Op-Ed: Art and Religion in the Public Square

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On February 20, Oklahoma City agreed to pay $20,000 in legal fees for two of its employees who had sued the city for what they claimed was a suppression of their religious freedom.

The suit grew out of a memo sent out on Nov. 15 of last year by City Manager Jim Couch outlining the city's policy on the display of religious items in public buildings. The memo banned Nativity scenes, crosses, angels, cherubs and other religious items so that public-owned government offices could "maintain neutrality" and avoid promoting one religion over another.

Meanwhile, on Feb. 29, the city of Ventura California decided to pull three nudes from as art exhibit celebrating passions on the grounds that they were too "racy" to be displayed in publicly owned government offices.

The two cases form perfect bookends to a controversy that has raged in this country since its beginnings.

The Founding Fathers were for the most part highly educated and sophisticated men deeply influenced by the European Enlightenment. They had cultivated tastes and filled the public spaces in their new capital with neoclassical art and architecture.



Any attempt to reproduce the art of Greece and Rome, of course, demanded the use of nude or semi-nude art, and throughout the history of the republic this nation has often celebrated its heroes and ideals by showing them in advanced states of undress.


George Washington as a Roman senator


So who's the lady?

Being men of the Enlightenment however, the Founding Fathers were not only educated and sophisticated but, for the most part, secular. Although many chose to cloak their lack of faith in the trappings of "Deism" this was usually only an intellectual word game or at best an affectation. Therefore, being highly skeptical of religion and of the dangers of a melding of piety and politics, the very first thing they did in the Bill of rights was to degree that the government would not take sides in religious matters. So, while art was permitted into the "public square," religion was to remain a private matter.

This separation of church and state has not sat well with many Americans of a more fundamentalist or evangelical persuasion. They have fought an almost constant war to intrude their religion, and only their religion, into the public life of this nation. Civil libertarians have fought just as hard to keep our government as the Founding Fathers intended--free of religion. The tide of battle has swept back and forth over the years with each side advancing and retreating in turns.

Underlying this battle, and helping to shape it, is the fact that American culture has always had a strong puritanical undercurrent. Many Americans of a more Conservative persuasion have viewed art with suspicion, often becoming positively corybantic at the sight of an undraped body. To people of this frame of mine art, if it is tolerated at all, should either be inoffensive or of a "morally uplifting" nature.

A classic example of the intellectual disconnect that underpins much American art is "The Greek Slave" by Hiram Powers, one of the most popular statues of the 19th century.



A thinly disguised reprise of the Uffizi's Medici Venus, with chains added as a cache-sexe, the statue is supposed to represent a Christian girl captured by Turks and stripped for sale in some Middle Eastern slave market. Powers was careful to point out the moral implications of his masterpiece in a pamphlet that was available where ever the statue was exhibited on its triumphant American tour in 1847.

Powers, in a spiel aimed directly at Puritan values, assures his audience that the girl's nudity is not her fault. She had been stripped by the "lustful and impious Turks" to better showcase her charms on the auction block. This, according to Powers, rendered her nakedness an idealized triumph of Christian virtue over sin.

This explanation was so successful that the statue was hailed by critic and clergy alike as the "first truly moral nude" that they had ever seen. Many ministers were so taken with the statue that they urged their congregations to go and see it when its traveling show visited their town. Small copies, suitable for desk tops and mantle pieces, were wildly popular throughout the 19th century. In a bit of sarcasm Henry James wrote about this craze for copies of the statue:

"so undressed, yet so refined, in sugar-white alabaster, exposed under little glass covers in such American homes as could bring themselves to think such things right."

Powers became so rich from showing this one statue that he was able to move to Italy where he produced a whole stream of "morally uplifting" nudes.


Powers "America"

The case in Ventura California reminds us that the battle over "morality" in art continues to rage to this very day. Not only have the self anointed guardians of public sensibilities sought to drive the nude figure from public buildings but, when the subject enrages them enough, they have even been known to impose their values on the owners of privately owned venues.

A case in point was the furor surrounding the proposed exhibition last year of a piece of art entitled "My Sweet Lord" in the privately owned Lab Gallery in downtown Manhattan.


"My Sweet Jesus"

The six foot depiction of a crucified Christ, made from 200 pounds of milk chocolate, sparked a fire storm of demands by self styled "Christian" groups that the exhibition not be allowed to open. What offended these people was not the material from which the statue was made, but the fact that the anatomically correct statue accurately portrayed as Jesus must actually have been crucified--in the nude.

William A. Donohue, president of the ultra-conservative "Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights," called the work "one of the worst assaults on Christian sensibilities ever." Philistine that he is, he was no doubt unaware of the fully nude statue of Jesus by Michelangelo in the collection of the Vatican (lead picture) and is therefore presumably unaware of the profound theological symbolism of Christ's nudity.

In metaphysical terms nudity symbolized perfection. Being free of sin or moral corruption, Jesus has nothing to be ashamed of and, like Adam and Eve before the fall, has no need of clothes or the shame that they imply.

While no art lover would dream of going into a church and demanding that the congregation take down pieces of their art that offended the aficionado's sensibilities modern America is filled with self appointed censors who not only seek to banish art offensive to them from government buildings, but even go so far as to demand that such art be banned from public display or private galleries.

This is a trifle hypocritical given that many of these self anointed censors are the often the same people who demand that their religious symbols be displayed in public buildings. This is flatly contrary to the spirit of the Founding Fathers who, while decreeing a separation of church and state stipulate no such separation of art and state.