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MARVIN HALVERSON AND
THE ORIGINS OF ARC
William J Conklin
The Society for the Arts Religion
and Contemporary Culture is the imaginative construction of one
person, Marvin Halverson, its founder and first prophet. Though
trained as a protestant theologian, Halverson could not believe
that religious insights were to be found only in religious institutions,
but also saw such insights in many forms of creative art and thought.
He searched for and identified many allies and co-believers and
then founded ARC as an institutional framework for their continuing
efforts.
I met Halverson in 1951 shortly after
I had arrived in New York City. The fifties have been described
as that decade when America put its full faith in the machi: when
everyone was wide-eyed about the glorious possibilities inherent
in mechanization, when the whole nation was utterly practical
and artistically naive. Although that was a truth about the fifties,
it was not the complete truth. In theology, Tillich and Niebuhr
reigned at Union Theological Seminary; in art, New York (with
Jackson Pollock at the forefront) had seized from Paris the mantle
of the avant garde; and in architecture, Walter
Gropius of the famed Bauhaus was enthroned in Harvard’s Graduate
School of Design. I had just graduated from that school under
Gropius's direction and had taken supplemental courses at Harvard
Divinity School.
Given my interest in religion and
my work under Gropius, it was inevitable that, once in New York,
the pursuit of new thinking about church architecture would lead
me to Halverson. Halverson had been born in the Midwest in 1913,
had been Dean of Students at Chicago Theological Seminary, had
traveled widely in Europe and was indeed deeply interested in
new church architecture. He was now in New York City setting
up special commissions within the National Council of Churches
to provide leadership to churches in searching out not only new
religious architecture but also new religious music, new religious
dance, and new religious drama. Also during those fifties he
waged, together with Stanley Hopper, Paul Tillich, Reinhold Niebuhr,
Alfred Barr and Jane Dillenberger, an unsuccessful battle against
the proposed retro-Gothic design of the massive Interchurch Center
on Riverside Drive. But John D. Rockefeller had given the money
and won on the subject of design, as is highly evident from the
still prominent Gothic pile on Riverside Drive.
Later, when I returned to New York
after a year’s study in Europe, I found myself on one of his Commissions
whose purpose was to study and to promote new religious architecture.
But his goal for the Commissions was not academic: it was distinctly
practical. He was determined to start a revolution and overturn
traditions in religious architecture and religious art, and his
zeal was extraordinary. He felt that the status of church art
and architecture was abysmal; that the trivial art that especially
characterized Protestant churches was an insult to their deep
religious truths; that church music had never felt the fresh air
of the 20th Century; that dance and drama--the prime language
of many religions--were anathema to Protestantism; and that the
general mood of Protestant religious services was stifling to
creative thought. But most importantly, he noted that then,
(in the 1950’s), the common understanding of the word myth
was that it was simply another word for lie. A kind
of naive rationality ruled in most fields of thought. The apple
had indeed fallen and was no longer a living fruit.
Halverson was determined to do something
about the whole crisis. Like many a church revolutionary before
him, he wanted to use his church position to accomplish his revolution.
The postwar fifties certainly contained hints of many kinds of
cultural revolutions, both social and artistic. Many of Marvin’s
perceptions were accommodated under the rubric of modernism.
In architecture, modernism was not conceived of as a style amongst
styles, as it is now; it was then a revolutionary movement that
would strip away all traces of shameful Victorianism, would provide
cleanliness and equal access to sun and air for one and all,
and it was a movement that promised an entirely new social and
artistic beginning with its own emergence of new forms of truth
and beauty. The boldness of these movements in the arts was astonishing,
and at least one man was determined to bring their fresh energy
into the church.
Halverson was not only a profound
theologian and a deeply perceptive judge of art; he was also a
marvelous conversationalist. Completely at home in the most abstruse
theological discussion or artistic evaluation, he easily made
friends with the high and mighty in every intellectual field.
His initial goal was to incorporate into the church the most creative
thinkers and leaders in all areas of human thought. His method
was to rely not only on his theological and artistic perceptions,
but also on his charm, to crash through doors that were normally
completely closed to church officials.
He had become a very close friend
of Paul Tillich, then at Union: in fact, they became drinking
buddies. Once at Marvin’s invitation, Paulus came down to Greenwich
Village where Marvin lived on St. Luke’s Place, to explore the
local color. To Halverson’s astonishment, Tillich appeared wearing
a beret. Tillich had carefully thought through an appropriate
attire but his European beret struck a strange, if not laughable,
note in the Greenwich Village of the 1950’s.
