UGLY: An Alternative Look at Western Art

“Beauty has only one form; ugliness has a thousand.” – Victor Hugo, preface to Cromwell, 1827

For many people, the history of Western art exists as an imagined litany of beautiful artworks, a chronology of idealized figures and finished objects. This exhibition gathers artworks that ask us to reconsider those assumptions.

Most simply, ugliness has been conceived as the inverse of beauty, but there has always been more at stake than mere aesthetic preference. Throughout history those notions have been imbued with moral values: beauty most frequently is equated with ideals of goodness, truth, and order, while the mundane, the irrational, the evil, the deformed, and the excessive are relegated to the realm of ugliness. Over time, just as moral values have shifted, both the appearance and usefulness of ugliness have taken on different meanings and different roles, often in surprisingly powerful ways.

This collection of objects does not offer a counternarrative to a history of beauty. It might, however, suggest fissures in such a history. Ugliness pushes at the boundaries of what we know and find comfortable. It can also make us more active viewers, prompting us to react, question, and take a second look.

Lotus Cross Painter, Pyxis, 575–565 BC

Earthenware vessel, Mildred Lane Kemper Museum of Art, WU 3263

Although the ancient Greeks remain most strongly associated with refined sculptures of idealized bodies crafted according to mathematical proportions observed in nature, strange, hybrid entities populated the vernacular imagination and arts. Thus, in a sharp contrast to Aristotle’s call for art as an imitation of that which is noble and lofty, we see a cosmetic jar encircled by half-human, half-bird Sirens. According to ancient mythology, the Sirens, though physically repulsive, could lure sailors to their death with beautiful songs; here they suggest the seductive—but perhaps also dangerous—power of the makeup that the jar once held.

 Pieter van der Heyden, The Last Judgment, 1558

Engraving, Mildred Lane Kemper Museum of Art, WU 4297

Centuries later in the Netherlands, similarly hybrid forms proved useful as a means of illustrating religious doctrine. In this engraving after a drawing by the well-known Netherlandish master Pieter Bruegel I, unregenerate souls are swept into a chaotic underworld populated by monstrosities: a half man, half lizard; an owl with legs facing backward and webbed feet; and a giant cave, covered in brambles, that is also the maw of a fish. While the upper portion of the composition is organized in neat symmetry around the figure of Christ, van der Heyden represents evil as a swarming field of pandemonium below. Order and balance in one section of the work visually express moral uprightness, while disorder and animality represent the fate of the sinful.

El Greco, The Resurrection, 1600-5

Oil on canvas, Mildred Lane Kemper Museum of Art, WU 3833

El Greco’s Resurrection also adopts a bifurcated composition, contrasting the tumbling, shadowed figures of the soldiers with Christ’s upright, luminescent form. In painting these stretched, impossibly curving bodies, unmoored in a theatrically lit space, El Greco disregarded classical proportions in favor of a more expressive, subjective style that through its exaggeration and drama suggests the miraculous and divine nature of Christ’s resurrection. Notably, the significance attributed to such distortions shifted according to the contexts and aesthetic commitments of those who saw his work. Although El Greco’s work was well-received in his own time, late seventeenth-century art historians writing immediately after his death dismissed his work as “contemptible,” and later nineteenth-century classicists, such as Carl Justi, condemned this and other of El Greco’s paintings as “distorted fancies of a morbid brain,” proof of the decline of culture following the brilliance of the Renaissance. In contrast, nineteenth-century Romanticists and many early twentieth-century modern artists and historians praised his paintings as the expressive outworking of the artist’s own private vision.

James Ensor, Le Christ tourmenté (Christ Tormented), 1888

Oil on canvas, Mildred Lane Kemper Museum of Art, WU 4391

As the notion of art as an expression of an artist’s inner life gained prominence in the nineteenth century, James Ensor created his own idiosyncratic reinvention of a traditional religious scene in Le Christ tourmenté. Amidst the garish colors and loosely handled paint we can make out not only the bleeding body of Christ, but a tiny demon defecating on his hand and a cluster of ghoulish faces witnessing the spectacle. In contrast to more conventional, idealized depictions of Christ, the vulgarity of the scene both underscores the horror of the crucifixion and personalizes it, possibly also suggesting the darkness of Ensor’s own psyche.

Alfred Le Petit, L’Homme d’affaire de sa Majesté (His Majesty’s Businessman, 19th century

Woodcut with color, Mildred Lane Kemper Museum of Art

Ugliness can also serve as a means of social commentary. Caricatures such as this one use the grotesque as a comic foil, a means of undercutting authority figures and elucidating the foibles of modern culture. Le Petit depicts Emperor Napoleon III with a bulbous pink nose, purchasing a heart—engraved with the name of the emperor’s mistress—from a white-haired man with a fish’s tail. Through exaggeration and juxtaposition, the artist undermines the usually strict regimes that govern representations of those in power, allowing his readers to laugh at and critique their ruler for his philandering. Ugliness here has a leveling effect, bringing the mighty down to the masses.

Käthe Kollwitz, Erwerbslos (Unemployed), 1925

Woodcut print, Mildred Lane Kemper Museum of Art, WU 1449

For Käthe Kollwitz, the traditional equation of beauty with dominant, high culture and ugliness with low culture and social marginality provided the means for a different political project: foregrounding the “ugliness” of the plight of the poor. In this woodcut, Kollwitz expresses the suffering of impoverished people by representing them as skeletal figures. The bodies of the gaunt, wide-eyed workers disappear into the inky shadow that fills the right hand side of the composition. The literal and metaphorical darkness of their situation—their economic and physical precariousness—is meant to inspire political action, not merely emotional sympathy, on the part of the viewer.

Robert Rauschenberg, Ally, 1975

Cast paper, bamboo, and string, Mildred Lane Kemper Museum of Art, WU 1984.13.33

Ugliness has also been conceived as “formlessness,” the dissolution of coherent, stable forms into a kind of unpredictable and therefore threatening state. These objects often evoke sensory experiences beyond that of vision in an effort to rearticulate conventions of sculptural production in the postwar period. Ally—a simple construction of cast paper, string, and a hanging bamboo pole—enacts this kind of destabilization. Rauschenberg created it in India while working at a paper mill, and he incorporated the materials and smells he found there—fenugreek powder, ground tamarind seed, chalk powder, gum powder, and copper sulfate—into the pulp he used to make the sculpture. The tactile nature of the materials, as well as the earthy, exotic scents still emanating from the lumpy dark brown paper, engage our senses of touch, taste, and smell, asking us to rethink, or more literally re-experience, aesthetic notions of finish, refinement, and beauty.

-  Elissa Weichbrodt