The Drawings the Shakers Got from God

But this show is not about chairs, except for a single introductory piece. It is about watercolor, and ink, and paper, and how a group can embrace the visual with a bottomless appetite and somehow be world-famous for simplicity. To describe one work as Sister Polly Jane Reed's drawing of the house of Holy Mother Wisdom, a Shaker spiritual entity, would not be incorrect. You should know, however, that there is a large blue eye staring out from the roof, and a tree growing there, and a compact cosmos of rainbow shapes surrounding the house, including a squelchy-looking thing that resembles a sea anemone but is really, per Reed's tireless labelling, the trumpet of wisdom. Those labels! They pant after the pictures, sometimes explaining what's what but always ornamenting with little confetti bursts of letters. Passing that chair on your way out, you may feel that the Shakers were abstemious in so many respects because they were already blazed on divinity. Furniture doesn't need to be comfortable when everybody is too ecstatic to sit.

The organizers have put together a small but expansive display of small, expansive work. There are only twenty-one Shaker gift drawings on view, all borrowed from the same collection, in Massachusetts, but there are only about two hundred known gift drawings in existence. Most were made by mid-nineteenth-century women who reported visions of the spirit realm. Drawings were not owned by their makers but passed on from spirit to individual or, sometimes, to community. Visionaries were called "instruments," not artists.

That the World—Shaker lingo for non-Shakers—knows so little about gift drawings today is no shock; more surprising is that the Shakers seem not to have known much else. Their literature, according to the historian Edward Deming Andrews, "is almost totally silent on the subject." One approach is to view the images as mirrors, both of Shaker doctrine and of other kinds of Shaker art. Many instruments were talented textile-makers, and some of their drawings could almost be quilts: flat, matter-of-fact figures without a drop of perspective. (Depicting Heaven in 1854, Polly Collins stacked Eve, Ann Lee, and St. Peter like cereal boxes at the supermarket.) Other instruments spoke in tongues; my pick for the most ravishing work in this show, a geometric "Sacred Sheet," by Semantha Fairbanks and Mary Wicks, is a pen-and-ink version of the same ritual—a drawing in tongues, almost, with thousands of tiny licks that look like letters but aren't.

None of this is obvious as you begin drinking the image in. The first shapes you're likely to see are circles and crosses that float between two long intersecting diagonals, but eventually you realize that there are barely any solid forms or straight lines here, just licks doing impressions of both. It is the only abstract drawing in the show and one of very few that don't explicitly address religion. It's also the one I would use to explain what the Shakers were all about. Clean, simple things are made of an endless wriggle of parts. The parts have no particular beauty on their own, but whatever beauty the over-all composition has would be duller—nonexistent, actually—without their chaos to overcome. Simplicity, understood like this, is complexity well tended, just as a long, graceful line is a collection of stubby ones, tamed but not deadened.

That may sound theoretical, but the big conundrum for Shaker society was, you could say, how to impose some Christian straightness onto the curves of human nature. Geometry is practically theology in Hannah Cohoon's "A Little Basket Full of Beautiful Apples" (1856), a hybrid work that combines ink, precisely applied to paper with a pen, with the blotched unpredictability of watercolor. Though the image has more shading than almost any other in the show, it is also, paradoxically, one of the flattest: each fruit struggles for roundness but ends up caked and freckled in its own distinct way.

Everything works out, you'll be glad to know. Circular handle joins with square container, apples form pert rows of three and four, individual finds perfection in collective. And look at the stems! Each points straight to Heaven, with no sign of rupture from the tree. Shaker villages, keep in mind, relied on endless supplies of outcasts and orphans. Polly Jane Reed, who joined Mount Lebanon at the age of seven, after crossing seventy miles of snow, claimed that she'd left home with her parents' blessing. I can't help thinking that the truth was less sunny, but no backstories, in any case, darken Cohoon's fruit utopia. The apples have reached their basket; where they came from doesn't matter anymore.

Beyond the basket, of course, things weren't so orderly. Shakers rejoined the World all the time, and the unwanted-baby pipeline flowed both ways. Writers such as Andrews, Thomas Merton, and Guy Davenport have praised the religion's sheer industriousness, but in the long run few believers were overjoyed about waking up at 5 A.M. The same urges that eat at all of us nibbled them down to single digits.

You barely need to search to find signs of those urges in gift drawings. An apple stem will never be perfectly straight, and a genuine artist will never be a passive instrument, even if she wants to be. I would guess that Hannah Cohoon sometimes did and sometimes didn't—this would explain how she created some of her era's strongest expressions of Shaker faith but had no trouble signing her art, breaking the bans on pride and property. For all their isolation, Shakers' visions of the spirit world bore a strong resemblance to the World. The use of bright colors was hyper-regimented in their villages (every meetinghouse blue, every bedstead green), but visionaries employed whatever colors they pleased, and some of their drawings showed the gold and jewels that no believer was permitted on earth. For a quarter of a millennium, we have stared at the Shakers, and they have stared longingly back.

Same old story: repress human nature too much and disaster follows. What's eerie—or, if you're so inclined, inspiring—is how little disaster seemed to bother the Shakers. One drawing, by Miranda Barber, depicts a perfect rectangular storm of blood reddening the world's rivers. It's not in this exhibit, but it would have made a good partner to "Sacred Sheet," completed the same year in the same community: here again, what looks like a solid shape turns out to be a collection of short, rough lines. The image is a cousin of Sister Hannah's basket, too, an apocalypse as placid as an afternoon of apple picking. Condescending to Shakers has always been easy for the World, more so now that there are billions of us and two of them. But every society dies one way or another. Can anybody picture ours going so peacefully?