Roger Wagner
The Orient Corn

There is a 'technical' progress in
20th century art. The Fauve defies
conventions of colour, the Cubist
those of static perspective; abstract
expressionists dramatise processes
of creation, conceptualists those of
reception. This succession cannot
simply be ignored. The decision
to paint in a style more akin to
Poussin than to Munch, Grosz,
Picasso or Scully is therefore
significant. It is not one which
Roger Wagner took in that form;

he liked Giorgione more than
Picasso and wanted to paint like
him. When people said he
shouldn't, he ignored them. The
importance of Christian
iconography in painting suggests
an analogy between the collapse in
the social authority of Christianity
and the collapsing conventions of
representation. Wagner's own
beliefs are, in this perspective, old
fashioned; they include the agency
of God in this world. Expressed
in paintings which bring angels to
the cornfields of Suffolk, scything
and sheaving in the costume of
18th century peasants, they might
seem like nostalgia if hot simply
reaction. This is the century of the
Holocaust. Palmer's tumescent
crops were Virgilian at a time
when the tide had long turned
away from Augustanism; their
pastoral came thirty years after the
French revolution. Now they
seem ahistorical. But Gray's Elegy,
set so close to Shoreham, records
in its 'mute inglorious Milton' th
absence of a career structure.
Though Palmer inspired Nash
and Sutherland, is there any place
for this very English tradition at
the end of the 20th century? Can
a visionary style do more than
wince away from contemporary reality?

The painting called Menorah is
one answer to this question.
Wagner is not the first artist to
transpose the Crucifixion to
another place and time, but the
juxtaposition of Christ and cooling
towers is a startling one. This is
not the intensely focused grief of
Rosso's equally startling
Deposition. The figures strung
across this flooded expanse of
loam seem intent on wider and
other griefs, to which the
crucifixions bring only the grim
rhythmic authority of
transcendence. The provenance of
certain of the figures adds a
further strand of complexity. One
who stoops in despair, another
whose arms are flung into the
space which words have deserted,
derive from Dmitri Baltermants's
portrayal of grief in his 1942
photograph Kerch, Crimea. Others
have looked out of our newspapers
from the ethnic cleansing of
Yugoslavia. In this montage, the
most startling element is also one
of the most visible. The grieving
onlookers wear the accoutrements
of Orthodox Jewry; in an earlier
version, they wore the emblematic
uniforms of the death camps.

'Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani',
which is, being interpreted, 'My
God, my God, why hast thou
forsaken me?' Whose God, unless
the God of the Jews? And in
whose mouths might these words
 resound more aptly than those of
the Jews at Auschwitz, as their
children and dignity were torn
from them in a pall of literally evil-
smelling smoke? Who better to
lament a Crucifixion that has
served to impress anti-Semitism
on the greatest treasures of
Western culture? 'Spit in my face,
you Jewes, and pierce my side',
says John Donne, but the
implication is all the other way.
Nazi Germany was not a land
without religion. The Jews of the Old
Testament, the heroes ofRacinian
tragedy, appear in Western
literature as the righteous forbears
of the Christians who conducted
the pogroms. The Jewish
Christians at the foot of the cross
lament the loss of all their hope;

the intervention of God in their
lives is apparently annihilated in
Christ's death. The smoke that the
Jews watch sweeping up into the
clouds evokes the ashes carried by
the wind over the bleak Polish
plains. And a parallel is
established. We are in the
presence of the cross, but the six
cooling towers and the central
chimney make up the seven
branches of the Menorah, the
ritual candlestick which defines
the holiness of the Jewish holy
place and thus marks the presence
of God. For Jews and Christians
alike, the face of desolation wears
(inevitably, as the agnostic
observes) another aspect, that of
the presence and providence of
God.

In the gloomy forms that preside
in the painting's background, the
colossal mechanisms of the state
themselves achieve a status like
that of destiny. Christ was
crucified, if not at the state's
behest, by the state. We depute to
the state titanic powers that we do
not control and cannot always
trust; our own obscure
apprehensions accompany our
knowledge of its exercise. Our
own century has seen such
apprehensions more than fulfilled;

our wildest dreams of horror have
been eclipsed by the functioning
of an industrial society which used
its technology and organisation to
administer a systematic death.
Capitalist considerations played
their part in the functioning of
Nazi and Stalinist death camps.
The considerations which should
determine conduct towards other
humans were overlooked. These
are not simple implications, but
they suggest how Wagner is able
to bring to bear upon lives lived
under the light of the electric
filament a politics of
transcendence.

They also serve to suggest why a
figurative technique is necessary.
Wagner is a gifted lay preacher,
and sufficiently devoted to his
God to have considered and
rejected the possibility of giving
up painting for ordination. His
concern with the representation of
his faith crystallizes in moments
of the Biblical narrative which
stand rather outside the scope of
abstract painting, in which
Biblical reference could only be an
accretion of non-visual
significance. Comparison of recent
winners of the Turner Prize with
the Christian iconographical
tradition is not necessarily in their
favour. At issue here is our
capacity to narrate and refer in an
art-form still reckoned central to
our culture. Wagner's rejection of
current trends, of the claim that
the century itself commands a
style determined by the evolution
of critical and artistic expectations,
is not made in ignorance.

