NEW RELIGIOUS ART IN U. S. CHURCHES

RELIGIOUS art, as Philosopher Jacques Maritain once remarked, "ought to be religious." That limits the field to those few modern artists who feel the need to express their religious faith. On this and the following page are recent works by two such skilled and devout moderns. The mosaic Station of the Cross (above] was done for Mt. Angel Abbey at St. Benedict, Ore. by a 55-year-old Californian named Louisa Jenkins. The stained-glass Sermon from the Boat (overleaf) is a replica detail of a window in St. Ann's Chapel of Stanford University at Palo Alto, Calif., designed by School-of-Paris Painter Andre Girard, 52.

Both artists breathe new life into mediums which have long suffered from lack of fresh talent. Louisa Jenkins studied Byzantine masterpieces of mosaic art in northern

Italy, then found new techniques of her own. Besides the traditional Italian mosaic glass, she uses lava rock, iridescent furnace slag, crystal, quartz, mica and pyrites to produce extraordinarily various effects. Her mosaic above shows the moment when Christ met his mother on the Way of the Cross. As Artist Jenkins puts it, the "Cross becomes a sword of Truth between them. In the look between them, Mary realizes that He must go before her."

Andre Girard studied with two French masters, Georges Rouault and Pierre Bonnard, and his glowing darks and sparkling lights show the influence of both. Girard, who has experimented with many new techniques of stained-glass design, melted bits of colored glass onto clear panes in making his Sermon from the Boat. Rich in color and texture, the finished window seems to radiate devotion.

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