Hell & Subhumanity in Art

Two experiences stand out in my mind. I was once asked to accompany a friend to an exhibition on Picasso (I went). And once I ingested (over the course of a morning) a massive tome on Salvadore Dali.

Both were slow descents into Hell.

Kinds of Art

I find that there are four types of art for me.

1. There is the art that is so beautiful that it is a physical pain. I have only felt this with something I have seen in person, never yet in a book or on a screen. In these cases the only thing to do is to walk away, sit down, and then come back. ... I sometimes imagine that the holiness of God is akin to this painful beauty that can only be appropriated in small doses.

2. There is the art that is good and wholesome, that grows on me and becomes increasingly dear, valuable. Like a friend, a fine wine, a well-brewed beer, a Cuban cigar, or a much-read book, I need to adjust to the flavour - roll it on my tongue - before it is revealed. The flavour gives it the depth and richness that makes it worth coming back to.

3. There is the art that is the equivalent of musack - it is a background noise that becomes annoying when it is the focus of attention. When I saw Renoir in person, I was surprised to find that his paintings were to me bland, without sustenance. I moved on.

4. And then there is the art that is wrong. It can be sensed immediately as wrong or even evil (as in the case of Bacon's Study After Velazquez's Portrait of Pope Innocent X). In others there may be an initial piquance or cachet (like college dorm Dali prints) that masks the perversion beneath. In my journeys through the massive output of both Dali and Picasso, the flavour soured and the spell quickly lost its charm as their art spoke their hells for them.

Fr. Seraphim

Fr. Seraphim Rose spoke of art like this last category, art that came out of Nihilism, art that came out of the lower depths, art that taught a subhumanity.

And in fact such an image has quite recently been portrayed; it is the image of contemporary painting and sculpture, that which has arisen, for the most part, since the end of the Second World War, as if to give form to the reality produced by the most concentrated era of Nihilism in human history.

The human form, it would seem, has been rediscovered in this art; out of the chaos of total abstraction, identifiable shapes emerge. The result, supposedly, is a new humanism, a return to man that is all the more significant in that - unlike so many of the artistic schools of the 20th century - it is not an artificial contrivance whose substance is hidden behind a cloud of irrationalist jargon, but a spontaneous growth that would seem to have deep roots in the soul of contemporary man. In the work, for example, of Alberto Giacometti, Jean Dubuffet, Francis Bacon, Leon Golub, Jose Luis Cuevas - to take an international sampling - there seems to be a genuinely contemporary art that, without abandoning the disorder and freedom of abstraction, turns its attention away from mere escape toward a serious human commitment.

But what kind of man is it to which this art has returned? It is certainly not Christian man, man in the image of God, for no modern man can believe in him; nor is it the somewhat diluted man of the old humanism, whom all advanced thinkers regard as discredited and outmoded. It is not even the man disfigured and denatured in the earlier Cubist and Expressionist art of this century; rather, it begins where that art leaves off, and attempts to enter a new realm, to depict a new man.

To the Orthodox Christian observer, concerned not with what the avant-garde finds fashionable or sophisticated, but with truth, little reflection should be required to penetrate to the secret of this art: there is no question of man in it at all; it is an art at once subhuman and demonic. It is not man who is the subject of this art, but some lower creature who has emerged (arrived is Giacometti's word for it) from unknown depths.

The bodies this creature assumes (and in all its metamorphoses it is always the same creature) are not necessarily distorted violently; twisted and dismembered as they are, they are often more realistic than the figures of man in earlier modern art. This creature, it is clear, is not the victim of some violent attack; rather, he was born deformed, he is a genuine mutation. One cannot but notice the likeness between some of these figures and photographs of the deformed children born recently to thousands of women who had taken the drug Thalidomide during pregnancy; and we have doubtless not seen the last of such monstrous coincidences.

Even more revealing than the bodies of these creatures are the faces. It would be too much to say that these faces express hopelessness; that would be to ascribe to them some trace of humanity which they most emphatically lack. They are the faces, rather, of creatures more or less adjusted to the world they know, a world not hostile but entirely alien, not inhuman but a-human. The anguish and rage and despair of earlier Expressionists is here frozen, as it were, and cut off from a world to which they had at least the relation of denial, so as to make a world of their own.

Man, in this art, is no longer even a caricature of himself; he is no longer portrayed in the throes of spiritual death, ravaged by the hideous Nihilism of our century that attacks, not just the body and soul, but the very idea and nature of man. No, all this has passed; the crisis is over; man is dead. The new art celebrates the birth of a new species, the creature of the lower depths, subhumanity.

- Fr. Seraphim Rose.

From here, recently shared in the blogosphere by Daniel Matsui here.

