William Congdon: Five Decades of Painting

Peter Selz

I felt the weight of Christ on my pictures, on my very creative freedom. In those years few pictures came to birth, and they would not have come to birth—I lament—if I always had to think of Christ when I painted. When I heard that the Blessed Angelico painted with a brush in one hand and the Gospel in the other, it struck me as the most absurd nonsense. One of the greatest difficulties for the artist who offers himself to conversion is letting Christ settle in. The autonomy of art is an inviolable, untouchable mystery that, like the Spirit, "blows where and when it wills." "A collision of two mysteries," a friend said to me. One mystery the artist had already within himself. God has given it to him, and the artist will only permit God, with difficulty, to take it from him in order to have the artist accept another mystery that he neither sees nor touches, even if this latter mystery promises to recover and to regenerate the first mystery which was lost.

—William Congdon

AT the end of the century, when art historians focus emphatically on the relationship of the artist to patronage and on the commodification of art, it is not easy to write about a painter who has paid relatively little heed to the marketing of his work. At the end of the millennium, when critics maintain that authenticity is not possible because mass culture leaves space solely for simulation and pastiche, it is difficult to discuss the work of an artist of deep personal vision and total commitment. Confronting the utter cynicism that has entered the making and the criticism of art, where is there room for an artist compelled to search for truth? And considering that we live in an era of almost total secularization of culture, how do we contextualize the work of an artist that—certainly during the last thirty years—has been dedicated to God? What is the relevance of the mystical, the shamanistic, the spiritual function of art in a time when demystification is de rigueur? William Congdon stated his view in a letter to his cousin and close friend, the poet Belle Gardner, that "art is the externalization of the reality of experience." Congdon's painting over a period of fifty years has gone through many changes, but it is this attitude which is apparent in the testimony of his work.

Repelled by the commodification of art and enabled to circumvent it by his family fortune, Congdon dropped out of the gallery circuit in the early 1960s, emerging with masterful work in the abstract expressionist vein, but done in isolation of American or European practitioners. This presents the additional problem of reinstating a major artist, who has worked outside the mainstream for almost thirty years, into the canon of art history.

Congdon's origins gave little indication of the life he was going to create for himself. Wellborn into an Anglo-Saxon family of bankers, industrialists, plantation owners and high public servants, he grew up in the Puritan ethic of New England's economic aristocracy. From a relatively early period Congdon was drawn to the arts. He majored in literature at Yale, wrote poetry during his years in World War II, and has continued to express his ideas in prose. He was attracted to the theater as well as to music, attending Wagner festivals in Bayreuth in 1933 and 1935. His interest in the arts was still diffused at the time, but in 1934 Congdon began his study of painting when he enrolled in Henry Hensche's Cape School of Art in Provincetown, Massachusetts. The Impressionists' manner of seeing and rendering color and light was essential to the teaching and plein air practice of Hensche. Congdon well remembers his teacher's lessons in the dissolution of form depending on the impact of light and shade.

In 1939 Congdon was ready to open his own sculpture studio in Lakeville, Connecticut, where he worked until 1942, carving in wood and modeling in clay. He sent his sculptures of animals and portraits to national exhibitions and received a number of commissions. During these years he also paid frequent visits to New York galleries and became familiar with the art of his time. He studied the work of Ernst Barlach, Georges Braque, and Paul Klee.

When the United States entered World War II, Congdon, who hated military discipline and violence of any kind, volunteered for the American Field Service as an ambulance driver. He was attached to the British Eighth Army, crossed the blazing desert of North Africa, and worked as an assistant to a New Zealand surgeon in the ravaging battle of El Alamein in October 1942.

Death announced itself to him as the wounded were brought into his tent in the implacable desert heat. Congdon became a witness for the dying and was compelled to render quick sketches such as Dying Man (1942), much as expressionist Max Beckmann had done as a medical corpsman in the previous war. This service to the wounded and mutilated left a permanent mark on the work of both artists.

The Allied Forces moved on westward through Libya and then on to Sicily. Congdon moved on with the armies, saw Naples, and found it a most fascinating and wondrous city, a place to which, he knew, he must someday return.

In the spring of 1944, assigned now to the Third Polish Armored Division, he witnessed the destruction of the great abbey of Monte Cassino and the suffering of the dying and the wounded. In June he was one of the first Americans to enter Rome, exploring the city, discovering the Pantheon and its piazza. Again he knew that he would have to return. After a brief furlough in the States he was back in the front lines of Italy during the hard winter of 1944-45, once more exposed to the brutality of the war, now in its final and least rational phase.

Congdon's command went to Belgium and Holland, then into Germany. He comments on the German's extreme deification of the state as part of a universal disease. In his poetry he deals with the futility of war, its hollow victories. Then, in May 1945, he was called to the Bergen-Belsen death camp. Here again he became the witness of death on a scale beyond comprehension in its vastness and horror.

