Joyous Challenge

That All, which alwayes is All every where,

Which cannot sinne, and yet all sinnes must beare,

Which cannot die, yet cannot chuse but die,

Loe, faithfull Virgin, yeelds himselfe to lye

In prison, in thy wombe; and though he there

Can take no sinne, nor thou give, yet he'will weare

Taken from thence, flesh, which deaths force may trie.

John Donne, the 17th Century cleric who wrote these words, was a great enough poet to rise to the loftiest challenge any Christian artist can face: the translation of faith into the medium of art. Before Donne's day, such painters as Giotto, Raphael, Bellini and Leonardo met the same challenge on the same high plane. Bach and Handel, a little later, met it with their music.

It is one of the commonplaces of the 20th Century that modern artists have not met it; most of them--in their modern preoccupation with the mortal nature of man--have not even tried. Yet, as the century reached midpoint, there was evidence that here & there, though with only debatable degrees of success, creative men in the Christian world have been turning to the old challenge and the old theme. Among them, in literature, have been Novelist Graham Greene and Poet T. S. Eliot. In music, such composers as Igor Stravinsky and Francis Poulenc (TIME, Nov. 27) have attempted the awesome task of setting the Mass to modern music. In painting, the record shows outcroppings of the same deep impulse.

After a lifetime of producing pictures meant to relax the looker--"like a comfortable armchair"--old Modern Henri Matisse is at work finishing his designs for a Dominican chapel in the Provenc,al village of Vence. Not too far away, at Assy in the French Alps, Pere Couturier has made the art of Moderns Fernand Leger, Jean Lurc,at and Georges Rouault shine clean and fresh in the new mountain church (TIME, June 20, 1949).

The impulse is wide as well as deep. One of the most interesting exhibitions of 1950 was the Vatican's assembly of art drawn from 600 mission centers around the world. Among the finest sculptures in the show (TIME, Aug. 14) were sere oriental Madonnas from Korea and India, a dark Madonna and Child from Africa. But among the moderns of Europe and the U.S., a preoccupation with the Christian theme is still the rare exception; the main streams and the main schools follow other and worldlier concerns. Even among the exceptions it is hard to find anything with the radiance of John Donne's lines:

Ere by the spheares time was created,

thou

Wast in his minde, who is thy Sonne,

and Brother . . .

On its cover and in the color pages following, TIME this week presents works by a handful of modern artists, neither great nor well-known, but inspired by something of the same joyous challenge that inspired Donne. Each has managed to illustrate in his own way a facet of the Christmas story.

Fred Meyer, who painted the cover, is a 28-year-old art teacher in Rochester, N.Y.; he modestly insists that he has no style of his own yet--"I'm too young." Modern art is still a matter of taste, and Meyer's treatment of his subject will leave many lookers cold, but he believes "it would be ridiculous to paint in anything but a fresh fashion. After all, religious painting has been tackled for so long and by such recognized masters . . ."

Come and See the Beautiful Child is the work of Cecile Belle, a Pawling, N.Y. matron who was once a singer. Her title is taken from a line of Bach's Christmas Oratorio. One of a series of religious canvases which she produced last year, the painting has a warmth and tenderness that make up for its weak draftsmanship. Fred Nagler, 59, is a professional artist who believes that "The Word is the way to settle things. War is our greatest fear and love is our only possible way to overcome it. I want to make my contribution to the world through religious art." In his Madonna and Child, Nagler "tried to express mankind's great devotion to and great love for infancy . . ."

Vytautas Kasiulis is a Lithuanian who made his way to Paris two years ago, thinks his painting of the Flight into Egypt was partly inspired by his own exile. A Roman Catholic, he boasts that Lithuania had a splendid tradition of religious art "until the Russians came." Roger Brielle's Birth of Christ is designedly childlike in technique. His picture is intended to show "both joyousness and its shadow, selfishness. Everybody in the center of the painting is happy. Even the flowers and fishes express joy. But at the bottom is a fortress where men are sleeping. Here it is darker. No matter what happens in the world, there are always people who think of themselves and nothing else."

In his Nativity, Washington's Edmund Demers emphasizes "the complete aloneness of the event, the way it was not observed by the rest of the world at the time. That is why there are no animals, no other figures present." At 30, Demers considers himself "still in the place of a student trying to determine a style to dedicate myself to."

All of these artists and hundreds more like them feel the impulse to create religious art. If any gain mastery equal to the impulse, a new generation of artists might yet produce works to match Donne's words:

Seest thou, my Soule, with thy faiths eyes, how he

Which fils all place, yet none holds him, doth lye?

Was not his pity towards thee wondrous high,

That would have need to be pittied by thee?

Kisse him, and with him into Egypt goe,

With his kinde mother, who partakes thy woe.

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