Could the introduction of modern art into our culture be a Trojan horse against traditional art? "The Procession of the Trojan Horse in Troy," circa 1760, by Giovanni Tiepolo. (Public Domain)
In April 1917, French experimental sculptor Marcel Duchamp submitted a porcelain urinal to an art exhibit, signed “R. Mutt, 1917,” and called it art. It was a declaration of war against traditional ideas of sculpture, form, and beauty. Duchamp simply willed the urinal to be a work of art even though it clearly was not, stating that even ordinary objects could be art if they were “raised to the dignity of a work of art by the artist’s act of choice.” Art, he asserted, is entirely subjective.
This was the same man who defaced a print of the Mona Lisa by inking a cartoon mustache and beard onto the enigmatic face of the portrait and titling it with a risqué pun.
This is not art. It is mockery of artistic achievement.
"The Mona Lisa" is one of the most famous paintings in the Western tradition. It represented the status quo to the Dadaists. (Public Domain)
Anti-Art
Duchamp belonged to an anti-rational, anti-art, anti-truth cultural movement in New York City. His urinal stunt instigated a New York branch of an art school called “Dada,” a precursor to surrealism. Dada and related avant-garde art movements aimed to redefine the very nature of art since the Dadaists viewed traditional ideas of rationality, beauty, proportion, and meaning as bourgeois constructs. They expressed their radical far-left politics and anti-bourgeois sentiments by concocting works of ugliness, nonsense, chaos, absurdity, and irrationality.
In the words of French Marxist philosopher Michael Löwy, “irreverence, derision, black humour and absurdity were the weapons used by these young artists in order to express their rage and supreme contempt for the values of the established order. The slate had to be cleaned of all bourgeois conventions, traditions and expectations.” A 1919 declaration by the Berlin Central Council of Dada for the World Revolution openly declared the movement’s adherence to radical communism. The consciously political art movement connected beauty and classical art with the “oppressive” systems of capitalism.
The Dada irrationalism emerges, at least in part, like a pale ghost, out of the dust and devastation of World War I. The war seemed to finally shatter the dreams and promises of a new era of peace and bliss founded on the reign of reason, as promised by the 18th-century rationalist philosophers and the progressive spirit of the early 20th century. The Dada crowd looked upon the absurdity and chaos of the war, its tragedy on a grand scale, and responded with both a protestation against and a surrender to war’s carnage and illogic.
Curator Leah Dickerman writes in the National Gallery catalog, “For many intellectuals, World War I produced a collapse of confidence in the rhetoric—if not the principles—of the culture of rationality that had prevailed in Europe since the Enlightenment.”
The Dadaists weren’t the only edgy artists to express war-related disillusionment. Horrified by reports of the suffering and desolation caused by a German bombing of Guernica during the Spanish Civil War in April 1937, Pablo Picasso painted a large, repulsive, grotesque image of the gruesome aftermath of the bombing. It is full of twisted shapes, confused lines, disproportionate and dismembered bodies, and crude human faces silently screaming in agony. It’s a jumble of pain portrayed in stark, monochromatic colorlessness. Many consider “Guernica” an anti-war masterpiece.
The ugliness of “Guernica” reflects the ugliness of war. And some art critics use this as an explanation and justification for the repulsive modern art we are surrounded with. It is true—as the Dadaists and Picasso demonstrate—that art tends to hold up a mirror to society. Art cannot remain unaffected by philosophy, politics, history, and religion. If our art is ugly, it is a symptom of a deeper-rooted cultural illness.
Classical art depicts wide-reaching historical events with an eye focused on the humanity and dignity of all involved. “The Battle of Alexander at Issus” (“Alexanderschlacht Schlacht bei Issus”), 1529, by Albrecht Altdorfer. Alte Pinakothek, Munich. (Public Domain)
Political movements and anti-war angst may be two reasons for the ugliness of most modern art. But under the broiling surface of radical politics, artistic movements such as Dadaism contain murkier depths: They give visual expression to a postmodern philosophy of nothingness, of nonbeing, the meaninglessness of life. The brokenness of the human figures of Picasso expresses the fragmentation of meaning and order that modern man has experienced since rejecting traditional notions of truth.
Classical art, on the other hand, is ordered, bright, understandable, beautiful, and harmonious because that is how humanity once viewed the world. By contrast, modern art emerges from a spirit of disillusionment and skepticism about the world. Poet Matthew Arnold articulates this idea in a poem that marks the beginning of modernity:
the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.
Just as harmony, order, and meaning gradually died and vanished from the visual arts in the 20th century, giving way to abstract, unidentifiable shapes and explosions of color, so too did poetry gradually dismember itself and revert into fragmented and pointless gibberish. One Dadaist, Hugo Ball, wrote a poem made up completely of meaningless, garbled sounds. This is the logical conclusion of the pessimism expressed by Matthew Arnold, the pessimism of a world that had lost confidence in objective meaning.