Even so, how are we to interpret
these peasant-angels calmly
scything the Suffolk fields? The
fulminations of a Last Judgement
are missing. It is customary to
represent the end of the world
with Michelangelesque terrors;
the instruments of torture
designed for the correction of
criminal and heretic in the real
world can be seen at work in
depictions of the Last Judgement.
Memling's Last Judgement at
Gdansk might serve as a metaphor
for the Holocaust. In the
perspective of Christianity, the
element of fear is not
inappropriate; there is nothing
worse than exclusion from the love
of the living God. Christ died to
lift that excluding burden of sin.
But the words we hear are
Christ's: 'the harvest is the end of
the world; and the reapers are the
angels. As therefore the tares are
gathered and burned in the fire;
so shall it be in the end of this
world'. 'Wailing and gnashing of
teeth' are mentioned. This
therefore is truly a painting of
faith, for what we see is our
harvesting. The world that
follows, in which 'the righteous
shall shine forth as the sun in the
kingdom of the father' is one at
whose methods and goals faith can
hardly baulk. For others, this
blithe confidence will evoke other
analogies. For Wagner, the
prospect of benefit is literally
infinite, and the metaphor of
harvest appropriate. There is a
terribilitas to this pastoral.

In one respect - identification of
vision and landscape - the analogy
with Palmer is clear. Wagner's
association with the landscape of
Suffolk dates from childhood. It is
the locus of his faith, the
emblematic pastoral innocence:

'The Green Trees... Transported
and Ravished me, their Sweetnes
and unusual Beauty made my
heart to leap,. . . they were such
strange and Wonderfull things'. It
is also the symbolic landscape of
The Harvest: 'The Corn was
Orient and Immortal Wheat,
which never should be reaped, nor
was ever sown. I thought it had
stood from Everlasting to
Everlasting'. Of the integrity of
this identification, the clearest
witnesses here are the studies of
the Four Seasons, which represent
episodes in the life of Elijah.
Something of the Suffolk 
landscape, its low horizons and
flat expanses of contrasting

colours, the stillness of its
estuaries, has entered Wagner's
style. In this exhibition, two

paintings, See What Desolations
and Storm with Willowherb, derive
from the impact on the Aldeburgh
landscape of the 'tornado' of
Spring 1989, while in Abraham
and the Angels, the Old Testament
scene is played out in the Suffolk
landscape beside the nuclear
reactor of Sizewell 'A', in a serene
confrontation of natural,
unnatural and supernatural.

To represent Wagner as a pastoral
painter is nevertheless misleading.
Among the most striking images
are those of the London
Docklands. They powerfully
illustrate Wagner's capacity to
introduce into his representation
what I have called 'the politics of
transcendence'. The Docklands
are themselves already a locus of
myth. Bankrupt development and
policy on a background of post-
imperial decadence, or a startling,
abrupt regeneration thrust from
the stinking Thames mud, to
describe them is to adopt political
terminology. The wharves and
warehouses have outlived
functions that prescribed their
forms, and their forms have come
to signify their abandonment.
This is the metaphor they are
made to serve: 'How shall we sing
the Lord's song in a strange land?'
What is the Lord's song in this
context? The past that made these
docks is not desirable in itself, nor
perhaps the culture which is
transforming them, yet something
in the order they inscribe upon the
river landscape, something about
purpose; energy, and activity
speaks of ideals which their
abandonment falls short of. In
these paintings Wagner's strategy
is neither to state an ideal nor to
allow overt political comment to
colour his representations. These
are very still paintings  their blue,
grey and brown tonalities and
successive layers of glaze fix a
remoteness easily related to Psalm
137's lament: 'By the waters of

Babylon, there we sat down, yea,
we wept, when we remembered
Zion'.

Wagner's progress as a visionary
artist is, in short, that of a cunning
innocent. There is no blindness in
this innocence. Traherne speaks of
his childhood Wonder: 'Harsh
ragged objects were conceai'd,
Oppressions Tears and Cries,
. . .were hid'. Wagner, in contrast,
writes: 'The mirrors of Almighty
God/ Have Oxford Street as their
love bower/ They leave their
names in public phones/ And sell
themselves for half an hour'. His
faith perceives without embracing
the meretricious and the atrocious,
Menorah is both unforgettable
witness and a breath of formal and
doctrinal redemption. His
cunning as a maker of images is
as radical as his innocence. The
Burning Fiery Furnace is set in
Oxford, in Lucy's Ironworks in
Walton Street, accommodates
that time-capsule's collocation of
Victorian structures and fiery
modern technology. Within the
furnace, the three companions are
engulfed in the astonishment of
faith. The angel to whom they
turn has a hieratic splendour that
makes burning love a metaphor in
the real world, their astonishment,
and the multifarious implications of this 
setting, offer the spectator
a way into that love. In the sonnet
quoted above, Donne speaks of his
own sin crucifying Christ daily,
'Oh let mee then, his strange love
still admire' is his conclusion.
Wagner's admiration of that
'strange love' is the source of these
images. He celebrates the
Affirmative Way in making of
every tree a susurration of angels;

in seeing inhumanity for what it
is, his work celebrates the
necessary, if distant, prospect of
redemption. The radical courage
of his enterprise is an invitation to
courage in our own.

Christopher Miller
© 1994