It was an insane asylum in reverse. The insanity having been superimposed upon the normal by the insane, who watched over them.... It was the wholly unrelated and revolutionary concept of humanity, that salvaged teeth fillings, fingernails and hair, stored them in the warehouses with catalogued corsets and buttons, so as not to waste any raw products convertible to the war potential.

Congdon wrote about the horrendous spectacle of the massed dead and dying and made drawings, seeing individuals with both precision and compassion. His Morgen Tod (1945) is a small drawing in Conte crayon of a Hungarian Jewish woman on the verge of death. It is an unforgettable depiction of the poignancy of dying, made by a witness who had become a skilled artist. Rico Lebrun, one of the few American artists who also dealt with the physical and moral outrage of the death camps, stated that in these works "composition was born out of the shocked heart. First a man, second a draughtsman, I had to find out for myself that pain has a geometry of its own."

With the end of the war, Congdon returned to America. He attempted to publish his war drawings and journal notes in Life magazine and in book form, but his antiwar sentiment was not acceptable to Americans in those days of victory.

Alienated both from the optimism that prevailed in the States as well as from the strictures of his New England environment, he returned to Italy in 1946 to work with the Quakers in the reconstruction of some of the very towns he had seen destroyed. Congdon began to paint seriously in Naples and Capri and continued to do so on his return to his hometown of Providence, Rhode Island late in 1947.

In Capri he made a number of drawings in which trees are transformed into vigorous abstract lines, done in ink and ContÈ crayon, as well as the head of a mason worker which recalls renditions of the heads of Christ in drawings from the High Renaissance. This was followed by a boldly drawn Portrait head, made in Providence in 1948. Later he noted that "the human figure...is the paradigm, model, and summary of every form which exists."

But these heads are his only explicit representations of the human figure until his Crocefissi (Crucifixion) series began in 1960. It seems surprising that the artist who so strongly believed in the significance of the human form, denied himself painting the human figure for so long. When asked about this seeming discrepancy he told me that he had transferred his sense of the figure to paintings of the cities, which themselves are identified with the human beings that made them alive. Beyond that, he would refer to all his paintings as his children.

Congdon felt too estranged from his family and childhood environment to remain in the city of his birth. There seemed to be no understanding of the arts there, and certainly no capability to deal with the artistic personality. In his notes he referred to his cultural background as limited to "business, wealth and Puritanism." Highly important, also, was his relationship with his father. Later on he spoke of his early feelings of "solitude in the lack of affection on the part of my father," and sees the "frustrated abortive relationship" as the factor "which aroused the creative gift within me."

He moved to New York and rented a cold-water room, just off the Bowery. There he looked at the miserable tenements that reminded him of the hospital corridors and concentration camp huts he had seen during the war. Later he recalled: "With the iron scrawl of ink on wet paper, I'd cancel out the Victorian elegance of my own background."

In his Bowery series Congdon did not depict the denizens of the slums, the derelicts, the homeless, the drunks. Rather, the reflections of this multitude in the urban environment became his subject. He made quick sketches, energetic drawings of freely curved random lines, and experimented with automatic writing, practicing this surrealist technique in a much less self-conscious way than his colleagues Matta, Motherwell, and Pollock. His ink and gouache Bowery (Dark) of 1948 is filled with graffiti of faces, animals, a game score, meaningless numbers and the word "DIES." Clearly death, which he had witnessed so recently in the battlefield and concentration camps, remained with the artist for a long time, even in so lighthearted a work.

In 1948, Congdon created the pivotal work New York City (Explosion) [see Plate 1] in which the whole metropolis is seen in the moment of its destruction. This total obliteration of an entire city, all at one time, is hardly imaginable before Dresden and Hiroshima, and may very well be an allusion to the devastation of the war. In this painting Congdon scored the surface of the canvas with his spatula, an extension of his energetic arm, making angular and spiraled marks which suggest bridges, houses, or crowded dwellings. Their interlocking forms are dense recordings of an urgent painterly gesture. The colors are applied in energized layers with red at the bottom, moving on to yellow and purple. The upper register, perhaps suggesting the sky, is off-white. The painting is a continuous surface. This kind of all-over painting, practiced on a small scale, was introduced in Mark Tobey's "white writing" temperas in the early 1940s and became an essential trait of abstract expressionism. Like Tobey, Congdon worked with continuous lines that seem to have a busy life of their own. But Congdon held to the integrity of a central motif, focusing on a splash of black ink in the center. It is a black sun in the explosion's vortex, symbolizing a turbulent city destroying itself.

In nocturnal paintings like Black City or the almost monochrome Black City on Gold River, both of 1949, the sun has become an orange fireball high on the horizon. Congdon recalls having seen paintings by Dubuffet and was impressed by the French artist's childlike paintings of the city's narrow streets with their brightly painted old facades and their population of Dubuffet's funny little stick figures. But when Congdon painted the tenements of New York a few years later, they became dark and foreboding. Congdon viewed them from above, looking at a black mesh of confused forms and movements, identifying with their turmoil. With suggestions of buildings, streets, light, action, the whole bustling city is painted in a single turbulent dark mass. New York took Congdon out of his disowned background. It was a place in which he felt free and for which he had the ambivalent feelings of love and terror.

