Ugliness The Non-Beautiful in Art and Theory

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Andrei Pop and Mechtild Widrich would like to thank the Chair for the History of Art and Architecture at ETH Zurich, Philip Ursprung, for financial support toward image permissions. They would also like to thank their students at the University of Vienna in spring 2011, who made the teaching of ugliness a pleasure.

Published in 2014 by I.B.Tauris & Co Ltd 6 Salem Road, London W2 4BU 175 Fifth Avenue, New York NY 10010 www.ibtauris.com Distributed in the United States and Canada Exclusively by Palgrave Macmillan 175 Fifth Avenue, New York NY 10010 Copyright Editorial Selection and Introduction © 2014 Andrei Pop and Mechtild Widrich Copyright Individual Chapters © 2014 Suzannah Biernoff, Frédérique Desbuissons, Gretchen E. Henderson, Kassandra Nakas, Edward Payne, Andrei Pop, Kathryn Simpson, Adele Tan, Brandon Taylor, Mechtild Widrich, Odeta Žukauskienė The right of Andrei Pop and Mechtild Widrich to be identified as the editors of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or any part thereof, may not be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher. International Library of Modern and Contemporary Art 12 ISBN: 978 1 78076 645 4 A full CIP record for this book is available from the British Library A full CIP record for this book is available from the Library of Congress Library of Congress catalog card: available Typeset by Dexter Haven Associates, London Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY

‘I never heard of “Uglification,”’ Alice ventured to say. ‘What is it?’

The Gryphon lifted up both its paws in surprise. ‘Never heard of uglifying!’ it exclaimed. ‘ You know what to beautify is, I suppose?’ ‘ Yes,’ said Alice doubtfully: ‘it means – to – make – anything – prettier.’ ‘Well, then,’ the Gryphon went on, ‘if you don’t know what to uglify is, you are a simpleton.’

Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland

List of Illustrations Gretchen E. Henderson, The Ugly Face Club Fig. 1.1

Advertisement for an Ugly Face Club anniversary celebration, 1806, reprinted in Edward Howell, ed., Ye Ugly Face Clubb,

Leverpoole, 1743–53 (Liverpool: E. Howell, 1912).

19

Suzannah Biernoff, The Face of War Fig.2.1

Nina Berman, Marine Wedding, 2006. © Photograph by

Fig. 2.2

Nina Berman/NOOR.

35

Henry Tonks, Portrait of a Wounded Soldier before Treatment, 1916–17, pastel. © The Royal College of Surgeons of England,

Fig. 2.3

Tonks Collection no 20.

39

Horace Nicholls, Repairing War’s Ravages: Renovating facial injuries. The patient examining the mould of his own face. Imperial War Museum, Q.30.455. Photograph courtesy of the Imperial War Museum, London.

Fig. 2.4 Fig. 2.5 Fig. 2.6

40

Nina Berman, Marine Wedding, 2006. © Photograph by Nina Berman/NOOR.

46

Nina Berman, Marine Wedding, 2006. © Photograph by Nina Berman/NOOR.

47

Nina Berman, Marine Wedding, 2006. © Photograph by Nina Berman/NOOR.

48

Brandon Taylor, Picasso and the Psychoanalysts Fig. 3.1

Pablo Picasso, Woman in Blouse in an Armchair, 1913, oil on canvas, 148 × 99 cm, Ingeborg Pudelko Collection, Florence. Photograph courtesy Scala.

Fig. 3.2

54

Paintings by Matisse, the Picasso-Matisse Exhibition, Victoria and Albert Museum, 1946. Photograph courtesy Public Record Office.

Fig. 3.3

59

Pablo Picasso, Dawn Serenade, 1942, oil on canvas, 195×265cm, Musée National d’Art Moderne. Photograph courtesy Public Record Office.

60

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Fig. 3.4

Viewing paintings by Picasso, the Picasso-Matisse





Exhibition, Victoria and Albert Museum, 1946. Photograph





courtesy Public Record Office.







Fig. 3.5

Pablo Picasso, Seated Woman with Hat in the Shape of a Fish,





1942, oil on canvas, 100 × 81.5 cm. Photograph courtesy





Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam.



62

Fig. 3.6

Pablo Picasso, Bottle, Guitar, and Pipe, 1912–13, reproduced



from the International Journal of Psycho-analysis 35 (1954).

67







61

Mechtild Widrich, The ‘Ugliness’ of the Avant-Garde Fig. 4.1

Otto Muehl, Degradation of a Female Body, 1963. Photograph





by Ludwig Hoffenreich © mumok, museum moderner kunst





stiftung ludwig wien.









Fig. 4.2

Hermann Nitsch, lamb manifesto, 1964. © mumok, museum



moderner kunst stiftung ludwig wien.







75



76

Fig. 4.3

Cover of Weibel/EXPORT, Bildkompendium Wiener



Aktionismus und Film (1970). Photograph by the author.

Fig. 4.4

Helen Chadwick, Piss Flowers, 1992, cast bronze and cellulose





lacquer, c.70 × 65 × 65 cm each. Courtesy Helen Chadwick Estate.





Photograph by Leeds Museums and Galleries (Henry Moore





Institute Archive).







Fig. 4.5

Maya Lin, Vietnam Veterans Memorial, Washington DC,



1982. Photograph by Andrei Pop, 2010.





74



78



80

Edward Payne, Ribera’s Grotesque Heads Fig.5.1

Manuel Alegre after José Maea, Portrait of Jusepe de Ribera,



late eighteenth century, engraving, from Retratos de los Españoles





Ilustres con un Epítome de sus Vidas, Imprenta Real,



Madrid, 1791.













Fig. 5.2

Jusepe de Ribera, Large Grotesque Head (state I), c.1622,





etching with some engraving on cheek, 21.5 ×14cm. The British





Museum, London.







Fig. 5.3

Jusepe de Ribera, Small Grotesque Head, 1622, etching,



14.2 × 11.1 cm. The British Museum, London.







87



88

Fig. 5.4

Jusepe de Ribera, Studies of Noses and Mouths (state I), c.1622,



etching, 14 × 21.6 cm. The British Museum, London.





Fig. 5.5

Jusepe de Ribera, The Martyrdom of Saint Bartholomew (state I),





1624, etching with some engraving, 31.4 × 24.1cm. The British





Museum, London.







86



89

92

li s t o f ill u s t r ati o n s

Fig. 5.6

Sir Anthony van Dyck, Emanuele Filiberto of Savoy, 1624, oil on



canvas, 126 × 99.6 cm. Dulwich Picture Gallery, London.





Fig. 5.7

Jusepe de Ribera, Magdalena Ventura with her Husband and



Child (The Bearded Woman), 1631, oil on canvas, 196×127cm.



Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid.







Fig. 5.8

Jusepe de Ribera, The Clubfooted Boy, 1642, oil on canvas,



164 × 93 cm. Musée du Louvre, Paris.



Fig. 5.9







95



97

Agostino or Annibale Carracci, Sheet of Studies, 1590s, pen and brown ink, 17.6 × 16.5 cm. The British Museum, London.



Fig. 5.10

Jusepe de Ribera, An Oriental Potentate Accompanied by his



Halberd Bearer, c.1625–30, point of the brush with carmine red





ink, possibly from cochineal, squared in pen and brown ink,





23 × 13.3 cm. The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles.

Fig. 5.11



93



99

101

Giuseppe Arcimboldo, Winter, 1563, oil on panel, 67×51cm. Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna.





Fig. 5.12

Jusepe de Ribera, Man in a Fantastic Hat, c.1630, pen and brown





ink with brown wash over some black chalk, 17×10.4cm.





Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia.





102

103

Frédérique Desbuissons, The Studio and the Kitchen Fig.6.1

Nadar, Nadar jury au Salon de 1857. Paris, Librairie Nouvelle, 1857,



p. 40. Bibliothèque historique de la Ville de Paris.





Fig. 6.2

André Gill, Gill-Revue n°1, 1868. Institut national d’histoire de



l’art, Bibliothèque, collections Jacques Doucet.





Fig. 6.3

Cham, ‘Le Salon pour rire’, Le Charivari, 19 May 1876. Institut





national d’histoire de l’art, Bibliothèque, collections





Jacques Doucet.









Fig. 6.4

Cham, ‘Salon de 1868’, Le Charivari, 31 May 1868. Institut national



d’histoire de l’art, Bibliothèque, collections Jacques Doucet.



Fig. 6.5

Cham, Le Salon de 1869 charivarisé. Paris, A. de Vresse, 1869.





Institut national d’histoire de l’art, Bibliothèque, collections





Jacques Doucet.

Fig. 6.6







108

109 111



112



113



113

Bertall, ‘Revue comique du Salon de peinture, de sculpture





d’architecture, etc., etc., etc.’, Journal pour rire n°78,





28 July 1849. Bibliothèque historique de la Ville de Paris.

Fig. 6.7

Gill, ‘Le Salon pour rire’, La Lune, 13 May 1866. Bibliothèque



historique de la Ville de Paris.



105





xi



xii

u g lin e s s

Fig. 6.8

Edouard Riou, ‘Costumes d’artistes’, Petit Journal pour rire n°492,



1865. Bibliothèque nationale de France.







Fig. 6.9

Amédée Pastelot, ‘La Photographomanie. Grande prophétie





pour l’année 1900’, Journal amusant n°350, 13 September





1862. Bibliothèque historique de la Ville de Paris.

Fig. 6.10

Cham, ‘Le Salon de 1847 illustré’, Le Charivari, 9 April 1847.





Institut national d’histoire de l’art, Bibliothèque, collections





Jacques Doucet.







Fig. 6.11

Cham, ‘Promenades à l’exposition’, Le Charivari, 4 August





1857. Institut national d’histoire de l’art, Bibliothèque,





collections Jacques Doucet.







115



116



117

Fig. 6.12

Japhet, Le Salon pour rire de 1883. Paris, A l’Imprimerie Nilson





et Cie, 1883. Institut national d’histoire de l’art, Bibliothèque,





collections Jacques Doucet.





Fig. 6.13

Stock, Stock-Album n°4, June 1870. Bibliothèque historique



de la Ville de Paris.









114



119



120

Kathryn Simpson, I’m Ugly Because You Hate Me Fig. 7.1

Oskar Kokoschka, Self-Portrait as a Warrior, 1909, unfired clay



painted with tempera, 36.5 × 31.5 × 19.5 cm, Museum of Fine Arts,



Boston, John H. and Ernestine A. Payne Fund, 60.958. Photograph



© 2013 Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

Fig. 7.2

Oskar Kokoschka, Der Sturm, 1911, lithographic poster,



70 × 46.5 cm. Albertina, Vienna.







124



138



146

Adele Tan, From Political Travesties to Aesthetic Justice Fig. 8.1

Teo Soh Lung, notebook sketches of the lizard in her cell,



undated. Artist’s collection.





Fig. 8.2

Teo Eng Seng, D Cell 1, 1987, plaster of paris, silver paint and shoe



polish, 38 × 25 × 7 cm (View 1). Artist’s collection.

Fig. 8.3

Teo Eng Seng, D Cell 1, 1987, plaster of paris, silver paint and shoe



polish, 38 × 25 × 7 cm (View 2). Artist’s collection.

Fig. 8.4

Teo Soh Lung, ‘I am OK’, pencil sketch on paper, 14 August 1987.



Artist’s collection.

Fig. 8.5

Teo Soh Lung, ‘The Interrogation: 21 May 1987’, pencil sketch on



paper, 30 May 1987. Artist’s collection.

Fig. 8.6

Teo Eng Seng, D Cell 1, 1987, plaster of paris, 26×14.5×4.3cm



(View of inner block). Artist’s collection.









148 148 149 150 151

li s t o f ill u s t r ati o n s

Fig. 8.7

Teo Eng Seng, D Cell 2, 1987, plaster of paris, silver paint and shoe



polish, 32 × 20 × 5 cm (View 1). Artist’s collection.



Fig. 8.8

Teo Eng Seng, D Cell 2, 1987, plaster of paris, silver paint and



shoe polish, 32 × 20 × 5 cm (View 2). Artist’s collection.

Fig. 8.9

Teo Eng Seng, Braving the Waves, 1989, ciment fondu,



26 × 30 × 4.5 cm (View 1). Artist’s collection.







152



154

Fig. 8.10

Teo Eng Seng, D Cell 3 – Confinement, 1987, plaster of paris, silver



paint and shoe polish, 21 × 17 × 9 cm (View 1). Artist’s collection.

Fig. 8.11

Teo Eng Seng, D Cell 3 – Confinement, 1987, plaster of paris, silver



paint and shoe polish, 21 × 17 × 9 cm (View 2). Artist’s collection.

Fig. 8.12

Teo Soh Lung, ‘Tribute to El Lissitzsky’, sketch on paper, undated.



Artist’s collection.











Fig. 8.13

Teo Soh Lung, ‘The Door Out’, sketch on paper, 30 August 1987.



Artist’s collection.









152

156 156 157



158

Fig.8.14

Teo Soh Lung, Beyond the Blue Gate: Recollections of a



Political Prisoner (Petaling Jaya: SIRD, 2010), cover design.

158

Andrei Pop, Can Beauty and Ugliness Coexist? Fig. 9.1

Francisco Goya, Si quebró el cantaro, 1799, etching, aquatint





and drypoint, 20.5 × 15.1 cm, Plate 25 of Los Caprichos. The





British Museum, London.







Fig. 9.2

Corinthian aryballos decorated with padded dancers,





c.620–600 bce, 6.7 × 6.2 cm. The British Museum, London.





© Trustees of the British Museum







169



177

Kassandra Nakas, Putrefied, Deliquescent, Amorphous Fig. 10.1

Ivan Albright, The Picture of Dorian Gray, 1943–4, oil on canvas,





216 × 106.7 cm. Gift of Ivan Albright, The Art Institute of Chicago.

Fig. 10.2

John Isaacs, Fat Man (The Matrix of Amnesia), 1998, mixed media.



Olbricht Collection, Berlin.









181 189

Odeta Žukauskienė, Orderly Ugliness, Anamorphosis and Visionary Worlds Fig. 11.1

Jurgis Baltrušaitis, Sketchbook drawing of Romanesque capitals.

Fig. 11.2

Jurgis Baltrušaitis, Sketchbook drawing after marginal



images in Gothic manuscripts.









Fig. 11.3

Jurgis Baltrušaitis, Sketchbook drawing of an allegorical head





of Carnival engraved by Giovanni Ambrogio Brambilla,





second half of the sixteenth century.



Fig. 11.4

Jurgis Baltrušaitis, Sketchbook drawing after a satirical



illustration by J. J. Grandville.







193 194



203



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Fig. 11.5

Jurgis Baltrušaitis, Sketchbook drawing after the portrait of



Saint Francis of Paola distorted into a cylindrical anamorphosis,







from J.-F. Niceron, Proposition III of La Perspective





curieuse (1638).



207

Fig. 11.6

Jurgis Baltrušaitis, Sketchbook drawing after Accolti’s



anamorphosis of an ear, from Lo inganno de gl’occhi (1625).

208









Fig. 11.7

Jurgis Baltrušaitis, Sketchbook drawing of optical instruments



illustrated in Gaspar Schott, Magia Universalis (1657–9).





212

List of Contributors Suzannah Biernoff is Lecturer in the Department of History of Art and Screen Media at Birkbeck, University of London. Her research has spanned medieval and modern periods: she is the author of Sight and Embodiment in the Middle Ages (2002), and her recent work on the cultural history of disfigurement has been supported by a Wellcome Trust Research Leave Award. Publications from this project have appeared in Visual Culture in Britain, Social History of Medicine and Photographies. Frédérique Desbuissons is Senior Lecturer in Art History at University of Reims Champagne-Ardenne, and currently detached as Conseiller Scientifique at the National Institute for the History of Art in Paris. Her research focuses on art and food culture in nineteenth-century France. Gretchen E. Henderson is Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in the Humanities at MIT. Deformity suffuses the form and content of her critical and creative work. Her books include Galerie de Difformité, On Marvellous Things Heard and The House Enters the Street. She is currently working on Ugliness: A Cultural History for Reaktion Books. Kassandra Nakas teaches Art History at the Institute for Art History and Aesthetics, Berlin University of Arts. Her current research focuses on the liquid, and liquefaction, as material and metaphorical topics in art and theory since 1800. Further fields of interest are the aesthetics of production in modern and contemporary art, the history and theory of photography, modern and contemporary art and theory, and American and German art of the 1980s. Edward Payne studied Art History at The Courtauld Institute of Art, specialising in seventeenth-century Spanish and Neapolitan paintings, prints and drawings, in particular the art of Jusepe de Ribera. He served as Visiting Lecturer at The Courtauld, and has organised a number of international scholarly conferences. Edward held a Rome Award at the British School at Rome in 2009, and he currently holds the Moore Curatorial Fellowship in Drawings and Prints at the Morgan Library & Museum.

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Andrei Pop received his PhD from Harvard University, and is Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Basel. He has published on Henry Fuseli and Emma Hamilton in The Art Bulletin and Art History respectively; essays on James Ensor and Ludwig Wittgenstein have appeared in edited volumes. Together with Mechtild Widrich he is completing an English translation of Karl Rosenkranz’s Aesthetics of Ugliness (1853). His monograph, Neopaganism, is forthcoming from Oxford University Press. Kathryn Simpson is an interdisciplinary PhD candidate at Concordia University, with MAs in Theory and Criticism (The University of Western Ontario) and Art History (York University). Her dissertation, Making Monsters: Strategies of Ugliness in Early-Twentieth-Century Viennese SelfPortraiture, examines ugly self-portraits by Richard Gerstl, Oskar Kokoschka, and Egon Schiele in their cultural, aesthetic and psychological context. Kathryn has published in Revue d’art canadienne (Canadian Art Review), Art History, Locus Suspectus, Journal of Art Historiography and C Magazine. Adele Tan received her PhD in Art History from The Courtauld Institute of Art and is currently Curator at the National Art Gallery Singapore, where she recently organised the symposium titled ‘What Makes a Great Art Museum: Contending with Southeast Asian Modernities and Art’. Her research focuses on contemporary art in China and Southeast Asia, with a special interest in performative practices and new media. She was assistant editor of Third Text and currently a member of the International Association of Art Critics (AICA) Singapore. Her articles have appeared in PAJ, Broadsheet, Yishu, ARTIT and Third Text, among others. Brandon Taylor is Professor Emeritus of History of Art at Southampton University and a visiting tutor at the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art, Oxford University. His books include Sculpture and Psychoanalysis (2006), Elements of Abstraction: Space, Line and Interval in Modern British Art (2005), Collage: The Making of Modern Art (2004), Art for the Nation: Exhibitions and the London Public (1999) and Art Today (1995). He has held research positions at Yale University, The Institute of Art History, Prague, and the Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles. He is currently completing a book on the legacy of Constructivism. Mechtild Widrich is Postdoctoral Fellow and Lecturer at the Federal Institute of Technology (ETH), Zurich. She works on the intersection of contemporary art and architecture, on ephemeral practices and on aesthetic theory. She received her PhD from the MIT Department of Architecture in 2009 and has

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published in Grey Room, Log, The Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians (JSAH), PAJ, TDR and Art Journal. Her book Performative Monuments is forthcoming from Manchester University Press. Odeta Žukauskienė is Senior Researcher in the Department of Comparative Culture Studies at the Lithuanian Culture Research Institute. She teaches in the Department of Humanities at the Vilnius Academy of Fine Arts, Kaunas Faculty. She is the author of The Metamorphoses of Art Forms: Comparative Art Studies by Focillon and Baltrušaitis (2006) and has published on cross-cultural exchange, dialogues and memory in art history and contemporary art.





Introduction Rethinking Ugliness Andrei Pop and Mechtild Widrich

Throughout its history, ugliness has been associated with a whole series of negative terms – imperfection, insignificance, failure – even non-existence, to which it was consigned, with evil, by philosopher and theologian Augustine of Hippo around 400 ce. But isn’t ugliness really just the opposite of beauty? And would that be a positive opposite with a content of its own, or just the absence of beauty? Could beauty itself be defined as nothing more than the absence of ugliness? Even if it should turn out, as Augustine thought, that ugliness doesn’t really exist – or, with Pierre Bourdieu, that it is only an ideological fiction used to enforce the judgements of elite consumers – there remains the fact that people think it really exists and have done so, in different ways of course, around the world for thousands of years. This at least requires explanation. A humble example can indicate the stakes of such an inquiry. On 5 January 2009, Sasha Obama, younger daughter of then recently elected Barack Obama, surprised the assembled journalists gathered to document her first day at Washington’s exclusive Sidwell Friends School by carrying on her backpack an ‘Uglydoll’. The toy, a turquoise stuffed animal representing a stylised monster with two protruding incisors, was a marketing phenomenon even before this ‘official’ endorsement. Obama’s decision to carry it made news and provoked much public speculation about the emulation of political personages in matters of fashion. Yet the representational connotations of her act were complex indeed. That the first non-white ‘First Daughter’ should carry Babo’s Bird (Babo means fool in Korean, but can be a term of affection), allaying her anxieties concerning both school life and media scrutiny through the perhaps talismanic function of an attractive monster, is neither accidental nor simple.1 Indeed, the company that makes Uglydolls, 





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founded by an American man and a Korean woman, is called Pretty Ugly, and announces on its web page that ‘in the Uglydoll universe “ugly” means unique and different’. All of this indicates a high level of theoretical awareness, in contemporary life, of the problems involved in identifying something as ugly, and in valuing it as such. Besides being current, ugliness is very much alive in the history of art: from ritual invocations of mythic monsters to the scare tactics of the early twentieth-century avant-garde, and from the cabinet of curiosities to the identity politics of today, ugliness has been every bit as active as beauty, and often much more of a reality, though less often a goal. Studies are needed that formulate not just a unitary countertradition to the canon of beauty, but help us understand why humans possess an aesthetic term that seems to negate all they want from their objects and practices. The book thus addresses ugliness primarily, though not exclusively, from an art historical perspective. In order to make the assumptions of such an inquiry clear, it may be useful to recapitulate the most significant episodes in the history of Western thinking about ugliness. It is no overstatement to say that theoretically, ugliness has been the foil of beauty throughout the pre-modern era. One of the first authors to explicitly advance theories of beauty and ugliness, Plato, embodies many persistent attitudes while proposing radically different and even incompatible models. In the early, ‘aporetic’ dialogues, Socrates inquires and eventually fails to find definitions for concepts like virtue, goodness, and beauty; in the Hippias Major, which comes just after this period, the search for a definition runs aground on the observation that the same objects and persons are both beautiful and ugly, as a beautiful pot is in relation to a person, and a beautiful person is in relation to a god.2 In the major work of Plato’s late middle period, the Symposium or Party, a whole series of then-current opinions about love and beauty are affectionately exhibited and dissected, before Socrates advances what may be thought the genuine Platonic view: beauty is love, or more accurately desire, which extends from the animal instinct to procreate, through successive purifications of the concept, through sexual love and intellectual friendship, to the highest mode of experiencing beauty and love, reflection on the ideas themselves. This has immediate practical consequences, since the beautiful object of love is protected or

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propagated by the lover. Consistent with this, ugliness is defined as that which prevents conception, that ‘in which one does not propagate’. This erotic theory of beauty and ugliness, which has persisted in Western aesthetics up to the present (Elaine Scarry’s recent work insisting that love of beautiful things makes us just toward things and fellow humans), also has some affinities with modern biological attempts to explain aesthetics in terms of the social life of animals. Be that as it may, Plato is notorious for banning artists from the ideal city (Republic); and in the late dialogue Philebus, while still distinguishing beauty from pleasure, utility, and goodness, he advances a more ‘classicist’ view of what makes things beautiful, namely proportion and order. Can this be reconciled with the anarchic effects of beauty as love, which the Socrates of the Symposium describes as a hungry, barefooted, restless being? As classical art gave way in late Antiquity to the wilder, more fantastic image production of Hellenism, and as the elite drinking groups of the Symposium gave way to the realities of imperial politics, the theory of beauty and ugliness had to shake off any such confident identifications between what is desired and what exists. Plotinus, writing in Greek in third-century Rome, still advocates a Platonic ascent to contemplation of pure beauty; but he finds no comfort in the thought of beauty as proportion. Two evil thoughts, he points out, may be just as ‘symmetrical’. Beauty remains form, but not in the sense of composition: a rock or a sound can be beautiful, though simple, because their ideas determine them perfectly. In the case of human souls, stuck between the divine world of mind and the fallen world of matter, beauty is autonomy in the sense of self-possession. Ugliness is memorably compared with a body rolling in mud; what is problematic is supposed to be the self-willed admixture with a foreign material that limits the agent’s independence qua soul; accordingly, the task is one of purification, and the Platonic erotic epic becomes one of salvation from the world of matter. A religious Platonism owing more to Plotinus than to Plato dominates, with some variations, medieval Christian and Islamic thought; with the Renaissance, this theory is emphatically brought down to earth. Artists also, for the first time, come to the forefront in articulating aesthetic concepts: without challenging the traditional subordination of ugliness to beauty, Leonardo da Vinci revolutionised their application by commenting that ‘beauty with ugliness seem more





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potent one through the other’.3 The complementary use of beauty and ugliness in art recommended here has important connections with the practice of chiaroscuro and other Renaissance techniques for representing the ephemeral and the ‘low’, aspects of reality that a classical theory of beauty would have relegated to the ugly or even the non-existent. Indeed, when two centuries later, Gottfried Leibniz justifies our world as the ‘best possible world’, he compares the emergence of good from evil with that of light from darkness in chiaroscuro painting.4 The metaphorical character of such analogies between aesthetic and moral terms, disconnected from a fixed religious system of values (as in the Middle Ages, when the Devil was both ugly and laughable), led to a crisis in the sceptical eighteenth century. It became clear that the analogies were subjectively valid if at all; that judgements of beauty and ugliness varied with place and time, that even elite male Europeans, conceived as the default audience, did not agree in all cases. These apparent uncertainties could, however, be reclaimed by a psychological aesthetics: the word ‘aesthetics’ as a science of the sensible came into use (in Alexander Baumgarten’s 1750 treatise of the same name), and a broader, historically informed study of ‘Taste’ that should encompass not just the ideal poles of beauty and ugliness (understood usually in materialist terms as pleasure and pain), but also the pleasant, the disgusting, the ordinary, the terrible. A modern reader confronting the plethora of ‘treatises on taste’ by German, French, English, and especially Scottish authors, will be both reassured and disoriented: the authors seem to treat the matter of beauty and ugliness not as timeless ideals, but as factual matters to be understood in sociological, political, and anthropological terms. On the other hand, the very terms under analysis have aged and will seem to us now exotic and peculiar to the period. A case in point is the eighteenth-century craze for diagnosing and experiencing ‘the Sublime’. A translation of what the first- or second-century literary critic Longinus had called a high style (Peri hypsos, ‘About the elevated’), the sublime entered modern English in Bishop Robert Lowth’s 1753 Lectures on the Sacred Poetry of the Hebrews, the first in a long line of texts to interpret the Old Testament as an aesthetically powerful but culturally alien text (Longinus in fact, though pagan, had already quoted the beginning of Genesis as an instance of the sublime). The sublime is physiologised by a young Edmund Burke,

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in his 1757 Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful, as a sensation of fear or discomfort evoked by the indistinct and the huge; it is applied to nations, mores, and even gender by Kant (1764, Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and the Sublime, published in English in 1799), and finally, by Kant in his major work on aesthetics, the Critique of Judgement (1790), still faintly following Burke, opposed to beauty as the second major aesthetic category, signifying an instable, threatening reality that evokes in the spectator emotions of fearful respect. The sublime as an extreme almost replaces ugliness altogether, overlapping ambiguously with beauty. One can see the problematic marginalisation of ugliness in the Enlightenment discourse on taste most forcefully in Kant. Of ugly objects such as furies, diseases or disasters of war, Kant asserts that it is the business of art to render them beautiful (Critique of Judgement §48); he still insists on this necessity in his last major treatment of the subject, Anthropology from a Pragmatic Standpoint (1798). But can art thus transform anything? In the same section of the Critique in which he insists on art’s beautifying function, Kant presents another category, disgust, which does the opposite: on encountering a disgusting scene, even in a work of art, the spectator is so disturbed that he regards it as real, and by implication, as non-art. Thus we are offered a trichotomy. Between the overwhelming force of the sublime (found in nature, mathematics, etc.), the beautiful representation of the ugly in art, and the disgusting (taken as real, and thus anaesthetic), ugliness as an aesthetic fact becomes hard to see and even harder to explain. Given this significant omission, it is no accident that the Romantic revolt against rationalism, appropriating Kant for a subjective, vitalist philosophy of art and politics, should rally around the reality of ugliness as one of its articles of faith. Friedrich Schiller, in one of the famous events in the history of letter writing (7 July 1797), expressed to Goethe discomfort with the domination of art by the theory of beauty: without ugliness, he felt, neither ancient art not the characteristic or individual in modern art and life can be understood. This equation of ugliness with individuality, with the differentia that make each person and artwork what it is and no other, might be classical; but as endorsement of the pursuit of ugliness in art, and of its tolerability in persons, it works against the whole aesthetic tradition from Plato to Kant.





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The avant-garde celebration of ugliness, which Schiller may be thought to have inaugurated, was lost on a generation of academic philosophers. Hegel, the dominant theoretician of the first half of the nineteenth century, in his posthumously published Aesthetics defines beauty, without discussing ugliness, as the sensible manifestation of the Idea (Part 1, ch.1, Section 3). In his lengthy historical account (Aesthetics, Part 2), ugliness rears its head only as a symptom of the dissonance between object and idea, whether in the ‘crude’ pre-Christian monuments of India and Egypt, or in the post-Classical ‘inwardness’ of Christian art. These dissonances are finally given room of their own (and a book) in the Aesthetics of Ugliness published in 1853 by Karl Rosenkranz, a follower of Hegel (not his student, as is sometimes said) and successor of Kant in the chair of philosophy in Königsberg. Writing just four years before Charles Baudelaire would scandalise Parisian censors with the loving, classicist renderings of the demimonde in Les fleurs du mal (1857), Rosenkranz describes his deeply ambivalent treatise as a ‘work of devotion’ comparable to street cleaning. At the same time, he resisted the friendly demand of contemporaries like Gottfried Keller to attach also an aesthetics of the beautiful: not only does the world have enough of that, Rosenkranz replied, but the most distinctive features of the modern world, from the metropolis to the newspaper caricature, participate more in ugliness than in its opposite. The theory that Rosenkranz proposed, commonly misunderstood as ‘idealist’ or ‘Hegelian’, asserts that ugliness is the active negation of beauty. The theories of ugliness then available, from materiality to aesthetic incompetence to evil, are shown to fall short of the mark: ugliness may be a sign of all of these things, but cannot be the same as them, since, as Rosenkranz put it, the devil can make himself beautiful if needs be. Ugliness is, following the ‘taste’ tradition, a matter of human judgement, from the revulsion felt on seeing an unfamiliar animal (Rosenkranz thinks poorly of giraffes) to the self-conscious turning away from good of an evil agent. This makes clear the social nature of ugliness, which earlier theorists, like Lavater, had to explain through mysterious communications of morals to the face. While remaining captive to many of his century’s racial and gender prejudices, Rosenkranz could thus celebrate Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) for its insight into how ugliness is given or attributed to the monster, first through its

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creator’s act of bringing it to life, which sets its disparate body parts into conflict, and then through the horrified reactions of the humans it meets, which turn the peaceful creature into a violent nihilist. The persistent ambiguity between ugliness as a social phenomenon and ugliness as the symptom of some underlying reality haunts the discussion to the present day. Shelley herself may have been aesthetically channelling insights from her mother Mary Wollstonecraft’s classic of feminist sociology, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), which argues that social standards of beauty, like those of ugliness and vice, have lost their relation to true virtue and morality. The feminist critique of the use of beauty, and eventually of the category itself, remains central to the study of ugliness in modernity, and in this book. Modernity is indeed the key target of any analysis of ugliness, thanks to its aesthetically challenging output. Modernist art may be difficult to grasp: yet the ugliness in it is not. ‘Let us go then, you and I, / Where the evening is spread out against the sky / Like a patient etherised upon a table;’ thus begins T.S. Eliot’s Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock. A romantic lyric of utmost musicality turns within one line to the image of a surgical patient unconscious on the operating table. Kant’s insistence that art can make anything beautiful may be helpful here: ugliness in Eliot is strictly a function of the subject matter, which the modernist wants to handle without idealisation, while beauty is achieved in the form or the performance. But such an explanation raises more questions than it answers: for why should the honest or unadorned or visceral treatment of an ugly reality be transmuted into aesthetic beauty? Theodor Adorno, in his posthumously published Aesthetic Theory (1970), devoted himself to precisely this question: the ‘ugliness’ of modernist beauty. He advances a speculative anthropological hypothesis, according to which the archaic is the ugly, and is overcome by being turned to beauty by each subsequent state of civilisation. But Adorno also notes that the unjust, barbaric (that is, ‘politically ugly’) state of the world demands an art able to deal with it, and that this art, modernism, has come to its austerity through a purely formal development, through the refinement of its means until all pleasant descriptive associations (what Kant calls ‘dependent beauty’) are burnt off. In these disparate claims on behalf of modernism, ugliness, and their respective politics, the question of representation and its relation to





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aesthetics is unavoidable. Can we even speak of beauty and ugliness with reference to artworks that claim not to represent anything, or only their own means of production, or only the second-hand references of the mass culture they belong to? It is perhaps no accident that, at the end of the 1980s, as if in response to the exhaustion of mass imagery in pop art, the coolly contextual exploration of art world institutions in conceptual art, and the ideologically loaded return to painting of the neo-expressionists, an ‘Abject Art’ overtook the art market and its theoretical organs. Visceral, direct, and cannily publicised, abject art employed ‘low’ bodily products and their simulacra, from faecal matter and blood to sexual fluids, to suggest deformed or ostensibly mistreated bodies. This might sound like a straightforward return to representation, with some relation to the shock tactics of high modernists like Eliot, but abject art was usually discussed as a radical break with modernism. Avoiding negative aesthetic discourse (‘the ugly’) in favour of a psychoanalytic language of trauma (the ‘abject’ Mother of Julia Kristeva, who returns to haunt a subject shaped by language and ideology), abject art sought a shock value meant to break through contingent cultural significations to put spectators and artists in touch with psychological and political realities which the dominant visual culture had no means of representing. Through its attempts to get beyond ‘mere’ aesthetic categories, abject art in fact brought issues of aesthetic experience implicit in the ideas of the beautiful and the ugly, and long buried under the weight of aesthetic discourse, to the foreground. Though seldom noted, the most prominent representatives of the ‘Return of Beauty’ in recent theory, Dave Hickey and Elaine Scarry, share the concerns if not to the rhetoric of abjection. Hickey’s paradigm case of the sensual, coercive, subversive pull of beauty are Caravaggio and Robert Mapplethorpe. Scarry, whose 1999 book On Beauty and Being Just finds goodness and beauty in the work of Homer, Matisse, and her garden, came to international attention with The Body in Pain (1985), a classic of poststructuralist literary criticism, in which an analysis of torture as the rhetorical exploitation of pain precedes analyses of Marx, war reportage, and aesthetic phenomena from Greek tragedy to Francis Bacon. Attention to this text shows that Scarry’s views remained consistent; she did not begin as an ‘avant-garde’ pain theorist and end as a ‘conservative’ beauty theorist, for the ethical dimension of

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experience drives both books. It is helpful to read what Scarry has to say about beauty in The Body in Pain: ‘The naturally existing external world – whose staggering powers and beauty need not be rehearsed here – is wholly ignorant of the “hurtability” of human beings’.5 The distinction between the indifferent ‘natural world’ and human beings with their subjective fears, delights, and aesthetic categories is questioned in Scarry’s subsequent work on beauty to yield political and moral insights about how humans respond to the world and to each other. Nevertheless, the insistence on positive aesthetic experience only (as if the experience of ugliness were necessarily one of pain) makes Scarry’s work on beauty less convincing than it might otherwise be. Like the eighteenth-century theorists of taste, Scarry might be thought to prefer a world that divides aesthetically into the beautiful and the ordinary. But an aesthetic theory that makes no room for ugliness cannot be any more complete than an ethics indifferent to evil, or a political theory unconcerned with injustice, as Rosenkranz put it. The theoretical position of ugliness today thus remains ambiguous: in Elaine Scarry and Theodor Adorno, as in Karl Rosenkranz and Mary Shelley, the ugly is neither mere nature nor culture, neither purely in the mind nor in the world, neither a solid fact nor mere ungrounded judgement. Its position between idea and reality seems to constitute its interest. And that is no narrowly contemporary insight. It is palpable already in Plato’s Parmenides, a late text often regarded as a theoretical self-critique. Pressed to state his position on the existence of ideas for ‘ridiculous things’ like ‘hair, mud, dirt’, Socrates replies irritably that they are nothing but what they seem, and that giving them more thought would mire him in a ‘bottomless pit of nonsense’. To this, the elderly Parmenides replies patiently that the true philosopher does not disregard ‘even the lowest things’, which in this case reveal that, however particular and ephemeral their objects may be, we could not think about them if they did not possess ideas of exactly the same character as ‘the good’, or ‘the beautiful’, or ‘man’. Ugliness as such is not mentioned by Parmenides. But it follows that ‘the ugly’ is more than some piece of detritus, and less than an eternal truth: it is one of the tools by which we organise the world, for better or for worse. This introduction and the following essays see themselves as investigations of these tools.



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The book is divided into three sections: the first, on the Politics of Ugliness, introduces ugliness in its relation to society and public life more generally. The socially constructed, normative nature of judgements of ugliness is of prime importance here, as are the uses of ugliness, whether strategic, satirical, or activist, which question these hierarchies. The second section, on the Experience of Ugliness, deals with the often overwhelming thoughts, feelings, and sensations that arise in the beholder, the ramifications of which extend into the political, social, and moral spheres. There are, as one would expect, similarities and echoes in these experiences and their discussion, but there is no one universal, transcendental experience of ugliness, any more than there is of beauty, or the good. The third section, on the Theory of Ugliness, discusses the way theorists and theories, art historians and art history, artists and art, define and think through ugliness. The relation of beauty to ugliness, and of both these terms to concerns beyond the aesthetic, is crucial here, and indeed throughout the volume. Gretchen Henderson opens ‘The Politics of Ugliness’ with the eighteenth-century phenomenon of ‘Ugly Face Clubs’, British drinking societies whose members selected themselves according to their lack of beauty. Was this self-defamation empowering, even as it confirmed existing prejudice? Henderson boldly pursues these clubs across the Atlantic to the United States, and across the centuries to the present, as they shade into and clash with the more self-conscious techniques of disability activism. She shows that, while criteria of facial beauty and ugliness remained indispensable to social stratification, they were not immutably mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion respectively: ugliness could serve the members of Ugly Face Clubs as a reason for conviviality, even respect, as embodied in their playful honorific, ‘Your Deformity …’ In ‘The Face of War’, Suzannah Biernoff compares the significance of living with facial injuries in the famous wedding photograph of an Iraq War veteran by Nina Berman with images and practices of facial reconstruction pursued in Britain during the First World War. This startling juxtaposition allows her to highlight the historically contingent nature of response to ‘stigmata’, linking identity and facial legibility as functions of a public and private discourse about what makes us human.

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In ‘Picasso and the Psychoanalysts’, Brandon Taylor practices a novel approach to the modernists, in which popular complaints that modern art is ugly, incompetent, or pathological are analysed alongside the sympathetic efforts of Melanie Klein and other psychoanalysts to make sense of the same phenomena in terms of social disintegration. Taylor charts the fortunes of the psychoanalytic theory of social ugliness, seeing it dissolve in scepticism. With Ernst Gombrich, we reach a psychologically inclined art historian who thinks modern art no longer depends on the neuroses of individuals; its ugliness is thus in a sense autonomous. In ‘The “Ugliness” of the Avant-garde’, Mechtild Widrich examines the curious shift that continuously occurs in modernist art practice: an object or movement is first received as shockingly ugly, but gradually comes to define ‘beauty’ for future artists. The essay asks if ‘ugliness’ of the avant-garde is simply, as formalists such as Roger Fry has claimed, a matter of education, and thus historically mutable, or a recalcitrant aesthetic fact, as Arthur Danto has argued. On the basis of the violent but visually striking work of the Viennese Actionists, Widrich shows that both beauty and ugliness are part of these artists’ aesthetic programme, and historical effects of audience response. Inaugurating the section on ‘The Experience of Ugliness’, Edward Payne, in ‘Ribera’s Grotesque Heads’, examines in detail two engravings of men suffering from tumours of the neck, situated somewhere between portrait and physiognomic caricature, by the Spanish Baroque painter Jusepe de Ribera. Payne shows that the figures resonate not just with the villains in Ribera’s religious scenes, but also with allegories of the senses, comic fantasies and the anatomical curiosities that were avidly collected by Spanish viceroys in Italy. No single theory of the ‘grotesque’ can encompass these deceptively straightforward prints, for they function almost as generic summations or allegories of the curiosity that drove the production of such images. With ‘The Studio and the Kitchen’ Frédérique Desbuissons gives a novel account of nineteenth-century newspaper criticism of painting through the trope of ‘culinary ugliness’, wherein a disliked artwork is identified, fatally, with a dish. Whether food is perceived as nauseating or appetising, the net result of such comparisons, Desbuissons argues, is to identify painting with unregenerate materiality. This implicit ‘materialist



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theory’ of painting, and ugliness, also explains why artists obsessed with the raw matter of their painting could turn the food comparison into an affirmation of modernist principles. ‘I’m Ugly because You Hate Me’: the direct address of Kathryn Simpson’s title suggests the uncomfortable encounter with the other that informed the fin-de-siècle psychology of ugliness. In her essay on Oskar Kokoschka’s self-portraits, Simpson makes the case that the ugliness reputed to inhere in the works and their sitter was almost entirely the accomplishment of the artist, who promoted himself tirelessly as an avant-garde agitator by equating audience hostility with subjective perception of ugliness. Simpson finds a surprising correlation between Kokoschka’s practice and the empathy theory of philosopher and psychologist Theodor Lipps, who made beauty and ugliness functions of emotional attachment and repulsion. Bringing the experience of ugliness up to date and across the globe, Adele Tan investigates an episode in the career of the Singaporean sculptor Teo Eng Seng, who responded to his sister’s imprisonment in the late 1980s with a set of small, enigmatic black plaster objects which seem to address the physical space of a prison cell and the subjective state of the inmate from the point of view of a family member not granted access to crucial facts. By an analysis of the way Teo casts negative space in his ‘cell’ sculptures, and by comparing these to the sketches his sister Soh Lung made in her prison cell, Tan points to how an intolerable reality can enter abstract art, allowing ugliness to become a subject for reflection rather than mere propagandistic ‘content’. The final section, concerned with ‘The Theory of Ugliness’, moves from philosophy to artistic practice and the writing of art history. Andrei Pop charts a difficult terrain: can beauty and ugliness coexist? Starting with Alexander Nehamas’ recent theory of beauty, which makes place for the aesthetic shock of Goya’s Caprichos and the television serial Homicide, Pop returns to Nehamas’ reading of Plato, who over two thousand years ago argued that beauty and ugliness must coexist. The relative nature of both ideas, as it emerges from this analysis, is suggestive for the social theory of aesthetics, as well as for understanding why ugliness can be so aesthetically striking. The poetics of a complementary strand of ugliness discourse, ‘Putrefied, Deliquescent, Amorphous’, concerns Kassandra Nakas in

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her wide-raging genealogy of concepts of the liquid seen as aesthetically and morally challenging. Beginning with the ethical aesthetics of Dorian Gray, and backtracking through turn-of-the-century Symbolism, Salvador Dalì’s renegade Surrealism, and the pathology of art in Max Nordau and Friedrich Nietzsche, Nakas isolates the worry with the liquid as one over a bleeding together of form and content, and ultimately of ethics and aesthetics. The running together of these concepts results in criticism that often responds with moral outrage to the formal traits of ‘deliquescence’. In ‘Orderly Ugliness’, Odeta Žukauskienė rereads FrenchLithuanian art historian Jurgis Baltrušaitis’s innovative studies of anamorphosis – the practice of stretching perspective to produce visual puzzles – finding in anamorphosis a strategy of ‘making ugly’ in accordance with strict rules of visual discipline. The visionary worlds which result, and which Baltrušaitis traced from Mannerist painting to the distorted reflections in a skyscraper, are continuous with our own visual habits, and with the mimetic illusions that dominate the Western artistic tradition since the Renaissance. Given the breadth of the essays, it is worth observing that certain patterns emerge across the historical and methodological variety. One is the increasingly precise historical articulation of the ‘social construction’ theory of aesthetics, according to which words like ‘beautiful’ and ‘ugly’, and the discourses to which they belong, to say nothing of the bodies and objects which they are applied, are primarily means of social control, shifting with the political and class structures which give rise to them. Within this framework, many of the essays challenge the simplistic topdown imprinting of aesthetic ideals on passive objects: just as often, an experience of certain images, faces, and things leads to fictive distinctions (like that between conventional perspective and anamorphosis) with no attendant social distinction. Nor is ugliness always the negative term of the pair: the enthusiasm for self-identification as ugly (Henderson, Simpson), the entwinement of ugliness and beauty (Pop, Žukauskienė), the willed production of repellent form (Nakas, Payne, Widrich), the emphasis on ugliness as a symptom of political and ethical strife (Taylor, Tan), and the aesthetisation of the real (Biernoff, Desbuissons) complicate hierarchical interpretation of ugliness as aesthetically subordinate to beauty.



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The book concludes with an annotated bibliography and three definitions of ugliness, spanning over a century, by Denis Diderot, Bernard Bolzano, and Vernon Lee. These definitions are meant less as final words than as starting points for rethinking ugliness. The whole volume is dedicated to this venture.



1



The Ugly Face Club: A Case Study in the Tangled Politics and Aesthetics of Deformity Gretchen E. Henderson

Should true Proportion e’ery Mortal Grace, And Simitry be seen in e’ery Face: Beauty no longer would be thought Divine; Nor would its Charms with half the Lustre shine …1 Tetrum ante omnia vultum –

(‘Before all things, an ugly face.’)2

Contemporary with William Hogarth’s Analysis of Beauty (1753), ‘Ye Ugly Face Clubb’ of Liverpool, England, offers a compelling case study in deformity as a practice of social exclusion and aesthetic inclusion (Fig. 1.1).3 While short-lived, lasting only the decade from 1743–54, this fraternity contributes to a longer lineage of Ugly Clubs and indirectly reflects a persisting crosscurrent between notions of ugliness and beauty, form and deformity, and the wide gray area between these binaries. By situating the Ugly Face Club in the context of historic and artistic depictions of ugliness, alongside period dissent toward the club’s seemingly physiognomic and caricatured style of discourse, this article engages recent criticism about eighteenth-century strategies of laughter that illuminate the intersecting histories of deformity and ridicule. Viewed through the bifocals of art history and disability studies, the Ugly Face Club becomes a potent symbol of both the defamation and self-empowering appropriation of deformity, in the eighteenth century and beyond, as variations of Ugly Clubs emigrate to America and to this day haunt our cultural imagination: with recent revivals in Liverpool, as well as in Germany and Italy, and in the author’s own aesthetic collaborative project that adopts some of the form and content of the Club under the guise of a contemporary Galerie de Difformité. 17



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My introduction to the Ugly Face Club began with one of the only remaining accounts: a slim, olive-coloured volume whose cover bears a gold-leafed human face, bodiless with disproportioned eyes, a somewhat bulbous nose, and open mouth – almost sticking out its tongue. Published in 1912, this volume of Liverpool’s extant club papers was edited by a bookseller named Edward Howell ‘from the original MS. in the collection of the late Joseph Mayer, Esq., of Bebington, Cheshire’.4 I have yet to fathom the circumstances that led to Mayer’s ownership of the papers and to Howell’s reprinting, but Howell states that his edited manuscript is far from complete, noting a particular practice ‘by the members of Ugly Clubs destroying all documentary evidence of their natural gifts; for even in this MS. many pages are missing, whether by accident or design is open to conjecture’ – a practice to which I will return. Regardless of their incompleteness, these hundred-odd pages suggest some sense of the club’s mission, proclaiming that this ‘Most Honourable and Facetious Society of Ugly Faces’ consisted of a fraternity of bachelors each ‘out of the way in his Phiz’, who banded together to satirise their physical deformities. Following motley rules (for instance, fining members who married), their fellowship resembles a bestiary, with members described as ‘shark’, ‘pig’, ‘eagle’, ‘cat’, ‘camel’, ‘monkey’, ‘cod’, ‘hedgehog’, ‘tortoise’, ‘badger’, and other animals – with much ado about noses. The members were some of Liverpool’s well-to-do: mostly merchants, as well as clergy, doctors, sea-captains, even the architect of the Town Hall, John Wood. The surviving papers also evoke a lineage of distinguished ugly forebears ‘who were all as eminently remarkable for their Ugly Grotesk Phizzes as for their several Great Abilities and Extensive Knowledge’, including Homer, Alexander, Aesop, Socrates, St. Paul, and Cromwell. In the clubbing climate that characterised eighteenth-century Britain, the Ugly Face Club was not exceptional in its activities, which revolved around meetings for merry-making, singing songs, and occasionally dining.5 Historian Peter Clark notes that in this period, ‘the image and concept of the voluntary society increasingly penetrated every nook and cranny of British social and cultural life’.6 While estimates are difficult to make, approximately 25,000 different clubs and societies may have met in the English-speaking world during the eighteenth century, with over 130 types just in the British Isles, ranging from clubs devoted to



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social benefit, education, art, literature, debating, gambling, horticulture, medicine, science, music, professions, neighbourhoods, ethnicity, sport, philanthropy, politics, ‘together with a bewildering array of other more or less obscure organisations’.7 The wide range of early modern clubs and societies were often restricted to men but, as Clark observes, also ‘served as a vector for new ideas, new values, new kinds of social alignment, and forms of national, regional, and local identity’.8 Like the Ugly Face Club, many societies were short-lived and left few documentary traces other than miscellaneous external references in correspondence, newspapers, sermons, and ephemera. For the scholar digging up a club’s remains, further complications arise as surviving materials often are difficult to date, are strongly weighted towards organisations linked to the elite, and represent varied kinds of association that make the word ‘club’ itself difficult to define – especially given the often satirical, sometimes even fictional, nature of the reputed club. As its name suggests, the Ugly Face Club’s theoretical allegiance was physiognomic, during a period when the ancient pseudoscience was regaining popularity. Correlations between physical and psychological



Advertisement for an Ugly Face Club anniversary celebration, 1806, reprinted in Edward Howell, ed., Ye Ugly Face Clubb, Leverpoole, 1743–53.

Fig.1.1



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states derived in part from Giovanni della Porta’s ideas of animalhuman parallels (1586) and Charles Le Brun’s treatise on the expression of passions (1698), which Johann Caspar Lavater built upon in his Essays on Physiognomy (1775–8), wherein he claimed: ‘Beauty and ugliness have a strict connection, with the moral constitution of the Man. In proportion as he is morally good, he is handsome; and ugly, in proportion as he is morally bad’.9 While Lavater claimed it is not ‘that virtue is the only cause of beauty, and that ugliness is the effect of vice alone’, he believed ‘that virtue beautifies, and vice renders a man ugly’, and that ugliness passes between generations.10 In The Analysis of Beauty (1753), Hogarth specifically contrasted physiognomy to his own view, writing in his chapter dedicated ‘Of the Face’: But least I should be thought to lay too great a stress on outward shew, like a physiognomist, take this with you, that it is acknowledg’d there are so many different causes which produce the same kind of movements and appearances of the features, and so many thwartings by accidental shapes in the make of faces, that the old adage, fronti nulla fides, will ever stand its ground upon the whole; and for very wise reasons nature hath thought fit it should.11

Hogarth addressed debates in the art academy by criticising the ‘poor artist’ who knew only to imitate ‘more perfect works’ who ‘fancies himself a nature-mender; not considering, that even in…the meanest of her works, [Nature] is never wholly destitute of such lines of beauty and other delicacies’.12 At the time, Hogarth’s serpentine line was denounced by critics as his ‘Line of Deformity’ and ‘The Anti-line of Beauty’, and attacked in caricature like Paul Sandby’s Puggs Graces Etched from his Original Daubing (1753–4), which depicted Hogarth painting monstrously deformed women in order to conform to his Line. Hogarth himself distinguished his character work from caricature, as seen in the 1743 subscription ticket for his series of prints entitled Marriage à-lamode, where he reproduced figures by Raphael, Annibale Carracci, and Leonardo da Vinci under profiles that distinguished ‘characters’ from ‘caricaturas’.13 Caricature tapped an existing discomfort and toyed with the means by which beauty and ugliness were determined. In the Renaissance, Leonardo da Vinci had made sketches of grotesque heads to better understand ideal beauty and devoted part of his Treatise on Painting to the ‘Variety of Faces’. He described how ‘the more the figures are



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contrasted, viz. the deformed opposed to the beautiful, the old to the young, the strong to the feeble, the more the picture will please and be admired. These different characters, contrasted with each other, will increase the beauty of the whole’.14 Copies of Leonardo’s drawings circulated and inspired contemporaries, particularly in Northern Europe. ‘Whatever their original meaning for the artist and his circle’, writes historian Diana Donald, the grotesque heads readily lent themselves both to moral and humorous purposes. The scheming Jews, publicans, and mockers of Christ in paintings by Hieronymus Bosch and Quentin Massys have clear connections with Leonardo, particularly his drawing of Five Grotesque Heads (c.1490)…and demonstrate at an early date the uses of physiognomy in picturing evil.15

Owing further origins to the Bolognese Carracci brothers, caricature derived from a simplification of lines and ‘loading’ of features (in Italian, caricare means ‘to load’), which seemed to produce the antithesis of beauty. With exaggerated features, caricatures provided a medium of inversions and twists, where dilettantes could look foolish, and people could parallel animal and other non-human natural forms – also exposing connections between beauty and ugliness, often by metamorphosis – for instance, when shapes of furniture and other inanimate objects figuratively echoed characters. Even Lavater identified a correspondence between physiognomy and caricature when he described how ugliness passes from generation to generation, until faces become ‘coarse, bloated, disfigured, swoln or shriveled out of all proportion; in short, the most hideous caricatures’.16 As physiognomy, caricature, and other practices enabled and complicated the view of deformity as natural, they threw classical oppositions into question and destigmatised ugliness as ostensibly evil. Such developments also anticipated movements that privileged an artist’s view (and right to exaggerate or naturalise) over classically ideal forms and imitations. In perusing the members’ directory of Liverpool’s Ugly Face Club, a reader finds echoes of these debates. Members exaggerated their features to border on human-animal hybrids – like John Wood, the architect, who was described as having ‘A stone colour’d Complexion. A Dimple in his Attick Story. The Pillasters of his face fluted, Tortoise ey’d, a prominent Nose, Wild Grin, and face altogether resembling a badger, and finer tho’ smaller, than Sir Chrishr Wren or Inego [sic] Jones’s.’17 With his face’s attic, pilasters, and stone, Wood’s deformity assumed



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not only animal but also architectural form, ambiguously praised as both finer and smaller than the faces of the two most renowned English architects. In contrast, would-be ugly contemporaries like John Wilkes and Samuel Johnson did not participate in Ugly Clubs (although they were involved in club culture as members of the Hell-Fire and Literary Clubs, respectively) nor did they seem to delight in their deformities. Wilkes’s ‘crossed eyes’ and ‘prognathous jaw’ led him to be ‘told in print that his face was “an indication of a very bad soul within” and should not be exposed to pregnant women’, reflecting the notion then in circulation that a pregnant woman’s imaginings and exposures affected the form of her gestating child. Despite such outrageous reproofs, Wilkes’ work as a political activist made his face eventually a symbol of liberty.18 The eminent writer and scholar, Johnson, was known for his ‘convulsive starts and odd gesticulations’, which led to a posthumous diagnosis in recent decades of Tourette’s syndrome.19 Beyond complimentary titles that arose from his prolific literary contributions (including editing the famed Dictionary of the English Language), Johnson was dubbed by contemporaries a ‘respectable Hottentot’ and ‘Caliban of Literature’.20 Neither Wilkes and Johnson, nor Alexander Pope, to whom I will return, seem to have relished their deformities; even when deformity became a kind of heroic epithet for these distinguished writers, it set them apart from the crowd in ways perhaps incompatible with the middle-class sociality of the Ugly Clubs. Arising in this milieu, the Ugly Face Club of Liverpool is noteworthy not only because it occupies a realm between ugliness and beauty, character and caricature, but also because the society’s roots and branches extend to a variety of even more aesthetically ambitious Ugly Clubs existing both in fact and fiction.21 The earliest reference to Ugly Clubs seems to arise in The Secret History of Clubs (1709), attributed to Ned Ward, famous for the urban narrative poem The London Spy (1700).22 Ward credits the Club’s foundation to ‘A Certain Userer, Name’d Hatchet, from whose Singular Aspect is deriv’d that common Saying, so oft apply’d to any homely Person’, who wished to return the compliment of ‘finding himself a Jest among most People’. Hatchet bands together with others of ‘ill compos’d Countenances’ to form a club with its own rules and dialect, where each member was addressed not by name but by his deformed feature: ‘Here Nose my Service to you;



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Thank you Chin: Here’s to you Blabber-lip; Your Servant Mr. Squint’, and so on.23 In contrast to the Liverpool chapter, this earlier Club of UglyFaces was allowed to marry, as Ward’s account notes: after merry-making at meetings, members return to their ‘Hatchet-fac’d Spouses, and by Mutual Drudgery, hammer out Ugly Faces for the next Generation’.24 Ward’s account or invention of the Club of Ugly-Faces likely inspired Joseph Addison’s and Richard Steele’s fictional Club of the same name in The Spectator (1711–12, 1714). Addison and Steele were both noteworthy contributors to Britain’s literary and political culture of the time, as well as being members of the Kit-Kat Club. Over a half-dozen of their Spectator papers (e.g. #17, 32, 48, 52, 78, 87) were devoted to Ugly Clubs, some ostensibly at Cambridge and Oxford. Mr. Spectator, the fictional narrator of the serial, learns of this ‘select Body’ via a letter from Oxford’s ‘Alexander Carbuncle’, who describes his ‘ill-favoured Fraternity’ (a so-called ‘burlesque’ upon the ‘Handsom Club’) as ‘a certain merry Species, that seem to have come into the World in Masquerade’ and collectively abide by ‘The Act of Deformity’.25 The implication that deformity was decided not only by birth but also mutual agreement suggests a double state of nature and political free will that resembles the social contract into which Englishmen are supposed to be born and by which they freely abide. Once inducted himself, the broad-faced Mr. Spectator addresses his fellow members (beginning one letter: ‘May it please your Deformities…’) to recommend new candidates for membership, including a deformed character named Hecatissa, whom Mr. Spectator is urged to marry so she may ‘be a Lady of the most celebrated Deformity’, and so the fated pair might ‘Breed’ to cancel out each other’s ugliness.26 The idea that two uglies make a beauty, and the urging of a union for such purpose, departs from Ward’s ‘Hatchets’ and ‘Hatchet-fac’d Spouses’ who ‘hammer out Ugly Faces for the next Generation’. In a culture characterised by birthright and inheritance, this caveat seems one of a few that distinguish the Ugly Clubs of The Secret History and The Spectator, although their witty selfridicule underscores a larger social unease about human deformities. For instance, The Spectator reports: ‘When he can possess himself with such a Chearfulness, Women and Children, who are at first frighted at him, will afterwards be as much pleased with him’. He adds that members ‘ought to be contented with our Countenance and Shape, so far, as never



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to give our selves an uneasie Reflexion on that Subject’, mustering ‘an honest and laudable Fortitude to dare to be Ugly’…‘Since our Persons are not of our own Making, when they are such as appear Defective or Uncomely’… ‘making every one sit down content in his own Carcase, though it were not perhaps so mathematically put together as he would wish’.27 Although no known images – caricatures or otherwise – of this Club exist, The Spectator notes their practice of furnishing a club room (the ugliest to be found) with portraits of great ugly men of history, and this tradition of ugly décor runs through Ugly Club history.28 Regardless of the dearth of surviving (or ever existing) images, such clubs opened up a space for textual representation where ‘ugly’ individuals could claim self-representation. Against the backdrop of aesthetic debates about the loaded features of caricature and their relationship to character, textual representations afforded a parallel play with portraiture. Deirdre Lynch has noted how ‘the hot commodities of the print market were portraits and texts devoted to beings preternaturally endowed with a surplus of characteristics, beings who were nondescript in the eighteenth-century sense of the term’.29 In contrast to earlier traditions (like ‘deformed mistress’ poems, in which a speaker acted as a spectator of beautiful and later ugly women), The Spectator helped to redirect the role of viewer and viewed, appropriating ugliness not to manipulate romantic projections but to realign a social contract among peers.30 The assuming of cognomens and alter egos by members of clubs seems a habit of the seventeenth century, continuing well into the long eighteenth century. As George Justice and Scott Black, respectively, argue, by ‘creating new literary forms to appropriate broadly held historical ideas for the interest, edification, and entertainment of a book-buying public’, The Spectator and related projects ‘offer[ed] an image (perhaps an illusion) of that public as a participatory community, serving as a print version of a bard in oral culture’.31 As Britain’s cultural imagination perpetuated Ugly Clubs (including a play by one ‘Edmund Spenser, the younger’ titled The Ugly Club: A Dramatic Caricature in One Act, performed at London’s Theater Royal at Drury Lane in 1798), it did so within a society where notions of ugliness, deformity, and ridicule intersected in complicated ways.32 In A Dictionary of the English Language (1755), Samuel Johnson defined deformity as ‘1. Ugliness; ill-favouredness’, and ‘2. Ridiculousness;



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the quality of something worthy to be laughed at, or censured’.33 The notion of deformity (something seemingly material) as ridiculous (defined subjectively, by social context) affords a way to re-view the Ugly Face Club through the lens of disability studies. Roger Lund has argued that modern readers discern ‘clear and significant distinctions between disability or crippling, which implies loss of ability, and deformity, which implies noticeable disfigurement. But for the eighteenth century all of these conditions tended to be conflated as occasions of ridicule’.34 The Ugly Face Club reflected and intersected with changing sensibilities of its time, seemingly able to laud a characteristic that was otherwise not embraced by deformed contemporaries. Alexander Pope, the great poet who suffered from scoliosis and other chronic illnesses, and who described his body as ‘the wretched carcase I am annexed to’, did not seem to delight in his deformities, while others ridiculed him.35 For instance, a caricature of Pope on the frontispiece of John Dennis’s Pope Alexander’s Supremacy and Infallibility Examined (1729) depicted Pope as part human and part animal (with a realistic portrait head, but a hybrid ape-rat body), with a caption equating ‘The PHIZ and CHARACTER of the Hyper-critick and Commentator’. Elsewhere, Pope was described as ‘like the Ancient Centaurs …a Beast and a Man’.36 In 1754, William Hay, a hunchback and Member of Parliament, published an essay entitled Deformity, in which he argued passionately that his twisted body did not mirror a twisted soul. Hay specifically singled out the Ugly Club as detrimental to society’s perceptions of deformity: I never was, nor ever will be, a Member of the Ugly Club: and I would advise those Gentlemen to meet no more. For though they may be a very ingenious and facetious Society; yet it draws the Eyes of the World too much upon them, and theirs too much from the World…When deformed Persons appear together, it doubles the Ridicule.37

Since Hay navigated his cultural environment to some degree as a political insider and social outsider, his essay on Deformity provides a pivotal viewpoint in this discussion of politics and aesthetics. Using his life as a lens, Hay evoked his personal and professional experiences to explore and expose the nature of deformity in Britain. He noted how ‘deformed Persons set out in the world to a Disadvantage, and they must first surmount the Prejudices of Mankind, before they can be upon a Par with others’, and that ‘Ill Features are but a superficial



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Ugliness’, as opposed to deformed limbs and more uncommon deformities like his own.38 To confront the notion that deformity is inherited, he stated that his father was ‘not deformed, but active’ and his mother was a ‘celebrated Beauty’.39 Comparing similarly shaped body parts, Hay asked why a curved back provokes ridicule while a ‘prominent Belly’ does not, ‘since the last is generally the Effect of Intemperance, and of a Man’s own Creation’.40 His rhetorical strategies undermined established binaries, as Kathleen James-Cavan has argued, fracturing the connection of body and character to enable the possibility of being both morally ‘upright’ and physically ‘crooked’.41 While Hay’s bodily deformity excluded him from certain segments of society, he claimed that his colleagues in the House of Commons ‘never objected to my Person’ and insisted that the devaluation of deformity exposed flaws within the body politic, which if addressed might help to alleviate social ills.42 Hay also seemed aware of the underlying fear in cultural responses to deformity and race. When describing his favourable experience in Parliament, he mentioned ‘a venal Borough, of which there goes a Story; that, though they never took Exceptions to any Man’s Character, who came up to their Price; yet they once rejected the best Bidder, because he was a Negroe’.43 Hay’s Postscript is perhaps most interesting in our context, as it refers to William Hogarth’s treatise, deeming the artist’s aesthetic project sympathetic to his own: ‘Since I finished this Essay, I am in Doubt whether I ought not to change the Title. For I have heard of a very ingenious Performance, called The Analysis of Beauty, which proves incontestably, that it consists in Curve Lines.’44 If Hay is correct in turning deformity into beauty, even in jest, then he suggests that aesthetic inclusion potentially can invert the common distinction to affect social exclusion – an idea to which I will return later. Despite the rise of sentimental society and charitable associations, ridicule of deformed bodies pervaded eighteenth-century Britain. In his study of period jestbooks, a genre that brimmed with callous jokes about cripples, dwarfs, hunchbacks, amputees, the blind and deaf, decrepit old men and women, invalids, and any manner of deformed figures, Simon Dickie has shown that these ‘were standing jokes in the mid-eighteenth century, almost automatic figures of fun…The most inventive range of taunts and nicknames was available for the deformed.’45 Beyond these forms of humour were elaborate ‘freaks’ or ‘frolicks’, orchestrated



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public pranks enacted by men of fashion that enlisted the deformed and disabled, ‘who would be paid to perform some physical task with hilarious clumsiness, or simply for their sheer entertainment value’.46 For example, one gentleman hosted a dinner party of stutterers; others hired and berated waiters with wooden legs or wobbling hands, who were thrown down stairs as punishment for spilling food. Others sponsored ‘freak runs’: footraces between the lame or one-legged, the obese or the elderly. Such gatherings likely fed the imaginations of Ugly Clubs, not to mention public unease. Many deformed individuals were left to perform and beg on the street in the face of public chagrin. For instance, in 1729, a London merchant suggested whippings, workhouses, and the establishment of a national ‘Hospital’ for ‘strictly confining such People … who wander about to extort Money by exposing those dismal Sights’, such as ‘maim’d Limbs, nauseous Sores, stumped Hands, or Feet, or any other Deformity’.47 The contrast between the cruel torture of poor, disabled individuals and the verbal wit and merrymaking of the well-heeled clubs leaves these two camps on divided terrain. At the same time, a number of ‘deformed’ individuals displayed themselves in contexts that complicated deformity through private exhibition, capitalising on this tension by performing against public expectations. These individuals in some ways help to bridge the divide. Venues for public exhibition like London’s Bartholomew Fair (founded in the twelfth century) had become popular by the seventeenth century, but the majority of fairs were seasonal. During the year, exhibitors tended to receive visitors in private houses or pubs. In the eighteenth century, exhibitions of unruly human bodies – those who were born without arms or legs, uncommonly sized (giants or dwarfs), remarkably shaped (Siamese twins), along with a range of other human forms considered deformed – were individualised rather than grouped into ‘freak shows’ like those that would emerge in subsequent centuries.48 Such individualised exhibitions differed markedly from the Ugly Club gatherings that cohabited their cultural milieu. Thomas Inglefield, who was born without arms and legs and became an artist, created selfportraits showing his drawing materials to identify himself as a working illustrator. Exhibiting himself privately in rooms near Tottenham Court Road in London ‘where ladies & gentlemen may see him & many more of his performances’, Inglefield’s prints were presumably



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sold on the premises during his artistic demonstrations.49 Members of the Royal Society were known to collect such work for their private collections.50 Sir William Musgrave, a fellow of the Royal College of Physicians, owned a portrait of John Valerius: a German man born without arms, who wrote on the back of said portrait with his feet. In the early part of the eighteenth century, Valerius spent almost a decade in England, where he demonstrated his ability to write in five languages, both with his feet and mouth, and provided his paying audience with samples created while they watched. Wybrand Lolkes, an eighteenthcentury Dutchman whose height was 25.5 inches, gave up his career as a jeweller to exhibit himself throughout Europe, including London, enabling him to financially support his wife and three children. The act of self-exhibition is complicated, to be sure. Regardless, these examples resist reductive definitions of deformity in a period when deformity and ridiculousness were conflated. Inglefield, Valerius, Lolkes, and other individuals multiplied their identities beyond merely that of a deformed person: being agents in their own portrayals, earning financial support, in some cases serving as their own managers, and demonstrating themselves as functional, educated, artistic, parental, etc. Living around the time the Ugly Face Club met, they emphasised their individuality rather than collective deformity, engaging with tensions about how to appropriate, reimagine, or undermine perceptions of deformity through self-exhibition. Like Hay’s favourable impression of Hogarth’s ‘Curve Lines’, the politics of these enterprises became aesthetically entangled. Before suggesting possible effects of aesthetic inclusion on social exclusion, it is instructive to chart a brief history of Ugly Clubs in America, where the democratic rhetoric of group self-selection is most clearly at play. Following transatlantic trends, Ugly Clubs migrated to the American colonies only a few decades after surfacing in British print culture. The first account predates Liverpool’s Ugly Face Club by four years, in 1739, when Dr. Alexander Hamilton joined the Ugly Club of Annapolis, Maryland. Hamilton was a Scottish émigré, otherwise known as the Loquacious Scribble. Distinguishing the Annapolis chapter from the Ugly Club of The Spectator, Hamilton described his society’s membership: It was Sufficient for [a member] Sincerely to profess and believe that he was not handsom, till he was declared to be a monstrous ugly fellow by the Ladies in public company…A man was to show his Sincerity in this opinion of himself,



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by assuming a certain Slovenliness and peculiarity in his dress, by never throwing away his time at a looking Glass, and diligently evading all foppish and finical airs and affection.51

The Annapolis chapter met for at least five years ‘to argue and debate upon various Subjects, and to discuss points of a knotty and abstruse nature’; however, contentiousness reduced membership until ‘from a numerous Club, it dwindled to nothing, and at last expired’.52 Likeminded clubs were rumoured to exist in the early years of the Republic, with documentation surviving from late eighteenth-century clubs in New York and South Carolina, although the latter may have been a fabrication of Philip Freneau, famed ‘poet of the Revolution’.53 From the nineteenth century, traces of American Ugly Clubs appear in archived records at various colleges, including the University of North Carolina, the University of Virginia, and Washington and Lee University (then Washington College). Like their forebears, Ugly Club chapters at American colleges were mainly social fraternities, perhaps even more so than their English kin.54 Interestingly, Virginia’s rituals quieted during the Civil War (1861–5), a period when many Americans suffered disabling, rather than amusing, deformities. The University of Virginia’s Editors’ Drawer (1868) notes: The gentlemen who were here during the war, indeed, – having sought this as an asylum from the injurious effects of the sun and weather, to say nothing of sword thrusts and bullet wounds, on the beauty of their complexions – found that the noise occasioned by the election was not consistent with the safety of their retreat, and consequently suffered the Club to pass by ‘unnoticed and forgotten’.55

The heroism or horror of war likely fit uneasily with self-ridicule and fraternal pranks, and the overriding mood of realism, and the rise of naturalism in art and literature, likely dampened the Club’s antics; yet even without the Civil War, traces of Ugly Clubs in England disappeared around the same time. What is left at this point is colourful hearsay. In 1862, English journalist George Augustus Sala mentioned familiarity with the Ugly Club – ‘which yet flourishes, I believe’ – echoing its origins in Ward’s edition and adding a colourful anecdote missing from other records: ‘A violent attempt was made to break up the “Ugly Club” by a committee of spinsters, who made unheard-of attempts to marry the members en masse, but in vain.’56 In 1869, the Ugly Club appeared in Victor Hugo’s novel, The Man



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Who Laughs, wherein he described their meeting chamber lined with portraits of ugly exemplars.57 Beyond that, as far as I have found, Ugly Clubs retreated until the twentieth century. To return to the contrast between private and public exhibitions, and between ugly clubs and freak shows, the nineteenth century experienced significant social changes that affected attitudes toward deformity and related notions. Our current sense of ‘freak’ dates to the 1840s, around the time the adjective ‘normal’ came into common use and ‘freak shows’ rose in popularity.58 Alongside changes in medicine and industrialisation, the Victorian era witnessed increased commercialisation and commodification of display, the establishment of permanent places of exhibition, and fascination with museums of anatomy and pathology, such as Dr. Kahn’s Museum in London. Similar trends occurred in the United States, where by the latter part of the century, reactions to deformed bodies led to so-called ‘Ugly Laws’ (c.1880s–1970s) prohibiting individuals with physical deformities from visiting public spaces, thereby perpetuating historic conflations of disability with ugliness and crime. By way of example, an Ugly Law in Chicago stated: Any person who is diseased, maimed, mutilated, or in any way deformed, so as to be an unsightly or disgusting object, or an improper person to be allowed in or on the streets, highways, thoroughfares, or public places in this city, shall not therein or thereon expose himself to public view under penalty of a fine.59

In The Ugly Laws: Disability in Public, Susan Schweik charts this complicated history and examines its consequences for the present: ‘Classic ugly law proceeded by drawing clear lines and firmly placing people outside or inside them; today’s exclusions convert people into cases, ones that fall perpetually, inexorably, right on “the line”, a thick gray area you cannot erase or thin.’60 From our vantage point in the twenty-first century, faced by and facing these Ugly Faces and their parade through history, what can we discern from their legacy? Helen Deutsch and Felicity Nussbaum (2000) see Edmund Spenser the Younger’s ‘dramatic caricature’ of The Ugly Club (1798) as ‘a very unsatisfying expression of a collective identity for the disabled’, where ‘connections among such groups…were most often drawn by the able-bodied, who made them into monsters’, adding that ‘shaping a unity among the physically disabled as a group and mustering



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its political force is largely a more recent phenomenon’. Other modern criticisms might be fielded against the Ugly Face Club. In addition to its gender-restrictive membership, few or no members seem to have been deformed in the sense of being disabled, since the directory notes each member’s profession, suggesting that they functioned in workplaces. Their exaggerated racial qualifications (stating ‘ugly’ qualifications such as ‘Jewish Sallow Phiz’, ‘Hottentot Complexion’, ‘Negro Teeth’, and ‘Japanezy Grin’, alongside animal analogies) likely reinforced outrageous stereotypes; furthermore, the majority of members were merchants at a time when Liverpool was Britain’s main slaving port.62 All that said: in repeating racist and other taunts, Ugly Club members were applying such labels to themselves. ‘Equally deformed’ marginalised groups might thus have been inverted conceptually to read as ‘equally justified’. This leads me to ask a question: is it noteworthy that neoclassical Ugly Clubs were able to exempt themselves from classical tropes that equated physical deformity with evil?63 Here lies the crux of my concern. I agree with Deutsch and Nussbaum that Ugly Clubs were an ‘unsatisfying expression of a collective identity for the disabled’. Members likely exaggerated descriptions of their deformed features, which did not seem (at least on the surface) to disable them in any social, political, or economic sense, against a backdrop that conflated deformity with ridicule and worse. It is arguable that Ugly Clubs even reinforced that culture of ridicule, ‘doubling the ridicule’, as William Hay argued. That said, their self-selected collectivity seems both consistent with and contrary to period trends. While Ugly Clubs were complexly entwined with a culture that demeaned deformity, their communal affiliation reframed the deformity that was otherwise isolating and disparaging. Their existence made visible a problematic, deeper question. Via their witty self-ridicule and ridiculous rules (not to mention the projected self-respect that went with abiding by them), Ugly Clubs participated in a broader historical interrogation of humanity and deformity that persists to this day. In Embodied Rhetorics, James C. Wilson and Cynthia LewieckiWilson write that ‘disability activists have been attuned to the ways that discourse can aid collective action, for example, seizing the term cripple and turning it against itself into the proactive label crip culture’.64 I see similar potential in appropriating the term ‘deformity’ via the Ugly Face 61



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Club and its self-proclamation of deformities (to echo Mr. Spectator: ‘May it please your Deformities…’). In that spirit, I am in the process of seizing the term to turn it against itself – collaboratively and proactively – enlisting deformants to create deformations in a project entitled Galerie de Difformité.65 I am interested in seeing whether a term associated with social exclusion can be turned against itself through aesthetic inclusion. Structured as an art catalogue, with choose-your-ownadventure directives, my ‘baggy monster’ of a novel (to borrow a genre characterisation by Henry James) intermarries genres, periods, and artistic deformations to act as a body that deforms through the active and passive ways in which it is read.66 The book’s creation and decreation takes on a larger life as the published book-object is contextualised in its cultural moment and medium, as collaborative deformations contribute to a collective installation about form, framed as ‘deformed’: a term that historically has been interchanged with ‘ugly’, ‘monstrous’, ‘freakish’, ‘asymmetrical’, ‘degenerate’, ‘handicapped’, ‘disabled’. Considering that viewers often respond more magnanimously to ‘broken’ bodies in art than in society, Galerie de Difformité aims to aesthetically suspend and widen the imagination.67 Lennard Davis defines eighteenth-century deformity as ‘a disruption in the sensory field of the observer’.68 In some small way, through fact-bending fiction that revives the Ugly Face Club’s obscure history, I am trying to evoke such a ‘sensory disruption’ to make something, to borrow the words of one of my characters, Gloria Heys, who is a descendant of a member of the Ugly Face Club, as she says, to make something ‘more monstrous – but magnanimous, too’.69 Beyond my appropriated revival, interest in Ugly Clubs has arisen elsewhere in recent years. In the course of writing this article, I found reports on NPR, BBC, and other respected sources about Ugly Club revivals not only in Liverpool (2002) but also in Hamburg (2005), the latter inspired by the Ugly Club of Piobbico, Italy, whose roots may go back to 1879, and whose activities include marital matchmaking, countering discrimination against ugliness in the workplace, and an annual festa dei brutti (or Festival of the Ugly), coinciding with the election of the club’s new president, who may be either a man or woman (one recent president was succeeded by his daughter).70 In addition to the nineteenth-century college clubs that pocked the American landscape, other clubs appeared in the twentieth century, including an Ugly Club



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boasting baseball players Yogi Berra and Mike Ryba, and another founded by a teenaged Marcia Tucker, who went on to become the first woman curator of the Whitney Museum of American Art and founder of the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York.71 Nor should we neglect increased general interest in ugliness, as shown in recent television shows like Ugly Betty and Ugly Americans, Scott Westerfeld’s young adult sci-fi novel, Uglies, or the toy phenomenon of Uglydolls (with children’s books like Ugly Guide to the Uglyverse), or the French concept of jolie laide, ‘pretty-ugly’.72 Whether or not the characters that inhabit these venues are ‘ugly’ is left to the eye of each beholder, as Voltaire wrote: ‘Ask a toad what beauty is…He will tell you that it consists of his mate’.73 Or, as Umberto Eco speculates in a lecture related to his volume On Ugliness: Beauty is, in some ways, boring. Even if its concept changes through the ages, nevertheless a beautiful object must always follow certain rules…[while] an ugly nose can be as long as the one of Pinocchio, as big as the trunk of an elephant, or like the beak of an eagle, and so on. Ugliness is unpredictable and offers an infinite range of possibilities. Beauty is finite. Ugliness is infinite, like God.74

In the spirit of ‘infinite’ possibilities for ugliness, deformity, and the litany of terms that have shared their company throughout history, I will close by returning to this article’s beginning, to Edward Howell’s mention of the practice ‘by the members of Ugly Clubs destroying all documentary evidence of their natural gifts’. Inviting this practice from my readers – to materially, collaboratively deform my Galerie de Difformité (and with it, some of the reproduced archival evidence of the Ugly Face Club) – I am engaging in a like-minded act to face and deface ugliness, in some small way, to collectively cause ‘a disruption in the sensory field of the observer’.75 And so I extend this invitation to you and your colleagues, students, cohorts, anyone you know who may be interested – whatever their artistic or non-artistic bent – to bring your sensibilities to bear on the Galerie de Difformité as we re-view the Ugly Face Club, its forebears and descendants, to see what this most ‘Honourable and Facetious Society’ may yet teach us.



