Related articles and links |  1 of 2

Regardless of what anyone may personally think or believe about him, Jesus of Nazareth has been the dominant figure in the history of Western culture for almost twenty centuries. … It is from his birth that most of the human race dates its calendars; it is by his name that millions curse and in his name that millions pray.

—Jaroslav Pelikan, professor emeritus of history, Yale University

Curators of the visual arts are preparing for the year 2000 with more than supplies of canned goods and water. For them, the culmination of two millennia represents a tidy, even sum of years in which to celebrate the development of Western civilization. This celebration is bittersweet since today's culture seems as antagonistic toward Christianity as the first-century Roman regime, which made martyrs of Jesus Christ and his followers.

This hostility no longer features gory competitions in sandy arenas, with gladiators and ravening lions. Rather, it involves the more sophisticated, seemingly polite medium of printed words and the dismissal of art with Christian meaning as a topic for serious academic consideration. Some would say that "Christian art" as a category ceased to exist in the art world shortly after the seventeenth century. It is often rigorously barred today in the most prestigious graduate programs.

It is no surprise, then, that support for a large-scale, international exhibition celebrating 20 centuries of images of Christ must come out of an unexpected corner, rather than from such prestigious venues as the Metropolitan Museum of Art or the Louvre. This is just what David J. Goa, curator of the Provincial Museum of Alberta, has planned for the year 2000, with the aid of governmental grants from Canada.

Structuring his exhibit on themes from Jaroslav Pelikan's Jesus Through the Centuries (1985), Goa's preparations for "Anno Domini: Jesus Through the Centuries" have taken him to Istanbul, Nicaea, most of Europe and Scandinavia, Mexico, North America, and Australia, in search of a broad representation of images of Jesus that capture his humanity without erasing his divinity. Since no one knows what Jesus actually looked like, no one image of Jesus can be more accurate than others. Some capture a sense of his presence and gravity—or, in some cases, levity—better than others.

"One challenge is to help my colleagues understand that the exhibition is about meaning and that it is legitimate," Goa says. He says that a deepening secularization has "colonized" the study of religious art, severing questions of meaning and context from appearance—thereby declawing and defanging the art. "When you look at what museums have done with religious materials, you often see a deliberate and very disciplined reductionism, which ignores the fact that this material has meaning both for people's lives and our culture, as well as enormous implications for the way our entire culture has been shaped and developed. As public institutions concerned with the development of social life, it is high time we had the courage and the skill to help the rest of the public understand the play of meaning that operates here."

Chuckling, he mentions heated arguments with other art professionals who felt that Jesus, perhaps, should not be included in the exhibit, even though it is subtitled "Jesus Through the Centuries: His Place in the History of Culture."

Still, "The name of Jesus is 'hot' … even in our curious age," Goa says. "It's surprising how many images people have in their mind—people immediately think the project has to be, by necessity, an evangelical pitch. Another response is that there is so much vested interest in controlling the discourse about Jesus in various church communities that to attempt such an exhibit is to walk into a minefield."

next page... |  1 of 2

November 15 1999, Vol. 43, No. 13