Bernard Maisner: Entrance to the Scriptorium is not a work of art but a window into an entire artistic universe—the catalog accompanying a major 25-year retrospective exhibition of the contemporary illuminator and painter Bernard Maisner. Organized by the Museum of Contemporary Religious Art (MOCRA) at Saint Louis University and later traveling to venues including Pepperdine University and the Austin Museum of Art, the exhibition gathered over 85 works spanning from 1975 to 1998. The clothbound catalog, distributed by the University of Washington Press in 1999, features 70 color reproductions alongside an essay by eminent art historian Dore Ashton and an introduction by curator Terrence Dempsey, S.J..
Maisner, a Cooper Union graduate and one of the finest manuscript illuminators working today, approaches his craft with a radical conceptual premise: to imagine that the printing press was never invented, and to ask how the tradition of hand-made illuminated manuscripts would have evolved into the modern day. The result is work that is unmistakably contemporary yet steeped in medieval technique—egg tempera, gold leaf, ink on parchment or hand-made paper—applied with a miniaturist’s devotion. His subjects are not narratives but concepts: infinity, paradox, creation, suffering, and the passage of time. Abstract symbols, calligraphic fragments drawn from writers like Kafka, Anais Nin, and Heraclitus, and geometries of square and circle populate compositions that the Los Angeles Times described as “a combination of modern abstract Surrealism and Outsider art”. Each surface is worked down to the last centimeter—a glowing mandorla’s edge might comprise hundreds of needle-thin lines, a jewel-like texture a hand-painted grid of sixteenth-inch squares. Maisner’s art does not preach. It invites the visitor to enter a scriptorium where devotion to craft and wonder at mystery are one and the same.