Halverson not only talked, he was
also a great listener. Tillich told him about an inspirational
moment that he had experienced years before in Germany. He (Tillich)
was touring the Bauhaus, and while first gazing at the astonishing,
radical, fresh, new art being created there, the idea suddenly
came to him: This is religious art! And that,
Halverson said later, was the mythical moment of ARC’s birth.
Together they defined Tillich’s relationship
to the evolving concept of an organization that would be devoted
to their common interests. Alfred Barr of the Museum of Modern
Art, the American leader of the modernist revolution, became ARC;s
first President. Eventually they decided that Tillich should
not be a member of the governing board, nor even an honored Fellow;
he was to be ARC's floating, spiritual, father-figure up there,
just a little beyond touchability.
All the initial Fellows of ARC were
friends of Halverson: architect Philip Johnson, theologian Stanley
Hopper, poet W. H. Auden, psychoanalyst Rollo May, as well as
Alfred Barr of MOMA. Other friends who quickly became ARC stalwarts
included Amos Wilder, Wolf Zucker, and the European-born Frederick
Franck and Emery Valyi as well as many artists and art historians.
So ARC gradually became the institutionalization of one man’s
remarkable vision that depended for its structure on his many
friends.
To encourage churches to consider
modern drama, Marvin wrote a small didactic book, Religious
Drama; it included work by W. H. Auden and other authors.
Consider a few introductory sentences from that book that he hoped
would be used in churches.
These plays
represent the return of poetry to the theater, one of the aspects
of the renewal of religious drama and a sharp departure from the
prevalent naturalism of the 19th and 20th Century drama. ...
T. S. Eliot in his plays has pointed to his awareness of the role
of myth in illuminating man’s situation. ... This need to return
to the hero paradigms of Judeo-Christian culture, to the Bible,
to history is demonstrated in each of the plays in this anthology.
Regarding Christopher Fry’s The
Firstborn, Halverson wrote: "The immediacy of this story
suggests the power of symbols and myths out of our past to illumine
the present and define the issues of life in our time."
These sentences suggest that Halverson had begun to feel that
myth was the ancient and eternal form of the human/divine conversation
and that art was its language. He felt that American culture and
institutional religion now had closed eyes and ears; and he wanted
to move toward renewal and reconnection.
Halverson’s work within the institutional
church moved from the National Council of Churches to the Congregational
Church and then to its successor, the United Church of Christ.
His Commissions formed to revolutionize the church from within
had met with stiff resistance, and his institutional position
and financial support began to erode. His roster of friends in
the world of high culture, however, constantly increased. He thought
of somehow formalizing their conversations and cross-connections
concerning religion and the arts -- insights that he thought held
great importance for the church, as well as for the world at large.
But very few of these thinkers who understood the interconnections
of myth, art and religion were active in institutional religions.
The estrangement between creativity and the institutional religions
seemed almost total.
And so Halverson gradually came up
with the idea of an independent structure in which creative intellectuals
might feel more at home and more able to carry on the crusade.
Its members would form a sort of army who would gather for mutual
reinforcement and then go out into the world to fight for the
new truth. The first board meeting that I remember, probably
in 1961, was held in the offices of the Board of Homeland Ministries
of the Congregational Church. Truman Douglas acted as chairman
of the board, which was formed of Halverson’s colleagues and friends.
Halverson wanted his new Foundation
for the Arts, Religion and Culture to have a home. He dreamt
of having a town house on the east side of Manhattan where his
scholar/soldiers from around the world could stay during their
New York sojourn, their evenings filled with theology and art.
Then later there would be similar centers in other cities, formed
for renewing the connections among local religious groups, creative
artists and the local culture, with the local meetings being their
common ground. Such chapters, then, through their inspired meetings,
were to lead churches and synagogues into a New World resonant
with both the new art and the ancient myths.
Discussion of the Foundation’s money
matters was largely avoided, but was brought to the board’s attention
when Halverson reported that virtually all of the letters received
by the Foundation thus far were not donations as he had hoped,
but were actually requests for grants from the great ARC Foundation.
Also Halverson did not like the sound of the acronym FARC. So
for both reasons, it was eventually decided to remove the word
"foundation" from the title and call it a "society,"which
sounded classier than "organization." The word "contemporary"
was added to reaffirm the Society’s commitment to the real world
and to the evolving forms of modernism.
