Without prayer, meditation, contemplation you just won’t get what all the fuss is about over these pictures of trees, mountains, sunsets and night skies. In fact, the audio guide to the show includes a little taste of the Catholic practice of Visio Divina (Latin for “divine seeing”), a meditation practice that begins with looking at art.
Franciscan spiritual director and artist Brother Ignatius Feaver provides the Visio Divina clip on the audio guide. He will also lead Visio Divina sessions with retired Regis College professor Maureen McDonnell in the Mystical Landscapes galleries on three Mondays, when the AGO is closed to the public.
“It’s not the ordinary way that art galleries operate, or any kind of public institution,” concedes Feaver.
Feaver will take groups into a room filled with the work of Charles-Marie Dulac, a third order Franciscan artist who died at the age of 33 and was buried in his Franciscan habit in 1898. Visio Divina is a process of “leading people into a place of reflection and then giving them time after my presentation just to be alone with the paintings,” Feaver told The Catholic Register.
“With no words, just paying attention to whatever they’re being drawn to and whatever is being evoked in them. Really, in fact, that’s prayer.”
Feaver’s involvement in the AGO-Musée d’Orsay exhibition is at the invitation of the AGO’s senior curator of international exhibitions, Katharine Lochnan. For many, Lochnan knows, the mystery will be why Dulac’s wispy landscapes have titles such as Jesu, Sol Justitiae and Spiritus Sancte Deus. What’s a tree got to do with religion?
For the artists featured in this Toronto exhibition — Gaugin, Monet, Van Gogh and most especially Dulac — such a question would never have come up.
“Creation itself was seen, and is seen by many, as the second book of God,” explained Lochnan. “It is the most tangible evidence we have of the existence of the divine.”
Dulac spent the last eight years of his life dying of lead poisoning and painting landscapes. He was inspired by a profound religious conversion he underwent after discovering why he experienced constant abdominal pain, vomiting and a weariness that he just could not sleep off. Lead poisoning was the result of his work as a commercial artist painting the wallpaper in rich people’s apartments and backdrops for theatre productions. The process used vast quantities of white, lead-based paint that was absorbed through his skin.
Unlike the wealthy Monet, Dulac was a poor boy with talent who had to work for a living. But after his diagnosis and religious conversion, Dulac devoted himself exclusively to painting landscapes, “to convey his deeply Catholic, Franciscan, spiritual, mystical experiences,” said Lochnan.
“Realizing that his life was going to be very short, he went off to a Franciscan friary in Vézelay in Burgundy,” she said.
He tried to join the Capuchin Franciscans, but they knew he would die soon and the order wasn’t going to take on that liability. But it didn’t prevent Dulac from joining the Third Order and living as a lay person devoted to Franciscan values and spirituality.
“He decided to devote the rest of his short life to painting devotional works of art. His paintings and prints he saw as his prayers,” said Lochnan.
Though he painted in oil, the larger part of his output was lithographs — a printing process which uses wax crayons on a flat stone and ink. Dulac created two major collections of lithographs — one called Paysage (Landscapes) and the other Canticle des Creatures (Canticle of the Creatures). He was at work on a third collection titled Credo when he died.
“We probably have his very last work here in the form of a drawing for a plate that was for his unfinished Credo,” Lochnan said.
The landscapes are not a roundabout way of getting at the mystical. For Dulac, they are the most direct route possible.
“Within Catholic mystical theology, unity with the divine is considered to be the ultimate experience of the mystic,” said Lochnan. “There is a real sense here of literally becoming one with
the landscape, of melting into the landscape, of everything coming together, of unity. I see these as very Catholic mystical landscapes.”
This religious function of landscape imagery was well understood by other symbolist painters, including Canadian Group of Seven artist Lawren Harris.
“The Lawren Harris decorative landscape (in the show) is constructed like a Byzantine icon,” said Lochnan. “And there are other pictures in this exhibition that draw on the icon format, making it very clear that it’s nature itself that is sacred.”
There’s nothing obscure or effete about looking at pictures of nature in the early 21st century. The 19th- and 20th-century paintings in the Mystical Landscapes exhibition are about the same sacredness of creation that Pope Francis highlights in his 2015 encyclical Laudato Si’, said Lochnan.
“We have, I think, a sacred trust. These artists are foregrounding the creation in many works,” she said. “Today, when the world is in such a terrible state, when the environment is threatened and the atmosphere itself… I think this fits absolutely with Pope Francis’ encyclical. I hope he sees this. By all means, invite him.”
Feaver discovered Dulac because Lochnan asked for his help interpreting the artist’s Canticle des Creatures lithograph series. Feaver picked up on the Latin invocations to the left of each image. Once translated, Feaver immediately understood “not only how they fit into each of the verses of (St. Francis’s) ‘Canticle of Creatures,’ but how imbued Dulac was with Franciscan spirituality,” he said.
“That’s how I came to meet Dulac. I really found him to be a very profound man,” Feaver said.
Feaver and McDonnell’s Visio Divina sessions will be Nov. 21, Dec. 19 and Jan. 16. On each day there will be three 90-minute sessions beginning at 11 a.m., 2 p.m. and 6 p.m. Registration is $60 for AGO members and $75 for non-members. The exhibition of works by 36 artists from 15 countries is free for AGO members, $16.50 for non-member youth up to 17, $21.50 for seniors and $25 for adults.
After Jan. 29 you will have to go to Paris to see the show.