dress upon one bluff. Here is a scene of harmony. A nature of romantic grandeur and an equal grandeur of mind contemplating it. God has given his generous blessing to both man and nature. They are equal in his eves. Cole and Byant eye nature and nature eyes them (with the eye of God).

It was in the eighteenth century that European art became conscious of nature. England felt the romantic movement strongly by the 1720's while American art hardly felt the movement before 1500. Edmund Burke's "Sublime and Beautiful." published in 1756, considered the "Sublime" as the untamed aspects of nature, forbidding and terrible. The other romantic view of nature considered its peaceful, lyrical qualities. The discovery of nature meant at once the recognition of its dual aspect. Man was free to invite the friendlier prospect, and God would save him from the forbidding and terrible. Cole and Bryant could stand before nature its equal, because God was by their side and made up the necessary strength to more than equalize the balance.

Much recent welded sculpture reveals man's plight when God disappeared. The initial shock is still with us; worse, for now man feels that God was never there, and the unthinking grasses wave unceasingly in gusts of wind and the trees are no longer friendly and the rocks have never cared. Nature does not harbor man, is unaware of man, and man whimpers in self-pity. Not because of what he recognizes, but that nothing anywhere recognizes him. Man is intimidated, for there is no shelter from the "sublime." Here is man without God.

The image of man in "harmony" with nature goes back to the time when man was a wild element among other wild elements. But even then he sought refuge among his gods. To identify with and be lost in nature is to be lost in God. To discover that God was never there removes man's chance to come into harmony with nature.

Much recent welded steel sculpture reveals man's further plight. Certain images pose as hostile nature, while others, as I have said, incorporate the image of man into a hostile image, making man an image as "sublime" as any other. Without God man can no longer trust nature, and without God, man can no longer place his faith in the eventual God-like goodness of men. All are organisms, as man is an organism, in but apart from nature. Welded sculpture tells us about this and offers no suggestion leading out of man's despair and into the realm of hope.

As the image of God disappeared from the mind of man, has the image of man disappeared from his painting? Not quite, for man-like images are discerned here and there in dim focus or terribly scarred and distorted. This painted image is never God-like when it is seen. It is the image of a victim. On the other hand, can we discern a heroic artistic attempt to reintegrate man -- to make him whole? Is the image of man to reappear as a unified thing? It is apparent that in 1950-52 at least one artist. DeKooning, was not able to make the step. DeKooning painted a series of seven canvases using as his theme an ambiguous form called "woman." The artist himself points out that this image can be interpreted as a landscape. (Is this an effort to integrate man with nature?) The figure is recognizable, its features forbidding. Its body is caught in a wild frenzy of dissolution. It is symbolic of mankind coming apart at the seams.

Art is an index to the emotional state of a culture, and in our culture only the name artists, the "innocent," can propound integrated images of man. The sophisticated artist, the aware, circle about cautiously avoiding the human image - painting, painting. painting, but for the most part avoiding the representational human image. This image of man will continue to be avoided in most of our art until that day when man may become convinced that, though "without God," he is of "godly" stature.

My position is no better than that of De Kooning, or the welders, for I cannot see man as a creature of godly stature. This means that unless some drastic intervention happens, I can only paint man's image as symbol of man spiritually lost-an ambivalent, indeterminate creature seeking salvation and not finding it. I am unable to reveal an image of godliness. Indeed I find it hard to reveal manliness.

Perhaps it is time to remind you again that the visual arts are comprised of a world of forms, and these forms have a metaphorical relationship to live experience. The Byzantine built his mosaics in firm belief that he honored his death. He created a metaphorical world of art attesting to the reality of his metaphysical experience. The Renaissance artist, lately came into a belief in Man's God-like visage and character and showed this in his art. The 15th Century painter reveals to us his new found faith in some thing called science. Other arts than painting have, of course, a]so kept faith with their times.

That which calls forth responses in one age dies fallow in another. Today's world is vastly different from our forefather's (what with differences in social organization, modes of transportation, building and housing, technology, philosophy, and so forth! These differences are highlighted in the forms our art has taken. The shape of things is seen in art-but only as idea.

The closer our concepts correlate with the real world, whatever it is, the righter we'll be, but who is to say when this happens? Art offers us a profusion of concepts-ways of achieving emotional grasp of our environment and selves. The arts reduce life to a perceivable level where aspects of the experienced world are readily felt and emotionally comprehended. To clinch these immediate remarks, let's say that men understand chaos when form is given to it.