VOLUME 94 | APRIL 2020 | MASHECK

JOSEPH MASHECK

Corpus Christi Church, New York

Its Architecture and Art

he treasured church of Corpus Christi on Morningside Heights in T­Manhattan (“Corpus”), is known for liturgy and music—including com- missioned Mass music and congregational singing in Gregorian chant and ­English—rather than as a work of architecture or a site for art. Yet in the mid- and later-twentieth century the parish that worshipped in this, its second church built on West 121st Street in Manhattan, was no stranger to contem- porary culture.

In 1938, two years after the church opened, Thomas Merton was conditionally baptized here.1 Three years later, the bombing of Pearl Harbor occurred during Advent; the next day, December 8, 1941, the US declared war on Japan; a few days later, children of the parish school, directed by one of their Dominican teaching sisters, found themselves painting a nativity mural with Japanese ­figures in a Japanese landscape.2 During the war, the French Jewish philoso- pher Simone Weil, who lived on Riverside Drive in 1942, often visited Corpus Christi for Mass, sitting, legend has it, in the back row. Corpus was in the ­forefront of the liturgical movement: I remember being taken here as a boy in the 1950s to participate in a “Dialogue Mass”—then considered extraordinary. (In the ’60s, Worship was sold in the vestibule.) When Nadia Boulanger, a Catholic and the great composition teacher of many modernist composers,

1 At a font from the first church, where the Servant of God Terence Cardinal Cooke had been baptized in 1921. 2 Leo J. O’Donovan, SJ, President of Georgetown University, letter, dated Advent 1997, to parishioners for the 90th anniversary of the parish. Fr. O’Donovan participated in the mural painting as a second grader, under the direction of a Sister Bernadelle.

154 FIGURE 1. Façade. Photo: Michael Holman.

died in 1979, we had a memorial service at which her student Aaron Copland gave a eulogy. Twice in the 1980s, the distinguished Oratorian liturgist Louis Bouyer participated in our regular 11:15 Sunday service and spoke at some length to the congregation of his admiration for this Novus Ordo choir Mass, which continues to this day.

Here we will consider historical aspects of Corpus Christi as a church building and note some of the artwork it houses.

THE BASIC BUILDING Wilfred Edwards Anthony (1878–1948) designed this fairly small Roman Catholic city church for its pastor Father George B. Ford in 1935; it was ­finished and dedicated in the following year (fig. 1). While not a textbook ­architectural masterpiece, it does offer an inventive solution to the problem of a church as one component of a vertical, multipurpose urban structure. 155 VOLUME 94 | APRIL 2020 | MASHECK

FIGURE 2. Birdseye view from the east. Antique postcard. Photo: Ann Plogsterth.

Its classical style is interestingly problematic, in relation not only to the Renais- sance, but also to early modernity’s first experience of “two cultures,” in the seventeenth century, and later alternatives to orthodox classicism as well.

The present steel-framed building with red-brick exterior is the second church built for the parish on this site. The earlier, built in 1906–7, also combined church and school in one structure, but it just looked like a school. The new program finds precedent in churches built in Ireland from around the time of Catholic Emancipation (1829), combining church atop a parish school, ­typically with an awkwardly high basement for the school. Wilfred Anthony’s cab-over-engine approach is not unique, even in Manhattan. Examples include the Gothic Revival Calvary Baptist Church on West 57th Street, of 1931, with a hotel on top, and Hugh Stubbins and Associates’ stylistically modern St. Peter’s Lutheran Church of 1977—a major venture of its day in American 156 religious architecture and art, freestanding underneath one corner of the Citi- corp Center, on Lexington Avenue. Combinations of this kind are hardly ever perfect marriages. St. Peter’s, despite an interior that proves a semi-precious gem of modern church design, looks to be under the wing, if not the heel, of capital.

As a façade, the Corpus Christi street front, tight up against the building line, is more graphic than sculpturesque. But Anthony’s handling of it is clever, using a tall, wide limestone “frontispiece”—here a temple front with two pairs of Doric pilasters—punctuated by a rose window and a modified classical “thermal window” in a pediment. By interrupting the brick wall, the “frontis- piece” disguises an incompatibility of functions, from a basement auditorium/ gymnasium, then the church proper, and the school, up to a convent, even as windows at front-and-center of the upper stories point up to a ­belfry above— as if a bell-tower had been flattened into the façade. On the east flank of the building one can see the various stories by the windows puncturing a con­ tinuous brick facing—behind and above the frontispiece, where the convent disappears behind a steep Mansard roof (fig. 2). As for the plain brick flank -it self, however much it was a matter of economy, I believe that the very fact that this was visibly permissible in an otherwise proper bourgeois building already raises the question of the Baroque versus the Renaissance, as consonant with Heinrich Wölfflin’s earliest affirmation of the Baroque as a reputable style. For in Renaissance and Baroque (1888) Wölfflin first pointed up how Baroque emphasis on the façade was so extreme as to justify neglecting the sides alto- gether, even of monumental buildings.