2



The Face of War Suzannah Biernoff

My leg? It’s off at the knee. Do I miss it? Well, some. You see I’ve had it since I was born; And, lately, a devilish corn. (I rather chuckle with glee To think how I’ve fooled that corn.) But I’ll hobble around all right. It isn’t that, it’s my face. Oh I know I’m a hideous sight, Hardly a thing in place; Sort of gargoyle, you’d say. Nurse won’t give me a glass, But I see the folks as they pass Shudder and turn away; Turn away in distress. . . Mirror enough, I guess. Robert W. Service, ‘Fleurette (The Wounded Canadian Speaks)’1

In 2006 the New York-based photographer Nina Berman was approached by People magazine to take photographs for a story about a US Marine sergeant, Tyler Ziegel, who had been trapped in a burning truck after a suicide bomber attack on the Iraq–Syria border in December 2004. Ty had been in Brooke Army Medical Centre in San Antonio, Texas, for 18 months by the time Berman met him, and undergone 19 operations. His shattered skull and face had needed to be reconstructed; he’d lost an eye, one arm, and three fingers from his other hand. Ty’s high school sweetheart and fiancée, Renee Kline, moved to Texas to be with him during his treatment and recovery. For the assignment, Berman met the couple and Ty’s mother at Brooke Army and spent several days with them at home in Metamora, Illinois, a few months later. She returned for the wedding in October 2006, and took the photograph in Fig.2.1 34

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in a commercial portrait studio on the way to the wedding ceremony at Metamora High School. In the end, People didn’t use the photograph, and Berman entered it in the World Press Photo Contest. When Marine Wedding won the prize for portraiture, the online response was phenomenal. The photo was viewed by hundreds of thousands of people and became the subject of countless blog posts and comment threads. For many Americans, it is an iconic image of the war in Iraq. Reviewing an exhibition of Berman’s photographs at the Jen Bekman Gallery in New York in August 2007, the New York Times art critic Holland Cotter remarked that ‘“Marine Wedding” speaks, as powerfully as a picture can, for itself.’2 But the stream of commentary in the blogosphere suggests that the photograph did not in fact speak for itself. As Lindsay Beyerstein observed in Salon, ‘Everyone sees something different.’3 Marine Wedding was a catalyst. The image, says Berman, ‘got linked to by everyone from pro-war sites to antiwar sites to sites dedicated to love and Valentine’s Day’.4 A copy



Nina Berman, Marine Wedding, 2006.

Fig.2.1



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of the photograph reportedly ended up in the International Triennale of Contemporary Art in 2009, held at the National Gallery in Prague, with the message ‘Be a hero – marry a hero’ obscuring Klein’s face.5 The range of reactions to this one image confirmed what Susan Sontag argued in her 2003 book Regarding the Pain of Others: ‘No “we” should be taken for granted when the subject is looking at another person’s pain.’6 Sontag’s injunction follows her opening discussion of Three Guineas, the epistolary essays on war and feminism that Virginia Woolf wrote as a companion piece to her novel The Years. Published in 1938, Three Guineas begins with an unanswered letter from a peace society: ‘How in your opinion are we to prevent war?’ asks Woolf ’s unnamed correspondent. In her belated response, Woolf recalls a series of photographs of Spanish civilian casualties taken during the winter of 1936–7: This morning’s collection contains the photograph of what might be a man’s body, or a woman’s; it is so mutilated that it might, on the other hand, be the body of a pig. But those certainly are dead children, and that undoubtedly is the section of a house. A bomb has torn open the side; there is still a bird-cage hanging in what was presumably the sitting room…7

Photographs like these ‘are not an argument’, Woolf reasons: they are a ‘crude statement of fact addressed to the eye’. Irrespective of class, education, profession or gender we see ‘the same picture…the same dead bodies, the same ruined houses’.8 We share the same horror, the same conviction that war must be stopped. For Sontag, the imagined photographs are less dependable, their reception less predictable. We now know that the horrors of war can be used to incite and justify war. Empathy is no more likely a response to such images than rage, or the violent desire for revenge. Pictures – above all those of war and suffering – cannot be depended upon to speak for themselves. It would be possible to use Marine Wedding to ask all kinds of questions: about the medical, military, social or psychological response to serious combat injuries. These are important issues, but it is equally crucial to interrogate and understand the representation of war and injury, because the military body (like the bodies in Woolf ’s photographs) is more than flesh and blood: it is a symbolic site invested with political as well as personal meaning. Valour, heroism, patriotism, courage: these concepts assume visible form, and do their cultural work, when they are personified and embodied. Mutilated or disabled, the veteran’s

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body can connote the hollowness or corruption of these ideals: a theme most famously exploited in Weimar Germany by the artists aligned with the New Objectivity movement, Neue Sachlichkeit. Such symbolic anatomies have long interested sociologists and anthropologists, who have recognised that the body is a primary system or microcosm of meaning (whether social, political or cosmological). The sociologist Bryan Turner, for example, suggests that ‘the dominant concerns and anxieties of society tend to be translated into disturbed images of the body’.9 The mutilated ‘face of war’, I would argue, has a special place in this symbolic economy, signifying – perhaps more than any other kind of image – the brutalising, dehumanising potential of modern combat. And yet the ‘face of war’ is a paradox. The human cost of war is signified in Berman’s photograph by the absence or travesty of the recognisably human face, or at the very least, its partial destruction or erasure. This is ugliness as ruination. In the review mentioned earlier, Holland Cotter describes Ziegel’s expression, as he looks at his bride, as ‘hard to read: his dead-white face is all but featureless, with no nose and no chin, as blank as a pullover mask’. Berman’s photographs of wounded veterans disturb the very idea of portraiture: that the face can be relied upon as an index of identity and emotion. This, I think, is the source of Marine Wedding’s fascination – and its challenge to anyone interested in the social production of the self and the human. This essay examines the concept of ugliness in one of its most troubling modern formations, as a symptom and consequence of industrialised war. The juxtaposition of historical and contemporary texts and images is not meant to imply continuity or universality. Horror – of disfigurement, of war – is a cultural artefact and there are significant variations in how, and in what circumstances, the human cost of war has been depicted. There are differences, too, in the medical and social response to disfiguring injury – and in people’s belief in (or scepticism about) medical progress. Certain themes, however, seem remarkably resilient, such as the virtues of bravery and stoicism and the redemptive power of love – implicitly heterosexual and preferably domestic. At the end of Robert Service’s poem, with which this chapter opens, the wounded protagonist is kissed by a girl who is there to visit her injured brother, a poilu or French soldier. ‘Sixteen, all laughter and love…Half woman, half child, – Fleurette.’ Curious about the malheureux in the opposite bed, she discovers that



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he saved his men by smothering a bomb that fell into the trench. After kissing her brother goodbye, she goes to the other man’s bedside. ‘May I kiss you, sergeant?’ she asks. Then she kissed my burning lips With her mouth like a scented flower […] God bless her, that little Fleurette!

* * *

For the past few years my research has focused on representations of the injured body during the First World War; in particular the visual record and public rhetoric of facial injury and disfigurement.10 There was no British or American equivalent of Otto Dix or Max Beckmann in the interwar years. The mutilated and disfigured body of the veteran was not exploited as a site of collective shame or trauma in Anglophone cultures the way it was in Weimar Germany.11 In fact, aside from medical photographs, there are few exceptions to the tacit censorship of facial injury. One of these exceptional cases is Henry Tonks, whose pastel drawings of soldiers before and after facial reconstructive surgery lie somewhere between medical illustration and portraiture (Fig.2.2). These intimate studies reveal much about Tonks’ approach to life drawing – and perhaps the surprising proximity of ugliness and beauty – but they tell us very little about the public visual culture of disfigurement. Tonks himself had been a surgeon before his celebrated career as an artist and teacher at the Slade School of Art, and the portraits were never intended for the curious eyes of the public. The other significant ‘artistic’ response to facial injury in First World War Britain is a series of photographs taken by the official home front photographer Horace Nicholls, showing Francis Derwent Wood making and fitting a prosthetic mask (Fig. 2.3). These are just as difficult to classify as Tonks’ drawings, blurring the line between photojournalism, art photography and official record-keeping. Like most of Nicholls’ photographs for Wellington House (the British government’s propaganda bureau), the series he captioned ‘Repairing War’s Ravages’ seems to have remained unseen by the public. Nicholls’ photographs, I have suggested elsewhere, play on the fantasy of perfect repair.12 The young men whose reconstruction he documents are stoical and self-composed, but it is hard to imagine them featuring in a

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propaganda campaign. As much as the sculptor’s skill they evoke the loss of identity alluded to in written accounts. Wood was not the only sculptor involved in this work: Kathleen Scott (the widow of Captain Robert Scott and one of Tonks’ former students) worked at the Ellerman facial hospital for officers in Regents Park, and wrote in her diary that it made her feel ‘terribly like God, the creator’.13 Anna Coleman Ladd, a well-connected American sculptor and the wife of a prominent paediatrician, opened her own ‘Studio for Portrait Masks’ in Paris in December 1917, under the auspices of the American Red Cross and in consultation with Derwent Wood. Ladd’s American, French and British team included three sculptors, two of them women ( Jane Poupelet and Louise Brent). When Maynard Ladd was appointed to head the Children’s Bureau of the American Red Cross in Toul, she embraced her own project with vigour: filling the ‘large bright studio’ in the Latin Quarter with flowers, posters and French and American flags, as well as casts of masks in progress.14 A silent film made for the American Red Cross documents Ladd and her assistants



Henry Tonks, Portrait of a Wounded Soldier before Treatment, 1916–17, pastel.

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at work in the studio. The two mutilés de guerre featured in the short film seem entirely at ease with the attention they are receiving. One smiles, chats and smokes a cigarette for the camera as Ladd admires his new chin from different angles. The social intimacy and informality of the scene suggest that in this context at least the stigma of facial injury was not insurmountable.15 These sources describe the ‘face of war’ in what is probably its earliest cultural formation, almost a century ago. There are medical representations of facial injury from the Battle of Waterloo (a remarkable series of watercolours by the surgeon and anatomist Sir Charles Bell),16 and photographs from the American Civil War (1861– 5), but the men wounded in those conflicts were less likely to live with severely disfiguring injuries. The steel helmet – first used by British troops in 1916 – decreased the number of fatal head injuries, but left the face exposed to snipers and flying shell fragments. Produced on an industrial scale, new types of guns and ammunition inflicted more damage – and more complex wounds – than those caused by ordinary rifles.

Horace Nicholls, Repairing War’s Ravages: Renovating facial injuries. The patient examining the mould of his own face. Imperial War Museum, Q.30.455.

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Severely disfigured men were considered unfit for active duty because of their effect on morale, and facial injury was consistently described in the wartime press as an unimaginable tragedy.17 ‘What kind of vision does your mind conjure up when you hear or see the word “wounded?”’ begins an article in the Daily Sketch: Probably, if you are an average stay-at-home civilian, a limping man in a blue hospital suit or, at worst, an indefinite huddled figure on a stretcher. But there are other wounded that the mind instinctively avoids contemplating. There are men who come from battle still walking firmly, still with capable hands, unscarred bodies, but who are the most tragic of all war’s victims, whose endurance is to be tried in the hardest days, who are now half strangers among their own people, and reluctant even to tread the long-wished-for paths of home. In medical language they are classed as ‘Facial and Jaw Cases.’ Think that phrase over for a minute and realise what it may mean…18

Journalists invariably praised the miraculous work of surgeons like Harold Gillies, one of the pioneers of modern plastic surgery, but the story of medical progress did not easily translate into images. Facial injury and disfigurement were referred to in newspapers and periodicals – often in remarkably graphic detail – but visual representations are almost nonexistent. In this respect, Bryan Turner’s observation that social anxieties tend to be manifest in images of bodily disorder needs, I think, some qualification: historically these have often been the very images subject to censorship. Disfigurement and disability are politically charged when they connote a loss that cannot be overcome or compensated.19 The most detailed narrative account of facial injury and its treatment in wartime Britain is in Ward Muir’s The Happy Hospital, which was published in 1918. A Corporal in the RAMC, Muir had published several novels and wrote occasional pieces for magazines including The Spectator and Country Life. He also edited ‘Happy – Though Wounded’, a fundraising publication with contributions from staff and patients at the 3rd London General Hospital, drawn from the Hospital’s Gazette. We encounter the facial ward in the final chapter of Muir’s otherwise upbeat portrait of hospital life. It is ‘something of an ordeal’, he writes: To talk to a lad who, six months ago, was probably a wholesome and pleasing specimen of English youth, and is now a gargoyle, and a broken gargoyle at that, – the only decent features remaining being perhaps one eye, one ear, and a shock of boyish hair…You know very well that he has examined himself in a mirror. That one eye of his has contemplated the mangled mess which is his face – all the



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more hopeless because ‘healed.’…He is aware of just what he looks like: therefore you feel intensely that he is aware that you are aware, and that some unguarded glance of yours may cause him hurt. This, then, is the patient at whom you are afraid to gaze unflinchingly: not afraid for yourself, but for him.20

Muir’s heightened self-consciousness and other-consciousness is typical of the ‘interaction-uneasiness’ that Erving Goffman associates with stigma – although the film footage of Coleman Ladd laughing with her patients tells another story.21 ‘Could any woman come near that gargoyle without repugnance?’ Muir asks rhetorically (p.145), yet the saintly wife or devoted fiancée, the beautiful stranger and the attentive (and inevitably attractive) nurse were enduring stereotypes, well illustrated by the poem Fleurette. In a popular variation on this theme, a story in the Sunday Chronicle (previously published in the Daily Mail) recounts a wife’s first visit to her wounded husband. He has not had the courage to tell her the extent of his injuries, and when she arrives at the hospital, the head nurse takes her aside to prepare her for the worst: ‘He told you of his wound?’ ‘He said he was hit by shrapnel, ma’am, but not bad.’ Matron motioned her to sit down, and then, with an infinite pity in her face… told the little woman before her in a few words what Sergeant Bates in his agony of mind could not write. ‘So you see, Mrs. Bates,’ she ended gently, ‘you must be brave when you see him, because – he dreads this meeting – for your sake.’

The visitor is ushered to her husband’s bed, around which the Sister has hastily drawn a screen: She took one searching glance as involuntarily he turned his ‘good’ side to her and then, deliberately choosing the other, she went right up to the bed, and with a hand on each shoulder kissed him – ever so lightly – on the worst scar of all.22

Reports like this rely on a shared shudder of revulsion; without it, the wife’s gesture would be unremarkable. Disfigurement turns conjugal love into a parable of patriotic devotion, in which the wounds of war are salved – and the horror of war erased – by the reinstatement of domestic bonds. The Sunday Chronicle anecdote exploits the familiar image of the nurturing, self-sacrificing wife (or mother, or nurse) whose empathic gaze and touch overcome the memory and the physical trauma of combat. Like the accounts of surgical miracles, however, the fantasy of redemptive love has no parallel in the public visual culture of the First

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World War; not when the subject is facial injury. It is as though these narratives of sacrifice and hope might be cast into doubt by illustrations. Even Tonks thought his studies of wounded servicemen ‘rather dreadful subjects for the public view’.23 One might see reparative intent in his drawings, but as portraits they remain disquieting. * * *

‘Portrait’, notes Ludmilla Jordanova, ‘has an air of formality to it; it conjures up both a pose, for a specific purpose, and a maker, someone who is more than a friend, a relation or casual acquaintance.’24 A portrait is more than a snapshot, and different from a medical photograph, in part because it bestows authority on the subject portrayed (and also implicitly on the maker).25 In this respect, none of our portraits are straightforward. The masks crafted by Wood and Ladd could be said to possess an air of formality, and they were certainly an attempt to restore ‘presence’ and authority. In this sense all portraits are forms of physical capital, as Bourdieu defines it; an investment in one’s public face.26 But the mask, unlike the commissioned portrait, also draws attention to the inability of art (or medicine) to recreate something that is lost forever. Nicholls’ photographs and Tonks’ portraits are just as equivocal. There is, in the photographs, a suggestion of the Godlike work of creating faces (a familiar trope at the time), but Frankenstein’s monster comes to mind as well. ‘By definition’, the sociologist Erving Goffman observed, ‘we believe the person with a stigma is not quite human.’27 Nicholls’ photographs do nothing to contradict this perceived loss. When I was writing about the Tonks pastels, I found myself thinking of them as ‘anti-portraits’ because they convey the fragility and mutability of subjectivity rather than ‘consolidating the self portrayed’.28 In Berman’s photographs, the authority of the photographic subjects is equally precarious. She does not portray injured veterans as victims, but nor are they ‘survivors’ in the popular sense of the term. In Marine Wedding, and in her earlier project, Purple Hearts (2004), Berman focuses on the homecoming: the protracted and difficult – perhaps impossible – transition from the military to civilian life, from able-bodied soldier or marine to disabled veteran. (In contrast, the historical examples we have looked at contain virtually no biographical clues other than the information in the case notes, and there was no assessment of the patient’s mental state.) Berman thinks that it is unlikely People magazine had seen a picture of



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Ziegel when they approached her. It was supposed to be a happy story: wounded war hero, high school sweethearts, fairytale wedding. When she first met Ziegel she was shocked at the extent of his injuries. ‘I’ve seen lots of wounded people before’, she comments in an interview with Richard Bradley, ‘but he was probably the worst-looking, and also the least expressive.’ She wondered why, ‘after all this time’, People had picked someone who was ‘going to be so physically a turnoff ’.29 Although Ziegel was possibly ‘the least self-conscious person [she had] ever met’, it was obvious that ‘part of the story had to be how people look at him’ – and to that extent the series is about the stigma of disability and disfigurement as Goffman describes it, ‘within a particular social interaction’. By the time Goffman was writing Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity in the early 1960s, there was already a substantial literature on the subject in social psychology and sociology. The term itself, however, has a much longer history. In the original Greek, the verb ‘stigmatise’ meant quite literally to mark or brand with a hot iron. Such a stigma would identify the bearer as a criminal, a slave or a traitor.30 Adapted by early Christians, the word came to denote ‘bodily signs of holy grace that took the form of eruptive blossoms on the skin’, but the idea that one could be ‘marked’ by God coexisted with a proto-medical understanding of stigma as a symptom of physical or moral disorder.31 Even today, this indexical logic persists. In Ty’s case, we are likely to ‘read’ his scars as the indication (in Charles Sanders Peirce’s terms) of an invisible condition: proof not of God’s grace or of human wickedness, but of the traumatising effects of war.32 Goffman’s contribution was to illuminate the relational nature of stigma. It is not the case, he argues, that certain conditions or characteristics are stigmatising in themselves. There is no indelible mark. Rather ‘normal’ and ‘stigmatised’ are shifting perspectives that depend on one’s expectations of others within a particular context.33 Goffman gives the example of a professional criminal who fears being seen entering his local public library and always checks over his shoulder. A love of books is perfectly ‘normal’ in some circles and stigmatising in others. Both normality and stigma are ‘a special kind of relationship between attribute [in this case “bookishness”] and stereotype [“middle class boy” or “professional criminal”]’.34 The same comparison of attribute to stereotype turns physical difference into a deviation from an imagined norm: deformity or disability. ‘We tend

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to impute a wide range of imperfections on the basis of the original one’, Goffman observes, ‘and at the same time to impute some desirable but undesired attributes, often of a supernatural cast.’35 The first point is well illustrated by a list of synonyms for ‘blind’ posted on Disability Culture Watch, a blog created by writer and disability arts advocate Simi Linton.36 They include: ignorant, imperceptive, insensitive, irrational, oblivious, obtuse, random, rash, unaware, unconscious, uncontrolled, unknowing, unplanned and violent. ‘These meanings’, observes Linton, ‘lurk under the surface when the word “blind” is used whether on its own, or in pairings, in such phrases as “blind passion”, “blind rage”, “blind justice”, “blind drunk” and “blind faith”.’ On the other hand, blindness is often associated with ‘inner sight’ (the blind prophet or ‘seer’). Ugliness, too, is implicated in this schema, either as a symptomatic ‘imperfection’ or (much less often) as a physical flaw that signifies inner beauty. This ambivalence is a characteristic of all three types of stigma identified by Goffman: physical deformities, perceived ‘blemishes of individual character’ and ‘the tribal stigma of race, nation and religion’.37 One could ask whether Goffman’s arguments apply to the representation of stigma in art. I think they do, for two reasons. Goffman was concerned fundamentally with the cultural construction and social negotiation of stigma: stereotypes and attributes are representations, and visual culture is arguably one of the primary sites of stigmatisation. Secondly, his attention to the inter-subjective dynamics of stigma – the ‘interaction-uneasiness’ betrayed by Muir – finds an intriguing parallel in the portraits we have been looking at. Art, I would argue, has the potential to reveal the ‘structural preconditions of stigma’, to show that ugliness – and beauty – are negotiated and contingent. Often these negotiations happen prior to or during the making of an image. Berman was aware, for example, that the lighting of the shots was crucial, and wanted to make sure she ‘didn’t make [Ty] look gruesome’.38 Furthermore, some of the photographs take the gaze – or its absence – as their subject. The child in the candy store (Fig.2.4) stares with undisguised amazement at Ty’s face: her awareness of his difference is a precondition for stigma, but as yet without moral judgement or self-consciousness. This is the only image in the series to show someone looking directly at Ziegel, and the lack of visual engagement – especially between Ty and Renee – reinforces the sense of his otherness and her withdrawal.



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* * * Linda Nochlin has observed that what we look for in a portrait (unlike a medical photograph or a mug shot) is ‘the meeting of two subjectivities’: the subjectivity of the person portrayed, and that of the artist.39 In Tonks’ studies, this meeting takes place in the eyes of the wounded soldiers, which seem to regard the artist (and us) with their humanity intact. The perception of intimacy and engagement is also an effect of Tonks’ delicate handling of the medium. The portraits are roughly half life-size, and the compelling details of surface texture record the artist’s touch and attentive gaze. In contrast, there is little sense of physical or psychological connection with the people depicted in Marine Wedding, and little intimacy between them. Berman’s theme is isolation. Yet the insinuation of emotional distance coexists with an extraordinary attention to the material texture of the lives she photographs (Figs 2.5 and 2.6). The gleam of the buttons on Ty’s dress uniform, the disconcertingly rubbery folds of his prosthetic hand, the stiff whiteness of Renee’s gown and her carefully manicured fingernails: these details are replete with narrative significance. Ty’s interior life may not be apparent in his face (which, captured in a photograph, can probably only signify trauma). Unlike Berman or his friends and family, we can’t speak to him (‘if you closed your eyes’, she says at one point, ‘you

Nina Berman, Marine Wedding, 2006.

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would feel he was a completely healthy person’). The only ‘identity’ we have access to is embedded in the material fabric of his life. Berman’s presence may be less tangible than Tonks’, but it can be discerned in the stylistic consistency of the photographs: in a certain formality of pose and composition, a stillness or reverie, and in the deep, saturated colours that declare a distance from the documentary look. ‘I don’t believe in the notion of the objective photographer’, she has said.41 Her technical and formal achievements are even more apparent when the photographs are displayed, as large format prints, in a gallery. I saw the wedding portrait at the Wellcome Collection’s War and Medicine exhibition in London in 2008: it was the scale that immediately identified the photograph as ‘art’ as opposed to photojournalism or studio photography. Formal beauty has come to seem suspect in the context of war, and Berman’s inclusion in the 2010 Whitney Biennial drew some predictably disgruntled responses. One blogger described the Whitney show as ‘dehumanizing’ because ‘it totally aestheticizes the work so that you think about [it] in terms of art and compositions rather than the human content.’42 But this criticism only holds if we can agree on what art is. What is ‘art’ in the context of the Whitney, or the Wellcome Collection?43 Part of the answer (especially in the last four 40



Nina Berman, Marine Wedding, 2006.

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Fig.2.6

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decades) is that art is a means of interrogating beauty, representation, identity and spectatorship. The identities at stake here – including Berman’s and our own – are arguably shaped by too many variables to be symptomatic of anything as monolithic as modernity or postmodernity. Social class, gender, politics, military service: all of these factors frame the public response to this story as much as they inform the identities depicted. Berman’s achievement is to exploit the conventions of portraiture while resisting the temptation to ‘consolidate the self portrayed’. Instead, the portrait photograph becomes a vehicle through which identity might be questioned, along with the concepts of likeness and ugliness. When facial identity is masked or damaged, when the image of a face signifies trauma rather than character or emotion, then conventional expectations of likeness break down.44 A ‘good’ likeness is assumed to be different from an accurate depiction. It promises a distillation of the subject’s essence, a glimpse of the soul (or social status or moral worth). When the face is altered, however, it is usually perceived as a false image: not a good likeness. In place of the traditional notion of ‘likeness’ – in Berman’s photographs – it is possible to discern a more dispersed, and more contingent understanding of identity: as something that has to be assembled and managed, something that can be ‘spoiled’; a fragile thing that can be ‘made’ in a small-town photographic studio, and ‘unmade’ in a moment of unguarded staring.

Nina Berman, Marine Wedding, 2006.



3



Picasso and the Psychoanalysts Brandon Taylor

To European modern artists who came to prominence in the 1920s and 1930s, accusations of having produced work that was ‘ugly’ or ‘incompetent’ or ‘offensive to taste’ were familiar. Many gallery-goers found their works disgraceful; even felt that standards of beauty and coherence had been abandoned in an elaborate hoax perpetrated by unscrupulous dealers, or that modern artists themselves had descended into a kind of underworld of bestiality and incoherence.1 But that sense of disappointment could be found among professional groups as well as among correspondents to the daily newspapers. For one profession, that of psychoanalysis, the perceived shortcomings of modern art – especially the newest works by Pablo Picasso, Paul Klee, Salvador Dalí – presented a particular challenge to both theory and explanation. And nowhere was this truer than in London, a city to which by the end of the 1930s leading psychoanalysts from continental Europe had gravitated, and where the level of controversy about the qualities of modern painting was rising fast. By the time of Sigmund Freud’s arrival in London in 1938, he was already known in the capital for his work on dreams, the workings of the unconscious, and the importance of sexuality to the subterranean mind. Most of his writings were already available in translation. Though Freud did not address himself specifically to the question of modern art, he was known to have compared the creative process to the workings of the dream, in which surface content in all its unintelligibility could be regarded as the expression of unconscious wishes, subject to the condensations and displacements of the dream-work before they reached the light of day. In the New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, published in London in 1933, he had reiterated that the surface dream, like a work of art of any period, could appear absurd, perplexing, or 49



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indistinct. His small book Leonardo da Vinci: A Psycho-Sexual Study of an Infantile Reminiscence had appeared in English in 1916, and presented a forensic account of the condensation and displacement processes of a group of much older works of art. The question in the 1930s was whether the discomforts of modern art, with its exaggerated distortions, fragmentations and displacements, could be considered in a similar light. In London a few years before Freud’s arrival, the International Surrealist Exhibition, organised by Herbert Read and André Breton, and accompanied by an influential book that Read edited, had been the occasion for misgivings and endorsements in equal measure. Already a supporter of psychoanalysis as well as Surrealism, Read also aligned the artwork with the work of the dream, in as much as both performed the twin functions of protecting the ego from the disturbing conflicts of the id, while expressing an illicit wish-fulfilment in disguised or hallucinated form. Read repeated Freud’s claim in his New Introductory Lectures that What is left over [in this process] may very well seem to lack coherence…It is as much the result of the archaic regression in the mental apparatus as of the demands of the censorship, that so much use is made of the representation of certain objects and processes by means of symbols which have become strange to conscious thought.2

But Read was also a historian of the modern movement, to whom the special demands of modern art stood in need of a historical explanation as much as a psychoanalytical one; and for him, the relationship of international Surrealism to the prospect of European war was paramount. If the idealisations of religion had functioned merely to increase the propensity of nations to war, Read supposed, Surrealism was given to expressing the folly of a further outbreak of sadism by means of its ‘revaluation of all aesthetic values’ and its break with every formal convention, producing ‘half consciously a matter from which, when produced, the reader [or viewer] may, if he chooses, extract ideas’.3 Picasso, for Read, ‘is using his bold, plangent, viscous brushwork to express certain sensations or ideas and he is not to be judged by the manner in which he uses the medium but by the success with which he conveys the sensations or ideas’. For as Read would emphasise, ‘the conditions of the present time are not normal’.4 In fact, Picasso was already the focus of fiercely clashing opinions of a moral as well as aesthetic kind. The diagnosis that he had delved into

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ugliness and incoherence could take a vigorously hostile form. Freud’s former disciple Carl Gustav Jung had developed an alternative theory of the instincts after leaving Freud’s shadow, and had already declared himself deeply affronted by the formal licenses and experimentation of modernist writing and art. His attempt to fathom James Joyce’s Ulysses had been published in the Europäische Revue in Zurich in September 1932. Then, in response to a show of some 460 paintings, sculptures, drawings, watercolours and prints from all stages of Picasso’s career, held at the Galerie Georges Petit in Paris and subsequently at the Kunsthaus in Zurich in September and November 1932, he had launched an attack on Picasso in the November 1932 issue of Neue Zürcher Zeitung. There, he had characterised the artist as one who is in withdrawal from empirical objects to the point of appearing schizoid, communicating ‘no unified, harmonious feeling-tone but, rather, contradictory feelings or even a complete lack of feeling’, expressed in ‘lines of fracture, that is, psychic faults (in the geological sense) that run right through the picture’. His pictures ‘leave one cold, or disturb one by their paradoxical, unfeeling and grotesque unconcern for the beholder,’ he wrote. Picasso is the victim rather than the ringmaster of these psychic faults, according to Jung; his withdrawal from things engulfs him. Even an occasional touch of beauty seems like only an inexcusable delay in the withdrawal. It is the ugly, the sick, the grotesque, the incomprehensible, the banal that are sought out – not for the purpose of expressing anything, but only in order to conceal; an obscurity that spreads like a cold fog over desolate moors; the whole exercise quite pointless, like a spectacle that can do without a spectator.5

‘Crude, earthy shapes, grotesque and primitive’: Picasso is in the underworld, fatefully drawn into the dark, ‘having followed not the accepted ideals of goodness and beauty, but the demoniacal attraction of ugliness and evil’. He and his Swiss exhibition ‘are a sign of the time, just as much as the twenty-eight thousand people who came to look at his pictures’.6 The tenor of Jung’s review is as aggressive as the paintings he was complaining of. In 1933 Jung became President of the Nazi-controlled General Medical Society of Psychotherapy in Germany, as well as editor of the Zentralblatt für Psychotherapie, in which pro-Nazi sentiments were inserted. To that constituency, modern art in its generality appeared as a disturbance of



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sanity as well as of value, and as wartime conditions approached would become the target of confiscation, denunciation and attack.7 Jung’s outburst at least demonstrates that, for some, the perceived failure of modern artists to live up to the traditional mission of art was difficult to separate from the wider situation of ideological conflict and approaching war. Picasso’s art had met with scepticism in London too; and popular reaction to Read’s Surrealism exhibition had shown that the psychological stability of the artist was also a matter of concern there. Opinion in many parts of British society seemed to agree that Picasso’s early Cubism as well as his contemporary works had undermined most traditional assumptions about artistic coherence and goodness of form. For his exhibition at the Lefevre Galleries in 1931, the supportive critic Maud Dale suggested that ‘Picasso in his experiments is revolutionising and destroying the form or reality of things as it was accepted during the century preceding him’, but was certain that ‘no other painter has in himself succeeded in arousing so much excitement and controversy since Manet’. His work is not decadent, as the traditionalists and ultraconservatives allege; and yet Dale remains persuaded that Picasso’s art in all its daring raises questions about the time in which he lives. ‘Does its abstract deformation of objects and faces reflect the agitation about us?’ she asked. ‘Are the things which menace us and may eventually destroy us to be found in the dissonances of this art?’8 It is clear that members of the psychoanalytic fraternity in London were often inclined to follow the popular lead; and that by the end of the 1930s the application of the theories of Freud and his followers to the incoherencies of modern painting had become an urgent professional task. But what conclusions would such an application bring? Several came close to agreeing with Jung that the eruption of unbearable instincts without the due regulation of consciousness had resulted in works that appeared chaotically ugly to a significant cross section of their viewers. The artwork parallels the dream-work, according to the Edinburgh psychoanalyst Ronald Fairbairn; and yet for him it still remained to be explained why many paintings by Picasso and Paul Klee ‘give the impression of having been either grossly distorted or broken up into fragments – or else subject to both those mutilating processes’. Fairbairn felt that so fractured or dismembered are the human figures in their works that ‘pictures of this sort very naturally produce in the man

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in the street an impression of chaos’. But Fairbarn was a diligent reader of Read’s book Surrealism as well as a Freudian who wanted to build on the findings of the recent child-analyses of Freud’s follower Melanie Klein, herself resident in London since 1926; and in two papers read before the Scottish Branch of the British Psychological Society in 1937 and 1938 respectively and published in London in the British Journal of Psychoanalysis just before the war, Fairbairn’s verdict was that monstrosity in the artwork appeared unsettling to the degree to which the secondary elaboration process (the dream-work) had been half-hearted in relation to the strength of the sadistic impulses unleashed. Klein herself had published a paper in 1929 that had located the origins of all creative activity in a reparative or restorative drive that comes into play in infancy when the mental structure seems in the grip of a ‘paranoid-schizoid’ phase, in which instinctual violence is exercised at the same time as unbounded love, but in relation to different experiences and things. The normal and healthy infant, Klein then supposed, was eventually able to grasp that the wholly Good Object (for example the breast supplied) is in reality the same object as the wholly Bad Object (the breast withheld or withdrawn, or the mother who withholds or withdraws it). Klein gives an account of the child’s primary sadism as one in which ‘smashing things, tearing them up, using the tongs as a sword’ – the details are from a contemporary performance of Ravel’s opera L’Enfant et les Sortilèges, reported in the Berliner Tageblatt – represent along with excremental soiling ‘the weapons of the child’s primary sadism, which employs his teeth, nails, muscles and so on’ to damage the parents either individually or in their copulating identity.10 And those phantasies of sadism are followed by anxiety, according to Klein, characteristic of a ‘depressive’ position that is only overcome by gestures of restitution and repair – the origin of all creative work. In the Surrealist work of art, Fairbairn suggests, small gestures of reparation can be observed, but the whole is typically a failed equation between the pressures of the destructive impulses and the restitutive powers of the finished work. He places a choice of examples before the reader: Joan Miró’s Maternity of 1924, Paul Klee’s Dynamics of a Head of 1934, and Picasso’s Woman in an Armchair of 1914, all of them shown in the International Surrealist Exhibition and all of them reproduced in Herbert Read’s book (Fig.3.1). In such cases ‘there is, so to speak, 9



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a low coefficient of repression in relation to the unconscious urges expressed; and the result is that the art-work is comparatively meagre’. Restitution should function positively, suggests Fairbairn, and not just in a compensatory way. Such examples express a cruel dismemberment of the human body, and they each parade that dismemberment without ‘making whole’ the parts that had been torn asunder. Picasso’s failure in his Surrealism lay in the fact that the work of art must both provide a release for destructive urges and visibly compensate for doing so by giving an impression of integrity or the reintegration of parts. In the absence of that balance, ‘aesthetic experience is precluded’, and ugliness and chaos are the result.11 With the slide of Europe into literal war in 1939, modern art continued to bear the weight of responsibility for adequately expressing the nature of the international conflict, as well as providing experiences of redemption and wholeness to which a contemporary public could



Pablo Picasso, Woman in Blouse in an Armchair, 1913, oil on canvas, 148 × 99 cm, Ingeborg Pudelko Collection, Florence.

Fig.3.1

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respond. For John Rickman in his 1940 paper ‘On the Nature of Ugliness and the Creative Impulse’, the question was whether pain, anxiety and guilt could not provide the same foundation for art as they did for everyday life. In describing the emotional dynamics of those responding to mutilated body-images (in statues), or the appearance of a deformed or defective body, or the unpleasant ‘lack of finish’ in the work of art, Rickman points to factors lying well beneath the level of conscious apprehension and which make predictable accusations of ‘ugliness’ little more than a cloak for the viewer’s unresolved internal hostility. ‘Just as distortion [in the work of art] rouses guilt at our complicity in the deed or anger at the potential good things being deformed’, Rickman suggests, ‘so on contemplating “unfinished” work some feel cheated by the artist and react to the frustration with hostility – using the judgement of ugliness as a cover for their resentment’. ‘But there is another characteristic which sometimes excites the judgement of ugliness, namely where the onlooker finds what he regards as a “foreign body” in an otherwise acceptable work…it is spoiled by this alien thing and the picture is reckoned ugly.’ In such cases the artist should be able to ‘go behind the veil which screens the source of our dejection and bring back evidence for the triumph of the creative impulse over the forces of destruction’. The work of art still resembles in its structure the operations of the dream, according to Rickman. But he strikes a rare note of sympathy for Surrealists in describing them, not as those whose instincts are unmodified by a countervailing good, but those whose work ‘will be strong only so long as the force attaching to the latent content can be given full scope’. And rather that, than the overcompensatory revisions that attempt to ‘finish’ the painting in accordance with all the exactness and detail available to the spectator in reality, and of which, for the benefit of his English readers, he cites Frith’s Derby Day of 1858 as a well-known instance.12 For other psychoanalysts, the implication was that in relation to the conflicts of the time, modern art had capitulated to forces beyond its conscious control. The pacifist orientation of the Surrealists in the run-up to wartime was especially irritating to Melanie Klein and her followers because she regarded the capacity to hate without qualification as an essential requirement of both internal and external victory – this after all had been the central achievement of the paranoid-schizoid position,



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the earliest stage of mental development after birth. Her close supporter Joan Rivière wrote to her in June 1940, asking her to ‘tell us first what you believe to be the causes of the German psychological situation, and secondly of that of the rest of Europe and mainly the Allies, since the last war. To me the apathy and denial of danger in the Allies, especially England, is not clear (I never shared it).’ She invited Klein to ‘tell us (and then a group of us) everything you think about the causes of aggression, so that all of us who can understand these things at all should share and know as much as possible, to help to preserve it’.13 On June 4th, the day Klein received the letter, London received news of the final evacuation of Dunkirk. After months of relative inactivity, Londoners were preparing for invasion and possibly death. The compromising tone of the depressive position, normally the successor to the paranoidschizoid phase, would be no good now. And hence in the paper that Klein came to write for Rivière’s group, ‘What Does Death Represent to the Individual?’ she writes that ‘the incapacity to dissociate the evil father and parents from the good ones…has a paralysing effect in the relation to external dangers’. Only when hatred and guilt connected with early phantasies have been successfully resolved can a person remain calm and constructive in the face of danger; only then, in Klein’s view, can one ‘turn with strength and determination against the external enemy’.14 The publication of a series of psychoanalytic studies on the experience of Londoners in wartime, in which the calm and courage of the population seemed to be aided by a prior willingness to hate, was enough to convince Klein and her followers that the resolution of infantile anxiety lay at the heart of adult psychological maturity – and with it, the maturity of art.15 And yet, during and for some time after the war, the problem of ugliness in the Surrealist work of art continued to dominate both popular and psychoanalytical discussion no less urgently than before. On the one hand, professional apologists for Surrealist techniques and imagery were finding new voices; on the other, art criticism was beginning to borrow the terms of psychoanalysis without a full-scale commitment to its methods or terminologies. A new magazine published in London between 1940 and 1949 under Cyril Connolly’s editorship and entitled Horizon: A Review of Literature and Art, had started to give enthusiastic support to Cubist painting and sculpture by Picasso and Georges Braque; to abstraction

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by Ben Nicholson, Barbara Hepworth and Henry Moore; as well as to Henri Matisse, Paul Klee and Joan Miró. In a sympathetic account of Picasso’s double-profile heads – to many, evidence of the artist’s descent and the immediate trigger for accusations of violence in the work of art – the critic Robert Melville gave an account of their ‘organic’, ‘conciliatory’, and ‘stabilising’ function, based on a group of Picasso’s paintings from 1925–32. ‘The mitigation of mutilation’ was a further phrase in which Melville celebrated not the clashing inconsistencies of Picasso’s art, but its ‘integrative’, ‘assimilative’ qualities, a reading in tune with Horizon’s wartime priority of giving support to an international artistic culture that was modern and constructive, imaginative, energetic and above all confident and free.16 It was one sign that art criticism was beginning to articulate a distinctively ‘modern’ aesthetic that traded not in accusations of violence to form, but which on the contrary could address questions of aesthetic achievement in a language of understanding and admiration. In the last year of the war, Horizon printed a set of photographs of Picasso’s studio alongside an article by a young American critic named Clement Greenberg, who transformed the terminology of unconscious action into a rhetoric of his own. Not only had Surrealism’s enthusiastic cohabitation with literature functioned as a sop to those for whom modern abstraction had proved more threatening still; but all talk of ‘latent’ versus ‘manifest’ content had only served to emphasise how little the psychoanalytical fraternity understood the relation of art to its medium – that is the implication of Greenberg’s announcement that ‘in the practice of painting it is much harder than in that of poetry…to tell where the unconscious stops and the reasoning will takes over’.17 Greenberg’s point was as powerful as it was simple. For if ‘it is impossible to determine with any satisfying exactness where in painting the automatic stops and the conscious begins’, it is also impossible to assess where the unconstrained instincts are active and where the restitutive forces begin their work. The operation of the unconscious mind in modern art, if such it be, serves only to lift the inhibitions which prevent the artist from surrendering, as he needs to, to his medium. In such surrender lies one of the particular advantages of modern art. Surrealism, under this aspect and only under this, culminates the process which has in the last seventy years restored painting to itself and enabled the modern artist to rival the achievements of the past.18



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Of course, the argument was by no means at an end. As Greenberg’s article was being published, steps were in train to bring to the exhausted but victorious London public two displays of modern art that would provoke hostility and applause in equal measure. An exhibition of work by Paul Klee took place at the National Gallery in December 1945; while at the Victoria and Albert Museum between December 1945 and January 1946 Picasso was paired with Henri Matisse in an exhibition that would tour to Manchester and Glasgow to popular disgust and fascination alike. The British Council in a partnership with the still bombed-out Tate Gallery were to be the London agents; the Direction Generale des Relations Culturelles and L’Association Françoise d’Action Artistique the partners in Paris. Negotiations for the show had gone badly in the early part of the year. The diplomacy, like the war before it, had been touch and go. Two months before the end of the war, Frank McEwen of the British Council in Paris writes to A.A. Longden in London that ‘I had a long talk yesterday with Picasso…he said he would on no account consider going to London as he had already wasted so much time with bores [emmerdeurs] coming to see him. He said: “Il ne faut pas tuer Picasso avec Picasso”.’ Accordingly, ‘the maximum of discretion and subtlety [souplesse] must be used…as he is easily hurt [froissé] and has little time for anybody other than his long-tried friends’.19 Gertrude Stein was approached to help bring Picasso round.20 By 24 May the position was somehow retrieved. McEwen was able to report: ‘Picasso and Matisse both accept to participate fully in their twin shows in London’, hence promising a display in which two modernists from mainland Europe would express the bitterness of the conflict as well as the gaiety and calm of a new life. No doubt it was felt that Picasso the fiery Spaniard would contrast effectively with Matisse the charming Frenchman. Shown in such a pairing, they could be expected to provoke and sensationalise, taunt and confuse.21 In retrospect, the pairing of Picasso and Matisse in London between 5 December 1945 and 15 January 1946 can even be seen as a reflection of the Kleinian depressive position itself, in which violent psychic conflicts in one set of rooms were resolved by soft and reparative feelings in another (Fig. 3.2). The trope of tolerating pain in order to gain tranquillity was ubiquitous. It occurs once more in the catalogue preface to Picasso’s part

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Paintings by Matisse, the Picasso-Matisse Exhibition, Victoria and Albert Museum, 1946.

Fig.3.2

of the show by the artist’s friend and biographer Christian Zervos, who in a powerful statement defends Picasso’s indulgence in strong emotion while claiming Picasso’s new works to be masterpieces of rejuvenation and inventiveness for a world that had become violent and even mad. Picasso’s works, all from the war years, with the addition of Night Fishing at Antibes, 1939, are ‘beyond question the most truly monsterlike figures in his whole work, more extraordinary than those of the Iberian-Negro or of the Cubist periods – weird creatures certainly, but yet not yet utterly adrift in the world’, wrote Zervos (Fig.3.3). ‘Beneath the apparent disorder of their shapes, there is always the revolutionary order of life – the only perfect order possible. The lack of coordination between the various elements of composition is only apparent.’ The artist’s new paintings are no longer limited to the two impulses of terror and suffering – reactions appropriate to the great unhappiness of the age – painted violently and hurled in contempt at our senseless existence. In the midst of so much madness, these figures convey the soothing power of everyday life.22

It might have seemed to any Kleinian reading such a statement that psychoanalysis had correctly divined the position of the negative instincts in modern art. On the other hand was the evidence of many



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Pablo Picasso, Dawn Serenade, 1942, oil on canvas, 195 × 265 cm, Musée National d’Art Moderne.

who were obviously offended by the show (Fig. 3.4); and here it is striking how frequently correspondents to the newspapers mixed their analogies between modern art and war with insinuations of psychological derangement in the artist and his milieu. Kleinians might have read with interest the ‘Must We Tolerate Ugliness in Art?’ headline in the London Daily Telegraph on 22 December 1945, in which correspondents spoke of ‘heresy’ and ‘unintelligibility’ in Picasso, and reminded readers that ‘several modern celebrities [in art] died insane’. They might have seen the ‘Picasso Art Monstrous: Criticism by Vicar’ headline in the same newspaper on 28 December. Or perhaps they could imagine the inner turmoil of Canon T.P. Stevens, Vicar of St Paul’s in Wimbledon Park, who wrote in his Parish Magazine that ‘distortion is the only word we can apply to these monstrosities. They represent noise – the noise made by certain other degenerates in music, statuary and literature.’ Meanwhile a musical analogy had been attempted by Evelyn Waugh, who wrote to The Times on 19 December suggesting that ‘Señor Picasso’s paintings cannot be intelligently discussed in the terms used of the civilized masters …he can only be treated as

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crooners are treated by their devotees. They are “sent” …We may even envy them their experience,’ he goes on, ‘but do not let us confuse it with the sober and elevating happiness which we derive from the great masters’.23 Others were more hostile still. ‘Useless to youth’, ‘a jungle of deformity’, was how the Conference of Educational Associations had Picasso described to it by a headmaster from the Isle of Wight. ‘We are shown deformed bodies, parts of limbs and parts of faces, with some of the fingers protruding from the tops of their heads.’ ‘Some of the drawings are openly indecent, all respect for humanity having disappeared. There is not a suggestion of beauty or truth or common humanity.’ They were ‘messages from the mortuary …morbid rubbish, which the youth of today had no use for’.24 Among artists themselves, traditionalists wanted optimism and constructive feeling. The sculptor Gilbert Ledward said that we could ‘no more “enjoy” these paintings than we can enjoy the present unhappy state of the world conditions’. In The Times letters columns, the flow of epithets against Picasso was unremitting and intense: ‘squalid and brutish’, ‘unfertile [sic]’, ‘crude’, ‘Belsen horrors’, ‘the phantasmagoria of a demented mind’.25



Viewing paintings by Picasso, the Picasso-Matisse Exhibition, Victoria and Albert Museum, 1946.

Fig.3.4



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Once the exhibition reached Glasgow, the newspapers there were full of references to Picasso’s mental state. ‘Horrid’, ‘morbid’, ‘demented’; ‘I venture to suggest’, wrote one E. McCreadie on 7 February, ‘that Picasso should pay for a consultation with a good professional psychiatrist instead of getting a free diagnosis from the general public’. Or in a lighter vein, it was supposed that Picasso’s Woman in a Fish Hat ‘revealed the misery of the women who stood in the cold in a queue for fish’ (or as another correspondent joked, ‘a pity he forgot the chips’) (Fig.3.5).26 Popular accounts of Freudian psychology abounded. ‘A psychoanalyst may tell us that a man who in his infancy was bashed on the head with a wet towel by an impatient nurse will delight in sticking red-hot needles into a festering sore on his instep, and pari passu have similar feelings with regard to artistic form’, according to one writer.27 Director of Glasgow Art Galleries Tom Honeyman, who had worked in the London art world in the 1930s and by coincidence had lived opposite Freud in Hampstead, sought to defend Picasso in terms of his ‘displacements’ of form. ‘The psychologists tell us that one of the characteristics of the imagination



Pablo Picasso, Seated Woman with Hat in the Shape of a Fish, 1942, oil on canvas, 100 × 81.5 cm.

Fig.3.5

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is the creation of substitute objects in the place of real ones’, he told a university audience early in 1946. Yet once more the psychological symptoms were frequently attributed to the atmosphere of the recent war: ‘Perhaps [Picasso] has been so moved by terrible events [in Paris] that in his efforts to convey “the truth” he has become incoherent’. On the other hand – and here the reference is to the threat of atomic war – ‘his works may be in the nature of an apocalypse, the symbols of which are always obscure’.28 For several years after 1945 the sources of ugliness in Picasso’s art continued to be debated in London – as if an alien artist had dropped aesthetic bombs on an unsuspecting nation in just the manner the Germans had used real bombs during the war. And yet a gradual shift can be observed in the most compelling commentaries, away from the qualities of the work itself towards the processes of perception, and particularly the way perception interacted with judgement in the face of new and formally experimental works of art. The most imaginative new investigation of the late 1940s and early 1950s came from a young tutor in the Textiles Department of the Central School of Arts and Crafts in London, Anton Ehrenzweig, who had arrived in London from Vienna in 1938 with an academic training in psychology and art history, and who was now collaborating with Eduardo Paolozzi and other vanguard artists in London at the forefront of new artistic work. What is distinctive about Ehrenzweig’s contribution to the debate about artistic form is his willingness to abstain from value-judgements, and to move beyond the appearance of disjointed or illegible form to locate the principles by which the mind at ‘deep’ and ‘surface’ levels works to integrate (and in the case of artists, to create) the new and engaging work of art. Building on a casual remark encountered in Herbert Read’s Art and Industry that ‘some modern paintings make the eye “wander”’, Ehrenzweig claims to transcend the theory presented in Wolfgang Köhler’s Gestalt Psychology (1930) that the eye necessarily perceives in ‘pregnant’, ‘simple’, or ‘good’ wholes, appealing instead to the effects of tapestry, wallpaper, and modern painting alike that appear superficially to ‘lack pregnant gestalts generally [and] also lack a pleasing aesthetic impression’.29 As Ehrenzweig puts it, In a painting by Picasso we might find a guitar superimposed upon a human limb. When we fix our attention first on the guitar and then on the human limb,



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each of the two objects might call up another set of adjoining forms to which it is juxtaposed. As the eye glides over the superimposed and overlapping forms the whole structure of the picture seems to shift continually as each form calls up a new juxtaposition of forms. An attempt at a definite form analysis such as is possible with traditional painting would fail here and would leave our eyes blurred and strained.30

On the contrary, Ehrenzweig proposes, depth perception is ‘not only free from the surface gestalt but follows a different form-principle altogether’, namely a dynamic interplay between depth and the surface levels. The Freudian dream-work may testify to the distance between the undifferentiated lower level and the differentiated surface mind, but in practice the viewer experiences a continuous interchange in perception between the two. Modern art such as Picasso’s is characterised by the ‘total inactivity of the surface mind’, says Ehrenzweig. ‘At the beginning [the artist] knows only vaguely, if at all, what he is going to produce: his mind is curiously empty while he watches passively the forms growing from under the brush’: his account of the trance-like automatism of the artist’s compositional technique echoes with some precision Picasso’s explicit statements on art – such as ‘when I paint my object is to show what I have found and not what I am looking for’, or ‘in my case a picture is a sum of destructions. I do a picture – then I destroy it’ – as well as HenriGeorges Clouzot’s 1955 film, Le Mystère Picasso, that emphasised Picasso’s volatile working method.31 In the book-length version of his essays published in 1953, Ehrenzweig explicitly attributes to Picasso mastery of a thing-free mode of depth perception (the primary process) which he then manages to bring to the surface in a series of steps; an ‘unconscious mode of vision…which scrambles up, as it were, the “true” retinal image’. Ehrenzweig proposed an intermediate stage…which combined several sectional views with ‘wrong’ (thing-free) composites. For the viewer, the final stage in perception is to ‘unscramble’ these distortions into the ‘correct’ composite and so restore the original spatial distribution found in the retinal image,

in this way producing ‘convincing likenesses’ out of apparently dismembered or disjointed forms, thus confirming Picasso’s 1923 maxim that ‘art is a lie that makes us realize truth’.32 And yet in that very interplay between gestalt-bound surface structures and

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gestalt-free undifferentiation, Ehrenzweig sees another confirmation and an extension of the tussle between Thanatos and Eros, between the destructive impulses of the Kleinian paranoid-schizoid position and the integrative tendencies of the depressive position. As Klein had implied and as Hanna Segal had more recently argued, with the true artist the alternative disintegration and reintegration of surface perception is part of a much farther-reaching process of disintegration and reconstitution within the self…[in which] aesthetic feeling (incumbent on the reintegration of surface perception) ceases to be a merely pleasant sensual pleasure and becomes one of the fullest and deepest experiences of which the human mind is capable.33

In the interval between Ehrenzweig’s two papers and his 1953 book The Psychoanalysis of Artistic Vision and Hearing, the London psychoanalytic community continued to be animated by questions of art. Herbert Read gave endorsement to both Fairbairn’s and Ehrenzweig’s positions in his 1950 Ernest Jones lecture.34 A more guardedly optimistic view was published by the Manchester-based psychoanalyst Michael Balint, in a paper ‘On the Dissolution of Object-Representation in Modern Art’ in 1952, in which the 11 states of Picasso’s lithograph Bull, made between 5 December 1945 and 17 January 1946, are taken to reverse the evolution from ‘naturalistic’ to ‘primitive’ in the work of art, to end up, according to Balint, looking like a kind of ‘narcissistic’ preoccupation with subjective ways of seeing and treating objects.35 In modern art ‘objects are dismembered, split, cruelly deformed, messed about. The dirty, ugly qualities of the objects are realistically and even Surrealistically revealed’. While his ultimate verdict is that contemporary methods of representation were often akin to primitive ‘anal’ messing, a kind of nadir in which ‘less and less regard is paid to the objects’ feelings, interests and sensitivities’, yet he is prepared to believe that modern art also shows us that discord can be tolerated and even enjoyed ‘by the artist as well as by the general public’, and that the degradation of the object ‘will very probably give way gradually to a concern for creating whole and hearty objects’.36 And yet, in longer retrospection, such language looks and sounds archaic; and it may be that Freudian and Kleinian psychoanalytical descriptions of modern art began to lose their appeal just as soon as more historically informed treatments of the representational process



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reached pubic notice. A particularly stern rebuff to Kleinian analyses of Picasso’s art would come, for instance, on the occasion of another Ernest Jones Lecture, that given in November 1953 by the art historian Ernst Gombrich. For Gombrich, who had arrived at the Warburg Institute from Vienna in 1936 and had already collaborated in 1940 on a psychoanalytical study of caricature with Ernst Kris, the artist who both matches and improves upon the representational schema of his predecessors leaves little room for the eruption into the artwork of his own psychological dramas. For art has a history and a style, insists Gombrich, whereas the dream and dreaming do not. And since ‘traditional conventional elements often outweigh the personal ones’ in the masterpieces of past art, he is inclined to think the same must be true of modern art. Contrary to the prevailing psychoanalytic view that Picasso was plumbing the morbid depths of his psyche as well as of his own time, Gombrich locates aesthetic achievement not in the artist, but in the relationship between the conventionalism of the picture’s forms and the verdicts of informed taste, specifically the appetites of what he calls the ‘sophisticated viewer’. Such a viewer – Gombrich calls him the ‘townified highbrow’, whose appetites are the more difficult to satisfy the higher the brow – derives a certain pleasure from difficult art, and finds only aesthetic discomfort at the opposite pole, in the saccharine or kitschy works that offer nothing but easy regressive pleasures (bodies, colours, and ambiguity). And in modern art, according to Gombrich, the most difficult of all pleasures arose in Cubism, specifically Picasso’s ability to dismember and rearrange the forms of the body such that ‘our mind is set in motion like a squirrel in a cage’.37 Following a lead provided by an earlier paper by Edward Glover concerning the part played by biting and sucking in gratification, Gombrich proposes that the disturbing form-fragmentations of Picasso’s Cubism are best understood, not in terms of the artist’s psychological biography, but as part of an equation in which intense regressive pleasures are matched by a corresponding participation on the viewer’s part in the reading of the work – and the greater the participation, the more rewarding the regression. In the language of taste, according to Gombrich, it is the highbrow who prefers crunchy aesthetic food whereas the beginner is happy with ‘sloppy mush’. Into his work of the period around 1910–13 Picasso poured

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all the aggression and savagery that was pent up in him, and he invents the game of Cubism, the art of representing Humpty Dumpty after the fall. In these pictures primitive representational clues turn up, but only to tease and misdirect us. Anything is possible in this crazy world: is not this guitar with its curves and hollow body also a symbol of the human body? And this bottle beside another guitar, is it not also a phallus? (Fig.3.6).38

Gombrich’s argument here is not that Picasso’s inner conflicts are special in themselves, but that ‘he found himself in a situation in which his private conflicts acquired artistic relevance’; one in which ‘without the social factors, what we may term the attitudes of the audience…the private needs could not be transmuted into art’. What the psychoanalysts had been ignoring was that without an understanding of the relation between novel artistic representation and precedent, little progress could



Pablo Picasso, Bottle, Guitar, and Pipe (upper right), 1912–13, reproduced from the International Journal of Psycho-analysis 35 (1954).

Fig.3.6



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be expected in coming to terms with particular apparent disturbances of form. And ‘whereas taste may be accessible to psychological analysis, art is possibly not’.39 Gombrich’s verdict here seems in retrospect to have been decisive. From the mid-1950s onwards – and even though Gombrich’s account of representation would not win universal assent – it remains the case that psychologised terminologies of ugliness would now begin to fall away from discussions of modern art; and conservative criticism more generally would wither, as more fully informed historical, sociological, and even biographical analyses of modern art came gradually into view.



4



The ‘Ugliness’ of the Avant-Garde Mechtild Widrich

A great deal has been said about these artists searching for the ugly instead of consoling us with beauty. They forget that every new work of creative design is ugly until it becomes beautiful; that we usually apply the word beautiful to those works of art in which familiarity has enabled us to grasp the unity easily, and that we find ugly those works in which we still perceive the unity only by an effort.1

In his 2003 book on The Abuse of Beauty, Arthur Danto quotes this startling defence of French modernists, in particular Henri Matisse, advanced in 1912 by the formalist critic Roger Fry. In the wake of a century of neglect or explicit invective against beauty in art theory, Danto asks whether it has any place among the means or ends of art. For Fry, who had organised two highly debated exhibitions of what he called ‘post-impressionist’ art, the polarisation between beauty’s ‘easy grasp’ and perception full of ‘effort’ was more than just a call for art education. It is also a declaration of avant-garde faith: the most shocking aesthetic effect would, once understood, be admitted to the canon. Danto turns Fry’s argument on its head. Great works of art, like Matisse’s Blue Nude (1907) could not only be ugly, they could remain so.2 Fry’s argument is for Danto of historical value: the first glimmer of the modernist idea that ‘it was possible for painting to be artistically excellent but at the same time ugly’.3 As an advocate of Matisse and African art, Fry should have known – and shown – that ‘it is not necessary for art to be beautiful, to be good’. But Fry was not arguing about art in general. Fry’s point is that it is necessary for art to be ugly – and subsequently beautiful – to be modern. My essay on the place of ugliness in the avant-garde tradition thus addresses a simple question: does radical ugliness only break new ground for beauty? ‘Pollock’, Clement Greenberg mused in an exhibition review published in 1945, ‘is not afraid to look ugly – all profoundly original art looks ugly at first ’.4 69



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This conquest of ugliness, of course, has itself become a myth of the avant-garde: in transgressing the aesthetic border that encloses art, new territories of experience are colonised by the aesthetic, or else aesthetic experience is dissolved in the everyday. This second variant is in fact a rival view of avant-garde history, ‘the blurring of art and life’ (Allan Kaprow) or what Danto calls ‘the intractable avant-garde’, a tendency, which, following Dada and Marcel Duchamp, has put aesthetic categories into question altogether, turning art into a broader investigation of reality, above all political and social. Danto describes the Zürich Dadaists, for example, as the ‘moral mirror’ of a society driven by war, and Max Ernst is cited approvingly: ‘to us, Dada was above all a moral reaction.’5 In this essay, my aim is to trouble the self-assurance of this by now dominant narrative of avant-garde autonomy from aesthetics. In what follows, I argue that the reception of contemporary art ‘first as ugly’, then as institutionally appropriate and thus ‘beautiful’, is a function of the engagement of art with its public, and its self-inscription in history. In other words, ugliness, though intrinsic to modern art, shares its significance with an expanded concept of beauty, at times visual, at times experiential, but in all cases contextual and predicated on audience uptake of investigations of and beyond aesthetics.6 This is not identical with ‘spectacle’ or commodification. It is rather a matter of art coming to shape the context in which other art is discussed and produced – put bluntly, entering the canon. Beauty is here to be understood not as an intrinsic concept, but as a function (becoming a mode of orientation for artists, being written about, and so on). The argument is, however, that this is no purely external matter of institutions. Rather, artists partly engineer this entry into aesthetic discourse by skilled, ‘beautiful’ if you will, manipulation of ugly or aesthetically neutral objects and actions. I analyse this phenomenon, and its implications for the political import of recent art, through a close look at a group of artists generally thought to be diametrically opposed to traditional notions of aesthetic value, the Viennese Actionists. Since the early 1960s, the spectacular and often aggressive actions of the core members – Günter Brus, Otto Muehl, Rudolf Schwarzkogler, and Hermann Nitsch – have incorporated their own and collaborators’ bodies as ‘material’, along with excrement (their own), animal blood, and slaughter. Smell, taste, and touch were central to their practice,

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which had various roots ranging from Nouveau Réalisme to Fluxus and the cabaret-oriented happenings of the slightly older Vienna Group (Friedrich Achleitner, Konrad Bayer, Gerhard Rühm, Oswald Wiener). In addition to this chaotic matrix of post-war avant-garde formations, the Actionists’ work should also, as Muehl and Brus repeatedly emphasised, be seen as a direct development out of painting.7 I will skip lightly over the reactions of the Austrian public and in particular of state authorities: suffice it to say that members of the Actionists were arrested, tried, fined, and on occasion even imprisoned for pornography, breach of public order, ‘degradation of state symbols’, and similar offenses, to the accompaniment of outraged press reactions.8 For art critics, even those close to Fluxus, Happenings, and the new media, the Actionists were also irritating and perplexing, resembling and yet apparently going beyond the vehemence of 1960s performance with acts of self-endangerment and materials that were viscerally sickening: and so scholars had to access them as apostles of ugliness, the death drive, and post-fascist destruction. In Fascination de la Laideur (1978), Murielle Gagnebin introduces ‘le Body-art’ near the end of her historical trajectory, in which ugliness in art represents death and the ‘malefic power of time’.9 Taking Nitsch and Schwarzkogler, together with other self-injuring performers like Gina Pane, as paradigmatic of body art in general, Gagnebin argues that ‘this school – which is none other than the school of death’ – challenges the brutality of the Gulag and widespread starvation through gestures that closely resemble it.10 Artist-critic Adrian Henri, in his 1974 volume on Total Art, is more explicit: What is certainly disquieting is that Germany and Austria are the homes of this violently sadistic art, only a generation after the Nazis had embodied Sade’s worst fantasies more thoroughly than he could have imagined. Is the work of Mühl, Brus and Nitsch an elaborate act of self-abasement for the sins of their fathers, or merely an echo of the hideous Nazi ethos?11

Henri and Gagnebin are both perceptive writers, and Henri was close to Fluxus, having himself participated in the Liverpool art scene of the 1960s; yet both authors are genuinely troubled by the ‘gestures’ (Gagnebin) and ‘sado-erotic images’ (Henri) produced by the Actionists, wondering what the purpose of such art could be. From our point of view, it is of course pertinent that it is as images or gestures that these



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seemingly anarchic actions pose a challenge for interpretation. But the shock value of disgust, as Kant saw, makes these images float uneasily between representations and the realities they represent. For both Henri and Gagnebin, ugliness is significant, but it remains unresolved whether it breaks into art as pure trauma, or is a carefully staged ‘aesthetic substitute’, as Nitsch called it in his 1969 manifesto: Through my artistic production (a form of the mysticism of being), I take upon myself the apparent negative, unsavoury, perverse, obscene, the passion and the hysteria of the act of sacrifice, so that YOU are spared the sullying, shaming descent into the extreme.12

Is it paradoxical that Henri cites this elaborate self-interpretation and then goes on to wonder whether the Actionists are symbolising or just enacting brutality? I think not, because what is at stake is the causal role played by violence, pain, and in general ugliness in Actionist art: whether it is a means or an end in itself. Let us look into the issue more closely. What did beauty and ugliness mean to the Actionists? Their output in Austria and in Fluxus events elsewhere (principally Germany and England) was framed by an international theoretical climate embracing Antonin Artaud’s Theatre of Cruelty, which called for violent abolition of the boundaries between spectator and performer, and the Freudian Marxism of Herbert Marcuse, who warned against a sexual and moral liberation in tune with capitalist consumption (‘repressive desublimation’), and instead proposed a non-affirmative art providing imaginative access to unavailable freedoms.13 This sounds quite abstract, and in Marcuse’s writings it generally is, except for when he is writing about the modernist ‘Rebellion against Art’, Art with a capital A being the aesthetic agent of political domination: ‘the commitment of Art to the Ideal, to the beautiful and the sublime, and with it the “holiday” function of Art, now offend the human condition.’ As a result, in the present ‘the cognitive function of Art can no longer obey the harmonizing “law of Beauty”.’14 Marcuse’s positive story, according to which beauty would return as a harmonisation of labour and imagination, is less interesting than his negative one. In existing society, ugly art allows us to reflect on society’s attempt to cover up ugly truths.15 If we approach ugliness as a way of criticism, we see that the Actionists’ anger with the conservative Austrian

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society of the 1960s – which does not, as Henri intuited, translate into a mature concern with the fascist past – informs their intra-aesthetic ambition for an expanded form of experience. Through this expansion, actions that seem radically destructive, repulsive, or abject give rise to carefully orchestrated and more or less aesthetically striking images and films.16 Should we consider these documents mere, if painstaking, records? Or are they self-conscious artworks responsive to art history in a way the actions were not?17 It seems that Actionist events and artefacts have a claim to being both. The documents would be senseless if they did not convey the tenor of the events, and the events were carefully planned and carried out so as to make possible photographic imagery. And the aesthetic reactions they evoke are similarly two-tiered. Even Henri and Gagnebin, with their well-founded distrust of the Actionists’ brutish methods, describe Actionist practice on the meta-level of the symbolic (gestures, images), and not as live encounters.18 And I think they are right, for the Actionists did not restrict their effects to the relatively few spectators they had in Vienna and elsewhere. An early, highly charged Actionist project may illustrate my point. Nitsch and Muehl’s first public collaboration, the Festival of Psycho-physical Naturalism (1963) is a prototype of Actionist practice, ending in exemplary fashion with a police intervention. Nitsch planned his own part in the Festival, and reported it before the fact, as follows: Through actions I will get myself psychically and physically excited and reach the experience of primordial excess. I pour, spray, stain the surface with blood and wallow in the pools of paint. With my clothes on, I lie down on a bed, entrails, mangled cow’s udders, hair, hot water being stuffed and poured under the feather bed. With luke-warm water I am cleansed of all secretions…I sacrifice my body to public libation.19

Due to the police, Muehl was unable to perform his part, the ‘Degradation of a Venus: a demonstration of the “artistic equality of morass, man, rags, bread and cement”’.20 He later performed his action (under the title ‘Degradation of a Female Body’), which in fact consisted in pouring various liquids and semi-solids on a bound naked female model, in his studio (Fig. 4.1). Decisively, Muehl invited a documentary photographer, Ludwig Hoffenreich, who went on to produce many Actionist documents, to this studio event.21 Or take the



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lamb manifesto Nitsch produced in 1964 (Fig.4.2): The references to Christian symbolism and the beauty of the composition are combined with a written statement. Nitsch declared that the goal of his art is a combination of a more sensitive ‘registration of the environment’ with the ‘symbolic content’ inherent in every object or activity.22 In recent years, the curator researching Actionism at Vienna’s Museum of Modern Art, Eva Badura-Triska, has presented the group’s output as a radical kind of expanded painting. In a recent article, she argues that even their actions have to be considered in this light, for the Actionists were driven by a ‘pictorial’ formal thinking.23 Countering the stillpredominant view that photographic documents were ‘secondary’ to the violent, charismatic, participatory acts, she tries to unite actions

Otto Muehl, Degradation of a Female Body, 1963.

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Hermann Nitsch, lamb manifesto, 1964.

Fig.4.2

and photographs under the umbrella of post-war efforts to break away from the easel painting. This view may be plausible, but the focus on very narrow avant-garde formal concerns does obscure the direct means by which the Actionists sought to contaminate and exploit old aesthetic presuppositions. There seems to be quite a bit of ‘beauty’, ranging from attractive models of both sexes to the production of masterful staged images, and quite a bit of ‘pleasure’ involved in the smearing of substances on naked skin, to say nothing of the lingering documentations of this in the films of fellow artist Kurt Kren. Besides the symbolic demotion of ideal beauty as announced in the title of the piece, we see male artists acting against beauty, embodied in their models, who conveniently correspond to contemporary beauty ideals (rather like Yves Klein’s). There must be more going on here than the expansion of painting into non-painting – at the very least, beauty ‘swamped’ by ugliness and returning, as live affect and delayed document, as the record of a corrosive engagement with beauty.



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The careful staging of photographs, even the careful staging of some of the actions for the camera, resulting in a pictorial tableau, can be best understood if we allow that both ugliness and beauty play a role in their formation.24 It does not mean that the Actionists really wanted to overcome ugliness, nor that they were simply inconsistent or courting the art market. What it reveals is several levels of aesthetic production, possibly, one might suspect even an expanded concept of ‘beauty’, which includes desire, passionate liberation, and angry satisfaction (i.e. modernist male artist clichés à la Jackson Pollock). The photographic output is a good indication of this, as is the first anthology of Viennese Actionism, entitled Bildkompendium Wiener Aktionismus und Film, edited by fellow artist Peter Weibel in collaboration with the sole female actionist (albeit marginal to the group) VALIE EXPORT (Fig.4.3). How is radical action conveyed in a book? How do photographs, typed chronologies, image captions, and the scandal around the publication itself play a role in the writing of history about Actionism, and how do these set the stage



Cover of Weibel/EXPORT, Bildkompendium Wiener Aktionismus und Film (1970).

Fig.4.3

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for later reception? The book was a scandal due to the explicitly sexual content of several images, and led to legal action against the editors, but it succeeded in setting up an authoritative historical framework for the reception of Actionism, which it first endowed with the canonical –ism of its title.25 The text glorifies the Actionists themselves as revolutionary outcasts rattling an ossified society, but the book’s design is productively ambiguous: it stakes out a position between the guerrilla immediacy of a pirated publication and the spartan elegance of conceptual art. More than two thirds of the book consists of images without text, interspersed with only a few manifestoes and facsimiles of newspaper clippings. The actions of the core members are presented with an emphasis on the sexually explicit. Genitals of both sexes are inspected or interact in various ways, dead lambs are cut open and paint is poured. For the Festival of Psycho-Physical Naturalism, the anthology tellingly shows a crowd of ordinary Austrians on the street: according to the caption, they are watching the police intervention. What they are straining to see – if the caption is accurate – is in a sense what the book, literally a picture compendium of Actionism, offers. In doing so, it has processed beauty at two removes with ugliness between them – the former degraded and brought in again indirectly, as the rhetoric by which the revolutionary ugliness of Actionism may unsettle, and impress, a reading audience. By the 1990s, the only member of the core group actively carrying out actions was Hermann Nitsch. By then the artist was engaged as stage designer for the Vienna Opera (Wiener Staatsoper) and elsewhere; his work, which since the 1960s had been called the Orgien-MysterienTheater (literally the ‘Orgies Mysteries Theatre’) had become an elaborate ritual, sometimes lasting several days at a time, resulting in grand painted relics foregrounding the classical and indeed liturgical conventions that had played a role all along. By then the audience had grown used to – if it had not in fact grown up with – photographs and films of the Actionists. The nineties were also the time the Actionists were canonised, just as the artworld was dominated by abject art, with its iconography and media of bodily fluids and perishable substances, accompanied by new and old theories of disgust and debasement, and by autonomous but related art forms ranging from performance to punk. Of course, abject art was on the whole aesthetically alluring, and the theory underwriting it posited an extreme aesthetic pleasure accessible



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through its pain and repulsiveness.26 Helen Chadwick’s Piss Flowers (Fig.4.4), for example, the technical process of which is described as ‘bronze casts of cavities created by pissing in the snow, both Helen Chadwick and her partner David Notarius’, are as witty as they are appealing, and when the work was confrontational and critical of arthistorical narratives (Mike Kelley’s stuffed-animal ‘take’ on abstract expressionism comes to mind), the confrontation was acted out on an elaborately symbolic level of art-world references.27 What is the exact relationship to ‘beauty’ in the Actionists and recent art that takes up their shock tactics? Beauty here stands not for an essential or globally valid concept but for a bundle of aesthetic options held in particular times and places. In this sense, if we allow the idea that beauty and ugliness can coexist in the same practice, both as intended means and unintended effects, we might come to understand the paradox of the Actionists and their careful orchestration of performance in photographic documents. This use and production of aesthetic value



Helen Chadwick, Piss Flowers, 1992, cast bronze and cellulose lacquer, c.70×65×65 cm each.

Fig.4.4

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has wider consequences for the historicity of beauty and ugliness in modern art, to which I now return. Arthur Danto, it will be remembered, denied beauty a constitutive role in art. He sees the tendency of modernist critics like Fry to wrestle with ugliness and declare it beauty as a symptom of a deeper tendency, active since the Greeks, to equate beauty with ‘the good’ in general. Precisely this ancient moral bond between beauty and goodness had a surprising revival at the turn of the twenty-first century, most prominently in Elaine Scarry’s 1999 book On Beauty and Being Just. Scarry not only claimed that in seeing beautiful things we want to care for them, but also that beauty, while not always equal to truth, would ‘ignite the desire’ for it.28 Danto, who is often considered to be in the ‘beauty camp’, in fact urges a middle ground between Scarry and the ‘intractables’: let ugly art do its work without attributing beauty to it (e.g. finding ‘beautiful’ the worms in a Damien Hirst animal corpse) and also without judging it ‘bad’ art on the basis of ugliness alone.29 But also, Danto adds, stop accusing beauty of being politically corrupt in general. Motherwell’s Elegy to the Spanish Republic, David’s Marat Assasiné, and Maya Lin’s Vietnam Veterans Memorial (Fig.4.5) are examples of what Danto calls ‘internal beauty’ – that is, beauty integral to the meaning of the work, a deeply political meaning in all these cases.30 The beauty in these works, according to Danto, makes possible the mourning and political consolidation the works want to effect, which can be achieved only due to the great force of their beauty.31 But – and this is Danto’s master point – we should not be misled by the fact that art can use beauty to conclude that art needs beauty. The point is sound, I think, but the view of beauty it presumes is unhistorical and unduly narrow. For Danto, beauty and ugliness are ingredients of the artwork, like the conventions it relies on and the art theory it needs to be intelligible.32 No doubt this can be the case, as in some of Danto’s examples, or in the case of the nude bodies used by Muehl in his Degradation: but it does not account for the ‘becoming beautiful’ of the Blue Nude or for the opening of two Hermann Nitsch museums.33 What needs explaining is not just authorial intentions and first responses of the public, but also how these change over time. Take Maya Lin’s Vietnam Veterans Memorial. Hostile newspaper articles described it as ‘trench’ and ‘ditch’, and even W.J.T. Mitchell, in a positive



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evaluation, sees the object as ‘scar’, or ‘trace of violence suffered’.34 Protest, motivated by conservative politicians, led to the construction of a figurative sculpture group by Frederick E. Hart adjacent to the monument. Are these reactions misunderstandings of the beauty of Lin’s work? How can Danto be sure the work is ‘beautiful’? Are perceived beauty, emotional force, and the appropriateness of Lin’s monument not end products of a longer historical encounter with audiences subsequent to her vilification in the press? But how could that vilification have worked at all if beauty was a prior ingredient in the work’s ‘meaning’? That from today’s point of view the massive post-minimalist block of stone is uncontroversial, even transcendently ‘right’ has more to do, I think, with how mourners interact with the piece than with its actual form, which has, after all, remained the same: a transformation of the public’s perception from ‘ugly’ to ‘beautiful’ of the kind Danto finds chimerical.35 It is not that we have just gotten used to the shock value, or that institutions indoctrinate us to understand certain forms as beautiful: we may have quite a while to wait for the Actionist coffee mug. We may need to think of modernist non-beautiful intervention into the canon

Maya Lin, Vietnam Veterans Memorial, Washington DC, 1982.

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from the side of the spectator as an expansion of aesthetic forms, even ‘beauty’, and not, as Danto does, as a tool to get meaning across. This, then, is my conclusion: Danto’s historical view of art must be expanded to include beauty and ugliness, understood as the historical reactions of audiences, which of course include critics, curators, art historians, the artists themselves and later artists. This view of beauty is not entirely estranged from the ‘first ugly, then beautiful’ formula of Fry. Where Fry and other modernists went wrong, I think, is in expecting this axiom to hold as a matter of historical inevitability. But they did not, pace Danto, think that it would overcome the ugliness of avantgarde art. I would like to end with a perhaps surprising statement of Fry’s, made in an unpublished lecture delivered in 1908. In this talk, Fry gave ugliness greater scope than Danto allows even his ‘intractable avant-garde’. For it belongs not to the meaning of modern art, but to its pleasure. ‘Ugliness, like a discord in music, will have to be resolved in any perfect work of art.’ But resolution does not mean disappearance, if the art expresses ‘an emotion so intense and pleasurable that we accept without demur the painfulness inherent in the ugly image’.36 Recalling Ernst and Muehl’s war trauma, and the grief of the visitors to Maya Lin’s memorial, it does seem that aesthetic counterparts of this affect must preserve ugliness if they are to be forceful. It is ‘the very force of our terror and repulsion’ that makes art relevant in a world of ‘increasing ugliness and squalor’. For Fry as for Scarry, then, but through ugliness, beauty attains to political justice: ‘art…seems to me to indicate the kind of lines on which a solution of the discords of experience might be anticipated. For in our aesthetic experience evil becomes actually transmuted into a good.’37 Fry’s ‘metaphysical aptitude’, as he calls it, may give rise to suspicion of a ‘closed system of aesthetic and political judgement’, as Amelia Jones has called the recent return to beauty.38 But a different picture emerges on Fry’s premises, for it is ugliness that is enjoyed as beauty. The recognition of ugliness is what we gain from (some) modern art, what makes it attractive in the contextual sense, taking ‘beauty’ as a second-order historical concept embodied in artefacts, documents, and discussions of artworks that make no such claim to beauty. It remains a choice, after all is said and done, whether to read the aestheticisation of the avant-garde as an expansion or a co-optation of its subversive force.



5



Ribera’s Grotesque Heads: Between Anatomical Study and Cultural Curiosity Edward Payne

In his biography of the seventeenth-century Spanish artist Jusepe de Ribera (1591–1652), Antonio Palomino (1655–1726) observes: Ribera did not enjoy painting sweet and devout subjects as much as he liked expressing horrifying and harsh things, such as the bodies of old men: dry, wrinkled, and lean, with gaunt and withered faces, everything done accurately after the model with extraordinary skill, vigor, and elegant technique.1

Palomino here recalls the Aristotelian concept of imitation, for the artist’s pleasure in representing brutal themes relates to the viewer’s pleasure in recognising the content of a disturbing depiction or, when it is not recognisable, in admiring its form.2 Ribera’s preoccupation with imagery that might be termed ‘ugly’, simultaneously provoking reactions of repulsion and fascination, was well noted in the eighteenth century. Not only does it appear in textual form in Palomino’s Museo pictórico y escala óptica (1724), but also in visual form in the Retratos de los Españoles Ilustres (1791).3 Comprising 114 engraved portraits of historical and contemporary figures, each accompanied by a short biography, the Retratos features six entries on seventeenth-century Spanish artists, including Jusepe de Ribera.4 Manuel Alegre’s (1768–1815) engraving after a drawing by José Maea (1760–1826) portrays Ribera not as a painter but as a graphic artist, thus creating a mise-en-abyme (Fig.5.1): the sitter presents to the viewer a work on paper depicting a grotesque head, the artist’s palette and brushes cast in shadow, his etching tools illuminated on the table. The object represented in the engraving is Ribera’s print of the Large Grotesque Head, which he executed around 1622 (Fig.5.2).5 Identifiable by the hint of a plate mark, the print medium is further revealed in the reversal of the design, which corresponds with the process of reversal particular to printmaking. Moreover, the juxtaposition of the deformed 85



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head with the artist’s gentlemanly head is striking, and points to the tensions between the ugly and the beautiful that permeate Ribera’s art. Ribera’s execution of the Large Grotesque Head was no isolated occurrence, for he also made an etching of a Small Grotesque Head, dated 1622 (Fig.5.3). His total output in this medium numbers 18 prints, and with the exception of two later etchings, all were executed during the 1620s after his permanent move to Naples.6 In the same year that he made the small and the large grotesque heads, Ribera produced three etchings of studies of eyes, ears, noses and mouths (Fig.5.4).7 These anatomical studies were apparently intended to form part of a pattern book for students, following the Italian tradition of drawing manuals by Agostino Carracci (1557–1602) and Odoardo Fialetti (1573–c.1638).8 In the lower right corner of the Studies of Ears, the inscription of a ‘4’ in reverse indicates that a fourth plate was planned for the series.9 Ribera’s source may have been



Manuel Alegre after José Maea, Portrait of Jusepe de Ribera, late eighteenth century, engraving, from Retratos de los Españoles Ilustres con un Epítome de sus Vidas, Imprenta Real, Madrid, 1791.

Fig.5.1

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Jusepe de Ribera, Large Grotesque Head (state I), c.1622, etching with some engraving on cheek, 21.5 × 14 cm. The British Museum, London.

