Stretching what you can enjoy

The old woman

In 1461 the French poet François Villon put into his Testament a ballad in the voice of an old woman who had once been a beauty. She is the “belle Heaulmière,” the helmet-maker’s wife, and she looks at what time has done to her shoulders, her breasts, her hips. Four centuries later the sculptor Auguste Rodin made her in clay and then in bronze: She Who Was the Helmet Maker’s Once-Beautiful Wife, conceived between 1885 and 1887, 50 centimeters high, a crouching, starved, collapsing body. The Musée Rodin in Paris owns the bronze (S.01148). It was shown at the Salon of 1890 and bought by the French state the next year.

The lecture mentions this figure while making its third method, breaking new ground, and gets her wrong: it calls her a famed courtesan of ancient Rome, a beauty of the rank of Xishi, who lost her looks. She is not Roman, and not a celebrity; she is Villon’s medieval Parisian. (The Metropolitan Museum calls its cast “The Old Courtesan,” which may be the source of the mix-up.) What the lecture takes from Rodin is sound. In his conversations with the critic Paul Gsell, published in French in 1911, Rodin said that the crowd would like to forbid the artist to show what displeases it in nature, and that this was a mistake: “What is commonly called ugliness in nature can in art become full of great beauty.” And: “In fact, in art, only that which has character is beautiful.” (These lines are from Mrs. Romilly Fedden’s 1912 English translation, which is in the public domain. The lecture also quotes Rodin as calling the decay of beauty more beautiful than beauty; we could not find that line in the translation and do not use it.) For Rodin, character was “the essential truth of any natural object, whether ugly or beautiful.”

The lecture’s method is a practical one. The point is not to like ugliness. It is that a person trained only on the pretty cannot feel a great deal of what art contains, and that what shocks you may be what wakes you. You may refuse to call a piece beautiful, the lecture says, but you cannot ignore it. This is a weaker claim than “the ugly is more beautiful,” and it is the claim the evidence supports.

Faces that look back

Chinese painting has its own tradition of the unlovely made powerful. Bada Shanren (八大山人, whose birth name was Zhu Da, 1626–1705) was a descendant of a Ming prince, of the line of Zhu Quan, Prince Ning. After the Ming fell in 1644 he became a Buddhist monk in the late 1640s and, about 1680, left the order and painted for a living. Reports say he feigned muteness or madness; an essay by the National Gallery of Victoria says that, in spite of all we know, nobody really knew him. He painted fish and birds, often with the eye rolled upward so that the white shows, and signed in a way that can be read as 哭, “to cry,” and 笑, “to laugh.” The common reading, which the lecture follows, is that the white eyes and odd shapes express a loyalist’s grief and defiance. It is a reading. The Cleveland Museum’s Fish and Rocks is hedged: the scroll “may” be autobiographical, its fish like “leftover subjects” who have lost their roles. (The lecture’s “two quails like two potatoes” could not be matched to any museum’s painting.)

Vincent van Gogh made a case in letters. In 1885, in Nuenen, as he was finishing The Potato Eaters (the museum dates it April–May), he wrote to his brother Theo on April 30 that these people eating by the light of their lamp had tilled the earth with the same hands they were putting in the dish, so that the picture speaks of manual labor and of food honestly earned. “If a peasant painting smells of bacon, smoke, potato steam—fine,” he added. The lecture gives a related claim about two children painted as wizened as old men; we could not find the painting and do not use it. (A line often quoted about van Gogh liking the ugly, “the uglier, older, meaner, iller, poorer I get,” is from an 1888 letter about taking revenge through color, not about beauty in ugliness.)

The lecture’s third example is the reverse case: an image so beautiful it wears out. Andy Warhol’s Marilyn Diptych (1962, Tate Modern) repeats one publicity photograph of Marilyn Monroe, from the film Niagara (1953), fifty times: color on the left, a black-and-white and fading version on the right. Warhol made it after she died on August 4, 1962. The lecture’s point is that when her face is on every lightbox and T-shirt the beauty changes and may even look ugly. Psychology says something similar in a weak form. Liking tends to rise with familiarity, and a famous 1968 study by Robert Zajonc and later reviews find that it can then fade after long repetition. Those results come mostly from laboratory tests with simple stimuli, so one safe sentence is all they support: liking rises with familiarity, then can fade with endless repetition.

