The twentieth century avant-garde presents an interesting problem in the history of beauty. What happens when artists no longer simply represent ugly things, but deliberately try to make art that earlier generations judge as ugly? This is different than painting a battle, an old body, suffering, poverty, or some other unpleasant subject beautifully. Here, ugliness is now the center subject.
Carl Jung, writing on Joyce’s Ulysses in 1932, suggested that ugliness can be a sign of transformations that are still coming. Something that appears distasteful today can later be recognized as important or even beautiful. This observation fits the historic avant-garde of the early twentieth century very well. This introduces an important distinction between ugliness in a subject and artistic ugliness. A painter can represent an ugly face through beautiful painting. A sculptor can represent a wounded or deformed body according to proportion, balance, craft, and order. The avant-garde is important because it broke this relationship. The subject may not be ugly, but the form could be distorted until the public experienced the artwork itself as ugly.
Picasso gives an obvious example through his paintings, where paintings of women were not generally intended as realistic representations. Eyes, noses, profiles, and planes no longer followed the expected structure of a human face. He purposely disrupted the visual order that was expected at the time. Political reactions showed how serious this argument became. Here are two major examples. First, Hitler condemned modern art as degenerate. Second, Nikita Khrushchev, accustomed to Soviet realism, later ridiculed avant-garde painting. Both reactions assume that art has a correct visual language and that departure from this language indicates failure or corruption. Questions were reframed to be political and who has the right to define what is correct.
Futurists like Marinetti famously claimed that a racing automobile was more beautiful than the Winged Victory of Samothrace. This is an extraordinary aesthetic claim. The classical statue represented beauty through proportion, restraint, the human body, and a connection to antiquity. The Futurists replaced this with a mechanical engine. They also criticized museums and libraries because these institutions represented the authority of the past. The problem for Futurism was that reverence for the old prevented a new industrial civilization from discovering its own aesthetic language. A world of automobiles, factories, electricity, airplanes, steel, and mass production could not simply continue pretending that the highest form of beauty remained an ancient marble sculpture.
There is something valuable in this argument, that machines do possess forms of beauty. Speed, force, repetition, engineering efficiency, and structural are their own kind of order. Yet the Futurist celebration of force also moved easily toward celebration of violence as many Italian Futurists became associated with Fascism. Destruction of an older aesthetic order did not produce a better moral order.
German Expressionism used ugliness for a different purpose. Artists such as Kirchner, Nolde, Kokoschka, Schiele, Grosz, and Dix represented bodies and faces through exaggeration and distortion, often as criticism of the society around them. Their people can look exhausted, corrupt, diseased, unpleasant, damaged, or spiritually empty. It became a means of describing social ugliness. If the society being represented is itself corrupt, then making it beautiful can be dishonest. Harmony in the painting may conceal disharmony in the world.
Cubism attacked another assumption, that European ways of representing the body and object were somehow natural rather than inherited. Braque and Picasso looked toward non-European art, including African masks. What had been categorized as ugly became a source of new form. This reveals that judgments of ugliness contain history. A person may believe they are simply looking at an ugly object, when in fact they are measuring the object against conventions they have inherited and rarely examined.
If anything can become art through selection and context, then craftsmanship, beauty, subject, and even direct manufacture by the artist are no longer necessary conditions. This created enormous freedom, but new unresolved problems. If almost anything can be art, then how can we now judge what is excellent art?
Surrealism moved the physical world toward the subconscious. Breton’s Surrealist Manifesto of 1924 called for forms of thought less restricted by rational control. Dreams, automatic writing, free association, disturbing combinations, and apparently irrational images became sources for art. Ernst, Dali, Magritte, and others created situations in which familiar objects appear in unfamiliar relations. An ordinary object placed into an impossible relation damages our expectation of order. Nature continues to look almost normal, but something within it refuses the rules. The Surrealists played games such as the exquisite corpse, where one person would draw part of a figure, fold the paper, and pass it to another person who continued the drawing without seeing what had come before. The figure’s structure came through an irrational combination.
Lautreamont had earlier given one of the great images for this new aesthetic, the accidental meeting of a sewing machine and an umbrella on an operating table. Beauty can emerge through an encounter that reason would never have organized. Bunuel’s Un chien andalou deliberately shows disturbing images. Artaud’s Theater of Cruelty sought an art capable of breaking through ordinary psychological restraints.
Later movements extended this interest. Pop art brought the ordinary objects and images of commercial civilization into art. Warhol did not need to rely on academic painting, but on consumer products and repeated commercial images which had already become part of the visual environment of modern life. Adorno gives this development a larger social meaning. If society itself contains injustice, repression, ugliness, and alienation, then an art devoted only to harmony can become false. Art can take into itself what society considers ugly and use it as accusation. What has been hidden, excluded, or rejected is given visible form.
The avant-garde wanted to scandalize the public, and eventually the public purchased the avant-garde. For example, Picasso entered museums, Duchamp is in undergraduate textbooks, surrealism became household knowledge, and Expressionist paintings became enormously valuable. What was ugly became beautiful. The avant-garde achieved something that is almost contradictory. It attacked the authority of beauty so successfully that many of its forms were eventually absorbed into beauty. However, ugliness can become as empty as beauty. Breaking a rule is not an accomplishment as once the violation becomes expected, it can become another convention. Ugliness can expose something hidden, correct a false harmony, or reveal that an inherited rule was never a law of nature.
References
- Jung, C. G., “Ulysses: A Monologue,” The Collected Works of C. G. Jung, Vol. 15: Spirit in Man, Art, and Literature, Princeton University Press, 1932.
- Marinetti, F. T., “The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism,” Le Figaro, Paris, France, 1909.
- Breton, A., “Manifesto of Surrealism,” Paris, 1924.
- Artaud, A., “The Theatre and Its Double, Paris, 1938.
- Adorno, T. W., “Aesthetic Theory” University of Minnesota Press, 1997.