When the Art disappeared…..

(Above and below) The somewhat arid appearance today of the late Gothic Frauenkirche in Munich, Germany. Reformers took the opportunity of repairing severe wartime damage to carry out a wholesale housecleaning. “They got rid of all the junk!” an otherwise esteemed professor told me gleefully once in my student days at Georgetown. It now turns out that not only was the 19th century art thereby lost of great value, but that real medieval works (such as in the choir) were mistakenly destroyed as well.

A most interesting article in Katholisch.de: “When the decoration disappeared – why so many old churches are so ‘empty.’ ”1) It tells the sad story of the so many churches in Germany after the Second World War. Innumerable churches had indeed suffered severe wartime damage from bombing and then from ground fighting. Yet the implementation of modernistic doctrines in art and architecture after the war completed the process – both in the damaged and undamaged churches. The champions of modern art thought that the church should be a  “bridge to God” and that churches overflowing with the art of many centuries didn’t serve this role. According to Professor Thomas Erne:

“They wanted to be modern, to go with the times. Churches had to be functional, everything else was superfluous.”…It seems to [Professor Erne] almost if the Church had been intimidated by the greatness of her own centuries-old cultural achievement.

The consequences were all too real: 

Magnificently carved altars were demolished, pulpits torn down, sandstone ornaments broken off, murals whitewashed. Images and statues disappeared and a great part of the often so richly ornamented “historicizing” furnishings went with them – final resting place unknown. So many an altar rail may have ended up as a garden gate for a vacation home.

I can personally testify to the presence of gilt baroque images of saints installed in upscale bars.

We should note that this iconoclasm and “purification” began well before the Vatican Council. It sprang from ideology. “Artistically, modernity wanted to exist only on its own: older approaches and traditions didn’t have a role to play anymore.”  Examples of such an architecture had been created as early as 1930 in Germany. “The walls are ostentatiously white and empty, not even a crucifix hangs on the end wall. The space, without images or decoration, very consciously celebrates the void.”

A particular target of the modernizers was the lavish ornamentation of the “historicizing” art of the 19^th and early 20^th century, which had sought to imitate – and often creatively combine – styles of diverse artistic eras.

In Germany today feelings are mixed. New ultramodern churches continue to be built. On the other hand, there is a growing recognition of the incalculable losses inflicted by modernity. And restoration attempts are being made in many churches to recover some of the decoration and furnishings that had been so heedlessly cast aside in the past.

But isn’t the postwar wave of destruction in church design and decoration the perfect equivalent of, and even prelude to,  the liturgical reforms of the 1950’s onward? Based on questionable theological and liturgical ideas, the liturgical reformers also strove to cast out the accumulated contributions of the past and free up the view to some “inner core “ of meaning. That’s not how things work – as we have belatedly realized! Baroque decorations are returning  to some German churches, in the very heartland  of Catholic modernity.  But how many more churches throughout the world have celebrated  the return of the Traditional liturgy – which had made all this art possible!

1. Hartmann, Christoph Paul, Als die Verzierung verschwand: Warum viele alte Kirchen so “leer” sind. Katholisch.de 7/31/2020