Fig.5.2

either Fialetti’s model book of 1608, where the Studies of Ears also bears the number ‘4’ inscribed in the upper right corner, or Guercino’s (1591–1666) model book of 1619, which follows suit with the number ‘4’ at the bottom right.10 The faint outline of an eye at the upper left of the Large Grotesque Head, coupled with the matching dimensions of the sheet (though vertical in format), further suggest that this may be the missing plate, originally planned as part of the pattern book.11 Why Ribera abandoned this project we may never know, yet there is a more revealing connection between the artist’s two grotesque heads and the three anatomical studies. In his Studies of Noses and Mouths, Ribera transforms the generic into the particularised: he pushes the boundaries of the pattern book by exploring not only physiognomy, but also expression in the portrayal of open, screaming mouths, a motif to which he returns for the figure of the suffering Marsyas in his two



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Jusepe de Ribera, Small Grotesque Head, 1622, etching, 14.2 × 11.1 cm. The British Museum, London.

Fig.5.3

surviving paintings of Apollo and Marsyas (1637). In addition to their allusions to smell and taste, Jonathan Brown has related these open and closed mouths to the contrast between sound and silence.12 Furthermore, Ribera introduces an ugly element by adding hair-sprouting warts to nose and chin, a feature which is also present in the small and the large grotesque heads. Both of these etchings depict figures suffering from von Recklinghausen’s disease, or multiple neurofibromatosis, which is characterised by large benign growths, and whose deformities Ribera exacerbates by adding extra warts and tumours.13 When viewed in connection with the anatomical studies, whose references to the five senses are explicit, perhaps the two grotesque heads can also be read as a commentary on sensory extremes, specifically the extremes of sight and touch. But if this is so, it further complicates the problem. Why were sensory extremes an appealing subject in the first place? Who was the target audience for these grotesque heads and what function did they serve? Although the etchings have been dismissed as containing ‘few internal clues for interpretation’, I will argue that the opposite is the case: these are, in fact, highly complex works whose meanings and motivations merit closer scrutiny.14 This essay aims to shed new light on Ribera’s grotesque heads, situating them within the context of his wider production of ‘ugly’ motifs. It has

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Jusepe de Ribera, Studies of Noses and Mouths (state I), c.1622, etching, 14 × 21.6 cm. The British Museum, London.

Fig.5.4

been noted in the literature that this imagery can be traced back to the grotesque heads of Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519); specifically, his sheet of Five Grotesque Heads (c.1490) has been considered a potential source for the Studies of Noses and Mouths.15 It has also been suggested that Ribera’s Large Grotesque Head may derive from a plate of Olympian Deities (c.1575), formerly attributed to Martino Rota (c.1520–83) and recently reattributed to Giovanni Ambrogio Brambilla (fl. 1560–99).16 While Ribera’s inspiration from these earlier works cannot be denied, it will be argued, instead, that his grotesque heads are fundamentally different from those of his predecessors.17 More individualised in their conception, Ribera’s grotesque heads can be set against Leonardo’s, which were designed as studies of physiognomic types, rather than portrayals of specific individuals.18 It will be suggested that Ribera’s prints do not fit neatly within the category of the ‘grotesque’ (the term here indicating an aesthetic quality); rather, they resist categorisation, falling between the spheres of anatomical study and cultural curiosity.19 The low subjects they portray were probably destined for high patrons such as the Spanish viceroys of Naples and Sicily, and they can best be understood when contextualised with works commissioned by these patrons that depict bodily extremes, as well as with several capricious



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drawings by the artist.20 The first part of this essay will sketch out the target audience for this type of imagery in general, and for these two prints in particular. The second part will contextualise these etchings with related works by Ribera depicting extreme subjects, and the third part will suggest how he pushes this genre in the direction of caricature, playing on the border between the serious and the satirical.21 Ultimately, this essay will demonstrate how Ribera’s small and large grotesque heads mark the beginning of an interest in exploring the tensions between fascination and repulsion, looking and turning away, a problem of visual engagement that the artist further develops in subsequent images of bodily suffering.22 At once individualised and generic, the grotesque heads are paradigmatic of the physiognomic mode of address: they take beauty and ugliness as indicators of lived experience, and problematise the notion of ugliness as a fixed aesthetic category. Prints, Princes and Patrons The disparity between the brevity of Ribera’s career as a printmaker and its lasting importance has been duly noted in the literature on the artist.23 However, the question which has more preoccupied Ribera scholars – and which has yet to yield any satisfying answers – is why the artist stopped making prints rather than why he started working in this medium.24 As mentioned above, all of Ribera’s prints were executed following his permanent move from Rome to Naples in 1616.25 Soon after his arrival, he married into the family of Sicilian painter Giovan Bernardino Azzolino (c.1572–1645) and, just before he left Rome, the former Viceroy of Sicily, the Duke of Osuna (1575–1624), was named Viceroy of Naples, an office which he held for four years.26 Ribera’s decision to move south was probably informed by his intention to seek Osuna’s patronage, the Duke having played a prominent part in rapidly advancing the artist’s status.27 Early on, he commissioned from Ribera a group of four saints, consisting of two martyrs, Bartholomew and Sebastian, and two penitents, Peter and Jerome, all figures whom Ribera would continue to represent throughout his career.28 Despite his initial success in securing royal patronage in Naples, Ribera’s service to the Duke of Osuna lasted only four years. In 1620, the viceroy was summoned to Madrid to answer charges of malpractice,

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and was subsequently imprisoned until his death in 1624. Following Osuna’s removal from office, his immediate successors both served short terms and were not enthusiastic art patrons.30 At this moment, Ribera was established in Naples yet working without any feasible replacement for the viceroy. It would thus seem plausible that he turned to the possibilities of printmaking in order to disseminate his work more widely and to seek patronage elsewhere. While some of his prints were, no doubt, executed earlier, the first dated etchings by Ribera are Saint Jerome and the Trumpet and The Penitence of Saint Peter, both made in 1621.31 The artist probably chose etching over other printmaking methods because of its similarity to drawing and its relative ease of execution.32 Nevertheless, he was by no means a flawless printmaker: Saint Jerome and the Trumpet is visibly marred in all its impressions by two pairs of parallel lines running across the surface, resulting from an abraded plate or false biting during the etching process.33 Both prints are directly related to the paintings of the same subjects from the Osuna commission, especially The Penitence of Saint Peter, which the artist revised and etched in reverse so that the impressions correspond with the orientation of the original composition. Three years later, after having tested and mastered the process of etching in his images of saints, anatomical studies and grotesque heads, Ribera executed one of his most ambitious prints, The Martyrdom of Saint Bartholomew (Fig.5.5). This elaborate etching stands out in Ribera’s graphic production, as it is the only one of his prints to bear a dedication.34 In the lower margin are inscribed the words ‘Dedico mis obras y esta estampa al Serenismo Principe Philiberto mi Señor / en Napoles año 1624. / Iusepe de Rivera Spañol ’.35 The dedicatee, Prince Emanuele Filiberto of Savoy (1588–1624), was a nephew of Philip III of Spain, and in 1622 he was appointed Viceroy of Sicily. Filiberto had previously commanded the Spanish armed forces as Admiral of the Fleet in naval engagements against the Turks, and he was also employed as an informal Minister of Italian Affairs.36 At virtually the same moment that Sir Anthony van Dyck (1599–1641) landed in Sicily, having received the prestigious commission to paint Filiberto’s portrait (1624) (Fig.5.6), Ribera made his dedicatory print representing Bartholomew flayed alive.37 If, as this dedication suggests, Ribera was attempting to secure the prince’s patronage, 29



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Jusepe de Ribera, The Martyrdom of Saint Bartholomew (state I), 1624, etching with some engraving, 31.4 × 24.1 cm. The British Museum, London.

Fig.5.5

it was to no avail, as Filiberto died of bubonic plague the same year the print was produced.38 Notably, an identical inscription appears in a single impression of Ribera’s Saint Jerome Reading.39 It seems that the artist subsequently removed the inscription, possibly in response to the prince’s death, as it does not appear in any other impressions of the print.40 In the Bartholomew etching, the costume of the principal executioner, in particular his slit breeches, relates to that of sixteenth-century mercenaries, and the inclusion of this outmoded dress might imply a cutting, satirical edge to the scene.41 More intriguing, however, is the clear resemblance between this executioner and the Small Grotesque Head, united by their bandannas, rough features and profile poses.42 This figure is one of Ribera’s stock characters, regularly cast in the role of executioner; he appears, for example, in a painting of The Martyrdom of Saint Bartholomew (c.1628) in the Palazzo Pitti in Florence, which, in its compositional design, directly recalls the earlier print. The ‘ugly’ appearance of this executioner was noted by later writers on Spanish art: in his 1873 text, Murillo and the Spanish School of Painting, William Bell Scott (1811–90) observes that in Ribera’s martyrdom scenes,

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‘[u]gliness in the characters represented, as executioners especially, was sometimes exceedingly repulsive, as in the man bringing the wood in the “Martyrdom of St. Laurence”, covered with warts and wrinkles’.43 Indeed, the Bartholomew etching represents the confrontation of two extremes of bodily experience: his torture involves the removal of skin, revealing the body’s hidden interior; the executioner’s monstrosity takes the form of gross tumours erupting from the skin, creating an extension of his hideous exterior.44 While blemishes such as warts can be interpreted as signifying vice, they can also constitute merely a frankness of representation.45 A classic example of such visual honesty may be found in Piero della Francesca’s (c.1415–92) portrait of the Duke of Urbino (c.1472), in which the sitter is simultaneously idealised and humanised, depicted ‘warts and all’. Balancing the executioner at the far left of the print is the cropped figure of the knife-sharpener, his leering expression suggesting an address to the spectator at once provocative and parodic. One commentator has described him as immersed in shadow, thus contrasting sharply with the luminous body of the saint.46 But it seems clear that the figure of the knifesharpener is simply dark-skinned. Ribera and his public could well have



Sir Anthony van Dyck, Emanuele Filiberto of Savoy, 1624, oil on canvas, 126 × 99.6 cm. Dulwich Picture Gallery, London.

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equated the physical appearance of the executioner and his assistant with the nature of their respective tasks. According to Samuel Edgerton, since Renaissance times, the executioner was ‘frequently recruited from the swarthy races, from among Neapolitans, Sicilians, and possibly Africans, his dark complexion making his presence on the scaffold all the more devilish’.47 Like the dark skin of the knife-sharpener, the ‘ugly’ features of the principal executioner confirm the spectators’ prejudices, making him suited to his grisly task of flaying Bartholomew alive. In addition to honouring the prince, the message that Ribera ultimately transmits through the dedicatory inscription is that he has changed his vice-regal allegiance. No longer does he wish to be associated with the Duke of Osuna, whose name went out of favour in Naples but, rather, with Emanuele Filiberto, current Viceroy of Sicily and active patron of the arts. Although he here acknowledges a particular viceroy, Ribera also identifies the figure of the viceroy in general as one to which he wishes to be affiliated. The dedication, therefore, reveals that the artist is endeavouring to establish himself as court painter to the Spanish viceroys in the wider Kingdom of Naples. The printed images of Bartholomew and Jerome both depict figures whom the artist had previously represented in paint for the Osuna commission, and whose suitable subjects he predicted would appeal to the Viceroy of Sicily and win his favour. Given the visual connection between the Small Grotesque Head and the executioner in the Bartholomew print, and the common theme of depicting extremes of human experience, it is likely that Ribera, in conceiving his two grotesque heads, had a similar audience in mind. Furthermore, the combination of the prints’ curious subjects, small format and portable nature likens them to other types of curiosities that were collected and transported in this period, a century renowned for the flowering of the Kunstkammer.48 Out of the Extra-Ordinary For the duration of Ribera’s career in Naples, his principal patrons were the viceroys under whom he served; from him they commissioned works either for their own personal collections or for the King of Spain. Of the 11 who governed Naples during the artist’s residence there, the collections of only four viceroys are known, including that of Don

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Fernando Afán de Ribera y Enríquez,Third Duke of Alcalá (1583–1637) and Viceroy of Naples from 1629 to 1631.49 Alcalá was one of Ribera’s most important viceroy patrons, having commissioned from the artist the celebrated portrait of Magdalena Ventura with her Husband and Child, also known as The Bearded Woman (1631) (Fig. 5.7). Both the history and the iconography of this work are complex.50 To the right of Magdalena, carved on two stone blocks, is an inscription detailing the circumstances of the work’s subject, commission and execution. The inscription opens with the Latin phrase ‘EN MAGNV[M] NATVRA / MIRACVLVM’ or ‘Great Wonder of Nature’, and closes with the words ‘AD / VIVVM MIRE DEPINXIT’, or ‘painted marvellously from life’.51 The text is thus



Jusepe de Ribera, Magdalena Ventura with her Husband and Child (The Bearded Woman), 1631, oil on canvas, 196 × 127 cm. Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid.

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bracketed by the expression of two marvels, the first referring to the sitter, the second, to her portrayal.52 The phrase ‘painted marvellously from life’ indicates that Ribera, though deemed by his contemporaries a follower of Caravaggio (c.1571–1610) and therefore widely labelled a ‘realist’, did not limit his practice to faithful imitation, but excelled in miraculous artistry. This is evidenced in the exposed breast, which the model would hardly have revealed when she sat for the portrait, and which Ribera places centrally and in isolation on the figure’s furry chest.53 Rivalling the sitter in importance, the lengthy Latin inscription flaunts the prominent role of the patron in commissioning this portrait. Towards the end of the text, Ribera is described as ‘another Apelles of his time’, alluding to the ancient Greek painter’s patron, Alexander the Great, with whom the viceroy is thus implicitly compared. Alcalá, a cultured, intellectual man, is thought to have composed the inscription, for artists rarely referred to themselves as ‘new Apelles’.54 Furthermore, according to Gabriele Finaldi, the text is atypical of the way in which Ribera, who was not well versed in Latin, habitually signed his canvases (‘Jusepe de Ribera español’, followed by the year of execution).55 Nevertheless, the elaborate inscription clearly documents Alcalá’s direct involvement with the work as patron and underscores his particular fascination with such anatomical anomalies. Had they ever found their way into the Duke’s collection, impressions of Ribera’s grotesque heads would have been in good company with The Bearded Woman. Another viceroy instrumental to Ribera’s career, whose collection is known to us, is Don Ramiro Felipe de Guzmán, Duke of Medina de las Torres (c.1600–68), who governed Naples from 1637 to 1644.56 During his vice-regency, Medina de las Torres may well have commissioned from the artist his monumental painting of The Martyrdom of Saint Philip (1639) for the King of Spain, now in the Museo del Prado.57 It has also been suggested that the viceroy commissioned one of Ribera’s most famous paintings, The Clubfooted Boy (1642), now in the Musée du Louvre (Fig. 5.8).58 Although the relationship between this work and Ribera’s grotesque heads is a subject of debate, scholars tend to agree on emphasising The Clubfooted Boy’s transmission of a Christian moral as its primary expression, exempting it from either the portrait tradition of dwarfs and jesters, as exemplified by the work of Diego Velázquez (1599–1660), or that of the street urchin (scugnizzo).59

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I would argue, however, that Ribera’s beggar boy speaks primarily to the world of physical deformity which encompasses the young as well as the aged, and which he depicts in paint as well as on paper. Positioned in the foreground of the picture plane and set against a luminous backdrop, the boy turns his head to grin at the viewer, revealing his rotting teeth and inflamed gums. As a result of the painting’s large scale and low horizon line, the figure appears to be towering over his club foot, which, though partly concealed in shadow, still catches the spectator’s eye. The parchment in his left hand, with its Latin inscription ‘DA MIHI ELIMO / SINAM PROPTER / AMOREM DEI’ (‘Give me alms for



Jusepe de Ribera, The Clubfooted Boy, 1642, oil on canvas, 164 × 93 cm. Musée du Louvre, Paris.

Fig.5.8



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the love of God’) denotes an image of Christian charity, and the boy’s smile has been interpreted as transmitting the Christian message of indifference to the trials of earthly existence.60 But this religious dogma, insofar as it is articulated in the relentless optimism of the boy’s grin, is part of his everyday world, just like his club foot. While the majority of Ribera’s works portray deeply serious subjects, he often gives them a satirical twist through various devices, notably the smiling figure. A beggar-philosopher painting in the Prado, for example, which may have been in the collection of the Duke of Alcalá, has been identified as representing Democritus principally by virtue of the figure’s smiling countenance.61 Further examples include paintings of The Drinker and Girl with a Tambourine (1637), where the gargoylelike figures address the spectator with unsightly grins, their open mouths suggesting the irruption of song or laughter. Although Ribera’s small and large grotesque heads are not portrayed as smiling, the bulbous nose and protruding lower lip in the former, coupled with the prominent warts and enormous tumours in the latter, do imply a satirical undertone, evoking the complex rapport between the grotesque and the comic. A Serious Joke? In his life of Ribera, Bernardo De Dominici (1683–1759) observes that the artist made some prints of deformed heads as a joke, or for fun.62 De Dominici himself owned two drawings of grotesque heads by Ribera, one in pen and ink and another in black chalk; several examples of such drawings in various media still survive.63 But to what extent are these works humorous? Perhaps their model was not the Five Grotesque Heads by Leonardo or the Olympian Deities by Brambilla but, rather, individuals whom Ribera may have personally observed and whose identity escapes art history. Although the grotesque heads should not be mistaken for caricatures – which were known as ritrattini caricati, or ‘weighted little portraits’ – the profile pose of the figures does push them in this direction, as it increases the potential for the exaggeration of facial features such as the nose, lips and chin.64 Moreover, the ruff and Phrygian bonnet worn by the man in the Large Grotesque Head resemble the accessories of contemporary court jesters, indicating the satire of a particular social type.65 The stocking cap’s crumpled peak rhymes visually with the man’s

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enormous tumours, which were traditionally associated with madness, further suggesting a comic dimension of the image.66 Indeed, when they are viewed alongside an example of contemporary caricature by Agostino or Annibale Carracci (1560–1609), the gap between these two prints and the genre of caricature becomes increasingly narrow. Sheila McTighe proposes that the man in profile at the far right of the Sheet of Studies (Fig. 5.9), who appears time and again in the Carracci caricatures, in fact portrays a fictive individual, the peasant Bertoldo, from Giulio Cesare Croce’s (1550–1609) most famous work, Le sottilisime astuzie di Bertolodo (1606).67 Apart from the lack of tumours, his exaggerated appearance (the long nose and whisker-sprouting chin) is not so distant from Ribera’s own grotesque heads. Jonathan Brown, however, insists that Ribera, in these works, by ‘resisting the temptations of caricature and mockery […] adopts the neutral stance of the illustrator of scientific treatises and texts’.68 But how ‘neutral’are these prints and the ‘science’to which they might be compared? It is pertinent to consider them in the light of a highly influential



Agostino or Annibale Carracci, Sheet of Studies, 1590s, pen and brown ink, 17.6 × 16.5 cm. The British Museum, London.

Fig.5.9



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scientific treatise for the development of caricature, Giambattista della Porta’s (1535–1615) De humana physiognomonia (1586). Published first in Naples, this groundbreaking book on physiognomy was frequently reprinted in illustrated editions throughout the seventeenth century.69 The treatise elaborates on a classical tradition of analysing the character of individuals according to their resemblance to animals. The Carracci used the illustrations as a point of departure when exploring the possibilities of visual distortion in the genre of caricature.70 While the images in Della Porta’s treatise may be considered generic illustrations, Ribera’s grotesque heads, in contrast, appear individualised without being recognisable. Furthermore, while Della Porta’s treatise makes explicit, through text and image, the associations between man and beast, physical traits and character traits, Ribera makes no such direct comparisons with the grotesque heads: their ugliness is represented as individually bestial and brutish, thus evoking the proximity in Italian between the words bruto (brute) and brutto (ugly).71 Rather than conceiving them as ‘neutral’, it seems that the grotesque heads should be regarded as an extension of the capricious. There is an element of the fantastic in these prints, especially in the Large Grotesque Head: despite Palomino’s claim that Ribera worked ‘accurately’ after the model, it is equally plausible that he exaggerated the deformities by adding extra warts and ballooning the size of the tumours. The grotesque heads can, in fact, be closely related to a small group of Ribera’s drawings whose subjects also verge on the capricious and the comic. One unusual brush and red ink drawing, executed c.1625–30, represents An Oriental Potentate Accompanied by his Halberd Bearer (Fig. 5.10). The considerable disparity in scale between the two figures, accentuated by the long shaft of the halberd, adds a humorous tone to the work. Indeed, the juxtaposition of a tall man with a short one, or a thin figure with a fat one, was a typical device employed in caricature to heighten the overall comic effect.72 Perhaps Ribera’s two grotesque heads, small and large, were also conceived as a humorous pairing. In this way, they can be likened to Giuseppe Arcimboldo’s (1526–93) teste composte or composite heads (Fig.5.11), which operate simultaneously on the levels of curiosity and comedy, oscillating between the ugliness of the figure and the beauty of the handling, the base genre of still life and the elevated language of visual wit.73

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Jusepe de Ribera, An Oriental Potentate Accompanied by his Halberd Bearer, c.1625–30, point of the brush with carmine red ink, possibly from cochineal, squared in pen and brown ink, 23 × 13.3 cm. The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles.

Fig.5.10

Scale is again used to comic effect in Man in a Toga (c.1630), where a little figure has mounted the head of a much larger one.74 As if to celebrate having conquered the summit, he holds a flag bearing the inscription ‘Nicolò Simonelli’, the name of a prominent Roman art dealer with whom artists in the orbit of Ribera were acquainted.75 Ribera returned to this capricious theme several times, notably in two drawings where the little men, by pulling on the nose and stepping on the hat, appear to be manipulating the larger figure to make it look exaggerated (Fig.5.12).76 In this instance, it can be argued that the capriccio functions as an allegory of caricature and the grotesque.77 Rather than being naturally disfigured, the larger figures point to the process of distortion by the small army of little figures, which may be read as a metaphor of the manipulating hand of the artist. Indeed, if this process of distortion in general can be taken as an allegory of caricature – a genre defined by the exaggeration of an individual’s physical features



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Giuseppe Arcimboldo, Winter, 1563, oil on panel, 67 ×51 cm. Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna.

Fig.5.11

for amusement or criticism – then perhaps it can help to explain the strange, anonymous specificity of Ribera’s grotesque heads. Ribera’s etchings of the small and large grotesque heads served as elaborate exercises in the observation, imitation and manipulation of an extreme bodily subject. As mentioned above, the artist may have conceived them as an extension of his anatomical model book, a project that never came to fruition. They may equally have been destined for a high audience with an evolving taste for low subjects and curiosities, such as the Spanish viceroys of Naples and Sicily. On the one hand, the grotesque heads fit well within Ribera’s practice of depicting bodily extremes, ranging from the crippled youth and the bearded woman to the penitent saint and the suffering martyr; on the other, they complicate the notion of the ‘ugly’ and the ‘grotesque’ as fixed aesthetic categories, revealing instead an affinity with caricatures and capricci, two more slippery forms of ugliness. Above all, Ribera’s grotesque heads demonstrate his mastery of the etching needle: signed with monograms, they ultimately functioned as an advertisement of his

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Jusepe de Ribera, Man in a Fantastic Hat, c.1630, pen and brown ink with brown wash over some black chalk, 17 × 10.4 cm. Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia.

Fig.5.12

abilities in this medium, for the admiration of future patrons. In this way, they call to mind the words of the seventeenth-century Neapolitan poet, Giambattista Marino (1569–1625) who, in his diatribe against fellow poet Gaspare Murtola (c.1570–1624), declares: The end of the poet is to arouse wonder (I speak of the excellent, not the foolish); Let him who cannot arouse wonder go work in the stables!78

In his prints of the small and the large grotesque heads, Ribera certainly rises to this challenge. Like the ‘marvel’ of the bearded woman, the ‘wonder’ of the grotesque heads lies in their power both to fascinate and repulse, the beauty of their execution drawing in the viewer, the ugliness of their subject matter simultaneously repelling. It is as if Ribera could arouse wonder and work in the stables.



6



The Studio and the Kitchen: Culinary Ugliness as Pictorial Stigmatisation in Nineteenth-Century France Frédérique Desbuissons

‘Man is what he eats [Der Mensch ist was er isst]’. What a scurrilous expression of modern sensualistic pseudo-wisdom! Ludwig Andreas Feuerbach

Cuisine and Painting: Two Intersecting Histories Food and its various culinary manipulations constituted the essential vehicle of criticism of formal elements of painting in nineteenthcentury France (Fig.6.1). From the 1860s to the 1880s, culinary ugliness was a critical leitmotif, the primary expression of the death of painting after illness and dirt. This anxiety reached its height in certain reactions triggered by modern art. Of course, the association of cooking and painting has a long history in Europe. Since the Middle Ages, painting has been closely related to culinary practices, both literally and metaphorically. Still today, words like léché (licked, or overfinished) or croûte (crust) bear witness to the role of the dietary in ways we speak about painting. This vocabulary comprises around one hundred words in French, which are common to both cuisine and painting, or slide from one domain to the other. The significance of this terminology, as this essay will demonstrate, is not only quantitative, but also programmatic: it embodies the fears and hopes attending ‘advanced’ painting. The parallel of culinary and painterly references emerges from shared practices and values – in short, histories. A noteworthy example is Cennino Cennini’s fourteenth-century Treatise on Painting, which lists a large number of utensils and procedures common to the painter and the cook.1 Three centuries later, the young artisan, Claude Gellée, was able to progress easily from pastry-maker to picture-maker.2 Recent studies have also shed light on the importance of culinary themes in the development of genre painting in the late sixteenth century.3 But the division between 104

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Nadar [pseudonym of Félix Tournachon], Nadar jury au Salon de 1857. Paris, Librairie Nouvelle, 1857, p. 40. Bibliothèque historique de la Ville de Paris: (‘Don’t you think the Razzia by M. Loubon looks a bit like spilled meat and cabbage soup?’)

Fig.6.1

artists and artisans progressively marginalised the long-standing proximity between food and painting. The subsequent devaluation of work in the studio reached its height during the late eighteenth century, when culinary practices were evoked in art discourse merely to reduce art to a manual craft. Thus, in November 1792, the painter and member of the National Convention, Jacques-Louis David, explained to the minister Roland that there was no need to maintain the position of director of the École de Rome – a post to which David’s close enemy, ‘Suvée the cockroach’, had just been elected – arguing that ‘the younger artists knew more than the director, and the best director was [nothing more than] a good cook’.4 This devaluation found a theoretical justification in the hierarchy of the senses deriving from antiquity, where taste and smell were ranked below the noble, abstract and spiritual senses of sight and sound.5 Ranking the senses not only determined their aesthetic value but also



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their social uses, as Alain Corbin has demonstrated in his study of the nineteenth-century sensory imagination. The same hierarchy shapes the representations of society and its different components, and the ordering of the senses can be related to the classing of individuals: The way in which individuals made use of touch, smell, hearing and sight made it possible to distinguish two groups: the first were in constant contact with the inertia of matter, were accustomed to exhausting toil, and were spontaneously capable of feeling with their flesh an animal pleasure, produced by contact; the second, thanks to their education in and habit of social commerce, and their freedom from manual labour, were able to enjoy the beauty of an object, demonstrate delicacy, subdue the instinct of the affective senses, and allow the brain to establish a temporal gap between desire and its gratification.6

Critics and caricaturists, whose activity combined visual and intellectual skills, had all the more reason to adopt these representations in their dissection of painting. Culinary Ugliness as a ‘Style’ Since the late eighteenth century, negative references to culinary activities have punctuated the history of art as well as social practice. Examples may be found in literature (where authors would engage in a certain genre alimentaire only to earn their bread and butter), in the theatre (when a performance would faire un four or ‘flop’), and in politics (with the cuisine électorale or fishy electoral practices). These references, however, acquired a particular sharpness in the second half of the nineteenth century, when ingredients, preparations and meals became important signs of failure in judging contemporary painting. The combination of these representations soon formed a topos: culinary ugliness. It concerned not represented ugliness – ugly objects or Ugliness as an idea – but, rather, the ugliness of painting: of works whose appearance was considered unpleasant (désagréable) to look at, or otherwise revolting (repoussant), as the word was generally understood in France since the seventeenth century. 7 The focus of this essay is thus the experience as distinguished from the theory of ugliness. It will be shown that, in the critical literature accompanying the Salon, the use of culinary formulae and imagery constituted one of the principal ways of assessing what in a work of art is a failure. The word ‘ugly’ appears only rarely in this context. It is as if Romanticism, then Realism, by legitimising the

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aesthetics of ugliness, had imposed on anyone who attempted to express an experience of the ugly the need to resort to indirect representations. The discourse on taste in the eighteenth century may have also led in this direction.8 The dietary function, which encompasses the act of eating as well as everything that precedes and follows it, offers the salonniers a vast gamut of vulgar references and motifs, and the means of transmitting their experience of a non-picturesque and non-heroic ugliness. Aiming neither to invert classical norms, nor to extend the limits of beauty, ugliness is simply experienced as the negation of art. In the second half of the nineteenth century, this bad painting, without any transcendence, is incarnated by cuisine. The manifestations of this topos were at once verbal and visual, serious and parodic. They can be found in criticism and caricature, as well as in contemporary art theory, correspondence between artists and in numerous anecdotal sources which comprise the so-called littérature artistique, or art literature. Unlike the ugliness of reality, a crucial leitmotif for the enemies of Gustave Courbet in the 1850s, culinary ugliness was exploited by the champions of academic art as well as by the defenders of modernism. The theme proved eminently flexible and adaptable to various situations, its only requirement being a sensually conspicuous object. The images by André Gill and Cham, two caricaturists of opposing aesthetic and ideological parties, display a range of associations between food and painting (Figs 6.2, 6.3). Gill’s caricature of Le Néophyte by Gustave Doré (Salon of 1868) comparing monks in prayer to pale, withered vegetables, mixes visual and verbal metaphors, as well as formal allusions and puns: a coward was said to have ‘the blood of turnips in his veins’, and the whole painting is a ‘turnip’, or, in slang, a weakling.9 Cham, on the other hand, uses the rhetoric of the recipe to debase the composition of Auguste Schenck’s Pigeons et laboureurs (Salon of 1876). He plays on the slippage between the oil of the painter and the oil of the cook, and relates both to the tutelary figure of Baron Brisse, a famous gastronome during the Second Empire whose notoriety had principally been established by the petite presse.10 The sheer quantity, variety, and discursive omnipresence of these motifs, developed by very different authors, lead me to suggest that culinary ugliness was the dominant ‘style’ of ugliness in French art, and especially in painting, between the 1850s and 1880s.11



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A Critical Category Culinary ugliness is, above all, a critical category. It takes the form of an aesthetic judgement using vocabulary, expressions, metaphors and images of cooking to offer a negative assessment of painting. The slang of the studios was crammed with pejorative words playing on comparisons between painting and food. Writers appropriated these words, making common their usage in order to legitimise themselves as experts on art. Through the medium of the press, they popularised expressions such as jus de pruneau, or prune juice (referring to the dark tonality of a painting); plat d’épinards, or spinach (for a bad landscape); ragoût, or stew (signifying an affected pictoriality).12 The systematic use of metaphors and puns peculiar to caricature turns the medium into the most important mode of expression for culinary ugliness. I therefore place particular emphasis on this genre, with the proviso that these motifs were present throughout the art discourse of this period. The career of Bertall (1820–82) gives us a good sample. In 1852, he called a portrait by Hébert ‘au jus de pruneau’, with



André Gill [pseudonym of Louis Alexandre Gosset de Guines], Gill-Revue n°1, 1868. Institut national d’histoire de l’art, Bibliothèque, collections Jacques Doucet: (‘This is not the first time since M. Gustave Doré gave us a painting that we have wanted to exclaim, “Turnips [flop]!”’).

Fig.6.2

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Cham [pseudonym of Amédée Charles Henri de Noé], ‘Le Salon pour rire’, Le Charivari, 19 May 1876. Institut national d’histoire de l’art, Bibliothèque, collections Jacques Doucet: (‘Mr Schenck: Beef sautéed with pigeons. Painting retouched by the Baron Brisse, all in oil (don’t know a thing about cooking’)).

prune juice; in 1855, The Barley Harvest by John Linnell was a ‘plum pudding’; in 1857, the Razzia by Emile Loubon was transformed into Beef and Lamb Sautéed in Cream; in 1868, the caricaturist stopped in front of Young Girl Cooking a pot-au-feu with Necklaces and Bracelets; in 1869, the Reclining Woman by Jean-Jacques Henner turned into a ‘skate in black butter’; in 1872, the Canal Saint-Marc by Amédée Rozier became ‘a mushroom omelette’; in 1874, the painting Goodness, it’s cold! by Giuseppe de Nittis was the ‘plat du jour’ composed of ‘three Sweet Cocottes [meaning tarts] Fricassees in the Snow’.13 This list indicates that parodic transformations of paintings into dishes constituted the most frequent manifestations of culinary ugliness. In other cases, it is food which bursts into painting, swallowing up the action, as in Le Salon pour rire de 1883 by Japhet, when Le Rêve! by Puvis de Chavannes becomes ‘A poor wretch dreams he is going to eat asparagus’.14 Food is so rich that it offers a variety of themes and situations that can easily be substituted into the actual subject of the picture, making the remainder all the more ridiculous. A history painting commissioned by the State from Sébastien-Melchior



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Cornu, Auguste presents to the deputies of the provinces of Gaul, assembled in Lyon (15 BC) the constitution according to which these provinces must be directed (Salon of 1872) was translated by Cham into: ‘A Roman emperor organises a gingerbread lottery in order to get on good terms with the city of Rheims [sic]’.15 Gingerbread (a speciality of Reims since the Middle Ages) was a popular cake traditionally sold at fairs, taking the form of different characters.16 The gingerbread man was a recurring motif in art criticism used to mock badly drawn figures, as in a caricature by Gill of the Couvent sous les armes, l’Espagne en 1811 by Georges-Jean Vibert (Salon of 1868) in which the caption mimics the rhetoric of advertisement and its dietary arguments: ‘There’s gingerbread, and then there’s gingerbread. Good gingerbread is signed Vibert and never hurt anybody’.17 The metamorphosis of painting into food indicates the failure of the work, but not from just any perspective. Rarely is the subject itself the provocation for such negative treatment. The only exception is the head of John the Baptist at the table of King Herod, which easily lends itself to a culinary interpretation. The decapitated head on a plate is regularly caricatured as a hot dish, as in the image of Lévy’s Hérodiade (Salon of 1872) by Cham, exclaiming: ‘If I were Herodias, I would prefer that it were a calf ’s head’.18 Indeed, beyond the range of works that we have considered, what condemns the transformation of painting into food is usually not subject but execution: tone, composition and design. Disgusting Execution Food constitutes the essential vehicle of criticism of formal elements in painting. Culinary ugliness is the product of bad practices, which reduce painting to its material qualities: ridiculous forms, garish colours and disgusting stuff. Cham unites these three characteristics in two caricatures of The Moonrise by Daubigny (Salon of 1868), depicting ‘two peasants overcome by the stench of cheese, which is standing in for the moon’ (Fig. 6.4), and, the following year, ‘Daubigny return[ing] the cheese to the seller who lent it to him to make the moon for his painting’ (Fig. 6.5). By metamorphosing the moon into cheese, it is implied that the pigments are runny and smelly, the colour unnatural, and the motif formulaic. Nothing is said about the cheese itself being

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Cham, ‘Salon de 1868’, Le Charivari, 31 May 1868. Institut national d’histoire de l’art, Bibliothèque, collections Jacques Doucet: (‘Two peasants overcome by the stench of cheese, which is standing in for the moon’).

Fig.6.4

unpleasant; the painting is damned by association. This destructive comparison implies a double assumption: of the cheese as a standardised product and of the painting as autonomous masterpiece, which neither is in reality. No one cheese is an exact copy of another, for its making is often the result of close individual attention, whereas many painters, like Daubigny, sold replicas and variants of successful compositions. Opposing pictorial ‘creation’ to cheese ‘fabrication’ reveals an idealistic conception of both, all the more necessary for criticism, which in itself is often a literature à l’estomac (with a nerve), based on easy, mercenary effects and snap judgements. Colour is crucial in this type of caricature, particularly because in French, as in many other languages, a single word often signifies both colour and food: marron (chestnut brown), orange, jaune citron (lemon yellow), rouge cerise (cherry red). In culinary metaphors, colour is represented not merely as hue, but as material.19 The transformation of paint into food reveals various fantasies about the textures of painting and what they evoke. Bertall proves himself a virtuoso in this type of interpretation: Terrains d’automne by Théodore Rousseau (Salon of 1849) changes into ‘Painting in the clay oven’ (Fig.6.6), while Naufrage sur la côte du Bohuslän by Marcus Larson (Salon of 1857) suggests to



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Cham, Le Salon de 1869 charivarisé. Paris, A. de Vresse, 1869. Institut national d’histoire de l’art, Bibliothèque, collections Jacques Doucet: (‘Daubigny returns the cheese to the seller who lent it to him to make the moon for his painting’).

Fig.6.5

him a ‘Lobster cooked in its juice at sunset, Swedish sauce, executed by Marcus Larson the Ostrogoth’.20 In another work by Gill, we find a striking interpretation of the expression tartine (a slice of bread and butter etc.), which was used in the studio to signify a (too) large format painting. The Prodigal Son, a triptych by Édouard Dubufe (Salon of 1866), whose wings were in grisaille, becomes a monumental slice of partly covered bread: ‘When M. Dubufe cuts a slice of bread, he cuts a big one. Therefore, there was not enough butter and jam to cover the whole surface’ (Fig.6.7). Cuisine as Dishonourable Work As an expression of work without art, culinary ugliness also functions as dishonourable work: painting without genius, it relates not to creation but to fabrication, or, more specifically, to its recipe.The studio is the site of these caricatures where bad painting is reduced to cuisine. In the 1865 satire of the blue stocking by Riou (Fig.6.8), studio and kitchen are two equivalent places where the female artist spends her time: ‘Madame works sometimes at the Louvre, and sometimes at home. What a funny concoction!’. More explicitly, in 1863 Gustave Courbet appears in Amédée Pastelot’s



Fig.6.6

Bertall [pseudonym of Charles Albert d’Arnoux], ‘Revue comique du Salon de peinture, de sculpture d’architecture, etc., etc., etc.’, Journal pour rire n°78, 28 July 1849. Bibliothèque historique de la Ville de Paris: (‘Tableau en terre cuite au four par M. Rousseau’ (“Painting in the clay oven by M. Rousseau”)).



Fig.6.7

Gill, ‘Le Salon pour rire’, La Lune, 13 May 1866. Bibliothèque historique de la Ville de Paris: (‘The prodigal son, or the too large tartine by Dubufe: When M. Dubufe cuts a slice of bread, he cuts a big one. Therefore, there was not enough butter and jam to cover the whole surface’).



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Edouard Riou, ‘Costumes d’artistes’, Petit Journal pour rire n°492, 1865. Bibliothèque nationale de France: (‘Madame works sometimes at the Louvre, and sometime at home. What a funny concoction!’).

‘La Photographomanie’ as a ‘positive’ inspector (Fig.6.9): working in front of a table, leaning over a plate, a glass and a bottle, he incarnates not an artist but a glutton. For Realism can be understood as a somatic activity in which the spectator faces his own physical sensations; thus Courbet is represented with unlimited appetite. Incapable of choice and restraint, the realist body is not simply material, but aesthetic and ultimately social. It is a vulgar, popular body, dangerous because in excess.21 The Bad Spectator Following bad form and bad work, the third culinary topos is the bad spectator, which manifests itself in the condemnation of the poor, because bodily, aesthetic experience. In 1847, Cham depicts a bourgeois visiting the Salon and considering himself in a small picture of a melon (Fig.6.10). The culinary desire of the visitor is the metaphor of an unnatural relationship to the artwork, lowered to the lowest form of consumption, where only physical satisfaction and the senses come into play. As for the peasant woman drawn by Gédéon, trying to pick the Raisins by Alexis Kreyder at the 1868 Salon, she re-enacts the fable of Zeuxis to the great displeasure

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Amédée Pastelot, ‘La Photographomanie. Grande prophétie pour l’année 1900’, Journal amusant n°350, 13 September 1862. Bibliothèque historique de la Ville de Paris: (‘Courbet fut inspecteur des positifs’ (‘Courbet was a positive inspector’)).

Fig.6.9

of the guard: ‘What are you going to do?’ ‘Sorry, I were gonna pick a bunch o’grapes to cool us down’.22 The taste to which Japhet alludes in ‘A tasty subject’ is implicitly popular, culinary and obscene: in the mass of vulgar spectators, crowding around the picture whose small format was traditionally associated with still life, we see only their bottoms.23 In these examples, what is scorned is the way in which the non-educated public – whether peasant or bourgeois philistin – addresses art. They reveal a corrupted aesthetic relationship, wherein the spectator annihilates the object. Charles Baudelaire saw in this consumption the emblem of his time, and he placed it ironically at the opening of his Salon of 1846: Art is an infinitely precious good, a draught both refreshing and cheering which restores the stomach and the mind to the natural equilibrium of the ideal. You understand its function, you gentlemen of the bourgeoisie – whether law-givers or shopkeepers – when the seventh or the eighth hour strikes and your tired head bends towards the embers of your hearth or the cushions of your armchair.24

The confusion of tastes remains at the centre of the images in which Cham represents the buffet of the Salon of 1857, an effective but



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Cham, ‘Le Salon de 1847 illustré’, Le Charivari, 9 April 1847. Institut national d’histoire de l’art, Bibliothèque, collections Jacques Doucet.

nevertheless emblematic setting where the unnatural rapport between art and stomach is played out (Fig.6.11). The recurring condemnation of food did not prevent the critic from adopting certain judgements from the gastronomy of his time. Since the end of the eighteenth century,25 these developments had contaminated other genres of aesthetic discourse. Art criticism echoed the contempt for sugar, which was supposed to spoil the nature of food, and which was considered a regressive taste, peculiar to women and children.26 This criticism denounced the artificiality of colour and the soppiness of inspiration. In 1857, Bertall mocked the figures of Bouguereau,27 which ‘the artist knew how to make attractive for children by covering them with a range of colours like sugared almonds. Violet, rose, coffee, chocolate’.28 Nearly thirty years later, Edmond Bazire reproached Bouguereau’s ‘goddesses in whipped cream’.29 Later still, the Nabi

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Cham, ‘Promenades à l’exposition’, Le Charivari, 4 August 1857. Institut national d’histoire de l’art, Bibliothèque, collections Jacques Doucet: (‘All the tables are full at the buffet. This exhibition is so badly organised. These devilish paintings take up almost all the space’).

Fig.6.11

painter Émile Bernard accused Impressionism in general, and Monet in particular, of being a ‘confiseur’ (confectioner) of landscapes.30 Like cheese, some meals are more dubious than others: sauces, suspected of masking the appearance and taste of food, as well as stews or omelettes, whose ingredients blend together indistinctly.31 These are ‘opaque’ preparations, whose condemnation echoes the classical requirement for clarity and legibility in art. Diderot’s positive image of the ragoût has no equivalent in nineteenth-century art literature, where comparison of painting to food is never a compliment. The Decay of Art The disparaging of the painter’s cuisine is analogous to negative discourse attending materialism, which can be found throughout the discourse on painting in the nineteenth century. Like filth or excrement, food is, above all, a substance that lowers painting to the level of a contemptible



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material. The culinary representations of painting contain the seeds of decay: ingestion leads naturally to defecation, orality to anality. This shift underscores the satire of the animal painter in his studio, where impasto and manure are implicitly related, as the artist boasts: ‘I’m a painter of animals and I’m not afraid of getting my hands in there.’32 Culinary metaphors certainly do not exhaust the vocabulary of ugliness in painting of this period. But judging by the frequency and variety of its manifestations, the motif of culinary ugliness became almost an obsession in the second half of the nineteenth century. As it developed further in painting, the motif resonated with specific technical developments. It took on a particular significance at a time when pigment and oil ground, applied to canvas, was the dominant medium. This technique incarnated the ethos of western art, producing not only uses and habits, but also ‘material imagination’, a fantasy of materials and forms. And this medium possesses a quality that affects its representation: it does not dry, but polymerises, or is transformed through a series of organic chemical reactions, which leads one to say that oil painting resists the passage of time because it stays ‘alive’. This fantasy of immortality of course has a downside: oil painting always runs the risk of rotting. Rot is the dark side of polymerisation; food is its allegory. Thus the rotten,33 the gamey (Fig.6.12) and the excremental34 haunt the representations of bad painting. From the 1860s to the 1880s, culinary ugliness, and its concomitant decay, was the primary expression of the death of painting, a leitmotif in the criticism of the avant-garde of the nineteenth century to rival those of illness (Romanticism) and dirt (Realism). This anxiety reached its heights in certain reactions triggered by female bodies in modern art: when Paul de Saint-Victor wrote ‘the crowd presses up to the putrefied Olympia as if it were at the morgue’,35 or when Albert Wolff described the Female Torso by Renoir displayed at the first Impressionist exhibition of 1874 as a ‘mass of decomposing flesh’.36 Such commentaries were long considered as specific to the reception of modern art but, in fact, their rhetoric was inscribed in the history of the period as a whole. They indeed participate to the same distrust of the material and the perishable that informs the more good-natured culinary metaphors. Culinary ugliness, as such, is but the expression of the disgust and fear not only of the materiality of painting, but of those who faced it.

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Japhet, Le Salon pour rire de 1883. Paris, A l’Imprimerie Nilson et Cie, 1883. Institut national d’histoire de l’art, Bibliothèque, collections Jacques Doucet: (‘M. Beaulieu. A gamey fellow gets high to prove that he is too ripe for his times’).

Fig.6.12

Ambivalence Throughout this essay, I have focused on the negative aspects of culinary ugliness. Yet, there is also an undeniable pleasure in tasting food. To what extent are these works ambivalent, and how might they evoke a paradoxical form of pleasure? A case in point is an especially revealing caricature of La Vague by Courbet (Fig.6.13). This picture, exhibited at the height of Courbet’s fame in 1870, was one of the many landscapes painted for connoisseurs who delighted in his rich impasto, an effect that he created by using the palette knife. Stock transforms the marine landscape into a creamy piece of cake standing on a blade, evoking both the instrument of the painter and the instrument of the gourmet. Perhaps unconsciously, Stock monumentalises La Vague and promotes the hand of the artist, the only protagonist in the scene. If the caption ‘May I offer you a slice of this light painting?’ is meant to be ironic (it must have been considered so by the contemporaries of a painter renowned for the heaviness of his painting),37 the caricature, nonetheless, makes the amateur’s mouth water. The multiplicity of culinary motifs in art literature is contemporaneous with the development of ‘rules of the stomach’, or gastronomie, in France, which sets the notion of ‘eating well’ against more traditional



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Stock, Stock-Album n°4, June 1870. Bibliothèque historique de la Ville de Paris: (‘The Wave, by Courbet. May I offer you a slice of this light painting?’).

conceptions of taste.38 In this light, culinary ugliness may be understood as a manifestation of collective, conflicting representations of the value of cuisine and its recognition as an essential cultural practice. From the First Empire, books such as the Code gourmand by Romieu and Raisson endeavoured to inculcate in their contemporaries the table manners and principles which were ‘the complement of any liberal education’.39 The second half of the century witnessed a major increase in learned and boulevardières publications concerning gastronomy, which strengthened ties between artists, writers and gastronomes. Fine arts and literature were not protected from culinary intrusions; they were open fields, subject to new influences. More than anyone, Bertall developed a wide range of culinary motifs in his caricatures; he also illustrated Brillat-Savarin’s Physiologie du goût 40 and Eugène Briffault’s Paris à table.41 Gill, like the Baron Brisse, to whom Cham paid homage in 1876, was among the regular customers at the pension Laveur, along with Courbet, Etienne Carjat, Jules Vallès and Léon Gambetta.42 Gastronomy, which had established cuisine as an art, was democratised in the form of ‘cuisine bourgeoise’, and extended its hegemony under the label of ‘cuisine internationale’. Some artists and writers claimed popular forms of food and gave them an artistic status. The Realists who drank beer and ate sauerkraut at the brasserie Andler elevated the Soupe au fromage (cheese soup) to an avant-garde song.43 Twenty years later, in his 1872 Salon success, Le Bon Bock, Manet transmuted the portrait of a barfly into the very sign of Modernism and of its alternative culture.44

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In Conclusion In the second half of the nineteenth century, culinary ugliness was the most significant, though not the only means to expressed what in the artwork is, according to Hegel’s formula, ‘absolute difference’: the failure of beauty, or the negativity of painting. Art criticism, and in particular caricature, whose principal focus is ugliness, gave food a demonstrative function by turning it into a metaphor of medium without art, ignoble craft and the corruption of aesthetic relation between artwork and spectator. The very essence of painting, which ought to preserve its models from death and oblivion, appears to be attacked in worldly representations borrowing from the traditional vanitas its rhetoric of the rotten. The choice of expressing the decay of painting through food should not only be explained by the return of a repressed proximity. The importance of negative representations of cuisine coincides with the development of gastronomy as the art of cooking, of appreciating it and speaking of it. Valuing the table as a ground for exercising taste and refinement posed a threat to previous representations of culture, especially in the fine arts. The art of painting, whose elevation was the result of a long and arduous process, was emulated by a new practice whose materiality was difficult to ignore. But those who wanted to redefine art in corporeal and sensory terms – modern artists – could be tempted by the subversive potential of l’art de la table. In so doing, they of course opened themselves to censure as ridiculous, if not degoûtant. Food, therefore, did not only contribute to representations of the ugliness of bad, repulsive painting, it also took on the role of an ontology of painting – both as a medium and as a social function – but predominantly in the negative: what painting must not be. In this way, the topos of culinary ugliness belongs also to a history of bad taste, much of which still remains to be written, above all in art history.



7



I’m Ugly Because You Hate Me: Ugliness and Negative Empathy in Oskar Kokoschka’s Early Self-Portraiture Kathryn Simpson

There is an anecdote about the reception of the young Oskar Kokoschka’s work that is often repeated and will be familiar to anyone who has studied the Viennese artist. Apparently, upon seeing Kokoschka’s art for the first time Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to Emperor Franz Joseph’s throne, proclaimed that ‘this fellow’s bones ought to be broken in his body’.1 The legendary moment is purported to have occurred in 1911, in the context of a group exhibition at Vienna’s Hagenbund where Kokoschka showed 25 paintings and drawings. His works were also lambasted belligerently in the press. Critics singled out Kokoschka’s pieces, which were mostly portraits, for their displeasing, even threatening aspects. But in Die Fackel, a newspaper run by the notorious iconoclast Karl Kraus, a review was published which noted that ‘the way in which Kokoschka attains the effect of his pictures is not one that also leads to the beautification of his subjects: another goal is aimed at by another means.’2 In the early years of the twentieth century, Kokoschka, himself in his early twenties, alighted on a self-representational strategy that would serve him well for decades to come, indeed, that would buttress the artist’s subversive reputation even after his death. Kokoschka seems to have decided that in order to be a successful artist in competitive Vienna he had to cultivate a highly negative persona, and represent himself as a pariah, hated and attacked. In a letter written in late 1907, Kokoschka complained to a friend: ‘If I could only get away somewhere…to Africa, or England or anywhere, it might save my life. Here you use all your energy creating resistance and friction for yourself.’3 A few months later, in another letter to the same friend, fellow artist Erwin Lang, Kokoschka insisted: ‘I can’t stand it here any longer, it’s all ossified as if the screaming had never been heard.’4 This image of himself screaming 122

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apparently appealed to Kokoschka; he later produced a self-portrait bust which he described as a warrior with its mouth opened in an ‘impassioned cry’.5 Self-Portrait as a Warrior (Fig.7.1) was one of a series of self-portraits Kokoschka made that relied on strategies of ugliness to produce and reproduce a theatrically negative persona, the artist as avant-garde antagonist. Negativity and ugliness were inextricably intertwined in earlytwentieth-century Viennese theory and practice, with various commentators – including artists, journalists, scientists, and art historians – pointing to the ways in which ugliness produces negative feelings and negative feelings affect visual perception. This link between negativity and ugliness can be better understood with reference to the aesthetic theory of negative Einfühlung, or negative empathy, propounded by Theodor Lipps, a contemporaneous Munich professor of philosophy and psychology. I will first offer a brief account of Lipps’s theories of positive and negative empathy, then touch on the broader history of the concept of Einfühlung. Proposing that Kokoschka developed his own practice of negative empathy, I will then examine his apparent desire to provoke hatred and his strategic use of ugliness to both provoke and connote that hatred. Lipps developed a new scientific field of ‘psychological aesthetics’, which sought to bridge psychology and philosophy; the lynchpin of this emergent discipline was Lipps’s theory of empathy, with negative empathy its ugly counterpart. Lipps described Einfühlung as ‘not a sensation in one’s [own] body, but feeling something, namely, oneself, into the [a]esthetic object’.6 He emphasised that this psychological process of projection was involved not only in the apprehension of aesthetic objects but in all intersubjective encounters.7 In his 1903 Leitfaden der Psychologie [Guide to Psychology], Lipps stated explicitly that the object of negative empathy is ugly, and he returned to his theory of negative Einfühlung in at least four texts published between 1903 and 1906.8 But Lipps’s idea of negative empathy seems to have remained largely undeveloped, the dark, bleary reflection of his more substantive theory of positive Einfühlung. In his recent article ‘Theodor Lipps and the Shift from “Sympathy” to “Empathy”’, Gustav Jahoda emphasises that Lipps’s notion of negative empathy is ‘rather an elusive concept’. It can be ‘tentatively summarised as…the effect of someone



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behaving in an offensive and hurtful way’. And although ‘the unpleasant behaviour is said to “penetrate” the observer or victim, it produces inner rejection’.9 The idea here is that if the aesthetic encounter is predicated on a sense of identification with the object of contemplation, then this object can potentially threaten or even hurt us. According to Lipps, when this happens we reject the object and consider it ugly. Even Lipps’s theory of positive Einfühlung can be difficult to define clearly, as he modified it several times. In 1903, Lipps first proposed a theory of Einfühlung as ‘inner imitation’ in his article ‘Empathy, Inner Imitation, and Sense-Feelings’, and in his Guide to Psychology he indicated that as far as he understood them, the manifestations of life were based in a drive toward imitation.10 But he rejected his own terminology later that year in Ästhetik: Psychologie des Schönen und der Kunst: ‘I described Einfühlung also with the name “inner imitation”. This naming we must … completely abandon.’11 Some elements of Lipps’s theory of Einfühlung remained constant, however, and we will

Oskar Kokoschka, Self-Portrait as a Warrior, 1909, unfired clay painted with tempera, 36.5×31.5×19.5cm, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, John H. and Ernestine A. Payne Fund, 60.958.

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focus on these below. Even if he abandoned the rubric of imitation, Lipps certainly retained the general notion of identification; moreover, he also consistently associated the positive experience of Einfühlung with beauty, harmony, freedom, and pleasure, whilst associating the negative Einfühlung with ugliness, dissonance, conflict, opposition, and displeasure. Concepts of Einfühlung had a rich history in German thought even before Lipps adapted the idea for his theory of aesthetic response.12 The noun Einfühlung, which literally means ‘in-feeling’ and refers to an instinctive form of psychological projection, a ‘feeling oneself into’, was coined by Robert Vischer in his 1873 dissertation Über das optische Formgefühl: Ein Beitrag zur Ästhetik [On the Optical Sense of Form: A Contribution to Aesthetics]. Vischer’s development of the concept of empathy had been influenced in part by Karl Albert Scherner’s 1861 text Das Leben des Traums [The Life of Dreams], and in turn Vischer’s own discussion subsequently influenced Johannes Volkelt’s notion of empathy in Volkelt’s 1876 text Der Symbol-Begriff in der neuesten Ästhetik [The Symbol Concept in the Newest Aesthetics]. Interestingly, Sigmund Freud’s Die Traumdeutung [The Interpretation of Dreams] reflects the very deep impression which Volkelt’s 1875 text Die Traumphantasie [DreamPhantasy], and through it Scherner’s Life of Dreams, made on the Viennese psychoanalyst; Freud cites both thinkers throughout the text.13 Theodor Lipps himself was also a major influence on Freud, who cited him repeatedly and even bemoaned the degree to which his own work simply restated Lipps’s earlier insights.14 It is difficult to overstate Lipps’s formative influence on Freud, as anyone familiar with Freud’s early writings knows. He first cites Lipps’s 1897 conference paper about the unconscious in The Interpretation of Dreams; Freud then acknowledges at the outset of his 1905 text Der Witz und seine Beziehung zum Unbewußten [Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious] that Lipps’s 1898 book Komik und Humor [Comedy and Humour] inspired Freud to write his own study of humour. Moreover, Freud takes the important economical notion of ‘psychical damming-up’ (cathexis) directly from Komik und Humor.15 Perhaps either directly or indirectly following Lipps’s psychological theory, Kokoschka seemed to believe that we find ugly what we hate, and he used this insight to deliberately portray himself as hated and ugly. Indeed, hostile intersubjective processes which provoke a reaction



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of negative empathy are central to Kokoschka’s early work. Passed over in the literature on Viennese modernists such as Gustav Klimt, Richard Gerstl, Egon Schiele, and Kokoschka, Lipps’s concept of negative empathy provides a compelling basis from which to examine and interpret strategies of ugliness in Kokoschka’s early self-portraiture specifically and Viennese modernism more generally. I argue that Kokoschka deliberately baited the public with arrogant, off-putting behaviour; represented himself with abrasive, alienating techniques; and produced and reproduced a discourse in which he repeatedly aroused hostility through his radical artistic originality. ‘I’m ugly because you hate me’, these early self-portraits proclaim, linking what might otherwise be two discrete phenomena. The ugly selfportraits do not aim to give an accurate sense of Kokoschka’s appearance as a young man; rather, such works offer opportunities to learn more about how and why Kokoschka used corporeal ugliness to represent the hostile feelings the public purportedly had toward him, and he toward them. This distinctive approach, I argue, helped Kokoschka to create a memorable artistic identity and reputation. Lipps himself describes a situation that provokes a reaction of negative empathy thus: I see…a person looking, not proudly but arrogantly. I experience within myself the arrogance contained in that look. It is not just that I imagine this inner conduct or inner condition; it is not just that I know about it; rather, it obtrudes, forces itself into my experience. But within myself I work against it. My inner being objects; I feel in the arrogant look a life-denial or life-inhibition affecting me, a denial of my personality. Because of that, and only because of that, the arrogance can hurt me. My feeling of discomfort rests on that negative [empathy].16

Not only in self-portraits produced around 1909–10, but also in his autobiography, another self-portrait of sorts, Kokoschka attempted to create a narrative of alienation in which he and his art occupy precisely the position of this negative, arrogant, ugly person that Lipps describes. More than merely a stance of youthful rebellion, Kokoschka’s embodiment of the theory of negative empathy clearly inspired him to be productive; he used hatred, ugliness, and negativity to create a new kind of confrontational art. Before finally turning to Kokoschka’s works, however, we must briefly situate Lipps’s Einfühlung theory in relation to broader philosophical and psychological questions.

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Contemporary psychologists and neuroscientists are well aware of the significant cross-fertilisation between early psychoanalytic ideas and Einfühlung theory.17 But this awareness does not seem yet to have extended substantially to art theory.18 Given that psychoanalytic approaches to art are quite common, and in light of the growing interest in ugliness and intersubjective dynamics in art, the art historical neglect of Einfühlung theory, and specifically of negative empathy, is unfortunate. It is interesting to note, however, that this disregard is consistent with the comparatively marginal status of negative Einfühlung in Lipps’s own aesthetic theory, where empathy rather than negative empathy is the focal concept. Just as love, rather than hatred, has been the focus of poetry and poetics, beauty, rather than ugliness, has dominated aesthetic discussion. In Lipps’s 1903 Ästhetik, aesthetics is defined, classically, as ‘the science of the beautiful’.19 Insofar as aesthetics was the science of the beautiful, and Einfühlung referred to a compulsion to imagine ourselves in the place of what we see, Lipps’s focus on positive Einfühlung, purportedly a harmonious feeling of love, freedom, and confidence in the face of a beautiful person, object, or work of art, made sense. In such a context, ugliness and negative empathy threaten not only the aesthetic participant, but the optimism of Einfühlung theory itself. According to Lipps, aesthetic experience is an ‘activity of the self ’ meant to be pleasurable, or at least to produce a feeling of self-worth (Selbstwerthgefühl).20 He elaborates that although we value our own lifeforce, this is not considered an aesthetic value. But when we encounter another’s life-force, or even their potential for it, not only do we value it, but this valorisation is also ‘the essence of aesthetic feeling’, and the essence of the feeling of empathy.21 Yet his description applies only to positive Einfühlung. Lipps clarifies by differentiating between beauty and ugliness, arguing that ‘All enjoyment of beauty is an impression of the quality of life, actual or potential, which lies in an object; and all ugliness is in its ultimate nature negation, defect of life, obstruction, pining away, destruction, death.’22 Lipps argues that beauty represents the power of life, whereas ugliness represents the forces of death. Indeed as early as 1883 Lipps was describing death itself as the ultimate form of ugliness.23 Lipps claims that when we encounter ugliness, it ‘obtrudes, forces itself ’ into our



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experience, and we instinctively ‘work against it’ because our ‘inner being objects’.24 The young Kokoschka portrayed himself as this threatening, objectionable phenomenon; in his self-portraits he also represented himself as defective, or even dead. The uncanny tensions which result from these ‘self-portraits as a dead man’ are consistent with Lipps’ account of the initial identification and subsequent repulsion of negative Einfühlung. Creating works of art which both attracted and repelled the viewer was an essential facet of Kokoschka’s self-constructed persona as a hated outsider. Kokoschka probably did not encounter Lipps’s ideas directly until after the publication of Wilhelm Worringer’s Abstraktion und Einfühlung: Ein Beitrag zur Stilpsychologie (Abstraction and Empathy: A Contribution to the Psychology of Style) in 1908, but he was familiar with other thinkers who had developed, or were developing, similar notions, including Arthur Schopenhauer and Freud. Although he did not discuss Lipps’s theory of negative empathy, Freud did address issues of Einfühlung and ugliness in Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious. And like Lipps, Freud emphasises the ways in which we resist empathetic identification with the ugly and use humour as a form of defence. Although he does not always use the specific terms ‘ugliness’ or ‘the ugly’, nevertheless physical deformity, obesity, age, disability, and the exaggeration of all kinds of physical characteristics underpin Freud’s joke theory; indeed, ugliness is one of the most important factors he discusses in the production of laughter. Caricature is intimately related to the ugly, and it is also one of the main themes in Freud’s analysis of humour. For Freud the entire structure of humour depends not only on ugliness, but also on Einfühlung: we take the producing person’s psychical state into consideration, put ourselves into it and try to understand it by comparing it with our own. It is these processes of empathy and comparison that result in the economy of expenditure which we discharge by laughing.25

Thus, in addition to hatred, laughter is another way in which we can disavow the discomfort of an empathetic identification with the ugly. Kokoschka himself alludes, in his autobiography, to a possible connection between physical deformity and Einfühlung, noting that one of his sitters was a hunchback with ‘an extraordinary capacity for empathy’.26 But whereas Lipps believed that ugly art and hostile affect

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should be generally avoided, Kokoschka, by contrast, seems to have been attracted to precisely these phenomena. In his autobiography Kokoschka consistently frames his artistic training and development in terms of dramatic feelings of hostility, alienation, and even horror. He notes that he did not attend the Vienna Fine Arts Academy (Akademie der bildenden Künste), but rather the School of Arts and Crafts (Kunstgewerbeschule) because, he claims, ‘[i]t never entered my head to go’ to the Academy ‘and pass myself off as an artist in a velvet jacket and beret’.27 Even at the Kunstgewerbeschule Kokoschka soon distinguished himself by his negativity. He apparently hated the ‘tedious instruction’, and pointedly drew life models tiny in protest against the distance, in a large studio full of other students, between the artist and his model. As a result, he was given what he refers to as a ‘solitary cell’, his own small studio at the school.28 Not only did Kokoschka disapprove of the local art schools, he apparently also eschewed local art and museums, claiming, for example, that he almost never visited the famed Museum of Fine Arts (Kunsthistorisches Museum) in Vienna. Fascinated by the ethnographic collection at the Natural History Museum (Naturhistorisches Museum), the young artist was drawn to the expression of pain he supposedly saw on the face of a tattooed Polynesian mask, a theme to which I shall return. In his autobiography the elderly Kokoschka immediately subverts this elective affinity, however, by insisting that actually he had no interest in imitating primitive art because, as he declares, ‘I was not a savage’.29 And not only did the young artist not imitate primitive art or appreciate the old masters in the Kunsthistorisches collection, he also claims not to have attended any of the exhibitions of the Vienna Secession, the famous artists’ collective headed by Gustav Klimt and the veritable nerve centre of Viennese art before 1905. Yet immediately after these attempts to convince the reader of his absolute originality and total lack of artistic influences or community, Kokoschka has to explain how and why he came to be included in Vienna’s 1908 Kunstschau, an exhibition of national and international art timed to coincide with the Sixtieth Crown Jubilee celebrations for Emperor Franz Joseph, ruler of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Kokoschka states that the artists ‘invited were chosen from among those who were still not fully understood or appreciated in their own



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countries’, and notes appreciatively that he was not only invited to participate but even given a small room to himself.30 Warming up to his topic, a reminiscence of youthful precocity over 60 years old at the time of the autobiography’s publication in 1971, Kokoschka describes his deliberately defiant performance as an avant-garde antagonist at the Kunstschau, insisting that: When you strive to create what people are not yet prepared to understand, you are bound to suffer the consequences. Their incomprehension turns to laughter, and they feel superior because your effort to solicit their attention has failed. I feared this would be my fate. So, when Klimt came to my room, flanked by [Ferdinand] Hodler in top hat, frock-coat and sash, with the other gentlemen of the jury following behind, I refused to let them in. ‘I won’t open the door,’ I said, ‘until you promise to show my work to the public, whatever the jury thinks.’ They were furious; but Klimt, though a little taken aback, did not stay to bandy words with me. Goodnaturedly, he motioned the group on, and said only: ‘Let the fellow get himself torn apart by the press, if that’s what he wants.’31

Kokoschka was not, in fact, torn apart by the press. Yet this image of the young artist’s origins as a provocateur who inspired the fury of the Viennese has been circulated tirelessly. It behoves us to remember, however, that the evidence which gave rise to this artistic reputation was related largely by the artist himself. That Kokoschka’s artistic identity developed from negative perceptions and affects is more than likely, but what might we learn by calling into question his oft-repeated narrative of exclusion? That is, what if that negativity originated largely in the artist himself, and he projected it onto others, creating ugly images of himself, pictures of the artist as hated, to correspond to that projection? What might that tell us about the construction and performance of artistic identity in Vienna circa 1908–10, after which Kokoschka left Vienna for Berlin? Gemma Blackshaw has noted how attacking one’s competitors was a central feature of early-twentieth-century Viennese culture, ‘with character defamation practically constituting its own literary genre’.32 She argues that in such a hostile atmosphere, ‘[f ]riendships had to be strategised and alliances carefully forged in order to grasp and maintain a position within the city’.33 As we shall see, Kokoschka managed to forge very strategic friendships and alliances while simultaneously portraying himself as loathed. At the 1908 Kunstschau, the young artist displayed a tapestry cartoon entitled The Bearers of Dreams [Die Traumtragenden]. This

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work related to lithographs Kokoschka had created at the Viennese Workshops [Wiener Werkstätte] for his art book The Dreaming Youths [Die träumenden Knaben], which explores adolescent anxiety, lust, and violence, all written in the first person and based loosely on Kokoschka’s actual relationship with a young woman named Lilith Lang.34 Although in his autobiography Kokoschka insists that he was not influenced by other artists at this time, his art teacher Otto Czeschka recalls that when Kokoschka entered his class he immediately started to emulate another student, Rudolf Kalvach, and Kokoschka’s The Dreaming Youths does bear an obvious resemblance to Kalvach’s Indian Fairy Tale [Indisches Märchen].35 Another influence on The Dreaming Youths seems to have been the work of Belgian artist George Minne, which Kokoschka claims not to have seen until the 1909 Kunstschau the following year.36 A further example of Kokoschka’s unreliability concerning early exhibitions is his claim that Self-Portrait as a Warrior was shown at the 1908 Kunstschau, when in fact it was exhibited at the Kunstschau of 1909.37 Kokoschka explains that both the work and the artist were despised: As far as the Viennese public was concerned, my room became ‘the Chamber of Horrors’, and my work a laughing-stock. Every day I found bits of chocolate and other debris in the mouth of my bust, probably put there by girls as a further expression of the scorn they felt for the Oberwildling, the ‘Chief Savage,’ as I had been dubbed by the critic Ludwig Hevesi.38

The portrait is certainly ugly according to Lipps’s theory, in which the ugly is that which is defective, destructive, or evokes death. Facial features are mangled as if by major trauma, and the whole visage looks as if it is in the process of collapsing after autolytic decay. The nose is crushed and irregular; the bright blue eyes are asymmetrical, look blind, and the left eye is covered by a flattened, floppy eyelid; the entire surface of the face is ridged with concave and convex lines resembling scars; the left ear seems cauliflowered; and examined closely from certain angles, the mangled, lumpy neck can provoke visceral horror. Although he may have been inspired by the aforementioned Polynesian mask at Vienna’s Museum of Natural History, the self-portrait Kokoschka produced under that influence looks like the decomposing corpse of a bruised and battered boxer. This is appropriate, perhaps, for a work



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entitled Self-Portrait as a Warrior, but who was Kokoschka fighting, and why? Kokoschka’s description of his encounter with the Polynesian mask evokes Lipps’s account of the basic structures of empathy. [S]eeing a Polynesian mask with its incised tattooing, I understood at once, because I could feel my own facial nerves reacting to cold and hunger in the same way.39

The artist notes that his understanding of the mask was empathetic, that it stemmed from his own similar physiological reactions to cold and hunger. Nevertheless, Kokoschka’s sentiment is ambiguous. As we have seen, he emphasises that he was sympathetic to primitive art but did not imitate it. But it is not clear to me whether Kokoschka means to indicate that he was actually cold and hungry while he was looking at the mask itself, or whether the mask triggered an embodied memory of his previous experiences of cold and hunger, or indeed whether the mask was in fact intended to represent cold and hunger at all. There is, moreover, an oscillation between imitation and rejection in Kokoschka’s account, a fundamental ambivalence around identification and disavowal. This ambivalence is an indication of how seriously he took not only his own artistic persona, but also the public’s perception of it. Kokoschka’s account of his encounter with the Polynesian mask, and the affinity he felt with it, also clearly highlights the physical and emotional intersubjectivity upon which, both he and Lipps argue, all aesthetic experience is based. I have suggested that in his autobiography Kokoschka instigates a number of falsehoods, related insofar as they all pertain to the artist’s radical originality – his ostensible lack of artistic influences – and his tendency to provoke hatred. But I have pointed mostly to chronological errors that might be simple mistakes. There is a more significant fiction, however, which is repeated frequently and has often remained unquestioned in discussions of Kokoschka’s life and work. At the 1909 Kunstschau, as well as displaying Self-Portrait as a Warrior and several other painted and graphic works, Kokoschka also staged his play Murderer the Women’s Hope [Mörder, Hoffnung der Frauen], frequently referred to now as the first expressionist drama. Below I will first recount certain salient details of the artist’s view of his play, and then turn to what I believe is his significant distortion regarding the actual reception of

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Murderer. Kokoschka, not surprisingly, makes himself and his play out to be far more controversial – more hated – than they actually were. In his autobiography, Kokoschka offers the reader a description not only of Murderer itself but also of the public reaction to its premiere. His description is quite titillating, involving multiple violent disputes between actors, audience members, and nearby soldiers, and culminating in a fracas serious enough to draw the Viennese police to the scene. Kokoschka describes the content of his play, its mise-en-scène, reception, and subsequent place in the history of expressionist theatre for several pages, and it is clear he believes the dramatic work has an important place in his oeuvre. Equally clear, I would argue, is how important it is to Kokoschka to frame the entire episode in terms of a fraught relationship between artist and public. We have seen that Lipps described the ugly as that arrogant person whose look we cannot successfully empathise ourselves into, instead feeling ‘inwardly unfree, inhibited, subjected to a constraint’, which produces a reaction of hatred.40 Kokoschka’s alienated and alienating arrogance produced a kind of emotional ugliness akin to the ugliness that Lipps describes in his empathy theory, in which pleasurable feelings are indicators of aesthetic quality or at least beauty, and people reject artworks and artists that make no attempt to please them. Both highly personal and highly allegorical, Murderer the Women’s Hope reflects Kokoschka’s view that the sexes are fundamentally antagonistic. Like fellow Viennese Otto Weininger, in his notoriously hostile 1903 treatise Sex and Character: An Investigation of Fundamental Principles [Geschlecht und Charakter: Eine prinzipielle Untersuchung], Kokoschka refers in his play not to specific men and women, but rather to archetypes of ‘Man’ and ‘Woman’.41 Textually, Murderer is very short, with a script of only a few pages. Set at night in a landscape dominated by a foreboding tower, the protagonists are surrounded by a chorus of likewise unnamed ‘Men’ and ‘Women’. Like The Dreaming Youths, the work is obviously somewhat biographical, however symbolically transposed, and even repeats specific motifs taken directly from Kokoschka’s earlier text, for example references to the ‘red fish’ which in The Dreaming Youths the artist’s first-person narrator stabs to death with a triple-bladed knife, then rends in two with his hands. The action of the play revolves around the interplay of sexualised violence between Man



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and Woman, in which Man orders other men to brand Woman with a hot iron, Woman stabs Man with a knife, and he is then imprisoned in a cage within a tower by three masked men. Finally Man breaks out of his literal and metaphorical cage and kills everyone ‘like mosquitoes, leaving red behind’.42 In the distance, cocks crow. Referring to a ‘savage review in the Neue Freie Presse’ printed on 5 July 1909, the day after the first performance, Kokoschka describes the context of this performance, and the reaction it supposedly elicited from the audience: A flimsy barrier separated the stage from the rows of seats, which were full to bursting-point. The garden was too small to hold the throng of society, intellectuals, and the merely curious, all of whom had come to see what outrage this bull in a china shop was about to commit. The audience maintained a chorus of catcalls throughout the play, but my actors were not deterred. Eventually, as all footstamping, scuffling and chair-brandishing increased in pitch, the soldiers stormed in and a free-for-all followed between them and the audience. In the tumult the police had to be sent for. Fortunately for me, Adolf Loos and his friend, the satirical writer Karl Kraus, knew the chief of police, Dr Schober, and arranged for him to come with a squad of men and restore order. Only the personal intervention of this senior official saved me from being arrested for a breach of peace.43

But the review Kokoschka refers to not only is not savagely critical, as the artist claims; it also mentions nothing about a significant squabble, much less the full-scale riot which Kokoschka implies took place.44 In fact, although the review does acknowledge that Kokoschka had incited some public debate, it also claims that the audience ‘accepted this certainly jovially intentioned drama’ [gewiß heiter gemeinte Drama] with ‘understanding cheerfulness’ [verständnisvoller Fröhlichkeit]. No violence is mentioned, certainly nothing to corroborate Kokoschka’s claim that some of the actors ‘emerged bloodied and bruised’, nor is there any mention of the police.45 Scholars have tended to repeat Kokoschka’s story concerning Murderer as if it were the proverbial naked truth, although certainly some have commented on the ‘blatant degree of revisionism’ in Kokoschka’s autobiography.46 For the most part, however, Kokoschka’s negative self-representation – as a hated outsider, a loner whose artistic provocations were brilliant but misunderstood and underappreciated – is reproduced in the literature on Viennese modernism. In Avant Garde Theatre, 1892–1992, Christopher Innes claims that as

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‘a gesture of defiance the performance was undoubtedly successful. It caused a riot, order had to be restored by force and the reviews were vicious, calling Kokoschka a “criminal”, a “degenerate”, a “corrupter of youth”’.47 Interestingly, however, although the citation Innes offers for this claim refers the reader to the Neue Freie Presse review of 5 July 1909, the words are actually taken verbatim from Kokoschka’s own autobiography.48 I would argue, moreover, that Kokoschka’s self-creation as an ugly, hated outsider has also helped to determine his legacy as an artistic ‘genius’, and was meant to do so. If, according to empathy theory, people love what pleases them, and what pleases them is beauty, then pictorial ugliness, as that which is unpleasing, signalled vanguard values in the arts. While Kokoschka’s strategies of ugliness might indeed have struck some conservative viewers as somehow degenerate, others championed his work as not only uniquely displeasing but also uniquely truthful, as though the two phenomena were connected.49 In Wittgenstein’s Vienna noted scholars Allan Janik and Stephen Toulmin evoke this conceptual rubric, and refer to Kokoschka as a ‘controversial and self-taught painter’, emphasising his ‘independence and genius’.50 This is somewhat inaccurate insofar as Kokoschka was neither self-taught nor even particularly independent: he attended the School of Arts and Crafts; made decorative art for the famous Viennese Workshops; and curried favour with a variety of artists, historians, and critics including Gustav Klimt and, later, Adolf Loos and Karl Kraus. In fact Kokoschka’s contemporary Richard Gerstl is probably a better example of an independent and largely self-taught artist. Gerstl initially attended Vienna’s Fine Arts Academy, but he and his teachers seemed unable to tolerate one another. The notoriously conservative professor Christian Griepenkerl, who taught Gerstl and, later, Schiele, apparently once told Gerstl angrily: ‘[t]he way you paint, I can piss in the snow’.51 After attending Academy classes between 1898 and the summer of 1901, for the next seven years of Gerstl’s brief life his artistic studies were ‘primarily self-directed’.52 He did return to Griepenkerl’s class briefly in 1904, but it seems he was expelled after two semesters.53 Gerstl eventually found a more progressive teacher, Heinrich Lefler, who supported the young artist’s work; nevertheless, Gerstl alienated even Lefler with his hostility toward his teacher’s



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participation in preparations for the Festival Parade [Festzug] to celebrate Emperor Franz Joseph’s Jubilee. Student and teacher fought, and Gerstl was asked to leave Lefler’s studio permanently.54 Whereas Kokoschka dedicated The Dreaming Youths to Klimt before even meeting him,55 Gerstl backed out of an exhibition at Galerie Miethke because Klimt, whose art he despised, would also be showing works in the same room.56 More than a true outsider, Kokoschka seems, in fact, to have been a canny self-promoter who simultaneously fostered notoriety and nepotism with those in a position to help him. That Kokoschka’s reputation as a ‘controversial, independent, and self-taught genius’ is more tenacious than Gerstl’s no doubt mostly results from the embarrassment of biographical riches concerning the former artist and the paucity of documents pertaining to the latter. Nevertheless, the fact that Kokoschka’s art is also more overtly confrontational and ‘ugly’ than Gerstl’s may have also contributed to Kokoschka’s seemingly greater reputation for provocation. Kokoschka certainly caused some real hostility with his strategic use of ugliness and negative empathy, but he especially pointed the historical discourse in this direction. For example, in an exhibition catalogue revealingly titled The Naked Truth: Klimt, Schiele, Kokoschka, and Other Scandals, the authors, describing Kokoschka’s play Murderer, assert that ‘[f ]rom the start, both the text of the play and Kokoschka’s own illustrations to it proved extremely controversial’.57 Peter Vergo and Yvonne Modlin have noted, however, that there is no record in the newspapers of any riot after the performance of Murderer. Citing their article, Jane Kallir claims that the desire to paint everything as a scandal was actually a post-war impulse on Kokoschka’s part. Kallir argues that ‘[h]ad such a riot actually taken place in 1909, it would have been emotionally devastating; after World War I, the story was proof positive of the play’s artistic merit.’58 In contrast I suggest that constructing a negative reputation was absolutely crucial to Kokoschka’s artistic practice even before 1909, and that intentional visual ugliness was a major facet of this practice of negativity. Indeed nearly all of Kokoschka’s representational strategies at this time seem to be inextricably intertwined with fear or hatred. Describing the costume design for Murderer in his autobiography, he writes:

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I dressed them in makeshift costumes of rags and scraps of cloth and painted their faces and bodies, where exposed. In this, I had been helped by my visits to the ethnographical museum. There I had learned how primitive peoples, presumably as a reaction to their fear of death, had decorated the skulls of the dead with facial features, with the play of expressions, the lines of laughter and anger, restoring to them the appearance of life. In a similar way I decorated the actors’ arms and legs with nerve lines, muscles and tendons, just as they can be seen in my old drawings.59

The artist’s illustrations, made to accompany the play, do not seem constructed to show the appearance of life, but rather of sickness and death. Their animated linearity and the exposed nerve lines, muscles, and tendons which Kokoschka mentions evoke the medical imagery that interested him at the time. One of the few artistic influences Kokoschka does acknowledge in his autobiography is Johann Amos Comenius, and Comenius’s 1672 text Orbis Sensualium Pictus contains medical imagery strikingly similar to the tradition of écorché images that represent the human body flayed and in agony. In turn, these images resemble the wax anatomical models at the medical history museum in the University of Vienna, which Kokoschka probably visited. Kokoschka insists that the tickets for Murderer ‘were sold out a week before the performance’, but only, he says, ‘[t]hanks to the notoriety of my pictures’. ‘As I had intended’, the artist gloats, ‘it sent the Viennese into paroxysms of rage’. Having thus asserted that he had deliberately provoked a strong negative reaction in the public, Kokoschka nevertheless goes on: I was angry at the insults I read every day in the Press where I saw myself treated as a criminal. So I had my head shaved in order to look the part, and in my drawings for the play, and in a second poster, I showed myself in this guise to the public.60

This ugly image of himself, with a brutish, enlarged jaw, massive underbite, leering grin, mismatched eyes, and a nipple placed like a giant hairy mole near the armpit, has become one of the most recognisable of Kokoschka’s early self-portraits (Fig.7.2). He returned to it not only in 1912, to advertise a lecture, but again in a 1923 double self-portrait, claiming with now-familiar rhetoric that when the work, The Painter II, was exhibited in 1924 at the Vienna Secession it provoked ‘caricatures and malicious comments in the Viennese newspapers’.61



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In this essay, I have considered several different falsehoods that Kokoschka perpetuated about himself, his art, and the Viennese artgoing public. In his letter to Erwin Lang, Kokoschka claimed that in Vienna one wasted energy trying to ‘create friction’, but it seems clear that such friction was not a waste of energy for Kokoschka so much as a resource. He was in fact celebrated as well as denigrated by the Viennese, and even though his works were often perceived as ugly, they were also at times commended for that very quality of ugliness. The strategic positioning of himself as an avant-garde antagonist, arousing the wrath of an ignorant public, was and is central to Kokoschka’s legacy. And to the extent that a theory of negative empathy was at play in Kokoschka’s art, his social provocations actually constituted an essential component of his art production. I have examined the ways that Kokoschka’s self-representational strategies in life were related to his representational strategies in art, focusing especially on those practices which produced an effect of ugliness. By putting Kokoschka’s early works, particularly his ugly self-portraits,



Oskar Kokoschka, Der Sturm [Self-Portrait], 1911, lithographic poster, 70 ×46.5cm. Albertina, Vienna.