One enters the church through a vestibule or narthex dominated by a staircase leading up to the church’s high “ground floor.” This disposition is used when a sanctuary must be higher than the entrance: a previous local example is Our Lady of Esperanza, on West 156th Street, as altered in 1924 (if truth be told, more elegantly than here). The lower level of the Corpus vestibule contains an architectural relic: set into the wall is a brick from Santa Maria Maggiore, an important early Christian basilica in Rome. Relics of this kind are some- thing like relics of saints’ bodies, reminiscent of the far-flung presence of the “Corpus Christi” (a building metaphor as well as an anatomical and ecclesial 157 VOLUME 94 | APRIL 2020 | MASHECK

one) in ­respect to its “members.” Other Christians on Morningside Heights harbor similar relics: a stone block from the agora at Corinth, “Where Many Hearing Paul Believed,” set as a cornerstone in the Interchurch Center at ­Riverside Drive and West 120th Street (Reinhold Niebuhr Place); and a little chunk of St. Hilda’s abbey at Whitby in Yorkshire, “Where This Abbess ­Presided and Taught in the Seventh Century A.D.,” set into the side of St. Hilda’s and St. Hugh’s Episcopal School on West 114th Street.

At the top of the vestibule stairs, behind a pair of white-painted doors, is the church interior, also largely white. When people refer to the architecture of Corpus Christi (fig. 3), they ordinarily mean this, the church’s principal space. Since its dedication the interior has seen little material change, the most con- spicuous exceptions being installations of stained glass and other commis- sioned paintings and, later, after Vatican II, the moving of the tabernacle to the Blessed Sacrament chapel (former Lady chapel), and the removal of a com- munion rail that, before Vatican II, marked a frontier between the space of the clergy and that of the people.3 Otherwise, what we see is as Anthony originally designed it, including fittings such as altar furniture and a polychrome wooden processional cross also designed by the architect.

A PROBLEM OF MODERNITY One might have thought that in 1935 an up-to-date Catholic parish would want something conspicuously modern in style. The usual American church patronage, however, along with an academic clientele that no doubt wanted to hold historical ornamentation to a Brooks-Brothers restraint, probably ­accounts for the blandness of the façade. While one can rationalize the result as allowing the façade to be a stepping stone to a more vigorously classical ­interior, questions of historicism (in the sense of a recourse to history that ­forsakes the present) do here become surprisingly acute.

3 For early views of the Corpus Christi interior, see Desider Holisher, The House of God (New York: Crown, 1946), 68–71. For the original disposition of the Lady Chapel, see also Liturgical Arts 8 (January 1940): 32. Old-timers remember that an initially white ­interior was succeeded by polychrome (red, blue, gold) especially up front, in the time of the 50th anniversary of the actual parish in 1956, and that this was restored to uni- form white ca. 1968–69, when the church was also air conditioned.

158 FIGURE 3. Interior. Photo: Fr. Daniel O’Reilly.

It deserves to be asked why Father Ford in particular, famous for progressivism in other respects, did not embrace the orthodox architectural modernism that just around this time was attaining wide repute. At the same time, moderns can applaud his not going along with the semi-modern (like semi-classical music) Art Déco luxuriousness popular before the stock market crash, even in the outer boroughs of New York.4 Whatever the politics of the situation, Father Ford must have known the problem, sometimes exaggerated by those hostile to contemporary culture within the Catholic Church (Evelyn Waugh is a notorious example), of the ideological status of modernist architecture, ­especially 1930s Functionalism, in religious circumstances. Little talk about a Thomistic beauty of sheer reason in that quarter!

4 Symptoms of the contemporaneous Art Déco are normally merely ornamental, such as the only one I have detected in this building: a then-fashionable reverse-fluting on the engaged proscenium columns either side of the stage in the basement auditorium/ gymnasium. Another, the vents with slim balusters in the doors of the confessionals at the back of the church, and a similar round-headed vent on the door of the pulpit, is suggested by Ann Plogsterth.

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Even while Corpus Christi was under construction, the great Columbia art historian Meyer Schapiro observed that a contemporary Catholic apologist for the Functional style wound up fabricating a mistaken theological rationale while failing to acknowledge significant examples of modern Catholic archi- tecture and religious art. In practice, the problem was sociological, and also, in religious terms, pelagian-heretical:

In architecture . . . the recent innovations, the new international or functionalist styles, spring from wholly secular, sometimes reformist, ideas of human and ­technical efficiency; the architects conceive of man as essentially a biological and economic creature capable of attaining happiness through adjustments in his physical environment. These new styles have been regarded in a neutral sense as the conventions of a time and place, like a language which can be applied to any content, practical or religious. But the interest in art today plays a part in the ­formation of general attitudes and constitutes an important ideological field, ­especially in educated circles. The adoption of a still problematic and disputed style by the Church may help to strengthen the forces from which the style arose.5

