Bill Congdon

‘‘Nothing Ends;
Everything Begins’’
Ten years since the death of the great American painter William Congdon, we asked the critic who shared his life and work to retrace the story of their friendship, which was born in the early sixties and continued to interweave art and truth, “piercing the crust of appearances”

by Rodolfo Balzarotti

For me, it all began in Milan one afternoon in February 1962. I was a student in senior high. Shy and introverted, like many of my companions I was seriously atheistic, a priest-hater with a certain exhibitionism, a hardened positivist, but I was fascinated by painting. I used to scribble and smear in my free time and often had my head buried in monographs on art. On a couple of occasions, people from GS, the Catholic youth movement at my school, made overtures to me. I had even gone to one of their meetings. They struck me as a bit weird, but disarming (“Are you happy?”!!). Then came that February morning at school: “Today, a famous American painter is coming to talk about his conversion. You’re into art, aren’t you? It might interest you.” The hook was baited.

Reality is a sign
That afternoon, I found myself in the main lecture hall of Catholic University. It was crowded with students. A wild-looking priest with a gravelly thundering voice got up and recalled the importance of this meeting. We were going to listen to a celebrated American painter, someone who was even mentioned by Jacques Maritain and Thomas Merton. (I wondered, “Who are they?”). Then the artist stood up: William Congdon. A good-looking American of about fifty but with white hair that made him look already venerable, at least in the eyes of us students. He began to read his speech in a monotonous voice with a distinctly American accent. Yet, as he went on, it became a song–a song in the epic sense. It was not a speech, it was a tale: of war and the killing fields, of black metropolises with a blood red sun sinking into the magma, of deserts and islands of death, of vultures and hypnotic moons in the void of night. In short, images. I remember very little, but I must have been rapt from the first word. That story gave me the reason, the reason for my confused and slightly autistic infatuation with art. Reality is reality, it becomes reality, when it is a sign. That was a decisive step in my understanding of life, myself, my destiny. In hindsight, I can say that his testimony had “opened up my reason” and introduced me to faith. The fact remains that I came out of that hall like a glove that had been turned inside out, amid the overjoyed amazement of the guys from GS.

The “art group”
On joining GS, I found that the array of initiatives and groups included an “art group,” since all our interests were supposed to be heightened by the encounter with Christ. Here, I met Sante Bagnoli, the heart and soul of the group. He shared my passion for art–above all, contemporary art. It was a big challenge to us. Remote as it was from the Church, inevitably it also bore testimony to man and his religious sense. Hence, the discussions and encounters about Matisse and the Chapel [of the Rosary] at Vence, Le Corbusier’s church at Ronchamp, Pasolini’s Gospel According to Matthew, and more. But beside and behind Sante there was Paolo Mangini. A good ten or twelve years older than we were (meaning he was definitely an adult), he was a very refined Genoese character. It was Mangini who had introduced Congdon in the Cittadella of Assisi to the Movement and Fr. Giussani. And then, in harmony with Giussani, he had decided to lay the foundations for an adult group of the Movement in the mid-’60s , when most of the members were still students in high school. He also had the insight to sense that Sante possessed the talent and courage to risk taking the intuitions that had flowered in his experience of GS into the open seas of world culture.

The moons of Subiaco
I envied Sante’s closeness to Bill Congdon. I could only observe Congdon from a distance, not daring to get too close. He was always surrounded by a bunch of GS members, amazed that this “elderly” foreigner, rich in his achievements as a great artist, was there with them, sitting like a school kid and taking notes during Don Giussani’s lectures.
But, a few years later, I had a chance to accompany a friend to the hermitage of Beato Lorenzo in Subiaco, which abuts the rocks overhanging the valley of the Aniene River. Here, Paolo had created a studio for Bill and guest quarters where small groups from the Movement could spend periods in retreat or vacation. It was also used to hold the retreats of what was beginning to be called “Adult Group,” the future Memores Domini. In the evenings, before retiring after Compline, we would gaze together at the magnificent moons rising over the valley. Bill often spoke of them: he was painting them; it was one of his finest seasons of painting after years of crisis. Every so often, Sante would climb up to the studio to see some painting just completed. To my mind, it was like Moses ascending Sinai. Then, one day, Paolo, who had recently caught sight of me, suggested I should accompany Sante to see the new “child” (Congdon always called his paintings his “children”). Bill claimed he didn’t paint his pictures: “It’s the picture that paints me,” he said. Painting was an event, and it should be the same for the viewer. And, above all, he said a painting is never “beautiful” or “ugly.” It simply “is” or “isn’t.” In short, it’s a question of truth, not aesthetics. It’s a question of the truth, the fullness with which the painter looks at things, at reality. When you look at a painting, you have to free yourself from prejudices and mental preconceptions–above all, of any kind of worldliness. It takes silence, poverty.