Fig.7.2

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in dialogue with the contemporaneous theory of negative Einfühlung, or negative empathy, we can not only broaden our perspectives on the artist himself, but also deepen our understanding of the important imbrications between negativity and ugliness in Viennese aesthetic theory and practice at the end of the first decade of the twentieth century. In her 2008 dissertation, ‘The Aesthetics of Ugliness’, Anna Elizabeth Baker notes that the Deutsches Wörterbuch defines hässlich, the German word for ugly, ‘in terms of inducing hostility (feindselig) and being unlovable. The etymology of hässlich is derived from the verb “to hate”, hassen, implying that something (or someone) ugly also contains something inherently dislikeable.’62 In such a context the connection between ugliness and hatred in the theory of negative empathy seems almost unavoidable. Causality has admittedly remained somewhat ambiguous in this analysis of ugliness and negative empathy: does ugliness cause hatred, or does hating someone make us see them as ugly? The answer may well be both; although contemporaneous commentators like Lipps were unclear about the exact nature or trajectory of our intertwined experiences of hatred and ugliness, nevertheless it seems plausible to suggest that causality here might be more cyclical than linear. We not only hate something because we find it ugly, but also then hate it all the more because of this aesthetic repugnance, which then makes the despised object even uglier, and so on. Indeed the ideas that ugliness causes displeasure and that experiencing the emotion of hatred might heighten our perception of ugliness both seem to be supported by contemporary neuroscience. For example, in The Age of Insight: The Quest to Understand the Unconscious in Art, Mind and Brain From Vienna 1900 to the Present, Eric Kandel discusses how although beauty and ugliness are both represented in the same part of the brain, we interpret pleasurable images as beautiful and displeasing images as ugly.63 Kandel also explains that emotion is actually a form of cognition; that we respond to threatening facial expressions with increased activity in the amygdala, a region of the brain which plays an important part in the experience and memory of negative emotions like hatred and fear; and that cues from the amygdala ‘boost the visual processing of emotionally charged stimuli, which presumably explains why the emotionally charged faces, hands,



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and bodies depicted by Klimt, Kokoschka, and Schiele sharpen our attention’.64 Thus although we might interpret Kokoschka’s facial expression in Self-Portrait as a Warrior as either evincing the emotion of fear or itself provoking a fearful reaction, it is important to note that these two interpretations are not mutually exclusive. More interesting still is the ambiguous nature of these interrelations between negativity and ugliness, and the fact that what one person finds displeasing, threatening, and ugly, another person may find pleasing, liberating, and beautiful.



8



From Political Travesties to Aesthetic Justice: The Ugly in Teo Eng Seng’s D Cells Adele Tan

My cell is like a rest-house For creatures big and small They come here at all hours I do not mind at all. The moths and beetles come at night Attracted by my light. The moths sleep with their wings spread wide The beetles take to flight. A cricket came one early morn And woke me from my sleep. He rendered me his favourite songs I think that I should keep.

A grasshopper came one sunny day And rested on my bed. He looked around and seemed to say, ‘I’ve come just for a shade.’ A toad was found on New Year’s Day So small and black was he. He lived here for just three short days I was sad when he took leave.

The ants come here in search of food Three species I have found. The red, the black and brown ones too They always move around. Insects of all hues and shapes Come here but do not stay. And spiders all with long thin legs Make webs to catch their prey.

Three lizards live in this my cell, Their homes are above the lights. They love to play amongst themselves And they give me such delight. Teo Soh Lung, ‘My Cell’, May 19891 141



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By most accounts, one would never think of Teo Eng Seng’s work as having any truck with ‘the ugly’. He is after all a formalist whose ‘joyous buoyancy’ and ‘general high-keyed colours’ (as described by the Singaporean art historian Constance Sheares) have cemented his reputation as the arch-abstractionist of the second generation in Singapore.2 In 1979, he openly declared that he would abandon painting and introduced a method of sculpting with dyed paper pulp which he termed ‘paperdyesculp’, a portmanteau coinage he would eventually apply to various forms of art production, from paintings and sculptures to media such as concrete and fibreglass. With their haptic quality, the paperdyesculp works straddle the boundary of sculpture proper and collage. Desiring to move away from Western aesthetics, so as to resist imputations of influence by Jackson Pollock and Francis Bacon, and to identify himself with Asia, Teo had begun to experiment in the late 1970s with paper, a centuries-old material for artists in China and Japan. He used it not as a ground for his work but as the main threedimensional ingredient, which he manufactured independently and used as a structural basis.3 By processing and manipulating the pulp through the addition of colour, texture and form, he created some highly original pictorial objects. The malleability and uncommon texture of the paper sculptures impart to his themes vitality and expressive power. Seldom are colours muted in his work, an aspect which gives it an aura of impish optimism located within a Greenbergian formal clarity exemplified by American Abstract Expressionism and Colour Field Painting. Teo is also known for being unflinching in using his art for social commentary. His work is often humorous and witty, sometimes deploying shock tactics, catchy titles, strong colours and forms that at the same time draw and repel audiences. Disturbing and intimidating at times, his works do not so much present didactic content forcefully as challenge the viewer to explore, contemplate and question. Teo’s father, a professional photographer, encouraged his interest in art and enrolled him at the age of 17 in the British Council’s art class. In 1961 Teo hitchhiked to London; he worked as a clerk and attended night classes at the Central School of Art and Design for two years, frequenting the art museums for ‘old masters’ such as Rembrandt, Francis Bacon and Alberto Giacometti. After completing his art education at the Birmingham College of Art and Design in 1968, Teo taught at schools



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in the UK but returned to Singapore in 1971 to become Art Master and later Head of Department at the then newly established International School, now known as the United World College of South East Asia. Apropos of this international environment, Teo’s themes were frequently taken from current world events which he felt were of real consequence, such as the reference to one of Ronald Haeberle’s devastating 1968 photographs in his 1970 painting Massacre at My Lai (after Haeberle’s), a condemnation of the American action in Vietnam that also took aim at the still-raging conflict in the Middle East. But where the 1960s saw Teo producing figurative and semi-abstract paintings, he had by the 1970s adopted an abstract expressionist approach closer to that of Wilem de Kooning and Jackson Pollock.4 Nonetheless, his concern for the social continues: [I want] To provide certain experiences for the spectator, not just entertainment. Sometimes, it can entertain but it should always be a special experience. It should be thought-provoking, produce a lasting impression, stimulate people to react because it is created in response to international events or as a result of intense personal experiences. But I’m not an activist, trying to change political systems. I’m just trying to make people aware of their situation or that of the world around them. For instance, Tribute to John Lennon in 1980, the first of my paper-and-glue paintings which I call paperdyesculp, [conveys my] anguish and outrage at the senseless and tragic murder of one of the most radical artists of his day. It was inspired by rock forms and the petals of the hibiscus flower, edged with fringes of green and pink wool. The combination of ruggedness (symbolised by the rock image) and fragility (suggested by the petal shape and fringes) is intended to suggest the substance of Lennon’s talents and artistic contributions as well as the fragility and tenuousness of life.5

While much of his work alludes to the absurdities, cruelties and injustices in the world, he has always described his contributions as positive. Concerned with the vulnerability of the human being in his environment, struggling to come to terms with his situation, the majority of his paintings or paperdyesculps are nonetheless often described as imbued with hope and joy, underscoring an ultimate belief that the spirit of man will triumph over the forces of darkness. This optimism, social commitment and strength of personal experience is meant to be conveyed through the handling of brilliant colours, rich textures and suggestive forms.6 This equation of message and formal aesthetic qualities is, however, never easily achieved for Teo: ‘Form, colour and surface texture must come to a tension, and it is this tension or energy



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which conveys something of my personal struggles and injects life into the work. To obtain this balance is a constant struggle.’7 Yet a glaring lacuna can be found in the reception of Teo’s work, in particular that of the 1980s when he was at the peak of his productivity. The work of this period has been described as characterised by a lighter mood, indicated by the often playful and jocular titles. Even the latent criticism of The Net: Most Definitely the Singapore River (1986) appears conciliatory in its symbolism: it depicts the flotsam and jetsam floating in the river, which would be swept away together with the traditional trades when the Singapore River was cleaned up from 1977 to 1987. The work has seminally functioned as the wry ‘last word’ on the ‘Great Singapore River Debate’ of the 1970s and 1980s over the perceived overuse of the Singapore River as a subject matter by painters. The fishing net and the alluded-to junk and rubbish of the river make visible the crux of the debate over the nostalgic and exotic representation of the Singapore River by artists without critical reflection. Still, the prognosis that Teo gives is that the old way of life might disappear but a new one would take its place, suggested in what he sees as a myriad of reflections that can now be seen on the water. Missing from this discussion, however, is a diminutive set of atypical, anxiety-ridden sculptures from the late 1980s which, to my knowledge, have never been mentioned in Teo’s extant catalogues and interviews.8 It was not until an exhibition nondescriptly titled ‘Life Journeys’, held in October 2009 at the private art gallery Muse House, which Teo started on the East Coast of Singapore, that a small group of viewers got to see a set of sculptures that is in no way consistent with what they knew of his oeuvre. Small, dark and visually impenetrable, the sculptures give away little of their local historical gravitas and the artist’s personal trauma. The exhibition in question was a little memorial to a period in Singapore’s history that poet and playwright Alfian Saat has called Singapore’s ‘open wound … a little black hole in history’.9 Teo had made the small, ‘malformed’ sculptures during the solitary confinement over three years of his younger sister Teo Soh Lung, one of the first 16 arrested without trial under the Internal Security Act (ISA), during the 1987 crackdown on an alleged Marxist conspiracy to overthrow the incumbent PAP government in Singapore (henceforth immortalised in the media as Operation



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Spectrum). Soh Lung’s story and the enormity of this historical punctum is retold through the vehicle of art, more specifically through postcard drawings she accumulated during her detention and the sculptures her brother fabricated during those difficult years. Soh Lung, a lawyer with her own practice, was working towards the provision of legal aid for disadvantaged people in Singapore, frequently in tandem with a group of Roman Catholic social activists and professionals. She was first detained on 21 May 1987 for more than four months, and then rearrested on 19 April 1988 for issuing a joint press statement rebutting the government’s allegations and claim that detainees were well-treated. She was eventually released in June 1990 after numerous appeals and habeas corpus writs were dismissed over the years and her detention at the Whitley Road Centre indefinitely extended. The impact of Operation Spectrum on Singapore’s laws has been tremendous: the ISA was amended in January 1989 to remove the power of the judiciary in cases related to internal security, and appeals to the Privy Council were similarly abolished in accordance with the government’s view that only local courts could preside over matters related to Singapore’s national security. With the Maintenance of Religious Harmony Act (MRHA) becoming law in 1990, the Minister for Home Affairs was given the power to issue restraining orders against any religious leader whose sermons, speeches or actions threaten Singapore’s religious harmony. The episode also had several immediate consequences: i) Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew sued and won a libel suit against the Far Eastern Economic Review for an article it published about his meeting with the Archbishop of Singapore; ii) circulation of Hong Kong-based magazine Asiaweek was restricted because it refused to publish two letters from the government concerning its cover story on the detentions; and iii) the Queens Counsel Anthony Lester (who represented Soh Lung) was banned from working in Singapore because the government claimed that he had started meddling in domestic politics.10 Surviving alone in her grey concrete cell, Soh Lung enlisted the discipline, patience and sanity afforded by art, more specifically amateur sketching and poetry writing, routinely recording her observations of life in a barren space, especially once rules were relaxed and prisoners were allowed paper and pen. She befriended a lizard and conversed with



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the spiders and ants that visited her cell, and then inscribed them in her poems and drawings (Fig.8.1). Her prosaic intention was to make blank cards for friends with the encouraging thought that she could sell them should she be released but unemployed. Yet it was uncertain whether the cards could ever leave the prison and in a fit of doubt and fear of the Internal Security Department (ISD), she began to destroy them by tearing them up and flushing them down the toilet until sorrow and a redemptive sense of waste led her to take a chance and submit them for official consideration. It was only after the second year of her release that the ISD returned all the works that they had retained. Fast forward 20 years and few Singaporeans now recall anything about the alleged Marxist conspiracy. Despite this social amnesia (or what some perceive as simply a sign that society has moved on), Teo’s works illuminate this context aesthetically and politically through their deliberate deformation. In his message to his sister when she was in detention in 1987, Teo wrote: ‘It does not matter where we come from. What matters is what we want



Teo Soh Lung, notebook sketches of the lizard in her cell, undated.

Fig.8.1



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to do with life. There are no heroes, heroines, just what one wants to do for mankind.’11 Teo added in his recent exhibition statement: ‘Indeed, there is no way of knowing for sure that life journeys would translate into unique experiences capable of effecting change. But staying still and doing nothing will ensure that nothing changes.’12 But effecting change is more difficult in the deed than in the saying. The sculptures display condensed anger and anguish as well as a calm collectedness. In the malformed shapes there is more than a sense of impotence: what art supplies here is a diagnosis or accusation of totalitarian power rather than suggesting the cure or a way out of it. But looking more closely at the sculptures, which retain the vestiges of the informel and minimalist architectonic abstraction, one can further glimpse the strategies and ruses for political justice contained within the aesthetics of the ugly. Indeed, the deployment of abstraction for visibly unpleasant subject matter suggests ugliness as a means of grasping political force, a force that makes itself felt even as it refuses to enter public discourse and social debate. Simply titled D Cell, short for detention cell, each piece in this set of three diminutive plaster of Paris (gypsum) sculptures is brushed with silver paint and rubbed with black shoe polish (Figs 8.2, 8.3). Each is forged from the active and desperate imaginative acts of an artist robbed of actual sight of a loved one: his objective is to see for himself the state of his sister’s living conditions, but he is unable to do so in this high-security prison. Teo attempts to construct an almost objective interpretation of the confinement cell based on descriptions given by his sister on family visits. But instead of positivising the environment, the negative space is cast in its place. This stand-in positivised void is also analogous to the process by which the sculpture is made: plaster is poured over the initial clay model to form a mould into which more plaster is poured to create a plaster cast. The void lives on as a haunting presence, both empty and confining. It is also structurally similar to how Teo has always worked: Usually, I start with an idea at the back of my head: the exact image is not yet formed, but I sense what I want already. And in the process of realizing my concept visually, the final image takes shape; it emerges from the subconscious to the conscious. I’m not repeating an experience; I’m experiencing it firsthand as I work. I work with the shapes which I have already formed with paper pulp and glue, grouping them and rearranging them until I arrive at the expression I am seeking.13



Fig.8.2

Teo Eng Seng, D Cell 1, 1987, plaster of paris, silver paint and shoe polish, 38 × 25 × 7 cm (View 1).



Fig.8.3

Teo Eng Seng, D Cell 1, 1987, plaster of paris, silver paint and shoe polish, 38 × 25 × 7 cm (View 2).



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The cells are non-literal depictions in the miniature, made up from what Teo gleaned was most terrible about the incarceration space: the sun-heated walls, the wire fencing, the spartan toilet and the metal bars. This image is later corroborated by Soh Lung’s subsequently released drawings detailing her living conditions (Figs 8.4, 8.5), where her depiction of herself in harsh shadow (despite the beguiling textual declarations of being alright) indicates the strong and relentless daytime heat, a situation of distress comparable to the forcing of confession under interrogation lamps. Like the foggy historical reception and analysis of Operation Spectrum, the architectural particulars of Soh Lung’s cell can only remain imprecise. Teo is sometimes inconsistent with what he chooses to be the solid and the void: Soh Lung’s latrine should not have been a hollow pit on the surface if the prior decision was that negative space be cast in his D Cells (Fig. 8.6). The forestalling of proper and accurate (over)sight is already the theme in the earlier work Hibiscus Outrage: Israeli troops had ‘failed to distinguish’ civilians from the Palestinian



Teo Soh Lung, ‘I am OK’, pencil sketch on paper, 14 August 1987.

Fig.8.4



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Teo Soh Lung, ‘The Interrogation: 21 May 1987’, pencil sketch on paper, 30 May 1987.

Fig.8.5

Liberation Army insurgents, thereby resulting in unnecessary mass casualties or what is now callously termed ‘collateral damage’.14 With this mental and perceptual impenetrability at work, what ensues is a cast of what appears to be a fortress wall that surrounds an inner court and whose tortuously textured and craggy surface mimics the political and emotional tumult felt either by the artist or his sister, which in turn undercuts the seeming quiescence of the work. As plain and ‘incorrect’ expressions of space, Teo’s D Cells appear to not only violate conventional compositional and aesthetic values (e.g. the notion of the beautiful) but also foreground ugliness as a more historically appropriate category of appreciation at a time when the beautiful has been co-opted by the commercialised culture industry. The task of indexing trauma and anger can no longer fall back upon normative solutions (such as realist and allegorical painting) but must look to a state of material that can adequately and justly meet the needs of the situation at hand, especially one that exceeds the limits of experience and affect of the artist. The necessary relationship between ugliness





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Teo Eng Seng, D Cell 1, 1987, plaster of paris, 26 × 14.5 × 4.3 cm (View of inner block).

Fig.8.6

and twentieth-century avant-gardism has been of central concern to the German philosopher Theodor W. Adorno, who argues that it is the task of modern art to be on the side of those social phenomena that have been treated as taboo, but without any overtures to aestheticise the ugly or reconcile its formal dissonances – that is, to tone down and integrate the abject. The critical function of the modern artwork, specifically its opposition to the social status quo, is supported and enhanced by the presentation of the ugly.15 Like the slightly earlier series of paperdyesculp now known by its acronym OTOSOS or On the Other Side of Silence, a quote from George Eliot’s Middlemarch, the cell sculptures can be displayed and viewed on more than one side; front and back and around are all possible viewing positions (Figs 8.7, 8.8).16 The metaphoric framework exists here to locate a hidden realm of truth and to break the taboos on speaking out because, as Eliot so aptly describes it in her following line, even ‘the quickest of us walk about well wadded with stupidity’. There is so much suffering in the world that the living have to inure themselves to the everyday violence they face. And even as we try to be compassionate and note every injustice, we defend ourselves against that intrusion or else find that we must surely ‘die of that roar from the other side of silence’. In OTOSOS No. 13, depressions in the shape of Chinese clogs form deep reliefs on the highly textured paper pulp surface, with colourful



Fig.8.7

Teo Eng Seng, D Cell 2, 1987, plaster of paris, silver paint and shoe polish, 32 × 20 × 5 cm (View 1).



Fig.8.8

Teo Eng Seng, D Cell 2, 1987, plaster of paris, silver paint and shoe polish, 32 × 20 × 5 cm (View 2).



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Chinese folk prints – traditional good luck charms – incorporated in the work for ornamental effect. In the centre are drawings of figures on horseback representing the Chinese idiom guiren liuma, an honourable and compassionate gentleman riding a lucky horse, symbolising justice and uprightness.17 This wish for a figure of justice is, however, conspicuously absent in the D Cells, with the surface depressions indicating only the bleak and unmitigated force of violence. The use of titular abbreviations suggests too that such intolerable situations can only be alluded to but not directly confronted because one simply does not know the complete truth. In the year of Soh Lung’s second detention, Teo accepted a sevenmonth fellowship (1988–9) at the Birmingham Institute of Art and Design, where he studied bronze casting and learnt to adapt metalcasting techniques to the creation of forms in paperdyesculp. In June 1989 the Tiananmen Square Incident took place in China while Teo was in England, recalling to him the diminished human rights of his own sister at the hands of an authoritarian state. The brief sojourn to Birmingham proved intellectually rewarding and galvanised a period of intense political reflection; the disturbing scenes at Tiananmen that appeared daily on the television screen moved Teo swiftly to create mixed media assemblages based on the happenings: another set of small sculptures, some with the clashing juxtaposition of wood and clay (the most humble of organic materials) and sometimes ciment fondu, but all carrying the burden of visualising the injustice of the rolling tanks against the sea of students, like the precariousness of a lizard’s life in the prison cell (Fig.8.9). The images are rough and inchoate, expressing a comparable mix of beleagueredness and faith he had felt with regards to Soh Lung’s situation in Singapore. In the midst of this psychic upheaval, Teo took an unusual step in venturing towards performance practice. He had forged a bronze Trophy of an open flame, commemorating a variety of political upheavals taking place around the world at the time – Poland, Romania, and Singapore – which contained an element of hope for mankind like ‘a shoot growing out of rubble or the flame of hope’.18 Teo later took Trophy along with him on a road show titled ‘Humanity Nurturing Humanity: an exhibition cum dialogue tour’, freely interacting with people in open spaces and on trains and performing with it in open spaces outside important art museums and



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galleries in England, and finally the Artists’ Village back in Singapore. But even Teo is sceptical of or ambivalent about a direct approach in pursuing political redress in artistic forms, as one infers from his later contemplation on the deployment of American iconography by the student protesters at Tiananmen: I take a serious interest in social commentary and believe that my art must enlighten the audience through questioning our values. If the Tiananmen Incident in 1989 could be depicted as an art form, it must be the most serious and monumental installation/performance art piece. Yet, how much is achieved from the demonstration is difficult to assess. I also wonder whether the protesters would have received more sympathetic ears had they not installed a Statue of Liberty but some other symbols that can be identified with the Chinese. […] Is the change a testimony of qualitative living today or a reflection of our vulgarism? Where do we go from here? How do we define progress in art and in life?19

Ugliness and the Progressive Language of Abstract Art It might sound strange that the articulated social ugliness of the D Cells and Teo’s subsequent works of the late 1980s relied much on the language of abstraction but also gainsaid its purported modernist claim to autonomy and purity. The cells dwelled on classical sculptural adumbrations of proportion and volume, solids and hollows, symmetry and geometry, fundamental co-ordinates for the image of Paradise.



Teo Eng Seng, Braving the Waves, 1989, ciment fondu, 26 × 30 × 4.5 cm (View 1).

Fig.8.9



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But Teo’s cells were made without set squares and compasses. They were the products of improvisation and disorder, incoherence and dissonance, cuboid shapes that are threatening but hesitant. Teo had foresworn representational art and this prohibition of images led to a period of visionary rather than visual forms. The ugliness of the political and personal situation required that abstraction give it an air of implacability but at the same time accommodate the legibility of its cause. Teo writes: A sense of belonging, identity and purpose are important aspects of human life. I would like my work to subscribe to certain human values, cultural identity and worthiness of doing. I avoid being illustrative or descriptive in my work. This is achieved by organizing the various artistic elements in abstract terms. This process is analogous to music, which allows the listener to feel and even visualise the composition.20

As much as abstraction gave Teo a vehicle to address the unjust, abstraction itself must in turn renounce its self-sufficiency. As Mark Cheetham has put it, the grounds have shifted towards social abstraction, whose causes if not its imagery are bound to a reality that cannot be ignored: ‘Disease keeps abstraction alive’. Using Kasimir Malevich’s difficult but seminal thoughts in ‘An Introduction to the Theory of the Additional Element in Painting’, Cheetham makes us see how Malevich in a future-oriented mode, through the isolation of the ‘supplementary’ element to explain change in art history and influenced by his experience with tuberculosis and medical discourse, fundamentally reversed his transcendent impulses and overturned the rhetoric of purity to provide an alternative narrative and future course for abstraction, whose history has been replete with episodes of contagion from extraneous sources. The contagion of abstraction with real referents mirrors then the entry into abstraction of a subject matter too traumatic or pervasive to be given conventional figural expression. Despite his avowed fidelity to abstract art, Teo has not been shy of alluding to bodily states: D Cell 3 – Confinement is studded with raised bumps, telling us of the acne-ravaged visage of Soh Lung during her internment, and the proximity of death and disgust in any social conflict (Figs 8.10, 8.11). Marcel Duchamp’s Torture-Morte (1959), with its painted plaster foot studded with flies and witty titular pun on nature morte (French term for still life), is its historical counterpart,



Fig.8.10

Teo Eng Seng, D Cell 3 – Confinement, 1987, plaster of paris, silver paint and shoe polish, 21×17×9cm (View 1).



Fig.8.11

Teo Eng Seng, D Cell 3 – Confinement, 1987, plaster of paris, silver paint and shoe polish, 21×17×9cm (View 2).



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which also brings into the equation Georges Bataille’s influential thesis on the big toe, which proposes the radical declassificatory force of our most neglected and lowly body parts: the big toe is ‘the most human part of the human’, one that distinguishes us as homo erectus and yet is considered as being of ‘the most nauseating filthiness’, a repression of the knowledge that we are anchored in mud.21 In posing latent anthropomorphic content, the self-seriousness of Teo’s abstract cell sculptures is thus overturned and instead brings to the fore the invasion of artifice or the disguising of the fact that the artworks’ manufacture is rooted in an economy or poverty of means, as Teo makes plaster of Paris resemble aluminium or cast iron via silver paint and shoe polish. It is therefore even more remarkable to find in Soh Lung’s notebooks a sketch titled ‘Tribute to El Lissitzsky’ (after the Russian avant-garde artist) that ostensibly features a rectilinear doorway shrouded in her attempts at cross-hatching and shading in ‘black, grey, white, blue’ (Fig. 8.12). This is in contrast to a more prosaic and literal drawing that she also provides in her notebooks of another doorway, with the header baldly stating ‘The Door Out’, a sign of her hope that reprieve



Teo Soh Lung, ‘Tribute to El Lissitzsky’, sketch on paper, undated.

Fig.8.12



Fig.8.13

Teo Soh Lung, ‘The Door Out’, sketch on paper, 30 August 1987.



Fig.8.14

Teo Soh Lung, Beyond the Blue Gate: Recollections of a Political Prisoner (Petaling Jaya: SIRD, 2010), cover design.



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and eventual release may be close at hand (Fig. 8.13). The extruding weed on the bottom right corner invades the enforced regularity of the pictorial composition, presaging the book cover of her memoirs Beyond the Blue Gate (Fig. 8.14), which inadvertently features the photographic image of a passage towards the rectangular blue gate of the detention centre framed by black-and-white foliage.22 The push towards a purity of form in these various instances cannot but yield to physical and psychical degradations, such as the pain, stress, disaffection, compulsion and anxiety (ugly feelings) that surround, and lead to, the respective aesthetic creations.23 Museumifying the Ugly: Marxist Conspiracy and Institutional Memory However, if we view abstraction itself as antidote (either poison or medicine), we might get to a new assessment of Teo’s strategically ugly sculptures. At this point, I venture to propose the fanciful idea that abstraction is what keeps the history of the Marxist Conspiracy in Singapore alive and will become the aesthetic channel through which this historical memory can survive. This reverses the Greenbergian ideology that abstract art is an antidote to society’s afflictions and that its unique value in the post-1945 period lies in the high degree of detached contemplativeness that its appreciation requires. At the present, inward-looking formal values have segued into the impure, eclectic, strategic and ultimately social means of abstraction. They have done this precisely because they seem pure or at any rate incommunicative. The ‘Marxist Conspiracy’ and Operation Spectrum, despite being incontrovertibly significant, continues to function like a taboo in public discourse. No art institutions in Singapore would deign to acknowledge the political significance and injustice of this event or even its role in fomenting Teo’s aesthetic evolution, although Teo is spoken of as among the most inventive, outspoken and daring artists working in Singapore today, and officially recognised at least since 1986, when the Singapore Government awarded him the Cultural Medallion, the country’s highest cultural honour. The role of abstraction in dealing with this political reality is confirmed by some recent incidents breaking the code of silence. At the



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2006 Singapore Biennale, which was held at the City Hall, the then 28year-old Singaporean artist Jason Wee tried to take on the subject with varying degrees of success and self-censorship. Wee’s 1987 narrated the repressed history of Operation Spectrum, interweaving it with his memories of his own great-grandmother (who had died that year), therefore combining the private and public and evoking the personal as political in the body of the state. In his multimedia installation, black and white photographs of rolling coastal waves hung on the walls of the converted courtroom and surrounded its long wooden tables, onto which were placed rows of neatly spaced laptops opened at right angles but with their screens lying on the work surfaces. Playing in the background was a soundtrack of funeral chants and interjecting voices contesting the official accounts that linked the arrested to Marxist liberation theology, thus also placing these narratives in direct opposition to the various ministerial quotes, handwritten in chalk onto the judge’s bench, on why the plot was treacherous and had to be stopped.24 For Wee, the textual supplemented the absence of a convincing and intransigent art object. Teo, nearly two decades earlier, had recourse not to language but to silent, perplexing and obdurate abstract sculpture, mirroring the enveloping silence that had already descended upon this subject. Teo’s D Cells have yet to enter the national collection, but the fate of British artist Rachel Whiteread’s Ghost (1993), which is now in the National Gallery of Art in Washington, holds promise for the delayed efficacy of Teo’s cell sculptures. There are close similarities in the manufacture, although Teo worked on a much more modest scale and involved the idiosyncrasy of hands-on modelling. Whiteread’s casts of negative spaces make a solid object speak less of its own material presence than of objects that are no longer present, maintaining a ghostly presence of their absence and thereby evoking physical memories of them. Whiteread’s work in various media, from resin to plaster to concrete, has largely comprised substantial castings of everyday furniture – mattress, table, bathtub and later architecture – whereby empty, negative space gets translated into opaque forms that can be marked externally by the contours and grooves of a room’s windows and door or the thumb marks and indentations of an object. Yet Whiteread’s casts have not always been received with admiration, her works being typically described as austere, melancholy and ugly.25 House, perhaps her best-known work,



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was a concrete cast of the inside of an entire Victorian terraced house completed in autumn 1993, and exhibited at the location of the original house on 193 Grove Road in East London (all the houses in the street had earlier been knocked down by the council). It drew mixed responses, winning her both the Turner Prize for best young British artist in 1993 and the K Foundation art award for the worst British artist. Tower Hamlets London Borough Council controversially demolished House on 11 January 1994, completing the cycle of obsolescence. Like Teo’s D Cells, Whiteread’s ‘ugly’ abstract casts stand as vulnerable witnesses to and ciphers of historical truth, all of which can be easily ignored, thwarted and disposed of. However, with her growing institutional affirmation, Whiteread’s more recent public work faces no such danger of eviction: her Holocaust Monument a.k.a. Nameless Library (2000) was commissioned by the Austrian authorities as a remembrance of Austrian Jews killed during the Holocaust, and inspired by historical observations on the abominable Nazi book burnings, and the Jews as ‘people of the book’.26 Located in the centre of the Judenplatz, Vienna, it is a concrete (and positive) cast of rows of books, with the pages, rather than the spines, turned outward and made into the monument’s walls. Whiteread’s work has by now lost the charge of sculptural ugliness, and instead gained critical appreciation that her abstract sculptures create tension between the haunting and the poetic, the monumental and the fragile, the ephemeral and the eternal, and are therefore appropriate vessels to contain inexpressible and difficult historical trauma.27 And I would venture further to suggest that the establishment embrace or transvaluation of Whiteread’s ugly lumps of concrete have much also to do with the legibility of abstraction’s legacy through key figures in minimal and post-minimal art such as Carl Andre, Donald Judd, Bruce Nauman, Gordon Matta-Clark, and Eva Hesse (although in concert with the extant memory industry). For Kirk Varnedoe, in his book Pictures of Nothing: Abstract Art Since Pollock, Whiteread has developed her own ‘symbolic vocabulary for expressing the moral ambiguity of rationality; the virtues of control and the extremely negative consequences’.28 The formal penchant for logic and repetition in abstraction is reworked in Whiteread’s hands to reveal instead its inhumanity, anomie and sterility, in other words, modernity’s ugliness. ‘What we are left with in this pared down vocabulary…is immediate sensory perception which in turn forces



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one to attend to the relationship with the body’.29 Varnedoe concludes that this is the preferred style of historical memory and contemplation; our contemporary and almost inescapable language of solemn monumentality. But where Whiteread has managed, via the critical shift in contemporary discursive trends, to displace the early monstrosity of her abstract aesthetics to that of historically felt horror, Teo’s dull grey cells are still displeasing to the eye when compared to his vibrant paperdyesculp and viewed from the Singaporean museum’s vantage point. Nonetheless, he can take small consolation in the fact that his cells can be spoken of in the same genealogy of abstraction as Whiteread’s Holocaust Memorial, thereby preserving, firstly, the injunction to remember the unjust accusations and detentions, and secondly, the imperative to dismember the official and prejudiced narratives. These were all accomplished without needing to take the authorities head on. ‘Whiteread is one of the most important artists of her generation,’ and Ghost is a ‘late-20th-century icon’, decreed museum director Earl Powell III as the work entered the NGA’s hallowed collection.30 In drawing a formal and thematic parallel between Teo and Whiteread’s treatment of positive-negative space, I am not trying to argue that a similar status should be accorded to Teo. What I have attempted to do is rather to explore the possibility of tentatively securing Teo’s D Cells and political ugliness in the genealogy and language of abstraction and its contemporary institutionally acceptable formulation so as to broach an alternative solution to an impasse – the cell sculptures remain inadmissible to Singaporean art historical and political discourse. As evidenced by Whiteread’s success, ugly historical events can be culturally registered via an abstract visual vocabulary that began with radical dissonance. One can therefore only speculate on whether Teo’s cellular sculptures will achieve the same, or at least become a Singaporean icon, for it seems that in this current aesthetic concern with memory and trauma, ugliness (parlayed by abstraction) is a dish best served old.



9



Can Beauty and Ugliness Coexist? Andrei Pop

I am an apple; one who loves you throws me at you. Say yes, Xanthippe; we fade, both you and I. Epigram attributed to Plato1

It is commonplace, if ugliness is admitted as a concept at all, to call it the negation of beauty. Even art historians now say so. Nina AthanassoglouKallmyer begins an essay on ugliness in the second edition of Chicago’s Critical Terms volume for art history thus: ‘Simply put, ugliness is an aesthetic category that stands at the opposite of beauty.’2 The claim is reasonable, but the spatial metaphor (‘stands at the opposite of ’) signals an ambiguity. Beauty and ugliness stand at opposite ends of what? Do they exhaust the field, so that what is not one is the other? Do they exhaust only an aesthetic field, so that what is neither (the number 3, for instance) is anaesthetic? Or is there an aesthetic universe of discourse – plain, ordinary, mediocre, of dubious taste – between them? The question is not an idle one, even for the practicing historian uninterested in Platonic ideas, who looks instead for answers to such questions in the texts or objects of a particular place and time. What to do when confronted with the 1960s radical slogan ‘black is beautiful’, traceable to speeches of nineteenth-century American abolitionist John Swett Rock?3 Did it imply any aesthetic judgement about ‘non-black’ persons when first coined around 1860? Certainly not. What about a century later? The issue becomes intricate, and it cannot just be settled by the quotation of documents: we must know how such terms stand in internal relation to one another, what writers meant but did not have to say, before we can judge what sources are pertinent. We may not be able to answer such questions in advance, but we certainly carry a battery of unexamined assumptions, not about aesthetic theory necessarily, but 165



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about the way its terms work.4 Making these workings explicit might bring clarity about our own aesthetic moves in doing historical work; in a happy case they might shed light on how others thought about their own, and in the very best case, about how beauty and ugliness stand to each other anyway. To do this, we must make some preliminary order in our conceptual trunk, which beside beauty and ugliness may contain in-between states that are at least candidates for being non-beautiful and non-ugly: the ordinary, everyday, unexciting, etc. Do these concepts pose a problem? Some beauty theorists do not think so. Making the classic equation of the beautiful with the good, they identify virtually all else with the ugly: ‘mundane reality, the irrational, evil, disorder, dissonance, irregularity, excess, deformity, the marginal: in short, the Other’.5 But the up-to-date term of approval gives the old terms of disapproval a spurious unity: whether or not they belong to the ugly, are aesthetically intermediate, or anaesthetic is just what historical work has to establish. Take Saint Bernard’s twelfth-century attack on grotesque architectural decoration: ‘in cloisters, before the reading monks, what does that ridiculous monstrosity seek there, that wonderful deformed beauty, that beautiful deformity?’6 Does Bernard’s text belong to a history of ugliness, to one of beauty, is he ‘deconstructing’ the two, or what? It seems plain that the ‘wonderful’ (mira) hybrids he dislikes are both beautiful and unwholesome, since they distract the monks from wholesome but less seductive reading. To describe their appeal, Bernard predicates ugliness of their beauty and beauty of their ugliness. Any definition of ugliness that lumps together the mundane, evil, the irrational, etc., or rigidly opposes beauty and ugliness, is liable to read right past Bernard. What kind of logic of ugliness do we need to make sense of intricate cases like this? It might seem to the theoretically inclined historian that what is needed is some substantial aesthetic theory, psychological or anthropological or sociological in character, whose terms we can substitute for the positive and negative poles, beauty and ugliness. Such a strategy is pursued in a typical German post-war textbook of aesthetics, whose author identifies beauty with ‘the satisfaction of needs’ and ugliness with dissatisfaction.7 It follows that Samuel Beckett and Goya’s etchings ‘are not to be named beautiful, even if they are certainly of high aesthetic rank’.8 This is at least very honest. One might hope that a theory which makes Goya and

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Beckett ugly by definition is self-refuting. But we cannot disprove even bad theories without knowing the relation between beauty and ugliness: without this, every theory, however bad, is rescued by indifference to the evidence of experience.9 The key question, then, concerns the coexistence of beauty and ugliness. Can anything be both? Is our reluctance to attribute beauty and ugliness together merely a subjective discomfort with two attributes that can but do not usually concur (like ‘shy and arrogant’), or is it the incompatibility of contraries that cannot both be true but may both be false (‘a blue ball or a red ball’), or, the strongest case, are they contradictories implied by each other’s falsity (‘I am asleep or awake’)? This is not technical quibbling; it bears on the historian’s work, for it tells us what is said about either beauty or ugliness in statements about the other. Do we have ways to decide this for particular historical cases based on textual evidence? Is there any hope of adjudicating the question more generally? First, we should notice that the solution cannot be as general as some substantial aesthetic theories make it out to be, especially the ‘proportion’ and ‘symmetry’ theories popular from Plato’s Philebus to today’s biologists. These theories seem to imply perfect exclusion, for a thing is either proportioned or not. But as Plotinus acidly noted in the third century ce, these theories cannot distinguish well-proportioned ugliness from beauty: ‘The proposition that honesty is merely a generous artlessness chimes in the most perfect harmony with the proposition that morality means weakness of will; the accordance is complete.’10 Some modern theorists would insist that ugly representations of ugliness, or evil representations of evil, do constitute beauty, and would thus admire Plotinus’s phrase – as might Nietzsche, who would also find it true.11 But in any case nothing follows about exclusion, since ugliness can be as consistent as anything else. The coherence theory, though no final answer, does afford a clue to coexistence, the distinction between form and content. This distinction is not wholly bogus: it answers well enough basic questions like ‘what is being represented?’ and ‘how?’ Should the interlocutor say, ‘listen, there is a broad grey swath of aquatint which I don’t know how to identify or describe’, we are dealing with a failure of interpretation, even of execution, but by no means a disproof that form and content can be distinguished.



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Yes, they are made of the same stuff, but content is dependent on the form in a way that form is not dependent on content, but only on the picture-making process. In the case of Goya, for instance, it is typical to affirm that the method is masterful, the content gruesome. Yet this kind of reconciliation of ugly and beautiful by saying that beauty belongs to the picture and ugliness to what the picture represents only evades our question.12 We want to know whether the two can logically coexist – that is, what contribution the ugliness of Goya’s subjects makes to the beauty of his technique, which though masterful is often rough, offputting, nihilistic: the greyish fog of his space and jumpy silhouettes of his hags and monsters certainly partake in both form and content. A treatment of Goya in these opposed aesthetic terms, rare in the art historical literature, can be found in Alexander Nehamas, who has recently offered a philosophical account of beauty.13 Conscious of the narrow tastes of some recent beauty theorists, and of Arthur Danto’s historical claim that twentieth-century avant-gardes have shown that art need not be beautiful, Nehamas wants a theory of beauty applicable not just to habitually discounted media (e.g. television), but to modern art at its bleakest, where its claims to mastery seem incompatible with any desire to have the world be as it is. This is where the Caprichos (Fig. 9.1) come in. Nehamas begins a lecture on beauty with them: Not that the world isn’t ugly.…Nothing may justify the cruel beating of the little boy in Yes, he broke the pot, but poverty and lack of education – both of which Los Caprichos expose and indict…Poverty and lack of education, however, are not enough to turn her into the beastly creature whose heartless pleasure in the beating of her boy gives the act its air of truly extraordinary savagery. One of the contemporary manuscripts that accompany Los Caprichos asks, ‘The child is mischievous and the mother bad tempered. Which is worse?’ But the mother is worse than ‘bad tempered’: her crouching posture is feral, her lined face an almost impossible combination of fierce intensity and bestial indifference. There is hatred in the hand that held this stylus. And yet that hatred does not prevent Los Caprichos – not even this particular etching, which, if anything, it makes more complex and worth contemplating – from being a thing of beauty.14

Nehamas not only acknowledges the coexistence of beauty and ugliness; his substantive theory ought to explain it. First, it is worth expanding on its view of coexistence, which is deeper that the content/ form distinction.15 Goya’s figures and actions are cruel and ugly, but there is also hatred ‘in that stylus’: the hatred, which on an erotic theory

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of beauty implies ugliness, is inseparable from its beauty. Indeed, it is part of it. This may sound arid to art historians concerned with Goya’s ‘ideology’ or how the work was received. But Nehamas is aware of the historical conundrums: as he points out, John Ruskin had exemplars of the Caprichos burnt when they first came to England. What are we to do with such ‘ideology’ and audience reaction? The problems of beauty, ugliness, and coexistence are concrete, only they are stated in a language of affect that the historian, perhaps rightly, suspects. But even a simple historical desideratum such as seeing how the Caprichos are subversive of the cocktail of traditional and Enlightenment prejudice they convey – is this not the very question how the ugly (the seen object of hate) can be beautiful in Goya? Even should the answer turn out to have nothing to do with beauty and ugliness, their relevance cannot be dismissed out of hand.16 To grasp the significance of Nehamas on Goya, and of Goya for Nehamas, we must consider the philosopher’s substantial theory



Francisco Goya, Si quebró el cantaro [Yes he broke the pot], 1799, etching, aquatint and drypoint, 20.5 × 15.1cm, Plate 25 of Los Caprichos. The British Museum, London.

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of beauty and ugliness. This theory is a psychological one, but one meant to commit us more deeply, both socially and morally, than the Enlightenment psychology of taste: we take pleasure in or even love things (which means we find them beautiful) with which we want to spend more time, to which we want to dedicate our life, whose beauty we aim to share with others. Beauty for Nehamas cannot be deduced from previous experience, because it is the relation between individual lovers of beauty and individual beauties.17 Beauty is thus never a shared feature, but a differentiating one. It follows for Nehamas that ‘nothing can be ugly or without aesthetic value on account of features that it shares with other things.’18 This is a strong claim, for it means that the same kind of features – indeed, the very same features – can make an object appear beautiful and ugly. Nehamas says as much: ‘I may find beautiful what others consider disgusting and ugly; I may be tempted to find beauty in something about which I am myself of two minds; or I may have just made the wrong choice.’19 We should not take the third clause as interchangeable with the other two, amounting to ‘there’s no accounting for taste’ and leaving taste a mere subjective will-o’-thewisp. Each clause says something different: two can disagree, one may make incompatible judgements, one may make wrong judgements, in which case one thinks that one is reacting to an object as beautiful, but the true feelings or reactions have been misapprehended. Questions arise how error is possible on Nehamas’ psychology – one can falsely think one is in love, but surely one can’t be in love falsely, since love is a feeling and not a state of knowing – but the key point is that beauty and ugliness apply to the same things, understood as the same features of things that contain much else: generic conventions, moral and political contents, and so on, which may be more or less crucial but are not themselves aesthetically relevant. How, by this theory of beauty, or by any other, can beauty and ugliness coexist? Nehamas sets aside a rigid form/content distinction, where, say, the form is beautiful while the content is ugly: according to him, shared aspects are never aesthetic at all. There is more to be said about this, and I shall return to it, but for now we should follow Nehamas and dispense with a simple content/form distinction, which dodges the question by essentially attributing beauty and ugliness to different things. The real

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question is: how can the very same feature of a thing count as both beautiful and ugly? The only attempt to answer this question I am aware of was made by Plato. It is an aspect of his thought that Nehamas himself has drawn attention to in earlier writings, so it is fair to assume that it informs his new (but quite Platonic) theory of beauty. I shall state the old Platonic view of coexistence as interpreted by Nehamas, criticise it where it seems necessary, and finally ask what it has to teach us about the relation of ugliness to beauty. The problem appears full-blown in a work of Plato’s early middle period, the Hippias Major (also commonly called ‘What is Beauty?’, and dated around 390bce), which still has the open-endedness of the early dialogues – Socrates and his interlocutor fail to find a solution – but also signals the advent of a theory of ideas meant to overcome the contradictions felt to permeate the sensible world. Here is how this contradictoriness manifests itself in the case of beauty and ugliness. Says Socrates: Heraclitus was right when he said that the most beautiful ape will be ugly compared to human beings – and, as the wise Hippias says, the most beautiful cooking-pot will be ugly compared with young maidens.20

Readers today are most likely to be struck by the ethnocentric, indeed androcentric nature of the examples cited, to which I should add the anthropocentrism of Heraclitus. It is only a certain kind of spectator, in a certain kind of culture, who will identify a young woman infallibly as beautiful (because desirable), so it is not clear what significance such examples of coexistence may have, besides being morally offensive. But note that Socrates never advances judgements of this kind himself, but accepts those proposed by his speakers, only to show them to be incomplete or somehow contradictory. Nor need we commit ourselves to the validity of any such judgements in finding them incomplete or problematic: all Socrates does is show that their objects lend themselves to contradictory predications, which rather casts doubt on their validity. This point is worth expanding on, not because the Platonic Socrates was ahead of his time morally (at least, not in this dialogue), but because the uncertain validity of our normative concepts was one of his main concerns. The problem of opposites occupies him in many guises: the same stick is both straight and bent (in water, Phaedo 74bc),



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and the man Simmias is both short and tall (Phaedo 102b10-11). This is the problem of the apparent ephemerality of the real world, whose members as conventionally identified ‘tumble about in the middle region between what is and what is not’.21 What actually tumbles about is not reality itself, but nómima, the customary names or usages applied to it. This suggests that Socrates, or at least Plato in speaking through him, does not accept these conventional attributions himself, not even those, like the generic beauty of women, which are endemic to Athenian public culture. I shall comment on the inadequacy of generic examples, regardless of their content, below; for now, we need to see that Socrates is ready, for the sake of discussion, to accept any judgement of taste, asserting its truth only to show that it also gives rise to its opposite. How does Socrates in fact do this? He says that the most beautiful ape , is ugly compared to human beings (ανθρώπων γένει/anthrópon génei), as is the most beautiful pot compared to young women (παρθένων γένει/parthénon génei).22 The plural might tempt us to follow the young Diderot and explain the relativity of judgement by set membership. Using Diderot’s example, a particular turbot I caught this morning may be a beautiful turbot, but whether it is a beautiful fish, animal, living thing, or thing in general are further questions that need not yield affirmative answers.23 The ‘turbot is beautiful as an X’ and ‘ugly as a Y’ approach seems reasonable, even if we should want to add ‘from cultural perspective X’ or ‘within aesthetic canon Y’. Unfortunately, in the form Diderot gives it, it does not solve the problem of coexistence. It is not entirely obvious why one could say at all of a beautiful turbot that it is an ugly living thing: what about the more inclusive set leads to a reversed judgement? There may be a change in degree, so that the handsomest turbot is only a mildly attractive animal, but the change in judgement to ‘ugly’ is inexplicable when one set is part of another. What if the judgement is made relative to incompatible sets? This seems to work for Socrates’ examples: on Diderot’s model a beautiful ape would count as an ugly human and a beautiful pot as an ugly goddess. But if this is a correct interpretation, we should have to deny that a judgement under an incompatible concept is possible at all. A pot is not an ugly goddess, but it is not a goddess at all. If Socrates subscribed to Diderot’s theory, he could not even have an intelligible problem to worry about.

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What strikes Socrates is not that apes make ugly humans, or pots ugly goddesses, but that the same thing, through legitimate comparisons but by no means by being forced into a category to which it doesn’t belong, is ugly and beautiful.24 The problem, as Nehamas makes clear, inheres not in pots or apes but in the terms themselves: Things are always equal to something, or large members of a certain class, they are beautiful or good in some respect, or in relation to the members of some class to which they belong. Such predicates are always more than one-place, and it has been said that Plato took them to be instantiated along with their contraries because he took them to be one-place: thus Helen is both beautiful (compared to Xanthippe) and ugly (compared to Aphrodite). Plato, I think, did not quite miss the difference between being beautiful and being a stick, but he did insist that a good definition of the former should in the end abstract from all other characteristics of the property, define it as if it were one-place, and at the same time explain the peculiarities of its application.25

Plato, as Nehamas reads him, offers a bold solution: what is beautiful (or tall, or just) in a thing is not the thing itself, but the Beauty (Tallness, Justice) that is in it. These instances are pure embodiments of the ideas, and are really in things. The ideas, and their instances (Nehamas calls them characters), are not themselves ugly, short, or unjust, but it is open to every object – indeed, it is necessary for finite things like ourselves and our artefacts – to possess the opposite character as well. Why this idiosyncratic theory of absolute qualities, which become relative only when embodied in a real object? Nehamas thinks Plato is defending reality, as far as possible, against the axiom set down by his formidable predecessor Parmenides: ‘never shall it be proved, that what is not, is.’26 Whatever metaphysical import this may have, it at least states a law of non-contradiction for qualities, along the lines of ‘X cannot be both red and non-red’. Plato sees this, at least in his middle period, as inviolable, and it would seem that Socrates’s interlocutors share Parmenides’s scruple.27 Take Hippias, with his problematic contention that ‘to be beautiful is to be a beautiful girl’. We may find his utterance objectionable, but the rhetorician, under pressure from Socrates to define beauty incontrovertibly, is making a dialectically safe move: ‘no one will dare say that being a beautiful maiden is not beautiful.’28 This sounds like a tautology, like ‘any red apple is red’. But of course it is not meant this way, since Hippias is supposed to deliver a definition of beauty, not a truism. He thus counts on Greek male aesthetic conventions to



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confirm the judgement that girls are unproblematically beautiful.29 Socrates says nothing about this or any other judgement; sticking with Hippias’ example, he gets him to admit that a beautiful pot would be inferior to his girl and his girl to Aphrodite, and then goes on to quote Heraclitus’ dictum concerning the ape. The only presupposition made by Socrates is the making of such judgements by others: if we never found things beautiful or ugly, we’d have no problem, but as long as we do, however consistently, the opposite attribution forces itself. This is then a problem not just for Hippias, or for the ancient Greeks, but for anyone willing to use these terms: for if a beautiful thing is also ugly, it is, it seems, non-beautiful. This is where a Platonic theory of self-predication, and with it a ‘special’ theory of ideas, comes in. What has to be abandoned to allow beauty and ugliness to coexist is the identity of ugliness with non-beauty. To be beautiful is nothing but to have Beauty.30 Sensible things have perfect instances of Beauty in them – what makes them imperfect is what else they have, in this case, Ugliness. According to the ‘special theory’, there are only ideas for those troublesome features that are always embodied with their opposites: we need not worry about the idea for Finger and Non-Finger, because things are fingers or not fingers, but never both.31 For qualities, on the other hand, there are ideas for both extremes: Beauty and Ugliness, Justice and Injustice. And, given the character doctrine of partaking in an idea, our troubles with opposites disappear: a pot participates in Beauty and Ugliness, a political action in Justice and Injustice.32 There is no longer any obstacle to the same thing being beautiful and ugly, any more than there is to it being beautiful and tall, or beautiful and short. This account preserves the reality of visible things, for their ideas can remain separate: Beauty cannot be ugly, nor Tallness short.33 Is this a solid principle, or just Greek mythology? It has become customary for some contemporary philosophers to cast doubt on the use of opposites like beauty and ugliness by ‘showing’ that beauty is ugly and ugliness beautiful; others might claim that beauty and ugliness really mean the same thing, or at least don’t mean anything different, because we can never point to a thing that possesses just one of them. I don’t know if Plato worried about this, but I do think he had no reason to: for if ideas entailed their opposites, if by tall we meant short as well as tall,

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we would really not mean anything by them: we would not even have terms that meant their opposites.34 We can with Nehamas stave off this result by insisting that it is only in this action that justice and injustice coexist, as ugliness and beauty do in that body. The necessity of concrete things for these ideas to be real, not to mention for aesthetics, is made manifest by the phenomenon of coexistence. This coexistence, to be interesting, must be able to inhere in every aspect of a thing: it is not present where we assign one attribute to this part of a body and its contrary to another (like Bernard Bosanquet’s academic cap, which is a round square), nor one to content and the other to form. In its relational nature, the beautiful, like the tall, is liable to turn into its opposite on being confronted with another object of comparison. But this casts doubt on the reality of what undergoes such a change, namely embodied beauty and ugliness.35 Even if this ascetic view is accepted, it does not shed light on the incompatibility of the ideas themselves. But there is at least one place in the Phaedo where such an account can be glimpsed. Here, a pair of opposites, not beauty and ugliness but tallness and shortness, are explained through just one relation: ‘Simmias is spoken of as both tall and short, being between the two; his shortness consists in being overtopped by his [Phaedo’s] tallness, and his tallness overtops his [Socrates’] shortness.’36 Here we appear to have one idea, ‘overtopping’ or ‘exceeding’, doing duty for the ideas Tallness and Shortness. These two absolutes are not, however, eliminated: to be tall is ‘to overtop’, and to be short is ‘to be overtopped’. One makes the measurements in the same way, but the result is one or the other. And so it is with moral qualities, with beauty and ugliness, etc.: to be beautiful means ‘to be lovelier than’ and to be ugly ‘to be less lovely than’.37 It is the directionality of relative judgements that gives rise to opposed ideas, so there is no way to reduce these to one idea without losing all sense of comparison. From the directional nature of the judgements and corresponding ideas, it does not follow that sensible things are imperfect ‘approximations’ of the idea, partly beautiful or partly tall things in light of some ideal of infinite beauty or height. The ‘imperfection’ suffered by real things consists not in falling short of the idea, but in possessing, perfectly enough, both the idea and its opposite.38



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If every judgement of beauty is also a judgement of ugliness, what are we to say about Beauty and Ugliness by themselves? Do they not, in their categorical use without mention of one another, problematically require the presence of an object of comparison? Of course we never deal with ‘beauty’ or ‘ugliness’ themselves, but only with their instances in individual objects; even when that object is a judgement or a thought or a proposition, it is going to admit the attribution of its opposite. Secondly, we need not in fact attribute beauty or ugliness to anything else in making an apparently non-relative judgement like ‘this turbot is beautiful’. For, in asserting the turbot’s participation in Beauty, we are saying it is beautiful ‘on the whole’, ‘in general’, ‘in comparison with a great many things’. We need not be surprised if a pretty turbot makes an ugly animal, not because it has failed to make some quantitative grade, but because even one other animal has been judged more beautiful. In other words, the imperfection of the attributes of things in fact adheres to our attributions, which rely on implicit practices of comparison, and can only be justified on their basis, even if they themselves are not comparisons. From these considerations, at least three consequences follow. First, Nehamas is right to claim that judgements of beauty and ugliness pick out individual things. It could not be otherwise, despite the apparent inconsistency with the generalising flavour of talk about ideas. To say A and B are beautiful may be to say ‘A and B have in common participation in Beauty’, but this is an empty explanation, because the claim is really a conjunction of two claims, ‘A is lovelier than most things’, ‘B is lovelier than most things’. The thought as it stands does not rank A and B against each other, it sets each of them apart from the world. It is only derivatively that it says something of both, and it does not say the same thing of both. Substantial theories have to respect this: an erotic theory cannot say all beautiful things share the property of being ‘loveable’. This also explains the inadequacy of all generic examples of beauty, whether maidens, pots, or for that matter ice cream. To say of any such category that its members are beautiful is not to make an aesthetic judgement, but to voice a prejudice. This explains the inadequacy of art criticism: it must explain the sui generis in generic terms (Fig.9.2).39 Secondly, the relative or aspectual nature of beauty and ugliness, which permits one object to be wholly beautiful in one way and wholly

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ugly in another, contradicts Nehamas’ formalist claim that, since ‘nothing can be ugly or without aesthetic value on account of features that it shares with other things’, it follows that ‘the moral features of art are irrelevant to its aesthetic value.’40 This seems to me an unwarranted Kantianism. Moral features, as Socrates saw, are judged relatively, since real things are good and bad, just and unjust, etc. That the same artwork can be ‘morally repugnant’, and thus ugly in content (the ugly humans it exposes to ridicule) and in treatment (the implicit violence which the author does to them), and at the same time intellectually beautiful (let us say, the cruel treatment of cruelty lends it a form that is both morally substantial and breathtaking) is well shown by Nehamas’ account of Goya. To the objection that we have changed the subject, I reply that I am still discussing appearance, the apparent moral ugliness of the persons Goya imagines and the apparent beauty of rightly imagining such ugliness. Beauty and ugliness, being applicable only to aspects of things, must be able to adhere to, or more accurately to be predicated of, the moral aspects of Goya’s work. Not that politics or morality should be judged in primarily aesthetic terms: there are notorious traps in doing so, exploited by twentieth-century demagogues. But psychologically, the



Corinthian aryballos decorated with padded dancers, c.620–600 bce, 6.7 × 6.2 cm. The British Museum, London.

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phenomenon of persuasion does reveal an aesthetic dimension in morals, politics, religion, and other human institutions – even in reasoning, when of two valid arguments with plausible premises we much prefer one. There are in all these domains of experience moves that draw and repel us, of actions and things to which we could devote ourselves and others we wish were not in the world. In saying this, I must not assume the hortatory tone found in some recent writing on beauty. For, for all its relevance (and that of ugliness) in aesthetic and extra-aesthetic activity, the third consequence of coexistence is that there is no theoretical primacy in erotic, evolutionary or any other kind of substantial theories of beauty. Our reasons for preferring A to B are in fact much closer to cognitive judgement than to the work of a sui generis faculty. Hume may have been right to dream that, with perfect education (it might take a perfect society as well), we could deduce aesthetic judgements as rationally as philosophical ones. At the very least, taste is transitive – if I prefer A over B, and B over C, I cannot prefer C over A – not under the same aspect. On the bright side, this means that, at least structurally, aesthetics is quite similar to ethics (it shares the logical structure of opposites), and other interesting disciplines dealing with Platonic opposites. It also means that our thinking about beauty and ugliness is likely to be shot through with political, moral, religious, and other ‘ideological’ imperatives, beside the emotional, instinctual, and mystical factors that contemporary theorists find most compelling. I am a bit sorry to come to this conclusion, for it seems to rob Socrates’ ideas of some of their glow. But a moment’s thought shows that the ideas of beauty and ugliness, both as opposed ideas and as ‘finger’-style concepts, survive in their crystalline purity in any consistent system of explanation, be it sociological, anthropological, erotic, etc. For, though comparison of concrete things is the origin of judgements of beauty and ugliness, what is being judged of these things is distinct from specific content. There is no idea of beauty and ugliness at work where there is just a ranked set of objects. It is the relations between them that the judgements draw attention to, and these relations can be inverted, argued about, applied to other things. Beauty and ugliness are thus strictly incompatible only from one point of view, judged in one respect against one particular object or set of objects, or as Gottlob Frege nicely

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put it, ‘lit up from one side’. The restriction of incompatibility to one relation means that one may always imagine or at least think about something more beautiful or ugly than anything concretely given. It also suggests that, given the longevity of the ideas, the objects judged shift places oftener and for more contingent reasons than most theorists of beauty allow. Not that nothing is beautiful or ugly in itself or for all time: but the coexistence of beauty and ugliness should open our eyes to their mutual dependence. 41



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Putrefied, Deliquescent, Amorphous: The ‘Liquefying’ Rhetoric of Ugliness Kassandra Nakas

[The picture] was watching him, with its beautiful marred face and its cruel smile. Its bright hair gleamed in the early sunlight. Its blue eyes met his own. A sense of infinite pity, not for himself, but for the painted image of himself, came over him. It had altered already, and would alter more. Its gold would wither into grey. Its red and white roses would die. For every sin he had committed, a stain would fleck and wreck its fairness. Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891)

In Oscar Wilde’s famous novel, the painted portrait of the protagonist stands not only as a powerful carrier of the narrative, suggesting the very beginning of Dorian’s doomful career as a handsome but amoral hedonist and sealing his fate in the moment of its final destruction. More than that, Basil Hallward’s painting painstakingly registers every sinful deed and thought of Dorian, thus becoming less a portrait of him than a representation of the utterly evil, the morally ugly. The ineffable disfiguration of the painting was interpreted most congenially by Ivan Albright when he was commissioned to create a version of Dorian’s corrupted portrait for Albert Lewin’s film adaptation of the novel in 1943. Albright, who at the time had made himself a name with rather dark still lifes and self-portraits, invented a composition with a grotesque male figure in a sumptuous interior equally rotten and decayed (Fig. 10.1). Known for his meticulous technique, Albright produced an effect of decomposition and putrefaction through a painterly texture that not only renders the blood soaking the old man’s hands in a strangely realistic way; the whole composition is executed in a seemingly ‘washy’ manner that evokes a rather wet, if not liquid, application of colour. The complex relationship of art to aspects of disintegration and decomposition, both on a formal and a semantic level, has so far found little attention in art history. This may not be surprising given the fact 180

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that, more generally speaking, the status of the Ugly per se has been quite underexposed in aesthetic theory since its very beginnings in the eighteenth century.1 It was only with Romanticism and Decadence that the classical canon of the Beautiful was revised within art and literature, and that the Comical and the Ugly found consideration in the writings of Christian Hermann Weiße, Karl Rosenkranz, and Friedrich Theodor Vischer.2 Among these authors, it was Rosenkranz who for the first time tried to establish a comprehensive phenomenology of ugliness, classifying his subject in the categories of the natural, intellectual and aesthetic Ugly (Natur-, Geist-, Kunsthässliches). Offering a plethora of examples, he differentiated phenomena of formlessness, improperness and disfiguration in nature, ethics and art, thus explicitly linking aesthetic judgement with ethical considerations. In his book, Rosenkranz only casually mentions liquidity (or The Liquid), a facet of formlessness and disfiguration that will become a



Ivan Albright, The Picture of Dorian Gray, 1943–4, oil on canvas, 216 × 106.7 cm. Gift of Ivan Albright, The Art Institute of Chicago.

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seminal quality in later redefinitions the aesthetic, namely in twentiethcentury concepts of the abject and the informe.3 The Liquid thus represents, at the very beginning of the discourse of ugliness, a somewhat repressed category. Still, it is articulated in a ‘liquefying’ rhetoric, both on a visual and textual level, and reaching beyond the purely physical realm – towards a consideration of the aesthetic category of ‘form’, and the (sometimes deliberate) loss of form, or control over it. Starting from the ugliness in Ivan Albright’s picture of Dorian Gray – a ‘stained’ and putrefied aesthetics, in which the Liquid becomes vital (in the literal sense of the word), I will try to shed some light on this rhetoric of the Liquid, fluid and elusive as it is. A Decadent Inheritance ‘Putrefaction’ was a favourite notion for one of Albright’s most famous contemporaries: Salvador Dalí, who was, incidentally, his fellow participant in an artists’ competition on the subject of the Temptation of Saint Anthony.4 Dalí had used the term excessively since the mid1920s, when he joined Federico García Lorca in Madrid to establish the group of ‘putrefactos’.5 In ‘San Sebastian’ (1927), his first major text which appeared at the heyday of his friendship with Lorca and which marks the beginning of Dalí’s highly productive writing career, the artist opposes an idiosyncratic ‘antiartistic’ modernist aesthetic to a traditionalist and educated bourgeois concept of art and beauty that he harshly condemns as ‘deliquescent’ and ‘putrefied’: Buster Keaton – here is Pure poetry, Paul Valéry! – post-machinist avenues, Florida, Corbusier, Los Angeles. The pulchritude and eurythmics of the mass-produced utility, aseptic and antiartistic displays, concrete, humble, live, joyful, comforting clarities, to oppose art which is sublime, deliquescent, bitter, putrefied.6

In Dalí’s aesthetic anti-canon, the term putrefaction seems quite appropriate to describe ‘all that [is] decrepit, dead and anachronistic in various people and objects’, as Rafael Alberti put it.7 Dalí’s idea of aseptic beauty lies in the mass-produced objects of a progressive mechanical and industrial world, leaving behind traditional high art such as Impressionism, Cubism and even Purism.8 Against the ‘horrible decorative’9 varieties of established artistic styles he puts forward an art ‘alive’, capable of offering ‘possibilities of prolongation, growth, and

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renewal’ and reaching beyond the ‘putrefied pastiche of works that are past their time, wholly concluded and already marvellously determined’.10 For all their enthusiasm for popular culture and the functionalist mass object, Dalí’s early writings reveal a pattern of cyclic thinking that is deeply rooted in the rhetoric of late-nineteenth-century decadence.11 Accordingly, he links the terms putrefaction with deliquescence, a word that had gained currency in the ‘decadent’ 1880s, in great part due to the instigation of two French poets who launched a small brochure by a fictitious author, Les Déliquescences, poèmes decadents d’Adoré Floupette (1885). This collection of poems was initially intended by its (real) authors, Henri Beauclair and Gabriel Vicaire, to parody the then-current fashion of decadent writing. Yet soon after publication it was paradoxically regarded as the very epitome of that eccentric literary style – a style distinguished by neologisms, artificiality, and a difficult syntax. Due not only to this violation of formal conventions and rules, but also to a topical predilection for morbidity, neurosis and synaesthesia, decadent writing was deemed by many critics as a menace to culture and society, like the decadent poet himself, whom the writer Paul Bourde identified as neuropathic, perverse, deprived and satanic.12 While the décadent thus emerged, in this criticism, as a prime example of a morally corrupted, or sinfully ‘ugly’ creature, his redefined concept of a frail and unconventional beauty was equally taken as a tribute to decomposition and deformation, and to decadent literature as the ‘disease of form’ celebrated by Arthur Symons.13 Physiology and the Arts While decadent culture was shaped by a thoroughly biological imaginary, the paradigm of natural science, and especially physiology, moulded nineteenth-century society in Western Europe as a whole.14 Accordingly, literature, and particularly French literature, not only dealt with physiological subjects (such as Émile Zola’s Roman expérimental, 1880), but was also read and interpreted (psycho-)physiologically, for example in the writings of Émile Laurent.15 Equally, in the visual arts, a ‘physiological’ art criticism held sway with an explicit biological rhetoric, weighing in on the ‘sick’ and ‘dirty’



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facets of, particularly, Impressionism.16 Critical discourse was tinged with bodily allusions and physiological analogies when it came time to discuss Impressionism, with its seemingly unfinished, ‘damp’ surfaces and its ‘illegible’ subjects. Accordingly, already during the early Impressionist exhibitions of the 1870s, critics made spiteful remarks on the state of ‘putrefaction’ of the paintings’ motifs, insinuating that the depicted subjects (mostly women) had been studied in the morgue, or else, that the gentlewoman to be portrayed should adapt her looks appropriately, as a Parisian caricature proposed: ‘Le peintre impressioniste: – Madame, pour votre portrait, il manque quelques tons sur votre figure. Ne pourriezvous avant passer quelques jours au fond d’une rivière?’17 Irrespective of the motif, the Impressionist artist was equally eager, in the eyes of the Parisian caricaturists, to accomplish, in his paintings, a synaesthetic effect as lively-unlively as possible, as a fictitious dialogue between a painter and an art amateur suggests: ‘ – Mais ce sont des tons de cadavres? – Oui, malheureusement, je ne peux pas arriver à l’odeur.’18 With this hint towards the olfactory, the caricature strengthened common reservations about the new art, which was not only seen as visually disturbing, but as intentionally repulsive. Still, while ‘putrefaction’ had become common currency in describing the aesthetic impact of a new art deemed formally decomposed and ugly in content,19 the term ‘deliquescence’, not least spurred by the success of Adoré Floupette’s poems, turned into a rather generalising phrase to disapprove of an overall aesthetic state of mind, the ‘bad shape’ of a society and culture that were believed to be ‘past their time’, as Dalí would have it four decades later. In this sense, it could be used by critic Léonce Bénédite in 1899 to reject the ‘morbid deliquescence of Romanticism’ just as well as by Henri Matisse, half a century later, to denounce ‘the deliquescence of Impressionism’ which, for Matisse, was finally overcome by Cubism.20 Putrefaction and Deliquescence Though the critics sometimes use the terms interchangeably, putrefaction and deliquescence signify two quite different chemical processes. The latter term refers etymologically to liquid matter, indicating a solid’s tendency to melt or dissolve, especially when absorbing moisture from

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the air. Derived from the Latin, the noun was introduced into French experimental chemistry in the mid-eighteenth century, and it was more than a hundred years later that the term acquired the utterly pejorative, figurative implication that made it so attractive for decadent talk.22 Still, the semantic openness of the word rooted in ‘laboratory objectivity’, as it were, made it seem apt to describe both the weakening of a human body and mind (due to age or illness), and the deterioration of a society or civilisation, or the decay of any other cultural entity or subject matter (such as literature, the visual arts, or a human being). And while on the discursive level, ‘deliquescence’ could indeed be connected to the case of alcoholism (and thus to liquid matter per se), the term became, on the whole, more and more fluid in regards to its semantic dimensions and rhetorical use.23 Putrefaction, on the other hand, denotes a process of decomposition in which organic matter successively liquefies and rots; as such, it represents one stage in the overall process following an organism’s biological death. A much older and more common word than deliquescence, it has a strong synaesthetic connotation, which may have contributed to its more explicit use in aesthetic discourse, namely to denote something repulsive and ugly. In addition to this, it also figuratively stands for moral corruption and perversion. While the physical fact of liquefaction may not be the most obvious association to arise when putrefaction is mentioned, the loss of form surely represents a quality that connects the term with deliquescence.24 Moreover, the process of liquefaction is notable as the key formal feature in Karl Rosenkranz’s discussion of putrefaction as a form of disfiguration: ‘The putrefying decomposes and dissolves, and even if this process may be necessary, as it is, it is repugnant, as we aesthetically make the fiction that the form still contains the vital powers of life.’25 According to Rosenkranz, what links putrefaction with the Ugly is the ‘flowing’ condition of an actually lifeless matter; it is the ambivalence of something dead displaying features of life, which violates aesthetic and ethical norms and appears, in this inadequacy, as ugly. In a formalist respect, moreover, one could argue that the very fact of a matter changing – or losing – a given form should be considered as disfiguring, and highly irritating. It is this very quality of liquid matter – in different states and density – that challenges aesthetic evaluation in art historical discourse. 21



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The Amorphous Liquid, fluid, wet – these real or metaphoric, unstable and erratic states of matter, occupying both a material and semantic level – were anathema to aesthetic theory around 1900. Metaphors of liquidity, fluidity or humidity were used to suggest a state of formal deviation – or deviation from ethical and aesthetic standards at large, as the notorious dispute about Gustav Klimt’s paintings for the University of Vienna suggests. Klimt’s allegorical representations of philosophy, medicine and jurisprudence were harshly criticised for the depiction of distorted bodies, and the dreadful vagueness of the compositions was even understood to epitomise the then-current zeitgeist of a world gone awry.26 Around the same time, in a lecture given in 1902, the German art historian Carl Justi introduced the term ‘amorphous’ to define thencurrent tendencies in Impressionism and Symbolism, which, he deplored, showed little concern with questions of form. He diagnosed a ‘form fatigue’ and even ‘form hate’ (‘Formhass und Formmüde’ [sic])27 in the fine and decorative arts of his time, an ‘urge towards the Amorphous’ meeting with an inclination to ugliness per se: There is an urge towards the Amorphous in the visual and applied arts of today. One can tell from the idea of form being shaken off altogether, from an urge towards the Unformed and Ugly, finally from the consistent selection of improper forms that contradict the object’s nature.28

Facing the seemingly unfinished character of Impressionist painting and the anti-naturalistic, often ‘sketchy’ modes of representation in Symbolism, Justi borrowed the chemical term ‘amorphous’ to describe a ‘theoretical and practical form hate’, and insisted on its scientific derivation by specifying that an amorphous substance is one which ‘does not crystallise’ in the phase transition from liquid to solid.29 It was a quasi-‘ever-liquid’ state of matter that Justi identified in much of the contemporary, French-infused art in Germany, an art that eradicated the long-cherished classical Greek roots of culture and the absolute primacy of the idea over materiality. For there is ‘nothing wrong’ with amorphous solids from a chemical point of view; it is aesthetics which finds them wanting. Even more so, the ancient Greeks would have considered the high appreciation of matter and the depreciation of form

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as a sort of ‘art insanity’, mused Justi. Justi’s fulmination against lateImpressionist and Symbolist painting was informed by an anti-French and antifeminist animus, and unequivocally condemned the modern penchant for ugly forms which, to be fair, he also deemed sensational and market-driven.31 For him, much recent art reflected what literary critic Rudolf von Gottschall had called, in an 1895 article, a ‘cult of ugliness’.32 Gottschall had glossed Karl Rosenkranz’ Aesthetics by topically arranging much of the naturalistic and decadent literary production of his time on the scheme of ugliness elaborated by the philosopher, substantiating and justifying the ‘cult’ as a cultural, intellectual and creative urge. In contrast, Justi, without ever mentioning Rosenkranz’s book, could not find any reasonable meaning in the ugly forms he encountered in contemporary art, distancing them from earlier, more meaningful examples of deformation and grotesquerie in the work of Hieronymus Bosch, William Hogarth or Francisco Goya: 30

This is not, as with Bosch, Hogarth, or Goya, the amusing ugliness of exaggeration, or of thoughtful satire, or the grotesque of a waking dream: it is a physiognomically empty ugliness, lacking any meaning and purpose, an ugliness for its own sake, with disgust occasionally forcing back the effect of derision or the ridiculous.33

Meaningless, formally degenerated and nauseating – the amorphous Ugly was indeed, according to Justi, a pathological phenomenon, and as such it corresponds to another equation of the Ugly with degeneration expressed earlier by Friedrich Nietzsche.34 What is more, with his temporal emphasis on the ‘ever-liquid’ character of the new (art), Justi also implicitly responded to Nietzsche’s call for the ‘necessary dryingout of everything good’. In his book, The Dawn: Thoughts on the Prejudices of Morality (1881), the philosopher had claimed that every new good work is at its least valuable as long as it lies exposed to the damp air of its own age […] the reason being that there still adheres to it all too much of the odour of the market-place and of its opponents and of the latest opinions and everything that changes from today to tomorrow. Later on it dries out, its ‘timeboundness’ dies off – and only then it acquires its deep lustre and pleasant odour and, if that is what it is seeking, its quiet eye of eternity.35

While it seems clear that, in this context, Nietzsche was not aiming at an essentially art-historical judgement, and also that his philosophical writing on the whole is very much affected by physiological discourse,



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the connection he establishes between the new, the damp, and aesthetic judgement makes his argument comparable to Justi’s.36 Even more so, both authors link their arguments with the economic sphere, suggesting that the ethically dubious ‘odour of the market-place’ leaves a work ‘ugly’ not only in an aesthetic, but also in a moral respect. With the cult of ugliness around 1900 being intricately linked with a cult of the New, it seems interesting that again, chemical materiality is brought into play, implying a thoroughly ambivalent quality of liquidity that makes it suitable to pejoratively describe both the repulsive Old and the hideous New.37 Equally noteworthy is Nietzsche’s description of the ‘eternal’ good and beautiful: it is completely ‘dry’, the very contrary of a putrefied matter, and rather, as it were, the result of a desiccating mummification. Coda The semantic power of the Liquid as the Ugly and the actuality of this far-reaching cultural equation seem disturbingly evident in some cases of contemporary art. The presence of the body is, in this context, the key matter for dealing not only with questions of identity and being, but the validity of aesthetic and, not least, ethical norms.38 In the work of British artist John Isaacs, the artist plays the role of a natural scientist, displaying the human figure in anatomic scenarios or as autopsied corpse made of wax (A Necessary Change of Heart, 1999). No less troubling appears Isaac’s less explicit sculpture of a headless, slightly smaller-than-life figure entitled ‘Fat Man’, which is displayed as if lying face down in a research laboratory in the installation called The Matrix of Amnesia (1998) (Fig. 10.2).39 The disfiguration of the Fat Man’s body results from the excessively flowing mass of ‘flesh’, hyperrealistically sculpted from wax and polyester resin, and apparently diffusing on the floor of the lab. Were it not for the missing head, this body would appear alive and potentially moving. Yet the image of a liquefying matter deforming a human body also suggests the idea of putrefaction, or what Rosenkranz described as the uglifying simulation, or pretension, of life. Even more explicitly, Carsten Zelle has recently defined the transition from the Living to the Dead, or rather the moment where both spheres interfere, as ugly; to the causes

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John Isaacs, Fat Man (The Matrix of Amnesia), 1998, mixed media. Olbricht Collection, Berlin.

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of this judgement could be added the overt indifference between real and fake, authenticity and illusion.40 As a phantasmagoric chimera, the Fat Man can certainly be taken as the memento of a corrupted society misled by the promises of natural science. Not by chance, it seems, the headless man, who is just as much a self-portrait of the artist as his other works, has collapsed within a laboratory, the symbolic space of knowledge and control. Here, control is obviously lost – over the creature, over the form, over the world in general perhaps. Merging aspects of putrefaction, deliquescence, and the Amorphous in a hopelessly lost gestalt, the Fat Man ultimately may account for a corrupted society and Self, and for a notion of the Liquid as the fathomless Ugly. In any case, Isaacs’ Doppelgänger on the floor reminds us both of hubristic Mr. Hyde operating in Dr. Jekyll’s lab and of Dorian Gray’s fatal last encounter with his painted alter ego.41 With Dorian stabbing the portrait, the pre-deliquescent beauty of the painting is restored, and, fittingly for a morality tale, the putrefying body with a knife in its heart is that of Dorian Gray himself.