Thanks to contemporary liturgical developments, the next generation would be better off. How refreshing to read in a brief 1952 essay on “Church Architec- ture of Today,” by Pie-Raymond Régamey, a French Dominican art historian (the whole Church owes much to French Dominicans for their advocacy of modern church architecture and art): “It is often argued that the functional quality of modern architecture is materialistic of its very nature. On the face of it, this might seem to be the case . . . but it is important to remember that architectural forms cannot of themselves be considered materialistic any more than they can be considered pagan or Christian. . . . If in our time we feel unable to infuse a Christian spirit into architecture, that spirit must be very weak indeed.” Besides, “Christianity should be at its most vital in a time when dangerous currents have to be turned to the glory of God. But no one can ­seriously consider modern architecture as a dangerous current. It has been

5 Meyer Schapiro, review of G. Arnaud d’Agnel, L’Art religieux moderne (1936), in The Review of Religion 3 (1939): 468–73; here, pp. 468–69; with n. 1, discussing contempo- rary totalitarian responses for and against Functionalism.

160 branded as materialistic and therefore anti-Christian, but only by those who insist on condemning anything new on principle and whose reading of the Gospel is Pharisaical. Such reactionaries will certainly never triumph in the pagan world we in fact live in.” 6

By and large, only Continental Europeans produced masterpieces of twentieth- century modern Roman Catholic church architecture (not only Le Corbusier’s 1955 Ronchamp Chapel but also important theologically immanentist Func- tionalism in Germany and Austria). Even in France the design of important modern churches and their accoutrements had to be defended by exceptionally sophisticated clergy with access to power. In the US, the church at Saint John’s Abbey, in Collegeville, Minnesota, 1958–61, is certainly a masterpiece, but it is by the Hungarian Marcel Breuer.

For Americans, the Catholic bottom line for churches does not seem to have been money as much as hostility begotten by ignorance, as a little tale will ­explain. A generation ago, a certain modern silver papal processional cross with downturned arms was despised by conservative US Catholics, who blamed it on Vatican II. In fact, the late Dimitri Hadzi, a devout Greek Orthodox pro- fessor of sculpture at Harvard made it on something like two weeks’ notice for St. Pope John Paul II’s visit to Boston in 1979. How many clerics since, ­unaware that they were formerly expected to dislike it, have bought plagiarized copies!—not to mention the thousands of mass-produced personal versions of the same crucifix design sent free with charity solicitations, all with no thought of this as the once-offensive crucifix design, let alone of Hadzi himself.

6 Pie-Raymond Régamey, “Church Architecture of Today,” in his Religious Art of the Twentieth Century (New York: Herder, 1963), 221–30, here pp. 221, 230. A like problem arose a generation ago with the demise of a modernist orthodoxy: Catholic anti-­ modernism hiding in the shadow of postmodern relativism. We cannot ignore such matters today, as all around us, rise ignorant glass boxes whose boorish severity it would be perverse to blame on the transcendental “Less is more” of the great modern- ist Ludwig Mies van der Rohe—a Catholic who absorbed philosophic influences from Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, and especially his contemporary Romano Guardini; see Joseph Masheck, “Reflections in Onyx on Mies van der Rohe,” in hisBuilding-Art: Modern Architecture Under Cultural Construction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 95–109; idem, “Thoughts on Mies’s Lemke House: Architecture, Feminism, Philosophy,” The Brooklyn Rail, October 2018 (online).

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Father Ford was to recall, “I wanted a Colonial American looking church, the style of which would be English in origin, but with a beauty added by American adaptations.” 7 With all due respect, only an amateur (though he was a good one) could think of beauty as a superadded quality that comes in various flavors. Fortunately, Ford’s good taste saved the day. (When Americans call a building “Colonial” they are not as a rule praising the colonial system, but recognizing a general eighteenth-century classicism that stems from the classical tradition of Greece and especially Rome, as passed down by the ­academies of Europe to the remotest colonies of their empires. And in the US, often with some American revolutionary association.) Whatever exactly Father Ford meant by his “beauty added by American adaptations,” it covered a harmonious stylistic pluralism in the fittings of the church that seems ­markedly American in its stylistic catholicity. We gain a sense of this in prac- tice from various fittings that Ford selected for the Corpus Christi interior: grand Belgian Baroque silver candlesticks, three silver altar lamps (the middle one old Russian, the others from Italy), and Bohemian crystal chandeliers, as well as Italian Renaissance paintings.

