Workman

You can't have art and religion both together.

What British Artist Eric Gill meant, when he wrote those words, was that he could see no common ground between his own religious sense and the kind of subjective, self-celebrating Art that moderns most admire. Bearded, bespectacled Gill never believed in Art. He believed in the arts--"with a small 'a' and an 's'--whether it be the art of cooking or that of painting portraits or church pictures. But that's a very different matter and puts the 'artist' under the obligation of knowing what he is making and why. It ranks him with the world of workmen doing useful jobs."

Gill's "arts" included tombstone lettering, type designing, wood engraving, architecture and sculpture, which he preferred to call "stone carving." An exhibition of his woodcuts at Manhattan's Grolier Club last week told something of how Workman Gill had fused what he did with what he believed.

Ordained to Praise. The woodcuts, mostly book illustrations and chapter headings, betrayed Gill's lack of academic training: the drawing, especially of human figures, was awkward, stiff and anatomically inept. But the prints also showed the order and clarity of Gill's mind and the precision of his craft; they had the decisive simplicity that characterized all his work. Beyond that, even his woodcuts of devils seemed to attest Gill's joy in life --and therefore to praise God. "Man," Gill wrote, "is that part of creation which can praise his creator. Because he can, he is ordained to do so; and because he is so ordained he is in misery unless he obeys the call."

In 1882, Gill was born into the poverty-pinched family of a nonconformist deacon. As a child he liked to draw locomotives, and later cathedrals, striving always for accuracy. Lettering appealed to him because "you don't draw an 'A' and then stand back and say: there, that gives you a good idea of an 'A' as seen through an autumn mist . . . Letters are things, not pictures of things." Moreover, letters, particularly when carved on tombstones, served a clear purpose, and they paid.

At 31, in the year of his conversion to Roman Catholicism, Gill was commissioned to do the Stations of the Cross in Westminster Cathedral. Gill carved them in "what might be called an archaic manner; but I wasn't doing it on purpose, but only because I couldn't carve in any other way." Next came a commission to carve Prospero and Ariel for London's Broadcasting House. Gill transformed them into God the Father and God the Son. Finally he was asked to do a 55-ft. frieze for the League of Nations council hall at Geneva. Gill suggested "The Turning Out of the Money Changers" as an appropriate theme. When the idea was turned down as being "too Christian," he compromised on a representation of God and Adam.

Constrained to Curse. In his Autobiography (Devin-Adair; $3.50), published soon after his death in 1940, Gill mingled praise of God with eloquent curses on 20th Century civilization. He himself had been a happy man, he concluded, largely because he had learned to run away from civilization and live with his wife and four children on remote hill farms. When he did show up in town, it was often to berate his fellow Catholics for supporting "a social order which as far as possible forces us to commit all the sins they denounce."

Gill wore a homespun smock both at home and on the streets of London (he belonged to the lay Third Order of Saint Dominic). Most people thought of Gill as a maverick crazily out of step with the world. Gill did not deny it; he believed capitalism and machine civilization to be inimical both to man and to the arts. "We build and fill up with great pride," he wrote, "vast buildings called museums and art galleries for the preservation of enormous collections of the very things which, by our industrial practice, we prevent the making of. Could madness go further? Could malice do more?"

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