Removal at Assy

Partly to prove that modern art has a place in churches, France's Father Pierre Couturier twelve years ago began commissioning the best and most extreme moderns he could find to embellish a church at Assy, high in the French Alps. The project has made Assy internationally famous (TIME, June 20, 1949). The church, with all its art works, was consecrated last year by Bishop Auguste Cesbron of Annecy. Last week the bishop had changed his mind about one sculpture.

Bishop Cesbron had heard complaints about the crucifix over the church's main altar. He motored over to Assy, spent half an hour studying the sculpture, decided that it was "a caricature representing nothing," and ordered it removed.

What troubled the bishop about the crucifix was that it had no cross, but only a green bronze, faceless figure cast roughly in the shape of a cross. The sculptor, whose fame has not yet spread to the U.S., is a woman named Germaine Richier. She explained that "the cross has been taken with the suffering into the flesh, and its outlines can just be made out coming from the undersides of the arms. There is no face because God is the spirit and faceless."

Valid church art or not, Richier's sculpture was easily the most original work at Assy. The influential Paris weekly, Arts, protested its removal as being "too categoric and too late; it justly provokes scandal and nothing can justify adhesion to the ideas defended by the partisans of mediocre art, by those who refuse the church the possibility of finding the means of expression our times demand."

The townspeople of Assy sided with the bishop. They had come to accept their church's Rouault windows, Lurc,at tapestry, Leger mosaic and Matisse sketch, but never the Richier crucifix. "It was evil," a woodcutter ventured. A young girl agreed: "The figure was thin and frightening. The colors of the other art in the church make me feel alive and strong, but this thing only scared me like a dark devil."

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