CLASSICAL VS. GOTHIC All American as well as European architectural classicism depended on the Ten Books on Architecture, by the early imperial Roman architect Vitruvius. Theoretically, its key feature is the column, with base and capital, in accord with proportional “orders” (mainly Doric, Ionic, and Corinthian)—like musical modes. In actual fact, Corpus Christi has no columns at all, although it does have the column’s secondary forms of flat pilasters, without fluting, on the ­façade, and square piers and pilasters with fluting, inside. Vitruvius’s Roman classicism, based on inaccessible Greek classicism, was the only literate game in town until the eighteenth century, when archaeology gave architects new knowledge of actual Greek buildings—a project that became politicized in the 1820s, with Western democratic interest in the Greek War of Independence.8

7 George Barry Ford, A Degree of Difference (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1969), 70. 8 Masheck, “Politics of Style: Dublin Procathedral in the Greek Revival,” in his Building- Art, 29–46.

162 Nevertheless, a hundred years before Corpus Christi, something entirely otherwise was happening in respect to the classically neglected Gothic of the cathedrals. In its singular revival, the Gothic had the Christian faith going for it, as well as a strongly empirical (hence anti-academic) engineering aspect. The Protestant art critic John Ruskin, drawing on the artistic practice and ­writings of the Catholic convert architect Augustus Pugin, promoted the hands-on craftsmanship of the pre-capitalist Gothic as the root of a specifically Christian architecture. The dyed-in-the-wool Protestant in Ruskin could never bring himself fully to recognize Pugin, but he is the obvious source of Ruskin’s sense of ­classicism as pagan and bourgeois. A century later, the art historian Erwin Panofsky would give the lecture that became a famous book, Gothic ­Architecture and Scholasticism (1951), arguing that scholastic philosophy, ­especially by systematic logical subdivision, was part and parcel of contempo- rary Gothic church design. The lecture was given at St. Vincent’s Archabbey, in Latrobe, Pennsylvania, where it was also first published as a book.9

There is no denying the Christianity of the Gothic, even though Renaissance Neoplatonism would one day manage to acquit classicism. Father Ford’s ­famous joke that his church looked like a Protestant church, whereas the huge Gothic Revival Riverside Church nearby looked like a Catholic cathedral, was more than jest: Anthony had already been, in fact, a protégé of one of the important late practitioners of the American Gothic Revival, namely, Ralph Adams Cram. Cram’s New York church work had included the Gothicization of the Episcopal Cathedral of St. John the Divine, under construction half a mile away. But if Gothic could be considered more Christian than anything classical, even Christian-socialist in the bargain, as well as being proto-modern, why did Father Ford want Wilfred Anthony effectively to change parties?

9 His Gothic Architecture and Scholasticism so influenced the sociologist Pierre Bordieu in translating it that he coined his key term “habitus” to substitute for Panofsky’s phrase “mental habit”; Nikolaus Fogle, The Spatial Logic of Social Struggle: A Bordieuian Topology (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2011), 43.

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Ford’s rationale likely entailed the social history of style in America in the time of the Great Depression. What people commonly called Colonial was a ­Neo-Georgianist classicism (from the several Hanoverian English kings called George in the eighteenth century) that proved a hallmark of cultural assimila- tion. The idea was so-called Americanization, if necessary with an underlying British accent. At the time, nearby Columbia, and America at large, were not accustomed to Catholicism on high levels.10

Eying Columbia, just down Broadway, might have made for other difficulties besides the question of Renaissance humanism as secularist. McKim, Mead & White’s campus plan was a symmetrical composition of quadrangles bounded by handsome brick Italian Renaissance-style classroom buildings, each differently but compatibly ornamented.11 Dead center, however, stood the grandiloquent Palladianism of Low Memorial Library, of steel but clad (non-“functionally”) in stone to look constructed of hefty stone blocks. By the time Anthony was asked to make Corpus Christi classical, Frank Lloyd Wright’s mentor, the great early modernist American architect Louis Sullivan, had already mocked Low Library: “Look at this mirage! See the Ionic columns, the entablature, the dome and so forth. Note especially the and-so-forth, for it is the untold that counts here—the discrete silence. Some say it is eloquent of speech; so the exile eloquent of his country.” 12 Sullivan’s opinion of the Columbia campus would never have helped Ford’s search for American “adaptations.”

But in 1935 American Catholics were not alone in seeking their slice of a popu- larly revived Colonial-style apple pie. Corpus Christi already had, behind it

10 Remarkably, Anthony’s mentor Cram, an Anglican, had publicly defended Al Smith’s running for president of the United States in the face of great anti-Catholic prejudice. 11 As a constellation, curiously consonant with the classically-learned yet modernist Viennese architect and urbanist Otto Wagner’s “Great City” planning project for Vienna; see Masheck, Adolf Loos: The Art of Architecture (London: I.B. Tauris, 2013), 78–80. 12 Louis H. Sullivan, “A College Library Building,” in his Kindergarten Chats (ed. 1918), repr., The Documents of Modern Art (New York: Wittenborn, Schultz, 1947), 91–92, here p. 92. The fine St. Paul’s Chapel seems spared.

