All nuns have a ministry. Some work in schools, others in hospitals or with the poor.
Sister Wendy Beckett’s ministry was art. It was an unusual calling to be sure, and Sister Wendy, who died last week at 88, cut an unlikely profile for an internationally recognized art historian. She was a habit-wearing hermit who lacked advanced degrees in the field.
Yet if nuns and art historians alike aspire to open people’s hearts to the glory of the world around them, Sister Wendy, who was born in South Africa but lived in England, succeeded better than most. Her television programs and books — informal, witty, rich with examples — made art accessible to the masses.
She learned like she invited others to do, through reading and self-study, and wrote poignantly about many works before ever seeing them firsthand. She addressed the nudity in art with a candor that delighted her admirers, once reminding newsman Bill Moyers, “We’re all made in the image of God.”
Sometimes, as with A Child’s Book of Prayer in Art (1995) and Sister Wendy on the Art of Mary (2010), there was an obvious religious aspect to her scholarship. But a spirituality ran through all of her work, as she made clear in the forward to “Sister Wendy’s Story of Painting” (1994):
“Love and knowledge go hand in hand,” she wrote. “When we love, we always want to know, and this book will succeed if it starts the reader on the track that leads to more reading, greater knowledge, greater love, and, of course, greater happiness.”
She was a celebrity but never let the attention go to her head. Once asked how other nuns felt about her stardom, she said, “They feel very sorry for me.”
She remained a hermit, living on the grounds of the Carmelite order to which she donated her royalties and other earnings. She devoted herself mostly to prayer, working only two hours a day. In view of that asceticism, her prodigious output — more than 45 documentaries and books — is astounding.
In her book on the art of Mary, Sister Wendy wrote that between birth and death is time “to grow into the fullness of what we are meant to be.” With her earnest yet inclusive approach to art, she helped many along that path.
First Published January 3, 2019, 11:15 a.m.