Modern art does reflect a culture that has rejected objective ideas of beauty and meaning, and in that sense, it is truthful. We can say that it is, at least, authentic, or perhaps even justified. An artist ought to speak the truth about his time. Yet, is that art’s only purpose?
Art’s Deeper Purpose
Is speaking the truth of the moment all an artist should do? Is art merely social commentary and a reflection of prevailing attitudes, philosophies, and historical events? The Western tradition would indicate otherwise. Thinkers going back to Aristotle believed that art could and should express something timeless and transcendent, not tied to any particular age or culture.
Renaissance artists looked back to the ancient Greeks and their belief in objective reality, truth, and purpose. “The School of Athens,” circa 1509–1511, by Raphael. Apostolic Palace, Vatican City, Italy. (Public Domain)
In Part IV of the “Poetics,” Aristotle teaches that art is an imitation of reality that helps us to understand reality more deeply. We see universal, unchanging truths through the rendering of something particular. In “Only the Lover Sings: Art and Contemplation,” philosopher Josef Pieper gives voice to this age-old understanding of art:
“Anybody can ponder human deeds and happenings and thus gaze into the unfathomable depths of destiny and history; anybody can get absorbed in the contemplation of a rose or human face and thus touch the mystery of creation; everybody, therefore, participates in the quest that has stirred the minds of the great philosophers since the beginning. We see still another form of such activity in the creation of the artist, who does not so much aim at presenting copies of reality as rather making visible and tangible in speech, sound, color, and stone the archetypical essences of all things as he was privileged to perceive them.”
Some might object that “Guernica” does depict a universal reality: the ugliness of war. That’s true to a point. But is war the deepest, most unchanging aspect of reality?
Symmetry, beauty, and idealism blend together in this depiction of Napoleon. The King of Spain commissioned “Napoleon Crossing the Alps,” 1801, painted by Jacques Louis David. Museum of the Chateau de Malmaison, Rueil-Malmaison, France. (Public Domain)
Though battles cost lives, art depicting them need not be repulsive or garish. “Battle of Chios,” 1848, by Ivan Aivazovsky. Aivazovsky National Art Gallery, Feodosia, Crimea. (Public Domain)
Recall that the world has always had war (though not the particularly dehumanizing post-industrial kind Picasso painted), and yet classical artistic depictions of it were not ugly in the manner of Picasso’s “Guernica.” Perhaps this is because, in times past, artists could see a certain meaning and purpose even in great catastrophes and sufferings, like war. The image of Aeneas fleeing the burning city of Troy, losing his wife, losing everything to war, in “The Aeneid” is tragic, but it is not absurd or mere chaos. The poet Virgil saw beyond the dark and ugly externals of the scene to a deeper, stable truth.
In “Iris Exiled,” Dennis Quinn says of Virgil’s perspective: “This is not the tragic view, however; there is no idea of a malign fate, but, to the contrary, the idea of a benign destiny. ... It may be that the worst things—the loss of the best things, the loss of everything—are for the best. Had not Troy fallen, there could have been no Rome.” A view of the world that can find meaning even in suffering will be reflected in art composed with harmony, proportion, order, symmetry—that is, beauty—regardless of the subject matter.
So, which is a truer picture of the world? “Guernica” or “The Aeneid”? That is no easy question to answer. Perhaps both hold elements of truth. But their final attitudes toward reality seem almost opposite. Is the world ultimately “a darkling plain/ swept with confused alarms of struggle” or are “all things in a single volume bound by Love/ of which the universe is the scattered leaves,” as the medieval poet Dante affirms? Arnold’s view would hold that we live in a kind of dark nightmare, with only occasional and half-illusory lights, like shooting stars. Dante’s view would hold that the heavens and earth are full of light, and the shadows we see are only the natural result of the exquisite luminosity of being.
The great Latin poet Virgil, holding the “Aenid” and flanked by the two muses, "Clio" (history) and "Melpomene" (tragedy). The 3rd century A.D. mosaic was discovered in Sousse, Tunisia. Bardo Museum in Tunis, Tunisia. (Public Domain)
Would you like to see other kinds of arts and culture articles? Please email us your story ideas or feedback at [email protected]
Walker Larson teaches literature at a private academy in Wisconsin, where he resides with his wife and daughter. He holds a master's in English literature and language, and his writing has appeared in The Hemingway Review, Intellectual Takeout, and his Substack, TheHazelnut. He is also the author of two novels, "Hologram" and "Song of Spheres."