164 on the next block, the equally assimilationist Georgianism of Gehron, Ross & ­Alley’s Jewish Theological Seminary of 1930, on West 122nd Street. The style even had an up-to-date Jeffersonian, New Deal aspect: Jefferson himself had practiced an eighteenth-century British Neo-Palladian architecture; and in the ’30s countless public works of all kinds that many would call Colonial were built in the United States in accord with it. ­Arguably its definitive national canonization came about at the time with the so-called restoration—actually the almost total rebuilding to the point of mythic fabrication—of Colonial Williamsburg in Virginia, undertaken by the Rockefellers as bolstering ­national morale, along with all the new W.P.A. Colonial courthouses, schools and post offices, during the Depression.

MERTON’S SENSE OF THE INTERIOR If Corpus had to have a “style,” Father Ford’s choice was sagacious. The church might harmonize with the better implications of the Renaissance humanism of Nicholas Murray Butler’s Columbia, but with a certain respect for Cardinal Newman. Here in the New York of the 1930s, Ford was setting a basically ­Oxford-Movement tone: distinguished liturgy and preaching, social concern, and the academic ministry of a Newman Club. Actually, despite stylistic ­commitment of the nineteenth-century Oxford Movement, Newman came to criticize Gothic Revival as “the emblem and advocate of a past ceremonial and an extinct nationalism.” 13 All the more reason to note that several huge English Oratory churches, before and after 1900, with their late Renaissance- into-Baroque style, are beholden to the Oratorians’ beginnings in late sixteenth-century Rome, even if the British interiors are more indulgently ­Baroque than those here.

Thomas Merton, who had first worshipped at a quasi-Colonial Episcopal church in Douglaston, Queens, that had burnt and been replaced by a simplistic stand-in, picked up on the subtle but dominant Oratorian key in Corpus Christi, writing in The Seven Storey Mountain (1948), “It had a kind of ­seventeenth-century Oratorian character to it, though with a sort of American

13 John Henry Newman, The Idea of a University (1873) (Garden City, NY: Doubleday Image, 1959), 113.

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colonial tinge of simplicity.” 14 A later Merton text on “Liturgical Renewal: The Open Approach” (1964) characterizes the Corpus interior thusly: “The sanctuary has a seventeenth-century look. But it is the air of Caroline Anglicanism as well as Baroque Catholicity.” This same passage encompasses much that we are discussing here, including Father Ford’s testimony: “It has no baroque excess about it, but it is consciously splendid, in an honest, forthright way.” Noting that the Colonial angle shows the “courage” of being unafraid of “being labeled ‘Protestant,’ ” it continues with a Mertonian salute to Father Ford: “There is enough about the tabernacle, candlesticks, and the ritual itself that is purely Roman, Post-Tridentine Roman. The paradox is then that here was a progressive who was able to get more out of all the things the conserva- tives claim to prize than the conservatives themselves!” 15

BETWEEN TWO CLASSICISMS The cultural historian Jacob Burckhardt had been responsible for the ­nineteenth-century notion that (a) the Renaissance was fundamentally secular, and (b) that was somehow a fine Protestant thing. The last significant gasp of this view in English-speaking culture had appeared some twenty years before Corpus Christi, namely, Geoffrey Scott’s late EdwardianThe Architecture of Humanism, unabashedly subtitled A Study in the History of Taste (1914). Scott’s book is a perennial bourgeois source for the idea that Renaissance ­architecture, especially in its ephebic fifteenth-century early maturity, can be taken as so nicely bleached and pressed as to be downright churchy (against,

14 Thomas Merton, The Seven Storey Mountain (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1948), 207. Corpus Christi has become something of a pilgrimage site for American Catholics ­interested in the monk and “peacenik” Thomas Merton, for his baptism in our baptis- try was a major turning point in his life. Not taken into account is that his conversion could have anything to do with art. But at Columbia College Merton was great pals with Ad Reinhardt, who came from a Christian-socialist family and became a major ­abstract painter, while his influence on Merton entailed Meyer Schapiro as well, ­particularly respecting political activism. See Masheck, “Where Thomas Merton’s Friend Reinhardt Was Coming From,” in his Texts on (Texts on) Art (2011), 2nd ed. (New York: Rail Editions, 2014), 64–87; idem, “An Editor’s View of Reinhardt and ­Merton: A Generation Behind; a Generation Ahead,” The Brooklyn Rail, January 16, 2014 (online) 15 Merton, Seasons of Celebration: Meditations on the Cycle of Liturgical Feasts (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1965), 231–48, here pp. 237–38; thanks to Father ­Raymond Rafferty for this reference.

166 of course, the Baroque as excessively and embarrassingly Catholic). To be ­honest, there is a whiff of Geoffrey Scott in Corpus Christi, twenty years after The Architecture of Humanism.