New York was also the locale in which Congdon established contact with his colleagues among the new avant-garde. For the abstract expressionists, reliance on the subconscious, on the exploration of the edge of awareness, had become a key issue. Artists tried to learn to sense directives from within and to paint their feelings about the world rather than their external experience of it. In an unpublished text which Congdon wrote for Life magazine in 1950, he said, "I paint from the unconscious (desire to paint, vague promptings of a jelled image) to the conscious (a painting)."

Like his confreres, Congdon exhibited at the Betty Parsons Gallery, where he had ten one-person shows between 1949 and 1968. He developed a great esteem for Mark Rothko, "who was very paternal, as though he loved me," and established a close and long-lasting friendship with Richard Pousette-Dart, whose paintings of the later 1940s also tapped the unconscious mind. Pousette-Dart's paintings, like Congdon's, were vibrating surfaces encrusted with pigment. And both painters believed in the mystical and magical properties of their work.

Unlike his colleagues who applied paint with brushes, or at times with a palette knife or their hands, or dripped paint onto canvas, Congdon always worked with the spatula and painted on boards. Just as Pollock in his mature years would drip the paint rhythmically, using the paint can as an extension of his arm, Congdon engaged his spatula in a similar fashion. The eye guided the hand, which applied color and line to the panel, creating an image intimately tied to the physical process. His years of working as a sculptor may well account for his lifelong use of the spatula and the awl as his painting tools.

Congdon knew that he had to return to Italy with its continuous tradition of humanism, moribund but persistent. In Italy (or France) American artists found recognition for being artists, an acceptance not available at home at the time.

He went to Venice: "Its fantastic aspect of a city in the water, offered escape from the materialistic world which after the war, particularly disgusted me....Venice and New York are both dreams of stone on the sea; one is horizontal, the other vertical....I loved Venice for the white of its stone, for what Venice does to the color white, when the violent light of August dives into the cage of the Piazza like a disk of fire, and the Campanile is liberated and tossed into the sky."

The disk of fire is still there in the paintings of Venice, but it is being transformed from the hot sun on New York's horizon to the great living stage of the Piazza San Marco. For several years Venice became the chief subject of Congdon's life and work.

Venice, totally man-made yet vulnerable to the sea and sky, with its palaces, bridges, churches and its unique topography, has attracted artists more than any other city. Although no place has probably been pictured as much as the "Stones of Venice," Congdon was willing to take the risk of using it as his subject as if it had never been painted before. He was overwhelmed with his love for the sky, the water, and the stony surfaces of the city and its peculiar light. He had to transform what he saw and felt into his own rhythm. Belonging to the generation of Action Painters, of American expressionists, he did not paint the place as much as the authentic emotion aroused by it when confronted with his unique discovery of the city.

Piazza Venice no. 12 (1952) [see Plate 2] can be seen as a summation of the series of St. Mark's Square. In a painting such as this he fuses cognitive perception into a mnemonic image. In this work the two side buildings have been separated widely, and the arc on the left seems to go on forever, fading into darkness. The two Procuratie leave broad imaginary lanes on either side of the church, which emerges like a dark island from the surrounding space. The white pavement in front of the basilica contrasts with the dark surfaces on either side. It appears like a great carpet with jagged wavy lines for its pattern, or, again, as a path of light emanating from the house of God. The thin campanile also radiates light as it rises elegantly on the right side of the church. The tower, church and white paving can also be seen as the vertical beam of the cross.

Congdon's paintings of Venice were received with considerable critical acclaim and commercial success. In 1950 he was included in a major exhibition of contemporary American painters at the Metropolitan Museum in New York. The following year he won first prize at the time-honored annual exhibition of the Pennsylvania Academy. Soon thereafter, Life magazine featured him with one of its rare articles on a contemporary artist. In 1951 he also had his first solo museum exhibition at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston, followed by a show at the Phillips Gallery in Washington in 1952. In the summer of that year his work was included in the Venice Biennale for the first time. He had exhibited in most Whitney Museum annuals since 1941, and in 1953 he was part of the Whitney's important exhibition "The New Decade: Thirty-Three American Painters and Sculptors."

Congdon's exhibition at the Galleria dell'Obelisco in Rome in 1953 was his first solo show in Europe and was succeeded by exhibitions at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice in 1957 and at the Arthur Jeffress Gallery in London in 1958. In 1959 he had his seventh one-man show at the Betty Parsons Gallery, which was successful in placing his works, especially the Venetian paintings, in the permanent collections of many major museums in the United States. As the stipend he received from his family was still modest, sales of his work were important to him for his livelihood and his extensive travels. Frequently he refers to awaited sales in his letters to Belle Gardner and also urges her to make purchases of his paintings.

