The Brooklyn Rail

In 1950, in the Apostolic Constitution Munificentissimus Deus, Pope Pius XII proclaimed: “The Immaculate Mother of God, the ever Virgin Mary, having completed the course of her earthly life, was assumed body and soul into heavenly glory.” Carl Jung wrote that this 1950 papal dogma was a significant harbinger that feminine divinity would be added to the Trinity, producing a quaternity signifying wholeness. Earthly women were also to be elevated as a result. The Dior New Look came out around the same time, so I imagined Mary ascending in a flared skirt and an hourglass-waisted jacket. As a classics student, Mary also made perfect sense to me. The Greco-Roman pantheon included a full range of feminine possibilities, from jealous wives to love goddesses. Mary may have been better behaved than Hera, more demure than Aphrodite, and less sporty than Artemis, but she had survived when the others had not. I grew up across from the Mount St. Gertrude Academy in Boulder, Colorado. My alcoholic family was rough going for a child. For solace I would climb over the wall, enter the grotto, and sit at the feet of the Virgin Mary statue. I had been adopted through Catholic Charities, and my birth mother was still a mystery to me, so I decided to ask Mary to be my mother. Instantly I felt her presence. Since that day, she has sheltered me under her cloak through devasting depressions, periods of poverty, and episodes of battering by the art world. This last Sunday, I entered Mary’s realm through a large icon at St. Nicholas Cathedral on 97th street.

The Abrahamic religions, especially Judaism and Islam eliminated a female deity, as had most Protestants since the Reformation. The modernist priesthood of art critics had largely expunged the sacred. Paintings were reduced to formal concerns like drapery styles and perspective, and discussions about the meaning of something like the Annunciation became irrelevant. Many of these Formalists and Frankfurters were authoritarian, militantly secular, oppressively patriarchal, or just plain sexist. The stirrings of the discourse around the sacred feminine began with anthropologists like Marija Gimbutas in her groundbreaking The Gods and Goddesses of Old Europe (1974). This work inspired Mary Beth Edelson to actually visit Eastern European goddess caves described in the Gimbutas text, and create rituals. Anthologies followed, such as Charlene Spretnak’s 1982, The Politics of Women's Spirituality: Essays by Founding Mothers of the Movement. “The Great Goddess” issue of Heresies was published along with Spretnak’s anthology. Heresies included a Merlin Stone essay and her book When God Was A Woman, served up a formula for societal salvation: women should run the world. One of the few art historians who supported the goddess movement, Gloria Orenstein, was included in the Heresies issue. The Goddess movement was very much about origins starting with the Venus of Willendorf, and resurrecting the historical roots of the divine feminine. “The Great Goddess” issue of Heresies included an expanded goddess pantheon. Featured were: Louise Bourgeois’s butch Frail Goddess (1975) sporting a penis neck and large testicle breasts, Carolee Schneemann’s daring 1975 Interior Scroll pulled from her vagina, and Mary Beth Edelson’s bare-breasted Goddess Head/Calling Series (1975). Not one image of Mary appeared in the issue; she was too virginal, too maternal, and somehow incomplete. That Mary had given birth to God and been included in the miracle of incarnation was overlooked. Even her archetypal antecedent, the devoted wife and mother Isis, had hardly made the cut. In the art world Marina Warner’s Alone of All Her Sex: The Myth and Cult of the Virgin Mary, stands out as a shining exception in contemporary Marian scholarship.

The Goddess movement existed on the periphery of the art world. The Minimalists ruled and took all of the prizes, dealers, and patronage. Women art patrons like Virginia Dwan and Dominique de Menil only supported the guys. Even Heresies grand dames like Louise Bourgeois couldn’t get a dealer during the period. As for Mary, she was to be reserved for Hispanics and old Italian women and kept out of the art world. Vatican II had eliminated many of her images, and the rest were now to be printed on T-shirts as Guadalupe decoration. Mary’s final collective trashing and elevation to kitsch came in 2018 with the Metropolitan Museum’s Heavenly Bodies: Fashion and the Catholic Imagination. Mary was now a fashion accessory who could be impersonated by rock stars. Her image had been stripped of its power, and was no longer to be venerated, revered, or even prayed to.

In the art world Marian devotees like Teresa Murak, Linda Mary Montano, and myself have been excluded from discussions about Catholic artists. We aren’t transgressive enough, and occlusion has been the rule. Only the lapsed could enter into the discussion as there was no place for the still-practicing. Some Marxist art critics power on like icon-smashing Bolsheviks, destroying any vestiges of religious discourse. Our current time is marked by an anti-Christian animus, and a very authoritarian form of secularism rules. A nativity on the public square is considered threatening, a divine birth of a Prince of Peace offensive. Silent Night has been silenced. The Notre Dame fire was devastating, but it felt emblematic of our time.

Critical theory as the ruling doctrine has begun to fade; the Frankfurters are dying off, and their acolytes can feel shop worn. What is rising up around the fringes is fresher. When something becomes taboo or is censored, it has a nasty habit of sprouting up through the concrete in revolt. I remember reading a wonderful essay by the art critic Jarrett Earnest about his pilgrimage to the Sainte Marie-Madeleine Cave in France. My Facebook feed is filled with posts about this French Madeleine pilgrimage site, and groups celebrating both Mary, and the Rosary proliferate. Like Notre Dame rising from the ashes, Our Lady is surviving her trashing.

Most of my art deals with alchemy, where Luna the Moon Goddess stands on her crescent, as an equal partner in a mystical marriage. Mary appears in many depictions with her feet planted in that very crescent. For my Guggenheim project I made a series of drawings about the mines, mills, and laboratories of my childhood. The refinement and transmutation of the ores is very much part of the alchemical process. Presiding over the process is Mary as a lamp illuminating the darkness. I know that no art dealer will touch this work. Bard-trained curators will not even consider it. I am fully aware it will probably not be shown in my lifetime, which at seventy-eight is drawing to a close. When you are approaching the big door, your spiritual life takes on greater meaning. The art world with its jaded commerce becomes meaningless as long as you can survive. In the midst of the fray and cultural collapse, Mary has become even more of a living presence in my life.