Inside Baton Rouge's Sacred Heart of Jesus Catholic Church. Photo by Frank McMains.

An audio companion piece to this article will air on WRKF 89.3FM on Friday, October 28 at 4:45 pm.

November 2011. The Religious Murals of Gregory DeWitt: An artistic monk’s obscurity is our boon.

Caricature does not tell the full story of its subject. Such is the case with both the life and work of Gregory DeWitt. Dewitt was sometimes uncharitably caricatured as the “mad monk” responsible for painting the murals at the Church of the Sacred Heart in Baton Rouge and several works at Saint Joseph Abbey outside of Covington. By some accounts he was possessed of both a prickly character and an inspired artistic gift.

The son of a Belgian weaver, DeWitt lived from 1892 until 1978, but his work is a product of some of the early twentieth century’s most significant artistic movements. He received part of his formal training in religious mural painting at the German Abbey of Beuron. The style practiced there, known as the Beuronese style, was “a response to the highly emotional and sentimental religious art [of the nineteenth century]” according to Living in Salvation, a book on DeWitt’s work by Father Adam Begnaud, pastor of St. Benedict’s Parish in Covington.

Secular artists were also rejecting the saccharine art of the Romantic Movement during the Belle Epoch period. Painters like Egon Schiele and Gustav Klimt, styles like Art Deco and the school of design that briefly flourished under Roosevelt’s Work Progress Administration’s Federal Art Project—all embraced a more stylized vision of art. They produced works that were highly modern in their approach, that echoed forms from popular comic books and advertising, to Egyptian burial painting. The early twentieth century saw an explosion in artistic styles, much of it flourishing between the two great wars and impacting artistic minds in places like Munich, where DeWitt polished the style he would later evidence in south Louisiana.

DeWitt’s work has been viewed by generations of parishioners at Sacred Heart and has come to be regarded by many as just as much a part of the structure as the brick and concrete. This was not always the case. Father Aelred Kavanagh a monk at Saint Joseph Abbey where DeWitt lived and worked for much of his adult life, brims with anecdotes about the painter’s life.

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