Perhaps most important, Congdon himself felt very confident about his Venice paintings. On November 6, 1953, he wrote to his friend Jim: "I have a growing sense of my power as a painter. I am less and less starry eyed (if I ever was) even before the greatest. Sometimes the energy of the vision is frightening—I'm sure as regards Venice that I have passed Guardi."

Congdon had come to Venice as a foreigner, impassioned by the city's drama. But after a number of years it lost its strangeness and appeal. "Venice no longer quickens me," he wrote to Gardner in 1954. And later he remembered: "Already in 1953...I recognized that everything was slipping. I was losing my grip on Venice, or Venice was losing its grip on me. So I realized that I had to move, and the move was to find the Venice that I had lost and I kept looking for Venice, and I never found it."

When Congdon lost his close relationship to Venice as the place of inspiration, as his muse, he began his almost ceaseless period of travel. His biography becomes an itinerary. In some respects his travels to Venice, Rome, and Athens are certainly a classic part of the affluent New Englander's tour of civilized Europe. Among artists in the previous generation Marsden Hartley was similarly restless, moving rapidly from place to place, establishing temporary studios wherever he went. Recognizing this need to roam, Congdon said: "The artist is a nomad, who in all places of the world seeks the place...searching for the image that was waiting for me." So Congdon the voluntary exile had to move from country to country, from city to city, to find the image he was seeking and, in the final analysis, to find himself.

One extremely important event in his incessant travel occurred as early as 1950 when he went to Mexico and painted a view of the Plaza de Toros entitled Mexico-Bull Ring. In this work he looks deep down into an empty arena of light and shadow, perhaps symbolizing the struggle of life and death. The bullring, in fact, appears like a crater with crackling explosions emanating from its center. As in most of his works, Congdon identifies with the subject. He is not only the observer, but also the actor, the toreador engaged in a bullfight which is left invisible. He wrote at one time: "Each painting is a reenactment of a life-and-death struggle in the arena of myself."

In 1955 Congdon went to Santorini, that most beautiful of the Cycladic islands of Greece, from whose volcanic eruptions much of the fertile land surrounding its ancient calderas has been formed. In his autobiographical notes, In My Disc of Gold, Congdon recalls this as a very difficult period of his life, writing: "The image of my salvation which had once been the radiant basilica of San Marco became the black core of a volcano." Indeed, this was a time of deep spiritual crisis for the artist.

Very frequently Congdon, the American expatriate, painted the most popular "points of interest" in the places he visited: the Piazza San Marco, the Colosseum and the Pantheon, the Acropolis, the Taj Mahal, Angkor Wat, and the Eiffel Tower. Clearly he felt that these were the places most endowed with human history, sites of historical and often religious significance. Furthermore, he would confront these clichÈd monuments with a highly personal approach, emerging with unexpected images. These sites, it would seem, had been waiting for the moment of encounter with the artist and the movement that would guide him into the birth of a painting.

In the winter of 1956 Congdon visited Providence and Exeter, New Hampshire, whose winter landscape furnished the inspiration for a new series of paintings. In these stark, almost totally abstract paintings he used a wide spatula to paint the black trunks of the trees. These landscape paintings, like his paintings of urban subjects, were done in the studio, never in plein air. The relatively small size of his panels, their transportability as he wandered about the world, made it possible for him to set up studios in different places and have his work with him much of the time.

Although Congdon's roots are in American art, generally and specifically in abstract expressionism, his sensibility became increasingly European in its attitude toward a universal romanticism. For his American paintings, Harold Rosenberg's term "action painting" seems most appropriate. Georges Mathieu's term, "abstract lyrique" is most fitting for the European work, with its reliance on poetic, often tragic reactions to the world. Like the earlier masters, Congdon's work remained grounded in the objective world. He cultivated the encounter with the actual object, externalizing the reality of that experience with his spatula on boards.

After his brief stay in New England, Congdon returned to Paris, and then to Rome in 1956; but he experienced much difficulty painting—the essential encounter with his subject occurred now only on rare occasions. In his letters he reveals a good deal of self-doubt and an increasing number of allusions to religion, to the Catholic church, and to Christ.

After visiting Guatemala the artist returned again to Venice in a futile attempt to capture the strength of his former vision of the city. Ceaselessly he continued to wander over the globe. He traveled to Cambodia to see and paint the ancient ruins of Angkor Wat; he went back to Rome, to Positano, to Paris, again to Venice. But he recalls: "I also knew that my painting would no longer sustain me, that I was already falling back exhausted like someone swimming against the current....I returned to my studio in Italy. In my spirit there was no image; I had no will, not even the desperation to paint."

