{"id":127979,"date":"2018-07-31T12:00:23","date_gmt":"2018-07-31T16:00:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=127979"},"modified":"2018-07-31T18:06:38","modified_gmt":"2018-07-31T22:06:38","slug":"ugliness-is-underrated-in-defense-of-ugly-paintings","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2018\/07\/31\/ugliness-is-underrated-in-defense-of-ugly-paintings\/","title":{"rendered":"Ugliness Is Underrated: In Defense of Ugly Paintings"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Czardas dancers<\/em>, 1908.<\/p><\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n

Inside an old brick building in Somerville\u2019s Davis Square, below the gilded stage and the red velvet seats, there is an unusual museum. Hidden in the basement of the 1914 Art Deco building is a collection of hideous paintings and disturbing drawings otherwise known as the Museum of Bad Art<\/a>. \u201cYou won\u2019t ever see this stuff in the Museum of Fine Arts,\u201d the curator Michael Frank says. Frank is the kind of guy who can\u2019t pass a yard sale or a flea market without stopping to browse. He loves ugly things, but for him, ugly<\/em> is a problematic word. \u201cWhen I read your email, I thought, Uh-oh,\u201d he admits. \u201cCalling something ugly is like calling something beautiful. The minute you say it, you\u2019re in a difficult spot, trying to define what that really means.\u201d<\/p>\n

Frank prefers to think of these paintings as \u201cbadart,\u201d one word, no hyphen. Badart is not the inverse of \u201cgood art\u201d; it\u2019s the inverse of \u201cimportant art.\u201d Some might call these pieces outsider art, and in the past, many of them could have been termed primitive or art brut. I prefer to think of them as ugly. Charming\u2014like the dancing dog wearing a tutu or the nineties eyebrows on one particularly serene Virgin Mary\u2014but ugly nonetheless.<\/p>\n

However, I understand where Frank is coming from. For Frank, ugly<\/em> is a word that suffocates, depriving his favorite paintings of their rightful playful air. Ugly<\/em> is also a word that carries hard moral implications; for centuries, ugliness has been associated not only with sickness and deformity but also dishonesty, violence, aggression, and bigotry. Consider the term ugly American<\/em>\u00a0or the repeated critique of Trump\u2019s \u201cugly\u201d acts. The word itself comes from the equally discordant-sounding ugga<\/em> and uggligr<\/em>, two Old Norse adjectives that mean \u201cdreadful, fearful, aggressive.\u201d (Other words that bloomed from the \u201cdreadful\u201d root include loath<\/em> and loathsome.<\/em>) The meaning changed only in the fourteenth\u00a0century, when uglike<\/em> stopped meaning \u201cterrifying\u201d and began to mean \u201cunpleasant to look at.\u201d<\/p>\n

Even though the word ugly<\/em> is now primarily used to describe the unaesthetic aspect of things rather than their deep moral fiber, it retains elements of its original meaning. Using it can shift a well-meaning aesthetic critique into the realm of moral judgment. This is unfortunate for those of us who genuinely enjoy, and celebrate, ugly things. If you, too, want to appreciate ugliness, the first thing you have to do is stop assuming that it is the inverse of beauty. We tend to talk about aesthetics as though the categories are locked in a battle: good versus evil, light versus dark. But opposites are a crutch. Beauty and ugliness do not negate each other.\u00a0<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Lucy in the Field with Flowers<\/em>, Anonymous. Image courtesy of the Museum of Bad Art.<\/p><\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n

Science supports this idea. Studies done in the emerging field of neuroaesthetics (studying how the brain responds to aesthetic stimuli) have found that beautiful paintings and ugly paintings light up the same regions of the brain: the orbitofrontal, prefrontal, and motor regions of the cortex. Oddly enough, the pictures ranked most beautiful activated the orbitofrontal region most and the motor region least, whereas the pictures ranked ugliest activated the orbitofrontal region least and the motor region most. The author of this particular study, Semir Zeki, tentatively suggests that perhaps ugly things mobilize the motor system so that we can flee from the unwanted stimuli. The same study has led Eric Kandel, author of The Age of Insight<\/em><\/a>, to argue, \u201cBeauty does not occupy a different area of the brain than ugliness. Both are part of a continuum representing the values the brain attributes to them.\u201d Although we experience them differently, beauty and ugliness both tap into our emotional center, an area deeply involved in analyzing other\u2019s motives and actions and generating both sympathy and empathy. Kandel writes:<\/p>\n

