Hans Rookmaaker’s Modern Art and the Death of a Culture:

After philosophy, much of my college study (1970-74) was dedicated to the fine arts. I immersed myself in painting and drawing, as well as continuous rummaging of the art books housed in the school library, which was almost the nearest building to  my dorm. Though captivated by much of what I saw, and at times sought to emulate, there was plenty that I wasn't really attracted to. I did, however, have a great love for the process of laying paint on canvas. I found the process of creation magical.

During that time I had a friend who periodically told me, "The artist is the vanguard of the revolution." His meaning was clear. Art was to be subservient to political ends. My friend Walter Urban created powerful works of this nature, a life-sized soldier on a cross (protesting Viet Nam), a family in the future taking a walk in the park wearing gas masks.

I myself saw many ends that art could serve. After the death of a best friend in high school art served a therapeutic function for me. There were dark things in my heart that words seemed inadequate to express. Beyond the grief there were other emotions and art was a means of working it out.

As one stepped back and surveyed the previous 100 years, one could see that art also served as a mirror of the culture. This is the theme tackled by Dutch author, professor and Christian scholar Hans Rookmaaker.

 

Hans Rookmaaker’s Modern Art and the Death of a Culture (1970) explores how the development of modern art reflects the spiritual and philosophical collapse of Western civilization. Writing as both an art historian and a Christian thinker, Rookmaaker argued that art is never created in a vacuum—it mirrors the worldview of its time. As Western society drifted from its biblical foundations, art, he says, became a visual record of man’s alienation, fragmentation, and loss of  meaning, themes taken up by mid-century existentialists like Camus and Sartre.

Rookmaaker traces the story from the harmony of classical and Renaissance art, where beauty and order reflected divine creation, through the Enlightenment’s turn toward human reason, and finally into the modern era, where faith in transcendence eroded. Artists like Van Gogh, Picasso, and Pollock emerge as prophets of a disintegrating world: their work cries out with spiritual yearning but lacks the hope once rooted in a Christian understanding of reality.

For Rookmaaker, the “death” of culture meant more than a shift in artistic style; it pointed to a deeper moral and spiritual drift. When God is no longer at the center, both art and life begin to lose their unity and meaning. Yet he did not fault the artists themselves. In their confusion and despair, he saw an honest reflection of the human condition. His response was not condemnation, but invitation—a call to recover beauty and, through it, a renewed sense of order and purpose.

[This seems to be a good place to insert a couple of comments by my eight-year-old grandson who visited New York's Museum of Modern Art this week. My daughter said, "He was so funny at the art museum with his sort of pithy, harsh reviews of the art: 'So, um ... How did this get so famous anyway?' and (no doubt responding to Pollock)  'Huh. It kinda looks like they just splattered paint on the paper.'"]

Ultimately, Modern Art and the Death of a Culture is not an argument against modernism but a plea for spiritual reawakening. The book invites readers to see that the renewal of art depends on the renewal of belief—that culture can be reborn only when it again recognizes its source in the Creator.

                                         "Red Star"  

Now that we are more than fifty years removed from Rookmaaker’s diagnosis, the story of art has not reversed itself so much as it has unfolded along the very trajectory he observed.

The boundaries are gone. The gatekeepers have loosened their grip. What once required training, patronage, or institutional approval is now open to anyone with a vision—and sometimes even to those without one. From installations and performance pieces to digital art and street murals, expression has multiplied in every direction. In this sense, there has indeed been a kind of liberation.

And yet, with that freedom has come a curious diffusion. Without a shared center—without a commonly held sense of the true, the good, and the beautiful—art often speaks in a thousand private languages. Some works are deeply personal, even therapeutic. Others are expressions of love. And then there is art that is simply functional, enriching us more than endless halls of empty walls.. And we still have the overtly political, echoing my friend’s conviction that the artist stands at the vanguard of revolution. Still others seem to revel in irony, fragmentation, or shock, as though meaning itself were suspect, though what shocks some seems to miss the mark because many of of oldsters have seen it all before and, yawn...

But beneath the variety, one thread persists: art continues to tell the truth about us. It reveals our longings, our confusions, our search for identity and transcendence. If the last century showed us the fracture, the past fifty years have shown us what it is to live within it.

Which leaves us, perhaps, where Rookmaaker left us—not with a neat conclusion, but an invitation.

If art is a mirror, then what we choose to create—and what we choose to behold—matters. The question is not only what art has become, but what it is for. And whether, in the midst of all this freedom, we might yet rediscover not only expression, but meaning… and perhaps even beauty in its myriad forms once again.

Related Links

The Painted Absurd

https://pioneerproductions.blogspot.com/2009/05/painted-absurd.html

A Century of Rebellion: Exploring 20th-Century Art Movements

https://pioneerproductions.blogspot.com/2025/03/a-century-of-rebellion-exploring-20th.html