Early meetings of ARC were irregular
and of several types: group discussions, public presentations
by famous names that could provide their own audience draw, and
wine cellars modeled on the Viennese variety (small gatherings
with one or two Fellows as moderators). But all meetings were
thought of as continuing conversations among the Fellows. Initially
there were no members, only Fellows. Meetings were held in various
places. I remember ones in the Museum of Modern Art, in the Guggenheim
Museum, in the Century Club, in the Gramercy Arts Club, and around
town in various places, but never, as far as I can recall, was
an early meeting held in a church.*
Halverson
was ARC’s first Executive Director. Initially he had financial
backing from the United Church of Christ. But the problems with
this church backing increased, and he began to have catastrophic
personal troubles. Fortunately, Marvin and the ARC board had
previously appointed another Executive Director, Elizabeth Bradley,
and ARC was actually well on its way.
I last saw Halverson upon his return
from the emergency room of a local Greenwich Village hospital
where he had spent the night. He was badly bruised, had many
bandages, and his arm was in a sling; he had been mugged. Later,
he seemed to have recovered and was given a job in Berkeley, California,
as a counselor to foreign students; but his health deteriorated,
and he died shortly afterwards in California at the age of 54.
There is no doubt that ARC is Marvin
Halverson’s legacy, his long shadow. He left several scholarly
papers that tell us about the breadth of his thinking on many
subjects, but of special interest to us here is his 1963 document
concerning the Foundation. Some of it reads as follows: "The
Foundation proposes to foster a timely collaboration of those
alerted groups in our society that have been the chief
carriers of cultural health and vitality." (Not alert,
notice, but alerted, as if there were a
background force moving these avant garde artists and
thinkers in their efforts. There are interesting theological implications
in his word alerted.) Later he says, "Standing
between the religious institutions and the persons involved in
these influential movements of our time, the Foundation will seek
to build bridges of communication and foster artistic, religious
and cultural renewal." Further on, "In carefully chosen
pilot projects, the Foundation will demonstrate what can be achieved
when the best artistic resources are brought into the life of
the churches and of society at large." Clearly, ARC was
to be an intermediate ground between the arts and the institutional
religions. We were to learn here and in our local ARC chapters
and then go back and preach the new truths to our stodgy churches
and synagogues. This concept of an organization with such bold
intentions creates in all of us, I think, a state of open-mouthed
amazement.
An important project in our forthcoming
ARC history will be to make available Halverson’s writings.
Consider now a final quote from him:
Though there were
lonely and prophetic seers in the 19th Century who protested
against the spirit of the age--Kierkegaard, Dostoyevsky, and
Van Gogh, to mention but three--it is only in the 20th Century
that we have begun to perceive again the full measure of man,
even as paradoxically we have recognized, largely through the
arts, the broken-ness of man’s existence. Amos Wilder--(his
good friend, writing at mid-century)--has pointed out that ‘the
most significant art of the 20th Century--Stravinsky, Picasso,
Joyce, Kafka, Pound and Eliot--is that which comes of the apical
convulsions of our time, out of full immersion in the condition
of man today.’
Later, Halverson
says: The arts tell us more about ourselves than does science,
because they arise from the imagination and the heart of life.
The arts reveal man’s inner life and the character of the age
to a greater degree than does any other expression of man’s
life. The serious artists tell us more about our time than
do the ostensibly religious representatives. Picasso reveals
more truth about man’s predicament than does Peale, and Stravinsky
excels Sallman at opening the channels of revelation.
William Conklin is an architect
with offices in New York and Washington and an archaeologist specializing
in pre-Columbian textiles. He now resides in Washington, DC where
his architectural work includes the United States Navy Memorial
and the new town of Reston, Virginia. His archaeological work
has been in Peru and Chile, with his most ecent publication entitled
“The Individual in pre-Columbian Archaeology” in the Textile
Museum Journal. Mr. Conklin is an ARC Fellow and Vice President
of the Society.
*David Miller later, in
answer to a question, detailed the structural plan. Activity
was to begin with wine cellars (Frederick Franck’s idea): small,
intimate meetings where artists/ theologians/thinkers (20-25 people)
would discuss questions and subjects; in larger meetings (like
this one here today) these things would be sorted out and subjects
chosen for a series of papers; then, in places of real stature,
papers on these subjects would be presented by Fellows; and,
finally, published. With the recurring distribution of such
material for study within the Christian and Jewish establishments,
the religious institution would be re-empowered and the level
of culture raised.
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