Human Beauty. Human Ugliness. Human Beauty, again?

In this hideous and yet highbrow lecture, Umberto Eco walks us through a history of ugliness showing how the notion of “repulsion” has shifted from generation to generation.

But what struck me most is how artists have chosen to represent humanity over time.

In ancient Greece and the European Renaissance, the human form was beautiful - a thing deserving reverence and celebration. The Greeks so revered the form that even their God’s took its shape. Renaissance painters, likewise, moved away from holy subject matter towards more human ones.

Petrus Christus, Portrait of a Carthusian, 1446

And it was this orientation that continued many centuries all the way up through the French academy and the beginnings of the industrial revolution in the 1700’s. 

Jean Baptiste Chardin, Laundress, 1733

And on through art movements such as Art Neavou:

Alfonse Mucha, Dusk, 1899

And commercial art such as the poster art of the early 1900s:

Leopoldo Metlicovitz, Calzaturificio di Varese poster, 1913.

But you might be surprised to know that fine artists didn’t just paint human beauty; they also painted human ugliness. However, that is not what I think is remarkable. Instead, it is the way the artists treated the ugliness. From what I can see, it was with surprising respect. Renaissance artists still saw their ghastly, even disfigured, subjects as people. People still capable of compassion, intelligence, strength and accomplishment. The following examples show how a few artists chose to show us the beautiful in the ugly: 

Quentin Matsys A Grotesque Old Woman (or the Ugly Duchess) ca. 1525

Rembrandt, Portrait of Gerard de Lairesse, ca. 1665

Image pulled from Umberto Eco’s presentation (I couldn’t find name of painter of this)

But as I watched Eco’s presentation I felt the art community took a dramatically different stance, almost an oppositional stance, to their predecessors. From the Modernist movement forward, it feels like artists, more often than not, wanted to show the ugliness of humanity and the human form. The human being was not something to be revered but reviled. 

We see it in the cubist movement…

Picasso, Man with Guitar, 1911

…in the Futurist movement…

Umberto Boccioni, Unique Forms of Continuity in Space, 1913

…in the Dadaist movement…

George Grosz, A Victim of Society, 1919

…and many other artists:

Hans Bellmer, ca. 1930

Francis Bacon, Two Studies for a Portrait of George Dyer, 1968            

Lucian Freud, in process of painting Naked Man, Back View, 1991.

What I find particularly interesting is that some modern artists are going back into old Renaissance works and deforming them. It gives me a weird feeling to look at this stuff. It’s as if someone, who by virtue of living at a later, more knowing age, went back and fixed the naivety of an ancient people. By altering the faces with horror film characters, the artists unmasked the true nature of subjects who once fooled us. It’s a statement that the grotesque is more human than the beautiful.

Aleesandro Botticelli, Portrait of a Youth, 1480s

Uknown Artist

Leonardo Da Vinci Mona Lisa

Unknown Artist

Unknown Artist (I couldn’t find the original)

Unknown Artist (I couldn’t find the original)

While I do think many things fueled this shift towards humanity’s ugliness, it is certainly no small point to note that the rise in “ugly” expressions coincided with the rise of Freudian psychology. Freudian psychology taught us that we are born bad – in the sense they we just want to do what feels good – and that our desires, if left uncontrolled, lead to personal ruin.

Artists saw this theme reinforced in the world around them. Greed, materialism and status fueled the erection of landscape-scarring factories that forced workers to endure horrendous working conditions and employed children to do dangerous, body-mangling tasks. Vengeance sparked trench warfare in WWI. Lust for strength lead to several notable WWII atrocities. It was a tough time to see the same beauty in humanity that Praxiteles or Botticelli did.

I bring all this up, I guess, because maybe we’re in a recursive phase circling our way back to our past. Maybe today we’re experiencing something akin to the Renaissance. After all, the Internet, like the printing press, has brought a rebirth in rampant learning - and I don’t necessarily mean education. Just as renascent Italians awoke to the humanities, we are reawakening to our relationship to the earth – a relationship at the core of many “ancient” and “primitive” civilizations. Networking technologies have opened up markets to smaller companies and individuals. They’ve even created new markets altogether (Second life, Ebay, MMORPG Gold, etc). That’s pretty big deal when you consider markets have been feudal territories ruled by corporate “kings”.

Swirled up in all these trends is the notion that maybe we’re starting, again, to see the beauty in humanity and an optimistic view on what we’re capable of. Maybe that’s why we elected a community organizer instead of a soldier. Maybe that’s why Pepsi, a brand that defines itself according to each generation, has developed Oneify and Hope campaigns and modeled its logo after a smile. Maybe that’s why WALL-E, while showing the grotesque side of humanity, also showed us our innate power to correct our errors and learn from them. (BTW, WALL-E received a 97% approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes, which almost never happens).  

I dunno. I have no specific point I want to make. I’m just thinking out loud here. Just trying to think about the context of what we do everyday so that maybe we can understand why we do it.