Peccatte (Patrick)

In april 2010 Patrick Peccatte published an article about the decorations which pastor Victor Paysant made in the parish church of Menil-Gondouin.

This article is on the internet in Culture Visuelle, a french social medium that promotes research of and discussion on visual culture.

Patrick Peccatte argues that the in general widely accepted point of view, that pastor Paysant's oeuvre is a kind of "art brut", can be questioned and he makes it plausible that it better can be studied using principles of the art of propaganda.

I am happy I got mr Peccatte's permission to re-publish his article here in an english translation.

Patrick Peccatte,

About a "living and talking church": art brut and art of propaganda

Father Victor Paysant (1841-1921) was appointed pastor of Menil-Gondouin (Orne) in 1873. A new church had been build after the re-grouping of three parishes. This church was not yet finished. The new priest completes it and then begins making decorations. During 48 years he restores ancient sculptures and creates new ones, he modifies the altars, decorates the font, enriches the furniture, and covers the building both inside and outside with different kinds of religious paintings and inscriptions.

The pastor gladly lets people visit his work, which he describes as a christian museum or a christian library, and he calls it the “living and talking church” (l’église vivante et parlante) [i] of Menil-Gondouin. He also begins publishing several brochures, and many postcards on which he very often is depicted. Added to this his "original" character and his famous tirades, all these initiatives are against the wishes of his superiors. After his death, at the request of his successors, the sculptures are removed and the paintings are erased or overpainted.

At the initiative of the municipality and with the permission of the bishop, the church has been restored since 2004.

The work of pastor Paysant is almost always described as art brut and the decoration of the church is often compared with paintings in churches and cathedrals of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, depicting kind of an ’illustrated catechism” [ii]

But this dual affiliation is never well explained. However, the use of these two qualifications among themselves raises some problems and needs clarification. We believe that this particular building is best understood by trying to identify the proper doctrinal and even propagandist intentions, which have motivated the author, rather than sticking to an artistic interpretation that supposes a lineage dating back to medieval times.

So the Church of Menil-Gondouin would refer to art brut, that is to say, in the words of Jean Dubuffet, creator of the concept, "an art that does not know its name."

The classic definition of Dubuffet deserves to be remembered here:

"By this we mean works that are executed by people who are free from artistic culture, who take little or no part in mimicking, contrary to what happens among intellectuals, so that the makers of these works take everything (subjects, choice of materials, means of transposition, rhythms, ways of writing, etc.) on its own merit and not on the merit of the clichés of classical art or art that is trendy.. We are witnessing the pure artistic operation, raw, reinvented by the author as a whole in all its phases, departing from his own impulses. "

The best known examples of art brut have another important characteristic of what is implied in this definition. Whether it's about the Palais Ideal of facteur Cheval (a contemporary of the église vivante et parlante), the house of Picassiette, the floor of Jeannot, or, less known but located in the same area, the achievements of André Hardy or Euclide Ferrera da Costa, it is always a same personality, who designs and realizes the work which is qualified as art brut.

This is not so for the church at Ménil-Gondouin, where the designer, pastor Paysant, certainly does not draw on his ”own merit” and who, to realise his oeuvre, employed several workers, painters and sculptors. Moreover, the pastor was probably not "free" from artistic culture and his sources of inspiration are known: the Bible, the Catholic rituals of that time, the breviary and the missal of the diocese of Bayeux (although the parish belongs to the diocese of Séez, which is a little mystery ...). In his time and his social setting he certainly was seen as intellectual. Also, he studied plants and took part in learned societies, which again does not really fits with the idea one has of a representative of art brut.

The comparison with the paintings of churches in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance [iii] is apparently a modern construct, which is not confirmed by pastor Paysant in his brochures, where he "explains" his work. One of the few churches in the region with murals in the interior, is the one at Douet Arthus in the parish of Heugon. But there does not appear any inscription in that church. The pastor probably could not know about this church, any more than he knew about churches elsewhere in France, which still contain inscriptions [iv]

The inscriptions in the church are numerous and often lengthy. It is a strange mixture of biblical quotations (mostly in Latin), liturgical texts, brief reflections or more elaborate compositions of the priest himself, which in totality would constitute for him what is important to note in relation with the displayed images and statues. The complete collection of texts one can read, truly is eclectic. Three languages have been used: french, latin (for the New Testament), hebrew (for a few quotations from the Old Testament). Unfortunately, there is no transcript of the inscriptions, which would make it possible to trace the origin of the texts in french, since they come from breviaries, missals or other liturgical works. A real epigraphic study would be necessary here.

The emphasis on Hebrew - badly written, by the way, according to Hebrew scholars consulted by Mr. Guy Bechet - and the abundance of Old Testamentic characters, is quite remarkable and can without doubt be explained by the several pilgrimages the pastor made, including one to Palestine. One can also note the absence of inscriptions in Greek, the classical language which had an important role in the training of clergymen of his time (certainly it was more important than Hebrew). The whole of inscriptions and some legends on the postcards, suggests that pastor Paysant was interested in the origin of languages from a theological perspective and could believe in a divine origin of Hebrew.