The lecture’s conclusion about all this is a little blunt, but useful. Standards of beauty change from dynasty to dynasty and country to country, it says, while the feeling of beauty is the most certain thing there is. If something numbs us, something that wakes us, even a shock, is worth more than something beautiful that has gone dead. The caution is that the best way to be shocked is rarely to look for shocks. Maya Lin’s design for the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, which won its competition in 1981, was attacked by some early critics as “a black gash of shame and sorrow,” and a statue was added in 1984. It is now widely admired.

A storm from indoors

The second kind of new ground is fear. Why do people watch horror films, the lecture asks, when a real tiger would send them running? Immanuel Kant had an answer in 1790. Rocks that overhang, thunderclouds piled up in the sky, volcanoes, hurricanes, the boundless sea: in Meredith’s translation of section 28, such things make our power of resistance “of trifling moment” beside theirs. “But, provided our own position is secure, their aspect is all the more attractive for its fearfulness.” And Kant says that someone who is truly afraid “can no more play the part of a judge of the sublime of nature” than a person captivated by appetite can judge the beautiful. Edmund Burke had come close in 1757: “When danger or pain press too nearly, they are incapable of giving any delight, and are simply terrible; but at certain distances, and with certain modifications, they may be, and they are, delightful.”

The lecture reads Kant as saying that what we enjoy in the sublime is our own inner strength. We are small beside a storm, but our minds can reach farther than the storm, and the lecture’s example is that Mount Everest could be ten times taller and we could still picture it. (The mountain stands 8,848.86 meters high by the 2020 survey of China and Nepal, and the example is the lecturer’s, not Kant’s. Kant’s own examples of the “mathematical” sublime were the pyramids and St. Peter’s.) The reading is fair, and Kant’s lines support it: we feel stronger than we are, and the safe place is part of it.

Recent psychology gives a modest check. In 2020 a research team studied 110 visitors, aged 12 to 57, at one haunted-house attraction, recording heart rate and filming the biggest scares, and asking about fear and enjoyment. Enjoyment followed an upside-down U: it was highest at a moderate level of fear, neither too little nor too much (Andersen and others, Psychological Science 31, 2020). It was one site and one design, and nobody has yet reproduced it; but the shape agrees with Burke.

The arm that is missing

The third kind of new ground is the incomplete. Why is one of the best-known statues in the Louvre a statue with no arms? The Aphrodite known as the Venus de Milo (Louvre Ma 399) is Parian marble, 2.04 meters tall, made in the second century BC, and found on the island of Milos in 1820. It came to the Louvre in March 1821. Both arms are lost, along with the left foot. The Louvre’s own account is that restoring the arms was proposed and “abandoned for fear of changing the nature of the work,” and that a hand holding an apple, found nearby, points to Aphrodite. Unofficial digital reconstructions exist. The lecture’s claim that none looks good is a judgment, not a fact, and “none has persuaded” is closer to it.

The lecture offers two reasons why the missing arms help. First, the viewer is free to imagine, and imagines differently each visit, because nobody remembers last time’s version. Second, with the arms gone attention goes to the line of the whole body, the long S of the pose. It then takes the idea to Rodin’s marble portrait of his pupil and lover Camille Claudel (1864–1943), called Thought, in which the head rises from a rough block of marble in the Musée d’Orsay. The lecture says Rodin stopped on impulse. Whether he did, or chose to leave the block rough, we could not confirm; the effect on a viewer is the same.

