ABSTRACT
The puzzle still remains that if painting can do all the things discussed so far (in particular, in Chapter 5)—achievements beyond what some twentieth-century theorists have allowed—where does the art lie? And are all paintings art? Until this point, nearly all the paintings and other things discussed in the book are generally accounted artworks. But not all paintings necessarily are—or function as—artworks throughout their existence. Paintings that promise access to the numinous in terms of art alone, as in the case, for example, of works by Mark Rothko (notably the Rothko Chapel, Houston, Texas, 1964–71) have superseded paintings accepted within the artworld that have served as foci of religious devotion. Yet modern and contemporary paintings that work in a way effectively disallowed within the artworld nonetheless exist. Indeed, the painting that is probably familiar to more people in world than any other (even more widely recognizable than Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa) is a non-artworld painting. Eugeniusz Kazimirowski’s Jesus Christ as the Divine Mercy (1934) is the subject of one of the largest and most widespread devotions in Roman Catholicism. This chapter argues that ascertaining the status as artwork or not at any given moment in the existence of a painting would seem to be one aspect of trying to establish its point, and its place in the historical understanding of things in relation to people across space and time. This chapter refers to the writers Saint Faustyna (Helena Kowalska) and Blessed Micha? Sopoćko; and artists Adolf Hyła, Eugeniusz Kazimirowski, Kazimir Malevich, and Mark Rothko.