The "Artists" in Question

Alberto Giacometti













Jean Dubuffet













Francis Bacon













Leon Golub













Jose Luis Cuevas













- V.

Ochlophobist and Art (Part II)

We resume our examination of Ochlophobist's recent post on art - my previous comments are over here.

When I went to Russia in my late teens, I had an experience in front of an icon of the Theotokos, one written in a traditional style, as I have briefly described here. While visiting a number of monasteries, churches, and "museums" in Russia I saw a number of icons. At that time I had never read or been told anything regarding the theology or aesthetics of traditional Orthodox iconography. Yet it was clear as day to me that there was a distinct difference between those icons which were Italianate and those which were traditional, and I was very much drawn to the traditional, and recognized a gravitas in them which I did not recognize in the Italianate icons. Indeed, I immediately regarded the Italianate as religious kitsch, a regard I hold to this day. Now, as a Protestant I grew up in an religious environment which had images, in our Baptist churches and most Baptist homes there were images of Christ, the Last Supper, hands folded in prayer next to a loaf of bread, and so forth. The aesthetic style of these images was much closer to that of Italianate iconography than it was Orthodox iconography. Now, one might suggest that like many Protestants I was only longing to find or create the NT Church all over again, and therefore would want something that was utterly foreign to my religious conventions as this would seem more "authentic." But this is not the typical paradigm through which virtually all Protestants assimilate and act on the desire to get back to the real NT Church. In almost every example of Protestant aesthetic purification of aesthetics, they either use iconoclasm to minimalize or eradicate prior forms, or they maintain the same artistic styles but change the content of the art. This is exactly what Baptists did. They adopted the artistic style of a given time and changed the content of the art to suit their aesthetic needs. Heck, a great example of this is the Mormons, who adopted 19th century aesthetics forms (painting, sculpture, and even faux-hieroglyphic manuscript writing) and assigned to such ancient pedigree. Thus it seems to me that if I had been very much in tune with the Protestant aesthetic ethos, I would have preferred the Italianate icons to the traditional Orthodox ones. I would have accepted them as a form of changed content (with Mary and Saints and somber Jesus instead of folded hands and laughing Jesus, etc.) in a common, "received" style in order to bring myself closer to the ancient Church. For in Protestant aesthetics, style and form, as it were, is decidedly arbitrary - whatever communicates the token talking points of content in a stylistic manner which is "heard" is the most acceptable. But I saw something in the traditional icons which was worlds apart from any religious art I had ever seen before. These icons spoke of a truth that far transcended my little "Jesus and me" self-evangelistic moment or my lust for didacticism or my religious sentimental inclinations or my need for a socio-religious commercial. The traditional icons were uncomfortable, demanding, and not, in the slightest bit, concerned with my own affectations or "needs." I thought there might be mercy to be found in them, and in one instance I was overwhelmed by such mercy, but it was not the sort of mercy I had encountered before.

Again, I don't want to dissect Ochlophobist's work (dissection being messy, usually involving something dead), but I feel that certain points he makes deserve further comment.

First, there is a clear difference between iconography and Italianate kitsch. "Gravitas" distinguishes icons from the Italianate painting, he says. Yes. Gravitas, sobriety, transcendence, a taste of eternity. In infusing religious art with the principles of realism and humanism, including emotionalism, the earlier qualities of transcendence and the eternal were lost. In essence, religious art became Nestorian, as it emphasized Christ's humanity at the expense of His divinity. And His Apostles and Saints lost their sanctity, as sanctity is not a humanist trait; their most sensational qualities had to emphasized instead.

Second, the aesthetic style of Protestant religious art is very similar to that of Italianate kitsch. Unfortunately, this is all too true. And where Protestant aesthetics is not of the Italianate kitsch variety, it belongs to the images of nature motivational poster variety, which is, if anything, worse. I remember two posters from my childhood: "Moi, je suis le chemin, la vérité, et la vie" ("I am the way, the truth, and the life" in French) on a rainy, rainbow-bannered landscape, and "I know I'm victorious, Lord, but it sure feels like I'm getting stomped" on a picture of a sad-faced dog. Somehow, neither attains to the watered-down respect for the holy that a pair of praying hands has.

Third, a desire to get back to the NT Church results in iconoclasm or the same style with a different content. I have never heard of the Protestant drive to return to the NT Church (or even the primitive Church) resulting in a change in aesthetics. I don't think Protestants are built that way with respect to art - they are, sadly, uneducated as to art or are hostile to it. The intimate nature with which theology interacts with art is completely lost on the average Protestant... maybe even your average liturgical Protestant. A change in theology will not, cannot, result in a change in aesthetics.