Our response to art stems from an irrepressible urge to recreate in our own brains the creative process\u2014cognitive, emotional, and empathic\u2014through which the artist produced the work. This creative urge of the artist and of the beholder presumably explains why essentially every group of human beings in every age and in every place throughout the world has created images, despite the fact that art is not a physical necessity for survival. Art is an inherently pleasurable and instructive attempt by the artist and the beholder to communicate and share with each other the creative process that characterizes every human brain\u2014a process that leads to an Aha! moment, the sudden recognition that we have seen into another person\u2019s mind, and that allows us to see the truth underlying both the beauty and the ugliness depicted by the artist.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Art, both badart and \u201cimportant art,\u201d can reveal the inner workings of artists\u2019 minds. Beautiful art is at its best and most useful when it illuminates truths about the human condition, but badart can reveal the inner workings of one individual\u2019s mind\u2014their strange lusts, their disturbing daydreams, their antisocial desires, and their nonsensical fears. Beautiful art can speak to the general trials and triumphs of being human, but badart can speak in equal eloquence to the highly specific neuroses and joys of one singular mad mind. After all, we all like sunsets<\/a>. But there\u2019s a unique appeal to the Museum of Bad Art\u2019s\u00a0behemoth crimson cat devouring a pale-faced human\u00a0under a Pepto-Bismol-pink sky<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Ugliness has never been the subject of much scrutiny. For the most part, artists and thinkers have treated ugliness as an immutable category, filled with things they simply didn\u2019t like. These included dangerous landscapes, people with disabilities, and objects that showed signs of too much use. When survival was a number one priority, people viewed anything potentially threatening as ugly. And for the most part, ugly works, particularly pieces that were unintentionally ugly, were forgotten to history.<\/p>\n

As a result, the most significant ugly works created before the nineteenth\u00a0century were intentionally ugly, created by technically skilled painters who decided, for whatever reason, to depict an ugly subject. Often, ugly art was created as a warning. There but for the grace of God go I, screams the gargoyle clinging to a medieval facade. To contemporary eyes, the art of the Dark Ages looks ugly as a whole (consider this great Vox<\/em> explainer about ugly babies in medieval paintings<\/a>.) At the time, however, people didn\u2019t consider the malformed dogs<\/a> or awkward hat-wearing crows<\/a> to be ugly, though they did know that doom paintings, which depict the worst-case afterlife scenarios, were hideous. Doom paintings highlight the difference between heaven and hell in order to strike fear into the heart of viewers and thus discourage them from, say, coveting their neighbor\u2019s hot spouse or lying when the tax official came around to collect coins. Sometimes these paintings function like the medieval version of Jonathan Edward\u2019s hellfire-and-brimstone sermons: they actually make the afterlife look interesting, stimulating, and perhaps even a little bit appealing.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Hieronymus Bosch, The\u00a0<\/em>Garden of Earthly Delights<\/em>, 1500.<\/p><\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n

Painted in the late fifteenth\u00a0century, Hieronymus Bosch\u2019s The\u00a0<\/em>Garden of Earthly Delights<\/em>\u00a0takes from the tradition of doom paintings to create a strangely humorous and oddly enticing image of the Netherlands. Bosch was warning viewers not to be too tied to earthly pleasures, and yet looking at his painting is so much fun. Despite the masterful composition, the painting is ugly\u2014or at least, it contains bright spots of ugliness. It is dappled with barbarity and splattered with joy. Heaven, shown on the left side of the triptych, looks rather boring and notably empty. Hell, shown on the far right, has fornicators and flute-assed musicians.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Leonardo da Vinci, Grotesque Heads<\/em>, ca. 1490.<\/p><\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n

Bosch showcases how ugliness can be playful, but other Renaissance artists approach ugliness with a more serious and steady hand. When Leonardo da Vinci<\/a> began his search for beauty through interrogating a \u201cseries of disgusts,\u201d as the historian Walter Pater terms it, he began by painting deeply misogynistic images (perhaps as a way to air out his disgust for heterosexual sex) and people with diseases and disabilities. These bruttezza <\/em>drawings were intentionally unattractive; the supposed ugliness of these individuals was intended to contrast with the beauty of Leonardo\u2019s other sitters. Quentin Matsys\u2019s 1513 painting A Grotesque Old Woman<\/em>\u00a0can be located in this same tradition of grotesques. Known more commonly as The Ugly Duchess<\/em>, this work shows a woman in a tight bodice and regal headdress. \u201cThe sitter is now diagnosed as suffering from Paget\u2019s Disease,\u201d Stephen Bayley explains in his 2011 treatise Ugly<\/em>. Despite the fact that we now \u201cknow better\u201d than to gawk at the suffering of others, Bayley claims there is a \u201cmagnificent absurdity\u201d to this painting\u2019s popularity. It is, he notes, \u201cone of the most popular postcards sold in London\u2019s National Gallery Shop.\u201d<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Quentin Matsys, The Ugly Duchess<\/em>, ca. 1513.<\/p><\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n