Not long after Corpus, a much more profound defense of Renaissance classi- cism in respect to church-building, based on Pythagorean geometry and Neo- platonic musical harmonics in respect to proportion, came from that other great Columbia art historian Rudolf Wittkower’s Architectural Principles in the Age of Humanism.16 From mid-century on, this book would allow that what had pleased Scott as nothing more than secular good taste might actually ­possess spiritual capacities, even as modernist architects were inspired by ­Wittkower’s view of the sixteenth-century Andrea Palladio to take bilateral symmetry out of the hands of academic classisists.

In wider purview, the Renaissance legacy also includes the widespread “­Quarrel of the Ancients and Moderns” that arose in the seventeenth century, pitting classical learning, not against religion, but against the new scientific knowledge. Today most would agree that the moderns won this decisive ­dispute by arguing that, while antiquarians tended to despise and dismiss the definitively modern achievements of science, moderns can also very well ­appreciate ancient wisdom. So it was that in architecture, Claude Perrault— a physician and anatomist as well as an architect, hence well versed in bodily structure—effectively demolished the arguments of François Blondel, the head of Europe’s only architectural school, the Royal Academy of Architecture in Paris, who banked on the classical tradition.17

16 London: Tiranti, 1952, first edition. 17 If some French churchmen opposed Perrault’s empirical disregard of the authority of the classical orders, the next century saw others developing the new Perraultean ­approach in its respect for the laws of nature—notably the abbé Jean-Louis Cordemoy and the Jesuit Marc-Antoine Laugier—installing modern architecture’s sense of an ­aesthetic of “fitness” as against the rules and regulations of academic classicism; see Kenneth Frampton, “Louis Kahn and the French Connection” (1980), in his Labour, Work and Architecture: Collected Essays on Architecture and Design (London: Phaidon, 2002), 168–85, esp. p. 173. On Perrault versus Blondel, see Joseph Rykwert, The First Moderns: The Architects of the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1980), 23–39; Anthony Gerbino, François Blondel: Architecture, Erudition, and the Scientific Revolution (London and New York: Routledge, 2010), esp. 57–65, 166–78.

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FIGURE 4. Pilasters of the chancel and apse. Photo: Mark Temple-Raston.

No one needs to measure the proportions of the Corpus Christi church ­interior to see how a narrow city lot and other practicalities in this project ­constrained Wilfred Anthony; indeed, we are lucky that the ceiling of the nave is as lofty as it is. If this seems like a casual approach to the serious matter of proportion, it is justified because Anthony himself shows casual disregard of systematic classical proportion at a most prominent point in our interior. Look at the evenly spaced pilasters of the Ionic order at the front of the sanc­ tuary (fig. 4). Because all are of the same width (19 inches), the taller pilasters stretch up from the floor of the chancel while shorter ones rise from the steps of the apse. This means that at least one of the two width-to-height ratios must literally be wrong by whatever classical standard of Ionic proportion Anthony used. The point is that not the rules of proportion, only artistic intuition, saved the day. 168 FIGURE 5. Florentine painter, Crucifix, tempera on panel, late XIV century. Photo: Anthony Marsh.

EARLIER PAINTING The stained glass at Corpus includes certain relics of medieval glass, not unlike the brick relic from Santa Maria Maggiore. These are fragments from the original stained glass of the great Reims cathedral, severely bombed in the First World War, set into two of the windows at the right of the apse that benefit from morning light.

A stunning, likely late fourteenth-century Florentine pulpit crucifix (fig. 5) is an example of early panel painting.18 Notwithstanding considerable repainting, it remains a marvelous work. Consider the articulation of the overall silhouette, with recessions and protrusions that respond to one another, up-and-down,

18 Crucifix now dated to accord with the researches of William E. Hood, as conveyed by Plogsterth. I have discussed this painting in relation to abstract art: Masheck, “Cruciformality,” Artforum 15 (Summer 1977): 56–63, with illus. on p. 56.

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left-and-right, and to the represented Cross painted on the wood ground. The handling of the shaped field and its framing rim permits the coincidence of two otherwise different cross types: Greek, with four equal arms, and Latin, with a longer vertical axis. The four arms carry subsidiary figures in their ­enlarged—in three cases terminal—zones, although there are really five such images in all: four human figures and one symbolic image. A pair of saints ­interrupting the stem of the cross with protrusions left and right is countered above by a symbolic Christological pelican—from the legendary notion that the pelican nourishes its young on its own blood.

A well-tuned relation prevails in this work among the superscriptions above the head of Christ, the meandering framing band of the whole crucifix at ­adjacent points, the ends of the arms of the painted, represented Cross within the already cruciform field and, finally, the slightly tilted footrest (in flat pro- jection, rhomboidal), down on the long stem of the object. One could go on about this beautiful painting; suffice it to mention the lyrical relation of the “S” curves of the two airborne angels at either side of Christ’s torso to one ­another, left and right, like the sound holes of a violin, and to the rigid yet complementary forms of Christ’s arms diagonally bisecting the arms of his (represented) cross above.

