Art Teaches Transcendence

Leo Marchutz (LM): The war was a great, hard, and horrible time.

Billy Weyman (BW): Can you say what you think the overall effect of the war was on you in general, especially in relation to your work?

LM:  . . . it was after the war, I started to make these (biblical) drawings. If that is a result of the war or not, I cannot tell you. It is probably connected, because the first paintings I made that were successful had come at the end of the First World War—it was in ‘17 or ’18. So there must be a connection.

BW: So really the two times in your life when you did religious works were right after both wars.

LM: Yeah, yeah. That is what I did. It’s obvious.

BW: Because everything else in between was landscape, or Symposium inspired works, or whatever.

LM: That is a fact. I think it was easier to simplify, to see it only a certain way …. the interest of these paintings is the relations between men, between people… the Gospels or the Bible is an “inepuisable” [inexhaustible] matter. Because it is already art! Nature is already simplified, it’s already appearing in a certain shape, in a certain form—human nature in this case.

And it makes it much easier to capture relations if they are already fixed in a certain form… If a few lines can say so much, well, it’s something which is certainly very near to art or is art already. And whatever you take in the Gospel, whatever its sense is, it is a kind of vision, a particular vision, which is very complete, very self-sufficient. And it is an image, even if the text is made with words. I think the visual part of it is the most important. It is transmitted by sayings, by words. You cannot say where it lies. If you think about the words of Mary, Martha – Mary complaining about her sister doing nothing. And the answer is, (I do not know the exact words), “You are a good woman and you take care of many things, but your sister has chosen the better path.” Well, that is something one cannot talk about but one can try to show it. It lends itself to an image. And even I should say the image has to express the totality of the going on. Any text you take.

L.M.: … it was a language, it was understood by people… And in the Middle Ages the paintings in the churches, they were understood immediately. They were a kind of speaking to the people who could not read, so they used images.

B.W.: I guess a language was on the whole used less abstractly in those times than it is today. If you take the images in Scriptures, for example, the whole of the Old and New Testament, it is really a very concrete language, always referring to the land or to the animals.

L.M.: Well, anyhow, always to the things people were concerned with. That is the first condition. Otherwise, art cannot be a common language, if people do not understand . . . 

BW: It’s a very concrete thing.

LM: It is an absolutely concrete thing yet at the same time the most abstract thing.

BW: The world of the Gospels is a world that one can feel and touch and see and know through the senses…

LM: Even many ways of doing it, I think, of rendering it. I should say these things have been rendered in many ways. But they have never been rendered in their simplicity….But the “propre” [i.e. unique characteristic] of the Gospels is really that they are the most common sayings. The vision is so complete.