The three essays contained in this book are the first translations into English of the Benedictine monk Desiderius Lenz, who as a painter and sculptor in the late nineteenth century anticipated many of the ideas associated with twentieth-century art – the rejection of naturalism and perspective and an insistence on ’abstract’, geometrically based principles for painting. The artistic school founded at his monastery at Beuron in Southern Germany had a great influence on ecclesiastical art and gained admirers among the European avant-garde, including Alexei Jawlensky, Alphonse Mucha and Paul Sérusier.
In an introduction by German art historian Hubert Krins, Lenz is seen in the context of German nineteenth-century art, and in his afterword Peter Brooke shows how Lenz’s thinking illustrates the relationship between modernism in art and the search for the sacred.