In the 1911 essay Concerning the Spiritual in Art, one of the most influential treatises on modern art, Wassily Kandinsky deplored "the nightmare of materialism which has turned the life of the universe into an evil, useless game," but the Russian artist saw the glimmer of "a feeble light...like a tiny star in a vast gulf of darkness," and found that in his time the soul was again emerging toward "a spiritual life...a complicated but definite and easily definable movement forwards and upwards." To Kandinsky and some of his contemporaries—artists such as Kasimir Malevich, Frantisek Kupka, and Piet Mondrian—this new spiritual impulse took the form of abstraction, which could express inner meaning and metaphysical ideals. Closer to our own time, Americans including Mark Tobey, Barnett Newman and Mark Rothko continued this search for mystical, transcendental experience outside the context of recognizable objects. For Newman and Rothko in particular, large paintings depicting vibrating space—a field of energy, or "mirrors reflecting what the viewer brings with him"—were "echoes of our experience." In the 1960s both artists painted cycles of paintings of great religious significance.

Meyer Schapiro, the eminent art historian, pointed out that such works "can induce an attitude of communion and contemplation" and "offer to many an equivalent of what is regarded as part of religious life," but he also warned that "painting, by becoming abstract and giving up its representational function, has achieved a state in which communication seems to be deliberately prevented."

In spite of its secular character, our age has seen a reemergence of sacred and spiritual art using Christian iconography. Some of this art has, in fact, often reached a state of power and passion nearly equal to the great religious art of the European past. Modern commissions of religious art have been rare, however. PËre Couturier's church of Notre Dame de-Toute-Grace in Assy, incorporating works by Bonnard, Braque, Chagall, LÈger, Lipchitz, Matisse, and Rouault, had been a most unusual enterprise, as were the Matisse chapel in Vence, Giacomo Manz's bronze doors for the cathedral in Salzburg and St. Peter's in Rome, and the Rothko chapel in Houston. It is not surprising that in the second half of this century, the era following Buchenwald and Hiroshima, it is primarily the iconography of the Crucifixion that became the major theme at a time of great anxiety and despair. The Crucifixion has been a recurrent theme for Francis Bacon. It occurred as well in the painting and/or drawings of both Pollock and de Kooning, although it was not central to their work. William Congdon, however, turned to the painting of Christian motifs, and particularly to the Crucifixion, not as a matter of choice, but of necessity.

During the late 1950s Congdon's life was often in a state of agony. Having early in life been deprived of a close relationship to his family and his roots in New England, he now lost Venice, and his search around the globe for a surrogate had failed. Congdon writes about the "destructive projection of his ego" and also of feelings of self-doubt and sin in his disordered life. In 1951 in Assisi he had met Don Giovanni Rossi, the founder of the association Pro Civitate Christiana, who had welcomed him with affection and who held out hope. In the Sahara Desert in 1955 a French waiter quite fortuitously gave Congdon a copy of the Confessions of St. Augustine, a book that took on increasing significance for the artist in his solitude. Perhaps it was St. Augustine's conviction that he who searches for God has already found God within himself, which helped the artist in his determination to alter the direction of his life. He returned to Assisi, converted to Catholicism, and was baptized in August 1959. He was received by the lay movement Pro Civitate Christiana and moved into an old, small house in Assisi, where he began his long cycle of religious paintings. He now no longer painted in isolation, speaking into the void, but felt able to relate his work to a larger community, even if there was no immediate comprehension of his individualistic and unorthodox work. Congdon was willing and able to accept the reassurance and the stability afforded by the Catholic metaphysical system as well as the moral imperatives that went with it.

The human figure has always been paradigmatic to William Congdon, and he spoke of it as the "model and summary of every form which exists." For many years, however, he stayed away from painting the figure. Nevertheless, he wrote: "After my baptism in the Catholic Church at Assisi in 1959, the figure again became explicit in the form and content of the Cross. However, it is perhaps inevitable that the encounter with Christ and the discovery that his drama of the Cross is also my own—I mean for our salvation—should lead me to the Crucifix through a return to the figure."

In Crocefisso no. 1 (1960), the corpse is seen in total isolation. In medieval and Renaissance paintings, depictions of the Crucifixion are usually comprised of Christ on the cross accompanied by saints and bystanders to the event, and perhaps donors as well. Later, the mother of Jesus and St. John the Evangelist are seen on either side of the cross. Only in the seventeenth century do we find the isolation of the crucifixion, the concentration upon the single image, as in Vel·zquez's Christ on the Cross in the Prado, which the Spanish master painted in the 1630s. His Christ, symmetrically balanced, is placed in front of the viewer and is an insistent image to be contemplated. The work strikes us with the realism of its depiction, it inspired the Spanish philosopher and poet Miguel de Unamuno to compose a volume of religious verse dedicated to this painting:

For Thou are the Christ,
the only Man who did willingly die
the conqueror over death, that to life
through Thee was elevated. And since then
through Thee that death of thine gives us life.