11



Orderly Ugliness, Anamorphosis and Visionary Worlds: Jurgis Baltrušaitis’ Contribution to Art History Odeta Žukauskienė

Jurgis Baltrušaitis’ works constitute a significant contribution not only to the history of art, but also to the history of ugliness. At the centre of his work were the monstrous and the grotesque, the deformed and the disfigured. He paid special attention to digressions from traditions and norms and to visionary modalities in European culture. In this article the author aims to reveal Baltrušaitis’ contribution to the history of ugliness, paying particular attention to the notion, upon which his historical research was based, that in the world of ugliness and distorted forms one can still find strict rules and laws. For instance, in the capitals of Romanesque churches all forms of monstrous creatures appear in entrelacs, ornamental and abstract architectural structures, which deform and distort reality in a disciplined way. Likewise, in the margins of Gothic manuscripts the initial letter and abstract decorations regularly produce deformed beings and monsters.This development culminates in anamorphoses, where geometrical purity and mathematical order create disorder and monstrosities out of nothing but themselves. In geometrical structures, amplified or modified according to conventional procedures, emerge manifestations of fantasy and ugliness; herewith, in the strict and rational system there appears for the perceiver visual distortion and irrationality. The author concentrates on Baltrušaitis’ study of anamorphosis, aiming to show that the spread of anamorphoses in the history of art is a part of the history of ugliness, a part essential to the understanding of ugliness as an aesthetic phenomenon. For in anamorphosis ugliness refers not to what is represented, but to representational form. Hence, the author focuses on the formal characteristics of ugliness. Representation causes necessary distortions, and those distortions introduce ugliness into artworks. Baltrušaitis’ historical research can be thus shifted to a theoretical level, revealing crucial aspects of ugliness: on the one hand, it is spectral 190

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form creating ghostlike appearances, on the other hand, giving pleasing form to an ugly and distorted world. Thus anamorphosis as a device of ugliness has two faces: monstrous and charming, metaphysical and pleasing. This article is not the first attempt to draw Baltrušaitis’ research into the discourse on ugliness. And yet his work on anamorphosis remains in the margins of this endeavour. Umberto Eco’s encyclopedic book On Ugliness (2007) contains many references to Baltrušaitis on medieval art, aberrations and physiognomic theories, but anamorphosis does not enter the picture. Indeed, anamorphosis first entered the discussion of ugliness in Michel Ribon’s Archipel de la laideur (1995), where it is claimed that ugliness implies dialectical ferment: There lies in it an attempt to overcome oneself, an inducement to turn into beauty, as if in ugliness there would be hidden an aspiration to get liberation from insignificance, from chaotic darkness or horror: it addresses the aesthetic dignity whose response is the noble mercy of art turning ugliness into beauty.1

In anamorphosis, disfigured, monstrous and apparently ugly form, seen from a certain angle, gains normal shape and proportion. Ugliness turns into beauty quite literally. Ribon notices in his book that anamorphosis is not merely a technical construction deforming and forming images, but also an eloquent aesthetic phenomenon. Anamorphic images reveal the fragility of reality and cause a metaphysical anxiety that is closely related to the experience of ugliness. On the other hand, anamorphic projections have something playful about them, rather like rooms with distorted mirrors that produce at once horrifying and funny reflections. I aim to develop these statements, revealing how anamorphosis is one of the multiple forms of the ugly, and a link between ugliness and its theoretical opposite, beauty. The spread of anamorphosis in today’s humanities and visual culture shows that it is a timely phenomenon: it concerns collision, the tangle of the actual and the virtual, of the real and the unreal.2 Jurgis Baltrušaitis: Historian of the Imaginary, the Monstrous and the Ugly A French art historian of Lithuanian origin, Jurgis Baltrušaitis (1903–88), is an atypical figure in his field.3 He was interested in curiosities, marginal phenomena, and aberrations; at the same time, geometry and optics



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attracted him. The point of contact of his varied interests was an effort to bring to light ‘the rules of the unruly’, ‘a secret geometry’ of visionary worlds, in short, a hidden aesthetic order within apparent disorder.4 Baltrušaitis began his career as a medievalist. Under the supervision of Henri Focillon, he studied medieval Christian art in Armenia and Georgia in situ.5 In 1931, Baltrušaitis published his doctoral thesis, La stylistique ornementale dans la sculpture romane, in which he reconstructed the morphological system of Romanesque sculpture.6 In this study, which owes something to the method of Alois Riegl, he demonstrated how ancient geometrical forms and simple vegetable motifs shaped figurative representation in Romanesque capitals, as it shaped the medieval art of Georgia and Armenia. For Baltrušaitis, ornamental stylistics, far from being a subsidiary matter, holds the key function of balancing the rigours of constraint and the outburst of fantasy. Going further, Baltrušaitis studied monumental Romanesque sculpture displaying exuberant decoration and hybrid forms, and found it to obey the law of abstract ornament. On this basis, he proposed a theory of ‘ornamental stylistics’ linking ornament to figurative style. He argued that monsters and hybrids spring from the geometry of ornament, rather than primarily reflecting religious or cultural concerns. This is a bold thesis, and its bypassing of cultural history might make modern readers suspicious. Even at the time of publication, it provoked severe criticism by Meyer Schapiro.7 And so it is worth examining how Baltrušaitis actually went about making his argument. He began with the empirical observation that Romanesque ornament is based on various modulations of palmettos. Quadrupeds and birds emerge from the skeletal stem of the vegetal motif. Their body parts acquire a tremendous flexibility and become fantastic hybrids, but are recognisably variations on the palmetto structure. The whole bestiary is generated through the intersection of ornamental and figurative approaches. Grotesque heads, diabolical masks, and other forms not related to palmettos also transform themselves according to abstract patterns. Two-bodied beings, two-headed monsters compose and recompose themselves according to simple rules. Ornamental stylistics overwhelms the forms of reality, without attempting to annihilate them, but rather to recreate them in a supernatural or suprareal world. Romanesque teratology is, Baltrušaitis concludes, wholly dependent

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on this ornamental formal law. The upshot of this study is almost modernist: an abstract pattern is the fundamental characteristic of the Romanesque grotesque. Yet this should not be read as a negation of cultural history: ornament brings together things from separate worlds. The most remarkable aspect of ugliness is the singularity of the heterogeneous world it evokes. Though not entirely obvious from his printed diagrams, Baltrušaitis’ historical analysis was based almost entirely on graphic sketches made in the field. A huge number of sketchbooks filled with drawings of capitals, bas-reliefs, ornamental and figurative motifs resulted from his travels (Fig.11.1). This and later drawn material serves not just as visual documentation in an era in which photographs were often inadequate; the drawings, with their simplifications and emphases, are central to his image-based research, and to the nature of his argument. Baltrušaitis did not simply ‘see’ the developments he described, but practised them by hand. In his later studies of medieval imagination, Baltrušaitis claimed that even in evolving toward representation of reality, the art of the Middle 8



Jurgis Baltrušaitis, Sketchbook drawing of Romanesque capitals.

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Ages never lost its abstract fantasy. He showed that the Romanesque grotesques and demons survived, and did not just emerge fully formed in the margins of gothic art. And he traced the history of the drollery in his remarkable Réveils et Prodiges (1960), insisting that the Gothic repertoire had already existed in Romanesque art and, enriched with exotic forms, survived and evolved through the Renaissance.9 In this body of work spanning the middle ages and Renaissance, Baltrušaitis’ key contention is that ornamental stylistics, predominant in Romanesque architecture, invaded the margins of manuscripts (Fig.11.2) in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. This continuity is inexplicable in purely cultural terms, unless one pays attention to the use of grotesque decoration itself. Central to this appeal is the production of variations and combinations that, like the sentences of natural language, are strictly limitless. These forms of the grotesque lack fixity, stability and order, and yet are derived from existing forms. The creative dimensions of this flux was also emphasised by Mikhail Bakhtin, who described the grotesque as ‘a body in the act of becoming…never finished, never completed;



Jurgis Baltrušaitis, Sketchbook drawing after marginal images in Gothic manuscripts.

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it is continually built, created, and builds and creates another body’.10 It does not just iconographically ‘mean’ some theological program, but puts into action a way of seeing. Or, in the words of Frances S. Connelly, ‘the grotesque may be better understood as “trans-”, as modalities; better described for what they do, rather than what they are’.11 According to Baltrušaitis, these fantastic combinations revived an existing repertoire and paved the way for the new invasions of exotic forms. He discovered many Middle Eastern premodern themes in the Gothic, earlier considered the quintessence of Western art. Not only the survival of Romanesque drolleries, but also motifs from Roman coins and medals, Islamic ornament and Buddhist themes could be found in Western Gothic, and in the ‘ultra-Flemish’ paintings of Brueghel and Bosch. This disrespect for the national boundaries that continue to define art historical specialisation is certainly a striking, if seldom noted, aspect of Baltrušaitis’ undertaking. He emphasised that medieval grotesque is a world of fantastic beings with complex and often very remote origins, mingling not just bodies but also their heterogeneous histories. It might be said that the grotesque and ugliness transgress physical and cultural boundaries: they are sites where cultural boundaries are negotiated. The point is made by Baltrušaitis not ideologically or programmatically but through art historical detail. First, he traced the transmission into the medieval world of the so-called Grylli and other grotesque figures engraved in antique gem stones and coins. As Aby Warburg did around the same time, he showed that the Middle Ages incorporated many motifs from Hellenistic intaglios and small talismanic objects. Secondly, he identified various contributions of eastern cultures and objects. Islamic civilisation fascinated Christians of the Middle Ages because of its high intellectual level and contact with antiquity, but also for its formal refinement and fantasy. From it, Christian Europe took the principles of arabesques, and a multitude of images of fantastic animals and hieratic monsters. Then, influences from China and India spread via the Ottoman and the Mongol empires and brought to the West new hybrid forms. An eclectic visual fauna emerged and was constantly transformed, but in accordance with stable principles of formal variation. It was a world filled with bizarre monsters, dragons and demons, expanding the vocabulary of Christian Hell.



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Turning to the psychological implications of these comparative studies, it can be said that grotesque, as an artistic expression, appeals to very common, almost archetypal, human fears. As Jeffrey J. Cohen has noted, ‘the monstrous body quite literally incorporates fear, desire, anxiety, and fantasy, giving them life and an uncanny independence’.12 On the other hand, it might be noted that grotesque forms are beloved, and are unexpectedly reborn and flourish in changing contexts. Baltrušaitis interpreted the grotesque as a sign and instrument of cultural change, as a general principle of antithesis. It is thus misleading to criticise him for rationalising away monstrosities, as Michael Camille has done: This was the approach of Jurgis Baltrusaitis [sic], who constructed diagrams and plans mapping monstrosities into different formal groups with various sources in ancient and earlier Indo-European culture. This codification not only plucked these forms from their context, it relegated marginal art to the menial position of ‘pure decoration’.13

Obviously such criticism holds only if one has in advance accepted the ‘menial position’ of decoration. Baltrušaitis himself emphasised that the medieval grotesque flourished in the works of Bosch, Brueghel, Pieter Huys and Arcimboldo. He continued exploring this anti-classical tradition, ambivalent and contradictory, well beyond epochal boundaries. And he showed that in the quest for greater realism, the Renaissance retained medieval imagery. However, he did not deny shifts in how the material was understood. Writing about personified objects in the works of the aforementioned artists, he noted that ‘the monster has never been so accurate in the details and so incredible altogether as in Hieronymus Bosch’s works’.14 This interest in the anti-classical tradition and visionary nature of ornament, though unique in its detail, was not random or isolated. Baltrušaitis learned from Henri Focillon, under whose supervision he earned his doctorate in 1931, and whose conception of the ‘life of forms’ was the common methodological approach of his school.15 It also left a large footprint on the formation of Baltrušaitis’ worldview. Henri Focillon’s Aesthetics of the Visionary In the beginning of the twentieth century, Henri Focillon was the leading figure in art history and aesthetics in France. Like the theorists of the Vienna school (Franz Wickhoff, Alois Riegl, Otto Benesch and

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Max Dvořák), though for different reasons, he rejected the tradition that celebrated classical art and beauty. Early in the twentieth century, Wickhoff and Riegl revised aesthetic values radically from a historicist standpoint, establishing non-hierarchical relations between beauty and ugliness as they meet and intermix in aesthetically undervalued periods like the late Roman Empire.16 The representatives of the Vienna school, as well as avant-garde artists, refused to acknowledge traditional links between beauty and truth, and in polemic debates expanded the limits of the concept of ugliness. Focillon arrived at similar conclusions along a different path: after having studied print culture, Asian painting, medieval and nineteenth-century art, he searched for the juncture of beauty and ugliness in the visionary production of various epochs. In 1926, Focillon published the article ‘Esthétique des visionnaires’, in which, examining the production of Rembrandt, Piranesi, Turner, Tintoretto, El Greco and Daumier, he aimed to establish a concept of visionary art.17 According to him, visionaries do not alter nature, but imbue it with a striking vivacity, intensity, and profundity. In other words, form is not replaced but intensified. On the other hand, such artists interpret more than imitate, creating phantasmagorias as illusory constructions of reality. To the group of visionaries he assigned artists having extraordinary powers used in creating imaginary worlds that trespass the boundaries of beauty and ugliness, and intertwine reality and irreality. Gradually Focillon introduced more artists into the circle of visionaries. One was Victor Hugo, whose unconventional paintings, achieved in part by reworking inkblots, he described as ‘an art of the unconscious, full of magic, dazzling and vertiginous’.18 In 1924, after having taken charge of the newly founded Institut d’Art et d’Archéologie at the Sorbonne, Focillon encouraged his students to research fantastic aspects of medieval art – the origins of Romanesque monsters and unrealistic features of Gothic art. In 1938, while giving lectures at Collège de France, he prepared a cycle on fifteenth- and the sixteenth-century visionary art: Bosch’s ‘nightmarish visions’, Andrea Mantegna’s ‘convulsive paintings’ and Matthias Grünewald’s ‘glory of the ruins of mankind’.19 He opposed the art of the visionaries to Renaissance Latin. In the late reflections Focillon focused his attention on the iconographic features of visionary art: fantastic landscapes, ruins, towers of Babel, monstrous nature, demons.20 According to André Chastel,



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Focillon was fascinated by ‘what is anxious, strange and distorted’.21 To the circle of visionaries he added canonical Renaissance artists concerned with fantastic mythologies and astronomical motifs (Piero di Cosimo, Botticelli and others). Visionaries, as Focillon wrote, deeply twist the light, the proportions, and even the density of the sensible world. Whatever one might think of the significance of such an account of the visionary, the work of Focillon made possible the reconsideration of aesthetic values by the directing of attention away from Beauty to Form, which, like Riegl’s Kunstwollen, embodies sublimated visions of an artist, his society, and the raw materials taken from other cultures in visible plastic ‘deformations’. In this context, it is possible to see the renewed French interest in ugliness, which includes but is not limited to Baltrušaitis, in light of Focillon’s formalism.22 ‘If over the centuries Ugliness was given the satellite role and Beauty undoubtedly dominated in the world, so in our epoch we see the universal re-evaluation of values’, wrote Lydie Krestovsky near the middle of the twentieth century, with Nietzschean but also undeniably Focillonian overtones.23 Aesthetics as Focillon understood it presented the antithesis of Beauty and Ugliness as a synthesis, and emphasised the majesty and greatness of Deformation. In this sense, Focillon also developed Rodin’s thought that what in nature is ugly can become a great beauty in art. On the other hand, it should be noted that, under the rubric of pure visibilité, the concept of beauty was deliberately displaced from the concept of art, ‘eliminating everything from significant form that can be described as beauty’.24 In his widely read Vie des formes, Focillon focused attention on the morphological nature of art, distracting focus from content and context, but also from the links between art and beauty. This allowed a shifting of attention from artist to artwork, which alone has form. As a prominent historian of aesthetics has put it: ‘The attempt to dissociate beauty from art also meant the recognition of ugliness, greatness, ridiculousness etc. as art values, and that art production is a specific form of activity, in other words, a specific technique.’25 From a contemporary perspective, it is worth noting that Focillon did not propose any authorial grounding of these effects. From his point of view, art existed only as a technique expressing emotional and physical aspects of human nature.26 Technique is not merely artistic procedure, but a creative process full of formal metamorphoses and

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poetry. These and other morphological considerations led Focillon to assert that technique itself contains a visionary mechanism. Technique helps to release imagination; it embodies nocturnal dreams and visions as well as conscious intentions. According to Focillon, form has a destructive as well as a productive function. A verbal sign lavishly expresses certain aspects of the life of the mind, of the passive and active aptitudes of the human spirit. It exhibits a wonderful ingenuity in the various processes of the distortion and the ultimate extinction of words. But to say that it wastes away, that it proliferates and that it creates monstrosities is equally true.27

Even plain linear perspective, according to Focillon, has a tendency to produce strange fictions and paradoxes. A life of form ‘creates various new geometries even at the heart of geometry itself ’.28 These thoughts of Focillon anticipate Baltrušaitis’ work on anamorphoses, in which he argued that the principles of perspective functioned not only as a technique for appropriating reality, but also for hallucinatory and disconcerting purposes. The history of perspective is related not only to the artistic concern with ‘realism’ and beauty, but also to the history of making visible irreality and deformation. The Origins and Definition of Anamorphosis Between 1946 and 1960, Baltrušaitis’ attention turned from the Middle Ages to the optical games of the Renaissance: a study of anamorphoses and aberrations. Anamorphoses (1955) argued that instead of reducing forms to their visible limits, anamorphoses are projected out of themselves and are dislocated in such a way that they only fall back into place when they are looked at from a predetermined point of view. The method is established as a technical curiosity, but it contains the poetics of abstraction, the powerful mechanism of optical illusion and the philosophy of artificial reality.29

Already Diderot had defined anamorphosis as ‘a monstrous projection, a disfigured representation of an image on a plane or curved surface that nevertheless, when viewed from a particular point, appears regular and properly proportioned’.30 Baltrušaitis wanted to know how in the rational architecture of perspective construction – that is, within the rules of geometrical structure – visionary worlds, ghostly forms and playful ugliness could emerge. He approached the problem broadly,



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examining not only perspective deformations but also works by Arcimboldo, Cellini, and Rabelais, the ‘monsters and prodigies’ of the sixteenth century, which Eugenio Battisti called the Antirinascimento, and Chinese cantoptric images (meant to be viewed through a cylindrical mirror) of landscapes and erotica. On the other hand, he was attracted to the actual practice of geometry and read treatises about perspective, from which he concluded that the dialectics of central perspective are also those of anamorphosis. Just what is anamorphosis? In a classic case, such as the elongated, unrecognisable skull in Hans Holbein’s (1497–1543) picture The Ambassadors (1533, London, National Gallery), an anamorphic object appears unconnected to the space in which it is placed. On being seen from the correct angle, the object appears to have its familiar shape in normal perspective. The rest of the image, however, is thus obliterated or turned into an anamorphic abstraction of its own. Despite this visual competitiveness, what the two kinds of images have in common is their dependence on the spectator, according to whose assumed position three-dimensional objects are projected. Both participate in a subjective illusion. In one case the illusion is one of three-dimensional space immediately available, in the other of a three-dimensional space that may be seen by abandoning the first, immediately available space. Thus anamorphosis creates unlikely, phantomic or spectral images, which are nevertheless tangent to the real. If perspective was ‘the aesthetic concept of proportion and symmetry that proclaimed the principles of “divine” harmony and beauty, as handed down and continued by the ideals of Classical antiquity’, anamorphosis was based on the same mathematical rules, applied to create a world not of plausible beauty, but of ugliness and irreality.31 Thus anamorphoses are a rational means of generating the irrational. It is not by coincidence that Leonardo called anamorphosis ‘monstrous’, for it represents a limit of representation.32 How does anamorphosis disturb vision? In anamorphosis, monstrous form recovers its natural proportions when the spectator assumes the indicated point of view.33 Viewed directly, the anamorphic image appears as a shapeless, unintelligible mass. The observer must play an active part in re-forming the image. A kind of metamorphic grotesque – metamorphic ugliness – exists in the process, ‘“morphing” from one thing or form to another’.34 It should be noted that undesired distortions also appear

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in linear perspective, if the observer’s eye is not correctly positioned. Leonardo noticed that strange deformations result when eyes are too close to the picture. It is possible that the first deliberate anamorphic distortions were designed to compensate for such extreme viewpoints.35 Quaintly, anamorphosis reveals the specificity of normal perspective. Anamorphic images exploit potential distortions and liberate viewers from the fixity of central-point perspective, while nonetheless confirming the importance of the observer’s position. Anamorphosis displaces the viewer to another locus, one not directly opposite the vanishing point, hence not perpendicular to the picture plane.36 An anamorphic object cannot thus be reformed until it captivates and ensnares the observer. Thus the viewer is reduced to a punctual site of reading. It is striking to what extent recent discussions of perspective could be read as accounts of anamorphosis. ‘The system incarnates a viewer, rendering him tangible and measurable: a Subject is a composed space, not merely a random witness. Subject and Object are captured and fixed along the centric ray passing back and forth between point of view and vanishing point. The distance between the two is a fully articulated space, rendered either explicitly or implicitly as architectonic – the chessboard of the urban stage, as Damisch has observed, “a word-bound scenography”.’37 In rationalising the relationship between depicted objects, central-point perspective introduced immediate cohesion between spectator and image. A paradigm case of this subjectivisation is anamorphosis, in which the spectator has to participate actively in image creation, performing ‘ocular gymnastics’, a physiological and mental collaboration.38 The perceptual doubling of anamorphosis produces a rupture in the viewer’s gaze and disrupts the stability of the represented object.39 Faced with ghost-like, changeable images, the spectator is, on a second plane of reflection, forced to give thought to the virtuality of reality, to reflect on the constructed nature of meaning in painting. Requiring an active effort on the part of the spectator, anamorphosis causes an anxiety that belongs to the aesthetics of ugliness. How exactly does anamorphic anxiety relate to ugliness? A parallel practice, which we might call ‘conceptual anamorphosis’, gives us a clue. As one might imagine, a key features of anamorphosis is the ability to hide one image in another.40 Giuseppe Arcimboldo’s (1527–93) grotesque mixtures of portraiture and still life combine animate and inanimate



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forms. Composite portraits are built up of various objects that reflect the attributes of work and nature: a cook is made of his utensils, a hunter from his trophies, portraits of ‘seasons’ are composed of seasonal goods. Through interlacing and permutation, these works turn every portrait into a ‘structural monster’.41 The metaphoric pictures of Arcimboldo are not senseless; indeed in them one can find an ingenious system. In every portrait lurks visual ambiguity: looking closely, we might see only fruits and vegetables (a baroque still-life), but after moving a bit we discern the portrait, or once again the totality of the portrait decomposes into a diversity of details. Sometimes turning the picture upside down is enough to turn the portrait into a still life.42 This variability of Arcimboldo’s pictures forces the spectator to approach or to back away. The effect is accompanied by surprise, horror, laughter and other emotions. According to Roland Barthes, Arcimboldo’s heads cause anxiety because of the fact that they are ‘compounded’. Only integral form, created alla prima, generates euphoria in Western culture. Whether or not this observation is true, its converse – that the composite is aesthetically worrisome – certainly holds in our case. No matter how beautiful the content of an allegorical picture by Arcimboldo (Summer, Flora, Water), its image causes anxiety related to the changeability of substance.43 Fascinated by Bosch and fantastic Buddhist miniatures, Arcimboldo, by decomposing the human body’s plastic integrity, replaces it with non-existence and colour harmony.44 Such polysemic and ambiguous pictures create a feeling of anxiety typical of the aesthetics of ugliness. Caricature as an art of portrait distortion drew inspiration from the conceptual anamorphism of Arcimboldo (Fig.11.3) but also from the physiognomic theories of Giambattista della Porta, Charles Le Brun and Johann Caspar Lavater.45 Nineteenth-century artists like Charles Philipon, J.J. Grandville (Fig.11.4), Honoré Daumier, Charles Joseph Traviès, and Auguste Desperret, working for the satirical journals La Caricature and Le Charivari, related superficiality and deepness, joy and sternness, vulgarity and majesty, grotesque and ugliness.46 Caricature, like optical anamorphosis, discovered the metaphor of the mask and turned multiplicity into an aesthetic category. Even when the caricatured figures are not monstrous, diabolic or spectral, the discrepancy between them and human ideals relates them to the expression of ugliness: ‘every ugly form indicates a beautiful form or beautiful value in a way that

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the former neglects the latter’. We may say that anamorphosis reveals the experience of plastic deformations that the caricaturists evoked ideologically; the aim is to interpret reality acutely and ironically through deviation. It is no accident that Baltrušaitis had an interest in caricatures, which he often sketched, particularly in caricatures wherein a monstrous body is formed through collation of many smaller bodies. Returning to anamorphosis as the locus classicus of this aesthetics of deformation, it should be noted that, according to Baltrušaitis, the term anamorphosis first appeared in the seventeenth century. Its inventor is generally thought to be the Jesuit polymath and experimental scientist Gaspar Schott (1657).48 It is interesting that this practice of the late Renaissance should take so long to be codified, but not surprising. The history of perspective is full of conflicts, for it is both a science that determines strict dimensions and distances in space, and also an art of 47



Jurgis Baltrušaitis, Sketchbook drawing of an allegorical head of Carnival engraved by Giovanni Ambrogio Brambilla, second half of the sixteenth century.

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Jurgis Baltrušaitis, Sketchbook drawing after a satirical illustration by J.J. Grandville.

Fig.11.4

illusion which distorts and re-creates these forms. Baltrušaitis reminds us of a story told by Pliny concerning the contest to create the statue of Minerva, which was intended to crown a high pillar. Alcmene created a sculpture with harmonious proportions, while Phidias designed a figure with deformed limbs, open mouth and stretched nose. When the sculptures were exposed to the public, the first was praised while the other was almost stoned. But after putting the sculptures on the column, the verdicts reversed: Phidias’ sculpture shone with beauty and the other became an object of mockery. Beauty and ugliness, insofar as they involve the perception of harmonious proportions, are dependent on point of view. By a change in viewpoint, beauty can be turned into ugliness and ugliness into beauty.49 This story was familiar to the creators of anamorphoses in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, an epoch in which perspective dominated as a ‘queen of methods’ (Niceron and Agrippa) and during

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which various artistic and scientific theories of perspective and the gaze were developed. In the background of these researches emerged a wave of anamorphoses, a play with deformed-reformed, distortedharmonious, and beautiful-ugly images. While looking straight at a painting, one saw disturbing, incoherent forms: intertwined lines, elongated curves and whirls, strange and repellent forms. Looking from another angle, or into a mirror, these distorted, meaningless forms interchanged and presented correct portrait, landscape, religious or love scenes. From the chaos emerged a tangible world, from ugliness – ordinary beauty.50 It is thus hardly hyperbolic to say with Baltrušaitis that ‘anamorphosis is a rebus, monster, and prodigy’.51 For it is a technique by which the puzzling and the ugly are enjoyably yoked to an active spectator. The History of Anamorphosis In aiming to show how precisely anamorphosis as optical distortion relates to ugliness, we have to discuss briefly the historical development of anamorphosis as presented by Baltrušaitis. Though Baltrušaitis in his research does not explicitly discuss ugliness, anamorphosis provides a useful lens for seeing how certain features of ugliness emerge from purely formal principles.52 In this context we should be reminded that Baltrušaitis was encouraged to delve into this phenomenon by the exhibition Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism (New York, 1946) in which the anamorphic engraving (Vexierbild ) of Erhard Schön and paintings by unknown artist from the collection of Jacques Lipchitz were exhibited, works which intrigued spectators by their ghostlike appearing and disappearing images. In the Schön Vexierbild (painting with a secret), a strangely curved landscape, seen close on, turns into the four well-known profiles of Charles V, Ferdinand I, Pope Clement VII and Francis I. Similar optic effects obtain in painting; interestingly, it is often rulers who are thus encrypted. While searching for historical data concerning this and other anamorphic portraits, Baltrušaitis discovered the journal of the German traveller Leopold Vedel, who in 1584 visited Whitehall and saw the anamorphic portrait of King Edward VI (the Protestant son of Henry VIII, who died in 1553 aged 16) painted in 1546 by the Dutch



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mannerist William Scrots. He was shaken by the hideous figure which, when viewed through a small hole from a distance of 60cm, turned into the elegantly proportioned face of the nine-year-old Prince. It was commonplace in discussing such works to emphasise the ugliness of the standard view. Thus Paul Hentzner, writing in 1598: ‘a picture of King Edward VI representing at first sight something quite deformed, till by looking through a small hole in the cover, which is put over it, you see it in its true proportions…’53 Baltrušaitis discovered that not only royal portraits but also religious themes were often hidden under disintegrated and prolix landscapes, and that the phenomenon, or at least meditation on it, spilled into literature as well. Deformations caused by sorrow and contempt are mentioned by Shakespeare: ‘For sorrow’s eye, glazed with blinding tears, / Divides one thing entire to many objects, / Like perspectives, which, rightly gaz’d upon / Show nothing but confusion, ey’d awry, / Distinguish form (…)’.54 By disintegrating and distorting the visible object, sorrow turns it into a fusion of strange forms. Such anamorphosis of sorrow, rendering familiar scenes as fantastic images, is a standard literary manifestation of the anamorphoses found in Renaissance art and Mannerism in particular. For Shakespeare, the sorrowful gaze is like the distorted image, but there is nothing corresponding to the corrected anamorphic image, unless it is the absence of sorrow. What is striking in anamorphic images, on the other hand, is the absence of personal motivation for distorting the objects. They are deformed not by tears, or by emotion, but by a technical trick of perspective construction. Baltrušaitis spends much time on the technical circumstances of the development of anamorphosis in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The first methods were meant to insert one form into another, in other words, to hide one image in another. In Pratica della Perspettiva (1559), Daniele Barbaro wrote that figures must be disintegrated in such a way that their separate parts should integrate only on looking from one side. Thus, while looking at a painting, it is not absolutely clear whether the artist depicts a head, because the nose looks like one thing, the forehead like another, etc.55 By these methods of image distortion, it was also possible, Baltrušaitis recognised, to produce images that were only ‘conceptually anamorphic’, like the heads of Arcimboldo and his followers.

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The first author to describe the peculiarity of the oblique gaze, important to the fixing of perspective in mural painting, was Leonardo da Vinci, who also produced the first well-known example of anamorphosis. However, the first formal explanation of straight ‘linear’ anamorphosis was provided by Giacomo Barozzi da Vignola in Le due regole della prospettiva pratica (1583). One illustration depicts a head in profile stretched over an extended grid, drawn on the inside back wall of a box. When seen from the front, the head is uncanny, but the regular image appears in correct perspective when viewed through a peephole in the side of the box that positions the spectator’s eye. Gradually during the seventeenth century, strict geometrical methods for creating anamorphic images were found. One of the first to do so was French scientist Jean-François Niceron (1613–46) who in Perspective curieuse (1638) (Fig.11.5) and the later Latin edition, Thaumaturgus opticus (1646), taught ‘how to create diverse distorted figures’.56 Unlike Leonardo and earlier perspective writers, Niceron was a serious mathematician, aware of the seventeenth-century revolution in projective geometry, particularly Descartes’ work on optics. The mechanisms for making absurd and distorted forms were



Fig. 11.5

Jurgis Baltrušaitis, Sketchbook drawing after the portrait of Saint Francis of Paola distorted into a cylindrical anamorphosis, from J.-F. Niceron, Proposition III of La Perspective curieuse (1638).



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also treated as a precise science in the works of Salomon de Caus. Thus, anamorphosis gained scientific ground and practical applicability, being now based on the geometry of visual rays and precise calculation. In Pietro Accolti’s Lo inganno de gl’occhi: prospettiva pratica (1625) (Fig.11.6) and Emmanuel Maignan’s Perspectiva horaria (1648) it was shown how to deform an image by invoking Dürer’s perspectograph. In 1642, Niceron and Maignan, who were Minorite priests as well as professors of mathematics, painted the largest anamorphic frescos of the time, more than one hundred feet long, in the monastery of San Trinità dei Monti in Rome. Presumably, these monumental anamorphic projections could be matched to the dogmas of the Catholic Church, showing that ‘faith is hedged in by mystery, doubleness and fleeting glimpses of the truth’.57 The new projective geometry was not necessary in practice, as the traditional Renaissance schema, called in Italian costruzione legittima, easily served as a mechanism of deformation. However, special rules and geometrical calculations were invoked in order to help to create ambitious extended pictures. With such paintings walls could be decorated: the larger the painting, the greater the effect. In La Perspective pratique, Du Breuil describes monumental examples in which a whole room is painted with deformed figures and gigantic distorted heads.

Jurgis Baltrušaitis, Sketchbook drawing after Accolti’s anamorphosis of an ear, from Lo inganno de gl’occhi (1625).

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Holes were pierced in a screen, through which these compositions were viewed. These rooms, full of suddenly appearing and disappearing faces, were like rooms full of ghosts.58 Anamorphosis as Spectral Form and Ghostlike Reality Though marginal in art historical literature, anamorphosis is not marginal in the history of Western art.59 We could even say that in anamorphosis lies revealed ugliness as anxiety concerning the aesthetic order. Let us remember what Plato wrote in The Sophist: art works which, when viewed from a certain angle erroneously look beautiful, are actually phantoms. It is concluded that these images, though pleasing, are less beautiful than images that are well proportioned and would be seen as such if not for limitations in the spectator.60 Plato’s story is the reverse of Pliny’s: whereas Phidias’ sculpture won the day by being a better illusion, Plato insists that the need for illusion implies imperfect existence. By deforming forms in order that they look beautiful to a spectator, artists found ways to deform and transfigure reality. However, these methods deepened the gap between reality and image, revealing the ghostly existence of all images. In the same spirit, Michel Ribon has recently noticed that spectrality and theatricality are typical of anamorphosis.61 Anamorphosis, born of Shakespeare’s epoch, is a spectral figure in which, beyond abstract forms and diversity appear other forms that could not be seen by the unaided spectator, because the depth and angle of the painted object separates it from the surface, and the space, of the painting. Yet beyond these deformed, ugly forms there exist others that are correct and clear. According to Karl Rosenkranz, the spectral is like a shadow of beauty, from which emerge monstrous and demonic images. The spectral is also one of the key concepts of ugliness, linking it to beauty but closely related to death.62 The same idea of mortality is revealed in Holbein’s 1533 Ambassadors. According to Baltrušaitis, in the picture everything seems to be mysteriously precise and true, but everything is pervaded with hallucinatory readability: ‘The picture is completely designed as trompe l’oeil, as a still life of allegorical objects, in which duration seems to be suspended, and the represented persons, symbols of secular and ecclesiastical power, are posited as objects.’63 However, a



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strange object between the two ambassadors does not let us complete this apotheosis. Viewed obliquely from the determined point of view, there emerges the anamorphosis of a skull. Its ghostly projection in the painting has been done according to the same rules of perspective, the same science and the same aesthetic. Thus, Holbein created a dramatic performance. Looking awry, the worthy and serious characters vanish, and the skull appears in their place as the sign of the End and Vanitas. Anamorphosis becomes the allegory of fragility and ghostlike reality of the visible. Ugliness in this painting is intimately related to death. This is not a repulsive so much as a melancholy, metaphysical ugliness. It is ugliness announcing death, revealing the ‘presence’ of death in the shadow of life. Similar spectral features are typical of the heroes of Shakespeare. Anamorphoses can be compared with the ghost scenes played in Shakespeare’s theatre, which highlight spectral aspects of existence. This feature of ugliness brings us closer to the supernatural and oddly returns death into life. In Ribon’s existenstialist terminology, ugliness exposes a ‘spectral relation between being and nothingness’.64 Therefore, in anamorphosis we may discern a particular transition from reality to illusion, which is also one from life to death, and from non-form to form. In the works of nineteenth-century writers like Edgar Allan Poe and Henry James, these ghostly forms bestowed on their literary world strange and obsessive optical properties. An Edgar Allan Poe hero reports: But these figures partook of the true character of the arabesque, only when regarded from a single point of view. By a contrivance now common, and indeed traceable to a very remote period of antiquity, they were made changeable in aspect. For the one entering the room, they bore the appearance of simple monstrosities; but upon a further advance, this appearance gradually departed; and step by step, as the visitor moved his station in the chamber, he saw himself surrounded by an endless succession of the ghostly forms which belong to the superstition of the Norman, or arise in the guilty slumbers of the monk. The phantasmagoric effect was vastly heightened by the artificial introduction of a strong continual current of wind behind the draperies – giving a hideous and uneasy animation to the whole.65

In the works of these and other writers anamorphosis emerges as a troubling ghost or platonic ‘phantom’. The ‘hideous and uneasy animation’ that Poe describes does not in fact depend on moving images: for there

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is an instability in the very process of shifting from standard to oblique viewing and its results. The ghostly character of anamorphosis, its link to an ugliness that is metaphysical rather than socially determined, is evident in Baltrušaitis’ analysis of the philosophical and religious contents of anamorphosis. According to Baltrušaitis, the Minorite Order (that is, the Franciscans), established in Paris since 1609, became an important centre of scientific research in which questions of optics, geometry, philosophy and theology were discussed. Erudite monks like Marin Mersenne (1588–1648), Emmanuel Maignan and others closely collaborated and strove to describe the distortions of perspective. Descartes visited the Order and presented his method of philosophical doubt. The same period saw the creation of the first automated machine for producing anamorphoses. Fascinated by mechanical instruments and the rational mystery of the automaton, Descartes in his Discours de la méthode and Dioptrique (both 1637) analysed the problem of illusion, using Albertian costruzione legittima to show the deceptiveness of the senses. According to Baltrušaitis, these texts reveal not merely an analyst, but a poet conceiving the world as a ‘theatre that reveals the secrets of nature through man-made toys’.66 Such considerations about what might be called ‘unrealistic reality’ – that is, about the unreliability of sense data and the contingent nature of optical facts (what would later be called ‘secondary qualities’) – were reflected in huge compositions in the Convent of the Minorites, depicting saints’ figures which appear and disappear depending on point of view. This reminder of the fragility and uncertainty of images combined in the Minorites’ religious thinking with notions of the world’s perishability and the vanity of human life.67 It must be emphasised that whereas Minorite monks methodically explored anamorphoses in the strict framework of science, the German Jesuits, notably Athanasius Kircher and Gaspar Schott, placed anamorphosis in the sphere of natural philosophy and simultaneously of the visionary. These researchers sought to apply anamorphic method to the creation of cities, mountains and parks. Kircher claimed that, when viewed from a certain angle, trees and plants in a garden could form animals that would look like those in a painting. Schott noted that the perspective machine (perspectograph), regarded as a magical instrument, could be used to elongate and compress form



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Jurgis Baltrušaitis, Sketchbook drawing of optical instruments illustrated in Gaspar Schott, Magia Universalis (1657–9).

Fig.11.7

(De portula Diureri in deformatione imaginem) (Fig.11.7). The optical deformations, for all their otherworldliness, are obtained mechanically: what makes them peculiar is their subjective effects. Anamorphoses, discovered in the optical sciences, occupy a space between the rational mind and apparent insanity.68 These paradoxes of distorted perspective, developed by the cold systematic mind, by the inventors of technical equipment and logicians, are closely associated with the inquiring spirit, not devoid of religion or superstition, of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Though adopted by the Romantics for its spectrality, this metaphysical side of anamorphoses was gradually choked by a playful interest in form alone. The shift of interest from intelligibility to pure form is important. As Baudelaire noticed, ugliness has the power to fascinate.69 In the eighteenth and nineteenth century, anamorphosis

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lost its philosophical contents and became an object of instruction and entertainment. It was reduced to an ‘optical skill, curiosity or game, appearing in the Wunderkammer of the eighteenth century with the purpose of entertaining the spectator’.70 The amateur artist used various methods and machines to transform a common drawing into anamorphosis. Anamorphosis, like drawing in general, turned into an ingenious game or parlour trick. Catoptrical anamorphoses, which required the use of a cylindrical mirror for the image to be rectified, intrigued spectators by the gap between particularly unintelligible form and correct figures. Galileo’s ‘extravagant and indecent chimeras’, with all their metaphysical anxiety, came to entertain the senses they were once meant to instruct. Conclusion Baltrušaitis is one of the art historians most often mentioned in the contemporary discourse on ugliness. However, his studies of anamorphosis remain in the margin of this discourse, in part because for all their suggestiveness, they never make explicit the link between the optical phenomenon and the affective one of the judgement of ugliness. My examination of his work should, however, allow us to do this. Anamorphosis, as an orderly ugliness, reveals that visual distortions and visionary worlds can also appear in geometrical structures and rational systems of representation. It is not related to normal perspective as rulebreaking is to rule-following, any more than ugliness is thus related to beauty. Rather, as a case of rational procedures producing visionary results, anamorphosis offers us a skewed but penetrating glimpse into the entire system of perspective imaging, and at the same time, into the visually compelling nature of the formally ugly – the deformed. Throughout its history, anamorphosis has created troublesome, spectral images that could become metaphors of some ghostlike reality, or of the ghostlike nature of all reality. At the same time, anamorphic images revealed the duplicity of the image and the ambiguity of ugliness, shifting from ugly to beautiful. In anamorphic projections, then, ugliness exists in process. Faced with deformed-reformed appearances, the spectator is challenged by anamorphic images to experience forms of perceptual oscillation and uncertainty. On the other hand, anamorphosis highlights the playfulness



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of perception and the ludism lying dormant in the constructed image. Thus we might say that the optic play of anamorphoses gives pleasing form to an ugly or shapeless world. It is clear that anamorphic images attract new interest today. They were already important for the Surrealists as ‘natural’ paradigms of the alienation sought by advanced art.71 Salvador Dalí used anamorphosis extensively in his paintings, and produced an entire edition of mirror anamorphoses – a set of erotic anamorphic paintings whose multiplicity of form again recalls Arcimboldo. For instance, in his Anamorphose, Nu féminin (1972) from the one side we see a naked woman, corpulent and misshapen, from the other, the monstrous face of a man. When viewed through a cylindrical mirror, in the reflection we see an archly smiling beautiful brunette.72 Marcel Duchamp was also interested in anamorphosis: some of his installations (especially Etant donnès, which resembles Dutch ‘peep shows’) are paraphrases of anamorphoses.73 Surrealist photographers, notably André Kertesz and Bill Brandt, used anamorphic lenses to make images of objects and bodies that cannot be reconstituted as in classical painterly anamorphosis. Andrei Tarkovsky’s films generate an effect of temporal anamorphosis, while American nonnarrative filmmaker Stan Brakhage used anamorphosis to transform the conventional space of representation and to deny an objective reality captured on film.74 Even in architecture, as Baltrušaitis noted, the glass towers of modernism constitute giant mirrors giving rise to a kind of urban anamorphosis.75 Gradually, anamorphosis as a trope spread everywhere: in literature, music, criticism. Roland Barthes defined New Criticism (the French nouvelle critique, not the American formalist movement of the same name) as an anamorphic projection that is a strictly determined deformation of the artwork.76 Psychoanalysts saw in anamorphosis a way by which the field of desire is incorporated into the range of sight.77 And philosophical literary criticism commends anamorphosis as a poetic device, conductive to ‘looking awry’ in the service of making available repressed meaning.78 Anamorphoses appear in contemporary art seeking to depict hardly visible forces, to reveal forces of abjection and disgust. Jan Dibbets and István Orosz use anamorphosis to challenge our customary notions of limits, frontiers and dimensions.79 Their work may support Gilles

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Deleuze’s contention that contemporary art seeks to grasp invisible forms and deformations, to depict hardly visible forces.80 But it is more than an appropriation of the unseen: as Alain Mons observes, systematic deformations of the visible in contemporary culture express a profound crisis of reality. Violating visual objectivity through its own procedures, anamorphosis demands interpretation of the visible, and invites spectators to reflect on forms that have become autonomous, prolific, and solitary.81 Focillon’s life of form, stripped perhaps of its soothing Bergsonian vitalism, seems to have made a ghostly comeback in a world of animated but strangely isolated images. And so the anamorphic effects in contemporary visual culture continue to express a spectral reality. The fantastic strangeness of anamorphosis continues to worry and seduce our view.





Conclusion Three Definitions of Ugliness (Denis Diderot, 1765; Bernard Bolzano, 1843; Vernon Lee, 1882)

Denis Diderot, Ugliness [‘Laideur’], Encyclopedie ou dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers, vol. 9 [‘Ju – Mam’] (Neuchâtel : Samuel Faulche, 1765), p.176. Appearing in the last batch of Encyclopedia volumes printed in 1765 after the softening of the official ban on the subversive venture (the volumes were printed in France, but a Swiss place of publication was listed), Diderot’s brief article on ‘ugliness’ represents a marked advance on his extensive 1751 entry on ‘beauty’. Where that text had proposed a relative beautiful and ugly, so that a tulip might be a beautiful flower but an ugly living thing, the entry on ‘ugliness’ makes all aesthetic judgements be of this sort (dispensing with the earlier absolute beautiful). Diderot finds beauty and ugliness, like moral values and values in general, comprehensible only against a background of objects of comparison and human ends. Indeed, Diderot’s naturalism goes so far as to assimilate judgements of beauty and ugliness to utility, so that a man’s beauty is his ability to discharge ‘animal needs’. It is striking that the examples he gives are of a practical or moral nature, leaving the application to visual and other aesthetic categories mysterious. ‘UGLINESS’ (Grammar & Morality)1 is the opposite of beauty; neither it nor beauty exist in morality, but for rules; in physics [the physical world], but for relations; or in the arts, but for models. There is no knowledge of beautiful or ugly without knowledge of the rule, of the model, of the relations and the goal [la fin – the ends, as in Kant]. That which is necessary is not in itself either good or evil, nor beautiful or ugly; this world is therefore neither good nor evil, nor beautiful or ugly, in itself; that which is not entirely known cannot be either good or evil, nor beautiful or ugly. But one does not know the entire universe, nor its purpose; one may not therefore pronounce on its perfection or imperfection. A formless block of marble, considered in itself, offers nothing to admire, nothing to blame; but if you observe it for its qualities; if mentally you assign it some use; if it has 216

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already taken some form under the hand of the sculptor, then the ideas of beauty and ugliness are born; there is nothing absolute in these ideas. Take a well-built palace; the walls are solid; all the parts are well-combined; take a lizard, and let it loose in one of its apartments; the animal, in not finding a hole in which to hide, shall find the lodgings most uncomfortable; it would prefer a heap of rubble. That a man were lame, a hunchback; that one added to these deformities all others that one can imagine, he should not be beautiful or ugly, but compared to another; and this other should not be beautiful or ugly but relative, more or less, to his facility in fulfilling his animal functions. It is the same with moral qualities. What account of himself could Newton have delivered, alone on the surface of the earth, supposing that he could have elevated himself by his own powers to all the discoveries that we owe him? None; he could only have been called great through his fellow men having been small. A thing is beautiful or ugly under two different aspects. The conspiracy of Venice, in its beginnings, its progress, and its means make us cry: what a man is the Count Bedmard!2 How great he is! The same conspiracy, from a moral point of view, relative to humanity and justice, makes us call it atrocious, and Count Bedmard hideous!

Bernard Bolzano, On the Concept of the Beautiful [Über den Begriff des Schönen] (Prague: Borrosch & André, 1843). An opponent of German Idealism, pacifist, and pioneer of the mathematics of the infinite, Bernard Bolzano (1781–1848) also wrote on art. The ‘first delivery’ of his Treatises on Aesthetics, part of a massive publishing effort undertaken by Bolzano’s students to make their teacher better known (Bolzano was stripped of his professorship in Prague and censored by the Habsburgs for his opposition to war), his small book on beauty reveals what might be called a ‘Biedermeier aesthetic’ of good-humoured clarity. But the concept of ugliness he develops out of it – the class of objects that disappoint our natural inclinations to draw conclusions about them from acquaintance with some parts of them – is suggestive even to some who may not accept the positive definition of the beautiful in these terms. It is in fact the first explicit definition of the ugly as the conceptually resistant object. This recalls a tradition of seeing ugliness as inconsistency extending to the ancient Greeks, and looks forward to the ‘anxious objects’ of postmodernity, for Bolzano also draws attention to uses of the term ‘ugly’ that have nothing to do with the concept: ugliness by association of a painful emotion or the subjective ugliness attaching to an object of hate.



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§18

One opposes the beautiful to the ugly, or – as might be said more precisely, if only we were accustomed to it – the nasty (das Garstige). If then our explanation of the beautiful is right, the ugly must also be explicable in a way that makes visible how it is opposed to the beautiful. [p.37] This is indeed the case. Just as the beautiful is an object whose contemplation pleases all able persons for the simple reason that, without the effort of clear thought, they are in a position to think up a concept of it through simply noticing some of its properties, which allows them to guess already other properties for whose discovery longer observation would be needed, and thus gives them at least an obscure impression of the proficiency of their powers of knowledge; in contrast, the ugly is an object that causes us the chagrin, that whatever concept we draw from observation of some of its properties disappoints us in the expectation that it will conform to it, in that we come across something that contradicts this concept; all of this at least, as long as we don’t take the trouble to think clearly. We can convince ourselves that this explanation works by applying it to various examples. We doubtless find ugly a rhymed poem, in which at one place the rhyme is either absent or rings false. Why? For no other reason, than that the presence of rhyme in the other parts of the poem led us to expect, and rightly, that the same rhyme should be found the whole way through, and despite this we find ourselves deceived in this expectation. Similar things can be said of a building that through several of its parts and accommodations leads to the thought that it follows the laws of symmetry, and we finally come unto a part which deviates from them. Our displeasure does not decrease, should precise measurement prove the transgressions of symmetry and rational proportion, which we thought to perceive in the building, only apparent, balanced in fact by certain other parts, which our gaze could barely reach; for the very need for such measurement is against the concept of the beautiful. Out of this explanation one can take away clearly not only how the ugly in itself causes discontent and is opposed to the beautiful, but also that, just as there is a mixed beauty, there is also a mixed ugliness; as when an ugly object is also sensuously unpleasant, and so on. One can also finally grasp how in a beautiful whole, for instance in a comedy, individual ugliness, say an ugly person, appearing in the right place, and thus conforming fully to the rule which we have made for this whole, is perceived with enjoyment, and can thus be explained as something relatively beautiful. §24 To the beautiful stands opposed, as I have already observed, the ugly; if my explanation of the former is right, so must be the explanation of the ugly (§18) grounded in this opposition. [p.44] But this, some will doubtless want to object, is obviously mistaken. For how many are the things we name ugly, and which the explanation does not at all fit! Namely things in whose sight something else entirely injures us than our inability to guess the remaining characteristics out of the ones we perceive. Everything that repulses our senses, which arouses disgust or another unpleasant sensation, were it simply through the association of ideas, for

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instance, a corpse, a gun through which a close companion came to grief, is called ugly without any reservation. I admit all this; but want to point out that it contains no challenge to the rightness of my account, either of the beautiful or of the ugly, but simply a proof that we do not always take the word ‘ugly’ in the sense in which it signifies precisely the contrary (Widerspiel) of the beautiful; we use it just as frequently in a sense in which it only stands opposed to the pleasant in general; in other cases, we even think in this word [hässlich] its derivation from ‘hate’ (Hass) and thus imagine under it something that is or can become an object of our hate. In such a sense we may indeed declare things to be ugly that represent nothing less than an opposite of the beautiful, but despite this can have much that is beautiful in them.

Vernon Lee, ‘Apollo the Fiddler: A Chapter on Artistic Anachronism’, Fraser’s Magazine, vol.26 (July 1882), pp.52–67, here pp.61–2. (reprinted in Lee, Juvenilia, vol.1, London: Unwin, 1887, pp.165–218.) The novelist and aesthetician Vernon Lee (pen name of Violet Paget) became notorious in 1897, when with her companion Clementina Anstruther-Thomson, she published ‘Beauty and Ugliness’, a bold combination of Theodor Lipps’s empathy theory and the materialist theory of emotion of William James; here beauty and ugliness are purely formal qualities that the body, in perceiving, imitates, resulting in physical and mental health (ugliness is the absence of ‘tie and time’, aspects of embodied perception coined by Lee).3 Instead of this hotly debated piece of physiological aesthetics, we excerpt the early article ‘Apollo the Fiddler’, which tries to come to terms with the anachronism of Raphael’s violin-playing god in the Vatican Stanze by elaborating a distinction between science and the arts. Here, in introducing beauty and ugliness, Lee is more cautious in her naturalism, seeing aesthetic capacities as biological features which science can only describe, without capturing their normative force. When we say science, we must define. There is science of all kinds, and some kinds have no possible chance of intruding into the domain of art. And, strange to say, these latter happen to be the very sciences you dislike most: those physical sciences, physiology, optics, acoustics, which teach other folk (for you decline being taught) why certain linear forms by requiring a painful adjustment of the visual muscles, and certain colour combinations by causing an excess of stimulus to the retinal nerves, and certain sequences and meetings of sounds by disintegrating with opposed movements the delicate mechanism of hearing, give us, each in its way, an impression called ugliness; while certain other combinations [62] of lines,



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of colours, and of sounds, induce the pleasurable sense of beauty: these natural sciences, which thus impertinently and coarsely explain the causes of artistic likings, do not attempt to influence those likings and dislikings themselves. For art deals only with the very surface of Nature; with that which she reveals to the naked eye and the unaided ear, with the combinations which require for their perception neither scalpel nor alembic nor logical mechanism of analysis. Our artistic sense of right and wrong is safely based in the structure of our organism, which science may explain, but which science cannot replace. It is from no knowledge of cell or tissue, of bone or muscle, of anything inside the human body, that we know when that body is comely and when it is uncouth. Our perception of line and colour, perhaps a collateral sense of weight and resistance, perhaps even a long engrained, long unanalytic, long instinctive, nay, automatic sense of fitness for the purposes of life – all these various senses, combined into what we call artistic perception, taught the Greek sculptors where to seek models for Aphrodite or Apollo long before the first profane knife had ever pried into the mysteries hidden beneath the more grand curves, the supple broken lines, the beautiful surface of the human body; knowledge of beauty, knowledge of the fair shapes and tints of man, and beasts, and plants, and rocks, and skies; knowledge of the sweet harmonies or melodies to be got out of pipe, or string, or throat – knowledge of beauty, thought knowledge, most indisputably, is no more scientific knowledge than is the knowledge of virtue or vice. Science, with it analysis, can teach us what hidden reasons of physical benefit or injury, of social progress or degradation, have made us such as to prefer beauty to ugliness, good to evil; but science was not born when our remotest ancestors already preferred beauty to ugliness, good to evil, and thought that the preference, the knowledge, was the pressure of some guiding angel’s hand, the mysterious voice of some unseen divinity. This sort of science, therefore, physical and physico-mental, which explains the function by the structure and the structure by the function of things, has therefore no power of meddling with art; for the sculptor knows before the anatomist when a limb is misshapen; and the musician has perceived that a chord is insupportable long before the physicist can begin analysing his air waves.

Notes Introduction 1 Richard Leiby and DeNeen L. Brown, ‘Obama Girls Start at Their New School, Sidwell Friends’, The Washington Post, 6 January 2009. Prior to this event, journalists emphasised the dolls’ appeal to boys: see Donald G. McNeil Jr., ‘Guys and Dolls: An Ugly Remake’, New York Times, 23 March 2008. On Babo, see Alex Pham, ‘Ugly Dolls were a labor of love’, Los Angeles Times, 18 August 2009. 2 Plato, Hippias Major, 289a1–6. See Andrei Pop’s essay for further references to Plato. On other writers and texts whose views are sketched below, see the bibliography. 3 ‘Le bellezze con le bruttezze paiono più potenti l’una per l’altra.’ Trattato della pittura / On Painting: A Lost Book (Libro A), ed. Carlo Pedretti (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1964), p.51 (no 41), cf. p.80 (no 100). Note that the text only existed in manuscript, and could not have been widely known. 4 Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Confessio philosophi: ein Dialog, ed. Otto Saame (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1994), pp.35, 37, 53. Interestingly, a sound metaphor is also used: the emergence of harmony from dissonances. 5 Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: the Making and Unmaking of the World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), p.288. Chapter 1 1 [Edward ‘Ned’ Ward], The Secret History of Clubs… (London, printed by the booksellers, 1709), p.83. 2 The motto of Liverpool’s Ugly Face Club. See Edward Howell, ed., Ye Ugly Face Clubb, Leverpoole, 1743–1753 (Liverpool: E. Howell, 1912), p.11. 3 Howell gathers extant papers of the Ugly Face Club, including an advertisement from an 1806 anniversary celebration, reprinted as Fig.1.1. The advertisement came from a county newspaper and read: ‘The anniversary of the UGLY CLUB will be held at Williams’s Tavern, Liverpool on Wednesday, the 18 May 1806. Dinner on table at half past three o’clock – N.B. any ugly Gentleman wishing to become a Member, will leave his name and qualifications at the bar of the Tavern. A ballot will be called in favour of two Candidates, one with a very large nose, the other with no nose at all.’ 4 Joseph Mayer (1803–86) was a collector of art and antiquities, and served as President of the Historic Society of Cheshire. See Rob Ainsworth, 221



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‘Joseph Mayer’s Life’, Liverpool History Society Questions Blog, http:// liverpoolhistorysocietyquestions.blogspot.com/2009/12/joseph-mayers-life. html (accessed 7 March 2011, link no longer active). In this period, the Ugly Face Club met primarily at Liverpool’s Exchange Coffee House. Regarding their musical activities, see Fritz Spiegl and Sara Cohen, ‘Liverpool’, Oxford Music Online, http://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/ subscriber/article/grove/music/43025 (accessed 19 July 2011). The entry states: ‘Among local musical societies, or convivial clubs based on musical activities, were the Ugly Face Club (1743), at least part of whose aim was the singing of songs, and the Apollo Glee Club (1796).’ Peter Clark, British Clubs and Societies 1580–1800: The Origins of an Associational World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), p.4. Ibid., p.2. Ibid., p.ix. See also pp.12–13. Quoted in Ronald Paulson, Rowlandson: A New Interpretation (New York: Oxford University Press, 1972), p.66. Ibid., p.66. William Hogarth, The Analysis of Beauty, ed. Ronald Paulson (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997), p.96. Ibid., p.98. Ibid., p.xliii. Elsewhere, Hogarth speaks about the difficulty of characterising ‘utmost beauty’: ‘I fear it will be difficult to raise a very clear idea of what constitutes, or composes the utmost beauty of proportion…perhaps even the word character, as it relates to form, may not be quite understood by every one, tho’ it is so frequently used…thinking of form and motion together…a character, in this sense, chiefly depends on a figure being remarkable as to its form, either in some particular part, or altogether; yet surely no figure, be it ever so singular, can be perfectly conceived as a character, till we find it connected with some remarkable circumstance or cause.’ Hogarth, pp.68, 70 (italics in the original). Leonardo da Vinci, A Treatise on Painting, trans. John Francis Rigaud (London: George Bell & Sons, 1877), p.48. See also Paulson, Rowlandson, p.46. Diana Donald, The Age of Caricature: Satirical Prints in the Reign of George III (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996), p.9. In the eighteenth century ugliness lost its stigma of evil; in the Spectator, which I will turn to momentarily, Joseph Addison poked fun at the pseudo-science of physiognomy: ‘nothing can be more glorious than for a Man…to be an honest, just, good-natured Man, in spite of all those Marks and Signatures which Nature seems to have set upon him for the Contrary…I have seen many an amiable Piece of Deformity which may have more charm than an insolent Beauty’. Quoted in Donald, p.10. Quoted in Paulson, Rowlandson, p.66. See also Hogarth, p.xxxvi, and Donald, pp.12–14. The popular tradition of caricature found expression in forms beyond print, as evidenced in entertainments like George Alexander Stevens’

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‘Lecture on Heads’, which started in 1764 and which ran in varied forms for over two decades (called in an 1785 edition ‘the most popular exhibition of the age’). Diana Donald has charted the Lecture’s lineage of caricatured heads back through Hogarth to Theophrastus and literary descriptions of ‘characters’ or human types in classical antiquity, which enjoyed a resurgence in seventeenthcentury England and fed eighteenth-century caricature (p.11). ‘Mr. Jno. Wood, 22 July 1751, of Liverpool, Architect’. Howell, Ye Ugly Face Clubb, p.42. Arthur H. Cash, John Wilkes: The Scandalous Father of Civil Liberty (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006), p.1. Aphra Behn’s novel, The Dumb Virgin; or, The Force of Imagination (published posthumously in 1700), suggests an early use of the maternal imagination in eighteenth-century English literature, with a mother who has two daughters: one who is ‘naturally and unfortunately Dumb’, a ‘defect of the learn’d attributed to the Silence and Melancholy of the Mother, as the Deformity of the other was [owed] to the Extravagance of her Frights’. In Callipaediae; or, An Art How To Have Handsome Children (1710), Abbot Claude Quillet writes: ‘Ye Pregnant Wives, whose Wish it is, and Care, / To bring your Issue, and to breed it Fair, / On what you look, on what you think, beware. / When in the Womb the Forming Infant Grows…’ See Philip K. Wilson, ‘Eighteenth-Century “Monsters” and Nineteenth-Century “Freaks”’, Literature and Medicine 21/2 (Spring 2002), pp.1–25; and Felicity Nussbaum, ‘Feminotopias: The Pleasures of “Deformity” in Mid-Eighteenth Century England’, in The Body and Physical Difference, eds David Mitchell and Sharon L. Snyder (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1997), pp.161–73. For a work contemporary with the Liverpool club, see Sarah Scott, Agreeable ugliness: Or, The triumph of the graces: Exemplified in the real life and fortunes of a young lady of distinction (London: R. and J. Dodsley, 1754), itself an anonymous translation of Pierre Antoine de la Place, Laideur aimable et les dangers de la beauté (Paris: Rollin, 1752), as shown in Gaby E. Onderwyzer, ‘Sarah Scott’s Agreeable Ugliness, A Translation’, Modern Language Notes 70/8 (December 1955), pp.578–80. See Helen Deutsch, Loving Dr. Johnson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), p.72. Ibid., pp.71, 94. Hester Thrale, Johnson’s intimate in the last two decades of his life, concluded that his enduring soul is ‘like some fine statue, the boast of Greece and Rome, plastered up into deformity, while casts are preparing from it to improve students, and diffuse the knowledge of its merit; but dazzling only with complete perfection, when the gross and awkward covering is removed’ (p.113). Clark also notes that other clubs and societies were ‘invented en masse in plays, poems, journals, and tracts for literary or satirical effect’ (p.4). Ward, Secret History of Clubs, Ch. IX, ‘The Club of Ugly-Faces’, pp.79–84. Ward’s chapter on ‘The Club of Ugly-Faces’ was reprinted in Howell’s 1912 book, unattributed, with an erroneous origin date of 1807. Ward’s collection underwent multiple editions, variously titled, e.g. A Compleat and Humorous



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Account of all the Remarkable Clubs and Societies in the Cities of London and Westminster… (London: Joseph Collier, 1745). Ward, Secret History of Clubs, p.83. Ibid. The Spectator (Dublin, 1755), #32 (p.129) and #17 (pp.74–6), respectively. ‘Mr. Spectator’ is inducted as a member due to the ‘Mold of my Face, which is not quite so long as it is broad’; another character, described as a ‘Hero’, has a ‘Shape, which he describes as very much resembling the Letter Z’ (p.73). Mr. Spectator’s membership in Oxford’s club rouses an offer from Cambridge, leading the two universities to vie for credit as founder of the first Club of Ugly Faces: ‘For when the wise Man who shall write your true History shall acquaint the World, That you had a Diploma sent from the Ugly Club at OXFORD, and that by virtue of it you were admitted into it, what a learned Work will there be among future Criticks about the Original of that Club…’ (#78, p.315). Spectator #48, pp.194–5, and #52, p.210. Hecatissa likely alludes to the Latin goddess Hecate, saying: ‘my Name is the only disagreeable Prettiness about me; so pr’ythee make one for me that signifies all the Deformity in the World: You understand Latin…’ Spectator, #17, pp.73–2, and #32, p.130; #17 is the only paper cited in the index of volume one under the entry: ‘Deformity, no Cause of Shame’ (p.328). At one point, The Spectator says: ‘and what think you if our Board sate for a Dutch Piece?…[A]s odd as we appear in Flesh and Blood, we should be no such strange things in Metzo-Tinto’ (quoted in Donald, Age of Caricature, p.10). Howell, Ye Ugly Face Clubb, p.17, reproduces an item of payment for ‘5 Pictures of Ugly Faces’, about which he conjectures: ‘Whether these were portraits of members or pictures of exceptionally hideous people purchased for the general comfort of the Club, there is no evidence to show.’ An anomalous broadside in the British Library, dating around 1715, shows a woodcut image of an Ugly Club and describes its membership of both men and women: ‘Of a Merry CLUB of Ugly-Faces, consisting of 200 Batchelors, Maids, Widdows and Widdowers of the Homely Society that flock’d to Hornsey-Cave on Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday last, where they design to have a Monthly Meeting, but not one to be admitted of their Club that is two Degrees Handsomer then a Monkey: As for Example, Hook’d-Nos’ed, Bleer-Ey’d, Beetle Brow’d, BlubberLip’d, Sparrow-Mouth’d, Hump-Back’d and Bandy-Leg’d. Also, a Summons to all their Brother Ugly Faces in and about the City, of both Sexes to repair thither, in order to be Register’d in the Society, which, whoever, will claim the Benefit of, must be endued with two or more of the foresaid Qualifications.’ A comical account of a merry club of ugly-faces (London: J. Read, [1715?]). Deirdre Lynch, ‘Overloaded Portraits: The Excesses of Character and Countenance’, Body & Text in the Eighteenth Century, ed. Veronica Kelly and Dorothea von Mücke (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1994), p.142.

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Lynch has described how the term ‘character’ over the course of the eighteenth century ‘effectively reversed its meaning’, constructed in opposition both to the ‘perceived excesses of the appearing body and the graphic characters of the page’ (pp.114–15). For more on the tradition of ‘deformed mistress’ poems, see Jan Ziolkowski, ‘Avatars of Ugliness in Medieval Literature’, The Modern Language Review 79/1 ( January 1984), pp.1–20; and Naomi Baker, ‘“To make love to a Deformity”: praising ugliness in early modern England’, Renaissance Studies 22/1 (2007), pp.86–109. George Justice, The Manufacturers of Literature: Writing and the Literary Marketplace in Eighteenth-Century England (Newark, DE: University of Delaware Press, 2002), p.52; Scott Black quotes Charles Knight in ‘The Spectator in the History of the Novel’, Media History 14/3 (2008), p.339; see also Charles A. Knight, ‘Bibliography and the Shape of the Literary Periodical in the Early Eighteenth Century’, The Library 8 (1986), pp.232–48. Edmund Spenser, the Younger, The Ugly Club: A Dramatic Caricature in One Act (London: George Cawthorn, 1798). Eight years later, the Liverpool chapter celebrated an anniversary; see Note 3 of this article. Samuel Johnson, A Dictionary of the English Language: In Which the Words Are Deduced from Their Originals, and Illustrated in Their Different Significations by Examples from the Best Writers; to Which Are Prefixed, a History of the Language, and an English Grammar (London: J.F. and C. Rivington, 1785). Roger Lund, ‘Laughing at Cripples: Ridicule, Deformity and the Argument from Design’, Eighteenth-Century Studies 39/1 (2005), pp.94–5 (italics mine). Lennard Davis notes about this period that ‘rather than disability, what is called to readers’ attention before the eighteenth century is deformity’. See Lennard J. Davis, ‘Dr. Johnson, Amelia, and the Discourse of Disability in the Eighteenth Century’, in ‘Defects’: Engendering the Modern Body, eds Helen Deutsch and Felicity Nussbaum (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2000), p.57. Pope’s words come from a letter to Jonathan Swift in 1734, quoted in Helen Deutsch, Resemblance and Disgrace: Alexander Pope and the Deformation of Culture (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996), p.24. Deutsch writes: ‘Both defending and confounding such definitions [of nature, art, and deformity], Pope’s method gives particular form to a cultural obsession’ (p.4). Ibid., pp.14, 17–18. William Hay, Deformity: An Essay (London: R. and J. Dodsley, 1754), p.14. At the end of Deformity, the author shares his wish upon death to be autopsied so that ‘eminent Surgeons’ might better understand his afflictions, adding that if a stone is found in his bladder, it should be donated to Sir Hans Sloane’s Collection, a cabinet of curiosities that became the basis for the British Museum (p.75). There is little evidence that such scientific exhibition would have invited or allowed the kind of ridicule associated with the Ugly Club. See



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also Kathleen James-Cavan, ‘“[A]LL IN ME IS NATURE”: The values of deformity in William Hay’s Deformity: An Essay’, Prose Studies 27/1–2 (2005), pp.27–38. Hay, Deformity, pp.30, 35–6. Ibid., pp.21–2. Ibid., p.35. Hay goes on to claim that deformity is advantageous to health, since ‘Deformed Persons have a less Share of Strength than others, and therefore should naturally be more careful to preserve it: and as Temperance is the great Preservative of Health, it may incline them to be more temperate’ (p.22). William Hay and Kathleen James-Cavan, Deformity: An Essay (Victoria, British Columbia: English Literary Studies, University of Victoria, 2004), p.12. Hay, Deformity, p.13. Ibid., 13. Hay also seemed aware of the notion of femininity as defective (i.e. deformed) maleness; see Hay and James-Cavan, Deformity, pp.14–15. Hay, Deformity, p.82. With a note of humour reminiscent of Ugly Clubs, Hay adds: ‘I congratulate my Fraternity; and hope for the future the Ladies will esteem them Des Beaux Garçons.’ That said, his so-called ‘Fraternity’ existed more as isolated members without group cohesion. According to Lund, both Hay and Pope seemed to desire ‘comforting communities’ (as Maynard Mack has described Pope’s ‘Club of Little Men’, written about in the Guardian) and yet appeared to be ‘held captive by the very categories [t]he[y] endorsed’ (p.109, 111). See also Maynard Mack, Collected in Himself: Essays Critical, Biographical, and Bibliographical on Pope and Some of his Contemporaries (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1982), p.374. Simon Dickie, ‘Hilarity and Pitilessness in the Mid-Eighteenth Century: English Jestbook Humor’, Eighteenth-Century Studies 37/1 (2003), pp.2, 14. Drawing upon David B. Morris’ suggestion that comedy relies ‘upon a pain that belongs to the reader or spectator’ (either as actual pain or the ‘ghostly trace’ of past or future pain), Dickie writes: ‘To laugh at the deformities and disabilities of others may have been to discharge for a moment one’s own fears of physical degeneration, one’s own sense of the precariousness of the body, of the proximity and near inevitability of disease and disability’ (16). Morris adds: ‘Yet there is a final twist to the paradox of comic pain. Comedy seems to mirror the structure of acute pain in its movement from affliction to disappearance… There is nothing funny about chronic pain, and its failure to disappear would wreck the structure of comic plots.’ See David B. Morris, The Culture of Pain (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1993), p.93. Dickie, p.15. C.J. Ribton-Turner, A History of Vagrants and Vagrancy and Beggars and Begging (Montclair, NJ: Patterson Smith, 1972), pp.186–9.

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48 The history of ‘freak shows’ and related enterprises is well documented, with roots ranging from curiosity cabinets to fairs and circus sideshows, charity and medical displays. For starters, see Nadja Durbach, The Spectacle of Deformity: Freak Shows and Modern British Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009), and Marlene Tromp, ed., Victorian Freaks: The Social Context of Freakery in Britain (Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 2008). 49 Quoted in Bridget Telfer, Emma Shepley, and Carole Reeves, eds, Re-framing Disability: Portraits from the Royal College of Physicians (London: Royal College of Physicians Publications, 2011), p.47. The caption of his portrait suggested a cause for his deformity (‘occasioned as his mother supposes by a fright she suffered when pregnant with him’) and stated his occupational practice: ‘he has by industry acquired the arts of writing and drawing, holding his pencil between the stump of his left arm and his cheek & guiding it with the muscles of his mouth’. 50 In 2011, the Royal College of Physicians sponsored an exhibition of rare portraits from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries in their collection, co-curated with ‘the involvement of 27 disabled participants from across the UK, who came together to discuss the historical portraits and their relevance to their lives’. The catalogue notes: ‘We disabled people have illustrated, via the social model of disability, that often our cures do not need medical intervention. Good access to buildings and public transport systems, accessible information, decent and appropriate services, education that meets our needs – removing the barriers to these “taken for granted” things will often be cure enough. These solutions are not the domain of the medical profession: they are potentially solvable by us all, particularly those of us who are providers of goods and services, or are in positions of power’ (p.12). 51 Alexander Hamilton, The History of the Ancient and Honorable Tuesday Club, ed. Robert Mincklus, vol.1 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1990), p.104. Alexander Hamilton, The Tuesday Club: A Shorter Edition of The History of the Ancient and Honorable Tuesday Club, ed. Robert Micklus (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), p.xi; see also Wilson Somerville, The Tuesday Club of Annapolis (1745–56) as Cultural Performance (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1996). 52 Hamilton, History, pp.110–11. 53 Edward W. Pitcher compares the spoof of the ‘Ugly Club’ in Charleston (which Philip Marsh and other scholars have attributed to Freneau, citing his locations and editorial roles at newspapers where Ugly Club notices appeared) to an advertisement in Portsmouth’s New Hampshire Spy (4 December 1789) that read: ‘Being their 5th anniversary, the members are desired to attend at Williams’s coffee-house, at two o-clock, in order to transact the business of day – before which time any Ugly Gentleman who wishes to become a member, will lodge his name and qualifications, sealed, at the bar of said coffee-house. Dinner







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on the table at half past three o’clock.’ The advertisement resembles other Ugly Club announcements, including the one for Liverpool’s anniversary in 1806, cited in Note 3 of this article. The 1789 Portsmouth ad ends with a verse: ‘Ugly Mortals, thither haste / Enjoy our mirth – enjoy our feast: / Bring rich red noses – long or crooked. / The Shandean nose, and noses hooked; / Bring wide stretch’d mouths, form’d for loud laughter: / Let lengthy chins come following after; / But each must bring a well form’d heart, / Or hear this sentence – OFFDEPART.’ Pitcher believes this to be the earliest reference to an Ugly Club in America, and the only one that predates Freneau’s satire. See Edward W. Pitcher, ‘Philip Freneau and the Ugly Club’, ANQ, 8/3 (1995), pp.6–8, as well as Howell, Ye Ugly Face Clubb, pp.96–100, which reprints an advertisement from a New York newspaper that advertised a special meeting at the Ugly Hall on Wall Street (noted to have been printed ‘about the period of the war between America and Great Britain’), as well as the ‘Charlestown Ugly Club’. 54 In Light on the Hill: A History of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1992), William D. Snider writes: ‘In 1838 there were the Ugly Club and the Boring Club. These groups, mostly social in nature, ended up creating disturbances. Young men disguised themselves with lamp black; insulted other students, faculty, and villagers; destroyed property; and engaged in pranks’ (p.60). William S. Powell cites UNC’s club founding in 1831 ‘for the avowed purposed of helping homesick students overcome their malady’; however, its altruistic intent soon descended into hazing, with club meetings that involved ‘horns and tin pans and lusty lungs’; see ‘Ugly Club’ in Encyclopedia of North Carolina (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2006), p.1143. For images of not-so-ugly members of the Ugly Club of Washington College, see ‘The Ugly Club at College’, Box 9, Item 279, and ‘Group portrait of the 1869’ in ‘Ugly Club’, Box 9, Item 280, Preston-Johnston family photographs, 1860–1952, Kentuckiana Digital Library. 55 The same article in Virginia’s Editors’ Drawer (1868) describes the club’s evolution: ‘As the students of the University…grew uglier and uglier, from year to year, it became apparent to those who had survived the horror of the change – that justice and common right dictated that there should be some substantial reward of the peculiar talents, for which many students were distinguished.’ One of the Club’s central rites included electing four members for special honours: ‘very ugliest’, ‘least ugly’, ‘most eminent for his conceit’, and ‘most diminutive’. They were rewarded, respectively, with a pair of boots, a fine hat, a pair of slippers, and a stick of candy. See John W. Fewell and Z.W. Ewing, eds, ‘The “Ugly Club”’, The Virginia University Magazine 6/4 (1868), pp.191–2. An earlier publication printed the ‘Song of the Ugly Club’, a verse of which sang: ‘This club all disown / Every secret but one, / And this secret you quickly may tell, sir; / For ‘tis I profess, / No more and no less, / Than just to be ugly as h – , sir.’ See Dabney

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Cosby, John M. Strother, and W.B. Ritter, eds, ‘The Song of the Ugly Club’, The University Literary Magazine 1/3 (1857), p.143. George A. Sala and William McConnell, Twice Around the Clock, Or, the Hours of the Day and Night in London (London: Richard Marsh, 1862), p.208. Victor Hugo, The Man Who Laughs, trans. William Young (New York: D. Appleton, 1869), writes of the Ugly Club: ‘This club was dedicated to deformity. They there incurred the obligation to fight, not for a pretty woman, but for an ugly man. The hall of the club was ornamented with portraits of hideous people …This club yet flourished at the opening of the nineteenth century’ (p.116). See Telfer, Shepley, and Reeves, Re-framing Disability, pp.20, 25. Susan M. Schweik, The Ugly Laws: Disability in Public (New York: New York University Press, 2009), p.293. Ibid., pp.285–6. Schweik draws upon writings by Emmanuel Levinas and Judith Butler to emphasise the ‘face’, as it exposes ‘precariousness, at once triggers and puts a restraint on aggression. And therefore this encounter produces the struggle “at the heart of ethics” between violence and nonviolence’ (286–7). Shweik notes of her conclusions: ‘The general impulses I describe here are in fact by no means limited to the United States …nor are they limited to the turn of the last century’ (p.4). Deutsch and Nussbaum, pp.2–3. Howell, pp. 33, 41, 43, 44. See also John and Sheryllynne Haggerty, ‘Visual Analytics of an Eighteenth-Century Business Network’, Enterprise & Society 11/1 (March 2010), pp.1–25. Members’ descriptions of their physical features (comparing their ugly faces to animals and masks, for instance) might be considered as performances, akin to Bakhtin’s notion of the carnival and grotesque. Additionally, as Helen Deutsch writes, ‘Eighteenth-century codes of bodily representation privileged the head, and more specifically the face, as the site of character, reading the image of the face “in symbolic relation to the subject, not in representation of it”.’ Deutsch, Resemblance and Disgrace, p.12, quoting Marcia Pointon, Hanging the Head: Portraiture and Social Formation in Eighteenth-Century England (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993), p.63. As for the demise of the Ugly Face Club in Liverpool, Arline Wilson suggests that competition from other clubs attracted membership from Liverpool’s first families and the merchant community, and also ‘did not require their members to exaggerate their less attractive features’. See Arline Wilson, ‘The Ugly Face Club’, Journal of the Liverpool History Society (2008), p.6. Classical notions of deformity have received much scholarly attention in recent years, as in Martha L. Rose’s The Staff of Oedipus: Transforming Disability in Ancient Greece (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2003) and a new edition of Robert Garland’s The Eye of the Beholder: Deformity and Disability in the Graeco-Roman World (London: Bristol Classical Press, 2010).









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64 James C. Wilson and Cynthia Lewiecki-Wilson, Embodied Rhetorics: Disability in Language and Culture (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 2001), p.3. 65 To view the collaborative online gallery of deformations, visit http://difformite. wordpress.com. The online Galerie de Difformité includes an entry for the Ugly Face Club that visually extends this article. 66 Henry James, ‘Preface’ to The Tragic Muse (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1908), p.x. 67 One example of a ‘broken body’ in art is the classical Venus de Milo with her severed arms, in contrast to Mary Duffy, the contemporary Irish performance artist who was born without arms and who imitates the Venus. See Lennard J. Davis, ‘Nude Venuses, Medusa’s Body, and Phantom Limbs: Disability and Visuality’, in Mitchell and Snyder, pp.51–70; as well as Ann Millett-Gallant, The Disabled Body in Contemporary Art (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010). 68 Davis, ‘Dr. Johnson’, p.56. 69 Gretchen E. Henderson, Galerie de Difformité (Chicago: &NOW, 2011), p.8. 70 See Monika Mueller, ‘The Less-Than-Beautiful Unite at the Ugly Club’, NPR News, 3 April 2006; Rebecca Pike, ‘Italy’s ugly club defies convention’, BBC News, 14 Sept. 2003. The emblem of Italy’s Ugly Club is the head of a wild boar, with a crest featuring a reclining man smoking a pipe with the slogan: ‘Ugliness is a virtue, beauty is slavery’. Rebecca Pike reports that the Club ‘campaigns against discrimination in the workplace based on looks. It tries to make society more aware of ugly people’s problems. It also helps people overcome their phobias and, in some cases, to find partners’. Italy’s Club also is linked to the ‘World Association of Ugly People’, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ World_Association_of_Ugly_People (accessed 20 March 2011). The resurgence in Italy is particularly interesting, since academies and clubs flourished there from the fifteenth century; as Peter Clark has written: ‘Imaginary or literary associations multiplied along with real academies…[and] English visitors to seventeenth-century Italy were dazzled by the wealth of activity’ (p.15). 71 See Bill Summers, ‘What I didn’t tell during 27 years of big league umpiring’, Baseball Digest, 19/8 (1960), pp.35–44; Marcia Tucker, A Short Life of Trouble: Forty Years in the New York Art World, ed. Liza Lou (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008), p.8. Tucker writes: ‘I formed the Ugly Club with my closest misfit friends. The Ugly Club had card-carrying members (I made the cards, each with a personal caricature), officers…and a theme song parodying the one the Mouseketeers were famous for: “U-G-L Y-C-L U-B ugly too! / Ugly Club! Ugly Club! Forever we will hang our noses low, low, low, low! / Come along and sing our song and join the Ugly Club! / U-G-L Y-C-L U-B ugly too!”’ 72 For contemporary examples, see David Horvath and Sun-Min Kim’s Ugly Guide to the Uglyverse (New York: Random House, 2008), as well as Sarah Kershaw, ‘Move Over, My Pretty, Ugly Is Here’, New York Times, 29 October

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2008, E1. The jolie-laide is an old theme in French culture, dating at least to La Place’s Laideur aimable of 1752. 73 Quoted from Voltaire’s Philosophical Dictionary in Umberto Eco, On Ugliness, trans. Alastair McEwen (New York: Rizzoli, 2007), p.10. A similar sentiment was expressed a decade earlier by the painter Allan Ramsey in his Essay on Taste (1755), arguing that Hogarth’s Line, and beauty generally, depends largely on convention. Ramsey used the example of a toad, which contains no Line of Beauty in its figure, yet ‘it hardly admits of a doubt, that a blooming she-toad is the most beautiful sight in the creation of all the crawling young gentlemen of her acquaintance’. Quoted by Paulson in Hogarth, Analysis of Beauty, p.xlvi. Richard Payne Knight used the same argument about wild boars in An Analytical Inquiry into the Principles of Taste (London: T. Payne & J. White, 1805), p.18. 74 Umberto Eco, ‘On the History of Ugliness’, VideoLectures.Net (accessed 8 October 2010). 75 By asking readers to metamorphose the physical object of the book that is a kind of body, I am asking them to participate in a creative act that might be viewed, from one cultural stance, as an act of defamation, in contrast to what otherwise might be considered communal, spiritual, and/or healing (in the vein of Navajo or Tibetan sandpaintings), not to mention a number of other connotations. As Galerie de Difformité looks forward and back like the two-headed Janus, it masquerades as a funhouse of mirrors, reflecting distortions (less of bodies than of perceptions) of whoever enters. See also Gretchen E. Henderson, ‘Consumed with (and by) Collecting: Museology as Narrative Strategy’, disClosure: a Journal of Social Theory, 19 (Summer 2010), pp.7–22.

