David Jones, ‘A Latere Dextro’, 1943-49
David Jones, A Latere Dextro, 1943-49, 24 x 18, Trustees of the David Jones Estate. Digital Image by the author of a colour plate reproduced in Nicolette Gray, The Paintings of David Jones (John Taylor/ Lund Humphries, 1989)
David Jones’s reverence for the Roman Catholic Mass was unshakeable. Half his life was spent on a never to be completed poem reflecting on the rite, much of it excerpted or expanded upon in his major published poetic writings: The Anathemata: Fragments of an Attempted Writing, The Sleeping Lord and Other Fragments and the recently recovered long poem The Grail Mass. Jones not only attended Mass regularly, but also annotated liturgical texts, turning them in his painted inscriptions into visual artworks.
A Latere Dextro continues this interest. The title is taken from the antiphon Vidi aquam, which may be sung before the Tridentine Mass. The raised chalice with the transubstantiated wine is at the centre of the image, demonstrating the importance Jones conferred on the Mass. All those assembled in the chapel look to the altar. Yet, the flatness of the painting’s surface places visual emphasis on both the intricate architecture of the chapel (the columns and buttresses) on the left and the floral arrangements on the right. The celebration of the Mass is at once the focal point – that which brought all those people together, marking a break from regular life – and a continuation of the artistic impulse seen in the design of the chapel, the organisation of the flowers and, indeed, Jones’s own artistic shaping of the pictorial space. The painting’s refusal of the depth or perspective that would set the celebration of the rite apart from its surroundings suggests the complementarity or even the interchangeability of the Mass and artistic endeavour.
Modernism and Religion is attentive to the mutually informative relationship between sacrament and aesthetics in Jones’s work, arguing not only that Jones’s thinking about the sacraments informed his art, but also – and perhaps more radically – that his thinking about art shaped his attitude to the sacraments. Jones can collapse architecture, floral arrangements and the Eucharist at least in part because he saw all those activities as exemplifying the human capacity for sign-making. Over the course of his lifetime, Jones’s verbal and visual work represented an effort to preserve and protect this element of human experience against what he understood as the utilitarian impetus of industrialised modernity.