Like church-perching gargoyles and vulva-spreading Sheela Na Gigs, these paintings are curious outliers. For the bulk of human history, artists have been far more concerned with beauty and the heavens than the ugly and the earthly. Ugliness was used as shorthand for spiritual damnation, when it was shown at all. Philosophers, while concerned with questions of beauty and morality, have not often grappled with visual ugliness (though they\u2019ve spilled plenty of ink on ethical offenses). \u201cYou can\u2019t write a historical narrative on ugliness, at least not in the academic sense,\u201d Bayley argues. \u201cThe books simply do not exist: appropriate to its aggressive nature, ugliness is a subject writers have generally avoided. Perhaps they have avoided it like a plague.\u201d<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Master of the Rouen Echevinage, Cite de dieu fol<\/em>, ca. 1460.<\/p><\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n

Bayley does identify a few other peak eras for ugly art, including the Baroque period, which spanned from around 1600 to 1750. During this time, artists were very into ornamentation, and every surface that could be fluted or gilded or scalloped or molded was, with a very heavy hand. Baroque artists were the original maximalists. But while many consider Baroque art to be rather unappealing or \u201cghastly\u201d or \u201cgag-makingly hideous<\/a>,\u201d as Bayley puts it, I have trouble calling this art ugly. The word b<\/em>aroque<\/em> means \u201ca deformed pearl,\u201d yet there is order in most Baroque art\u2014the ornamentation and uneven surfaces on Francesco Borromini\u2019s buildings do not appear at random but rather undulate like a slithering snake. Caravaggio\u2019s dramatic canvases feature classically inspired compositions and high levels of technical skill. They are extra, certainly, but they\u2019re not really ugly. And for my money, Bernini\u2019s Apollo and Daphne<\/em> is the most beautiful sculpture ever created, so I suppose I quibble with Bayley\u2019s distaste for the baroque. I certainly prefer it to what came next: the prettified fluff and saccharine frills of Rococo-crazed Europe.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Caspar David Friedrich, The<\/em>\u00a0Sea of Ice<\/em>, 1823.<\/p><\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n

But slowly, these decorative phases fell out of style, and with the advent of Romanticism, European artists began to turn toward a more naturalistic form of painting. This coincided with a newfound desire to define both beauty and its opposite. In the early nineteenth\u00a0century, theorists began approaching ugliness as though it were its own aesthetic category. In 1853, Karl Rosenkranz published one of the first deep dives, Aesthetics of Ugliness<\/a><\/em>. This picks up the aesthetic baton from Hegel and attempts to figure out how negative aesthetic categories\u2014like the uncanny, the grotesque, the ghastly, and the ugly\u2014relate to one another and how they differ. For previous generations, a mountainous landscape would have been viewed as rather ghastly\u2014it was ugly simply because it was scary. The Romantics challenged this notion and began to create scenery that was both beautiful and frightening (i.e., sublime). Caspar David Friedrich\u2019s paintings are an excellent example of this. They\u2019re beautiful and frightening, but few would call these landscapes ugly. What had once been terrifying was newly approached as aesthetic, and so ugliness was pushed into another realm. The new home for ugly art became the big tent of the abstract.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Marc Chagall, Hommage \u00e0 Apollinaire<\/em>, 1911.<\/p><\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n

Even though today we\u2019re perfectly capable of finding beauty in Rothko, when it arrived on the scene in the nineteenth\u00a0century, abstraction felt like a deviant impulse. And as Impressionism gave way to Expressionism and the nineteenth\u00a0century turned into the twentieth, the impulse to label these artistic experiments as morally wrong or degenerate grew greater. In July 1937, the Nazi-curated \u201cEntartete Kunst\u201d (\u201cdegenerate art\u201d) exhibit opened in Munich, featuring works by Karl Schmidt-Rottluff,\u00a0Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Edvard Munch, Emil Nolde, Franz Marc, Lyonel Feininger, and Marc Chagall. Were these works ugly? Some of them were. But they were not nearly as ugly as the Nazi\u2019s genocidal vision. The paintings were also part of a new art world, one in which categories of ugliness and beauty didn\u2019t hold so much importance\u2014at least, not to the makers. Some of these works were ugly, and that was the point. They were intentionally strange, surreal, and disorienting. They showed a chaotic and fragmented society. They were broken mirrors for a broken world.<\/p>\n

In our postmodern or post-postmodern art world, it can be hard to remember why ugliness matters because ugly paintings are now everywhere. Ugly paintings hang in every major museum, and ugly work has been accepted as part of the canon. But while ugly art crosses genres and time periods, it can still be useful to think of ugly art as falling into its own unified aesthetic category. Like zany<\/em>, cute<\/em>, and interesting<\/em>, the three labels defined and clarified by Sianne Ngia in her book Our Aesthetic Categories<\/em>, ugliness plays a pivotal role in art history and in contemporary design.<\/p>\n