TheMadonna and Child Enthroned with Four Saints (see fig. 6) in the Blessed Sacrament chapel is probably a smaller version of a Florentine painting by ­Lorenzo Monaco, possibly made in Lorenzo’s workshop circa 1410–20.19 This is the altarpiece of the current Blessed Sacrament chapel, as the location of the tabernacle.20 Despite some restoration, the painting has vividly citrus patches of color and, at bottom, a decorative strip of pseudo-Kufic script. (Used in Islamic art for ornamental, calligraphic quotations from the Koran, Kufic script was often copied or parodied for its appeal as a play of forms in early Italian Renaissance painting).

19 New ascription and dating as in previous note. 20 Original deposition of the chapel, illus. in Liturgical Arts 8 (January 1940): 32. At least one of the archived blueprints of the church calls this the “Newman Ch[apel].”

170 FIGURE 6. Circle of Lorenzo Monaco, Madonna and Child Enthroned with Four Saints, early XV century. Photo: William Derby.

COMMISSIONED PAINTING Valentine d’Ogries (1888–1959), an Austrian-American painter and church designer, supplied Corpus Christi’s stained-glass windows and the main ­altarpiece in the 1940s. It happens that on Ascension Day, 2019, someone on Facebook quoted an amusing aesthetic confession: “Though he wanted to ­pursue modern design,” d’Ogries said, “ ‘They wanted 15th century so I gave them 15th century!’ ” 21 Some of this frustration shows in his altarpiece; it is more sublimated in the high degree of formalization in his more decoratively subsidiary features: Stations of the Cross and painted windows.

The principal altarpiece, from 1947, represents Christ the King (fig. 7). The church had been dedicated on that new feast day in 1936. Monsignor Myles Bourke, pastor from 1966 to 1992, used to emphasize that Christ the

21 “Original Stained Glass by Valentine d’Ogries,” June 24, 2013, https://www.facebook .com/media/set/?set=a.554022884654366&type=3&comment_id=1149194018470580 &reply_comment_id=1149373518452630. 171 VOLUME 94 | APRIL 2020 | MASHECK

FIGURE 7. Valentine d’Ogries, Christ the King, 1947, oil (?) on panel; main altarpiece. Photo: Ann Plogsterth.

King was an ­observance instituted by Pius XI in 1925, largely to stress Christ’s To measure bottom of caption to text. sovereignty in the face of rising nationalism and fascism in Europe. The paint- ing is an earnest­ if dated work showing the frontal, hieratic image of ancient kingship (though its potency seems more indicated than elicited), flanked, left and right, by wings with roundels illustrating salvation history. The black- and-white checkered paving of the floor beneath Christ’s throne in the central panel extends the actual paving in the aisles of the church, relating our litur- gical space to the kingdom to come. In Holy Week, when the wings of this triptych are shut, the excellent gilt lettering of the donor inscription on the outside of the doors is exposed. This gift of the beauty of sheer lettering when traditionally the beauty of holy images may be withdrawn is a worthy touch.

D’Ogries’s Stations of the Cross along the side walls have some specifically modern interest in their inventive variations in the placement and rotation of the Cross and in silhouetted figures set against a gold ground. As such, they are a ­somewhat tasteful cut above mere illustration. 172 FIGURE 8. Peter Watts, St. Bernard of Clairvaux, ca. 1957. Photo: Matthew Heeney. To measure bottom of caption to text.

The windows of the apse have violet glass with painted designs. Below, the flanks of the nave have yellow glass painted with black devices in alternating panes. Above, in the gallery, larger centralized motifs (some pictorial) have quasi-Baroque frames. It is always interesting to look at these windows and ­discover special features, whether the names of great composers of liturgical music, from Buxtehude to Gounod, in the choir’s window, or the names of more of the holy angels than one usually has heard of in another window, ­upstairs on the right side. Finally, visible from the apse end of the gallery is the only ­Gothicizing feature of this church—hidden, as though for ecumenism as well as style: a more conventionally medieval-style stained glass window, also by d’Ogries, commemorating English Catholic ­martyrs from the time of Elizabeth I to Cromwell. 173 VOLUME 94 | APRIL 2020 | MASHECK

CONTEMPORARY ART In a niche on the right-hand wall of the Blessed Sacrament chapel is a chunky little stone sculpture of St. Bernard of Clairvaux (ca. 1957) by the English sculptor Peter Watts (1916–2002; fig. 8). A nicely grittybozzetto or sketch, with springing posture and cocked head, this was a study for a larger, more suave (but also more decorative) work at Thomas Merton’s Abbey of Our Lady of Gethsemani in Kentucky. The inscription on the scroll, “AMOR QUIA AMO”— the first half of a famous statement by Bernard in a sermon on the Song of Songs, “I love because I love; I love in order to love”—is here in ordi- nary capitals. In the final version the letters look closer to those of calligrapher and typographer Eric Gill, a sculptor who influenced Watts and also designed the typeface for the numerals in The Catholic Hymnal (1966), this church’s ­beloved “green hymnal.” The piece has an interesting provenance: from the ­artist to Merton to Robert Rambusch, who gave it to Father Raymond ­Rafferty, ­pastor from 1998 to 2013, who gave it to the parish.