Unfortunately, far more common than altered content is outright iconoclasm. At one time in my varied (or is that checkered?) past I was an art teacher in a Christian setting. And time and again I would run into parents who had no understanding for the value of art, save as a historical phenomena, or in rare cases, as a part of Western culture. For these parents, the intersection of image and God, no matter how remotely or tenuously linked, was sacrilege. My freedom to put the sacred into art, or simply to present religious art in class, was not welcome, and my decision to do so resulted in some pitched battles.

[Perhaps at some point in the future I will give my patented five minute defense of religious art against those who attack it on the grounds of the Second Commandment.]

Fourth, iconography transcends the vagaries of art history and societal aesthetic tastes. This transcendence is formed in carefully defined theology, and it is preserved and perfected in Tradition. Because Protestants never had a theology of art, and because Catholics have regrettably lost theirs (save for isolated pockets of conservative Catholics where Italianate kitsch is the tradition), both are left helpless before the whims and the winds of fashion. The new method of "communication", no matter how inarticulate it may be or how imperfectly it speak the colours and the tones of eternal truth, must perforce become the new mode for the masses. In the absence of tradition, the new and the unconventional is a seduction for which there is no defense.

---

We look forward to Ochlophobist's next post on art.

- V.

Ochlophobist and Art (Part I)

Once more, Ochlophobist has impressed me with a brilliant post, this one on art. It comes out of a dialogue involving Daniel Matsui from The Lion and the Cardinal and Arturo from The Sarabite, and is chiefly a reaction to Arturo. Arturo's reasoning frequently gives me headaches, so I appreciated Ochlophobist's response.

There is a lot to process, a lot of meat in his post, but I am not going to examine it piece by piece. Rather I am going to simply react to a couple comments he makes. More in keeping with my patience levels.

1) Classical art is not the model for a Christian art (paragraph 9). Although classical academies today and the preponderance of artists and art critics from the time of the Renaissance to the time of the Impressionists regard and regarded Greco-Roman art as the be-all and end-all of truth and beauty, it is a truth worth noting that the Fathers of the Christian faith did not feel so. Instead, they guided us into our respective iconographies (Western and Eastern) for the sake of adhering to theological truth and beauty, for the sake and purpose of forming the people of God into Saints of God, and to praise God with brush and pen.

As a sidebar, modern art did not come into being until the salons - the guildhalls of the art world - crumbled under the impact of Impressionism, leaving no larger principle to guide them or keep them from deeper error. Hitherto it was classical art that was the larger principle.

2) Catharsis in modern art is akin to the release of orgasm (paragraph 10). In his critique of catharsis in art, Ochlophobist says that catharsis is foreign to Orthodoxy, and then he proceeds to define this catharsis as orgasmic, ecstatic. Elsewhere he goes further and links post-Renaissance art to what he calls pansexualism.

I am not fully with him on this point, mostly because I don't understand the bit about pansexualism. However, I think I get the bit about catharsis. In my art classes we were not urged to paint out our feelings, but I saw a lot of that in the university program I didn't take. There it was de rigeur to work in tar and newspaper clippings. I still remember the "deeply meaningful" exhibition to which a friend of mine invited me, involving tar, dismembered dolls held together by wires, and her own blood. Apparently she had expressed or channelled her inner pain. I wasn't happy for her - I was horrified, as this was manifestly not art, being neither true, beautiful, nor good.

Despite not being trained in cathartic painting, I find that most of the artwork that I have done was a response to strong emotion (passion?) and not disciplined, not work. This I would feel is a great weakness - though I haven't gone so far as to identify it as unOrthodox.

3) Rouault is the one big exception (paragraph 11). I have never chatted with either Ochlophobist or Mr. Mitsui, but I would like to. Having waded through modern art (no matter the precise appellation: modern, post-modern, cubist, etc.), I would have to reject almost all of it. Certainly that which is held up as exemplary - with one exception: Georges Rouault. Unlike Ochlophobist, I do not like Rouault's clowns and whores, but I am moved by his images of Christ, especially Crucifixion, which to me has all the feel of a stained-glass window.

As for the rest? So much trash. I remember admiring Dali at one point in my life. Then I read a 600-page volume of his collected works. The man was an obsessive pervert whose nightmarish images of clocks, horses, and breasts should have had him locked up somewhere. A few years later, and wiser, I visited a Picasso exhibit - under duress - with a friend. He thought it would be cultural, I think. Afterwards, we looked at each other with horror. Picasso was no genius, unless it was a diabolical genius. The man was evil, with every bestial thought made tangible through his "art" - the exhibit left us feeling soiled. Art cannot be art unless it be beautiful, unless it be true, and modern art has failed us in these two regards. And we have failed art, by not demanding better.