Unlike grotesques, which elevate their subjects until they approach the beautiful, truly ugly works aren\u2019t about pleasing anyone. Ugliness is about discomfort. It makes us feel a little unsettled\u2014not because we\u2019re looking at a depiction of something unsettling, like a gory religious scene or a photograph of a war zone or a painting of a warted nose, but because we\u2019re confronted with a sense of disorder.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Otto Dix, Wounded Man (Autumn 1916, Bapaume)<\/em>, 1924.<\/p><\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n

This can be intentional, or it can be the result of badly applied technique or poorly chosen colors. Typically, the ugly art we see in museums was made that way consciously, either to highlight the artist\u2019s abilities (like with Leonardo\u2019s elegantly drawn caricatures), to rebel against the conventions of the art world (for example, Philip Guston or the contemporary painter Neil Jenney), or to reveal something about the world and our place in it (Hieronymus Bosch, Otto Dix, and Francis Bacon and their stomach-turning depictions of bodily pain).<\/p>\n

Frank and his colleagues at the Museum of Bad Art don\u2019t collect the kind of significant ugly paintings that the New York Times<\/em> might write about<\/a> or the Met might display. Instead, Frank uses his aesthetic judgment to choose works that feel compelling.<\/em> \u201cI reject anything that is uninteresting,\u201d he says. \u201cUninteresting work is unacceptable. If something is silly or if it was made cynically in an attempt to get into the Museum of Bad Art, then I\u2019m not interested.\u201d He\u2019s also not interested in kitschy pieces or commercial art, like black velvet paintings or taxidermy sculptures.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s a sense of brazenness to unintentionally bad art\u2014it embodies desire gone awry. And being able to enjoy ugly art isn\u2019t simply about making fun of it. It\u2019s also about being able to sit in discomfort and recognize mistakes. Ugly art demands a sense of looseness; it asks you to dip into a slippery state of mind where you can hold multiple beliefs simultaneously. The piece can be both ugly and unappealing, and it can also delight and appeal for those very reasons. It can pull you closer\u2014you want to know why this ugly art was made, what it means, and what the artists were thinking. And if you let yourself get unbalanced enough, you might just find yourself a little bit in love. \u201cIf you go on social media, you\u2019ll see the most common comment I get,\u201d Frank says. \u201cPeople are always posting, I like it. Or even, I like this painting\u2014it shouldn\u2019t be here.\u201d<\/p>\n

Frank often responds, \u201cI like it too. That\u2019s why I collect this art. I like it.\u201d<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Katy Kelleher is a writer who lives in the woods of rural New England. She is the author of\u00a0<\/em>Handcrafted Maine.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

  Inside an old brick building in Somerville\u2019s Davis Square, below the gilded stage and the red velvet seats, there is an unusual museum. Hidden in the basement of the 1914 Art Deco building is a collection of hideous paintings and disturbing drawings otherwise known as the Museum of Bad Art. \u201cYou won\u2019t ever see […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1397,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[419],"tags":[34862,34863,13912,34866,34859,34865,34612,34857,29428,34854,34861,34864,25700,1775,20525,34856,34855,507,34867,34858,34868,34860,17317,34869],"class_list":["post-127979","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-arts-culture","tag-aesthetics-of-ugliness","tag-casper-david-friedrich","tag-edvard-munch","tag-emil-nolde","tag-eric-kandel","tag-ernst-ludwig-kirchner","tag-franz-marc","tag-garden-of-earthly-delights","tag-grotesques","tag-guston","tag-karl-rosenkranz","tag-karl-schmidt-rottluff","tag-leonardo-da-vinci","tag-lyonel-feininger","tag-marc-chagall","tag-michael-frank","tag-museum-of-bad-art","tag-otto-dix","tag-our-aesthetic-categories","tag-semir-zeki","tag-sianne-ngia","tag-the-age-of-insight","tag-ugliness","tag-ugly-paintings"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nUgliness Is Underrated: In Defense of Ugly Paintings<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"If you, too, want to appreciate ugliness, the first thing you have to do is stop assuming that it is the inverse of beauty.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2018\/07\/31\/ugliness-is-underrated-in-defense-of-ugly-paintings\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Ugliness Is Underrated: In Defense of Ugly Paintings by Katy Kelleher\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"July 31, 2018 \u2013   Inside an old brick building in Somerville\u2019s Davis Square, below the gilded stage and the red velvet seats, there is an unusual museum. Hidden in\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2018\/07\/31\/ugliness-is-underrated-in-defense-of-ugly-paintings\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"The Paris Review\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:publisher\" content=\"https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/parisreview\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2018-07-31T16:00:23+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:modified_time\" content=\"2018-07-31T22:06:38+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:image\" content=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/07\/ernst_ludwig_kirchner_-_czardas_dancers_-_google_art_project.jpg\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:width\" content=\"1000\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:height\" content=\"762\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:type\" content=\"image\/jpeg\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"Katy Kelleher\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<meta 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