Week Fourteen: Station X: The Disrobing of Christ by Frank Brangwyn

April 7, 2019

Week Fourteen: Station X: The Disrobing of Christ by Frank Brangwyn

Frank Brangwyn, a multi-talented British artist who made everything from wall paintings to wall paper, was one of the first major twentieth century sacred art-makers to find a place in my collection ten years ago. An internet search for Crucifixion images turned up a woodcut of Christ falling on the road to Calvary from a Stations of the Cross series Brangwyn made in the early 1930s with William de Belleroche, a British printmaker who later became his biographer. A Roman Catholic born in Belgium, Brangwyn was deeply interested in religious themes, especially Christ’s Way of Sorrow, which he told Belleroche was “at the back of my mind all of my life. This week’s Lenten image of the Disrobing of Christ is an unusual tracing paper sketch for a lithographic suite on the Stations of the Cross Brangwyn created in 1935, one of two to be found in the gallery of the artist’s profile page along with the woodcut that introduced me to Brangwyn’s significant body of contemporary religious art. (John Kohan)