His Disc Of Gold

By ANNE BUCKLEY

I am looking at a painting, an Abstract Expressionist vision of a dark city. It is New York City, as seen through the soul of the artist William G. Congdon. He used to look at it from his cold-water flat on Stanton Street near the Bowery and think of the miseries in the tenements and of the alcoholics dying on the streets. And he painted the suffering with a spatula and incised it with an awl. But above it all, there began to rise an orange moon. It rose, he wrote, unconsciously from the depth of his spiritual need.

That moon, that disc of light, he said, was to become, in various forms, for his next 10 wandering years, "a Star of Bethlehem, a symbol and search of my salvation."

Finally, the disc became the center of a monstrance in his paintings, holding the sacrament of the Body and Blood of Christ, the center of the artist's life.

His book which I have beside me is titled "In My Disc of Gold" and subtitled "Itinerary to Christ of William Congdon."

He speaks of a life of immorality, without going into any detail, and of his restless search which took him to many countries, as far as Cambodia, and always seemed to return him to Italy. He was born in Providence, R.I., to a prominent family, well educated and attaining fame as a sculptor when World War II broke out and he joined the American Field Service. He served with the British Eighth Army in Italy, Germany and North Africa. He was one of the first Americans to enter the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. He painted suffering. And kept on searching.

It was in Assisi that he finally found his orange moon of warmth and love. He became a Catholic, and joined Pro Civitate Christiana, a lay organization founded in 1939 to make Christ known, especially in influential circles of unbelievers.

Nourished by the sacraments, he wrote, "I began to paint from love rather than from my senses."

He painted a luminous Virgin Mary, "Rorate Coeli," and a Nativity that plunges the simple mother and child into a cavelike cosmos. His powerful streams of oils transferred to the viewer the agony of Mary Magdalen and of Christ poured out like a libation on the cross. His Ascension and Transfiguration are all light and grace and power.

"To the degree that I am possessed of the love of Christ, and therefore of his having called me through conversion to share in his work of the redemption of man, I can only see my painting as an instrument of this redemption," he wrote. This he saw as the calling of the artist.

"We live in an age that does not believe, or thinks that it does not believe," he wrote. "Lacking faith, yet driven to believe in something, man invents subterfuges which barricade him within the limits of himself."

But Congdon's belief shimmered in the gold that accents his paintings. He used that light even in those paintings that portray with excruciating reality the pain in the body of Christ on the cross. His belief engendered love which impelled him to share his faith with the community. It seems to be the essence of art, all but lost in many areas these days.

William Congdon died on April 19, three days after Easter, in a hospital in Milan, Italy, far from New York where his disc of gold first arose in one of his paintings in 1949. I think of the vision he might have had were he to see the pageant of faith that will take place this weekend on some streets of New York on the feast of the Body and Blood of Christ. He loved to paint cathedrals, though I don't think he ever transferred St. Patrick's to one of his awed and awesome canvases. He loved to paint the monstrance with that sacred disc shooting its golden rays out to the people of the world. He loved to insert a suggestion of the Eucharist into his portrayal of life.