Wry humor
When I overcame my initial shyness, I found that Bill was a person of extraordinary simplicity. He had a wry sense of humor, often self-effacing. (“That’s my house and Winston Churchill’s,” he used to say whenever he went past a lavatory.) He lived in solitude but would spend a lot of time glued to the radio (always the BBC), listening to news from around the world. Every drama, every tragedy, he felt as if it was his own. In some way, he would feel responsible for it, but not in a moralistic sense–faced with evil, you just have to affirm goodness the way God grants you to. In his case, it was by painting, which meant reaffirming, as he always said, “the positivity of being.”
I eventually got to know his weaknesses, his frailties, and his obsessions and manias, which he was so conscious of that he always referred to himself as “poor me.” But all that was surpassed by his disarming certainty that everything is Christ, that reality is truly Christ, that Christ is the unavoidable, the ineluctable, meaning Destiny. “Nothing ends; everything begins,” he once said to a cousin who was in tears at the death of his sister, dear to both of them. And his fair eyes had a strange intensity that really seemed to pierce the crust of appearances. Everything really did begin again, even after that day, April 15, 1998, when we entered his studio and found ourselves before his last picture resting on the easel with the paint still fresh.

From the States
to Gudo Gambaredo
William Grosvenor Congdon was born in Providence, Rhode Island, in 1912. In 1934, he graduated from Yale. Between 1934 and 1939, he studied painting under Henry Hensche at Provincetown and subsequently sculpture in Boston under George Demetrios. From 1942 to 1945, he was a volunteer ambulance driver with the American Field Service. He took part in three military campaigns, in Africa, Italy, and Germany, where his unit brought aid to the Bergen Belsen concentration camp. After the war, he worked on the reconstruction of villages destroyed in the Molise region of southern Italy. Returning to the USA in 1948, he moved to New York and began exhibiting as a painter at the Betty Parsons Gallery together with other Action Painters, then a nascent movement. In 1950, Venice became his habitual source of inspiration and his main residence. At the same time, his works aroused considerable interest among critics and the public. In the mid-’50s he made frequent journeys to North Africa, Paris, Greece, the Near East, and Latin America. In Assisi in 1959, he was received into the Catholic Church.

From 1960 to 1979, he lived in Assisi, closely embedded in the community context and with attentive spiritual direction after his encounter with Fr. Giussani in 1961. As the years passed, he recovered his most deeply authentic creative vein, painting views and landscapes. But he never renounced his religious themes, which he now identified with Christ crucified, painted in multiple versions, some stunningly original, between 1960 and 1980. A second season of travel in Africa, India, Latin America, and the Near East in the ’70s inspired numerous series of views and landscapes, in which he renewed the forms and coloring of his painting. His output of writings, mostly centered on the relationship between art and faith, was very rich in this period. He spoke frequently in public, with lectures, seminars, and testimonies that were met by rapt audiences and were especially fascinating to the young.
Also intense were his spiritual readings: apart from Maritain, he discovered Guardini, Evdokimov, the Orthodox theologian Olivier Clément, and Hans Urs von Balthasar. With the latter two he also had memorable meetings in the early ’80s.

His last years were spent at Gudo Gambaredo, in the countryside near Milan. Here he settled in 1979 and it was here that he died on April 15, 1998, his eighty-sixth birthday. In this period, his participation in the life of religious fellowship became more intense. His studio home was in a wing of the Benedictine Monastery of Saints Peter and Paul (Santi Pietro e Paolo), also called Cascinazza, and he was in close touch with the house of the Memores Domini at Gudo Gambaredo. He gave up travel and his painting underwent a radical change in contact with the plain but peaceful farming landscape of lower Lombardy.