All Saints day I

A feast, filed as shapes and colours

All Saints is the observance that collects every name in the calendar, including the ones nobody kept. It is the one subject in this catalogue that cannot be given an attribute, because the attribute system exists to tell individuals apart and this feast exists to stop counting them. What a painter is left with is the idea of a multitude — and the record here shows exactly what an index does with that.

What the record holds

The entry is dated 1911 and gives the Lenbachhaus, Munich, Germany as its location. No dimensions are recorded. It is filed under Abstract Art, with Shapes and Colors as subheadings, and under cultural heritage and religious cultural heritage. The style is given as Expressionism and the nationality as Russian; the measured colour family is ochre.

Two headings that do not usually meet

An index rarely files one work under both Abstract Art and religious cultural heritage. Here it does, and the pairing is a fair reading of a title that names a feast and a record that finds no describable scene. The numeral at the end of the title implies a sequence; this catalogue holds this one. 4 of its titles contain the words All Saints, and they run from two nineteenth-century treatments of the feast to a church in south London to this — the same words doing entirely different work each time.