“I BUY these tuxedoes 30 and 40 at a time in Lower Manhattan, impregnate them with plastic, shape them, and they become hard and permanent. Five or six tuxedoes may be used in a single work. Some I use pretty much as is; others I rip apart and shred so that they become almost unrecognisable. . . This informality and casualness relates it to folk sculpture — to the dummy, the effigy, the scarecrow.”
The abstract expressionist artists of 1950s and ’60s New York were renowned for searching out new (often, in fact, old, discarded) materials, from which to create an art of the unexpected, which would hit the viewer with a heightened emotional kick. Few were more adventurous in these quests for the unconventional than Robert Mallary who, one Wednesday in May 1962, turned five or six ripped-apart and shredded dinner jackets into this monumental (nearly nine-foot-high) cloth and polyester Crucifixion.
THE immediate stimulus for its making was Mallary’s response to the funeral service of a fellow artist, Franz Kline. He had been moved by the High Episcopalian ceremony, and was especially struck by its impersonality: the fact that, in the course of it, Kline’s name had been barely mentioned; the great ritual — articulating sin, death, life, hope — had been on a plane far above any individual existence. It seemed to be about all humanity. Leaving the church, he returned to the studio and set to work.
The wider context for Mallary’s Crucifixion was also on a cosmic plane: the real, growing threat of nuclear war between the United States and the USSR, which was to come to a head just a few months later in the Cuban missile crisis of October 1962. Like many others, Mallary saw this as the supreme ethical challenge of the day, distilling as it did into one immediate, all-embracing danger the problems of evil, greed, violence, and the wrong use of power.
Crucifixion is the culmination of a series of fabric sculptures on which Mallary had been working, to explore this aspect of our human predicament. As he put it, “There is in this work no specific ideological position . . . rather, a conception of the nature of man. The focus is on evil . . . because there is the root of our difficulties.” It is not entirely a coincidence that, also in October 1962, the Second Vatican Council opened.
IF AT first sight surprising, the choice of material turns out to be rich in meaning. In the Jewish tradition of mourning, rending garments is a ritual act of lament, grief, or anger, and a tear over the heart is especially powerful. At the foot of the cross, lots are cast over the seamless tunic that must not be torn. Finally, in the tomb, it is the clothes without a body that speak of the resurrection.
Marble and bronze — materials of the rich — are ill-fitted to show us squalor. Used from antiquity to celebrate the beauty of the human form, they often struggle to carry the pain and humiliation of a felon’s public death. Cloth, on the other hand. . . Once ripped apart, the dinner jackets lose all promise of worldly status or pleasure. When dipped in liquid polyester, the cloth will fall, or can be shaped, into drapery of great visual power and emotional intensity. Torn, stretched rags are transformed into flayed skin and taut, aching sinews; they can even appear to be liquid. Mallary himself was conscious of echoes of Grünewald and Goya.
We involuntarily read these shreds as clothes; so we know that this is a story about human action and bodily pain, even though there is no specific human presence. And there is a further, disconcerting appropriateness in all this for a meditation on the crucifixion. As Mallary observed in the opening quotation, bits of old clothes assembled in this way have unavoidable connotations of the effigy and the dummy — figures of mockery and abuse, the butt of jokes, designed to invite derision, even violence, from those that pass by. Like Christ on the cross.
THIS is a rare kind of image: a cross with clothes but not a body; a crucifixion without the figure of Christ. That, I think, makes it particularly rewarding to contemplate today, in our post-Christian British society, because it raises a fundamental question. If, like most of our fellow citizens, we see Jesus not as divine, but merely a great teacher put to death by religious and political authorities for propounding ideas that threatened their power, what might his crucifixion mean to us now? Beyond deploring an(other) instance of past oppression, why should anybody outside the Church, or from another faith tradition, still care?
It was a question much in the air even in secular circles in 1962, part of the capacious interfaith (and not just inter-Church) debates about the role and meaning of the Holy Spirit which led up to the Second Vatican Council. Prominent in those conversations were the Texas-based John and Dominique de Menil, then building their outstanding collection of art reflecting the spiritual traditions of different world cultures. Now housed in the Menil Foundation, Houston, in Texas, it would eventually contain Mediterranean, African, and Oceanian masterpieces from the past, alongside works by leading modern artists with no specific faith affiliation — most famously, the meditative abstract paintings of Mark Rothko. The Rothko chapel, erected just yards from the Foundation, is a monument to their quest for spiritual truths that might speak to the world. It was the de Menils who bought Mallary’s Crucifixion.
AND to me that makes sense, because I think Mallary here has elevated Jesus’s death from historical fact to universal mythic truth. This piece is not just about the death of one person, once. It is about something that was, is, and probably ever shall be: the struggle for the glorious freedom of the children of God being defeated by the powers of the world, and the leader of that struggle put to death — defeated, but, emphatically, not destroyed, because the ideal of that glorious liberty cannot be killed, but will live on, to be embodied and eliminated again and again. It is a reading of the crucifixion which gives a meaning to Easter far beyond the confines of the faith.
In Mallary’s words, “The tattered and shredded fabrics certainly suggest decay and disintegration. The folds hang in the quiet suspension of death. But working against these are the energetic diagonals, the taut contours and fast-moving surfaces. For me, at least, these suggest a quickening of new life — the Resurrection.”
The cycle of ideals crushed in death, reborn in hope: the recurrent tragedy of humanity. Outside the Rothko chapel, the Menil Foundation later erected Barnett Newman’s memorial to Martin Luther King, Jr, murdered in 1968. Later still, it established an award to honour Óscar Romero, gunned down at the altar in 1980. Mallary’s Crucifixion of torn tuxedos, completed years earlier, is a meditation on those deaths, too.
Neil MacGregor is a former director of the British Museum and the author of Living with the Gods (Allen Lane, 2018).