The Great Wall shows a larger version. A 2012 survey counted 21,196 kilometers of wall from all periods, of which 8,851.8 kilometers belongs to the Ming. Sections such as Jiankou are largely unrestored, and their weathering is part of what visitors come to see. (It is not visible from the Moon. Yang Liwei, China’s first astronaut in space, said in 2003 that he did not see it from orbit.) In the United States the equivalent may be the Liberty Bell. It cracked on its first test ring and was recast in 1753, took a narrow split in the early 1840s, and in 1846 was repaired in a way that widened the crack and made it silent for good. It was called the “Liberty Bell” by an abolitionist publication in 1835. A silent, cracked bell has become a symbol that a perfect one could not.

Taken to its limit, the lecture says, the missing thing is the most visible: a husband or wife who is away on a trip is suddenly seen in the empty chair. Jean-Paul Sartre’s 1943 example is a café where we expect to find our friend Pierre and he is not there: the café is shaded by his absence. The lecture also cites Theodor Adorno, who, in Aesthetic Theory (1970), compared the appearing of an artwork to fireworks. The lecture reads that to mean that each viewing is a one-time event that flares and vanishes, and that nobody is meant to destroy art. We could not check Adorno’s wording and keep this to one sentence. The lecture’s own conclusion is plain: an art object or a product is experienced once each time, and a creator who tries to make something that works forever will fail.

Standing back

The fourth method asks for something different: a distance. The lecture’s word is neutrality, a disinterested attitude. It starts with Francis Hutcheson, who held in 1725 that we perceive beauty by an inner sense, and that the pleasure “does not arise from any Knowledge of Principles, Proportions, Causes, or the Usefulness of the Object; but strikes us at first with the Idea of Beauty.” (The lecture’s gloss, that the outer senses are prone to bias and the inner sense is a “sixth sense” combining the others, is the lecturer’s. Hutcheson’s inner sense is a separate power, not the five senses fused.) It goes on to Kant. Taste, he wrote in section 5, judges “apart from any interest.” An interest is a wish for the thing to exist, to eat, to own, to use. In section 2 he gave his own illustration: asked about a palace, a man could say he does not care for such things, or that it was the work of the people’s vanity, or that he prefers the eating-houses of Paris like the Iroquois chief in the anecdote. Kant’s example is a palace and a sachem. The lecture’s apple is not Kant’s; it says that Cézanne’s apple is one we do not want to eat, so we notice its form.

The lecture’s fullest illustration is from Edward Bullough, a British psychologist who published “‘Psychical Distance’ as a Factor in Art and an Aesthetic Principle” in 1912. His main example is a fog at sea. To a sailor who must steer through it, it is a danger; to a passenger who can step back, it can become a thing of beauty, a milky veil that blurs outlines. Bullough then considered what happens when a viewer’s distance fails. A jealous husband watching Othello is likely to start thinking about his own wife and to stop watching the play. That is being too close. A viewer who thinks “it is only actors” is too far. Bullough’s name for the problem was an “antinomy of distance”: the best viewing keeps as little distance as it can without letting it vanish. (The lecture calls Othello a comedy; it is a tragedy, first recorded at the court of James I on November 1, 1604.)

The lecture’s second illustration is Claude Monet’s Impression, Sunrise. It says the picture shows the Thames in London in 1872, and that smoke from chimneys made the haze, in air so polluted that, if we stopped to think about it, we could no longer enjoy the painting. Much of that is wrong. The picture, in the Musée Marmottan Monet in Paris (inventory 4014), shows the harbor of Le Havre, not London. The astronomer Donald Olson fixed the date, from tides and the Sun, as November 13, 1872, at about 7:35 in the morning. It was first shown in April 1874 at the first Impressionist exhibition in the former studio of the photographer Nadar, and the critic Louis Leroy gave the movement its name in a review in Le Charivari on April 25. There are chimneys, steamers, and smoke, since Le Havre was a working port. Nobody measured pollution there in 1872, and the figure in the lecture’s transcript has no basis. Monet did paint London, in 1870–71 and in 1899–1901, and he is reported to have said that without the fog London would not be a beautiful city. The principle survives the correction. If we smelled that harbor we would not see the picture the same way.