This is a courageous book on an unfashionable theme, which cannot be defined by the rather vague, all-purpose term "spirituality". The author (a German living in Ireland) is trained primarily as a theologian, but she knows her Irish art well and is no amateur in this field. Basically, she concentrates on ten leading painters, some of them dead: Louis le Brocquy, Jack Yeats, Mainie Jellett, Gerard Dillon, Colin Middleton, Patrick Collins, Tony O'Malley, Patrick Scott, Patrick Graham and Patrick Hall.
I rather regret that she leaves out Evie Hone, probably the prime example of an Irish religious artist in the mid-century; but then she includes only painters, and Hone was at her best in stained glass. Geza Thiessen has done both sound academic research and solid field-work in the form of interviews with various of the people whom she considers (it goes without saying that Jellett, Yeats, Dillon, Middleton, and Collins are all dead). Her theology is wide, flexible and ecumenical, though I should have guessed at some basic grounding in Tillich, Barth et hoc genus omne. Philosophers are brought in too, of course, not excluding Heidegger, though curiously enough there appears to be no mention of Hegel, Nietzsche or Schopenhauer - all notable writers on aesthetics.
Middleton is an artist whom I would not have credited with strong religious or metaphysical leanings, so it is interesting to be proved quite wrong in this field (a Crucifixion by him is even reproduced). Patrick Scott is assessed in the context of a kind of transcendentalism with a certain Oriental colouring; and in general the iconic, symbolic and imagistic aspects of the various painters' visual vocabulary are analysed in terms which go well beyond the safe, all-too-popular method of discussing these things purely as a formal language.
The final section is entitled "Towards a Theology of Art" and here the argument widens beyond a merely Irish context into a consideration of the whole spiritual, emotional and expressive content of 20th-century art. And high time, too - we have had far too much surface (though verbose) analysis of artworks, and far too little exploration of their inner resonances. While occasionally Geza Thiessen is in some danger of tripping herself up with her own abstractions, she has written a thoughtful and thought-stimulating book, which should be in the library of all art and religious institutions in this country, and in most other Irish public libraries as well. There is, by the way, a central section of passably good colour reproductions
Brian Fallon is an author and critic