Congdon's Crocefisso no. 1 evokes similar emotions. The twentieth-century artist, like the medieval painters Cimabue or Duccio who inspired him, does not use a fictive third dimension. Christ's body is flattened. The only indication of depth in space is conveyed by the white lines scratched into the dark surface, which recalls his paintings of St. Mark's Square, the place of the artist's earlier epiphany. But now the cross has taken the place of the horizontal basilica and the vertical campanile. This crucifixion is stripped of the usual components of the scene: the beams of the cross are absent or are unified with the body. There is no halo, no titulus; there are no wounds or lacerations. Christ's corpus is like a shaft of light. Plotinus, the Neoplatonic philosopher, wrote with great eloquence of light as the revelation of God and as the metaphor of the soul. St. Thomas Aquinas spoke about brightness as an essential quality of art and beauty, and as "splendor shining forth on the proportioned parts of matter."

Crocefisso no. 2 (1960) [see Plate 3] issues forth from the same spirit. A much larger painting, done for the Pro Civitate Christiana in Assisi, it has the same dramatic illumination, but the paint seems to have been applied more spontaneously, resembling the brushwork of the abstract expressionists.

Congdon's approach to this highly traditional subject situates him once more in close relationship to the New York artists. Rothko and Adolph Gottlieb in their famous 1943 letter to the New York Times defined their aim as artists as "an adventure into the unknown world which can be explored only by those willing to take risks." By moving into an uncertain terrain, and by identifying the Passion and the martyrdom of Christ with his own suffering, Congdon has at times painted works which evoke "a religious shudder"—Johan Huizinga's comment on Matthias Gr¸newald's great painting, the Isenheim crucifixion.

During the early years after his conversion, Congdon felt an obligation to paint devotional pictures of religious subjects that strike the observer as sincere attempts at liturgical and didactic achievements, rather than paintings that came to him intuitively. His Getsemani, Trasfigurazione, Annunciazione, Deposizione, Nativita, and Eucarestia, all of 1960, are works that indicate his piety, but, as the artist realized later, their liturgical subjects were not painted from his intuitive inner self.

In the summer of 1965 on a trip to New York, Congdon had a highly important encounter with Mark Rothko, who at the time was working on his murals for the Houston Chapel. Rothko, who had been deeply moved by the murals of Fra Angelico in the convent of San Marco in Florence, and whose own paintings are inexplicable surfaces of meditation, discussed Congdon's recent work with him. Rothko, as well as Barnett Newman, approached religious themes as contemplative universal subjects, whereas Congdon after his conversion depicted these images in a manner which is both more conventional and deeply personal. He recalls his meeting with Rothko, writing: "I was on the fringe of my confusion of not painting freely, but painting religious subjects, and I was hypocritical to Rothko...after this meeting with Rothko, I changed." The image of the Crucifixion serves as the relevant subject for Congdon's "reenactment of a life-and-death struggle."

Four years later in Crocefisso no. 46 [see Plate 4], Congdon focused on the juncture of the body with the head plunging downward. The image of the Crucifixion is only intimated in this work. While the body is dematerialized in this version, the physicality of the paint lends a material presence to the metaphysical content. The dense black in the upper third of the painting might also serve as the night sky in a tragic landscape.

Ecce Homo no. 4 (1973) is certainly another variation on the theme of the Crucifixion. But now the cross has been eliminated, as have the arms of Jesus. This minimal depiction offers nothing but the visual form suggesting the torso topped by a shape, imprinted by the painter's spatula, which is canted against the lower plinthlike shape and signifies Christ's head.

Stripping the representation of the Crucifixion of all its traditional iconographic elements, Congdon has now arrived at an image which appears like a stele of a primitive cult. In his unpublished notes about art, written about this time and dedicated to his friend Rudy Zgraggen, Congdon writes of seizing "the essentiality of things on the ONE of their body, the only single mass or form" and warns against "bogging down in particulars."

His later crucifixions with the figure of Christ minimalized and encapsulated in dense clots of heavy pigment remind us of Alberto Giacometti's standing women or walking men, figures that, retaining their integrity, are barely able to withstand the onslaught of space. Giacometti's purpose was to establish the finite presence of the figures in space. Congdon, on the other hand, in his late crucifixions made effigies of the body of Christ which meant to him "the transfiguration that Christ effected in Himself within the Cross: His resurrection and redemption."

Although paintings of religious subjects occupied Congdon's creative energy almost exclusively during the first years after his conversion, other subjects, landscapes, and cityscapes continued to be an important part of his repertoire.

