Burch’s crucifix within “The Trinity” by Lippold

With this edition of The Current for the 5th week of Ordinary Time, the dateline on our cover has inched its way fully into February, with Ash Wednesday, or Mercoledi delle ceneri, only weeks away. By the time most readers will have seen this story in print, the oblates of Portsmouth Abbey will have gathered on campus for their Pre-Lenten Day of Recollection on February 5 with its focus during both sessions on the Stations of the Cross. It is this devotion that has provided the impetus for choosing the Swiss artist, Meinrad Burch-Korrodi (1897-1978) as the featured “Artist of the Abbey” for this month. Our editor, Dr. Blake Billings ‘77, researched and wrote an excellent essay titled, “The Quiet Influence of Meinrad Burch,” which appeared in the September 2020 issue of this newsletter as an installment in the monthly series on our monastery’s history. Archived and available online at the Abbey website under “2020-sept-archives,” the article focused on Burch’s personal and artistic background, illustrated by a number of photographs of his work still extant at Portsmouth, as well as elsewhere. In this brief reflection we shall concern ourselves mainly with two of Burch’s important and highly visible Portsmouth commissions, as well as how they have been referenced by scholars in the years since his death 45 years ago.

Meinrad Burch-Korrodi
 

Crucifix undergoing restoration

In Chapter 53 of the Rule of St. Benedict (The Reception of Guests), we learn that “guests…are never lacking in a monastery” (translation by Patrick Barry OSB, Ampleforth Abbey Press, 1979). These, too, have prompted the theme of this article. Four recent guests who arrived at Portsmouth from overseas were particularly intrigued by the modern double-sided crucifix suspended directly above the altar and within the Richard Lippold wire sculpture, The Trinity. That is as good a place to begin as any. On October 24, Louisa Hutton and Matthias Sauerbach, husband-and-wife architects and authors based in Berlin, were wrapping up a U.S. visit by driving from Long Island to Cambridge before their eventual flight home out of Boston Logan. They had been advised by their friends at the Museum of Modern Art in New York that they must stop at Portsmouth on their drive up I-95 to experience Pietro Belluschi’s 1960 Church of St. Gregory the Great, which they did, even bypassing Newport. As architects, they were familiar with Belluschi’s work but were utterly amazed to find a small “village” of his buildings. Yet it was also the Lippold/Burch collaborative artwork inside which captured their attention. The 2007 booklet titled, A Brief Guide to the Abbey Church of Saint Gregory the Great, identifies the Burch bronze and steel crucifix as, “the first example of abstract art at Portsmouth.” Also fascinated by the simple modernity of the crucifix and the Stations of the Cross were two theology professors from England, traveling separately but stopping by the Abbey Church within days of each other. I was honored to give tours to Dr. Michael Ward of Blackfriars Hall at the University of Oxford and to Dr. Stephen Bullivant, from St. Mary’s University, London, a recent guest of the Portsmouth Institute.