4) Arturo claims that a love of medieval iconography comes from a Protestant aesthetic (paragraph 12). This assertion just horrifies me - it insinuates that iconography is sterile, beauty-hating, or iconoclastic. As a sidebar, not all Protestants are iconoclastic or beauty-hating, but then, they usually aren't terribly Protestant either.

5) Baroque/Italianate/modern Catholic folk art are not true, if only because they betray an overt religious eroticism (paragraphs 18, 19). My agreement here is experientially based. When I was in my late teens I was - somewhat understandably - consumed by a love of the erotic, and nowhere was this more manifested than in my artwork and in the artists I most admired and emulated: Klimt, Rossetti, and Bellini. In Bellini's case, it was the clearly erotic, even orgasmic, Ecstasy of St. Theresa, which caught my attention, and which, while wonderfully rendered and beautiful, revealed something perverse and false. Not all Baroque artists (and their descendants) are as obviously untrue, but I can see this tendency to varying degrees.

As for modern Catholic folk art, I would have to make an exception for Our Lady of Guadalupe, which is to my eyes more iconic than erotic.

6) Schoenberg's gravestone is perhaps the best example of a Protestant aesthetic (paragraph 21). Iconoclastic? Beauty-hating? Sterile? Yep. As a broad caricature, this statement works for me.

I will come back to this post - to paragraph 14 in particular - but a small child beckons, and that insistently.

- V.

Artistic Temperament as Disease?

Over at Daniel Mitsui's blog, he offers us the following quote by G. K. Chesterton:

The artistic temperament is a disease that afflicts amateurs. It is a disease which arises from men not having sufficient power of expression to utter and get rid of the element of art in their being... Artists of a large and wholesome vitality get rid of their art easily, as they breathe easily, or perspire easily. But in artists of less force, the thing becomes a pressure, and produces a definite pain, which is called the artistic temperament. Thus, very great artists are able to be ordinary men... There are many real tragedies of the artistic temperament, tragedies of vanity or violence or fear. But the great tragedy of the artistic temperament is that it cannot produce any art....

It need hardly be said that this is the real explanation of the thing which has puzzled so many dilettante critics, the problem of the extreme ordinariness of the behaviour of so many great geniuses in history. Their behaviour was so ordinary that it was not recorded; hence it was so ordinary that it seemed mysterious. Hence people say that Bacon wrote Shakespeare. The modern artistic temperament cannot understand how a man who could write such lyrics as Shakespeare wrote, could be as keen as Shakespeare was on business transactions in a little town in Warwickshire. The explanation is simple enough; it is that Shakespeare had a real lyrical impulse, wrote a real lyric, and so got rid of the impulse and went about his business. Being an artist did not prevent him from being an ordinary man, any more than being a sleeper at night or being a diner at dinner prevented him from being an ordinary man.

Perhaps it is over-bold of me to challenge such an esteemed man of letters as Chesterton, but I must take issue with the above.

Assuming that Chesterton is using a standard definition of "artist", his over-broad strokes leave no place for accepted masters such as Dürer, da Vinci, Cellini, or Michelangelo. Albrecht Dürer was subject to depression, Leonardo da Vinci struggled to complete any of his brilliant concepts, and Benvenuto Cellini, da Vinci, and Michelangelo were all almost certainly homosexual. Geniuses all, but not untroubled.

I suspect Mr. Matsui included this quote not because he is ignorant of art history or because, like Chesterton, he is over-fond of bold generalizations, but because he does not accept the aforementioned masters as such. I know that Mr. Matsui feels that art took a decidedly downward turn at time of the Renaissance*, and here I would agree with him. If, however, he agrees with Chesterton that true artists are untroubled, there I part company, for there is no doubt in my mind that Dürer, da Vinci, et al. were masters of their media, and that even the deeply psychologically troubled Van Gogh from our godless age was unparalleled in his genius.

It seems to me that what we call the "artistic temperament" is nothing more than a soul cracking under inner stresses, stresses formed by the challenge of the human psyche facing the divine - communicating beauty being one of the holiest of acts. It seems to me that without a way to understand the divine (ie. through traditional iconography, Eastern or Western), these stresses are inevitable in all but the most hardy souls. And artists, true artists, are by definition sensitive to their environments.

Perhaps the reason why we see so many shipwrecked artists from the time of the Renaissance to this is that humanism, under which delusional philosophy we still continue to labour, is manifestly a system without codified ways to appropriate and understand the divine.

- V.

* Unfortunately, a cursory search of Mr. Matsui's site was insufficient to provide me with sourcing at this time.