In 1962 Congdon, with his close friend Paolo Mangini, had opened a new studio in an abandoned Benedictine monastery in Subiaco, on a mountainside in the Apennine Mountains east of Rome. Subiaco has an ancient history. A great intellectual center in the medieval period, Subiaco is not far from Olevano Romano where Camille Corot and his friends painted lyrical pictures of harmonious landscapes bathed in light. But there can be no greater contrast in landscape painting than that between Corot's elegiac and ordered compositions and the wild, tempestuous quality of Congdon's landscapes. Subiaco no. 4 (1962) [see Plate 5], with its nervous lines of energy scored into the surface and its dark color, evokes a sense of the sublime. The wildness of nature, overwhelming and fear-inspiring, which goes back to the idea of sublimity in Longinus and Edmund Burke, is evoked in Congdon's paintings of Subiaco. Goethe, speaking through the protagonist Young Werther, tells us of the exaltation and perception of the Godhead elicited by the view of stupendous mountains, and a similar emotion is called forth in Congdon's panel of the Apennine valley in Latium.

In 1966 Congdon opened a studio in Milan but could not establish any kind of positive relationship with the teeming city. A painting such as Milano no. 0 (1968) reflects his dismal feeling. We see rapid indications of tall buildings: the Duomo and the Velasca and Pirelli towers scratched into a dark, polluted sky. In fact the artist mixed some of the soot from his window sill into the paint to give a tangible sense of the city's smog. In the foreground a carnal female body is graffitied into the paint together with numbers and words and names such as "Gina Lollobrigida." Among the inscription is, ironically, the word for merrymaking, "Allegria," and then, on the bottom and in large letters "Morte."

Congdon remains preoccupied with death, whether he paints crucifixions or other images of extinction.

In Egypt in 1977, Congdon painted a beautiful small panel, Deserto-Egitto, an almost symmetrical abstraction in pink, ochre and white, surrounded by deep black. It is a picture of extraordinary clarity and unity in which the pigment has been applied with great economy. Although no object is readily recognizable, the painting, like all his work, is ultimately based upon the perception of reality. Here it was the experience of a beam of light seen through the window of a car in the desert. Congdon does not have a preconceived notion of what to paint, but it is the encounter which induces him to paint: "I do not paint the image of what I have seen. In reality it is that image that has seen me." And in a completely successful work, such as this small painting, it is the experience of the image and its vibration that then guide him into completion.

For many years William Congdon had his home and studio in Assisi, spent the summer in Subiaco, and continued journeying during the winter months. But a new and more regulated existence became necessary for him as he approached his seventies. In the winter of 1979 with the help of Paolo Mangini, he found a new place to live and to work in the low plains of Lombardy in the precinct of a Benedictine monastery. The convent is located to the southwest of Milan in one of the few remaining rural areas close to the modern city, whose factories and apartment buildings are constantly encroaching onto the surviving farmland.

The monastery and the nearby Lombardian village are holdovers from a quieter rural life. Congdon's austere dwelling and small studio are surrounded by silent fields of wheat, corn, and barley. The flat fertile earth is bordered by trees and canals, and the artist's window gives on to the land and the expansive sky. In this tranquil environment he has been able to begin anew, to infuse meaning into the anonymous space.

But from the 1980s to today, Congdon has not led the life of a recluse. In 1980 he exhibited his work on the occasion of the first "Meeting per l'Amicizia fra i Popoli" in Rimini. The "Meeting" became an annual international forum, organized by a lay organization dedicated largely to the revival of Catholicism among young people. The small show in Rimini was followed by an important exhibition at the Galleria Civica d'Arte Moderna in the Palazzo dei Diamanti in Ferrara, in 1981. Congdon participated in several of the annual Meetings in Rimini, and his lectures were published by the Foundation for Improving the Understanding of the Arts, issued by Jaca Book. The foundation, founded in 1980 and funded primarily by William Congdon, was organized to administer the patrimony of his work—its custody and conservation—as well as to broaden issues in the art of our time.

But these engagements in the external world notwithstanding, Congdon continued to work in solitude, removed from the "world of art" and the ever-accelerating changes in style and marketing that were so evident in the 1980s. This decade, more than any other period in memory, was a time in which culture no longer made moral demands on its artists in an art world increasingly oriented toward obsolescence as part of the almost universal market economy. Congdon, like his abstract expressionist colleagues, believed that his painting could achieve the power of myth, of private redemption at a time of public despair. We find little such ambition in the mainstream art of the 1980s. Artists who became quickly famous during the 1980s often resorted to spectacular figurative paintings which simulate the appearance of expressionism but lack its conviction.

Jean Baudrillard suggests that the overkill and saturation experienced through the media, the unreflected jumble of visual images, has killed the imagination. But Congdon, working in relative isolation, has managed "to cultivate [his own] garden." Like Giorgio Morandi quietly painting bottles, vases, and pitchers in his studio in Bologna and creating still lifes that suggest metaphysical dramas, Congdon, despite the sense of despair in our time, has painted the fields around his studio with a sensibility both precise and imaginative.

Through the 1980s, the physical imprint of knife and spatula, once so essential to Congdon, gives way to smooth surfaces, and his images became less bound to appearance, more abstract. Still, he never abandoned his contact with the objective world. He was aware that the artist does not create ex nihilo, but is inspired by what he sees, and obeys his impulse to formulate it. "The painting," he wrote, "is not made but born before it is painted. The painter, looking at nature, imposes form and order on preexisting matter"; as Maritain has written, the painter "impresses form and reveals a world more real than the reality offered to his senses."