Corpus Christi has three contemporary paintings, two by Keith Milow, an To measure bottom of caption to text. ­English abstract and conceptual artist represented in the Museum of Modern Art, Tate Britain, and other museums. These are cross-shaped object-paintings belonging to a series of “Crosses Between Painting and Sculpture,” of which the church has Number 54, of 1976, executed with iron powder as pigment, hanging in the sacristy corridor and visible from the nave when the doors to it are open; and Number 63, 1977, made with copper powder, in the ­narthex ­beside the outside entrance to the baptistry. In a sense preferred by their atheist artist, these “crosses” are secular works, punning on their ambivalence not only as painting and/or sculpture, but also on whether they are sacred­ or not. The question of an artist’s own religiosity is as irrelevant as the employ- ment of gentile artisans to have the best for God’s house in the building of ­Solomon’s temple: when these works were installed here, two from the same series had already been installed by Milow at All Saints (Church of England) Church, Margaret Street, in London. In any case, one can consider the utterly elemental materiality of their iron and copper pigments as a matter of signifi- cant immanentism.

The most contemporary permanent work of art at present in Corpus is by ­Alfonse Borysewicz, an American painter represented at Merton’s abbey, 174 FIGURE 9. Alfonse Borysewicz, Lectio No. 2: Crown, 1989–90, oil on wood with gold leaf. Photo: The artist. To measure bottom of caption to text.

the Rose Art Museum at Brandeis, St. Francis College and the Oratory in Brooklyn, and the Vatican’s Pontifical Council for Culture. The Corpus piece, Lectio No. 2: Crown, 1989–90, in mixed media on wood (fig. 9), hangs over the sacrarium (the basin emptying to the ground) in the sacristy. A critic writes tellingly of Borysewicz’s “scruffy formalism” in describing the work as “a schematic Crown of Thorns painted modestly in black on a small gilded wooden panel that permanently dangles from its own inner wire hanger against another gilt panel, the whole in a raw, decrepit frame of slats.” 22 When Crown arrived here, the artist had already executed an altarpiece and a processional cross for the Brooklyn Oratory. In 1998, when Corpus Christi declared itself a sister parish to a church in Cuba at San José, Esmeralda, in ­Camagüey (a province Thomas Merton had visited in April 1940), Borysewicz

22 Thomas Frick, “Alfonse Borysewicz at Stavarides [Boston],” in Art in America (March 1986): 154; quoted in Masheck, “Alfonse Borysewicz,” Tema Celeste, US ed., no. 31 (May–June 1991): 64–66, esp. p. 66, illustrating the painting as it hangs in the Corpus sacristy. 175 VOLUME 94 | APRIL 2020 | MASHECK

FIGURE 10. Stephen Antonakos, St. Anthony, 1996, gesso on wood, neon; installation for the Easter season, 2001. Photo: Stephen Petegorsky © Stephen Antonakos Studio L.L.C.

gave the Cuban church a painting from the same series—Lectio: Mother and Child—which one of our parishioners reported was enthusiastically received.

In 2000–2001 Father James Blaettler, SJ, organized short-term exhibitions of abstract artists in the church. At Easter 2000, Deborah Farre effected a cloud form in the clerestory space above the Blessed Sacrament chapel. In Lent 2001 Robert Natkin (1930–2010), whose work hangs in many museums, attached small lyrical-abstract Stations of the Cross paintings, from 1997, to the piers in the nave, keyed to the d’Ogries Stations behind. At the same time, Father Andrew O’Connor matched photo-conceptual light boxes in the gallery to both sets of Stations below. 176 In the Easter season of 2001, St. Anthony, 1996, by the well-known Greek- American sculptor Stephen Antonakos (1926–2013), was temporarily installed in the space above the Blessed Sacrament chapel (fig. 10). It is a pristine white- painted square relief, backlit by a halo of colored neon (in Orthodox iconogra- phy a square halo indicates a living saint). Notwithstanding a common social prejudice against neon as a material, it, too, is a created element; indeed science calls it a “noble gas”—once again raising the question, in a church, of the ­divine in immanent form.

If certain recent artworks are in modes that might have seemed beyond the pale to Valentine d’Ogries, Wilfred Anthony, and even Father Ford, what Ford built was never a museum to begin with. Whatever has been changed has ­managed to sustain his remarkably creative-eclectic spirit.23

23 For help with particular points in this essay I thank Naomi S. Antonakos, Louise Basbas, Fr. James Blaettler, SJ, Elizabeth Browne, William Derby, Philip Gleason, Alexandra Halidisz, Matthew Heeney, Michael Holman, Fr. Daniel O’Reilly, Dr. Ann Plogsterth, and Fr. Raymond Rafferty.

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