With regard to the impersonations, there are various depictions of the Virgin, one dedicated to Notre-Dame-de-France and another to Notre-Dame-des-Armées. However, the Immaculate Conception is not mentionned, a belief which even so has been proclaimed as a catholic dogma in 1854 [v]. In addition to several local saints, there are also impersonations of Jeanne d’Arc and St. Michael and references to characters which have not been canonized, like Charlemagne. All these impersonations illustrate a combative and patriotic conception of religion, in the spirit of the Christian right of the nineteenth century.

The publication of postcards is an essential aspect of the work of pastor Paysant, inseparable from the development and the decoration of the church. From 1902 to 1914, right in the golden age of the postcard [vi], more than 200 postcards (244 according to some counts) have been published by 17 different publishers. One of these publishers is named E.L.C. (Edition Locale de Cartes, Local Edition of Cards), and pastor Paysant is certainly the publisher of this series. The purpose of these cards is to propagate image and message as conveyed by the decoration of the church, but also to highlight its protagonist. Without modesty the église vivante et parlante is qualified as the "eighth wonder of the world", its creator being the "inspired founder” He also sets himself on stage as the archangel Michael, as he appears to Jeanne d’Arc, represented in the church as if he was about to celebrate an office. This propagation by varied and important postcards, had also a lucrative goal, i.e. to raise funds for the maintenance of the building. Such a use of a relatively new medium at that time, being planned and controlled by the designer of the oeuvre, cannot be found, to our knowledge, among the usual representatives of outsider art.

Finally, from 1887 to 1909 pastor Paysant published a dozen of texts, mostly to explain and justify his work on the church. Again, in the field of art brut this is not a usual practice. Four titles of this series of booklets are enough to describe the intentions of the author:

* Why all these statues, paintings, pictures, symbols, memories, in this new church in Gondouin Menil (1902);

* Inspirational reasons for what I have done here for the glory of God and the uplifting of the public (1902), in which he brands "the false devotees, the bigoted and prudish people, whose pharisaic and judaic grimaces are more offending than the insults of the godlesses" (sic);

* Do not be Turks, but true Catholics, intelligent and practitioning (1909, re-sic),

* Responses to objections (1909) [vii]

The developments, the images and the style used in these writings reveal a simple (not to say simplistic) faith, certainly sincere and profound, but advocating a respectful and complete submission to the Catholic religion. These indiscriminate texts, where good and evil are always fully identified, are clearly rooted in a doctrinal reactionary point of view of the late nineteenth century.

We must read the decorations of this building as a testimony of a catechesis, original in form, but extremely conservative in essence, as practiced in the late nineteenth century in rural areas. The direct accessibility and the immediacy, which is assumed in art brut does not suffice for this form of art. It requires quite the opposite and should be carefully placed in its historical, societal and ideological context. Because of its themes and the content of the inscriptions, the church would need to be interpreted by specialists of ecclesiology and of catholic doctrine, perhaps more than being claimed by art brut from which it differs in many aspects. In this sense, the historical and comparative methods which have been used to analyze the graphic material of political propaganda in the early twentieth century, would certainly be useful. The église vivante et parlante of Menil-Gondouin can be considered as belonging to a specific form of art of propaganda.

I thank Guy Bechet, Jean Jaigu Virginia Manso, Sylvain Maresca for their help during the writing of this post.

Notes

i This expression, referring to the Church as an institution, is already present in a passage that is hostile to protestantism in l’Histoire universelle de l’Église Catholique, by René François Rohrbacher between 1842 and 1849. It is possible that pastor Paysant got this notion from the ecclesiastical historian, whose work he could have read during his seminarian studies from 1863 to 186

ii See for example: the article on Wikipedia Victor Paysant; this post on Animula Vagula - rives et dérives de l’art brut and another here; a report on art-insolite; Normandie Insolite by Pascale Lemare (Christine Bonneton, 2005); Bonjour aux promeneurs – sur les chemins de l’art brut by Olivier Thiebaut p.11 introduction by Denys Riout (Alternatives, 1996), Art brut, architectures marginales : un art du bricolage by Marielle Magliozzi, p.104 (l’Harmattan, 2008) ; L’église vivante et parlante by Yves Buffetaut in Itinéraires de Normandie no. 12, december 2008; La huitième merveille du monde , film ACCAAN 2007 ; a video of the diocese of Séez on Dailymotion

iii "In the smaller churches or in the chapels in the villages, the christian imagery was provided by murals, whoch were less costly but also more fragile: most have disappeared” La vie sociale des images by Sylvain Maresca, chap. 3, The Rise of images from the Middle Ages, p

iv Like those of Meslay-Grenet near Chartres and Vals near Foix (reported by Sylvain Maresca)

v The first church dedicated to this cult however has been built at Séez, diocese to which the parish belongs

vi See La vie sociale des images by Sylvain Maresca, chap. 12, The postcard, p. 3

vii Extracts in the monograph Abbé Victor Paysant, recherches sur sa vie et son œuvre, les Amis du Houlme, 1996, Chapter III

added to OEE-texts june 2010