In the summer of 1981 Congdon painted another picture of Subiaco, Subiaco no. 12 [see Plate 6]. In it we still recognize the mountains, the sky and the deep valley, which here suggests a feminine cleft. In contrast to his earlier paintings in Subiaco, which pictured the roughness of the mountain landscape or the serenity of the moonlit night, this work is sensuous, both in its closely related tones of color and in its varied corporeal densities of textures. Congdon's intuitive approach to the landscape has yielded a painting which recreates the atmosphere and mood that inspired the artist, as well as communicating feelings of both tension and calmness.

Congdon's sensuous use of color, his stress on the physicality of the medium, his use of the spatula, his strong response to his natural surroundings, and his controlled organization of space have a remarkable parallel in the work of Nicolas de Stael. Congdon became aware of the work of the Russian-French painter when reading critical reviews of his Ferrara exhibition in 1981. Congdon's biographer, Rodolfo Balzarotti, tells us that the artist became very much interested in de Stael and also that "it was the suicide of this contemporary of his, as well as the self-destruction of Congdon's old friends of the Action Painting group, which mobilized his spiritual energies. He felt a great burden of responsibility towards those 'brothers' who have sacrificed themselves on the altar of art."

In 1983 Congdon had to undergo surgery, and for about one year, unable to stand up, he produced very few paintings and turned to working with pastel on paper. In 1985 he began his continuing series of oil pastels in which bands of different color create spare networks of rectangular strokes. The limpid transparencies at their convergence are extraordinary feats, extremely difficult to accomplish with the pastel medium. In these works on paper he has stripped his work of all remnants of the object and focused entirely on the spatial relationships in the structure of the color bands. He pointed out that "the significance of the painting is not in the line, stroke or sign which I apply—and which is visible—but it is rather the spaces between the strokes which are not physically visible in themselves but which are known through feeling and recognized as the form of the work."

Returning to paintings, Congdon's oils become fields of color.

He paints the void of the fog—Nebbia 6 (1984)—in a picture of subdued vertical bands of light and color, arranged asymmetrically on the panel. Although the medium is very different from the earlier pastels, Congdon again reduces the object to an absolute minimum in his paintings of fog, snow, or the sky. He has created grisaille surfaces in which—as in nature itself—space is sensed rather than seen. In these works he painted the sensation of space and the translucency of light. Friedrich von Schelling in the early nineteenth century spoke of incorporeal and spiritual aspects of light and color. For painters such as Caspar David Friedrich and the American Luminists this became a major theme, often suggesting the realm of the transcendental, while Turner, Whistler, Monet observed the dissolution of physical matter in perceptible light.

In the 1980s Congdon gave up working with the substance of paint in favor of a more fluid medium. But in his work we do not get the sense of disengagement, so characteristic of the "cool" American painting of the 1960s. At times, as in Occhio Violetto (Nero con Viola) (1984) [see front cover], he produced a symmetrical painting with a centered image. Upon a gray outer surface the black rectangle with its blurred edges repeats the dimension of the panel itself. An interior rectangle slightly different in tone becomes the frame of the occhio violetto, the violet eye, the center of the painting. This is one of the most magical and mysterious paintings of Congdon's late period. The violet nucleus appears like a secret light. It evokes the image of the mandala; Carl Jung reminds us that in the Native American and Eastern civilizations mandalas are used "to consolidate the inner beings or to enable one to plunge into deep meditations."

Many of Congdon's paintings of 1989 have uneven grisaille surfaces. There is a sense of great silence in these paintings. For Congdon, a deeply religious man, these paintings certainly manifest the omnipresence of God. We think of the Biblical story of Elijah, in which God made himself audible to the prophet not in the strong wind of the mountains, not in the earthquake, nor in the fire, but in the still small voice. Congdon's last silent works deal with light much more than color. Light, which he used at an earlier time to shimmer on the Piazza San Marco or to shine forth in the body of Christ on the cross, is now immaterialized and diffused throughout paintings that have become large tinted spaces, their volume based on the presence of the void.

Ever since the Romantic movement, the idea of progress and innovation has become an almost tyrannical concept in the evaluation of artists. But the overemphasis on novelty has actually become rather monotonous and its very feasibility is doubted in our time. Even in assessing past masters, we find that Mozart's greatest strength was not, after all, in the realm of musical invention. William Congdon has developed consistently from painting which embodied the turbulence of the city and his own temperament to a calm communication of the mystery of space.

In the fall of 1992 the Palazzo Reale in Milan presented a large retrospective exhibition of Congdon's paintings. In 1995-96, two more exhibitions were held, in Faenza and in Bologna, and for the first time Congdon's pastels were shown in Ferrara and Bologna.

Issue #14 • Summer 1996