Chapter 2 This research has been made possible by a Wellcome Trust Research Leave Award (no 082864), granted in 2007 for an ongoing project on the corporeal territories of war.

1 Robert W. Service, Rhymes of a Red Cross Man (Toronto: W. Briggs, 1916), p.54. 2 Holland Cotter, ‘Words Unspoken Are Rendered on War’s Faces’, New York Times, 22 August 2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/22/arts/design/ 22berm.html (accessed 30 December 2010). 3 Lindsay Beyerstein, Salon.com, 10 March 2007, http://www.salon.com/life/ feature/2007/03/10/berman_photo (accessed 30 December 2010). 4 Berman, interviewed by Beyerstein, Salon.com, 10 March 2007, http://www.salon. com/life/feature/2007/03/10/berman_photo (accessed 30 December 2010). 5 From Nina Berman’s interview with Richard Bradley, posted 8 June 2010, http://www.richardbradley.net/shotsinthedark/2010/06/08/6731 (accessed 30 December 2010).



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Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others (London: Penguin, 2003), p.6. Virginia Woolf, Three Guineas, ed. Naomi Black (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001), 10. Ibid. Bryan S. Turner, ‘Social Fluids: Metaphors and Meanings of Society’, Body & Society 9/1 (2003), pp.1, 6. Suzannah Biernoff, ‘Flesh Poems: Henry Tonks and the Art of Surgery’, Visual Culture in Britain 11/1 (March 2010), pp.25–47; Suzannah Biernoff, ‘The Rhetoric of Disfigurement in First World War Britain’, Social History of Medicine, published online February 2011. doi: 10.1093/shm/hkq095. For a discussion of the politics and aesthetics of trauma in Weimar Germany, see Paul Fox, ‘Confronting Post-war Shame in Weimar Germany: Trauma, Heroism and the War Art of Otto Dix’, Oxford Art Journal 29 (2006), pp.247–67. Suzannah Biernoff and Jane Tynan, ‘Making and remaking the civilian soldier: The World War I photographs of Horace Nicholls’, Journal of War and Culture Studies 5/3, Special issue: Men at War (December 2012), pp.277–93. Lady Kennet [Kathleen, Lady Scott], Self-Portrait of an Artist: From the Diaries and Memoirs of Lady Kennet, entry for 19 October 1918 (London: John Murray, 1949), p.167. An American visitor to Ladd’s studio, quoted in Caroline Alexander, ‘Faces of War’, Smithsonian magazine, http://www.smithsonianmag.com/historyarchaeology/10023711.html# (accessed 30 December 2010). Further biographical details are given in: Sarah Crellin, ‘Hollow men: Francis Derwent Wood’s Masks and Memorials, 1915–25’, Sculpture Journal 6 (2001), pp.75–87; Claudine Mitchell, ‘Facing Horror: Women’s Work, Sculptural Practice, and the Great War’, Work and the Image, vol.2, Work in Modern Times: Visual Meditations and Social Processes, ed. Valerie Mainz and Griselda Pollock (London: Ashgate, 2000), pp.33–53; and Sharon Romm and Judith Zacher, ‘Anna Coleman Ladd: Maker of Masks for the Facially Mutilated’, Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery, 70/1 ( July 1982), pp.104–11. The film is in the Wellcome Collection, and on several websites including the Smithsonian Magazine: http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history-archaeology/ mask.html (accessed 30 December 2010). http://www.wellcome.ac.uk/News/2010/News/WTX063790.htm (accessed 30 December 2010). Albert G. Bettman, ‘The Psychology of Appearances’, Northwest Medicine, 28 (1929) p.184, quoted in Sander L. Gilman, Making the Body Beautiful: A Cultural History of Aesthetic Surgery (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999), p.161. See also Reginald Pound, Gillies, Surgeon Extraordinary (London: Michael Joseph, 1964), p.39. ‘Miracles they work at Frognal’, Daily Sketch, April 1918. A collection of press clippings from the Queen’s Hospital in Frognal is held at the London Metropolitan Archives, HO2/QM/Y01/05.

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19 This is not to imply that all images of disfigured or disabled veterans provoke cultural anxiety or censorship, or that responses to horror (or ugliness) are universal. In ‘The Rhetoric of Disfigurement’, for example, I consider the very different representations of facial injury and limb loss in First World War Britain. 20 Ward Muir, The Happy Hospital (London: Simpkin, Marshall & Co., 1918), p.144. 21 Erving Goffman, Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968), p.30. 22 ‘Surgical Marvels. Restoring the Men who Went Over the Top. A National Appeal’, Sunday Chronicle, June 1918. London Metropolitan Archives, HO2/ QM/Y01/05. 23 Henry Tonks, Imperial War Museum file, item 18, 18 August, 1917. 24 Ludmilla Jordanova, Defining Features: Scientific and Medical Portraits 1660–2000 (London: Reaktion / National Portrait Gallery, 2000), p.20. Italics in original. 25 Ernst Van Alphen, ‘The portrait’s dispersal: concepts of representation and subjectivity in contemporary portraiture’, in Portraiture: Facing the Subject, ed. Joanna Woodall (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997), pp.239–56. 26 Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, trans. Richard Nice (London: Routledge, 1984), pp.190–208. Chris Shilling defines physical capital as the ‘ability of dominant groupings to define their bodies and lifestyle as superior, worthy of reward, and as metaphorically and literally, the embodiment of class’. Chris Shilling, The Body and Social Theory (London: Sage, 1993), p.140. Italics in original. 27 Goffman, Stigma, p.15. 28 I have taken this phrase from Van Alphen, p.239. Emphasis in original. 29 From Nina Berman’s interview with Richard Bradley, posted 10 June 2010, http://www.richardbradley.net/shotsinthedark/2010/06/10/nina-bermanpart-2 (accessed 30 December 2010). The most balanced account of Ziegel in the press is Ariel Leve’s ‘one year on’ piece for The Sunday Times. Leve visited Metamora with Berman. ‘Tyler Ziegel and Renee: one year on’, The Sunday Times, 11 May 2008, accessed online at http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/ news/world/us_and_americas/article3886348.ece (30 December 2010). 30 Goffman, Stigma, p.11. 31 Ibid. 32 Charles S. Peirce, ‘Logic as Semiotic: The Theory of Signs’, in The Philosophical Writings of Peirce, ed. Justus Buchler (New York: Dover, 1955), p.109. Cf. Jorgen Dines Johansen, Signs in Use: An Introduction to Semiotics (New York: Routledge, 2002), p.32. 33 Goffman, Stigma, pp.14, 163–4. 34 Ibid, p.14. 35 Ibid, p.16.







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36 Simi Linton, ‘Blind People and other Spurious Tales’, DisabilityCulture Watch, 30 November 2007, http://similinton.com/blog/?p=92 (accessed 7 November 2011). 37 Goffman, Stigma, p.14. 38 From Nina Berman’s interview with Richard Bradley, posted 10 June 2010, http://www.richardbradley.net/shotsinthedark/2010/06/10/nina-bermanpart-2/ (accessed 30 December 2010). 39 Linda Nochlin, ‘Some women realists’, Arts Magazine (May 1974), p.29, quoted in Van Alphen, p.239. 40 From Nina Berman’s interview with Richard Bradley, posted 10 June 2010, http://www.richardbradley.net/shotsinthedark/2010/06/10/nina-bermanpart-2/ (accessed 30 December 2010). 41 Berman, quoted in The New York Times’ Lens blog, ‘Showcase: The War’s Long Shadows’, 11 June 2009, http://lens.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/06/11/showcase3 (accessed 14 February 2011). 42 mad@er, response to Berman’s interview with Richard Bradley, posted 9 June 2010, http://www.richardbradley.net/shotsinthedark/2010/06/08/6731 (accessed 30 December 2010). 43 As Berman says to Richard Bradley: ‘what’s art, what is the place for journalism?’ Nina Berman: The Conclusion, posted 11 June 2010. http://www. richardbradley.net/shotsinthedark/2010/06/11/nina-berman-the-conclusion (accessed 30 December 2010). 44 For a discussion of the historical permutations of ‘likeness’, see Joanna Woodall, ‘Introduction’, Portraiture: Facing the Subject, pp.1–25.

Chapter 3 1 For a view of rearguard art criticism in England in the earlier part of the century, see my ‘Fascists and Foreigners: Patterns of Hostility to Modern Art in Britain before and after the First World War’, in David Peters Corbett, Ysanne Holt, Fiona Russell, eds, The Geographies of Englishness: Landscape and the National Past 1880–1940 (New Haven/London: Yale University Press, 2002), pp.169–98. 2 Herbert Read (with contributions by André Breton, Hugh Sykes Davies, Paul Éluard, Georges Hugnet), Surrealism (London: Faber and Faber, 1936), p.68. 3 Ibid., pp.45, 50–1. 4 Ibid, pp.63–4, 89. 5 Carl Gustav Jung, ‘Picasso’, Neue Zürcher Zeitung, 13 November 1932; reprinted in The Collected Works of C.G. Jung, vol.15, ed. Herbert Read and others (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul / New York: Pantheon, 1966), pp.137, 138. 6 Ibid., p.138.

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7 Walter Benjamin’s verdict was that Jung ‘leapt to the rescue of the Aryan soul with a therapy reserved for it alone’; see Gershom Scholem, ed., The Correspondence of Walter Benjamin and Gershom Scholem 1932–40 (New York: Schocken, 1989), p.197. Evidence of Jung’s alliance with the Nazis is presented in Andrew Samuels, The Political Psyche (London: Routledge, 1993), Chapter 12, pp.287–316. 8 Maud Dale, ‘Foreword’, Thirty Years of Pablo Picasso (London: Alex Reid and Lefevre Ltd, 1931), n.p. The text is an excerpt from Maud Dale, Picasso (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1930). 9 Ronald Fairbairn, ‘Prolegomena to a Psychology of Art’, British Journal of Psycho-Analysis 28/3 ( January 1938), p.298. 10 Melanie Klein, ‘Infantile Anxiety Situations Reflected in the Work of Art and in the Creative Impulse’, International Journal of Psycho-analysis (1929), reprinted in The Selected Melanie Klein, ed. Juliet Mitchell (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1986), p.96. 11 Ronald Fairbairn, ‘The Ultimate Basis of Aesthetic Experience’, British Journal of Psycho-Analysis 29/2 (1938), p.180. Fairbairn also suggests that such works may belong to the category of Surrealist ‘found object’ from which restitutive work is almost entirely absent. Or to use Fairbairn’s words from the second of his papers to the Scottish Branch, ‘it is really a work of art approximating qualitatively to a zero value – a minimal work of art’: Fairbairn, ‘The Ultimate Basis of Aesthetic Experience’, p.170. This passage is almost certainly the source of Richard Wollheim’s much later definition of ‘Minimal’ Art as ‘works that have a minimal art-content’ in his ‘Minimal Art’, Arts Magazine, January 1965, pp.26–32. 12 John Rickman, ‘On the Nature of Ugliness and the Creative Impulse’, International Journal of Psycho-analysis 21 (1940), p.303. 13 ‘One great question’, Rivière scribbles in the margin in a moment of doubt, ‘is why is it so important to be brave and to be able to bear whatever happens? Everything in reality depends on this (I see a lot of answers, but I don’t see all it implies).’ Joan Rivière, letter to Melanie Klein, 3 June 1940, Klein Archive, Wellcome Institute, London: file PP/KLE/C95. 14 Melanie Klein, ‘What does death represent to the individual?’ (1940), unpublished paper, Klein Archive, Wellcome Institute London, file PP/KLE/C95, p.6. 15 The relation of the London bombing to Kleinian theory is the subject of Adam Phillips, ‘Bombs Away’, History Workshop Journal 45 (Spring 1998), pp.183–98. 16 Robert Melville, ‘The Evolution of the Double Head in the Art of Picasso’, Horizon 6/35 (November 1942), pp.343–51. 17 Clement Greenberg, ‘Surrealist Painting’, Horizon 40/64 (April 1945), p.51. 18 Ibid., p.52. 19 Letter from F.J. McEwen to A.A. Longden, 24 February 1945, Public Record Office: file BW/31/20.









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20 Longden, in Paris to conclude the deal, writes despairingly back to London complaining of the ineptitude of Philip James, at that time Fine Art Director of the CEMA: ‘Philip James absolutely ruined the chance of an immediate exhibition. Picasso received P. James and McEwen and everything was going well until James…said “of course we will show your works in factories and amongst work people when we have had a show in London”. James having heard that Picasso was very red and Bolshie thought that it would go down very well. Picasso flew into a rage and left the company’. Letter from A.A. Longden to Miss Somerville of the British Council, London, 2 March 1945, Public Record Office: file BW/31/20. 21 See further the account in Yve-Alain Bois, Matisse and Picasso, exh. cat. Kimball Art Museum (Paris: Flammarion, 1998), pp.180–4. 22 Christian Xervos, ‘Pablo Picasso’, Exhibition of Paintings by Picasso and Matisse (London: Victoria and Albert Museum, 1945), n.p. Other endorsements were supplied by Leigh Ashton of the Victoria and Albert Museum, Herbert Read, Douglas Cooper and Philip James, as well as the artist Patrick Heron, who contributed both ‘Picasso’ and ‘Paul Klee 1879–1940’ to New English Weekly, 10 January and 21 February 1946 respectively. 23 Daily Telegraph, 28 December 1945; The Times, 19 December 1945. Further responses can be consulted in my Art for the Nation: Exhibitions and the London Public (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999). In relation to the Paul Klee at the National Gallery, J. Dugdale MP, Financial Secretary to the Admiralty, was overheard saying that Klee’s works were ‘fantastic, his designs would be better on carpets’; while a certain Miss L. Haber, a hairdresser from Gloucester Place, said that Klee’s colours and designs were ‘beautiful … they remind me of Walt Disney’s Fantasia’ (both were referring to Klee’s The Vegetation Stirs, which the Daily Express had printed the wrong way up on 28 December). 24 Daily Telegraph, 1 January 1946. 25 These phrases are from the letters columns of The Times: 21 December, 22 December 1945, 8 January 1946. 26 See Glasgow Evening Times, 9 January, 30 January 1946, and Glasgow Herald, 7 February 1946. 27 V. A. Firsoff, The Scotsman, 14 February 1946. 28 T. J. Honeyman, ‘Understanding Picasso’, lecture MS, National Library of Scotland, Edinburgh, Acc 9787/208, pp.2–3, 3–4. 29 Anton Ehrenzweig, ‘Unconscious Form Creation in Art’, British Journal of Medical Psychology 2 (1948), p.185. 30 Ibid., p.187. 31 Ibid., pp.189, 191; and ‘Statement by Picasso: 1923’ and ‘Statement by Picasso: 1935’, both reproduced in Alfred H. Barr, ed., Picasso: Forty Years of His Art (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1939), pp.9, 13.

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32 See Anton Ehrenzweig, The Psychoanalysis of Artistic Vision and Hearing: An Introduction to a Theory of Unconscious Perception [London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1953] (New York: G. Braziller, 1965), pp.191, 195. 33 See Ehrenzweig, The Psychoanalysis of Artistic Vision and Hearing, p.115. The Segal paper is ‘A Psycho-Analytical approach to Aesthetics’, read in 1947 and published in the International Journal of Psycho-analysis 33/2 (1952), reprinted in Melanie Klein, Paula Heimann, and Roger Money-Kyrle, eds, New Directions in Psycho-analysis: The Significance of Infant Conflict in the Pattern of Adult Behaviour (London: Tavistock / New York: Basic Books, 1955), pp.384–405. 34 Herbert Read, ‘Psycho-Analysis and the Problem of Aesthetic Value’, International Journal of Psycho-analysis 33/2 (1952), pp.73–82. 35 These lithographs are F. Mourlot, Picasso Lithographie, Monte Carlo, 1949–56, vol.1, Nos. I–XI. 36 Michael Balint, ‘Notes on the Dissolution of Object-Representation in Modern Art’, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 10/4 (1952), reprinted in Balint, Problems of Human Pleasure and Behaviour (London: Hogarth Press, 1957), pp.121, 123. According to Balint, his paper was stimulated by a discussion between Masud Khan and Herbert Read at the British Psychoanalytical Society in June 1951. I have been unable to trace these papers. 37 Ernst Gombrich, ‘Psychoanalysis and the History of Art’ (1953), Meditations on a Hobby Horse (London: Phaidon, 1963), p.43. The text was first printed in the International Journal of Psycho-analysis 35 (1954), pp.401–11. 38 Ibid. 39 Ibid.

Chapter 4 1 Roger Fry, ‘The Grafton Gallery: An Apologia’, The Nation (9 November 1912), reprinted in A Roger Fry Reader, ed. Christopher Reed (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), p.113. Quoted by Arthur Danto in The Abuse of Beauty (Chicago: Open Court, 2003), p.35. 2 Danto, Abuse of Beauty, pp.36–7, 88–92. The image caption for Matisse’s Blue Nude, p.36, reads: ‘Possible great, definitely unbeautiful’ (!) Danto’s criticism oddly turns Fry’s own claims against him. At p.45 we read of Fry that ‘it failed to occur to him, as a theorist, that whole artistic traditions have existed in which beauty was never the point at all’. Compare Fry: ‘Fixing their attention almost exclusively on a rather dull academic period of Greco-Roman figure art, the older critics arrived at the idea of a beautiful type…they failed to notice how important a part the ugly played in art, what great artists, what whole periods and schools of great art were entirely innocent of any desire for this normal and typical beauty, and were devoting themselves instead to cultivating the characteristic even to the verge and beyond of the grotesque.’ A Roger Fry Reader, p.65.











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3 Arthur Danto, ‘Kalliphobia in Contemporary Art’, Art Journal 63/2 (2004), pp.24–35, this quote p.27. Cf. Abuse of Beauty, p.33, at the header ‘Good Art May Not Be Beautiful’. 4 ‘Review of Exhibitions of Mondrian, Kandinsky and Pollock; of the Annual Exhibition of the American Abstract Artists, and of the Exhibition European Artists in America’, The Nation, 7 April 1945, reprinted in Clement Greenberg, The Collected Essays and Criticism: Arrogant Purpose, 1945–49, ed. John O’Brian (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), p.17, my italics. Cf. Danto, Abuse of Beauty, p.46. 5 Danto, ‘Kalliphobia’, p.28. For Danto, ugliness thus has not just a moral but also a didactic function, serving to involve the spectator in the refusal of the political status quo. 6 This sounds odd partly because since Kant we are unused to attributing cognitive content to aesthetic judgements. For a dissenting voice, see Mary Mothersill, Beauty Restored (Oxford: Clarendon, 1984). 7 The classic publication is Hubert Klocker, ed., Viennese Actionism 1960–71, 2 vols. (Klagenfurt: Ritter, 1989). 8 See Hubert Klocker, ‘Viennese Waltzes: Viennese Actionism and the Law’, in The Trials of Art, ed. Daniel McClean (London: Ridinghouse, 2007), pp.273–86. Even the 1970 anthology of Actionist documents, Bildkompendium, edited by Peter Weibel and VALIE EXPORT, brought with it a pornography trial. 9 Murielle Gagnebin, Fascination de la Laideur: la main et le temps (Geneva: Editions L’Age d’Homme, 1978), p.327. 10 Ibid., pp.296, 301. These statements are about ‘le Body-art’; specific Actionists are named on p.299. 11 Adrian Henri, Total Art: Environments, Happenings, and Performance (New York and Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1974), p.169. Muehl also spelled his surname ‘Mühl’; both forms are common in the literature. 12 Henri, quoting Nitsch’s Orgien Mysterien Theater (Frankfurt am Main: März, 1969), p.168. ‘Aesthetic substitute’ is a formulation of Nitsch’s from the same passage. 13 Antonin Artaud, Le théâtre et son double (1938) was translated as Das Theater und sein Double (Suhrkamp: Frankfurt am Main, 1964). Peter Weibel sought to combine Marcusian non-affirmative art with Artaudian anti-sociality in his 1966 analysis of Muehl and Brus, ‘Von den Möglichkeiten einer nichtaffirmativen Kunst’, in Weibel, Kritik der Kunst: Kunst der Kritik (Vienna/ München: Jugend & Volk, 1973), pp.34–43. 14 Herbert Marcuse, ‘Art as Form of Reality’, New Left Review 74 ( July–August 1972), pp.51–8. Tellingly, Marcuse begins by noting the currency of the ‘end of art’ thesis, and citing contemporary forms of this end, such as the Living Theatre. The text was first delivered as a lecture at the Guggenheim Museum in

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New York in 1969, and printed in Edward Fry, ed., On the Future of Art (New York: Viking, 1970), pp.123–34. Cf. ‘Art in the One-Dimensional Society’, an 1967 lecture printed in Marcuse, Art and Liberation, ed. Douglas Kellner (Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2007), pp.113–22: ‘Knowledge of the truth is painful and ugly in most cases, and truth in turn can be called beautiful only in a highly desensualised, sublimated manner, for example, if we speak of the beauty of a mathematical solution’ (p.119). Henri, though he does not make much of it, notes: ‘The film-maker Kurt Kren has been an integral part of the Vienna Group’s activities, collaborating with all the artists, in particular with Günter Brus’ (p.169). Peter Gorsen argues that photographers submitted to the aesthetic ideals of the Actionists in ‘Viennese Actionism and Photography’, in Julius Hummel, ed., Wiener Aktionismus: Sammlung Hummel (Milano: Mazzotta, 2005), p.120. Hanno Millesi, in his monograph on Actionist photography, sees photos and films as necessary, but subservient means of capturing actions. See Millesi, Zur Fotografie im Wiener Aktionismus (Wolkersdorf: Fluss, 1998), p.7. Rather undermining this thesis, Millesi mentions several conflicts between filmmakers and Actionists. Gagnebin, Fascination de la Laideur, p.300, does say that the body artist hopes for a ‘fraternal look’ (une regard frère) from the crowd, but this look is frankly an imagined one – on the part of Gagnebin and the hypothetical body artist. Klocker, Viennese Actionism, vol.2, p.270 [the English translation is taken from the catalogue]. Klocker (quoting from the poster), Viennese Actionism, vol.2, p.189. The German title ‘Versumpfung einer Venus’ plays on the word Sumpf (swamp, bog) to suggest the ‘bogging down’ of an ideal; the verb versumpfen is also used in the vernacular to describe a person that is ‘plastered’ or ‘wasted’. The studio action Degradation of a Female Body was not the first action of the group documented by Ludwig Hoffenreich, as Klocker claims in Viennese Actionism, vol.2, p.189. Photographs of the 1963 festival attributed to him are already included in the 1970 Bildkompendium. Millesi prints photos of the 1963 police intervention during the festival, shot by Hoffenreich according to his credits (p.39). At the end of the text, which is printed together with photographs of slaughtered lambs, Nitsch returns to the comparison between ‘sado-masochistic laceration’ and ‘extreme breakthrough of drives’. Eva Badura-Triska, ‘Inszenierte Fotografie. Bilder nach dem Ausstieg aus dem Tafelbild’, in Hubert Klocker, Eva Badura-Triska, eds, Wiener Aktionismus: Kunst und Aufbruch im Wien der 1960er Jahre (Cologne: Walter König, 2012), pp.69–113. Thames and Hudson will distribute an English version under the title Vienna Actionism: Art and Upheaval in 1960s Vienna. I would like to thank Eva Badura-Triska for sending me pre-print proofs of this article. In my ‘The



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Informative Public of Performance: A Study of Viennese Actionism, 1965– 1970’, TDR - The Drama Review 57/1 (Spring 2013), pp.137–51, I examine how the Actionists are also carefully staging the site in some instances. Badura-Triska uses the word ‘tableaus’ in ‘Inszenierte Fotografie’ and also draws attention to pauses in Actionist events, held so that photography could take place. Peter Weibel claims that he invented the group name Wiener Aktionismus, a claim confirmed by Brus on various occasions. Julia Kristeva, whose 1980 Pouvoirs de l’horreur was the theoretical framework for abject art (even though her aim is not at all visual), described the abject as ‘edged with the sublime’. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), p.11. The sublime was in the 1980s often opposed to beauty, as a category of the unconceivable or unrepresentable (Burke and Kant as read by Lyotard). Kristeva herself uses the word ‘beauty’ to describe the pleasurable falling apart of language, identity and politics through the abject, particularly in Ferdinand Céline’s work. Kristeva’s book ends by distinguishing once more between civilisation and abjection: literature is on the side of abjection, ‘the sublime point at which the abject collapses in a burst of beauty that overwhelms us––and “that cancels our existence” (Céline)’ (p.210). See also p.206 on ‘a brilliant and dangerous beauty…’ The crediting of the action for Piss Flowers is presumably due to curators at the University of Brighton, which owns the work. I obtained it from http://fineart. ac.uk/works.php?imageid=bt0005 (accessed 20 February 2012). See also Andrea Schlieker, Helen Chadwick: Effluvia (London: Serpentine Gallery, 1994). Scarry, On Beauty and Being Just (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001), p.52. After the last meeting of Scarry’s seminar on beauty at Harvard University, which I attended in 2004 as a fairly outspoken sceptic of any connection between beauty and the morally good, Prof. Scarry gave me a cutout palm tree, perhaps to encourage me to get over what she in On Beauty calls ‘failed generosity’, the ‘error’ (p.14) of not acknowledging beauty – a palm tree ‘greets’ her until she understands its beauty (p.48ff.). I remained a sceptic, but Scarry’s profound knowledge of literature and aesthetics, and the motivating discussions were of great help for this book. See Danto, Abuse of Beauty, pp.50, 52, on the misguided appreciation of Damien Hirst’s maggots. Danto’s distinction between ‘external’ and ‘internal’ beauty, detailed in The Abuse of Beauty, appears already in the 1994 text ‘Beauty and Morality’, in Arthur Danto, Embodied Meanings (New York: Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux), Ch.6, and in his ‘Art, Essence, History, and Beauty: A Reply to Carrier, a Response to Higgins’, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 54/3 (Summer 1996), p.287. Danto does admit with Kant that beauty can ‘symbolize morality’ (Abuse of Beauty, p.40), but his own Hegelian view is that beauty is a form of meaning:

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‘The meaning of a work of art is an intellectual product…and the beauty of the work, if indeed it is beautiful, is seen as entailed by that meaning’ (p.13). Note that one cannot, on this theory, find beauty in a language one does not understand, as people often claim to do. Not that Danto lumps their politics together. But it is notable that he, like Scarry, does not give examples of fascist or even Counter-Reformation ‘political beauty’. Would Danto deny the possibility of such beauty on moral grounds, as Scarry did in conversation with me? It seems so, if beauty is entailed by the meaning, and the meaning is regarded by the spectator as morally repulsive. Arthur Danto, ‘The Artworld’, Journal of Philosophy 61/19 (15 October 1964), pp.571–84, is his first and sharpest statement of the theory-dependence of all art. This, as he has often repeated, is an ‘essentialist’ account of art, which makes art essentially historical: it is what it means, which is a historical matter. Note, however, that the account as it stands says nothing about the historical nature of beauty or ugliness. In 2007, the Hermann Nitsch Museum opened in Mistelbach, Austria; the following year, the Museo Archivio Laboratorio per le Arti Contemporanee Hermann Nitsch opened in Naples. W.J.T. Mitchell, ‘The Violence of Public Art: “Do the Right Thing”’, Critical Inquiry 16/4 (Summer 1990), pp.880–99, quote p.888. On the competition and the heated discussion about Lin’s design, see for example Patrick Hagopian, ‘The Commemorative Landscape of the Vietnam War’, in Places of Commemoration and Landscape Design, ed. Joachim Wolschke-Buhlmann (Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks, 2010), p.321, and Kirk Savage, Monument Wars: Washington, DC, The National Mall, and the Transformation of the Memorial Landscape (Berkeley/Los Angeles: The University of California Press, 2009), particularly pp.251f. Savage’s cover image is a close-up of visitors interacting with the memorial. On the role of the photographs of these ‘engaged mourners’ in the press, see Geraldine A. Johnson, ‘Sculpture, Photography, and the Politics of Public Space. Serra’s Tilted Arc and Lin’s Vietnam Veterans Memorial’, in Sculpture and Photography: Envisioning the Third Dimension, ed. Geraldine A. Johnson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp.213ff. ‘Expression and Representation in the Graphic Arts’, A Roger Fry Reader, pp.61–71, this quote p.67. Ibid. Amelia Jones, ‘Beauty Discourse and the Logic of Aesthetics’, X-Tra Contemporary Art Journal 2/3 (Spring 1999). Jones’s text, first given as a lecture in 1997, was accompanied by a ‘pro-beauty’ essay by Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe. An extended version of Jones’s text can be found on the XTra website, http://strikingdistance.com/xtra/XTra100/v2n3/ajones1.html (accessed 7 February 2012).



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1 Antonio Palomino de Castro y Velasco, El Museo pictórico y escala óptica, III, El Parnaso español pintoresco laureado, Madrid, 1724, p.311: ‘No se deleitaba tanto Ribera en pintar cosas dulces, y devotas, como en expressar cosas horrendas, y asperas: quales son los cuerpos de los ancianos, secos, arrugados, y consumidos, con el rostro enjuto, y malicento; todo hecho puntualmente por el natural, con extremado primor, fuerza, y elegante manejo.’ For the English translation, see Antonio Palomino de Castro y Velasco, Lives of the Eminent Spanish Painters and Sculptors, trans. Nina Ayala Mallory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), p.123. 2 At the beginning of his Poetics, Aristotle states: ‘Speaking generally, poetry seems to owe its origin to two particular causes, both natural. From childhood men have an instinct for representation, and in this respect man differs from the other animals that he is far more imitative and learns his first lessons by representing things. And then there is the enjoyment people always get from representations. What happens in actual experience proves this, for we enjoy looking at accurate likenesses of things which are themselves painful to see, obscene beasts, for instance, and corpses. The reason is this. Learning things gives great pleasure not only to philosophers but also in the same way to all other men, though they share this pleasure only to a small degree. The reason why we enjoy seeing likenesses is that, as we look, we learn and infer what each is, for instance, “that is so and so.” If we have never happened to see the original, our pleasure is not due to the representation as such but to the technique or the colour or some other such cause.’ Aristotle, The Poetics, trans. W. Hamilton Fyfe (London: William Heinemann and Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1946), pp.13–15. See also Harald Hendrix, ‘The Repulsive Body: Images of Torture in Seventeenth-Century Naples’, in Florike Egmond and Robert Zwijnenberg, eds, Bodily Extremities: Preoccupations with the Human Body in Early Modern European Culture (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003), pp.82–3. 3 Retratos de los Españoles Ilustres con un Epítome de sus Vidas (Madrid: Imprenta Real, 1791) n.p. See also Andrew Schulz, Goya’s Caprichos: Aesthetics, Perception, and the Body (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), pp.84–5.

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Chapter 5 The seed of this essay was planted in a presentation on Ribera’s grotesque heads at The British Museum, delivered at the Graphic Arts Group in 2009. I would like to thank Mark McDonald and Patricia Rubin for inviting me to speak in this forum, and the group’s members for their helpful comments and questions. Special thanks go to Andrei Pop and Mechtild Widrich for inviting me to participate in their session Ugliness as a Challenge to Art History at the 2011 AAH Conference, and to the following colleagues for their invaluable suggestions: Caroline Arscott, Judy Corbalis, Frédérique Desbuissons, Craig Felton, Jim Harris, Karin Kyburz and Sheila McTighe.





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4 The other artists represented are Juan de Herrera, Pablo de Céspedes, Diego Velázquez, Alonso Cano and Bartolomé Esteban Murillo. 5 Nicola Spinosa originally suggested that Ribera is showing a preliminary drawing for the print. See Alfonso E. Pérez Sánchez and Nicola Spinosa, L’opera completa del Ribera (Milan: Rizzoli, 1978), p.84. 6 Jonathan Brown, ‘Jusepe de Ribera as Printmaker’, in Alfonso E. Pérez Sánchez and Nicola Spinosa, eds, Jusepe de Ribera, 1591–1652, exh. cat. (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1992), p.167. 7 Related to the Studies of Ears is a drawing of a Bat and Two Ears, c.1620– 5, brush, red wash and red chalk on paper, 16 × 27.8 cm. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Hannah Friedman is currently undertaking new research on this drawing in her PhD thesis on Ribera at the Johns Hopkins University. 8 Andrea Bayer in Jusepe de Ribera, 1591–1652, cat. 77, pp.179–80. For a recent study of anatomical books, see Deanna Petherbridge, ‘Bodies in Pieces: Anatomical and Drawing Manuals for Artists’, in The Primacy of Drawing: Histories and Theories of Practice (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2010), pp.234–59. 9 Brown in Jusepe de Ribera, 1591–1652, p.168. 10 Odoardo Fialetti, Tutte le parti del corpo humano diviso in più pezzi (Venice: Justus Sadeler, 1608) and Guercino, Primi elementi per introdurre i giovani al disegno, 1619. See also E.H. Gombrich, Art and Illusion: A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation (London: Phaidon, 2002), pp.137–9. 11 Andrew Robison made this observation, noted in Jonathan Brown, Jusepe de Ribera: Prints and Drawings, exh. cat. (Princeton, NJ: The Art Museum, Princeton University, 1973), p.70. 12 Jonathan Brown, Jusepe de Ribera, Grabador: 1591–1652, exh. cat. (Valencia and Madrid: Sala de Exposiciones de la Fundación Caja de Pensiones, Valencia, and Calcografía Nacional, Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando, Madrid, 1989), p.26. 13 Brown in Jusepe de Ribera, 1591–1652, p.169. 14 Bayer in Jusepe de Ribera, 1591–1652, cat. 81, p.184. 15 Lubomír Konečný, ‘Shades of Leonardo in an Etching by Jusepe de Ribera’, Gazette des Beaux-Arts 6/95 (1980), pp.91–4. 16 Jonathan Brown, ‘The Prints and Drawings of Ribera’, in Craig Felton and William B. Jordan, eds, Jusepe de Ribera, lo Spagnoletto, 1591–1652, exh. cat. (Fort Worth, TX: Kimbell Art Museum, 1982), pp.74–5, and Sophie Harent and Martial Guédron, eds, Beautés monstres: curiosités, prodiges et phénomènes, exh. cat. (Nancy: Musée des Beaux-Arts de Nancy, 2009), cat. 4, pp.203–4. 17 See also Bayer in Jusepe de Ribera, 1591–1652, cat. 81, p.184. 18 E.H. Gombrich, ‘The Grotesque Heads’, in The Heritage of Apelles: Studies in the art of the Renaissance, III (Oxford: Phaidon, 1976), pp.57–75.













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19 For a range of studies on art and curiosity in the early modern period, see the special issue of Word & Image 2/4 (October–December 1995), in particular Peter Parshall, ‘Introduction: Art and curiosity in northern Europe’, pp.327–31, Christopher S. Wood, ‘“Curious Pictures” and the art of description’, pp.332– 52, Claudia Swan, ‘Ad vivum, naer het leven, from the life: defining a mode of representation’, pp.353–72, and Lorraine Daston, ‘Curiosity in early modern science’, pp.391–404. 20 For an overview of Ribera’s relations with the Spanish viceroys of Naples, see Gabriele Finaldi, ‘Ribera’s Viceroy Patrons’, in ‘Aspects of the Life and Work of Jusepe de Ribera, 1591–1652’, PhD thesis, The Courtauld Institute of Art, University of London, 1995, pp.136–98. This chapter has been published in an updated and abbreviated form: ‘Ribera, the Viceroys of Naples and the King: Some Observations on their Relations’, in José Luis Colomer, ed., Arte y diplomacia de la Monarquía Hispánica en el siglo XVII (Madrid: Fernando Villaverde, 2003), pp.379–87. 21 This Ribera also does in his numerous torture drawings, as I have argued in my paper ‘The Bound Man: Ribera’s Drawings of Torture in Context’, read at the conference Drawn to Spain: Showcasing New Research on Spanish Drawings, The Courtauld Institute of Art, 14 January 2012. 22 For an extensive study of Ribera’s depictions of suffering, see Edward Payne, ‘Violence and Corporeality in the Art of Jusepe de Ribera’, PhD thesis, The Courtauld Institute of Art, University of London, 2012. For a recent and pertinent discussion of the tensions between horror and delight in early modern imagery of deformities, see Elena Lazzarini, ‘Wonderful Creatures: Early Modern Perceptions of Deformed Bodies’, Oxford Art Journal 34/3, Special Issue on Early Modern Horror (October 2011), pp.415–31. 23 Brown in Jusepe de Ribera, 1591–1652, p.167. 24 Brown, Jusepe de Ribera: Prints and Drawings, p.25. 25 On Ribera’s journey from Spain to Italy, see José Milicua, ‘From Játiva to Naples’, in Jusepe de Ribera, 1591–1652, pp.9–17. For the most recent studies of Ribera’s early years in Italy, see José Milicua and Javier Portús, eds, El joven Ribera, exh. cat. (Madrid: Museo Nacional del Prado, 2011), and Gianni Papi, Ribera a Roma (Soncino: Edizioni dei Soncino, 2007). For the most recent biographical accounts of Ribera’s life and works, see Craig Felton, ‘Jusepe de Ribera, Called “lo Spagnoletto” (1591–1652): A Spanish Painter in Baroque Italy’, in Jusepe de Ribera’s Mary Magdalene in a New Context: The Prado at the Meadows, Volume 2, exh. cat. (Dallas, TX: Meadows Museum, Southern Methodist University, 2011), pp.35–77, and Javier Portús, Ribera, trans. Richard Lewis Rees (Barcelona: Ediciones Polígrafa, 2011). 26 On the Duke of Osuna, see Finaldi, ‘Aspects of the Life and Work of Jusepe de Ribera’, pp.142–53. 27 Finaldi, ‘Aspects of the Life and Work of Jusepe de Ribera’, pp.142–3.

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28 Following the Duke’s death, his widow donated ten paintings to the Collegiate Church of Osuna including this series and a Crucifixion by Ribera which she herself commissioned. See Gabriele Finaldi, ‘The Patron and date of Ribera’s “Crucifixion” at Osuna’, Burlington Magazine 133/1060 (1991), pp.445–6. 29 Rosario Villari, ‘Naples in the Time of Ribera’, in Jusepe de Ribera, lo Spagnoletto, pp.41–2, and Finaldi, ‘Aspects of the Life and Work of Jusepe de Ribera’, pp.148–9. 30 Cardinal Borgia was in Naples from June to December 1620; Cardinal Zapata, from 1620 to December 1622. See Finaldi, ‘Aspects of the Life and Work of Jusepe de Ribera’, pp.153–4. 31 On the grounds of style and technique, Ribera’s earliest forays into etching include his prints of Saint Sebastian, Saint Bernardino of Siena and The Poet, all dated c.1620–1. 32 Brown in Jusepe de Ribera, lo Spagnoletto, p.70. 33 Brown, Jusepe de Ribera: Prints and Drawings, no 4, pp.66–7. 34 On the significance of printed dedications, see Michael Bury, The Print in Italy: 1550–1620 (London: British Museum Press, 2001), pp.78, 126. 35 ‘I dedicate my works and this print to the Most Serene Prince Filiberto my Sir / in Naples in the year 1624. / Jusepe de Ribera, Spaniard’ 36 Brown, Jusepe de Ribera: Prints and Drawings, p.18, n.8. For the most recent and comprehensive study of Filiberto, his artistic and political context, see Xavier F. Salomon, Van Dyck in Sicily, 1624–1625: Painting and the Plague, exh. cat. (London: Dulwich Picture Gallery, 2012), pp.23–8. 37 On Van Dyck’s portrait and Filiberto’s armour, see Salomon, Van Dyck in Sicily, cats. 2 and 3, pp.58–67. 38 Brown, Jusepe de Ribera: Prints and Drawings, p.18. For an account of Filiberto’s funeral, see Cesáreo Fernández Duro, ed., Disquisiciones náuticas, vol.3: Navegaciones de los muertos y vanidades de los vivos (Madrid: Aribau, 1878), pp.366–83. For a communication from the Duke of Osuna to the King of Spain about Filiberto, see Coleccion de documentos inéditos para la historia de España, vol.45 (Madrid: Viuda de Calero, 1864), pp.222–6. 39 Brown originally thought this impression to be a trial proof. See Brown, Jusepe de Ribera: Prints and Drawings, no 13, pp.74–5. 40 Although Peter Dreyer argues that a later hand may have pasted on the dedication and extended the paper, it is equally plausible that Ribera himself may have added it to this single impression of Saint Jerome Reading. This possibility then complicates the question of Ribera’s order of operations when making the respective Jerome and Bartholomew prints: the Jerome without the inscription could well have preceded the Bartholomew before Ribera experimented with adding the inscription. See Peter Dreyer, ‘Note on “Jusepe de Ribera”’, Print Quarterly 7/2 (1990), pp.180–1.













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41 I am indebted to Tristan Weddigen for this observation. A similar pair of slit breeches is worn by the sitter in Giovanni Battista Moroni’s The Tailor (‘Il Tagliapanni’), 1565–70, oil on canvas, 99.5 × 77cm. The National Gallery, London. There is an intimate relationship between flaying and fabric in Ribera’s art, as I have argued in my paper ‘Skinning the Surface: Ribera’s Executions of Bartholomew, Silenus and Marsyas’, read at the conference Bild-Riss: Textile Öffnungen im ästhetischen Diskurs, Kunsthistorisches Institut, Universität Zürich, 24–5 November 2011. 42 Brown in Jusepe de Ribera, 1591–1652, p.169. 43 William Bell Scott, Murillo and the Spanish School of Painting (London, 1873), pp.48–9, quoted in Nigel Glendinning and Hilary Macartney, eds, Spanish Art in Britain and Ireland, 1750–1920: Studies in Reception in Memory of Enriqueta Harris Frankfort (Woodbridge: Tamesis, 2010), p.110. 44 On the relationship between suffering and ugliness, see Umberto Eco, ed., ‘Passion, Death, Martyrdom’, in On Ugliness, trans. Alastair McEwen (New York: Rizzoli, 2007), pp.43–71. 45 Bayer in Jusepe de Ribera, 1591–1652, cat. 81, p.184. 46 Ibid., cat. 82, p.185. 47 Samuel Y. Edgerton Jr., Pictures and Punishment: Art and Criminal Prosecution during the Florentine Renaissance (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985), p.134. 48 For two complementary studies of the Kunstkammer, see Horst Bredekamp, The Lure of Antiquity and the Cult of the Machine: The Kunstkammer and the Evolution of Nature, Art and Technology, trans. Allison Brown (Princeton, NJ: Markus Weiner Publishers, 1995), and Oliver Impey and Arthur MacGregor, eds, The Origins of Museums: The Cabinet of Curiosities in Sixteenth- and SeventeenthCentury Europe (London: House of Stratus, 2001). See also Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann, ‘Remarks on the Collections of Rudolf II: the Kunstkammer as a Form of Representatio’, Art Journal 38/1 (Autumn 1978), pp.22–8. 49 On the Duke of Alcalá, see Finaldi, ‘Aspects of the Life and Work of Jusepe de Ribera’, pp.157–70. See also Jonathan Brown and Richard L. Kagan, ‘The Duke of Alcalá: His Collection and Its Evolution’, Art Bulletin 69/2 (1987), pp.231–55. 50 For the most extensive study of The Bearded Woman, see James Clifton, ‘Ad vivum mire depinxit: Toward a Reconstruction of Ribera’s Art Theory’, Storia dell’Arte 83 (1995), pp.111–32. This excellent article unfortunately treats Ribera’s advocacy of ‘naturalism’ over ‘classicism’, and thus the practice ‘colorire dal naturale’ over the foundations of ‘disegno’, without taking into account the artist’s prolific career as a draughtsman. 51 For the Latin transcription and English translation of the inscription, see Clifton, ‘Ad vivum mire depinxit’, p.112: ‘Behold! Great Wonder of Nature, Magdalena Ventura from Oppido at Accumoli, commonly called Samnites in Abruzzo of the Neapolitan Kingdom, 52 years old, and what is strange is that when she was

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37 she began to become hairy and grew a beard so long and thick that it seems more like that of some bearded gentleman than of a woman who had borne three sons by her husband Felici de Amici, whom you see present here. Jusepe de Ribera, Spaniard, distinguished with the Cross of Christ, another Apelles of his time, ordered by Ferdinand II, Third Duke of Alcalá, Viceroy of Naples, painted it marvelously from life, on the 14th Kalends of March, in the year 1631.’ Ibid., pp.125–6. Ibid., pp.124–5. Ibid., p.120. Finaldi, ‘Aspects of the Life and Work of Jusepe de Ribera’, p.161. On the Duke of Medina de las Torres, see Finaldi, pp.182–7. See also Marcus B. Burke, ‘Paintings by Ribera in the collection of the Duque de Medina de las Torres’, Burlington Magazine 131/1031 (February 1989), pp.132–6. Burke, ‘Paintings by Ribera’, p.132. Felton, Jusepe de Ribera, lo Spagnoletto, cat. 33, p.211, and Denise Maria Pagano in Jusepe de Ribera, 1591–1652, cat. 60, p.149. Finaldi proposes that it may have been commissioned by a wealthy Flemish merchant then resident in Naples, Ferdinand Van den Eynden (d. 1674). See Gabriele Finaldi, ‘Portrait and Reality: Ribalta, Zurbarán, Ribera’, in The Spanish Portrait from El Greco to Picasso, exh. cat. (Madrid: Museo Nacional del Prado, 2004), p.152. Felton, Jusepe de Ribera, lo Spagnoletto, cat. 33, p.211, argues that the beggar boy, with his clubfoot and rotting teeth, recalls the artist’s early prints and drawings of grotesque deformities; Denise Maria Pagano in Jusepe de Ribera, 1591–1652, cat. 60, p.146, insists that the image is not grotesque, and that it does not ‘conform to the taste for the unusual and disfigured seen in numerous drawings executed early in Ribera’s career’. Felton, Jusepe de Ribera, lo Spagnoletto, cat. 33, p.211. Brown and Kagan, ‘The Duke of Alcalá’, pp.242–3, and Pérez Sánchez in Jusepe de Ribera, 1591–1652, cat. 22, p.90. Bernardo De Dominici, Vite dei pittori scultori ed architetti napoletani, vol.3 (Naples: Tipografia Trani, 1844), p.135: ‘Tutte queste sono intagliate di sua mano ad acqua forte: come ancora, sono alcune teste deformi intagliate per ischerzo, una delle quali disegnata a penna, ed un altra con lapis nero, con altri disegni di sua mano rappresentanti S. Paolo, alcuni Santi romiti, e mezze figure di S. Girolamo, e dei Santi Apostoli, ed altri suoi capricci, si conservano nella nostra raccolta di disegni originali.’ Finaldi, ‘Aspects of the Life and Work of Jusepe de Ribera’, p.200. For newly discovered drawings of grotesque heads by Ribera, see Gabriele Finaldi, ‘Dibujos inéditos y otros poco conocidos de Jusepe de Ribera’, Boletín del Museo del Prado 23/41 (2005), pp.24–44, and Nicholas Turner, ‘A Grotesque Head by Jusepe de Ribera in the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford’, Master Drawings 48/4, Special Issue on Drawings in Spain (Winter 2010), pp.456–62.









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64 Brown, Jusepe de Ribera, Grabador, p.26. On the origin of caricature in the Carracci workshop and its connection to Annibale Carracci’s Arti di Bologna series, see Sheila McTighe, The Imaginary Everyday: Genre Painting and Prints in Italy and France, 1580–1670 (New York and Pittsburgh: The Bownes Library, 2007), pp.131–5, and idem, ‘Perfect Deformity, Ideal Beauty, and the Imaginaire of Work: the Reception of Annibale Carracci’s Arti di Bologna in 1646’, Oxford Art Journal 16/1 (1993), pp.75–91. On the role of psychology in the development of caricature, see Gombrich, ‘The Experiment of Caricature’, in Art and Illusion, pp.279–303. 65 Guédron in Beautés monstres, cat. 10, p.154. 66 Ibid. 67 McTighe, The Imaginary Everyday, pp.132–3. 68 Brown in Jusepe de Ribera, 1591–1652, p.169. 69 The first edition was published in Latin as De humana physiognomonia, Vico Equense, 1586. It was subsequently translated into Italian, and later editions include Della fisionomia dell’huomo, Padua, 1623. For a comparison with Charles Le Brun’s (1619–90) studies of expression, see Jennifer Montagu, The Expression of the Passions: The Origin and Influence of Charles Le Brun’s Conférence sur l’expression générale et particulière (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1994), p.20. 70 McTighe, The Imaginary Everyday, p.132. 71 Salvatore Battaglia, Grande dizionario della lingua italiana, vol.2 (Turin: Unione tipografico-editrice torinese, 1984), pp.410–14. 72 Manuela Kahn-Rossi, ‘Pier Francesco Mola e la caricatura’, in Pier Francesco Mola, 1612–1666, exh. cat. (Lugano and Rome: Museo Cantonale d’Arte and Musei Capitolini, 1989), p.126. 73 For the most recent and comprehensive studies of Arcimboldo, see Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann, Arcimboldo: Visual Jokes, Natural History, and Still-Life Painting (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), and Sylvia FerinoPagden, ed., Arcimboldo: 1526–1593, exh. cat. (Paris and Vienna: Musée du Luxembourg and Kunsthistorisches Museum, 2007). See also Giancarlo Maiorino, The Portrait of Eccentricity: Arcimboldo and the Mannerist Grotesque (University Park and London: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1991), and The Arcimboldo Effect: Transformations of the Face from the Sixteenth to the Twentieth Century, exh. cat. (Venice: Palazzo Grassi, 1987). 74 Andrea Bayer, ‘A Note on Ribera’s Drawing of Niccolò Simonelli’, Metropolitan Museum Journal 30 (1995), pp.73–80. Bayer’s argument for the Man in a Toga representing a caricature of Simonelli remains contentious. 75 Finaldi has noted that the inscription on the banner does not seem to be in Ribera’s hand (it may, in fact, signify ownership), and that it was perhaps Salvator Rosa (1615–73) who gave Simonelli the drawing. See Finaldi, ‘Aspects of the Life and Work of Jusepe de Ribera’, pp.268–9, 278. For the most recent

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study of caricatures by Pier Francesco Mola (1612–66) depicting Niccolò Simonelli (fl. 1636–71), see Edward Payne, ‘Dealing with Art: Pier Francesco Mola’s Caricature of Three Ecclesiastics’, immediations: The Courtauld Institute of Art Journal of Postgraduate Research 2/2 (2009), pp.45–59. 76 Jonathan Brown et al., The Spanish Manner: Drawings from Ribera to Goya, exh. cat. (New York: The Frick Collection, 2010), cat. 9 and Fig.6, p.38. 77 I am indebted to Caroline Arscott for this suggestion. 78 Giambattista Marino, La Murtoleide, fischiate del Cavalier Marino, con la Marineide risate del Murtola (Norinbergh: Per Ioseph Stamphier, 1619), Fischiara 33, p.35: ‘E del Poeta il fin la meraviglia: / Parlo de l’eccellente, e non del goffo, / Chi non sà far stupir vada a la striglia’. For the English translation, see Helen Langdon, Caravaggio: A Life (London: Pimlico, 1998), p.191. See also James V. Mirollo, The Poet of the Marvelous: Giambattista Marino (New York and London: Columbia University Press, 1963), pp.24–5. On Marino, see Elizabeth Cropper, ‘The Petrifying Art: Marino’s Poetry and Caravaggio’, Metropolitan Museum Journal 26 (1991), pp.193–212, and Hendrix, ‘The Repulsive Body’, pp.84–90. On early modern marvels, see Peter G. Platt, ed., Wonders, Marvels, and Monsters in Early Modern Culture (Cranbury, London, and Mississauga: Associated University Presses, 1999).

Chapter 6 A first version of this paper was presented to the seminar La Laideur comme norme, formes, representations at the University of Reims Champagne-Ardenne in November 2010. I would like to thank the organisers of the session ‘Ugliness as a challenge to art history’, Andrei Pop and Mechtild Widrich, and the colleagues and friends who helped me to improve this text: Ting Chang, Elaine Williamson and Pamela Warner, and above all my colleague and translator Edward Payne, who also translated this essay from the French.





1 The materials, utensils and gestures shared by the painter and the cook in Cennino Cennini’s treatise have been underlined by Delphine Lesbros: ‘Rhétorique de la recette dans le Libro del arte de Cennino Cennini’, paper presented at the Rencontres de l’honnête volupté, Paris, Maison des Sciences de l’Homme, 28 March 2008. 2 According to Joachim von Sandrart’s Teutsche Academie (1675–9), the young apprentice pastry-maker Claude Gellée came to Italy to continue his training; he was later hired as a cook and a handyman by the landscapist Agostino Tassi. The early years of Claude Gellée are poorly documented, and Sandrart’s statements have never been confirmed. 3 See Sheila McTighe, ‘Foods and the Body in Italian Genre Paintings about 1580: Campi, Passarotti, Carracci’, Art Bulletin 86/2 ( June 2004), pp.301–23,



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and Valérie Boudier, La Cuisine du peintre: Scène de genre et nourriture au Cinquecento (Rennes: Presses universitaires de Rennes, 2010). Jacques-Louis David, letter to François Topino-Lebrun, 24 December 1792, in Jacques Louis Jules David, Le Peintre Louis David (Paris: Havard, 1880), p.121 (translation by Edward Payne) Martial Guédron, ‘Physiologie du bon goût. La hiérarchie des sens dans les discours sur l’art en France au XVIIIe siècle’, in Ralph Dekoninck, Agnès Guiderdoni-Bruslé, Nathalie Kremer, eds, Aux limites de l’imitation: L’ut pictura poesis à l’épreuve de la matière (XVIe–XVIIIe siècles) (Amsterdam/New York: Rodopi, 2009), pp.39–49. Alain Corbin, ‘Histoire et anthropologie sensorielle’ (1990), reprinted in Le Temps, le Désir et l’Horreur (1991), English translation in ‘A History and Anthropology of the Senses’ in Time, Desire and Horror: Towards a History of the Senses (Cambridge/Oxford: Polity Press, 1995), pp.181–95 (quotation 191–2). From the end of the seventeenth century, French dictionaries testify to the aesthetic inflection of the adjective laid: the Dictionnaire universel by Antoine Furetière (1690) and the first edition of the Dictionnaire de l’Académie françoise dedié au Roy (1694) define ‘laid’ respectively as ‘qui a une figure, ou des qualités désagréables à la veuë, ou à l’idée que nous nous sommes formées du beau’ and ‘Il se dit aussi generalement de tout ce qui est desagreable aux yeux dans son genre’. This last definition is reprinted in all subsequent editions of the Dictionnaire de l’Académie, 1718 to 1879. See Dictionnaires des 16e et 17e siècles and Corpus des dictionnaires de l’Académie française (du 17e–20e siècle) (Paris: Classiques Garnier Numérique, 2007). On the notion of taste and its evolution between the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, see Viktoria von Hoffmann’s thesis, Goûter le monde: Pour une histoire culturelle du goût à l’époque moderne, Université de Liège, 2010. For metaphors of the turnip, see Trésor de la langue française. Navet, in the sense of a failed work of art, has been used from the Restoration onwards. Léon Brisse (20 September 1813–13 July 1876) wrote regular columns on gastronomy signed ‘Baron Brisse’ in several newspapers during the Second Empire. He retired in Fontenay-aux-Roses (south of Paris) at the beginning of the Third Republic, and died in July 1876. For Baron Brisse and his equivocal reputation as a gastronome, see Jean-Léo, Le Baron Brisse, un gastronome du Second Empire (Bruxelles: Le Grenier du Collectionneur, 1992). The medical historian Marcel Sendrail suggested that the notion of ‘style’ – that traditional art-historical category – invites a consideration of the historical nature of phenomena such as diseases. He claimed that illnesses ‘concourent à la définition d’une culture. Chaque siècle se réclame d’un style pathologique, comme il se réclame d’un style littéraire ou décoratif ou monumental’. See Marcel Sendrail, ‘Civilisations et styles pathologiques’, in Le serpent et le miroir (Paris: Plon, 1954), 212–37, this quotation on p.224.

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12 When Diderot refers to the ragoût of a work, it is, rather, to praise its pictoriality; he thus describes the breasts of a figure in the Concert by Le Prince as ‘d’un ragoût infini’. See Salons III. Ruines et paysages: Salon de 1767 (Paris: Hermann, 1995), p.318. ‘Ragoût’ is still a synonym of pictoriality in the Salon of 1859 by Charles Baudelaire, who enumerated, but not without disdain, ‘l’art des sauces, des patines, des glacis, des frottis, des jus, des ragoûts’. Œuvres complètes, vol.2 (Paris: Gallimard, 1976), p.613. Champfleury in turn used the word in 1863, along with many negative allusions to cuisine, only referring to a pictoriality de chic and old fashions: ‘Un tableau a du ragoût quand il est peint avec des ingrédients particuliers, séché au four, surtout quand la pâte sèche sera raclée avec du verre. Quelques coups de rabot dans de vieux empâtements, des grattages avec une pierre-ponce, l’huile d’une boîte de sardines renversée à propos sur la toile, donnent à certaines peintures romantiques un ragoût particulier, dont le secret est perdu pour la génération actuelle.’ In ‘Dictionnaire à l’usage des connaisseurs qui ne s’y connaissent pas’, L’Hôtel des commissaires-priseurs (Paris: E. Dentu, 1864), p.26. 13 Bertall, ‘Couleur du Salon de 1852, ou le Salon dépeint et dessiné par Bertall’, Journal pour rire, May 1852; ‘Le Salon dépeint et dessiné par Bertall’, Journal pour rire, 25 August 1855; ‘Le Salon de 1857 dépeint et dessiné par Bertall’, Journal amusant, 15 August 1857; ‘Promenade au Salon de 1869’, Journal amusant, 22 May 1869; Le Grelot au Salon: Le Salon de 1872, dépeint et dessiné par Bertall (supplément du Grelot), 2e livraison, 1872, p.13; ‘Promenade au Salon de 1874’, L’Illustration, 23 May 1874. 14 Japhet [pseudonym of Alexandre Jazet], Le Salon pour rire de 1883 (Paris: Imprimerie Nilson et Cie, 1883), n.p. Since 1845, an asperge in French refers to a person with a pale, long, skinny body (Trésor de la langue française). 15 Cham, Le Salon pour rire, 1872 (Paris: Au bureau du Charivari, 1872). 16 First introduced in France during the Middle Ages, this cake originating in the East was made of rye flour, honey, spices (cinnamon, coriander, ginger, etc.), and was at the time mainly produced in Reims, Alsace and Burgundy. 17 André Gill, Gill-Revue: Le Salon pour rire, 1868. 18 Cham, ‘Le Salon pour rire’, Le Charivari, 31 May 1872. 19 On colour as food, see my contribution ‘Les Couleurs de l’alimentation’ in Faim(s) de littérature: L’art de se nourrir au XIXe siècle, Eleonor Reverzy and Bertrand Marquer, eds (Strasbourg: Strasbourg University Press), in press. 20 Bertall, ‘Le Salon de 1857 dépeint et dessiné par Bertall’, Journal amusant 81, 18 July 1857. According to my colleague Frank Claustrat (Université de Montpellier), the so-called ‘Coucher de soleil à la côte occidentale de la Suède (gouvernement de Bohus), après l’orage’ (catalogue of the 1856 Salon) is in fact Naufrage sur la côte du Bohuslän (1856, oil on canvas, 52 × 71.5cm, Private Collection, Sweden). 21 On the realist painter as excessive eater and drinker, see my contribution ‘Gros, gras et grossier: l’empâtement de Gustave Courbet’, in Trop gros? L’obésité et ses



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représentations, ed. Julia Csergo (Paris: Éditions Autrement, 2009), pp.198–212, and on a related subject, ‘La chair du Réalisme: le corps de Gustave Courbet’, in Courbet à neuf, eds Mathilde Arnoux et al. (Paris: Éditions de la Maison des sciences de l’homme/Musée d’Orsay, 2010), pp.65–82. Gédéon [pseudonym of Gédéon Baril], ‘Au Salon’, Le Hanneton, 28 May 1868. Japhet, Le Salon pour rire de 1883. (Paris: Imprimerie Nilson et Cie, 1883), n.p. Charles Baudelaire, ‘Salon de 1846’, in Œuvres complètes, vol.2, pp.415–16: ‘L’art est un bien infiniment précieux, un breuvage rafraîchissant et réchauffant, qui rétablit l’estomac et l’esprit dans l’équilibre naturel de l’idéal. / Vous en concevez l’utilité, ô bourgeois, – législateurs ou commerçants, – quand la septième ou la huitième heure sonnée incline votre tête fatiguée vers les braises du foyer et les oreillards du fauteuil.’ See Jean-Claude Bonnet, ‘L’éclosion de la littérature gastronomique au dixhuitième siècle’, in Livres en bouche: Cinq siècles d’art culinaire français du quatorzième siècle au dix-huitième siècle, exh. cat. (Paris: Bibliothèque nationale, 2001), 223–30, and Pascal Ory, Le Discours gastronomique français des origines à nos jours (Paris: Gallimard, 1998). On the taste for sugar and its association with femininity and childhood, see Rolande Bonnain, ‘La femme, l’amour et le sucre’, Papilles 8, April 1995, pp.18f. William Bouguereau exhibited in 1857, Les Quatre heures du jour (plafond) (Present location unknown). Bertall, ‘Le Salon de 1857 dépeint et dessiné par Bertall’, Journal amusant 85, 15 August 1857. Edmond Bazire, Manet (Paris: A. Quantin, 1884), p.100. Émile Bernard, letter to Emile Schuffenecker, 17 December 1920, Bnf, Mss, Naf 14277, f°75. Once again, Diderot was a precursor in this domain: in 1767 he compared to an omelette the Essaim d’amours by Jean-Honoré Fragonard (Musée du Louvre). See Diderot, Salons III, p.419. Edouard Riou, ‘Costumes d’artistes’, Petit Journal pour rire 492 (1865). As in Bertall ‘Promenade au Salon’, Journal amusant, 16 May 1868: ‘Still Life, by Villain. Portraits of expired onions…it’s depressing.’ In the catalogue of the 1868 Salon, the only work by Eugène Villain (1821–97) was Derniers moments, a genre scene, but he was better known as a still life painter. As in Cham, Salon de 1857 illustré (Paris: Librairie Nouvelle/Bureau du Charivari, 1857), after Gustave Courbet’s Demoiselles des bords de la Seine: ‘Society women with a sudden attack of the colic in the country.’ Paul de Saint-Victor, ‘Le Salon de 1865’, La Presse, 28 May 1865. Albert Wolff, ‘Le calendrier parisien’, Le Figaro, 3 April 1876. See Frédérique Desbuissons, ‘Courbet’s Materialism’, Oxford Art Journal 32/2 ( July 2008), pp.251–60.

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38 See in particular Priscilla Parkhurst Ferguson, ‘A Cultural Field in the Making: Gastronomy in Nineteenth-Century France’, in Laurence R. Schehr and Allen S. Weiss, eds, French Food on the table, on the page, and in French Culture (New York/London: Routledge, 2001), pp.5–50. 39 Horace-Napoléon Raisson and Auguste Romieu, Code gourmand, manuel complet de gastronomie, contenant les lois, règles, applications et exemples de l’art de bien vivre (Paris: Ambroise Dupont et Cie, 1827), p.v: ‘Au milieu des bouleversements successifs de la civilisation, une puissance a grandi, qui domine toutes les autres. Amie des aristocraties, alliée des républiques, soutien des États constitutionnels, la Gastronomie est la reine du monde!’ 40 The first time in 1848 for the G. de Gonet edition, the second in 1851 for a less expensive edition by G. Barba. Both are available on Gallica, the digital library of the Bibliothèque nationale de France. 41 Eugène Briffault, Paris à table (1846), reprint (Geneva/Paris: Slatkine, 1980). 42 See Jean-Léo, Le Baron Brisse, pp.52–3. 43 La Soupe au fromage was originally a poem by the Realist writer Max Buchon, a Fourierist close to Victor Considérant, who lived in exile in Switzerland from 2 December 1851. His Parisian friends turned it into the ‘hymne du Réalisme’. The poem is reproduced in Max Buchon, Poésies franc-comtoises, tableaux domestiques et champêtres (Salins/Besançon: Duvernois et Billet/Bulle et Gérard, 1862), pp.29–30. 44 Frédérique Desbuissons, ‘A l’enseigne du Bon Bock’, 48/14, la revue du musée d’Orsay 30 (2010–11), pp.34–44.

Chapter 7 1 ‘Dem Kerl sollte man die Knoche im Leibe zerbrechen.’ Franz Ferdinand in Edith Hoffmann, Kokoschka: Life and Work (London: Faber and Faber, 1947), p.86. 2 Franz Grüner in Hoffmann, Kokoschka, p.87. The original review ran in Die Fackel under the title ‘Oskar Kokoschka’ on 28 February 1911. 3 Oskar Kokoschka, ‘Letter to Erwin Lang [late 1907]’, in Oskar Kokoschka Letters 1905–1976, trans. Mary Whittall (London: Thames and Hudson Ltd, 1992), p.15. 4 Kokoschka, ‘Letter to Erwin Lang [winter 1907–8]’, in Oskar Kokoschka Letters, p.16. 5 Oskar Kokoschka, My Life, trans. David Britt (New York: Macmillan, 1974), p.21. 6 Theodor Lipps, ‘Empathy, Inner Imitation, and Sense-Feelings’, in A Modern Book of Aesthetics: An Anthology, 5th ed., ed. Melvin Rader (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1979), p.377. 7 Ibid., p.371. 8 Theodor Lipps, Leitfaden der Psychologie (Leipzig: Wilhelm Engelmann, 1903), p.200: ‘Den Gegenstand der negativen Einfühlung bezeichnen wir als häßlich.’ See also Lipps, ‘Einfühlung, innere Nachahmung, und Organempfindungen’,











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Archiv für die gesamte Psychologie 1 (1903), pp.185–204, Ästhetik: Psychologie des Schönen und der Kunst, vol.1: Grundlegung der Ästhetik (Hamburg and Leipzig: Leopold Voss, 1903), and vol.2, Die ästhetische Betrachtung und die bildende Kunst (Hamburg and Leipzig: Leopold Voss, 1906). 9 Gustav Jahoda, ‘Theodor Lipps and the Shift from “Sympathy” to “Empathy”’, Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences 41/2 (Spring 2005), p.158. 10 ‘Einfühlung, innere Nachahmung, und Organempfindungen’, and Leitfaden der Psychologie, p.193: ‘Mein Verständnis der Lebensäußerungen hat seinen Grund im instinktiven Triebe der Nachahmung.’ 11 Quoted in Jahoda, p.155. (Lipps, Ästhetik, vol.1, p.127). See also Ästhetik, vol.2, p.414, where Lipps affirms that while the idea of inner imitation is ‘ultimately justified’, the term is misleading. l2 Johann Gottfried von Herder, for example, used the neologism ‘sich einfühlen’ in the eighteenth century. 13 Freud writer that Scherner’s attempt to explain dreams is ‘the most original and most comprehensive’, but also that the reader will ‘gladly resort to the clearer and conciser presentation of Scherner’s theories made by the philosopher Volkelt’. ‘The Interpretation of Dreams’, in The Major Works of Sigmund Freud (Chicago: Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1952), p.172. 14 For example, in a letter written to Wilhelm Fliess on 31 August 1898, The Complete Letters of Sigmund Freud to Wilhelm Fliess 1887–1904, ed. and trans. J. M. Masson (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986), p.325. 15 Sigmund Freud, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol.XIII (1905), Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, ed. James Strachey (London: Vintage Books, Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psychoanalysis, 2001), p.118. 16 Lipps in Jahoda, ‘Theodor Lipps’, p.158. The original reads: ‘Ich sehe…einen Menschen nicht stolz, sondern hochmütig blicken. Auch den in diesem Blick liegenden Hochmut erlebe ich in mir, Ich stelle mir dies innere Verhalten oder diese innere Zuständlichkeit nicht nur vor; ich weiss nicht nur davon; sondern sie drängt sich mir auf, drängt sich in mein Erleben ein. Aber ich arbeite innerlich dagegen. Mein inneres Wesen widersetzt sich; ich fühle in dem hochmütigen Blick eine eigene innere Lebensnegation oder Lebenshemmung, eine Verneinung meiner Persönlichkeit. Darum und nur darum kann mich der Hochmut verletzen. Mein Gefühl der Unlust ist begründet in dieser negativen Einfühlung.’ Lipps, Ästhetik, vol.1, pp.139–40. 17 In The Age of Insight: The Quest to Understand the Unconscious in Art, Mind and Brain From Vienna 1900 to the Present (New York: Random House, 2012), Nobel Prize-winning neuroscientist Eric Kandel discusses not only the interaction between psychoanalysis, art, and pathological medicine in Vienna circa 1900, but also the specific overlapping ideas within Einfühlung theory and psychoanalytic theory, and the extent to which these early theories have been

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subsequently confirmed by contemporary neuroscientists. I am most grateful to Kandel for sharing his manuscript with me in 2011. 18 Einfühlung theory does play an important role in architectural studies. Juliet Koss, whose work straddles art and architectural theory, has written extensively about empathy. See, for example, Juliet Koss, ‘Empathy and Abstraction at the Munich Artists’ Theatre’, in The Built Surface, Volume Two: Architecture and the Pictorial Arts from Romanticism to the Twenty-First Century, eds Christy Anderson and Karen Koehler (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002), pp.98–119; Juliet Koss, ‘On the Limits of Empathy’, Art Bulletin 88/1 (March 2006), pp.139–57. 19 Theodor Lipps in James H. Tufts, ‘Review of Aesthetik: Psychologie des Schönen und der Kunst’, Philosophical Review 13/6 (November 1904), p.677. Lipps, Ästhetik, vol.1, p.1: ‘Die Ästhetik ist die Wissenschaft vom Schönen; implicite auch vom Hässlichen.’ The final chapter of the work treats ugliness, at less than ten pages of the total 600. 20 Tufts, ‘Review’, p.679. 21 Ibid. 22 Ibid. 23 Theodor Lipps, Grundtatsachen des Seelenlebens [The Basic Facts of Mental Life] (Bonn: Max Cohen, 1883): ‘Nennen wir die absolute Gehemmtheit und Negation des Lebens Tod, so können wir kurz den Tod als höchsten Inhalt des Hässlichen bezeichnen’, p.691. 24 Lipps in Jahoda, ‘Theodor Lipps’, p.158. 25 Freud, Jokes, p.186. 26 Oskar Kokoschka, My Life, p.42. For the German original, Einfühlungsgabe, see Oskar Kokoschka, Mein Leben, Vorwort und dokumentarische Mitarbeit von Remigius Netzer (München: Bruckmann, 1969), p.83. 27 Kokoschka, My Life, p.17. 28 Ibid., p.19. 29 Ibid., pp.19–20. 30 Ibid., p.20. 31 Ibid., p.21. For more information on Kokoschka at the Kunstschau see Peter Vergo, Art in Vienna, 1898–1918: Klimt, Kokoschka, Schiele and Their Contemporaries (London: Phaidon, 1993), and for an in-depth analysis of Kokoschka’s play see Peter Vergo and Yvonne Modlin, ‘Murderer Hope of Women: Expressionist Drama and Myth’, in Oskar Kokoschka 1886–1890 (London: Tate Gallery, 1986), pp.20–31. 32 Gemma Blackshaw, ‘The Jewish Christ: Problems of Self-Presentation and Socio-Cultural Assimilation in Richard Gerstl’s Self-Portraiture’, Oxford Art Journal 29/1 (2006), pp.35–6. 33 Ibid, p.36. 34 Lilith Lang was fellow student at the Kunstgewerbeschule and Erwin Lang’s younger sister.











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35 Kalvach’s work is reproduced in Patrick Werkner, Austrian Expressionism: The Formative Years, trans. Nicholas T. Parsons (Palo Alto: Society for the Promotion of Science and Scholarship, 1993), p.66. 36 Ibid. Cf. Kokoschka, My Life, p.21. 37 This discrepancy has been discussed repeatedly, although some ambiguity remains. For discussions which cite the work’s date as 1909 see, for example, Frank Whitford, Oskar Kokoschka (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan, 1986), pp.30–4; Claude Cernuschi, Re/Casting Kokoschka: Ethics and Aesthetics, Epistemology and Politics in Fin-de-Siècle Vienna (Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press; London: Associated University Presses, 2002), p.28 and note 28, p.198; Museum of Fine Arts Boston, Oskar Kokoschka, Self-Portrait as a Warrior, http://www.mfa.org/collections/object/self-portraitas-a-warrior-64963 (accessed 30 November 2011). 38 Kokoschka, My Life, p.21 39 Ibid., p.20. 40 Theodor Lipps in Wilhelm Worringer, Abstraction and Empathy: A Contribution to the Psychology of Style, trans. Michael Bullock (New York: International Universities Press, Inc, 1963), p.7. 41 Otto Weininger, Sex and Character: An Investigation of Fundamental Principles, ed. Daniel Steuer and Laura Marcus (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2005). 42 Oskar Kokoschka, Murderer the Women’s Hope, in Henry Schvey, Oskar Kokoschka: The Painter as Playwright (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 1982), p.140. 43 Kokoschka, My Life, p.29. 44 Neue Freie Presse, Vienna, 5 July 1909, p.8. 45 Kokoschka, My Life, p.29. 46 Cernuschi, Re/Casting Kokoschka, p.118. Patrick Werkner also refers to ‘the distortions so seductively offered by hindsight (one thinks of Kokoschka’s Autobiography)’, in Austrian Expressionism, p.3. Schvey, Oskar Kokoschka, p.31, among others, takes Kokoschka at his word. 47 Christopher Innes, Avant Garde Theatre (London: Routledge, 1993), p.55. 48 Innes, Avant Garde Theatre, note 36, p.237. In his autobiography, Kokoschka notes that after the performance of his play he ‘was called a “degenerate artist”, “bourgeois-baiter” (Bürgerschreck), “corrupter of youth”, and “common criminal”’ by the press. My Life, p.31. 49 For more on this, see my ‘Viennese Art, Ugliness, and the Vienna School of Art History: the Vicissitudes of Theory and Practice’, Journal of Art Historiography 3 (December 2010). 50 Allan Janik and Stephen Toulmin, Wittgenstein’s Vienna (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1973), p.101. 51 Jane Kallir, Austria’s Expressionism (New York: Galerie St. Etienne/Rizzoli, 1981), p.24.

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52 Ibid. 53 Ibid. 54 Jane Kallir, Arnold Schoenberg’s Vienna (New York: Galerie St. Etienne/Rizzoli, 1984), p.25. 55 Kallir, Arnold Schoenberg’s Vienna, p.38. 56 Kallir, Austria’s Expressionism, pp.26–7. 57 Tobias G. Natter and Max Hollein, eds, The Naked Truth: Klimt, Schiele, Kokoschka and Other Scandals (New York: Prestel, 2005), p.150 (catalogue entry by Berud Apke). 58 Kallir, Arnold Schoenberg’s Vienna, p.78. 59 Kokoschka, My Life, pp.28–9. 60 Ibid., p.28. 61 Oskar Kokoschka in Natter and Hollein, The Naked Truth, p.125. 62 Anna Elizabeth Baker, ‘The Aesthetics of Ugliness’ (PhD dissertation, University of California, 2008), 5. 63 Kandel, Age of Insight, pp.390–1. 64 Ibid., pp.352, 358 and 359 respectively.

Chapter 8 1 Poem published in Tan Jing Quee, Teo Soh Lung & Koh Kay Yew, eds, Our Thoughts Are Free: Poems and Prose on Imprisonment and Exile (Singapore: Ethos Books, 2009), pp.146–7. For the sake of clarity, the artist Teo Eng Seng will be called Teo and his sister will be referred to as Soh Lung. 2 See catalogue essay by Constance Sheares in Contemporary art in Singapore: where East meets West (Singapore: National Museum, 1991), unpaginated. The so-called Second Generation of Singaporean artists differentiated themselves from the pioneering Nanyang School of painters, who had striven to capture Southeast Asia on canvas. In the 1960s, a group of young artists, including Teo Eng Seng, Thomas Yee, Ng Eng Teng, Gen Beng Kwan and Anthony Poon, went away to study art in Europe and North America. These artists imbibed formalist and abstractionist aesthetics in their formative training and had significant impact upon their return in the late 1960s and 1970s. The term ‘Second Generation’ also extends to artists of that period who did not go overseas but produced innovative work, notably those associated with the Modern Art Society. 3 This fascination started when Teo was teaching papier-mâché in the early 1970s and experimenting with different methods in his classes. One day his Japanese students told him that traditional Japanese dolls were made of a mixture of starch and paper pulp which had been cooked together, and this inspired him to cook a mixture of various materials – paper, leaves and natural fibres. Its versatility enthralled him as he could stain it to achieve certain colours, apply certain kinds of paint on it, assemble pieces of it or work on just one piece.











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4 Teo appears to have progressed in reverse from his peers, with his defiance showing up in his early work through monumental war elegies. These huge canvases were rare instances of paintings in Singapore modern art history that cited politics, war and conflict, during a time when many artists were pursuing Lyrical Abstraction or otherwise veering away from overt political commentary in their works. 5 Constance Sheares and Teo Eng Seng, ‘Interview with the Artist: Teo Eng Seng’, in T.K. Sabapathy, ed., Change: 20 Singapore artists: a decade of their work (Singapore: P. Mowe, 1991), p.15. 6 Another related work that speaks of Teo’s underlying sanguinity is A Child Is Born (1984), which addresses not only the then-current debate on genetics and eugenics in light of the Singaporean concern for the declining rate of procreation, but also the child’s natural longing for adventure, the fact that an unknown world of intense visions, fears, wonders and terrors awaits him or her, through means both evocative and literal – the figure of the child is derived from the Chinese pictogram. 7 Ibid. 8 The sculptures were also not mentioned in the most recent monograph on Teo’s work. Although Soh Lung’s incarceration was mentioned, it was only as context for Teo’s much-lauded paperdyesculp series OTOSOS or On the Other Side of Silence. See T.K. Sabapathy, Teo Eng Seng: Art and Thoughts (Singapore: Ethos Books, 2011), pp.79–80. 9 Alfian made this remark in his introductory speech at The Legends Hotel at Fort Canning when addressing the 150-strong audience which had turned up for the launch of the book Beyond the Blue Gate by ex-ISA detainee Soh Lung. See Andrew Loh, ‘An Open Wound’, in The Online Citizen, 28 June 2010, http:// theonlinecitizen.com/2010/06/an-open-wound (accessed 30 January 2012). 10 For a summary of the events, see Jagjit Kaur, ‘Marxist Conspiracy’, National Library Board, 31 October 2009, http://infopedia.nl.sg/articles/SIP_1578_ 2009-10-31.html (accessed 30 January 2012). 11 Quoted from the exhibition pamphlet of ‘Life Journeys: An exhibition of drawings by Teo Soh Lung and sculptures by Teo Eng Seng’ (Singapore: Muse House, 2009). 12 Ibid. 13 Sheares and Teo, ‘Interview with the Artist: Teo Eng Seng’, p.15. 14 Hibiscus Outrage (1982) was Teo’s response to the news of the Sabra-Shatila Massacre in Lebanon and uses the hibiscus, an ordinary wayside flower, to call up the helplessness and defencelessness of the people killed. 15 Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, ed. and trans. by Robert Hullot-Kentor (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1998), Ch.3. See also Peter Uwe Hohendahl, ‘Aesthetic Violence: The Concept of the Ugly in Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory’, Cultural Critique 60 (Spring, 2005), pp.170–96.

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16 The exact quote is: ‘If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel’s heartbeat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence.’ George Eliot, Middlemarch: A Study of Provincial Life (London and Edinburgh: William Blackwood, 1874), p.143. The exhibition On The Other Side of Silence (OTOSOS), was held at Camden Arts Centre, London, 8–24 April 1988. Twenty-two pieces were presented in the exhibited suite of artefacts, corresponding to the 22 persons arraigned at the same time as Soh Lung. 17 This noble figure stands also in contrast to the imputed nemesis in the work, who becomes the target of an ancient Chinese ritual of ‘hitting the villain’ (da xiao ren), customarily achieved by repeatedly bashing a paper cut-out person with a wooden clog along with incantations or curses. 18 Sheares and Teo, ‘Interview with the Artist: Teo Eng Seng’. 19 Southeast Asian Art: A New Spirit (Singapore: Art & Artist Speak, 1997), p.36. 20 Ibid. 21 Georges Bataille, ‘The Big Toe’, Visions of Excess, trans. Allan Stoekl (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minneapolis Press, 1985), pp.20–1. 22 Teo Soh Lung, Beyond the Blue Gate: Recollections of a Political Prisoner (Petaling Jaya: SIRD, 2010). 23 In speaking of ‘ugly feelings’, I take inspiration from Sianne Ngai’s book of the same title, which critically elaborates upon a panoply of what she calls ‘minor affects’ such as envy, irritation, and paranoia (in contrast to more powerfully negative emotions like anger), states of feeling that arise from situations where actions are thwarted. Ngai argues that these are politically ambiguous feelings that characterise late modernity and which can be harnessed to interrogate the status quo of our media-saturated century. See Sianne Ngai, Ugly Feelings (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 2005). 24 See Ringisei, ‘Singapore Biennale 2006 Report’, in Singapore Report Archive, 18 September 2006, http://www.singaporeangle.com/2006/09/singaporebiennale-2006-report.html (accessed 30 January 2012). 25 Rachel Whiteread, interviewed by John Tusa, see transcript of interview on 4 January 2004, http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio3/johntusainterview/whiteread_ transcript.shtml (accessed 30 January 2012, link no longer active). 26 The Holocaust Monument referenced its method (but in the reverse) from an earlier 1997 work Untitled (Paperbacks) where the negative cast of the interior of a library is turned inward, such that one enters a room filled with the spectral marks of books whose contents and titles appear to be lost. 27 One could even consider Whiteread’s memorial as now being beautiful, in accordance with Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory: ‘In its historical shape, the notion of the beautiful is just a moment in a larger whole, a moment which has undergone radical change by absorbing the ugly itself…By absorbing its opposite, ugliness, beauty expands and becomes that much stronger.’ Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, p.384.





