Both the Chaos of Jackson Pollock and the Sterility of Photorealism are Incompatible with Christianity

Unveiling the middle ground where faith, philosophy, and beauty all meet in the person of Christ, image of the invisible God.

Authentic Christian art strikes a balance between abstraction and realism, rejecting the extremes of Abstract Expressionism—where meaning dissolves into unrecognizable chaos—and Photorealism, which reduces reality to soulless or meaningless matter. Rooted in a worldview shaped by faith and philosophy, the Christian artist uses partial abstraction to blend naturalistic forms with spiritual depth, revealing the soul and invisible truths of existence. This tension, distinct from modern art’s dualistic pitfalls, defines its unique purpose and beauty.

John the Baptist, by David Clayton, 21st cent.

The Limits of Abstraction and Naturalism

If a painting of a man is so abstracted that it is not recognisably what is meant to be—as is the case with Abstract Expressionism —then put simply it is a bad painting. There can be no Christian Abstract Expressionism. On the other hand, extreme naturalism, such as we see in Photorealism, is also bad art from a Christian point of view because it reflects an attitude that says there is no meaning or spiritual dimension in what we are looking at, only matter. There is no Christian Photorealism. Christian art sits between these two poles of dualism. It has traditionally aimed to reflect naturalistic appearances so that we know what we are looking at, but to stylise the image through partial abstraction to suggest to the observer the invisible aspects of what we see, such as its meaning and importance, and in the human person, the soul.

The Profound Connection Between Faith, Philosophy, and Art

A painter’s artistic choices are not made in a philosophical or theological vacuum. Rather, an artist’s ‘worldview’—his ‘personal philosophy’ or understanding of reality that combines philosophical and theological truths—profoundly shapes what he paints and how he depicts it. At a more general level, everyone possesses an underlying philosophical framework that informs his perceptions and judgments, whether he recognises it or not. This “worldview” also determines an artist’s decisions when he paints, including what he deems worthy of imitation and the specific stylistic techniques he employs to emphasise those aspects of reality that matter most to him. Therefore, a Christian artist must have a correct worldview; otherwise, he might lead people astray and misrepresent aspects of the faith through his paintings' content and style.

Lessons from Ancient Greece

Ancient Greek philosophy can help us here. Ancient Greece was a great cauldron of ideas. Indeed, there are so many ideas that it could be argued that just about any personal philosophy we encounter today was represented in some form by the ideas of at least one of those ancient Greek philosophers. Many of those ideas of ancient Greece passed into Roman civilisation, and the best of them, subsequently, into mainstream Christian thought. Of course, two Greek philosophers stood out as giants: Plato and his greatest student, Aristotle. Together, they came closest to describing the nature of man, God, and the world through natural reason alone and without the benefit of Revelation.

Plato, Aristotle, and Christian Thought

The ideas of these two philosophers have continued to be of great interest to Christians because the philosophical methods of inquiry they developed have helped Christians understand more deeply what Christ revealed to us and how it can be applied in everyday life today and in the past. Perhaps the Christian who did more than any other to integrate Christian teaching with Aristotelian and Platonic thinking and the Fathers who preceded him is St Thomas Aquinas (1215-1274 A.D.), who integrated their philosophies with the gospel.

Raphael’s School of Athens: A Visual Parable

To illustrate the continued importance of the ancient Greeks to Christian thought, consider this painting. It is called the School of Athens, and it was painted in 1511 by the Italian artist Raffaello Sanzio da Urbino (1483-1520), generally known in English as Raphael. His painting is on a wall in the Vatican Museums.

It shows many great philosophers of the ancient world. Despite the name of the painting, not all of them lived in Athens. Indeed, some are not even Greek, but collectively, they represent the tradition of philosophy that originated in Athens and lasted over 1,000 years from about 600 BC. At the centre, featured most prominently, we see these two great figures already mentioned, Plato and Aristotle. Raphael has shown Plato pointing upwards to the metaphysical world, what we might call the spiritual world, which exists beyond the material realm (which he called the world of Ideas or Forms). Plato is talking to Aristotle, who is pointing downwards to the earth to symbolise his more significant interest in the goodness and reality of the material realm of existence.

The Eternal Tension in Art

This detail of a great painting symbolises the tension in all art: that is, how do we describe the relationship between the spiritual and the material worlds, especially when painting people, between body and soul? Some people believe that the essence of human nature is what we think and feel. An artist who believes this might dispense with the portrayal of the human body and try to represent pure emotion, thought, or subconscious aspects through abstract shapes (20th-century abstract artists did this, for example). The ethos of the abstract expressionists is testable - we can present people with these paintings to a hundred people (who haven’t studied art history at university) and ask the question that only 5-year-olds dare ask…what is it? If the majority respond with the artist’s intention without being told in advance, then we can concede a point to them. However, in my experience, few, not even the critics who promote their work, seem to see what the artists hope to portray.

Jackson Pollock No. 1

Mark Rothko, Untitled

At the other extreme, some people, called ‘materialists’, believe that man is only made of matter and has no soul. An artist who is a materialist might decide to paint the man in perfect correspondence to natural appearances, as close to perfect in every visible detail as possible, but would have no interest in communicating that he possesses a soul or that a painted scene has a meaning that indicates a Creator or loving God. If executed skillfully, such a painting or sculpture would be dazzling in its lifelike detail but sterile and lifeless in appearance, like a death mask or an image created mechanically without human artifice. Photorealism is an example of the art of the materialist. For example, I invite the reader to look at the work of Ron Mueck, who sculpts in an extreme form of photorealism called Hyperrealism (it is difficult to find photos that can be reproduced here).

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