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

Pollock: A Film About Artistic Process

This year the Duluth Art Institute is once again sponsoring a film series featuring art-themed films at the Zinema here in Duluth. Saturday we saw Pollock, the Ed Harris feature film that was released to the big screen in 2000. As in the past, a local "expert" gave a preview of the film and facilitated a discussion afterwards. This week's facilitator was Dr. Nathan Carroll, professor of communication, theater and art at the College of St. Scholastica.

Amber White of the Art Institute welcomed us and reminded the audience about upcoming events, which you can check out here at their website. A highlight for me will be the Community Forum at the Underground on Wednesday evening, 5:30 p.m.

After Dr. Carroll was introduced, he briefly made several remarks to put the film in perspective. Ed Harris, the central character in the film and its director, grew up in New Jersey and has performed in a lot of great films. He met his wife Amy Madigan in the Sally Field film Places in the Heart. Madigan plays Peggy Guggenheim in this film. Marcia Gay Harden plays the longsuffering Lee Krasner, Pollock's partner and wife.

Ed Harris took an interest in making the film when a friend told him he looked like Jackson Pollock. Harris proceeded to read Pollock's biography, becoming acquainted with Pollock the drunk and Pollock the painter. His aim was to focus on the artistic process itself more than the source of Pollock's demons. "We don't have to like the artist to appreciate the art," he stated. This question is at the heart of many discussions about art, though.

* * * *

The film itself tells the story of Jackson Pollock's drivenness to produce art important enough to be noticed. It begins with a major art opening after Pollock has been featured in Life Magazine. He's "made it" to the big time. And then we flashback to 1941, the struggling artist in his New York apartment, striving not only to survive as an artist but also to gain recognition for his work. (He is the youngest of five brothers and not drafted to fight in the new war because he is 4F.)

When Lee Krasner enters his life his fortunes begin to change. His abstract expressionism begins to get noticed. Unfortunately, he is severely alcoholic and gives the appearance of being a manic depressive. As Dr. Carroll noted, "It's a pretty intense little film."

Pollock, the film,  conveys a number of key themes. One of these is the new challenges fame can introduce into a life. He craved attention for his work, but once he got it he didn't know what to do with it.

Like many such films Hollywood seems to enjoy recreating moments that have been documented in Life or other media. The Aviator, with Leonardo DiCaprio re-living Howard Hughes, comes to mind. I remember seeing the old Life magazine spread that featured Pollock. In another lace Harris re-enacts making Hans Namuth's attempt to capture Pollock's painting technique to document it and share with the wider world.

In the discussion afterwards one woman noted how Hollywood frequently presents artists as troubled human beings, giving the impression that madness is almost an essential feature in great artists. I wrote a blog post about this based on a quote from Dorothea Brande's Becoming A Writer (1934). She wrote, "The picture of the artist as a monster made up of one part vain child, one part suffering martyr and one part boulevardier is a legacy to us from the last century, and a remarkably embarrassing inheritance. There is an earlier and healthier idea of the artist than that, the idea of the genius as a man more versatile, more sympathetic, more studious than his fellows, more catholic in his tastes, less at the mercy of the ideas of the crowd."

A favorite pastime of mine is to read reviews on imdb.com in order to decide whether a film is worth my time, or afterwards to see what other thought about what I just experienced. Quite often the divergence of opinions is itself fascinating. In the case of Pollock that is exactly what you find. Remarks like "boring" and "I hated it from the beginning" are strange to me. I'd seen the film when it came out. It's not boring, especially if you've ever been serious about your art, whatever form that might take.

One reviewer at imdb.com stated that artists and the general public perhaps view this differently based on where they're coming from. This is probably the case with most films.

As for the artists reading this, the question preeminent in my mind after watching Pollock was the one regarding who we're doing art for. Is it for the approval of others? Or because we ourselves love the act of creation and want to see what will happen next? How important is it to have critics, or the general public, love your work? What is the ultimate aim of what were are striving for?

When all is said and done, Ed Harris can be commended for what he achieved in producing this film.