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28 Kirk Varnedoe, Pictures of Nothing: Abstract Art Since Pollock (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006), p.138. 29 Ibid, p.139. 30 See ‘Breakthrough Sculpture By Rachel Whiteread Acquired By National Gallery Of Art’, press release dated 15 October 2004, http://www.nga.gov/press/2004/ releases/fall/whiteread.shtm (accessed 30 January 2012, link no longer active).

Chapter 9 1 Epigram 8, in Plato: Complete Works, ed. John M. Cooper (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1997), p.1744. 2 Nina Athanassoglou-Kallmyer, ‘Ugliness’, in Robert S. Nelson and Richard Schiff, Critical Terms for Art History, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), p.281. This second edition also contains an essay on beauty by Ivan Gaskell. 3 See C. Peter Ripley, ed. The Black Abolitionist Papers: The United States, 1859–1865, vol.5 (Durham, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1992), pp.58–66. 4 Typical in this respect is Umberto Eco’s anthology On Ugliness, many of whose categories (illness, diabolism), while highly charged, are not a priori connected to ugliness: one searches in vain among many of the very interesting documents quoted for such a claim, which modern readers simply assume. 5 Athanassoglou-Kallmyer, ‘Ugliness’, p.281. 6 ‘Coeterum in claustris coram legentibus fratribus quid facit illa ridicula monstruositas, mira quaedam deformis formosita ac formosa deformitas?’ St. Bernard of Clairvaux, ‘Apologia ad Guillelmum sancti Theodorici abbatem’, in Patrologiae cursus completus: Series Latina, ed. Jean-Paul Migne, vol.182 (Paris: Garnier, 1854), col. 895–918, this quote col.916. Eco, in The Aesthetics of Thomas Aquinas, trans. Hugh Bredin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988), p.9, observes that Bernard writes with the gusto of a ‘mystic voyeur’. 7 Franz Koppe, Grundbegriffe der Ästhetik (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1983), p.156. My translation. The book has proved popular, undergoing several editions, with an expanded version appearing in 2003. 8 Ibid. To be fair, Koppe does not declare these ugly, just unbeautiful. 9 Cf. Nelson Goodman, Languages of Art (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1976), p.255: ‘If the beautiful excludes the ugly, beauty is no measure of aesthetic merit; but if the beautiful may be ugly, then “beauty” becomes only an alternative and misleading word for aesthetic merit.’ Consider an analogous argument: ‘if tallness excludes shortness, it is no measure of height, but if the tall may be short, then “tallness” becomes only an alternative and misleading word for height.’ The weakness of such reasoning leads me to suspect modernist prejudice at the heart of Goodman’s own criticism of aesthetic terms. 10 Plotinus, ‘On Beauty’ (Enneads I:6, c.245ce), trans. Stephen McKenna in Daedalus 131/4 (Autumn 2002), pp.27–34, this quote p.28. This point was picked up by

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Edmund Burke, who argues that ugliness is the opposite of beauty, but not of fitness or proportion. A Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Beautiful and the Sublime, 2nd ed. (London: J. Dodsley, 1770), p.226. But the position remains unenlightening. Is Shakespeare’s Iago the perfect match for villainy? Or is Verdi’s and da Ponte’s Iago better because he sings a criminal ‘Credo’? Bernard Bosanquet, ‘The Æesthetic Theory of Ugliness’, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 1/3 (1889–90), 32–48, is a classic discussion of this mode of coexistence. For instance, Diego Velazquez’s portraits of the Habsburgs had to have ugly objects insofar as the sitters had to be recognisable, while the splendour of their dress and the handling in general made the paintings beautiful in spite of themselves (pp.42–3). Alexander Nehamas, Only a Promise of Happiness: the Place of Beauty in a World of Art (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007). Alexander Nehamas, ‘The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters’, Representations 74 (Spring 2001), pp.37–54, this quote pp.41, 43. The text was given as a lecture at Stanford University in 1999; the discussion of the Caprichos does not recur in Only a Promise of Happiness. Nehamas does treat this, in Only a Promise of Happiness, p.96, where an ugly nose enhances the beauty of a Ghirlandaio portrait, and John Currin is offered as a case of ugly paintings of beautiful bodies. I am not too worried about Goya, whose work I find straightforwardly beautiful and ugly. But I can think of cases where that coexistence is puzzling. The song ‘Bloodshot Eyes’, written by Hank Penny and recorded in 1952 by Wynonie Harris, has a line: ‘Your eyes look like two cherries in a bowl of buttermilk’. I find the image repellent, yet perfect. Yet there is nothing to it, certainly not the copious maneuvers of a Goya, for judgements of beauty and ugliness to attach to. Cf. Winfried Menninghaus’s Das Versprechen der Schönheit (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2003), which like Nehamas takes its title from Stendhal. Ranging from Adonis cults to the cosmetics industry, Menninghaus finds a Freudian sublimation of Darwinian sexual desire (the titular ‘promise’) run amok in violently practiced bodily ideals. We suffer today under a ‘normatively “cheerful” convergence of beauty, pressure to conform, and the death drive’ (p.287). This pessimistic analysis presumes that earlier cultures had only nature in their bodily ideals, while we moderns submit to gruesome technological regimens: but just how natural are the Willendorf Venus, Fouquet’s Madonna, or Rossetti’s Beatrice? Nehamas, ‘The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters’, p.48. Ibid, p.50. On the ‘error theory of beauty’ sketched in the first part of Elaine Scarry, On Beauty and Being Good (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), see Nehamas’ review essay, ‘The Return of the Beautiful: Morality, Pleasure, and the Value of Uncertainty’, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 58/4 (Autumn 2000), pp.393–403, esp. p.395.













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20 Plato, Hippias Major, 289a1-6, as quoted in Alexander Nehamas, ‘Predication and Forms of Opposites in the Phaedo’, Review of Metaphysics 26/3 (March 1973), pp.461–91, this quote p.466, with one modification. I quote Plato from Nehamas whenever possible to avoid terminological confusion. His essays on Plato, with the exception of this one, his earliest, are collected in Virtues of Authenticity: Essays on Plato and Socrates (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999). I give these page numbers as (VA ). 21 Plato, Republic 479d4-5. 22 This means literally the ‘race of man’ and ‘race of maidens’, as W.R.M. Lamb renders it (Plato, vol.9, 1925), but as there is no such biological species as the latter, it is clear that a mass term is meant. In any case, Nehamas (1973), p.466 misleads in rendering the phrase ‘a young maiden’, though the thought behind this change, I shall argue, is correct. 23 Denis Diderot, ‘Recherches philosophiques sur l’origine et la nature du beau’ [1751], in Diderot : Essai sur la peinture, édition critique établie par J. Assézat, vol.10 (Paris, Garnier, 1876), 5–42; or Encyclopédie, second ed., vol.4 (Pellet: Geneva, 1777), pp.608–36. The turbot is at Diderot (1876), pp.27, 29. Beside the beau and laid relatif, Diderot admits a beau absolut, which consists of internal proportion or symmetry. 24 Diderot himself came to the same conclusion, some years after his essay on beauty, in the (much shorter) entry on ugliness in the 1765 Encyclopédie: ‘a thing is under two different aspects beautiful or ugly’. The only examples he gives, however, concern usefulness and morality. See Assézat, ed., vol.14, p.410. 25 Nehamas (1973), p.470. Nehamas is defending Plato perhaps against Gilbert Ryle’s objection (to Plato and Husserl) that abstract concepts are functions which do not occur as ‘ideas’ in isolation from their variables. 26 Here, and in the rudiments of the theory of self-predication, Nehamas follows his own teacher Gregory Vlastos, ‘The Third Man Argument in the Parmenides’, Philosophical Review 63/3 ( July 1954), pp.319–49, revised after debates with Wilfrid Sellars and Peter Geach, with much related material, in Gregory Vlastos, Platonic Studies (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1973). Nehamas’ view of self-predication (‘beauty is beautiful’) differs from Vlastos’s, in that in Nehamas the statement is not tautologous, but an informative, though necessarily true, definition of essence (i.e. ‘beauty is what it is for something to be beautiful’). Nehamas also differs from Vlastos in thinking that Plato maintains this only for terms with an opposite (beauty, justice, tallness, etc.). 27 See, e.g. Socrates’s summary of results at Phaedo 103c7-8: ‘All we have agreed on is simply this: an opposite will never become opposite to itself.’ Quoted after Nehamas (1973), p.484. 28 Plato, Hippias Major 288b1-3, quoted after Nehamas, ‘Confusing Universals and Particulars in Plato’s Early Dialogues’, Review of Metaphysics 29/2 (December

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1975), pp.287–306, this quote p.301 (VA 170). In this article, Nehamas shows that Socrates’s interlocutors are not as stupid as commonly thought. 29 Hippias’ ‘maiden’, parthénos, means virgin when attached to certain figures (Athena and Iphigeia), but not always when describing real young women (Scott and Liddell cite the Iliad, Sophocles and Aristophanes), though they are implied to be unmarried. 30 At Phaedo 100c4-6, Socrates says: ‘It seems to me that if anything else is beautiful other than the beautiful itself, then it is beautiful for no reason but because it participates in the beautiful; and I mean this for everything.’ Quoted after Nehamas (1973), 464. Note that this explanation leaves the nature of beauty untouched, so that Socrates is free to advance his erotic theory in the Symposium, as do other symposiasts. 31 Plato, Republic 523c11-16: ‘each seems equally a finger, whether it is in the middle or at the end [of the hand], thick or thin, pale or tan, etc.…in no case does sight alone tell us that the finger is also not a finger.’ Cf. Nehamas (1973), pp.467–8. Unfortunately, at Republic 596a6-7, Plato seems to forget about fingers and posit an idea ‘for each group of many things to which we give the same name’, a position first spelled out in the later Parmenides, where the elderly philosopher notes that without thorough coverage, discourse would not be possible. The same text suggests, however, that Plato added opposites for all concepts; later still, in the Sophist, the Parmenidean axiom is discarded even for ideas, which come to participate in each other. 32 Cf. Nehamas (1973), p.467: ‘Each is itself one, distinct from its contrary, but every particular which bears either bears both.’ Note that Nehamas here, unlike in the rest of the essay, where he uses the vague ‘opposite’, writes ‘contrary’. Contraries in logic may both be false but cannot both be true: e.g. the number ‘7’ has Largeness (compared to 1–6) and Smallness (compared to larger integers), but it probably has neither Justice nor Injustice. Later, Nehamas uses ‘contraries’ consistently: see ‘Plato on the Imperfection of the Sensible World’, American Philosophical Quarterly 12/2 (April 1975), pp.108, 116 (VA 142, 155), and ‘Participation and Predication in Plato’s Later Thought’, Review of Metaphysics 36/2 (December 1982), pp.348, 369 (VA 199, 214). Whether the term is apt, given coexistence, I am not sure. 33 As Socrates humorously puts it, ‘Whereas I, accepting and tolerating shortness, and still being who I am, will be short without change, it [tallness] will not dare, being tall, to be short.’ Phaedo 102d, quoted after Nehamas (1973), pp.475–6. 34 This worry is akin to the objection made to Nehamas by Myles Burnyeat, according to which one cannot distinguish between ideas and the objects that participate in them. See Nehamas, ‘Self-Predication and Plato’s Theory of Forms’, American Philosophical Quarterly 16/2 (April 1979), p.99 (VA 183). On ‘indeterminacy’, see W.V.O. Quine, Word and Object (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1960), Ch. 2. The criticism I make on behalf



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of Plato is inspired by John R. Searle, ‘Indeterminacy, Empiricism, and the First Person’, Journal of Philosophy 84/3 (March 1987), pp.123–46. ‘Plato does not think that an object really is beautiful and also really is not. A sensible object is neither (really) beautiful, since it is also ugly, nor is it (really) ugly, since it is also beautiful.’ Nehamas (1982), p.345 (VA 197). In this essay, Nehamas argues that the late Plato gave up the thesis of the unreality of real objects, and with it, the Parmenidean rule, for both ideas and sensibles. Plato, Phaedo 102d1-3. The translation ‘overtop’ (exceed) for huperechein is introduced by Nehamas (1973), p.473, where he insists that it is of no import for the theory of ideas. It is of great import for coexistence. It won’t do to set an arbitrary bound on quantitative ‘good looks’ below which things get called ugly. See Sean McConnell, ‘How Kant Might Explain Ugliness’, British Journal of Aesthetics 48/2 (April 2008), pp.205–28. For McConnell beauty is absolute, consisting of an arbitrary limit of pleasure (‘AHA moment’), and ugliness relative, consisting of lower pleasure scores. One strange result is that a pleasure just below the cutoff is ‘slightly ugly’ while one slightly more pleasurable is ‘absolutely beautiful’. Nehamas, ‘Plato on the Imperfection of the Sensible World’. Justin Gosling, ‘Similarity in Phaedo 73b seq.’, Phronesis 10/2 (1965), pp.151–61, first drew attention to this: copies are imperfect by not having all attributes of their original; if they did, they would be second originals (Cratylus 432). They may also, however, be imperfect in having an additional quality not in the original, in this case, the opposite. This might also be seen in Plato’s pot example at Hippias 289a: a chútra (earthen pot) is quite workaday, beautiful only in make, but had Plato thought of a particular vase, even a humble object like the Corinthian aryballos in Fig.9.2, the comparison would have been less certain and more aesthetic. But see the discussion of Phidias in Hippias 290a-c, used, characteristically, to disprove the hypothesis that gold alone is beautiful. Nehamas, ‘The Sleep of Reason’, p.48. ‘The moral features of a work, like the philosophical features of Plato’s dialogues, can be detached from it. They remain what they are after they have been discussed in isolation, and it is only because of their independence and generality that they can be used, for good or bad purposes, in the rest of our lives.’ (ibid.) These contents are ideas, but so are beauty and ugliness! Morality and politics are just as concretely embodied, and can be aesthetic. In one relation (aesthetic judgement), if A is beautiful, then it is not ugly, and if A is not beautiful, then it may be either ugly or not. By contraposition, we then get: if A is ugly, it is not beautiful, and if A is not ugly, it may be either beautiful or not. In symbols, B ⊃ ~U : U ⊃ ~B, where ⊃ means material implication, as in Bertrand Russell, ‘The Theory of Implication’, American Journal of Mathematics 28/2 (April 1906), pp.159–202.

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Chapter 10 1 In what follows I shall use upper-case words ‘The Ugly’ and ‘The Liquid’ to signal that particular discourses are being discussed, rather than literal identifications on my part of something as liquid or ugly. 2 Christian Hermann Weiße, System der Ästhetik als Wissenschaft von der Idee der Schönheit in drei Büchern (Leipzig: Hartmann 1830); Karl Rosenkranz, Ästhetik des Hässlichen (Königsberg: Bornträger 1853); Friedrich Theodor Vischer, Das Schöne und die Kunst: Zur Einführung in die Ästhetik: Vorträge (Stuttgart: Cotta 1898). 3 Rosenkranz mentions the Liquid in connection with the Putrefied and with the organically ‘Raw’, which implicates, in his context, the representation of bodily fluids. See Rosenkranz, pp.163, 219, 294–5. 4 Salvador Dalí’s painting of the same title (Musées royaux des Beaux Arts de Belgique, Brussels) was an outcome of this so-called ‘Bel Ami International Art Competition’ in Washington, DC (1946/47). As in the case of Albert Lewin’s film on Dorian Gray, the competition was organised to choose a work to be featured in Lewin’s film The private affairs of Bel Ami, with Max Ernst’s painting The Temptation of Saint Anthony (Lehmbruck Museum, Duisburg) emerging as the winner of the contest. 5 While a projected ‘Book of Putrefieds’ by Dalí and Lorca was not published (Haim Finkelstein, ed., The Collected Writings of Salvador Dalí, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998, p.381, n. 36), Lorca’s 1930s cycle of poems Poeta en Nueva York (Poet in New York) links the alienating experience of the American city with metaphors of somatic liquidity. See, e.g. ‘Landscape of the Urinating Multitudes (Battery Place Nocturne)’, in Lorca, Poet in New York, trans. Ben Belitt (New York: Grove Press, 1955), pp.43–5. I am grateful to Andrei Pop and Mechtild Widrich for this reference. 6 Salvador Dalí, ‘San Sebastian’ (in L’Amic de les Arts, 31 July 1927, 52–4), in Finkelstein, Collected Writings, p.23. 7 Rafael Alberti, Obras, Barcelona 1979, p.171, quoted in Haim Finkelstein, Salvador Dalí’s Art and Writing, 1927–1942, The Metamorphoses of Narcissus (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p.31. 8 However, Finkelstein, Collected Writings, p.43, points out that the polemic intensity and critical thrust of Dalí’s writing should be taken with a grain of salt, given his intention to provoke and to demonstrate his affiliation with avant-garde groups. 9 Salvador Dalí, ‘Poetry of the Mass-Produced Utility’ (‘Poesia de l’útilstandardizat’, in L’Amic de les Arts, 31 March 1928, 176, 177), in Finkelstein, Collected Writings, p.59. 10 Salvador Dalí, ‘Current Topics’ (‘Temes Actuals’, in L’Amic de les Arts, 31 October 1927, 98, 99), in Finkelstein, Collected Writings, p.48 (italics in the original).













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11 ‘Impressionism is a pictorial trend that is completely dead. […] Its vital cycle is closed […]’. Ibid., p.50. 12 See Robert L. Mitchell, ‘The Deliquescence of Décadence: Floupette`s Eclectic Target’, Nineteenth-Century French Studies 9/3-4 (Spring–Summer 1981), pp.247–56, this quote p.249. For the ‘image of the decadent’ in French culture of the 1880s, see also Louis Marquèze-Pouey, Le mouvement decadent en France (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1986), pp.139–76. 13 Arthur Symons, ‘The Decadent Movement in Literature’, in Harper’s Monthly (November 1893), pp.858–67, quoted in Evanghélia Stead, Le monstre, le singe et le fœtus: Tératogonie et Décadence dans l’Europe fin-de-siècle (Geneva: Librairie Droz, 2004), p.30. 14 On the biological ‘imprint’ of decadence, see Stead. For the physiological paradigm, see Philipp Sarasin, Jakob Tanner, eds, Physiologie und industrielle Gesellschaft: Studien zur Verwissenschaftlichung des Körpers im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert, 2nd ed. (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2003). 15 See Marie Guthmüller, Der Kampf um den Autor: Abgrenzungen und Interaktionen zwischen französischer Literaturkritik und Psychophysiologie 1858– 1910 (Tübingen/Basel: Francke, 2007). 16 See Matthias Krüger, ‘Das Fleisch der Malerei. Physiologische Kunstkritik im 19. Jahrhundert’, in Daniela Bohde, Mechthild Fend, eds, Weder Haut noch Fleisch: Das Inkarnat in der Kunstgeschichte (Berlin: Gebrüder Mann Verlag, 2007), pp.159–80; Nicole Dubreuil-Blondin, ‘Les métaphores de la critique d’art: Le “sale” et le “malade” à l’époque de l’impressionisme’, in Jean-Paul Bouillon, ed., La critique d’art en France, 1850–1900, Actes du colloque de Clermont-Ferrand, 25–7 May 1987 (Université de Saint-Etienne, 1989), pp.105–18. 17 Caption of a caricature in Cham, 22 April 1877, on the occasion of the Third Impressionist Exposition, quoted in Jacques Lethève, Impressionistes et Symbolistes devant la presse (Paris: Armand Colin, 1959), p.86. 18 Caption of a caricature in Cham, 26 April 1877, on the occasion of the Third Impressionist Exposition, quoted in Lethève, p.87. 19 For a review of decadent literary descriptions of a ‘putrified’ art, see Stead, chapter V, section 2, esp. pp.282–90. 20 ‘[Gustave Moreau’s] art logique, équilibré, son idéalisme très élevé, profondément moral ne procèdent, comme on le voit, ni des sciences occultes, ni d’aucune déliquescence morbide de romantisme.’ Léonce Bénédite, ‘L’idéalisme en France et Angleterre. Gustave Moreau et Edward Burne-Jones’, in Revue de l’Art ancien et moderne (April 1899), pp.288–9. For Henri Matisse, see ‘Statements to Tériade: Matisse Speaks, 1951’, in Jack Flam, ed., Matisse on Art, rev. ed. (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1995), p.204. Given the retrospective tone – ‘Cubism had a function in fighting against the deliquescence of Impressionism’ – it hardly seems as if, c.1950, Matisse had finally decided this.

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21 See http://oxforddictionaries.com/definition/deliquescent (accessed 14 October 2011). 22 See http://www.cnrtl.fr/etymologie/déliquescence (accessed 14 October 2011). 23 ‘Puis on parle de l’alcoolisme de Verlaine, de la déliquescence que cela avait mis dans sa chair, et Rodenbach rapporte la phrase de Mallarmé, disant qu’il ne pourrait jamais oublier le bruit mou, visqueux, qu’avait fait après sa mort l’enlevèment du plâtre du moulage sur sa figure […].’ ‘Sunday, 19 April 1896’, Edmond and Jules de Goncourt, Journal: Mémores de la vie littéraire 1891–1896, vol.4 (Paris: Fasquelle and Flammarion, 1956), p.965. 24 In French, putrefaction in its figurative sense can be used synonymously with deliquescence. See http://www.cnrtl.fr/definition/putréfaction (accessed 14 October 2011). 25 Rosenkranz, p.163: ‘Das Verwesende fällt und fließt auseinander, und so notwendig dieser Prozess unter gegebenen Umständen sein kann, so widrig ist er, weil wir ästhetisch die Fiktion machen, dass die Form auch noch die Kraft des Lebens in sich trage.’ My translation. 26 For a discussion of this dispute, see Cornelia Blasberg, ‘Ornament, Schrift und Lektüre. Überlegungen zu Ernst Haeckel, Gustav Klimt und Hugo von Hofmannsthal’, in Hans-Georg von Arburg, Michael Gamper, Ulrich Stadler, eds, Wunderliche Figuren: über die Lesbarkeit von Chiffrenschriften (Munich: Fink, 2001), pp.293–317, and Christoph Asendorf, Entgrenzung und Allgegenwart: Die Moderne und das Problem der Distanz (Munich: Fink, 2005), pp.24–31. 27 Carl Justi, Amorphismus in der Kunst (Bonn: C. Georgi, undated), p.24. 28 Ibid., p.22: ‘Der Zug nach dem Amorphen geht heutzutage durch Kunstgewerbe und Bildende Kunst; man verfolgt ihn in der Abschüttelung der Form überhaupt, in der Neigung zur Unform und zum Hässlichen, endlich in der konsequenten Wahl unpassender, dem Wesen des Gegenstands widersprechender Formen.’ My translation. 29 Ibid., p.19. One might contrast this with Rosenkranz’s discussion of ‘Amorphie’ (Ästhetik des Hässlichen, pp.70–8), which, though it makes reference to form in mathematics, does not borrow from the natural sciences. 30 Justi, p.20. This is a selective view of the Greeks, naturally, not taking into account Heraclitus or the atomists. 31 See Justi’s invective against women working in the applied arts, ibid., p.25. 32 Rudolf von Gottschall, ‘Glossen zur Aesthetik des Hässlichen’, in Richard Fleischer, ed., Deutsche Revue über das gesamte nationale Leben der Gegenwart, Stuttgart 3 ( July–September 1895), pp.38–54. Brigitte Scheer has noted that the impact of Rosenkranz’s Aesthetics of Ugliness on late-nineteenth-century art theory was rather remote. See Scheer, ‘Zur Theorie des Hässlichen bei Karl Rosenkranz’, in Heiner F. Klemme, Michael Pauen, Marie-Luise Raters, eds, Im Schatten des Schönen: Die Ästhetik des Hässlichen in historischen Ansätzen und aktuellen Debatten (Bielefeld: Aisthesis, 2006), pp.141–55.







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33 Justi, Amorphismus, p.23: ‘Es ist nicht wie bei Bosch, Hogarth, Goya die humorvolle Hässlichkeit des Übercharakteristischen, oder die gedankenschwere der Satire, oder die Groteske des wachen Traums: es ist eine physiognomisch nichtssagende Hässlichkeit, ohne Sinn und Zweck, eine Hässlichkeit um ihrer selbst willen, bei der selbst die lächerliche oder schadenfrohe Wirkung öfters vom Ekel zurückgedrängt wird.’ My translation. 34 See Konrad Paul Liessmann, ‘Der hässliche Mensch. Nietzscheanische Streifzüge durch das entstellte Gesicht’, in Im Schatten des Schönen, pp.259–72. 35 Friedrich Nietzsche, Morgenröthe: Gedanken über die moralischen Vorurtheile, book 5, par. 506 (Chemnitz: E. Schmeitzner, 1881), p.324. My translation. 36 Cf. Helmut Pfotenhauer, Die Kunst als Physiologie: Nietzsches ästhetische Theorie und literarische Produktion (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1985). 37 For a discussion of this connection, and that of ugliness and femininity, see Leslie Higgins, The Modernist Cult of Ugliness: Aesthetic and Gender Politics (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002). 38 For further discussion of this topic see Karlheinz Lüdeking, ‘Vom konstruierten zum liquiden Körper’, in Pia Müller-Tamm, Katharina Sykora, eds, Puppen, Körper, Automaten: Phantasmen der Moderne (Cologne: Oktagon, 1999), pp.219–33. The ethical dimension of the bodily presence of an absent body is exemplified in the work of Mexican artist Teresa Margolles. In her installations Vaporization (2001) and In the Air (2003), she diffuses water from the morgue in the exhibition space. The water was used to wash the corpses of victims that died in the course of the Mexican drug war; cf. Thomas Macho, ‘Ästhetik der Verwesung. Zur künstlerischen Arbeit von Teresa Margolles’, in Thomas Macho, Kristin Marek, eds, Die neue Sichtbarkeit des Todes (Munich: Fink, 2007), pp.337–53. 39 However, the figure of the ‘Fat Man’ is also often reproduced in isolation (without the laboratory installation). 40 Carsten Zelle, Die doppelte Ästhetik der Moderne: Revisionen des Schönen von Boileau bis Nietzsche (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1995), p.197. 41 John Isaacs himself made the association between his ‘self-portraits’ and the picture of Dorian Gray in an artist talk given at the University of Arts in Berlin, January 2011.

Chapter 11 1 Michel Ribon, Archipel de la laideur: Essai sur l’art et la laideur (Paris: Kimé, 1995), p.22. 2 See Slavoj Žižek, The Abyss of Freedom (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2004), p.23. 3 To prevent confusion, it is worth nothing that this study concerns the art historian Jurgis Baltrušaitis (1903–88), not the noted modernist poet Jurgis Baltrušaitis (1873–1944), the art historian’s father.

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4 ‘On Baltrušaitis’, Roland Recht interviewed by Jeanette Zwingenberger, in art press 2/13, Hidden Images (May–July 2009), pp.29–37. 5 In 1927 and 1928, he made several archaeological expeditions to the Transcaucasia, which served as the basis for four books. His first, Études sur l’art médiéval en Géorgie et en Arménie (Paris: E. Leroux, 1929), explored the ornamental patterns of Christian monumental sculpture in the Transcaucasia. 6 La stylistique ornementale dans la sculpture romane (Paris: E. Leroux, 1934). The book was reprinted by Flammarion in 1986 as Formations, déformations: la stylistique ornementale dans la sculpture romane. 7 M. Schapiro, ‘Über den Schematismus in den romanischen Kunst’, Kritische Berichte zur kunstgeschichtlichen Literatur 5 (1932–3), pp. 1–21. Schapiro’s 1933 critique of Baltrušaitis’ Stylistique is strongly coloured by his political beliefs; that said, Focillon’s and Baltrušaitis’ approach was directly opposed to that of Shapiro, ‘for whom the disorder of Romanesque sculpture was a sign for its expressivity and its primitivism’, as Alexandra GajewskiKennedy notes in ‘Henri Focillon (1881–1943)’, Key Writers on Art: The Twentieth Century, ed. Chris Murray (London: Routledge, 2003), p. 110. See also Walter B. Kahn, ‘Schapiro and Focillon’, in Gesta 41/2 (2002), pp. 129–36. 8 On his approach, see also Jean Wirth, L’image médiévale: naissance et dévelopement (VIe-Xe siècles) (Paris: Méridiens Klincksieck, 1989), p.268. 9 Réveils et prodiges: le gothique fantastique (Paris: A. Colin, 1960); see also the related, slightly earlier Le Moyen Âge fantastique: antiquités et exotismes dans l’art gothique (Paris: A. Colin, 1955). Baltrušaitis was fond of the longue durée. In Art sumérien, art roman (Paris: E. Leroux, 1935; reprinted by Flammarion, 1989), he sought to establish the ultimate sources of Romanesque ornamental stylistics in Sumerian art. The book has been recently published in Italian as Arte sumera, arte romanica (Milan: Adelphi, 2006). 10 Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and his World (1940), trans. Helene Iswolsky (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1968), p.317. 11 Frances S. Connelly, ‘Introduction’, in Modern Art and the Grotesque, ed. Frances S. Connelly (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), p.4. 12 As quoted in Connelly, p.15. 13 Michael Camille, Image on the Edge: The Margins of Medieval Art (London: Reaktion, 1992), p.31. 14 Jurgis Baltrušaitis, Le Moyen Âge fantastique (Paris: Flammarion, 1993), p.50. 15 Baltrušaitis took courses by Henri Focillon at the Sorbonne, was the member of his distinguished group of students, and received his doctorat ès lettres in 1931 under his direction. Later on he participated in the systematic research of medieval art undertaken by Focillon at the Institut d’Art et d’Archéologie of the Sorbonne (1932–6). In 1931 Baltrušaitis married Focillon’s stepdaughter.











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16 Kathryn Simpson, ‘Viennese art, ugliness, and the Vienna school of art history: the vicissitudes of theory and practice’, Journal of Art Historiography 3 (2010), p.1. 17 Henri Focillon, ‘Esthétique des visionnaires’, in Journal de psychologie normale et pathologique 23 ( January–March 1926), pp.275-89, reprinted in Henri Focillon, Maîtres de l’estampe (Paris: Henri Laurens, 1930), pp.193–212. 18 Henri Focillon, ‘Les dessins de Victor Hugo’, in Victor Hugo (Paris: Gallimard, 1985), p.199: ‘un art de l’inconcient, plus fertile en magies, en éblouissements, en vertiges’. 19 Henri Focillon, ‘L’art visionnaire à la fin du Moyen Âge et pendant la Renaissance’, in Esthétique et l’histoire de l’art: Extrait de l’annuaire du Collège de France (Paris, 1939), pp.4–7. He noted that visionary art is characterised by the attempt of the artist to reveal the nostalgia for the past (‘la poésie des ruines’), the image of death, and the caducity of man and the universe. See also Henri Focillon, ‘L’irréalisme à la fin du Moeyn Age et à la Renaissance’, in Pour un temps – Henri Focillon / Textes et dessins d’Henri Focillon (Paris: Centre Georges Pompidou, 1986), pp.171–88. 20 Pascal Schandel, ‘Henri Focillon, l’eau-forte et les artistes visionnaires’, Histoire de l’art 52 (2003), p.76. 21 André Chastel, ‘Henri Focillon et son enseignement’, in Victor Focillon et Henri Focillon, exh. cat. (Dijon: Musée des beaux-arts de Dijon, 1955), p.17. 22 After World War II and Focillon’s death, Baltrušaitis gathered former students and colleagues every Wednesday at his home, Villa Virginie, to continue Focillon’s research on the end of the Middle Ages and visionary art. As J.-F. Chevrier notes: ‘The most brilliant art historians presented their papers there: Krautheimer, Sterling, Charles Seymour, Tolnay, Otto Benesch, Saxl, Chastel, Grodecki, Edgar Wind, Gantner, Hahnloser…’ See Jean-François Chevrier, Portrait de Jurgis Baltrušaitis; Art Sumérien, Art Roman par Jurgis Baltrušaitis (Paris: Flammarion, 1989), p.20. 23 Lydie Krestovsky. La laideur dans l’art à travers les âges (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1947), p.14. 24 Roberto Salvini. Pure visibilité et formalisme dans la critique d’art au début du XXe siècle (Paris: Klincksieck, 1988), p.40: ‘c’est-à-dire en excluant de la forme signifiante d’un côté tout ce qui peut être contenu dans la qualification de beau, au sens d’agréable et de désirable, de l’autre côté tout ce qui peut être enveloppé par le concept de description’. 25 Maddalena Mazzocut-Mis, ‘Focillon et l’esthétique française de la première moitie du XXe siècle’, in La vie des formes: Henri Focillon et les arts (Paris, Gand: INHA, Snoeck Decaju & Zoon, 2004), p.193. 26 In ‘Praise of Hands’, Focillon combatted the view that visionary artists ‘are carried away by their visions suddenly, utterly and despotically, and that they transfer them intact to any medium whatever by a hand guided from within, like those automatic artists who can draw in reverse. Nothing is less certain, however, if one

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examines one of the greatest of these visionaries, Victor Hugo. No mind is richer in inner spectacles, in flamboyant contrasts, in verbal surprises that depict the object with an enthralling exactness. One would willingly believe, as he did, that he was inspired like a magician and possessed by presences impatient to become apparitions, complete and already three dimensional in a world at once solid and convulsive’. Focillon, The Life of Forms in Art, trans. Charles Beecher Hogan and George Kubler (New York: Zone, 1989), pp.178–9. Ibid., p.40. Ibid., p.94. Jurgis Baltrušaitis, Anamorphoses ou Thaumaturgus opticus (Paris: Flammarion, 1996), p.7. The subtitle is a reference to Jean-François Niceron, and appears in the third edition, first published by Flammarion in 1984; the first edition was called Anamorphoses ou Perspectives curieuses (Paris: O. Perrin, 1955), the second, Anamorphoses ou Magie artificielle des effets merveilleux (Paris: O. Perrin, 1969). Encyclopédie ou dictionnaire raisonné des sciences et des métiers, ed. Denis Diderot et Jean le Rond d’Alembert (Paris, 1751), I: p.404. Quoted by Baltrušaitis in Anamorphoses, p.164. Dieter Mersch, ‘Representation and Distortion: On the Construction of Rationality and Irrationality in Early Modern Modes of Representation’, in Instruments in Art and Science: On the Architectonics of Cultural Boundaries in the 17th Century, ed. K. Schramm, L. Schwarte, J. Lazarding (New York: Walter de Gruyter, 2008), p.25. Quoted in Mersch, ‘Representation and Distortion’, p.28. See also Leonardo da Vinci: Leonardo on Art and the Artist, ed. André Chastel (New York: Dover, 2002), p.106: ‘If the eye looking at this representation in perspective moves slightly, all the images will appear monstrous to it.’ In the seventeenth century, Perspective and Optic (the art of seeing) were used interchangeably. See Mersch, ‘Representation and Distortion’, p.28. Connelly, ‘Introduction’, p.3. Kim H. Veltman, ‘Perspective, Anamorphosis and Vision’, Marburger Jahrbuch für Kunstwissenschaft 21 (1986), pp.93–117. Donald Preziosi, Rethinking Art History (London and New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), p.57. Ibid., p.58. Jean-Claude Margolin, ‘Aspects du surréalisme au XVIe siècle: fonction allégorique et vision anamorphique’, in Bibliothèque d’Humanisme et Renaissance 39/3 (1977), p.511. Jen E. Boyle, Anamorphosis in Early Modern Literature: Mediation and Affect (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2010), p.1. The exhibition dedicated to the double images ‘One Image May Hide Another: Arcimboldo, Dalí, Raetz’ (curated by Jean-Hubert Martin with Dario Gamboni,



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Thierry Dufrêne, Michel Weemans, Jeanette Zwingenberger), took place in Paris, Galeries Nationales du Grand Palais, from 8 April to 6 July 2009. Ribon, Archipel de la laideur, p.210. Roland Barthes, ‘Arcimboldo, or Magician and Rhétoriqueur’, in The Responsibility of Forms, translated Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1985), pp.129–48. Ibid., pp.144–6. Ribon, Archipel de la laideur, p.211. See Jurgis Baltrušaitis, Aberrations: Essai sur la légende des formes (Paris: Flammarion, 1983). Bertrand Tillier, ‘Les fruits défendus de la caricature’, in Une image peut en cacher une autre: Arcimboldo, Dalí, Raetz, ed. Jean-Hubert Martin, exh. cat. (Paris: RMN, 2009), pp.39–41. Ribon, Archipel de la laideur, p.214. The word anamorphosis refers to Greek ana, which means the return of, and morphē – the form or shape. The words ‘anamorphosi’, ‘anamophotica’ appear tardily in Schott’s four-volume Magia universalis naturae et artis (Würzburg, 1657–59), in the third part of the book Optica (1657), called De magia anamorphotica, sive de arcana imaginum deformatione ac reformatione ex optices atque catoptrices proescriptio. Schott, like Niceron and Kircher, treated optical phenomena and visual effects in the context of natural philosophy, and defined perspective as ‘anamorphic magic’. However, the term ‘anamorphosis’ was introduced long after the practice itself existed. Anamorphic drawings, engravings and paintings were particularly numerous in sixteenth-century Germany. But a consistent and clear definition of the artistic practice did not exist: the pictorial technique was usually described as ‘curious perspective’ or ‘reversed perspective’. See also Stuart Clark, Vanities of the Eye: Vision in Early Modern European Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), p.105. Erwin Panofsky, in Perspective as Symbolic Form (1927), already drew attention to the curvatures in classical architecture, to the distortions occurring from a close viewpoint in Renaissance paintings, and to ‘scenography’ as a method of correction (but also intentional production) of visual distortion. Ribon, Archipel de la laideur, p.360. Baltrušaitis, Anamorphoses, p.7. Maddalena Mazzocut-Mis, in Deformazioni fantastiche: introduzione all’estetica di Jurgis Baltrušaitis (Milan: Mimesis, 1999), the only detailed study of Baltrušaitis’ theoretical commitments, also does not discuss ugliness. She has since approached the topic in P. Giordanetti, M. Mazzocut-Mis, G. Scaramuzza, Itinerari estetici del brutto (Milan: Libreria Cortina, 2011). See also her Il senso del limite: Il dolore, l’eccesso, l’osceno (Milan: Modadori, 2009). Baltrušaitis, Anamorphoses, p.29. The English text here is from Horace Walpole’s translation of Paul Hentzner’s Travels in England (London: Edward Jeffery, 1797), p.22.

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54 William Shakespeare, Richard II (1595), act II, scene 2, v.16–20. This passage is pointed out by Baltrušaitis in Anamorphoses, p.34, with reference to Erwin Panofsky, The Codex Huygens and Leonardo da Vinci’s Art Theory (London: Warburg Institute, 1940), p.93. 55 Baltrušaitis, Anamorphoses, p.49. 56 Ibid., p.56. 57 Eileen Rieves, Painting the Heavens: Arts and Science in the Age of Galileo (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999), p.239. 58 Baltrušaitis, Anamorphoses, p.65, paraphrasing the claims of Du Breuil. 59 Baltrušaitis notes that Niceron gave advice on anamorphic method to Florentine painter Lodovico Cigoli (1559–1613), the inventor of a perspective machine. Galileo sent Cigoli a letter in 1612 that compares anamorphoses with the phantasmagorias of allegorical poetry. See Erwin Panofsky, Galileo as a Critic of the Arts (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1954), p.13, and JeanFrançois Lyotard, Discours, Figure (Paris: Klincksieck, 1985), p.377. In Considerazioni al Tasso, Galileo declared that allegory operates in the manner of paintings that present to us ‘nothing but a confused and distorted mixture of lines and colours in which, with much application, one may form an image of sinuous rivers and roads, deserted beaches, or clouds or strange chimeras’. Quoted by Hubert Damisch, A Theory of Cloud: Toward a History of Painting, trans. Janet Lloyd (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2007), p.135. Galileo, as Panofsky shows, denounced mannerist tendencies in art, including anamorphosis; he also felt that anamorphic allegories had infiltrated literature. An instance, noted by Baltrušaitis, might be the Gargantua of Rabelais, who in his gigantism eliminates the gap between physical reality and other worlds. Anamorphosis in literature, as in Arcimboldo, used its disharmonies to highlight the opposition between naïve perception and various semiconscious associations. 60 Plato, The Sophist, 236a–c. 61 Discussing spectrality, Ribon, like Rosenkranz, refers to Shakespeare, in the chapter ‘Le monde de Shakespeare: de l’ombre de la mélancolie au spectral’, pp.192–204. 62 Karl Rosenkranz, Ästhetik des Hässlichen (Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt, 1968), pp.337–53, cited in Ribon, p.197. 63 Jurgis Baltrušaitis, ‘Holbein : cherchez l’ovni!’, Le Musée égoïste 30/1 (1985), pp.94–5. “Ovni” is French for UFO, ‘objet volant non identifié’. 64 Ribon, Archipel de la laideur, p.197. 65 Edgar Allan Poe, ‘Ligeia’, The Works of the Late Edgar Allan Poe, vol.1 (New York: Blakeman & Mason, 1859), p.462. Poe first collected his stories in two volumes under the title Tales of the Grotesque and the Arabesque (Philadelphia, PA: Lea & Blanchard, 1840). 66 Baltrušaitis, Anamorphoses, p.95.







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67 Ibid., p.100. 68 Ibid., p.159. 69 Murielle Gagnebin, Fascination de la Laideur (Lausanne: L’Age d’Homme, 1978), p.149. 70 Mersch, ‘Representation and Distortion’, p.31. 71 Anamorphic images from the collection of Jacques Lipchitz were exhibited in the exposition Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism, organised by Alfred Barr in the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1936. 72 Allen S. Weiss, The Aesthetics of Excess (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1989), p.150. 73 The term anamorphic is used by photographers for any lens that produces deformed images. 74 R. Bruce Elder, The Films of Stan Brakhage in the American Tradition of Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein and Charles Olsen (New York: Wilfrid Laurier, 1999), p.136. 75 Baltrušaitis, Anamorphoses, p.203. 76 Roland Barthes par lui-même (Paris: Editions de Seuil, 1975), p.48. 77 Jacques Lacan, Le séminaire, Livre XI: Les quatre concepts fondamentaux de la psychanalyse (Paris: Editions de Seuil, 1973), pp.75–84. 78 Slavoj Žižek, Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan through Popular Culture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992), pp.88–91. 79 István Orosz, ‘The Angle of Our Vision: About and a propos Anamorphosis’, http://kepes.society.bme.hu/art-science/Istvan_Orosz_-_The_Angle_of_ Our_Vision.pdf (accessed 10 August 2011). 80 Gilles Deleuze, Logique de la sensation: Francis Bacon (Paris: La Différence, 1982). 81 Alain Mons, La traversée du visible: Images et lieux du contemporain (Paris: Passion, 2002), p.190.

Conclusion 1 ‘Gramm. & Morale’: Encyclopedia categories to which this article was supposed to relate. 2 Alfonso de la Cueva-Benavides y Mendoza-Carrillo, marqués de Bedmar (1572– 1655), Spanish ambassador to Venice, and head of an 1618 plot to bring Venice under Spanish control. Diderot probably had in mind Bedmar as portrayed in Thomas Otway’s 1682 tragedy Venice Preserv’d, or A Plot Discover’d, available for instance in The Works of Thomas Otway, vol.3 (London: Hitch et al, 1757), pp.217–329. 3 We’d like to thank Francesco Ventrella for sharing with us his unpublished work on Lee.

Annotated Bibliography One might learn more about the essence of ugliness from the Inferno or Silent Spring, but to avoid arbitrariness we stuck with explicit discussions of the concept, producing a partial but perhaps usable list. As it is, many key treatments are sandwiched inside larger works, whether on beauty, art, or politics; we quote, paraphrase, or comment accordingly. Adams, Robert Martin. ‘Ideas of Ugly’, The Hudson Review, 27/1 (Spring 1974), pp.55–68. The first English-language discussion of Rosenkranz after his facsimile reprinting, whose relational theory of beauty and ugliness Adams thinks refuted by the modernist marriage of the two. The noted American literary critic also gives an early citation of the Ugly-Club in Spectator 17 (p.67), and bears as epigraph an ‘old saying, courtesy of Alice Sachs: Beauty is only skin-deep, but ugly is to the bone’ (p.55). Addison, Joseph and Richard Steele, The Spectator [1711–14], Complete in one volume with notes, and a general index (London: Jones & Co., 1840). On The Spectator’s near-single-handed invention of Ugly Clubs, see the first essay in this volume. We list the relevant articles, all by Steele. 17. Account of the Ugly Club; 32. Admission of the Spectator into the Ugly Club; 48. Spectator’s Letter to the Ugly Club—Letters from Hecatissa—an old Beau—strolling players; 52. Letter from the Ugly Club—Hobbes’s Theory of Laughter; 78. Claim of Cambridge to the Origin of the Ugly Club—Petition of Who and Which; 87. On Beauties: Letter from a Beauty. The last entry gives the moral of the whole enterprise: ‘It has been the purpose of several of my speculations to bring people to an unconcerned behaviour, with relation to their persons, whether beautiful or defective’ (p.126). Adorno, Theodor Wiesengrund. Ästhetische Theorie (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1970), English edn (London: Routledge, 1984; Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), Ch.3. Adorno’s modernist aesthetics defends autonomy and abstraction as critical symbols of domination. Ugliness emerges as an anthropological hypothesis: it is the remains of archaic religion, which art deprives of its fright and exploits as beauty. Aristotle, The Nichomachean Ethics, ed. David Ross (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), pp.14, 47 [1099b2-4, 1114a23-24]. Aristotle thinks happiness may be out of reach of the ugly, destitute and childless (but unhappier still are those with evil children); nevertheless, since vice is voluntary, the ugly by nature are not blamed, as are those who are ugly through ‘lack of exercise or care’. — The Poetics, ed. Richard Janko (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1987), pp.4, 6 [parts iv, v; 48b10-15, 49a33-36] Humans delight in imitation, even of unpleasant or painful things (e.g. dead animals), because they delight in learning. Comedy and the laughable, subsets of the low, form a subset of ugliness, one not involving pain. 275



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Aschenbrenner, Karl. ‘Aesthetics and Logic: An Analogy’, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 23/1 (Autumn 1964), pp.63–79. An eccentric defence of art theory as approximating to logic. Aschenbrenner insists that ugliness is ‘never without aesthetic import’, nor necessarily failure, since ugliness ‘may have a kind of perverse aesthetic function, and the performance of a function is the same as success at it’ (p.70). — The Concepts of Criticism (Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 1974). An offhand remark in this large tome may be construed as the statement of an ‘extinction theory’ of ugliness: war, once celebrated as glorious, is now revealed in its repulsive brutality. ‘The revelation of its ugliness may yet assure its extinction’ (p.264). Athanassoglou-Kallmyer, Nina. ‘Ugliness’, Critical Terms for Art History, ed. Robert S. Nelson and Richard Shiff, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), pp.281–95. A rare discussion of the subject by an art historian, focusing on the abject and the grotesque, and viewing ugliness somewhat optimistically as ‘a subversive strategy that ironically confounds the very culture that invented it’ (p.294). Augustine. De musica, book 6, ch.13 pt. 38, in J.P. Migne, ed., Patrologiae cursus completus, vol.32 (Paris: Migne, 1845), p.1184, translated into English in The Fathers of the Church, vol.4 (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America, 1947). Augustine’s proportion theory of beauty is rounded out by a treatment of ugliness as its complement, serving to make beauty whole as silence does sound and darkness light. Austin, John Langshaw. ‘A Plea for Excuses’, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 57 (1956–7), reprinted in Philosophical Papers (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979), pp.175–204. Austin argues that classical philosophical problems like Freedom might be solved by paying attention to our everyday use of words, e.g. excuses. In aesthetics, he insists, similar ‘field work’ will take place, ‘if only we could forget for a while about the beautiful and get down instead to the dainty and the dumpy’ (p.183). Bacon, Francis. ‘Of Deformity’, The Essays, or Councils, Civil and Moral [1597] (London: Holt, 1701), §44. Coming just after the essay on beauty, which ‘like a rich Stone … should be plain set’, Bacon is extravagantly hard on the deformed, claiming that they ‘are void of Natural Affection’; still, he leaves himself an exit in free will, which can rise above bodily defect, so that ‘it is good to consider Deformity, not as a Sign which is more deceivable, but as a Cause which seldom faileth of the Effect’ (p.118). Bain, Alexander. The Emotions and the Will [1859], 2nd ed. (London: Longmans, 1865), Ch.14.33 (‘The aesthetic emotions – The animal kingdom. Beauties and deformities’). Of the mysterious repugnance caused by small, fast-moving animals, e.g. beetles and centipedes, Bain suggests it has to do with ‘their power of invasion’, which offends our sense of dignity by ‘crossing our path or lighting on the person uninvited’ (p.243). Baker, Naomi. Plain Ugly: The Unattractive Body in Early Modern Culture (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2010). A survey of literary ugliness and its bearers from Shakespeare to Burton, with some remarks on art, and a good passage on William Hay. Bancaud, Florence, ed. Beauté et laideur dans la literature, la philosophie et l’art allemand et autrichien au XXe siècle, Germanica 37 (2005). Essays on German and Austrian ugliness, ranging from the expected (Karl Rosenkranz and Egon Schiele) to the less so (Fritz von Hermanovsky-Orlando and Josephine Baker). Bataille, Georges. ‘La beauté’, L’Erotisme (Paris: Minuit, 1957), Bk.1, Ch.13. Fruit of a lifelong engagement with transgression, the chapter on beauty sees it and ugliness in

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biological terms, beauty pointing indirectly to sex, ugliness doing so directly. The essence of eroticism is abasement, but ‘ugliness cannot be abased’, so we need beauty. Bénard, Charles. ‘L’Esthétique du Laid. K. Rosenkranz’, Revue philosophique de la France et de l’etranger 4 (1877), pp.233–65. The one substantial contemporary review of Rosenkranz in France, by the Hegelian Bénard, who objects to Rosenkranz’s taste in art. Incidentally, this taste is quite Francophile, but with an emphasis on the early nineteenth century, from Girodet to Sue; this must have seemed outré in 1877. Bernard of Clairvaux, ‘Apologia ad Guillelmum sancti Theodorici abbatem’, in Patrologiae cursus completus: Series Latina, ed. Jean-Paul Migne, vol.182 (Paris: Garnier, 1854), col. 895–918. This classic attack on the ‘ridiculous monstrosity’ of monastic architectural decoration rather contradictorily renders them glamorous as ‘deformed beauty, beautiful deformity’ (col. 916). Berthaud, Auguste. Sancti Augustini doctrinam de pulchro ingenuisque artibus e variis illius operibus excerptam (Poitiers: P. Oudin, 1891). This obscure thesis on Augustine’s aesthetics delivered to the University of Besançon furnished Riegl with the primary evidence for his idiosyncratic defence of ugliness in late Roman art and thinking. Bettella, Patrizia. The Ugly Woman: Transgressive Aesthetic Models in Italian Poetry from the Middle Ages to the Baroque (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2005). An anti-Petrarchan tradition ranging from pastoral clichés of the ugly nurse to the praise of aged, eccentric, and lice-ridden beauties, the woman serving ‘as a defective object whose imperfections allow the poet to display his bravura’ (p.132). Blake, Peter. God’s Own Junkyard: the planned deterioration of America’s landscape [1964] (New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1979). Not to be confused with the English pop artist, American architect and critic Peter Blake assaulted suburbia in 1964 with this vividly photographed indictment of commercial architecture (an excerpt was published in 1961 by Horizon as “The Ugly America”). After Learning from Las Vegas appropriated Blake’s photos, most notoriously “The Duck”, an ornithomorphic shed which Venturi and Brown took to be the paradigm of all consistently designed buildings (‘The Parthenon is a Duck’), Blake responded, writing in the 1979 preface that some of his early examples now struck him as ‘extraordinarily interesting – even beautiful’ (p.14), but that the ugliness and destructiveness of commercial building nevertheless requires criticism, not cynical assent. Bodei, Remo, et al. La Disarmonia prestabilita: seminario promosso dal Centro internazionale studi di estetica, in occasione dell’edizione italiana dell’Aesthetik des Hässlichen di Karl Rosenkranz (Palermo: il Centro, 1985). Aesthetica pre-print vol.10. The first conference on Rosenkranz, coinciding with the Italian edition overseen by neo-Hegelian philosopher Remo Bodei, who sets the tone. Boldt-Irons, Leslie, Corrado Federici, Ernesto Virgulti, eds, Beauty and the Abject: Interdisciplinary Perspectives (New York: Peter Lang, 2007). Despite the title, there is fine, geographically varied work on ugliness here, from Chinese burial custom (Anna Ghiglione) to Renaissance Cretan drama (Marina Rodosthenous). Bolzano, Bernard. On the Concept of the Beautiful [Über den Begriff des Schönen] (Prague: Borrosch & André, 1843), §18, 24. Bolzano finds ugly not what is formless but what disappoints expectations of form (such as a failure to rhyme in a rhymed poem, p.37); this cognitive shock of ugliness leads Bolzano to describe also an alternate use of ugliness (German hässlich) to denote objects of hate (Hass). [reprinted in this volume]



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Bourdieu, Pierre. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste [1979], trans. Robert Nice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984). A sociological classic responsible for much nominalism about aesthetics in the contemporary academy. A typical passage: ‘Taste classifies, and it classifies the classifier. Social subjects, classified by their classifications, distinguish themselves by the distinctions they make, between the beautiful and the ugly, the distinguished and the vulgar, in which their position in the objective classifications is expressed or betrayed’ (p.6). More suggestive than such assertions is statistical evidence that with social status and education, more respondents find ‘that ugly or trivial objects can make a beautiful photograph’ (p.65). Bosanquet, Bernard. ‘The Æsthetic Theory of Ugliness’, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 1/3 (1890), pp.32–48. Though inconclusive and Victorian, this essay is widerraging than even Rosenkranz. In search for ‘real ugliness’, which he distinguishes from the ‘apparent ugliness’ that can be a fit object of (beautiful) art, Bosanquet suggests contradiction as the ultimate cause, whether between intention and feeling in kitsch or between humans and nature in industrial buildings. — A History of Æsthetic (London: Sonnenschein, 1892; 2nd ed. 1904 and New York: Macmillan). A good survey of philosophies of ugliness, particularly sharp on Rosenkranz, Lessing, and the idealists. Brady, Emily. ‘Ugliness and Nature’, Enrahonar: quaderns de filosofia, 45 (2010), pp.27–40. An argument against the ‘positive aesthetics’ school, according to which all that is natural is beautiful; Brady believes there is real ugliness in nature, which nevertheless deserves our interest and protection. See also her references on environmental aesthetics. Briese, Olaf. ‘Biedermeierliche Vermittlung. Karl Rosenkranz’ Ästhetik des Häßlichen’, in Konkurrenzen: Philosophische Kultur in Deutschland 1830–1850 (Würzburg: Königshausen und Neumann, 1998), pp.54–64. A revealing intellectual portrait of Rosenkranz, recounting his correspondence with and enthusiasm for the scatological novelist and political instigator Karl Gutzkow. Buffier, Claude. Traité des vérités prèmieres [1717], translated as First Truths (London: Joseph Johnson, 1780). Buffier advanced the classic proposition, taken up by Voltaire and Payne Knight, that beauty is relative to culture, so that neither black nor white is essentially beautiful (p.73). Buffier also has an ingenious statistical argument: beautiful faces are rare but resemble more faces than do the more numerous ugly ones; it follows that ‘those differences which constitute ugliness, lessen the trouble of painters, and enable them to give a more characteristic likeness to their portraits’ (p.69). Burke, Edmund. A Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Beautiful and the Sublime [1757], 2nd expanded ed. (London: Dodsley, 1770), Part III, Section XXI, ‘Ugliness’. Having set up terror and pain as the sublime, a positive opposite of beauty, this founding text of psychological aesthetics devotes just one page to ugliness, noting that it is the opposite of all aspects of beauty, but not the opposite of fitness and proportion, nor incompatible with the sublime (p.226). Carmichael, Peter A. ‘The Sense of Ugliness’, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 30/4 (Summer 1972), pp.495–8. Ugliness is a moral sense serving as ‘alarm and flight before demonic assailants of the aesthetic spirit’ (p.498) – a formula that might indicate the role played by air-raid alarms in American intellectual life of the Cold War. Cohen, Alix. ‘Kant on the Possibility of Ugliness’, British Journal of Aesthetics, 53/2 (April 2013), pp.199–209. A novel contribution to the bustling industry trying to

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outfit Kant with a theory of ugliness; Cohen argues that Kant’s aesthetics commits him to not one but two opposites of beauty, an impure and a pure ugliness. Cohn, Jonas. Allgemeine Ästhetik (Leipzig: Wilhelm Engelmann, 1901), pp.188–9. The botanist, psychologist, and neo-Kantian subscribes to a conventional Hegelianism, according to which ugliness is overcome in struggle with the sublime; in a lighter vein, he notes that immobile protuberances like a camel’s hump are especially ugly, while a lion’s mane, being mobile, is beautiful (p.174). Collingwood, Robin George. The Principles of Art (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1938), Ch.2, §6. Though he doesn’t mention ugliness, Collingwood’s idealist aesthetics, which owes less to Croce than he thinks, cleared the way for the study of ugliness by urging that ‘aesthetic theory is the theory not of beauty but of art’ (p.41), and showing that this was essentially Plato’s position, supplanted in modern aesthetics by a ‘realist’ attempt to impute aesthetic qualities to things rather than to the agent’s aesthetic activity. Cory, Herbert Ellsworth. ‘Ugliness and Evil’, International Journal of Ethics 38/3 (April 1928), pp.307–15. An anarchist converted to Catholicism, Cory allows that discord may be beautiful, defines ugliness formally as incongruity in the object and divided attention in the spectator, then applies this politically, finding ugly the exploitation of nature, and in general the use of art as a means rather than an end, as in propaganda. Cousin, Victor. Cours de philosophie professé a la faculté de letters pendant l’année 1818, sur le fondement des idées absolus du vrai, du beau et du bien, ed. Adolphe Garnier (Paris: L. Hachette, 1836). The founder of nineteenth-century French ‘eclectic’ philosophy asserts the identity of the three titular ideas; contains perhaps the first French discussion of ugliness as necessarily attended by sentiments of hate (p.217). Cousins, Marc. ‘The Ugly’, AA Files 28 (1994), pp.61–4, and AA Files 29 (1995), pp.3– 6. A widely read recent manifesto, inspired by Kristeva and Žižek, of ugliness as excess: ‘an invasive contaminating life stripped of all signification’ (I: p.62). Croce, Benedetto. Estetica come scienza dell’espressione e linguistica generale [1902], trans. Douglas Ainslie as Aesthetic as Science of Expression and General Linguistic (London: Macmillan, 1909), Ch.10. Croce’s influential expression theory made of ugliness ‘embarrassed activity’, or ‘unsuccessful expression’. It follows that beauty is unity devoid of degree or parts (there is no ‘expressive that is more expressive’), while ugliness is multiplicity, and has parts, in fact beautiful parts: for without beautiful parts, ‘disvalue would become nonvalue’ and thus aesthetically irrelevant (pp.74–5). Damme, Wilfried Van. A Comparative Analysis Concerning Beauty and Ugliness in SubSaharan Africa (Ghent: Africana Gandensia, Rijksuniversiteit-Gent, 1987). A pioneering study of African aesthetics, with surprisingly Burkean results (clarity and smoothness tend to be beautiful, their opposites ugly), focussed primarily on religion and visual art. Danto, Arthur. ‘The Abuse of Beauty’, Daedalus, 131/4 (Autumn 2002), pp.35–56; largely incorporated in The Abuse of Beauty (Chicago: Open Court, 2003). Danto argues in retrospect that the avant-garde has loosened ties between beauty and truth, and beauty and art to the point that ‘beauty belongs neither to the essence, nor the definition of art’. Nonetheless, artists are free to use truth, beauty and ugliness as they see fit. — ‘Kalliphobia in Contemporary Art’, Art Journal, 63/2 (Summer 2004), pp.24–35. A mild rethinking of The Abuse of Beauty in which Danto argues, with reference to Austin’s ‘Plea’, that the terms beautiful and ugly, like Austin’s ‘dainty and the dumpy’, though not essential to art, have a real descriptive function in daily life.



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Darwin, Charles. The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex, vol.2 (London: John Murray, 1871), Ch.19. Darwin’s perceptive discussion of varying standards of beauty (which reads like Kant) concludes that there is no universal standard, and no evidence (though he does not rule it out) that local standards of beauty are biologically inherited (p.353). He combats Schaaffhausen’s idea that ugliness ‘is an approach to the lower animals’, which fails to explain why a ‘nose twice as prominent…is hideous’ (p.355). Darwin thinks what local standards have in common is a desire for variety, with a few traits taken to a ‘moderate extreme’; of interest is also Ch.20, where it is argued that both human males and females tend to choose mates on economic and social criteria, and thus that humans as a species fail to select for beauty as many animals do. Derrida, Jacques. ‘Economimesis’, trans. R. Klein, Diacritics, 11/2 (Summer 1981), pp.2–25. One of Derrida’s two widely read essays on Kant’s aesthetics, insisting on the unruly nature of the ugly in Kant’s category of the disgusting: ‘in-sensible and un-intelligible, irrepresentable and unnameable, the absolute other of the system’ (p.22). Dessoir, Max. Ästhetik und allgemeine Kunstwissenschaft (Stuttgart: Ferdinand Enke, 1906), V: 3. Dessoir founded a long-running journal of aesthetics (still in print) by the same name; in his section on ugliness and the comic he sees both, predictably, as based in perceived ‘disharmonies’, which he brings up to date with Zola and Millet (p.215). Deutsch, Helen. Resemblance and Disgrace: Alexander Pope and the Deformation of Culture (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996). Disability and ugliness in eighteenth-century context read through the hunch-backed poet Alexander Pope. Dewey, John. Art as Experience (New York: Minton, Balch, & Co., 1934, 1952). Dewey’s pragmatism makes room for no less than two opposites of beauty, ‘slackness’ and ‘tightness’ (p.40). Diamond, Stanley. ‘The Beautiful and the Ugly Are One Thing, the Sublime Another: A Reflection on Culture’, Cultural Anthropology 2/2 (May 1987), pp.268–71. Typical ‘80s speculation, contrasting aesthetic convention (beauty/ugliness) with the sublime, which is ‘transcendent and cultural’ at once, and capable of producing meaning ex nihilo. Diderot, Denis. ‘Recherches philosophiques sur l’origine et la nature du beau’ [1751], in Diderot: Essai sur la peinture, ed. J. Assézat, vol.10 (Paris, Garnier, 1876), Ch. 1. The young Diderot distinguishes between real and relative forms of beauty and ugliness. The real depend on internal relations like symmetry, while the relative involve comparison with other objects under a category: a turbot may be beautiful or ugly relative to the class of turbots, fish, animals, or natural things (p.29). — ‘Salon de 1761’, ibid. In an attack on the painter Hallé, Diderot complains that, due to the divergence between classical taste and the corrupt eighteenth century (with its ‘garters that cut our thighs’ and ‘shoes that disfigure our feet’), ‘what we call beautiful on the street, we call ugly in the atelier’, and vice versa (p.118). — ‘Laideur’, Encyclopédie ou dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers, vol.9 [‘Ju – Mam’] (Neuchâtel : Samuel Faulche, 1765), p.176. The most radical statement of Diderot’s utilitarian relativism, according to which a lizard would find a sumptuous palace ugly for lack of holes to hide in. [reprinted in this volume] Dmitrieva, N.A. O prekrasnom [‘On Beauty’] (Moscow, 1960). A typical Soviet tract, widely translated in Eastern Europe, identifies aesthetics with ‘the ethics of the future’ (Gorki); beauty is the result of free labour and ugliness of capitalism.

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Ducasse, Curt John. ‘What has beauty to do with art?’ Journal of Philosophy, 25/7 (29 March 1928), pp.181–6. The idiosyncratic Franco–American philosopher and aesthetician proposes ecpathy as an expressive function symmetrical to empathy, and argues several decades before Arthur Danto that ‘there is no connection’ between beauty and art (p.181), a thesis ‘of which the existence of ugly art already assures us’. (p.186) Duignan, Michael George. ‘The Dignity, Benefit, and Beauty of Ugliness’, Positive Facts, without a Shadow of Doubt (New York, self-published, 1860), Ch.40. Eccentric evangelical tract devoting a chapter to the ‘almost infinite’ benefits of ugliness, among which are the convenience of having fewer suitors, and its lasting nature. (pp.362–4) Ebong, Inih A. ‘The Aesthetics of Ugliness in Ibibio Dramatic Arts’, African Studies Review 38/3 (Dec.1995), pp.43–59. Discusses the use of fright and ugliness in West African mask sculpture and performance, and in Chinua Achebe. Very suggestive is the discussion of the colour black, which in the aesthetics of ugliness signifies not evil, as scholars have suggested, but a cosmological principle of timelessness and power (p.49). Eco, Umberto. Storia della bellezza (Milan: Bompiani, 2004); English as On Beauty (London: Secker & Warburg, 2004) and History of Beauty (New York: Rizzoli, 2004). — Storia della bruttezza (Milan: Bompiani, 2007); English as On Ugliness (London: Harvill Secker / New York: Rizzolo, 2007). Eco’s standard works are rich in images and texts, including long excerpts from Rosenkranz; there is little argument, though the author does ask at the end if contemporary performance art (he reproduces Marina Abramović self-incised star) bears witness to an eternal fascination with ugliness. Eileraas, Karina. ‘Witches, Bitches & Fluids: Girl Bands Performing Ugliness as Resistance’, TRD: The Drama Review 41/3 (Autumn 1997), pp.122–39. A multimedia investigation of 1990s ‘riot girl’ musicians’ use of ugliness, defined as an ‘intentional deviation’ from ritual codes of femininity. Etcoff, Nancy. Survival of the Prettiest: The Science of Beauty (New York: Random House, 1999). A book-length popularisation by Harvard psychologist Etcoff of the case for culture-invariant preference for broadly biological ‘beauty’ and discrimination against ‘ugliness’; a good bibliographic starting point for more work in this vein. Fechner, Gustav Theodor, Vorschule der Ästhetik, vol.1 (Leipzig: Breitkopf & Härtel, 1876). The celebrated psychologist, like many others, identifies beauty and ugliness with pleasure and displeasure. But he insists that ugly objects be shown in an ugly fashion, in which case we may like a representation ‘for its truth, and dislike it for its object’ (p.64). Finck, Henry Theophilus. Romantic Love and Personal Beauty (Macmillan, 1887). The first Darwinian sociology of love is a racist, sexist mess; Finck advances the novel, if perverse claim that ‘Romantic Love’ seeks to ‘increase the amount of Personal Beauty in the world’ by compelling marriage based on looks. But taste is scarce, so unfortunately ‘ugly people fill the world with photographic copies of themselves’ (p.305). Firenzuola, Agnolo. Dialogo delle bellezze delle donne [1548] in Le Bellezze, le Lodi, gli Amori & i Costumi delle Donne (Venice: Barezzo Barezzi, 1622), trans. Clara Bell as Of the Beauty of Women (London: Osgood, McIlvaine & Co., 1892). The one honest Renaissance beauty theorist (perhaps because he was a ‘Mannerist’) confesses the peculiarity of the fact that a hairy woman is ugly but a horse without hair is deformed; he attributes this to ‘uno occulto ordine della natura’ (p.17). Fischer, Kuno. Diotima. Die Idee des Schönen. Philosophische Briefe [1849] (Stuttgart: Scheitlin, 1852), pp.236–59. Fischer’s update of Schiller’s great aesthetic letters defines



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ugliness in Young Hegelian fashion as the moral negation of the sublime. More novel is the historical linkage of ugliness and ‘decadence’: ‘The frivolous Romans and rigid Jews are the last expression of a soulless prehistory, just as the lecherous monks and effeminate caliphs are the triumph of ugliness over pious Catholicism and courageous Islam’ (p.259). This suggests to Fischer a ‘theodicy of beauty, to which ugliness belongs as does evil in its religious form’, an idea that reappears in Nietzsche. Florea, Luminița, ‘The Mostrous Musical Body: Mythology and Surgery in Late Medieval Music Theory’, Philobiblion, 18/1 ( January–June 2013), pp.128–63. A discussion of hybrid modes and extended tones in polyphonic music, described by medieval theorists as monsters equipped with multiple grafted limbs, and of the wondrous and gruesome surgical practices to which these musical theorists alluded. Forbes, Avary William Holmes. The Science of Beauty (London: Trubner, 1881), Ch.7. A revival of physiognomy as evolutionary utilitarianism; Forbes lays it down as a law that ugliness consists of subjective disgust and an objective ‘suggestion of inutility’ (p.157). Francke, Ursula. ‘Das Hässliche’, in Historisches Wörterbuch der Philosophie, ed. Joachim Ritter (Basel: Schwabe, 1974), vol.3, pp.1003–7. An influential reference article in the German tradition, by an aesthetician still working on ugliness (cf. Klemme et al). Frege, Gottlob. ‘Logik’ [c.1897] in Nachgelassene Schriften, ed. Hans Hermes, Friedrich Kambartel, Friedrich Kaulbach (Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 1969), pp.137–63. Near the end of this unpublished introduction to logic, Frege notes that while beauty and ugliness are opposed, they are not contradictories, which could be obtained by negating the other: even if ‘unbeautiful’ meant ‘ugly’, the sentences ‘this house is not unbeautiful’ and ‘this house is beautiful’ nevertheless differ in meaning (p.162). Freud, Sigmund. ‘The Sexual Aberrations’, in Three Contributions to the Theory of Sexuality [1905] (New York: Brill, 1930), Ch.1. Footnote 20 posits a puzzle: ‘I have no doubt that the conception of the “beautiful” is rooted in the soil of sexual stimulation … the more remarkable, therefore, is the fact that the genitals, the sight of which provokes the greatest sexual excitement, can really never be considered “beautiful”’. Fry, Roger. ‘Expression and Representation in the Graphic Arts’, in A Roger Fry Reader, ed. Christopher Reed (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), pp.61–71. The great formalist critic, notorious for his coinage ‘significant form’, also introduced, in a lecture text printed very posthumously, a historicist-avant-garde theory of ugliness, according to which all new art is deemed ugly before it is deemed beautiful. For Fry, however, there is another sense of the words besides this purely aesthetic judgement of success and failure: ugliness in a natural sense is associated with pain and disappointment, and is thus ‘likely to be used by the artists who penetrate deepest into the human heart’ (p.67). Fuller-Maitland, John Alexander. ‘Towards Ugliness: A Revision of Old Opinions’, Musical Quarterly, 6/3 ( July 1920), pp.317–25. The advocate of Purcell sketches a historical development from obvious to subtle beauty, so that ‘we old fogies must reconcile ourselves to the admission, into the realm of serious music, of noises for the making of which children in our own youth were smacked and sent to bed’ (p.323). Gagnebin, Murielle. Fascination de la laideur. La main et le temps (Lausanne: L’Age d’Homme, 1978). Ugliness as ‘the sensible force of time’ (p.327), applied to art from Goya to performance, with much obscure post-war figurative painting; there is also a most entertaining interview with Sartre concerning ugliness (pp.335–43).

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Garvin, Lucius. ‘The Problem of Ugliness in Art’, Philosophical Review 57/4 ( July 1948), pp.404–9. A defence of the view of ugliness as opposed to beauty, and as an aesthetic ‘event’ (p.407), against the school of Croce, which sees it as failure to express. Geron, Małgorzata and Jerzy Malinowski, eds, Szpetne w Sztukach Pięknych [‘The Ugly in the Fine Arts’] (Kracow: Libron, 2011). A recent Polish volume dealing with ugliness from Renaissance ecorchés and 1930s racist caricature to contemporary Polish art and Marlene Dumas. With English abstracts. Gethmann-Siefert, Annemarie. ‘Hegel über das Hässliche in der Kunst’, in Hegels Ästhetik. Die Kunst der Politik – Die Politik der Kunst, ed. A Arndt, K. Bal, H. Ottmann, W. van Reijen (Berlin, 2000), 21–41. The editor of Hegel’s unpublished texts (including Philosophie der Kunst: Vorlesung von 1826) expounds Hegel’s debt to Lessing, and claims contentiously that in Hegel’s original notes, ugliness is far more modern than in the young Hegelians, in that it contains no link to beauty. Gigante, Denise. ‘Facing the Ugly: the Case of Frankenstein’, ELH 67/2 (Summer 2000), pp.565–87. From a close reading of the ‘active’ ugliness of Shelley’s monster, Gigante generalises to the ugly as ‘resistance to aestheticization’. Indeed, ‘the threat it poses to the survival of the subject qua subject’ gives rise to the curious tendency to conflate linguistically the monster, the scientist Frankenstein, and Shelley herself (pp.579–80). Gilbert, Katherine Everett. Studies in Recent Aesthetic (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1927), pp.162–7. Perhaps the first American woman aesthetician, Gilbert finds ugliness in incongruity (cheery hymns) and overbearing authors, phenomena to which she gives the blanket term ‘presumption’, either of the artwork or of the maker. Gilman, Charlotte Perkins. The Man-Made World: or Our Androcentric Culture (New York: Charlton, 1911). A brilliant extended attack on women’s subjugation, arguing on Darwinian principles that the suppression of women’s dominant role in sexual selection is responsible for the pervasive ugliness and ill health of all extant human society. Giordanetti, Pierro, Maddalena Mazzocut-Mis, and Gabriele Scaramuzza. Itinerari estetici del brutto (Milan: Libreria Cortina, 2011). Goble, Erika. ‘Facing the Ugly Face’, Phenomenology and Practice 5/2 (2011), pp.6–19. An exploration of the ‘lived experience’ of finding another ugly, a phenomenon that implicates the person making the judgement as much as it does the person found ugly. Gombrich, Ernst H. Review of Mr. Gillray, the Caricaturist, by Draper Hill and The Duke of Wellington in Caricature, by John Physick. Burlington Magazine 108 ( Jan. 1966), pp.206–7. A classic if brief statement of caricature as anti-art, taking for granted, in negating, the canons of beauty of eighteenth-century classicism. Gombrich thinks that as beauty lost its prestige in the nineteenth century, caricature declined in turn. Goodman, Nelson. Languages of Art: An Approach to a Theory of Symbols [1968], 2nd ed. (Minneapolis, MN: Hackett, 1976), Pt.VI: 6. This influential conventionalist aesthetics damns beauty and ugliness: ‘If the beautiful excludes the ugly, beauty is no measure of aesthetic merit; but if the beautiful may be ugly, then “beauty” becomes only an alternative and misleading term for aesthetic merit’ (p.255). Gorsen, Peter. Sexualästhetik (Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1987), pp.13–48. Art history as Marxist psychoanalysis à la Herbert Marcuse, emphasising the animal character of the obscene in sexual ugliness, deployed by the avant-garde to challenge normative beauty. Gottschall, Rudolf von. ‘Glossen zur Aesthetik des Hässlichen’, in Richard Fleischer, ed., Deutsche Revue über das gesamte nationale Leben der Gegenwart, Stuttgart, 3 ( July–



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September 1895), pp.38–54. An attempt to apply Rosenkranz’s mid-nineteenth-century taxonomy to then-contemporary (we would say symbolist) art with its ‘cult of ugliness’. Groddeck, Georg. Das Buch vom Es [1923] (Fischer: Frankfurt, 1979), 8th Letter. The colleague of Freud published his book on the ‘it’ some months before Freud. Groddeck explains women’s hatred of their children through bodily changes due to pregnancy, which are absolutely ugly, unlike, say, an interesting scar on the face. ‘It is sad’, sneers the misogynist, ‘that a drop of semen…turns everything into a formless mass’ (p. 80). Guyer, Paul. ‘ Kant on the Purity of the Ugly ’, in Paul Guyer, Values of Beauty: Historical Essays in Aesthetics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), pp.141–62 [also online in Kant e-Prints 3/3 (2004), and in German in Klemme et al, below). The authoritative English translator and interpreter of Kant glosses Kant’s early, littleknown engagements with ugliness and the everyday, and develops a Critique-style account of judgements of ugliness as mixed aesthetic judgements. Hamburger, Jeffrey. ‘“To make women weep”: Ugly art as “feminine” and the origins of modern aesthetics’, RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics, 31 (Spring 1997), pp.9–33. An ambitious history of a ‘feminine’ spectatorship, which Hamburger traces to medieval nuns and the strikingly ugly and violent representations of Christ made for and by them; their passionate approach to devotion was discounted from Michelangelo (if we can trust Francisco de Hollanda) to modern art history. Hartley, David. Observations on Man: His Frame, His Duty, and His Expectations (London: S.Richardson, 1749), Ch.3, Sect.1, Corr.5.Hartley’s associationist psychology, influential from the utilitarians to the behaviourists, has a fascinating disquisition on the origin of our ideas of beauty and ugliness: ‘the Words sweet, good, pretty, fine, &c. on the one hand, and the words bad, ugly, frightful, &c on the other, being applied by the Nurse and Attendants in the young Child’s Hearing almost promiscuously…the one to all the Pleasures, the other to all the Pains of the several Senses, must by Association raise up pleasurable and painful Vibrations…’ (p.286). Hartmann, Eduard von. Ästhetik, vol.2: Theorie des Schönen (Berlin: Carl Duncker, 1887), III: 2. The Kantian theorist of the unconscious sees ugliness like Rosenkranz in intentional terms as a willed deviation from beauty, but, characteristically, allows for unconscious or ‘neglectful’ deviations from the ideal, as in ‘stupidity, madness, and weakness of mind’ (p.250), a chilling if unintended anticipation of fascist aesthetics of ugliness. The first volume contains useful historical discussions (pp.363ff ). Hartmann, Nicolai. Ästhetik (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1953). Germany’s last traditional metaphysician finds everything in the world liable to judgements of beauty and ugliness (p.333). He identifies ugliness as ‘not simply the formless, but the mistaken or failed in the sense of a specific formation’ (p.26), an intentionalist standard strongly reminiscent of Rosenkranz. Hay, William. Deformity: An Essay (London: Dodsley, 1754). A classic Enlightenment defence of the deformed, in the form of the autobiographical confession of a sciatic Member of Parliament, who affirms that virtue can coexist with disability. A running argument against Bacon, the book also notably contradicts Aristotle’s claim that the congenitally ugly are forgiven; Hay sets forth the puzzle that evitable ugliness is more tolerated than pockmarks or hunches, and suggests that it is precisely the helplessness of the victim that disturbs. The 2004 reprint has a helpful essay by Kathleen James-Cavan.

