Faith Abstracted

For nearly a week, the slim, greying American walked through the winding streets of Assisi, pausing now and then before the office of Father Giovanni Rossi, founder of an institute for lay Catholics called Pro-Civitate-Christiana. Finally, he burst in on the priest. "Of course," he blurted out. "I must be converted." Two weeks later, Artist William Congdon was baptized as a Roman Catholic, and --as he puts it--"fell into the church as a child abandons itself to the mother."

Religious conversion touches the very being of a man, but Bill Congdon has been more deeply affected by new faith than most. Nowhere is the transformation more visible than in his painting, which is as abstract as it was before his conversion but is devoted now to religious themes. Admired by secular critics, Congdon's recent work, which last week went on display at the Betty Parsons Gallery in Manhattan, is praised even more by such Catholic intellectuals as Philosopher Jacques Maritain, Jesuit Theologian Martin D'Arcy and Author Thomas Merton. "Here," writes Merton, a Trappist monk in Kentucky, "we see a breakthrough of genuine spiritual light into the art of an abstract expressionist."

Sorrows & Joys. The art of William Congdon explores both the sorrows and joys of Christian revelation. Like nearly all religious artists in history, he has been moved by the drama of the Cross. In most of Congdon's ten powerful Crucifixions, the figure of Christ is a stricken sweep of white against a mottled background of browns, greys and blacks. When he turns to the exultant scenes of the New Testament--Christ's Ascension into Heaven, the Nativity--Congdon's palette changes; the triumph of God is painted in springlike shades of blue, green, yellow and gold. "It is probable," Catholic Poet Critic Allen Tate says of this work, "that we have in these pictures the greatest Christian art of our time."

Voluble and intense, Congdon is the son of a rich Providence, R.I., steelmaker. Brought up as an Episcopalian, he went to St. Mark's School and Yale; with his parents' reluctant approval and support, he studied sculpture in Boston under George Demetrious, painting in Philadelphia and Provincetown, Mass. At the start of World War II, Congdon, a lifelong bachelor, gave up painting to buy his own ambulance, trailed the British Eighth Army through battles in Egypt, Libya, Italy and Germany. "The war was the savior of my life," he recalls. "It gave me a feeling of being needed."

"It's an Explosion." Congdon spent nearly a year on the staff of the American Friends Service Committee in Italy before returning home to take up a life in art. He rented a cold-water flat near Manhattan's Bowery for $17 a month, began to paint his vision of city life. Trained as a sculptor, he never bothered with brushes, instead squished thick layers of paint on masonite boards with palette knives, sometimes sprinkling on gold dust to provide added brilliance. Failing to find much spiritual light in Bowery life, he moved to Venice in 1948. There, he would wait, thinking and absorbing, until the last rays of the afternoon sun shimmered across a canal into his studio; only then would he begin to paint. "Sometimes," he says, "I finished a picture in 20 minutes. It was an explosion."

His explosions sold. In ten years, he had seven shows with Betty Parsons, a dozen more at other top galleries in Europe and the U.S. Manhattan's Metropolitan, Whitney and Modern Art museums bought his work; so did such collectors as Nelson Rockefeller and Peggy Guggenheim. But Congdon shrank from success. He traveled widely through the Mediterranean in search of new images, drank as a stimulus to creation. "Each painting," he wrote, "seemed to redeem me, as the life-ring saves the drowning man. I began to see in each painting a stay against the eventual death sentence."

"Art's Arch Cliche." Even painting failed. After a visit to Cambodia in 1959, Congdon returned home to Venice convinced that he had exhausted his creative reserve. In this searching mood, he went to Assisi and became a Catholic.

Congdon still likes the technical beauty of his secular works, but feels there is "a whole new space, life and breath of spirit in my paintings now." As a Christian and an artist, he is aware of the danger that he might confuse the "religious subjects" to which he is drawn for the direct experience and personal vision that can be the only legitimate subject for a work of art. But as an abstract painter, he is appalled at the emptiness and formality of most modern art. "It is the purest materialism," he argues. "My painting seems more important than ever. It has much better perspective than other modern art. Without faith, abstract expressionism is becoming art's arch cliche."

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