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Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. Vorlesungen über die Ästhetik, ed. D.H. Hotho, 2nd ed. (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1842), Pt.1, Ch.2, A2. Hegel’s posthumous aesthetics, heavily edited by his pupil Hotho, have seemed to contain a minefield of potential ‘ugliness’, from Hegel’s dictum that prose begins among slaves to his characterisation of the third, Christian-romantic age of world art as one favouring inner experience over form. What Hegel explicitly calls ugly is more conventional: since beauty for him is the sensuous embodiment of ideas, ugliness is their inconsistency. Thus, non-Western art tends to be ugly (see Mitter), as are animals whose type goes against the general idea of ‘liveliness’, like the sloth (p.166). Helper, Rowan Hinton. Nojoque: A Question for a Continent (New York: Carleton / London: S. Low, 1867), Ch.2. The racist abolitionist, who wanted all non-whites expelled from North America, produced in this book perhaps the low point in a chilling literature, equating dark skin with ugliness, disease, and death, and calling for its elimination. Heraclitus of Ephesus, Fragments, translated and ed. T.M. Robinson (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1987), fragments 82, 83: According to Plato, Heraclitus found that ‘the most handsome of apes is ugly in comparison with [a member of the] human race.’ Conversely, ‘in the matter of wisdom, beauty, and every other thing, in contrast with God the wisest of mankind will appear an ape’ (pp.50, 51). Herder, Johann Gottfried. Plastik. Einige Wahrnehmungen über Form und Gestalt aus Pygmalions bildendem Traume (Riga: Johann Friedrich Hartknoch, 1778), trans. Jason Geiger as Sculpture: Some Observations on Shape and Form from Pygmalion’s Creative Dream (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), and usefully collated with unpublished notes and the 1770 version of Plastik in Herders Sämmtliche Werke, vol.8, ed. Bernhard Suphan (Berlin: Weidmannsche Buchhandlung, 1892; here SW). Herder’s proto-romantic manifesto not only set the sense of touch as the privileged means of accessing sculpture, but contains powerful criticism of ‘laws of ugly beauty’ that prohibit unpleasant figures in then-contemporary classicism, and which view frightening subjects and forms (Medea, crocodiles) as inevitably ugly (pt. 2 ch.3): ‘what fool would forbid these things…because God’s creatures appear ugly to him, and he is afraid of spiders?’ (Geiger, 58). In a 1769 note written in Paris, Herder was already trying to imagine how an ugly object must feel for a blind person: ‘he sympathises with it, becomes sick in imagination, like Montaigne’ (SW p.94). In another sketch he notes, against Burke, that ‘baby mice and flat foreheads are ugly’ (SW p.110). In a text that appeared the same year as the Plastik, dealing with the knowing/feeling distinction, he goes furthest, denying that any animal or even the Egyptian gods (roughly handled by Hegel) are ugly, for in their context they are in no way imperfect. Indeed, ‘a lizard is in itself as beautiful, as Venus is among the gods’ (SW p.149). — Kalligone: Vom Angenehmen und Schönen, vol.1 (Leipzig: Johann Friedrich Hartknoch, 1800). Herder’s dialogic response to Kant’s aesthetics, an eloquent plea for a more embodied pleasure, defines ugliness as a ‘hostile’ feeling caused in the perceiver by an object (p.75); an example he cites, and which becomes standard in romanticism, is sea animals that seem on the border of two realms (presumably amphibians), and thus come across as undeveloped or confused (pp.174–5). There is also a clear statement of aesthetic subjectivity within an objective natural world: ‘In itself the thing is what it is; perfect in its essence or imperfect; for me it is beautiful or ugly insofar as I feel or discern this perfection or imperfection. For another let it be what it may!’ (p.215–16). Higgins, Lesley. The Modernist Cult of Ugliness (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002). Ezra Pound’s ‘cult of ugliness’ is examined in feminist perspective, highlighting



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the dependence on a feminised modern metropolis for modernists to be ‘ugly about’; particularly instructive is the chapter on Ruskin and Whistler. Hofmann, Werner. ‘Fragen der Strukturanalyse’, and ‘Kitsch und Trivialkunst als Gebrauchskünste’, in Bruchlinien (München: Prestel, 1979), pp.70–89 and 166– 79. Hofmann’s attempted reform of formalist ‘structural analysis’ cites Rosenkranz’s ‘negative beauty’ as a precursor in widening the field of aesthetic phenomena (pp.71–2), and discusses R.’s theory of kitsch as the overused and commonplace (pp.173–4). Hogarth, William. The Analysis of Beauty. Written with a view of fixing the fluctuating Ideas of Taste (London: R. Jeeves, 1753). Hogarth’s principles are meant to explain why we ‘call the forms of some bodies beautiful, others ugly’ (p.1) empirically, by example of the author’s prints. These strictures extend from the ugliness of plants (Ch.8, p.44) to advice on how to avoid ugly posture (Ch.17, p.144). At bottom is the praise of variety (which is beauty), and the criticism of uniformity (which is ugliness). Also suggestive is his critique of physiognomy, to which Hogarth applies the old adage fronti nulla fides (‘no faith in the forehead’, Ch.15, p.127). Hohendahl, Peter Uwe. ‘Aesthetic Violence: The Concept of the Ugly in Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory’, Cultural Critique 60 (Spring 2005), pp.170–96. An attempt to untie various strands of Adorno’s theory (ugly content as political realism, ugly form as cruelty), and tie them to Adorno’s theory of myth and enlightenment: the latter supplants myth as beauty does ugliness, but produces new, problematic myth (ugliness) in its core. Hume, David. A Treatise of Human Nature [1740], 2nd ed, vol.2 (London: Allman, 1817), Part III, Sect.1. Hume’s epochal essay ‘Of the Standard of Taste’, finds this in objective but social agreement, and so has little to say of beauty or its opposite; but his great first book first defined them as the seeming tendencies crucial to Rosenkranz and others: thus, ‘when a building seems tottering and clumsy to the eye, it is ugly and disagreeable; though we be fully assured of the solidity of the workmanship. ’Tis a kind of fear, which causes this sentiment of disapprobation; but the passion is not the same with that which we feel, when obliged to stand under a wall, that we really think tottering and insecure’ (p.315). Hume thinks these apparent and real qualities, though analogous, may in fact be opposite, as when enemy fortifications ‘are esteemed beautiful upon account of their strength though we could wish that they were entirely destroyed’ (p.316). Hutcheson, Francis. An Inquiry into the Original of Our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue [1725], 5th corrected ed. (London: Ware etc., 1753), Part I, Sect.6.1. The father of the Scottish Enlightenment updates Plotinus’s theory of beauty as agreement between thing and idea in a psychological vein, so that ‘there is no Form which seems necessarily disagreeable of itself, when we dread no other Evil from it, and compare with nothing better of the Kind.’ (pp.71–2) The consequences are astonishing: ‘Thus bad Musick pleases Rusticks who never heard any better, and the finest Ear is not offended with tuning of Instruments, if it be not too tedious, where no Harmony is expected.’ The optimistic upshot is that our sense of beauty gives positive pleasure, ‘but not a positive Pain or Disgust, any farther than what arises from Disappointment.’ James, William. The Principles of Psychology, vol.1 (New York: Henry Holt and Co., 1890), Ch.10, ‘The Consciousness of Self ’. ‘The old saying that the human person is composed of three parts—soul, body, and clothes—is more than a joke. We so appropriate our clothes and identify ourselves with them that there are few of us who, if asked to choose between having a beautiful body clad in raiment perpetually shabby and unclean,

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and having an ugly and blemished form always spotlessly attired, would not hesitate a moment before making a decisive reply’ (p.292). — ‘Does Consciousness Exist?’ Journal of Philosophy, Psychology, and Scientific Methods, 1/18 (Sept. 1, 1904), pp.477–91, reprinted in Essays in Radical Empiricism (New York, London, Bombay, Calcutta: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1912), pp.1–38. James’s idiosyncratic monism holds that mental and physical designate different functions, not different natures; along the way he speaks of ‘wandering adjectives’, so that ‘perceptions of loveliness, of ugliness, tend to pass muster as lovely or ugly perceptions’ (p.34). These tend to exclude their opposites, ‘yet not as stubbornly as in the case of physical qualities, for beauty and ugliness, love and hatred, pleasant and painful can, in certain complex experiences, coexist’ (p.35). Janson, Horst Waldemar. Apes and Ape Lore in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance (London: Warburg Institute, 1952), esp. Ch.10. The ape as a poor copy of the human (hominum deformis imago, as Bernardus Silvestris put it), which makes it a suggestive metaphor for art. See also the discussion of Augustine on the beauty and ugliness of apes (pp.287–8). Jauss, Hans Robert, ed. Die nicht mehr schönen Künste: Grenzphänomene des Ästhetischen (München: Wilhelm Fink, 1968). Conference proceedings of an influential meeting of German hermeneutic critics (and the last appearance of Siegfried Kracauer). Only a fraction of the essays and roundtables deal directly with ugliness. Well known are Jauss’s and Jacob Taubes’s texts on medieval ugliness; see also Gerhard Müller and Bernhard Fabian on ancient Greek and Roman literary ugliness respectively. Jung, Werner. Schöner Schein der Hässlichkeit oder Hässlichkeit des schönen Scheins (Frankfurt: Athenäum, 1987). A dissertation surveying German idealist theories of ugliness from the Schlegel brothers to Schopenhauer and Wagner; of especial use is the Hegelian contextualisation of Rosenkranz and the discussion of some obscure idealists. Kandel, Eric R. The Age of Insight: The Quest to Understand the Unconscious in Art, Mind, and Brain, from Vienna 1900 to the Present (New York: Random House, 2012), esp. Ch.23. A popularization of the author’s original work in neuroscience, with an accessible discussion of brain processes correlated to experience of beauty and ugliness, which are presented as biological ‘universals’ (p.389). Kant, Immanuel. Beobachtungen über das Gefühl des Schönen und Erhabenen [1766] (Riga: Friedrich Hartknoch, 1771). Kant’s silly catalogue of why he likes various people and things (‘night is sublime, day beautiful’; ‘man is sublime, woman beautiful’ etc.) would not now be read were it not for Burke and his later Critiques; in light of these, it is interesting to note that for the younger Kant women’s virtue is purely aesthetic, woman being innocent of universal principle – indeed women avoid evil ‘not because it is wrong, but because it is ugly’ (p.56). It follows that if a husband has given part of his fortune to help a friend in need, he should by no means inform his wife! — Critik der Urtheilskraft (Berlin and Ligau: Lagarde und Friedrich, 1790), Book 2, §48. Kant’s great book about ‘purposiveness without purpose’, which he thinks we identify in nature and pure (that is abstract, useless) art, says of ugliness only that in art it is transformed into beauty, as in the case of Furies, diseases, devastations of war; one phenomenon alone cannot be thus transformed, disgust, for it forces us to imagine the very thing it represents, rather than being able to see it as a representation (p.187). — Anthropologie in pragmatischer Hinsicht [1799], 2nd rev. ed. (Königsberg: Friedrich Nicolovius, 1800), Book 3 Pt.2. In his late anthropology, Kant repeats his opinion about the Furies, but adds a discussion of the Characteristic, under which he includes a



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kind of lovably ugly face that is not caricatural, but part of a natural variety of forms, so that ‘without being beautiful, it is not ugly’ (p.277). A footnote to this sentence recounts the tale of the German musician Heidegger, who in a London bar saw a woman famed for her ugliness exchange her hat for an ugly man’s wig: he looked like a whore, but she became an elegant gentleman (p.278). The moral Kant draws from this is that judgement is relative (in this case to gender), and thus ‘one can’t call a chap ugly just because he’s not pretty’. Only disgusting facial scarring, he adds, is categorically ugly. Kieran, Mathew. Revealing Art (London: Routledge, 2005), Ch.2.6. Kieran advances what he takes to be a ‘stronger claim’ than the simple one that some things are beautiful in one context and ugly in another: the ugly ‘may, in certain contexts, remain ugly whilst none the less becoming pleasing and delightful’, for which he offers as evidence a couplet from the Twelfth Night: ‘O! What a deal of scorn looks beautiful / In the contempt and anger of his lip.’ (p.79) Alas Shakespeare seems to be advancing the weaker claim. Klemme, Heiner F., Michael Pauen, Marie-Luise Raters, eds, Im Schatten des Schönen (Bielefeld: Aisthesis Verlag, 2006). The major recent German collection on ugliness, dealing with canonical figures – Kant (three essays), Hegel, Rosenkranz, Nietzsche, Adorno – and, more surprisingly, G.E. Moore and The Silence of the Lambs. Of particular interest is Paul Guyer’s unearthing of a category of ‘everydayness’ in Kant. Kliche, Dieter. ‘Pathologie des Schönen: Die ‘Ästhetik des Hässlichen’ von Karl Rosenkranz’, in Rosenkranz 1990, pp.401–27. Rosenkranz’s East German editor proposes a social theory of modernist ugliness, drawing attention to R.’s frustrated involvement in nineteenth-century revolutionary struggles, and to Marx’s pronouncements on the ‘beautiful’ (bourgeois) and the ‘ugly’ (proletarian) revolutions. Kniffin, Kevin M. and David Sloan Wilson, ‘The Effect of Non-Physical Traits on the Perception of Physical Attractiveness: Three Naturalistic Studies’, Evolution and Human Behavior 25 (2004), pp.88–101. Dissenting results on ‘biological beauty’, finding beauty and ugliness ascribed on the basis of prior emotional bonds established with the subject. Koerner, Joseph Leo. ‘Editorial: The Abject of Art History’, RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics 31 (Spring 1997), pp.5–8. The shock of ugliness, which Koerner equates with the abject, provides us with the illusion ‘of a gesture that seems unrepeatable’ (p.8). Also notable is the opening thought experiment: ‘Imagine, if you will, that the entire discipline of art history were suddenly to devote itself to ugliness. Imagine, in other words, that the abject, and not the object, was art history’s accepted universal…’ (p.5) The entire special issue of RES on ‘The Abject’, edited by Koerner, is of interest. Kolnai, Aurél. On Disgust, ed. Carolyn Korsmeyer and Barry Smith (Chicago: Open Court, 2004) [“Der Ekel” in Jahrbuch für Philosophie und phänomenologische Forschung 10 (1929)]. Kolnai’s phenomenology of disgust is central to recent work, from Menninghaus to McGinn, even as it reveals German interwar ideas about what is disgusting (for instance, cowardice). Kolnai’s late return to the subject, ‘The Standard Modes of Aversion: Fear, Disgust and Hatred’ (1973, published posthumously in Mind in 1998), is conveniently included in Korsmeyer and Smith’s edition. Korsmeyer, Carolyn. Savoring Disgust: The Foul and the Fair in Aesthetics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). The editor of Kolnai’s pioneering book on disgust distinguishes herself in a crowded field, like Kolnai, by focusing on why we like disgust— roughly speaking, because we are curious beasts and we find the unpleasant fascinating.

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Krestovsky, Lydie. La laideur dans l’art à travers les âges (Paris: Seuil, 1947). The daughter of Russian emigré painter Vassily Krestovsky wrote on Russian politics, lettrism and ‘aesthetic doubling’ (Psyché 63, Jan.1952). The book begins with prehistoric ritual, and purports to track the growing autonomy of ugliness, which culminates in modernity with a ‘dehumanisation’ in the style of Ortega y Gasset and Sedlmayr. There is also a suggestive passage near the end on the ‘formless’ (pp.193–4). — Le problème spirituel de la beauté et la laideur (Paris: Presses Univ. de France, 1948). The announced sequel to Krestovsky’s 1947, dealing with literature and the history of ideas, with a preface by historian of philosophy Émile Bréhier. Lalo, Anne Marie and Charles, La faillite de la beauté (Paris: Ollendorff, 1923). Lippsstyle psychological aestheticians, for whom ugliness is repulsion, discover, somewhat ahead of their time, the ‘bankruptcy of beauty’ in art and theory. Indeed, evolution itself is capable of going from beauty, through prettiness, to the ugly (p.65). Langer, Susanne Katherina. Philosophy in a New Key [1942], third ed. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1957). Langer’s theory of art as a symbolic system, influential in the abstract art discourse of the 1950s, attributes the modern tendency to treat art as ‘significant’ rather than ‘pleasurable’ (which Langer approves) to the ‘free use of dissonance and so-called “ugliness”’ by leading modern artists (p.205). Lavater, Johann Caspar. Physiognomische Fragmente, 3 vols. (Leipzig: Weidmanns Erben & Reich, 1777), trans. Thomas Holcroft as Essays on Physiognomy (London: Robinsons, 1789). Lavater’s chaotic, ragbag update of an old tradition of visual identification of character traits contained a refutation of his view by the physicist and aphorist Lichtenberg. In response, Lavater admits that honesty may be found in the ugliest, and vice in the most beautiful, but insists on the processual truth of Lichtenberg’s adage ‘virtue beautifies, vice deforms’ (Holcroft vol.2, p.310). Lee, Vernon. ‘Apollo the Fiddler: A Chapter on Artistic Anachronism’, Fraser’s Magazine, 26 ( July 1882), pp.52–67, reprinted in Lee, Juvenilia, vol.1 (London: Unwin, 1887), pp.165–218. An unusually careful late-nineteenth-century statement of naturalised aesthetics, according to which biology can show the utility of beauty and disutility of ugliness, but in doing so only explains a natural human proclivity that can do the same, unerringly, in the absence of science. [reprinted in this volume] — The Beautiful: An Introduction to Psychological Aesthetics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press and New York: Putnam, 1913). A fuller statement of Lee’s view of ugliness as ‘balked perception’ (p.54), intrinsic, like beauty, to our activity as humans. Lee’s moral psychology is especially interesting: ‘it is evident from the foregoing that shape as shape, and without the suggestion of things, can be evil only in the sense of being ugly, ugliness diminishing its own drawbacks by being, ipso facto, difficult to dwell upon, inasmuch as it goes against the grain of our perceptive and empathic activities.’ (p.151) Lee, Vernon and Clementina Anstruther-Thomson, ‘Beauty and Ugliness’, Contemporary Review, vol.72 (October and November 1897), pp.544–69 and 669–88, reprinted in Beauty & Ugliness and other studies in psychological aesthetics (London/New York: John Lane, 1912), pp.153–239. A James-Lange aesthetics in which beauty and ugliness are symmetrical psycho-physical phenomena, which the authors find compatible with Lipps’ empathy theory (given pre-eminence in the 1912 version), and tie to visual rhythm and breathing, but also to ‘the dim places of our consciousness’ (p.688/239).



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Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim. Laokoon: oder über die Grenzen der Mahlerey und Poesie [1766], 2nd rev. ed (Berlin: Christian Friedrich Voss, 1788), ch. 23–5. Lessing’s crucial treatise on the difference between the temporal and spatial arts (primarily poetry and painting) contrasts the two with regard to ugliness: though neither ought to pursue ugly form in itself (Ch.25), poetry can use it, as Homer uses Thersites’ ugliness for comic effect, to produce mixed sensations (Ch.23); painting on the other hand must shut it out altogether, for ugliness and disgust are made intolerable by its constancy (Ch.24). Lipps, Theodor. Ästhetik: Psychologie des Schönen und der Kunst, vol.1: Grundlegung der Ästhetik (Hamburg and Leipzig: Leopold Voss, 1903). The classic statement of Lipps’ ‘empathy theory’ of aesthetic stimuli, positing a direct emotional reaction of like or dislike, sharpened to hate, when threatened by the ugly object of attention (pp.139–40). A late chapter also discusses the value of ugliness in art, which is compared to a stormy sky. — Grundtatsachen des Seelenlebens (Bonn: Max Cohen, 1883), p.691. The earliest statement, in Lipps’ textbook of psychology, of the empathy theory of ugliness, from which it follows, since death is the ultimate restriction on the organism, that ‘death is the ultimate content of ugliness’. Loos, Adolph. ‘Architektur’, [1909] in Trotzdem 1900–1930 (Innsbruck: Brenner, 1931), pp.90–104. The great modernist’s wide-ranging meditation on building, art, and urban deculturation begins with an image of an idyllic mountain lake, unspoilt by peasant houses and modern railroads, but ruined by the intrusion of an architect, whether good or bad: ugliness is the self-conscious absence of purpose. Loos conveys this in his dramatic prose: ‘The axe strokes sound cheerful! He’s making the roof. What kind of roof? A beautiful or an ugly one? He doesn’t know. The roof ’ (p.91). Lorand, Ruth. ‘Beauty and its Opposites’, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 52/4 (1994), pp.300–406. A text typical of the current pluralism in aesthetics, exploring a number of ‘opposites’ for beauty, e.g. the monotonous, the dull, the insignificant, and the ugly. Lotze, Hermann. Geschichte der Ästhetik in Deutschland (München: Cotta, 1868). Lotze argues in his discussion of Robert Vischer’s example of the crocodile that what makes a thing ugly is not a discrepancy between idea and thing, but vicious intention (feindselige Absicht): it follows, for Lotze, that nothing can be ugly accidentally (pp.340–1). — Grundzüge der Ästhetik: Diktate aus den Vorlesungen (Leipzig: Hirzel, 1884), §20. Lotze’s lecture notes present beauty as consisting in the possession by a thing of qualities that, while not determined by a type, harmonise with it; ugly qualities, while not banned by the type, make the object seem dependent on an outside force (p. 20). Though poor in examples, Lotze seems to imply that the attraction of symmetry is thus explained. Mann, Thomas. Doktor Faustus (Stockholm: Bermann-Fischer, 1947), esp. Chs 13, 47. Mann’s allegory of German modernity could be read as an aesthetic roman a clé: in Ch.13, the demonic theologian Schleppfuss lectures on the problem of ‘absolute good and beauty without relation to evil and the ugly’ (p.163): even if it is blasphemous to say the positive terms require the contrast of their negatives, without them they are meaningless. This claim is brought to life in the final chapter, as the hero’s confession to having sold his soul is reluctantly swallowed as ‘beautiful’ by his assembled intimates (pp.755, 759). Marx, Karl. ‘Die Junirevolution’ [1848] in Marx Engels Gesamtausgabe [MEGA] (Berlin: Dietz, 1976), vol.5, pp.138–44, here quoted from Karl Marx, Die Klassenkämpfe in Frankreich 1848 bis 1850 (Berlin: Vorwärts, 1895). Less an

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aesthetics than a political rhetoric of ugliness, Marx’s article calls the February 1848 Revolution in France ‘the beautiful revolution’, idealistic and airy, whereas ‘the June Revolution was the ugly Revolution, the repulsive Revolution, for in place of the phrase came the thing’ (p.40). Mather, Frank Jewett. Concerning Beauty (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1935), pp.255–7. The first famous American art critic ‘hoped to dispense with ugliness’ in his art theory, but must be mentioned for the extreme Kantian view that ugliness, consisting only ‘in states of mind’, is alchemically turned by art ‘into a kind of beauty’ (p.256). McConnell, Sean. ‘How Kant Might Explain Ugliness’, British Journal of Aesthetics, 48/2 (April 2008), pp.205–28. An elaborate recent attempt to give Kant, contra Guyer, a pure judgement of ugliness: a ‘WOW!’ feeling separates absolute judgements of beauty from relative judgements of ugliness. McConnell might be allowing ugliness a constitutive role in reaching WOW-levels in his quotation from Frank Zappa: ‘you can’t always write a chord ugly enough to say what you want to say’ (p.228). McGinn, Colin. The Meaning of Disgust (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). An odd foray into disgust studies by a philosopher of mind (notorious in his own field as a ‘mysterian’ who does not believe we will ever solve the mind-body problem), notable for treating of disgust as the basic human emotion, our revulsion at our own animal nature. Meltzer, Richard. The Aesthetics of Rock (New York: Something Else, 1970), esp. p.13. Meltzer’s difficult (because stoned) philosophy of rock contains the first development of Austin’s ‘Plea for Excuses’: one must first assemble the pop vocabulary from terms like ‘incongruous, trivial, mediocre, banal, insipid, maudlin, abominable, trite, redundant, repulsive, ugly, innocuous, crass, incoherent, vulgar, sour, boring’, before the positive terms (‘poignant, sincere, beautiful’) can be applied to the same. — Guide to the Ugliest Buildings of Los Angeles (Los Angeles: Illuminati, 1987). A collection of columns first published in the LA Reader, and an inversion of Ed Ruscha’s photobooks, with their cool aestheticisation of the ‘strip’. Meltzer sees Los Angeles’s prefabricated eclecticism as the domination of humans and nature by capitalism. Mengs, Anton Raphael. Gedanken über die Schönheit und über den Geschmack in der Malerey (Zürich: Heidegger, 1762), better known as ‘Riflessioni su la bellezza e sul gusto della pittura’, Opere di Antonio Raffaello Mengs, ed. José Nicolás de Azara, vol.1 (Bassano: Remondini, 1783). Mengs’ eclectic Platonism sees beauty as conformity to the idea. Non-ugly features, in being superfluous, become ugly. Thus ‘a child with a mature man’s face would be ugly: a man with a woman’s face would be ugly; and a woman is certainly not beautiful with a beard or a man’s features’ (p.13). ‘Mephisto.’ ‘The Gospel of Ugliness According to Mephistopheles’, The Art World, 1/6 (March 1917), pp.370–4. Printed under a pseudonym in academic sculptor Frederick Wellington Ruckstuhl’s anti-modernist organ, the ‘Gospel of Ugliness’ sees ugliness in the distortion of the human image, begun by the Greeks with their Gorgons and vigorously carried on by modernist ‘sex-perversion’. The broad satire ends on a thoughtful note with the claim that classic Greek sculpture bears the experience of ugliness: ‘on all the faces of their Gods and Heroes there is a trace of the haunting terror of that contact’ (p.374). Mendelssohn, Moses. ‘Über die Empfindungen’ [1756], in Moses Mendelssohn’s Schriften zur Philosophie, Aesthetik und Apologetik, ed. Moritz Brasch, vol.2 (Leipzig: Leopold Voss, 1880). Mendelssohn’s theory of sensations, though it rigidly identifies beauty with



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pleasure and ugliness with pain (and assigns them the signs + and – respectively!), finds a particular appeal in mixed sensations not available to pure sensations, especially in the sequel, ‘Rhapsodie’ (pp.113–16). Menninghaus, Winfried. Ekel: Theorie und Geschichte einer starken Empfindung (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1999), trans. Howard Eiland and Joel Gold as Disgust: The Theory and History of a Strong Emotion (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2003). Menninghaus, who subsequently wrote one of the principal studies of beauty, combining Freud and Darwin (2003), revived disgust studies (for instance, Oxford published two in 2011) with this magisterial historical arch from the Greeks to abject art, its detailed discussion of German idealist theories of disgust, and a Derridean reading of Kant, according to which ideal beauty is a discourse that depends on ‘absolute disgust’ as that which it excludes. Since this phantasm changes from place to place and time to time, disgust appears as a culturally motivated but irreducible form of human life. Michelet, Jules. Histoire de France, vol.2 (1840 ed.), ‘Clarifications to Book 4’. In an anti-Romantic manifesto, Michelet defines ‘Christian beauty’ and ‘Christian ugliness’ as one: gothic art, dedicated to the annihilation of the flesh, and thus to the love of ugliness. Miller, William Ian. The Anatomy of Disgust (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997). Miller reopened the study of disgust after Kolnai and Kant; the author sees disgust, not unlike Foucault and Bourdieu, as the elitist setting of social bounds. Montesquieu, Charles Secondat, Baron, ‘Essay on Taste’, in Alexander Gerard, An Essay on Taste, with Three Dissertations on the same Subject by Mr. de Voltaire, Mr. d’Alembert and Mr. de Montesquieu (London: Andrew Millar, 1759), pp.257–314. In Montesquieu’s unpublished fragment on taste, a section ‘Concerning the je ne sçai quoi’, finds ‘this secret charm is principally the effect of surprise’, and specifically the triumph of subtle charms over ‘those defects, which the eye still perceives, but which the heart no longer feels. Hence we find often, among the female sex, those inexpressible graces adorn the ugly, which are very seldom lavished upon the fair and beautiful’ (pp.295–6). Moore, George Edward. Principia Ethica (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1903). The basic ethics text in modern English philosophy and bible to the Bloombury group of writers and artists defines beauty and ugliness as that whose contemplation is good and evil in itself (§124); it follows for Moore that enjoyment of ugliness thus defined is a foremost evil. More dramatic still is a thought experiment contrasting a beautiful and an ugly world, both uninhabited: ‘imagine the ugliest world you can possibly conceive. Imagine it simply one heap of filth, containing everything that is most disgusting to us, for whatever reason, and the whole, as far as may be, without redeeming feature…is it irrational to hold that it is better that the beautiful world should exist than the one which is ugly? Would it not be well, in any case, to do what we could to produce it rather than the other? I certainly cannot help thinking that it would’ (§50, p.77). Mothersill, Mary. Beauty Restored (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984), 380–3. The first and most original, and the most thorough, of the recent beauty theorists; though ugliness is not theorised, Mothersill does dissect Plato’s ‘Hippias point’ that beauty and ugliness are relative, for which ‘there appears to be no nontrivial interpretation’ (383). Muecke, Mickesch. ‘Strategies of Transgressing Boundaries: The Good (Beauty), The Bad (Ugly), and Caricature’, in Essays on Architecture and Other Topics (Ames, IA: Culicidae Press, 2006), pp. 95–115. A discussion of Rosenkranz in an architectural context, with especial attention to Reyner Banham and post-war brutalism.

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Müller, Eduard. Geschichte der Theorie der Kunst bei den Alten, 2 vols. (Breslau, 1834 and 1837). The first history of Greco-Roman aesthetics, cited by Rosenkranz, has a fair amount on ancient theories of ugliness (e.g. vol.1, pp.58–72 on Plato). Nahoum-Grappe, Véronique and Nicole Phelouzat-Perriquet, eds, Beauté, laideur, Communications 60 (Paris: Seuil, 1995). Much less ugliness than beauty; a good essay by Myriam Tsikounas on the comic-grotesque screen actor Michel Simon (pp.109–29). Nehamas, Alexander. Only a Promise of Happiness: The Place of Beauty in a World of Art (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007). The most detailed Platonic theory of beauty as love in recent philosophy, and a defence of the moral relevance (not virtue) of art. Of ugliness, it is maintained that it is not compatible with love, and in its virulent form, is in fact only compatible with hate (pp.57–61). — Virtues of Authenticity: Essays on Plato and Socrates (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999), Ch. 7–10. Essays on Plato, written mostly in the 1970s, dealing incidentally but illuminatingly with a problem in much early and middle-period Plato, the odd fact that, in relation to other things, each object appears to be both beautiful and ugly. Ngai, Sianne. Our Aesthetic Categories (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012), and more briefly, ‘Our Aesthetic Categories’, PMLA 125/4 (Oct. 2010), pp.948–58. A literary study of cuteness, zaniness, and the interesting, categories between official opposites beauty and ugliness, and that inform both mass culture and avantgarde practice. — Ugly Feelings (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005). Wide-ranging study of negative feelings of aesthetic import (from envy to disgust) in literature and public life. Nietzsche, Friedrich. Die Geburt der Tragödie. Oder: Griechenthum und Pessimismus (Leipzig: Fritzsch, 1886). The second edition of the Birth of Tragedy (1872) says explicitly, in its new foreword (‘attempt at a self-critique’), that the anti-visual Dionysian aesthetic with which the book begins is one of ugliness – which Nietzsche identifies with the fundamental evil of the world and the proper attitude of resignation toward it. These themes recur near the end (esp. Ch.24), where Apollonian beauty is seen as safeguarding human individuality, which would otherwise melt in the intolerable reality of universal pain and ugliness. Nussbaum, Felicity. ‘Feminotopias: The Pleasures of “Deformity” in Mid-Eighteenth Century England’, in The Body and Physical Difference, eds David Mitchell and Sharon L. Snyder (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1997), pp.161–73. O’Donnell, Caroline. ‘Fugly’, Log 22 (August 2011), pp.95–100, with translations from Rosenkranz by Sarah Haubner, pp.101–11. Combining functionalism with Rosenkranz’s intentional theory of ugliness (the article is accompanied by excerpts of the Aesthetics of Ugliness) O’Donnell defines ugliness as the defiance of expectation, and proclaims in manifesto-like fashion that ‘ugliness is a motor of change’. Oesterle, Günther. ‘Entwurf einer Monographie des ästhetisch Hässlichen’, in Zur Modernität der Romantik, ed. D. Bänsch (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1977), pp.217-97. An influential discussion of the Romantics and Rosenkranz. Parry, C. Hubert H. ‘The Meaning of Ugliness’, Musical Times 52/822 (1 August 1911), pp.507–11. A Fry-style discussion of acceptance of the formerly ugly in new art, defining ugliness, on analogy with dirt, as ‘matter in the wrong place’ (p.509).



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Payne Knight, Richard. An Analytical Inquiry into the Principles of Taste (1805), esp. Pt.II, Ch.2. Payne Knight’s inquiry is notable for its biological relativism (each species and tribe prefers what is habitual for it); also notable is the puzzle about the preference for regularity found in the chapter on the imagination: ‘There is no reason to be deduced… why an animal should be more ugly or disgusting for having only one eye, or one ear, than for having one nose or one mouth’ (p.195). De la Place, Pierre Antoine. Laideur aimable et les dangers de la beauté (Paris: Rollin, 1752). A moralist case for the advantages of virtuous plainness over spendthrift beauty. Plato. Complete Works, ed. John Cooper (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1997). Plato’s works contain the most multifaceted discussions of beauty extant, and correspondingly complex reflections on ugliness (whether or not they are consistent is controversial). The middleperiod Symposium (c.385 bce) contains a classic discussion of beauty, the object of love, and of ugliness, as that which repels, from which we ‘draw back in pain’ and in which we ‘do not reproduce’ (206d, p.489). In Cratylus, with tongue in cheek, Socrates suggests an etymological definition of the ugly (greek aischron) as ‘that which restrains the flowing of things’ (greek aei ischei ton rhoun, 416a, p.133). The somewhat later Phaedrus, in its famous myth of the soul’s wings, presents ugliness as one of the causes of the soul losing its plumage, so that the soul descends from the spiritual to the physical world (246e, p.525). Though early on, in the Protagoras, Plato has Socrates argue that beauty has only one opposite, ugliness (332c, p.765), he often presents quite novel forms of ugliness: the late Sophist, for instance, sees ignorance as a form of intellectual ugliness (228e, p.249; cf. Philebus, 49c, p.439). The relation between these opposites is also a complex one. The mid-to-late Phaedo has an argument (70e-71b) that all things emerge from their opposites (bad from good, large from small, beauty and ugliness from one another). This corresponds to an only apparently paradoxical coexistence of beauty and ugliness, and of all Forms and their opposites, in actual objects, as discussed in the Hippias Major (286–90, pp.904–7), a point reinforced in the Republic (479ab, p.1106). For more on the beauty-ugliness relation in Plato, see Nehamas. Plotinus, ‘On Beauty’, Enneads, Bk 1, No 6 (Treatise 1) [c.250–70] Loeb Classical Editions, 2000; trans. Stephen MacKenna (1917) in Daedalus 131/4 (Summer 2003) ‘Beauty Issue’, pp.27–34. Plotinus identifies the beautiful with good and existence, the ugly with evil and nonexistence, but not with lack of proportion: as he points out, evil (ugly) components can be as harmoniously combined as good (beautiful) ones. Ugliness as empirically found is for him heteronomy, as in a vivid image, he imagines the soul wallowing in sins as in mud; the equation of beauty with ordering through the idea and of ugliness with disorder is reinforced in the later treatise on ‘Intellectual Beauty’ (Ennead 5, No 8 / Treatise 31), and the dualistic positing of an absolute evil/ugliness to go with the absolute good is denied in the polemic ‘Against the Gnostics’ (Ennead II, No 9 / Treatise 33). Price, Uvedale. An Essay on the Picturesque: as Compared with the Sublime and the Beautiful, 2nd rev. ed. (London: Robson, 1796), Ch.9. A classic discussion of ugliness as formlessness, to which deformation, as the placing of particular anomalies, plays the same role as the picturesque does to the beautiful (p.207). Price insists that picturesque ugliness can be a source not only of great interest, but also of pleasure (p.220). Raffaëlli, Jean-François. ‘Le Laid, l’intimité, la sensation et la caractère dans l’art. Une bibliothèque des dessins’, Conférence faite par M. Jean-François Raffaëlli au Palais des Beaux-Arts de Bruxelles au Salon anneul des XX, 7 Feb. 1885, pp.22–3. A survey

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of things banal and repulsive as amenable to painting, presented by the most realist of the French Impressionists to his Belgian symbolist colleagues. Ribon, Michel. Archipel de la laideur. Essai sur l’art et la laideur (Paris: Kimé, 1995). Ribon is particularly fascinated by mixtures; like Rosenkranz, but more romantically, he insists that ‘every ugly form indicates a beautiful one’, but not vice versa (p.214). Rickman, John. ‘On the Nature of Ugliness and the Creative Impulse (marginalia psychoanalytica)’, International Journal of Psycho-analysis 21 (1940), pp.294–313. A Freudian, and aesthetically modernist, reading of deformation and unfinish in art in terms of ‘guilt at our complicity in the deed’ (p.313). Riegl, Alois. Die Spätrömische Kunst-Industrie, nach den Funden in Österreich-Ungarn (Vienna: K.K. Hof- und Staatsdruckerei, 1901), trans. Rolfe Winkes as Late Roman Art Industry (Rome: Giorgio Bretschneider, 1985). Riegl studied the ‘ugly and clumsy’ (p.54) products of mass-produced late Roman handicrafts; the last chapter on ‘The Leading Characteristics of Late Roman Kunstwollen’ cites Augustine as the first author to provide a relative theory of beauty and ugliness (p.226; but cf. Plato), and, following Berthaud, finds in Augustine the view that ‘evil is just a privation of the good, the ugly is merely intervals of beauty; they are as necessary as the intervals between words in language and between tones in music’ (p.229). Riegl also cites a discussion Berthaud missed (City of God, Book XI, Ch.23) on the use of black in painting to emphasize the lights: this demonstrates ‘not just the right of existence, but even the necessity of ugliness and shapelessness’, for from a distance ( Fernsicht) we see that ‘beauty would not be possible without its complementary ugly shape.’ (ibid.) Rosenkranz, Karl Ästhetik des Hässlichen (Königsberg: Gebr. Bornträger, 1853). 2nd German ed., Leipzig: Reclam, 1990, 2007. Italian, Romanian, French, Spanish translations, English ed. in preparation by the editors. Historically and philosophically central to the theory of ugliness, which it presents aesthetically as the intentional deviation from beauty, and ethically as the apparent lack of freedom. Naturalistic, formalist, and moral theories are refuted; ranges from Homer to Heine, from the obscene to kitsch. Caricature and the comic in general are prized as self-conscious deformations that allow beauty to refract through them. Ruge, Arnold. Neue Vorschule der Ästhetik: das Komische mit einem komischen Anhange (Halle: Verlag der Buchhandlung des Waisenhauses, 1837), pp.107–37. A sequel to Jean Paul’s Vorschule der Ästhetik, with satirical pretensions (an appendix of ‘six ridiculous letters on ridiculousness’). The ugly, typically for an idealist, is aesthetic selfnegation, but, anticipating Ronsenkranz, can return to beauty through the comic. Ruskin, John. Lectures on Architecture and Painting (New York: Wiley, 1854), Lect. 1. Beauty is the ‘complete fulfilment of a natural law’, ugliness its violation. A sapphire is an example of the one, a square leaf of the other (pp.27–8). — ‘Greatness of Style’, Modern Painters, vol.3: Part IV – Of Many Things’ (1856), Ch.3. Great art allows as much beauty as is possible, ‘consistently with truth’, bad art hides it. That is because good art, in dwelling on beauty, draws the viewer’s attention thus; bad art eliminates all that is not beautiful, stultifying attention, and thus beauty as well. Also interesting is the chapter ‘Of the True Ideal’ on ‘The Grotesque’ (III), complementing The Stones of Venice. Russell, Bertrand. A History of Western Philosophy (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1945), Ch.15. Against Plato’s coexistence arguments, Russell observes that ‘when we say



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of some work of art that it is beautiful in some respects and ugly in others, analysis will always (at least theoretically) enable us to say “this part or aspect is beautiful, while that part or aspect is ugly”’ (pp.128–9). Rusu, Liviu. Logica frumosului [‘The Logic of Beauty’] (Bucharest, 1946, 1968), esp. pp.23–5. An extreme case of the denial of the aesthetic category of the ugly: what is ugly in life is a species of beauty in art, but at the cost of the classical canon of beauty. This is where the argument gets interesting: were such a classical canon valid, Rusu argues, ugliness would be an aesthetic concept on all fours with beauty. Santayana, George. The Sense of Beauty (New York: Scribner’s, 1896). The great American materialist, in his first book, sees ugliness as ‘rather the source of amusement’, arguing that the mediocre is the real opposite of beauty (p.21). Schaaffhausen, Hermann. ‘Über den Zustand der wilden Völker’, Archiv der Anthropologie 1 (1866), pp.161–90. The co-discoverer of the Neanderthal man, in an essay criticising the destruction of native peoples by European colonists, introduces the racist idea, anticipated by Lavater and picked up by Spencer, that ugliness consists either in illness or ‘proximity to animal structure’ (p.164). Darwin combated this suggestion. Schiller, Friedrich. ‘Letter to Goethe, July 7th 1797’, in Briefwechsel zwischen Schiller und Goethe, vol.2 (1797–8) (Berlin: Deutsche Bibliothek, 1880s), no 339. Though he left no room for ugliness in his theory of beauty as play, Schiller around the same time wrote the most famous letter on the subject. He criticises modern disregard for ancient Greek ugliness (Winckelmann and Lessing are named, but he probably had Schlegel in mind), and suggests that only a concept of the characteristic can do the job (pp.71–2). Schlegel, Friedrich. ‘Über das Studium der griechischen Poesie’, [1795–6] in Sämmtliche Werke, vol.5 (Vienna: Jakob Mayer & Co., 1823), pp.7–218, esp. pp.148–51. Schlegel’s ‘Studiumaufsatz’ (Study-Essay) inaugurated modern German literary criticism, though it evinces, for all its romantic fascination with extreme phenomena, a classicist view of ugliness as ‘the pathology of art’. With a view to steer artists clear of it, he defines the ugly as a purposeful negation of the beautiful, for in ugliness ‘animal pain is only the vehicle of the morally bad’ (p.148). Concretely this takes the form of dead, empty forms; but because the ugly always involves negation and a disappointed need, it ever maintains, ‘seen metaphysically’, an element of beauty (p.151). Schmarsow, August. Grundbegriffe der Kunstwissenschaft: am Übergang vom Altertum zum Mittelalter (Leipzig and Berlin: Teubner, 1905), p.255. This influential treatise on principles of art history argues that ugliness only enters art historical vocabulary ‘in a teleological sense’ to determine how well a work accomplishes what it set out to do. Schweik, Susan M. The Ugly Laws: Disability in Public (New York: New York University Press, 2009). A study, both legal and ethical, of the punitive laws policing appearance in nineteenth-century United States and their wider implications. Scott, Sarah. Agreeable Ugliness, or the Triumph of the Graces (London: Dodsley, 1754). The adventures of an ugly but virtuous woman; a loose translation of De la Place. Shaftesbury, Anthony Ashley Cooper, Earl. Soliloquy, or Advice to an Author (London: John Morphew, 1710), Pt.1, Sect.3. A polemic against realism in art and prose (what he calls Mirrour-Writing), which the ancients excelled in, because we moderns, crippled by ceremony, make for ugly portraits: ‘The Antients cou’d see their own Faces; but we can’t. And why this? Why, but because we have less Beauty? For so our Looking-Glass can inform us.—Ugly Instrument! And for this reason to be hated’ (p.205).

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Shier, David. ‘Why Kant Finds Nothing Ugly ’, British Journal of Aesthetics 38 (1998), pp. 412–18. A reductio ad absurdum of Kant’s aesthetic, arguing that since taste for Kant relies on free play, no judgement of taste can ever be negative. Has been repeatedly refuted (by Paul Guyer, Miles Rand, Christian Wenzel), so it may be on to something. Simpson, Kathryn. ‘Viennese art, ugliness, and the Vienna school of art history: the vicissitudes of theory and practice’, Journal of Art Historiography 3 (Dec. 2010), pp.1–14. Argues that the defence of Viennese modernism by Viennese art historians around 1900 led them to think through ugliness historically, and without prejudice. Slonimski, Nicolas. Lexicon of Musical Invective (New York: Coleman-Ross, 1953). A humbling study of critical receptions of avant-garde music, wherein ‘nontraditional dissonance put contemporary reviewers in mind of cats yowling on a roof ’, as Mary Mothersill (Beauty Restored, p.382) memorably puts it. Solger, K.W.F. Vorlesungen über Aesthetik, ed. K.W.L. Heyse (Leipzig: Brockhaus, 1829). A Hegelian interpretation of ugliness as the ordinary (das Gemeine, a precursor of Rosenkranz’s category), understood as a ‘falling away from the idea’ (p.101). Spencer, Herbert. ‘Personal Beauty’ in Essays: Scientific, Political, and Speculative (London: Longmans, 1858), pp.417–29, esp. 422–3. The eugenicist proponent of Social Statics announces ‘recession of the forehead, protuberance of the jaws, and largeness of the check-bones, three leading elements of ugliness’ to be ‘demonstrably indicative of mental inferiority’, presaging the racist, biologistic rhetoric of fascism. Stace, Walter Terence. The Meaning of Beauty (London: Richards & Toulmin, 1929), Ch.4, ‘The Essence of Ugliness’. An empiricist theory of ugliness as not opposed to beauty (the ‘unbeautiful’ is), but as unpleasant aesthetic stimuli. For Stace, though ugliness causes pain, this is not an aesthetic feeling: ‘the purely æsthetic feeling produced by the ugly is, on the contrary, a feeling of pleasure’ (p.72). Stead, Evanghélia. Le Monstre, le Singe et le Fœtus: Tératogonie et Décadence dans l’Europe fin-de-siècle (Geneva: Droz, 2004). A vast study of Symbolist ugliness, especially of the biological and religious imagination of the monster; Stead suggests that evolution and diabolical agents were seen as ‘non-divine creators’ akin to the artist. Stolnitz, M. Jerome. ‘On Ugliness in Art’, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 11/1 (September 1950), pp.1–24. An attack on the ‘Never-Never Land’ doctrine that the ugly is beautiful in art, to which Stolnitz rather oddly opposes an expressivist theory that the ugly is compelling because aesthetic activity consists in paying attention. Strube, Christian. ‘Das Hässliche und die “Kritik der ästhetischen Urteilskraft”: Überlegungen zu einer systematischen Lücke’, Kant-Studien 80 (1989), pp.416– 46. Perhaps the first attempt (followed in English by Hud Hudson and Henry E. Allison) to endow Kant with a systematic ‘analytic of the Ugly’. Taine, Hyppolite. ‘Balzac’, in Nouveaux essais de critique et d’histoire (Paris: Hachette, 1865), pp.63–170, esp. 118–19. Realism as the production of monsters; Balzac as an anatomist who ‘uglified ugliness’. Thomson, Garrett. ‘Kant’s Problem with Ugliness’, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 50/2 (Spring 1992), pp.107–15. A criticism of Kant on the grounds that his identification of beauty with purposefulness without purpose makes ugliness either impossible or threatens the intelligibility of nature. Thomson was attacked by Paul Guyer (same journal, 50/4, pp.317–19), but remains suggestive on Kant’s reluctance to treat



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ugliness; the article begins with a memorable enumeration of ugly natural objects: ‘Crabs’ faces, cows’ faeces, catfish, and monkeys’ bottoms…’ (p.107). Tolstoy, Lev. What is art? [1896] trans. Aylmer Maude (New York: Thomas Crowell, 1899) and by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1995). Tolstoy’s didactic theory of art as the expression of moral principles finds no use in particular for beauty, or ugliness, but notes a historical development whereby both terms are applied more and more widely, e.g. ‘beautiful music’ and ‘ugly actions’ which 40 years earlier ‘were not only unusual, but incomprehensible’ (Maude ed., p.40). Valette, John de la, ed. The Conquest of Ugliness (London: Methuen, 1935). An edited volume prefaced, with a propagandistic touch, by the then-Prince Edward, gives a telling perspective on the self-perception as ugly of industrial applied art. Venturi, Robert and Denise Scott Brown. Learning from Las Vegas [1972], rev. ed. (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1979), Pt.2. Advocating ‘ugly and ordinary’ architecture made of plain materials and decorated with signage against ‘heroic and original’ modernist architecture, Venturi and Brown argue that, seen historically, the tables turn, and modernism becomes ugly and ordinary (p.101). Their ‘ugly ordinariness’ is an intentional style of historical citation, yielding rich juxtapositions akin to pop art (p.130). Véron, Eugène. L’esthétique (Paris: C. Reinwald et Cie., 1878), trans. W.H. Armstrong (London: Chapman and Hall, 1879), Ch.6. The leading French physiological aesthetician had an unsubtle expression theory, according to which an ugly portrait well done remains ugly, but the genius of the artist makes the battlefield of Eylau (p.116) or the portrait of Quasimodo (p.118) more compelling than the Antinous. Vischer, Friedrich Theodor. Ästhetik, oder Wissenschaft des Schönen, vol.2 (Leipzig: Mäcken, 1847). Vischer’s theory of natural beauty insist that we perceive certain animals (crocodiles and frogs) as ugly prior to all aesthetics, but adds that these, though disproportionate, can be aesthetically revived as powerful or comic in their activity; further, science and medicine might find deformation ‘beautiful (or instructive)’ (p.15). Vischer, Robert. ‘Albrecht Dürer und die Grundlagen seiner Kunst’, in Studien zur Kunstgeschichte (Stuttgart: Bonz, 1886). The younger Vischer, known for his theory of empathy ( Über das optische Formgefühl, 1873), defends Dürer’s choice of ugly models (p.162), and presents the double interest in ‘how one may make pretty and ugly things’ (Dürer’s words) as motivated by their coexistence in the world of appearance (p.259). Vygotsky, Lev. The Psychology of Art [Psikhologiia iskusstva, 1925] (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1971). A Russian empathy theorist, Vygotsky approves of Lalo’s and Vernon Lee’s incorporation of ugliness in the sublime as instances of catharsis, the ‘law’ which ‘compelled the builder of Notre Dame to place atop the cathedral ugly and horrifying monsters, the gargoyles, without which the cathedral is unimaginable’. Wedgwood, Hensleigh. A Dictionary of English Etymology, vol.1 (A–D) (London: Trübner & Co., 1859), p.xiii. Emotions of horror are according to Wedgwood expressed by gutturals like ‘ugh’, ‘ugsome’, ‘ugly’, ‘huge’, ‘fie’ and ‘pfui’. This is picked up by Darwin in his Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1886, p.307). Weisse, Christian Hermann. System der Ästhetik als Wissenschaft von der Idee der Schönheit in drei Büchern, vol.1 (Leipzig: Hartmann 1830), pp.173–207. This critic of Hegel’s aesthetics tries to incorporate ugliness systematically into the idea of beauty, which is mediation between the worldly (limited) and the godly (limitless). In trying to be immediate, beauty ‘sinks into its opposite, ugliness’ (pp.163–4). This negative moment of

ann o tat e d bibli o g r ap h y

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beauty, which is for Weisse strictly speaking nonexistent, gains in reality by being combined with the negative moral moment of evil; both are in turn negated in the comic. Wickhoff, Franz. ‘Was ist hässlich? [What is ugly?]’, lecture, Vienna, 9 May 1900, reported in Wiener Fremdenblatt, reprinted in Hermann Bahr, Gegen Klimt (Vienna: J. Eisenstein, 1903), 31–4 (see the University of Vienna’s free edition of Bahr’s work, ed. Claus Pias, http://www.univie.ac.at/bahr). The founder of Viennese art history defended Klimt’s controversial University murals by outlining a biological theory of beauty and ugliness, emerging from prehistoric considerations of fitness and survival: from this follows in historical time the celebration of the current style as beautiful and the castigation of past styles as ugly, a theme that recurs in Roger Fry and Theodor Adorno. Wilde, Oscar. ‘The Truth of Masks’, in Intentions (New York: Brentano’s, 1905), pp.219–61. Wilde notes that Shakespeare valued Richard as much as Juliet, and Caliban as much as Ariel, for he ‘recognizes the artistic beauty of ugliness’ (p.233). Wilson, Philip K. ‘Eighteenth-Century “Monsters” and Nineteenth-Century “Freaks”’, Literature and Medicine 21/2 (Spring 2002), pp.1–25. Wisbey, Roy A. ‘Die Darstellung des Hässlichen im Hoch- und Spätmittelalter’, in Deutsche Literatur des Spätmittelalters, ed. Wolfgang Harms and L. Peter Johnson (Berlin, Erich Schmidt, 1975), pp.9–34. Worley, Linda Kraus. ‘The Body, Beauty, and Woman: The Ugly Heroine in Stories by Therese Huber and Gabriele Reuter’, German Quarterly 64/3 (Summer 1991), pp.368–78. A feminist reading of Romantic women writers on ugly women, who are not ‘constrained by the culturally determined boundaries set for beauty’ (p.377). Zelle, Carsten. Die doppelte Ästhetik der Moderne. Revisionen des Schönen von Boileau bis Nietzsche (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1995). A study of the beauty-sublime binary, and of its marginalisation of ugliness, which returns emphatically in Nietzsche’s aesthetics. — ‘Angenehmes Grauen’. Literarhistorische Beiträge zur Ästhetik des Schrecklichen im 18. Jahrhundert (Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 1987). A study of the role of fear and the repulsive in Enlightenment aesthetics, with its privileging of affect and novelty. Ziolkowski, Jan. ‘Avatars of Ugliness in Medieval Literature’, The Modern Language Review 79/1 ( Jan. 1984), pp.1–20. Very good on the tradition of ugly objects of desire. Žižek, Slavoj. The Abyss of Freedom / Ages of the World: An essay by Slavoj Žižek with the text of Schelling’s Die Weltalter, trans. Judith Norman (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1997). This odd commentary on Schelling’s philosophy of history contains Žižek’s coinage ‘ugly Jouissance’, a quasi-Nietzschean recognition that ‘what is ugly is the brutal fact of existence (of the real) as such’ (p.21).

Index Figures in italic type refer to figure numbers

abjection, abject art 8, 77–8, 182, 240n.26 abstraction 8, 12, 52, 63–5, 147, 154–5, 157–62, 193 academies of art 20, 129, 135, 230n.70 Accolti, Pietro 208, 208 Addison, Joseph see Ugly Club, Ugly Face Club, in the Spectator Adorno, Theodor 7, 151, 259n.27, 275, 286, 299 aesthetics 3–8, 13, 69–70, 79–81, 123–7, 166–8, 177–8, 198, 217 aesthetic judgement 78, 108, 121, 171–4, 177–8, 185, 287 African art 279, 281 Albright, Ivan 180, 181, 182 alcohol 10, 114, 120, 185, 251n.21, 267n.23 Alfian, Saat 144, 258n.9 ambiguity 6–7, 66–7, 139–40, 202–3, 259n.23 amorphous, the 186–9 anamorphosis 190, 199–214, 272n.48 ugliness and 190–1, 209–13 animals, animal analogies 18, 20–1, 99, 118, 145, 146, 192, 211, 216–17 Annapolis see Hamilton, Alexander anxiety 41, 45, 53–6, 118, 131, 157, 201–2, 209 apes 171–4, 285, 287, 297 appropriation 17, 31–3 arabesque see Poe, Edgar Allan architecture 21–2, 149, 160, 194, 214, 216–17, 254n.18, 277, 292, 298

Arcimboldo, Giuseppe 100, 102, 201–2, 203, 206, 248n.73 Aristotle 85, 242n.2, 275, 284 Artaud, Antonin 72, 238n.13 Athanassoglou-Kallmyer, Nina 165–6, 276 audience(s) 4, 28, 58–63, 77–81, 88–9, 94–5, 114–15, 131–4, 204, 226n.23, 241n.34–35 see also blogs; public sphere Augustine of Hippo 1, 276, 277, 287, 295 Austin, John Langshaw 276, 279, 291 avant-garde see modernism, modern art Bacon, Francis 276, 284 Badura-Triska, Eva 74, 240n.24 Bain, Alexander 276 Baker, Naomi 225n.30, 276 Bakhtin, Mikhail 194, 229n.62 Balint, Michael 65 Baltrušaitis, Jurgis 190–6, 199–202, 205–11, 213–14 ancient art and 269n.10 drawing practice 193–4, 193, 194, 203, 203, 204, 207, 208, 212 Focillon, Henri and 269n.15, n.22 Barbaro, Daniele 206 Barozzi da Vignola, Giacomo 207 Barthes, Roland 203, 214 Bataille, Georges 156, 276-7 Baudelaire, Charles 6, 115, 212, 250–1n.12, 252n.24 Baumgarten, Alexander 4 301



302

u g lin e s s

beauty, the beautiful biological theory of 2–3, 5, 139, 167, 219–20, 281, 288 conceptual theory of 3–4, 6, 217–18 erotic theory of 2, 168–70, 177–8, 263n.30 errors about 170, 240n.28, 261n.19 morality and 4, 6–7, 9, 20–1, 26, 70, 79, 170, 176–8, 216–17, 240–1 opposite of 1–2, 4, 81, 121, 165–6, 174–6, 216–18, 259n.27, 260n.10, 262–4 proportion or symmetry, theory of 3, 17, 20–1, 167, 222n.13, 260n.10, 262n.23 social theory of 1, 7, 10, 13, 70, 78, 177, 191 utility and 182, 216–17 see also pleasure, the pleasant; ugliness, the ugly, coexistence with beauty Bedmar(d), Count 217, 274n.2 Bell, Charles 40 Bénédite, Léonce 184, 266n.20 Benjamin, Walter 235n.7 Benn, Aphra 223n.18 Berman, Nina 10, 34–7, 43–4, 46–8 Bernard of Clairvaux 166, 260n.6, 277 Bernard, Émile 117 Bertall 108–9, 112, 113, 116, 120 Beyerstein, Lindsay 35 Black, Scott 24 Blackshaw, Gemma 130 Blake, Peter 277 blindness 26, 45 blogs 35, 45 body, bodies 7–9, 25–6, 36–8, 54–5, 67, 70–3, 93, 114, 137, 156, 162, 175, 185, 188–9, 226n.45, 230n.67, 231n.75, 268n.38 Bolzano, Bernard 217–19 Bosanquet, Bernard 175, 261n.12, 278 Bosch, Hieronymus 21, 187, 195–7 Bouguereau, William 116 Bourdieu, Pierre 1, 43, 234n.36, 277–8

Brakhage, Stan 214 Breton, André 50 Brisse, Léon, Baron 107, 120, 250n.10 Brown, Jonathan 88, 98–9 Buchon, Max 253n.43 Buffier, Claude 278 Burke, Edmund 4–5, 240n.26, 260n.10, 278, 285 Camille, Michael 196 canon 69–70, 77, 80–1, 161–2, 181 caricature 20–1, 98, 100–1, 128, 202–3, 247–9, 283 Carracci, Annibale and/or Agostino 20–1, 86, 98, 99, 248n.64 cause, causality 20, 22, 72, 132, 139, 155, 217–20, 222n.13 Céline, Ferdinand 240n.26 Cennini, Cennino 104, 249n.1 Chadwick, Helen 78, 78, 240n.27 Cham 107, 109, 110, 114, 115–16, 116, 117, 120 Champfleury 251n.12 characteristic, the 5, 25, 99, 237n.2 Cheetham, Mark 155 Chinese art 151, 153–4, 200, 258n.6, 259n.17 Cigoli, Lodovico 273n.59 Clark, Peter 18–19, 230n.70 Clouzot, Henri-Georges 64 clubs, conviviality 18–19, 22–3 see also Ugly Club, Ugly Face Club Cohen, Jeffrey 196 Collingwood, R.G. 279 colour 47, 66, 110–11, 142–3, 219–20, 251n.19 comedy, the comic see humour Comenius, Johann 137 community 24, 31, 239n.18 Connelly, Frances 195 Connolly, Cyril 56 consumption 72, 114–15 content see subject matter

in d e x

convention 48, 66–8, 79, 170, 174, 231n.73 Corbin, Alain 105–6 Cotter, Holland 35, 37 Courbet, Gustave 112, 114, 115, 119, 120 Cousin, Victor 279 criticism, art 56–7, 107–11, 116, 121, 177, 183–4, 214, 234n.1 Croce, Benedetto 279 curiosity 27–8, 94–6, 103, 166, 192, 213, 225n.37, 244n.19 da Vinci, Leonardo 4, 20–1, 89, 200–1, 207, 271n.32 Dale, Maud 52 Dalí, Salvador 182, 214, 265n.4–5, n.8 Damisch, Hubert 201, 273n.59 Danto, Arthur 11, 69–70, 79–81, 168, 237n.2, 238n.5, 240–1n.30–2, 279 Darwin, Charles 280, 281, 283, 292, 296, 298 Daubigny, Jean-François 110–11 David, Jacques-Louis 105 Davis, Lennard 32, 225n.34, 230n.67 de Dominici, Bernardo 98 death 36, 56, 71, 104, 127–8, 136, 155, 184–5, 209–10 Decadence, Decadents 181, 183, 266n.12–14 decay, decomposition 117–19, 131–2, 180–5 deformity, deformation 21, 24–5, 32–3, 45, 61, 96, 166, 213, 217, 226n.40 Deleuze, Gilles 214–15 deliquescence see Floupette, Adoré; liquid Derrida, Jacques 280 Descartes, René 207, 211 Deutsch, Helen 30–1, 225n.35, 229n.62 Dewey, John 280 Dickie, Simon 26, 226n.45

303

Diderot, Denis 172, 199, 216–17, 251 n.12, 252 n.31, 262 n.23–4, 280 dirt 3, 9, 53, 65, 70, 73, 78, 102–4, 117–18, 183–4 disability, the disabled 25–7, 30–2, 41–5, 128, 225n.34, 226n.45, 227n.49–50, 230n.67 disease 27, 30, 88, 92, 118, 155, 183, 226n.45, 250n.11, 266n.16 disfiguration, disfigurement 21, 25, 37–8, 40–2, 101, 180–1, 185, 199, 233n.19 disgust 5, 30, 72, 77, 110–12, 118, 155, 187, 286–8, 290–2 dismemberment 53–4, 64–5 distortion 101, 190, 199, 200–1, 204 Donald, Diana 21, 223n.16 Doré, Gustave, caricatured 107, 108 Dubreuil (Du Breuil), Jean 208–9 Duchamp, Marcel 155–6, 214 Dyck, Anthony van 91, 94 Eco, Umberto 32, 191, 260n.4, 281 Edgerton, Samuel 94 Edward VI 205–6 Ehrenzweig, Anton 63–5 Einfühlung see empathy Eliot, George 151, 260–1n.16 Eliot, T.S. 7 emotion 5, 12, 37, 55, 81, 85, 123–39, 147–50, 160–2, 202, 206, 218, 259n.23 empathy 124–5, 127–8, 132 negative 123–4, 126–8 Ernst, Max 70, 81 265n.4 Etcoff, Nancy 281 ethics see morals, morality everyday the, see ordinary, the excrement see dirt experience 8–12, 64–5, 70, 73, 81, 93–4, 106, 114, 125–8, 132, 143–7, 170, 213, 265n.4 EXPORT, VALIE 76, 76



304

u g lin e s s

face(s) 6, 17–18, 20–3, 31, 34–48, 85–103, 127, 129–31, 180, 206, 229n.60–2 Fairbairn, Ronald 52–4, 65, 235n.11 fantasy, fantasies, the fantastic 38, 100, 118, 192, 195, 205 fear 5, 9, 26, 118, 136, 139–40, 146, 196, 226n.45, 286 Fechner, Gustav 281 Feuerbach, Ludwig 104 Fialetti, Odoardo 86–7 Firenzuola, Agnolo 281 Floupette, Adoré (pseudonym) 183–4 Focillon, Henri 192, 196–9, 215, 269n.7, n.15, 270n.26 food, food analogies 66, 104–21, 249n.3 see also gastronomy; ugliness, culinary form 3, 7, 21, 47, 52, 63–6, 74–5, 80–1, 104, 110, 157–8, 160–2, 167–8, 190–1, 197–203 formlessness 147, 155, 181–2, 185–9 205, 217, 289 Frankenstein 7, 43 Franz Ferdinand, Prince 122 Franz Joseph, Emperor 129, 136 freaks, freak shows 26–7, 30, 227n.48 Frege, Gottlob 282 Freneau, Philip 29, 227n.53 Freud, Sigmund 49–50, 125, 128, 254n.13–14, 282 Frith, William Powell 55 Fry, Roger 69, 79, 81, 237–9n.2, 282 Galerie de Difformité 17, 32–3, 231n.75 Galilei, Galileo 213, 273n.59 Gagnebin, Murielle 71–3, 239n.18, 282 game(s) see play gastronomy 106, 116, 119–21, 250n.10, 253n.38–9 gaze 42, 45–6, 48, 126, 201, 205–7, 254n.16 Gellée, Claude (Le Lorain) 104, 249 n.2

gender 19, 37, 41–2, 75–6, 112, 118, 171–4, 226n.43, 252n.26, 263n.29, 267n.31, 283 Gerstl, Richard 135–6 Gestalt psychology 63–5 Gethmann-Siefert, Annemarie 283 ghosts, ghostliness 200–1, 205, 209–11 Gill, André 107, 108, 110, 113 Gilman, Charlotte Perkins 283 Goffman, Erving see stigma Gombrich, Ernst 11, 66–8, 248n.64, 283 Goncourt brothers 267n.23 Goodman, Nelson 260n.9, 283 Gothic art 190, 194 Gotschall, Rudolf 187, 283–4 Goya, Francisco 168–9, 169, 177–8 Grandville, J.J. 204 Greek art, ancient 3, 175, 186–7, 195, 204, 229n.63, 264n.39 Greenberg, Clement 57, 69 Groddeck, Georg 284 grotesque 11, 20–1, 51, 85, 88–9, 94, 98–103, 187, 193–6, 200–2, 229n.62, 247n.59 Guyer, Paul 284 Hamburger, Jeffrey 284 Hamilton, Alexander 28–9 Hartley, David 284 hate, hatred, hate speech 30–1, 45, 55–6, 125–6, 132–5, 139–40, 219 see also emotion Hay, William, 25–7, 31, 225n.37, 226n.40–4, 284 head(s) see face(s) Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich 6, 121, 283, 285 Helper, Rowan Hinton 285 Henri, Adrian 71–3, 239n.16 Hentzner, Paul 206 Heraclitus 171, 174, 285 Herder, Johann Gottfried 285

in d e x

Hickey, David 8 hidden images 201–2, 205–6, 271 n.40 Higgins, Leslie 268n.37, 285–6 Hirst, Damien 79, 240n.29 history, historicity 2, 66, 70, 79–81, 106, 121, 125, 165–6, 192–3, 199 Hoffenreich, Ludwig 73, 239n.21 Hogarth, William 20, 26, 222n.13, 231n.73, 286 Holbein, Hans, the Younger 201, 209–10 Honeymay, Thomas 62–3 Horizon (magazine) 56–7, 277 horror see emotion; war Howell, Edward 18, 19, 33 Hugo, Victor 29–30, 197, 229n.57, 270n.26 Hume, David 178, 286 humour 26–7, 62, 98, 100, 125, 128 Hutcheson, Francis 286 hybrid 21, 25, 166, 192–3, 195 imitation 85, 95, 124–5, 132, 242n.2, 254n.11 Impressionism 117, 182, 184, 186–7, 266n.20 Inglefield, Thomas 27–8, 227n.49 injury 10, 27, 34–6, 40–1, 219 Innes, Christopher 134–5 Isaacs, John 188–9, 189, 268n.41 Jahoda, Gustav 123–4 James, Henry 32 James, William 286–7 James-Kavan, Kathleen 26 Janson, H.W. 287 Jauss, Hans Robert 287 Johnson, Samuel 22, 25–6, 223n.20 jokes see humour Jones, Amelia 81, 241n.38 Jung, Carl Gustav 51–2, 235n.7 Justi, Carl 186–8, 267n.27–30, 268n.33

305

Justice, George 24 justice see law, legal action; Scarry, Elaine Kallir, Jane 136 Kalvach, Rudolf 131, 256n.35 Kandel, Eric 139, 254n.17, 287 Kant, Immanuel 5–7, 72, 177, 238n.6, 240n.26, 240n.30, 278–9, 280, 284–5, 287–8, 291, 297 see also disgust Kircher, Athanasius 211 kitsch 66, 182 Klee, Paul 49, 52–3, 57–8, 236n.23 Klein, Melanie 11, 53, 56, 65 Klein, Yves 75 Klimt, Gustav 129, 130, 136, 186 Koerner, Joseph 288 Köhler, Wolfgang 63 Kokoschka, Oskar 12, 122–3, 126, 128–40, 255n.31, 256n.37, self-portraits of 124, 131, 137–8, 138, 140 Kolnai, Aurél 288 Koss, Juliet 255n.18 Kraus, Karl 122, 134 Kren, Kurt 75, 239n.16 Krestovsky, Lydie 198, 289 Kristeva, Julia 8, 240n.26 Ladd, Anna Coleman 39–40, 43 Lang, Lilith 131, 255n.34 language, linguistic analogies 8, 25, 65–6, 111, 160, 194, 218, 240n.26, 240n.30 Lavater, Johann Caspar 6, 20, 289 law, legal action 27, 30, 70, 73, 77, 145–6, 157 Lebrun (Le Brun), Charles 20, 248 n.69 Ledward, Gilbert 61 Lee, Vernon 219–20, 289 Leibniz, Gottfried 4, 221n.4



306

u g lin e s s

Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim 283, 290, 296 Lewin, Albert 180, 265n.4 Lin, Maya 79–80, 80, 241n.34–5 Linton, Simi 45 Lipchitz, Jacques 205 Lipps, Theodor 123–6, 253n.8, 254n.10–11, n.16, 255n.19, n.23, 289–90 liquid 180–2, 184–6, 188 Liverpool 18, 19, 21–2, 31, 32, 71, 222n.5, 229n.62 Lolkes, Wybrand 28 London 22, 24, 27, 30, 49–52, 56, 58, 65, 160 Longinus 4 Loos, Adolph 134–5, 290 Lorca, Federico García 182, 265n.5 Lotze, Hermann 290 love see beauty, the beautiful, erotic theory of; Plato Lowth, Robert 4 Lund, Roger 25, 226n.44 Lynch, Deirdre 24, 224n.29 Maignan, Emmanuel 208, 211 Malevich, Kasimir 155 Manet, Édouard 118, 120 Mann, Thomas 290 Marcuse, Herbert 72, 238–9n.14–15 Margolles, Teresa 268n.38 Marine Wedding 35–7, 35, 43, 46–8, 46, 47, 48 see also Berman, Nina Marino, Giambattista 102, 249n.78 martyr(s), martyrdom 90–4, 96, 246n.44 Marx, Karl 290–1 materiality, materialism 3, 103, 107, 110–11, 117–18, 185–8 Matisse, Henri 58, 59, 69, 79, 184, 237n.2, 266n.20 Mazzocut-Mis, Maddalena 198, 272n.52

McConnell, Sean 264n.37, 291 McGinn, Colin 291 McTighe, Sheila 98, 248n.64, 249n.3 medicine, medical images 19, 34, 37, 41–2, 47, 51, 137, 155, 183–6, 250n.11, 254n.17 see also mental illness; reconstructive surgery medium 57, 108, 111, 118, 121, 156 Meltzer, Richard 291 memory 80, 157–62 Mendelssohn, Moses 292 Mengs, Anton Raphael 291 Menninghaus, Winfried 261 n.17, 292 mental illness 51–7, 60–2 Mersenne, Marin 211 metaphor(s) 4, 101, 104, 107–9, 111, 121, 186, 213, 221n.4, 265n.5, 266n.16 Minimalism 80, 161, 235n.11 Minorites 208, 211 Mitchell, W.J.T. 79 modernism, modern art food and 104, 107, 114, 118–20 psychoanalysis and 49–50, 66–8 ugliness and 7–8, 11, 49, 69–70, 81, 126, 135–6, 214 monsters 1–2, 6, 43, 59, 192–4, 196, 203, 223n.18 Montesquieu, Charles Secondat, Baron 292 Moore, G.E. 288, 292 morals, morality 3–4, 7–10, 20–6, 37, 44, 51, 70, 79–81, 96–7, 167–70, 177–8, 183–5, 188 see also beauty, the beautiful, morality and; ugliness, the ugly, morality and Muehl, Otto 72, 73, 239n.20–1 Muir, Ward 41–2

in d e x

Naples 86, 90–1, 94–6 National Socialism 51–2, 71–3, 160, 235n.7, 241n.31 nature 5, 9, 20–1, 183, 216–20, 261n.17, 275, 278–80, 298 Nehamas, Alexander 168–78, 261–4, 293 on beauty 170, 177–8, 261n.14–15 on Plato 173–6, 262n.25–8, 263n.31–3, 264n.35, n.38 neuroscience 127, 139–40 Ngai, Sianne 157, 229n.23, 293 Niceron, Jean-François 207, 207, 271n.21, 273n.59 Nicholls, Horace 38, 40, 43 Nietzsche, Friedrich 167, 187–8, 293 Nitsch, Hermann 72–4, 75, 77, 79, 239n.22 Nochlin, Linda 46 Nussbaum, Felicity 30–1 ordinary, the 9, 55, 59, 70, 97, 151, 156, 160, 165–6, 259n.16 ornament 190, 192–6, 267n.26, 269n.9 pain 4, 7–9, 36, 55, 58–9, 72, 81, 92–4, 129, 155, 218, 220, 226n.45, 239n.15 painting 4, 8, 57, 71, 74–5, 104–7, 110–12, 117–18, 121, 180, 184, 201, 249n.1 Palomino, Antonio 85, 100 Panofsky, Erwin 272n.49, 273n.54, n.59 Parmenides 173 patriotism 36, 42, 56 patronage 90–4, 244n.20 Payne Knight, Richard 231n.73, 278, 294 peace, pacifism 36 People (magazine) 34–5, 44 performance art 70–1, 73, 153 perspective 192, 199, 201, 204–5, 207, 208–13, 208

307

Phidias 204, 209, 264n.39 photography 36–7, 46–7, 73–7, 114, 214, 239n.17, n.21, 240n.24, 241n.35, 274n.73 physiognomy 19–21, 87, 89–90, 99, 202, 222n.15–16, 248n.69 Picasso, Pablo 50–67, 54, 60, 61, 62, 67, 236n.20 Plato 2–3, 9, 165, 171–6, 209, 262–4, 294 Hippias Major (‘On Beauty’) 2, 171–4, 262n.22, 263n.29, 264n.39 ideas 9, 173–4, 177–8, 263n.30–2 Parmenides 9, 263n.31 Phaedo 171–2, 176, 263n.30, 264n.36 Philebus 3, 167 Republic 3, 263n.31 Sophist 209, 263n.31 Symposium 2, 3, 263n.30 play 66–7, 90, 191, 199–200, 213–14 pleasure, the pleasant 3–4, 65–6, 75, 77–8, 81, 106, 119, 125, 170, 264 n.37 Pliny 204, 209 Plotinus 3, 167, 294 Poe, Edgar Allan 210–11 police 73, 77, 133–4, 239n.21 politics, political art 7–8, 23, 25–6, 30–1, 41, 79–81, 106, 142–7, 153, 158–62, 241n.31 Polynesian art 129, 131–2 Pope, Alexander 22, 25, 225n.35, 226n.44 Porta, Giovanni della 20, 99, 248n.69 portrait, portraiture 24, 37–8, 43, 46, 48, 89, 96, 100, 224n.28 composite 102, 103, 202, 203, 204, 206 see also representation, selfrepresentation pregnancy 22, 222n.14, 227n.49 prejudice(s) 6, 25, 31, 42, 45, 94, 169, 171, 174, 177, 260n.9 Price, Uvedale 294



308

u g lin e s s

prints, printmaking 85–7, 90–1, 102, 247n.62 prosthetics 38, 40, 46 psychoanalysis art and 49–50, 53–7, 62, 65–7, 127, 214 politics and 51–2, 55–6, 72, 237n.7 ugliness and 282, 283 public sphere 24, 27, 30, 38, 42–3, 70–1, 79–80, 137–8, 147, 158–60 putrefaction see decay, decomposition Rabelais, François 273n.59 race, racism 31, 93–4, 285, 297 Ramsey, Allan 231n.73 Ravel, Maurice 53 Read, Herbert 50, 53, 63, 65 Realism 106, 114, 118, 251n.21, 253n.43 reconstructive surgery 34, 38–41, 232n.14 relativity of taste 4, 172, 175–7, 219 religion 3–5, 33, 39, 43–4, 97, 208, 211 Renaissance 3–4, 20, 94, 194, 196, 198, 203, 206, 208 representation artistic 8, 45, 50, 79–80, 106–7, 120–1, 155, 198–200, 227n.62, 233n.19, n.25 of reality 36, 38, 40, 59, 65–8, 72–3, 95, 155, 175, 191, 201–3, 209–12, 215 self-representation 27–8, 122–3, 128–30, 134, 138 repulsive, repulsion 78, 93, 121, 184–5, 188 Ribera, Jusepe 85–103, 87, 88, 89, 92, 95, 97, 101, 103, 244n.25, 245n.40, 246n.50 Latin knowledge of 97–8, 246n.50–1 portrait of 86 Ribon, Michel 191, 209–10, 273n.61, 295 Rickman, John 55, 295

ridiculous, ridicule 23–6, 28–31, 109–10, 166, 187, 198, 225n.34, n.37 Riegl, Alois 192, 197, 198, 277, 295 Riou, Édouard 112, 114 Rivière, Joan 56, 235n.13 Rock, John Swett 165 Rodin, Auguste 198 Romanesque art 190, 192–4 Romanticism 103, 118, 181, 212 Rosenkranz, Karl 6, 181, 185, 187–8, 209, 265n.3, 267n.25, n.29, n.32, 276–8, 288, 295 Ruskin, John 169, 295 Russell, Bertrand 295–6 Sandby, Paul 20 Santayana, George 296 Scarry, Elaine 3, 8–9, 79, 240n.28, 241n.31, 261n.11 Schaaffhausen, Hermann 280, 296 Schapiro, Meyer 192, 269n.7 Schiller, Friedrich 5, 296 Schlegel, Friedrich 296 Schmarsow, August 296 Schön, Erhard 205 Schott, Gaspar 203, 211–12, 212 Schweik, Susan 30, 229n.60, 296 science, scientism 4, 99, 127, 139, 183–6, 189, 212, 220, 225n.37 sculpture 142–4, 147–50, 153, 160–2, 204 self see subject, subjectivity self-display 27–8, 95–6, 125–7, 129–32 sensation, senses 5, 32, 70, 88, 105–6, 114, 184 Service, Robert 34, 37–8 sex 2, 23, 37–8, 49–50, 72, 77, 133–4, 224n.28, 261n.17, 283 Shaftesbury, Earl of 296 Shakespeare, William 206, 210, 261n.11, 273n.54, n.61, 288 Sheares, Constance 142 Shelley, Mary see Frankenstein

in d e x

Singapore 142–62, 257–8 slavery 31, 44 social construction 10, 13, 37, 44–5, 48, 128–30, 165–6, 179, 233n.26, 250n.8 social contract 23–4 Socrates (Platonic) 2–3, 9, 171–6 Sontag, Susan 36 soul 3, 22, 25, 48, 223n.20 see also morals, morality; subject, subjectivity space 147–50, 160–2, 200–1, 209 spectral, spectrality see ghosts, ghostliness Spencer, Herbert 296, 297 Spenser, Edmund, the Younger (pseudonym) 24, 30, 225n.32 Stead, Evanghélia 266n.14, n.19, 297 Steele, Richard see Ugly Club, Ugly Face Club, in the Spectator Stein, Gertrude 58 stigma 42–5 subject, subjectivity 4–5, 8–9, 43, 45–8, 65, 101–2, 123–7, 200–1, 212, 285 subject matter 7, 85–90, 102–3, 110, 147, 155, 166–7, 175–8, 185 sublime, the 4, 240n.26 Surrealism 50, 53–7, 205, 214 symbolism 186–7 Symons, Arthur 183 Taine, Hypolite 297 Tarkovsky, Andrei 214 taste (aesthetic) 4–5, 66–8, 102, 107, 115–16, 121, 170, 178, 250n.8 television 12, 33, 153, 168 Teo Eng Seng 142–62, 257n.3, 258n.4 D Cells 147, 148, 149–50, 152, 154–6, 154, 156, 157 Teo Soh Lung 145–50, 156–7 drawings of 146, 149, 150, 158, 159 writings of 141, 145, 157, 161, 258 n.9

309

theatre 72, 77, 106, 132–7, 210, 238n.14 Tiananmen Square 153–4 Tolstoy, Lev 298 Tonks, Henry 38, 39, 43, 46 truth 63–4, 72, 79–81, 151–3, 160, 208, 239n.15 Tucker, Marcia 33, 230n.71 Turner, Bryan 37, 41 ugliness, the ugly biological theory of 5, 25, 139–40, 219–20, 261n.17, 281, 288 coexistence with beauty 12, 38, 69, 76, 78–81, 167–79, 191, 218–19, 264n.41 culinary 106–18, 121, 251n.12 definitions of 2, 24–5, 139, 165–6, 173–4, 184–5, 216–19, 250n.7, 262n.26 intentional or idea of 6, 218 morality and 2–4, 13, 25, 45, 60–1, 72–3, 166, 170, 177–8, 180, 185, 188–9 psychological theory of 4–5, 7, 12, 51–5, 62–3, 123–6, 134–6, 170, 219, 220 social theory of 1, 7, 24, 31, 36, 177–8 transformation in art 5, 7, 151 see also beauty, the beautiful, opposite of Ugly Club, Ugly Face Club 17–25, 19, 28–33, 221n.1, 222n.5 in contemporary culture 32–3, 230n.70–1 in the Spectator 23–4, 224n.25, n.28, 275 in the United States 28–9, 227–8 Ugly Laws 27, 30 ugly mistresses 24, 225n.30, 277, 299 Uglydolls 1–2, 33 unconscious 50–2, 63–5, 125, 128, 139, 197



310

u g lin e s s

Valerius, John 28 Varnedoe, Kirk 161–2 Venturi, Robert and Denise Scott Brown 277, 298 Vienna 63, 66, 71–7, 122–3, 129–32, 137, 161, 186 Actionists 70–8, 238–40 school of art history 196–7, 256n.49 Secession 129–30, 137 violence 53, 56–7, 67, 70–2, 79, 131–3, 150, 153, 229n.60, 241n.34 Virginia, University of 29 visionaries, visionary art 197–9, 211–13, 270n.19, n.26 Vlastos, Gregory 262n.26 Voltaire 33 war 10–11, 29, 34, 36–8, 40, 54–6 art and 38, 60, 63, 143, 149–50 horror and 29, 36–7, 233n.19 photography and 36, 146 Warburg, Aby 195 Ward, Ned 22–3, 29 Waugh, Evelyn 60–1 Wee, Jason 159 Weibel, Peter 76, 76, 238n.13, 240n.25

Weimar Republic 37–8, 232n.11 Weininger, Otto 133 Weisse, Christian Hermann 181, 265n.2, 298–9 Whiteread, Rachel 160–2, 259n.26–7 Wickhoff, Franz 299 Wilde, Oscar 180, 189, 299 Wilkes, John 22 Wilson, James C. and Cynthia Lewiecki-Wilson 31 Wolff, Albert 118 Wollheim, Richard 235n.11 wonder 95–6, 102–3, 166, 244n.22, 246n.51, 249n.78 Wood, Derwent 39, 43, 232n.14 Wood, John 18, 21 Woolf, Virginia 36 world art history 6, 195, 197, 277 Worringer, Wilhelm 128, 256n.40 Zelle, Carsten 188–9, 299 Zervos, Christian 59 Ziegel, Tyler (Ty) 34–7, 35, 44–8, 46, 47, 48 Ziolkowski, Jan 225n.30, 299 Zola, Émile 183