Vincent, age 160.

Happy birthday to you, Mr. Van Gogh! Congratulations, you’ve made it from obscurity all the way to kitsch!

The ever charming and insulting Roger Scruton in the hour long BBC documentary “Why Beauty Matters” makes his case against the cult of ugliness.

Damien Hirst, For the Love of God, 2007. Platinum, diamonds, human teeth.

For creation of later art objects, ORLAN has saved large trash bags filled with the bloody gauze, bandages, used rubber gloves, scrubs and masks from her surgical performance, some of which have molded in the plastic bags. She says she will display them if she can find a way to make them a bit less repulsive. Fat removed from her face is also set aside in jars for later sale. As a gift to the performer Madonna, ORLAN creates a piece of jewelry using fat from her cheek. Madonna replies that it looks like caviar and she will cherish it.

“Omnipresence,” the title of her piece, reflects the live broadcast of her surgery and their instant connection to ORLAN, as the performance was shown live in dozens of places around the globe.

ORLAN, the carnal artist, in 1993

ORLAN provides her readers with a list of definitions in her Manifest of Carnal Art. “Carnal Art is self-portraiture in the classical sense, but realized through the possibility of technology. It swings between defiguration and refiguration. Its inscription in the flesh is a function of our age. The body has become a “modified ready-made”, no longer seen as the ideal it once represented; the body is not anymore this ideal ready-made it was satisfying to sign.” (ORLAN)

Through her Carnal Art series, she makes herself a permanent art object. In the past, she made herself temporary art objects through performance pieces and photography. With her surgical performances, she no longer blends in when not in costume – her own skin is her costume, suggesting we all wear costumes and hers is just clearer and noticeable.

Many of her works directly deal with her own body. Besides her nine surgical performances, she has worn a dress printed with a life-size image of her naked body for her performance “Dressed in One’s Own Nudity” (1976-1977), she has sold life size paper cut outs of a variety of her body parts in “Selling Oneself on the Market” (1976-1977), she has removed Madonna-like draped clothing for “Incidental Striptease” (1974-1975), as well as hundreds of photographs, sculptures, installations, and other works of art depicting her face – or her body, with her face obstructed.

ORLAN challenges the absurdity of “conventional” and “traditional” beauty by changing herself into a living reenactment of art history. By choosing her new features from different time periods in the historical canon of beauty, she shows the ever changing fashion of the ideal created by the male gaze, and continued pursuit of these standards by each group of contemporary women. She takes the ideal to the extreme to show not only the ridiculousness of the natural conclusion of this type of thinking, but also to remove all doubt from people’s minds as to her goal in these surgeries; no one will say she is making herself more beautiful under the guise of Feminism and art.

ORLAN, still from “Incidental striptease,” 1974-1975

She also expresses the violence done to the body, especially to women’s bodies. She raises her point by reinforcing the objectification women suffer at the eyes of male dominated society. She goes to extreme lengths – she places herself not as a victim of violence toward women for the sake of beauty, but uses her consciousness of the act as a criticism of the act itself. Rather than subjected to it, she subjects it to herself and takes on the process for her own ends.

Dr. Cramer believes there are many layers of reasons for ORLAN’s performance – reasons which may go back to her childhood or relationships or countless other reasons. She interviewed ORLAN extensively before the surgery to make sure she was not doing this to hurt herself “or for other deranged reasons, because then we could have a psychological disaster.” According to the New York Times, Dr. Cramer is waiving her fee, which would be $12,000 – $15,000 (Fox).

While some women claim that plastic surgery empowers them by allowing them to have further control over their own bodies, they often are still conforming to male dominated ideals on beauty and promised fertility. Alex Kuczynski, a New York Times reporter and author of “Beauty Junkies” (Doubleday, 2006) calls these latest appeals “the new feminism, an activism of aesthetics.” That ignores the work of feminists from Susan Faludi to Susan Bordo, who have argued for years against the global beauty industry and its misogynistic practices. Yet the cosmetic-surgery industry is doing exactly what the beauty industry has done for years: It’s co-opting, repackaging and reselling the feminist call to empower women into what may be dubbed “consumer feminism.” Under the dual slogans of possibility and choice, producers, promoters and providers are selling elective surgery as self-determination. (Cognard-Black)

The only way that plastic surgery empowers women is by empowering them to better fit into the ideal already set for them. By twisting the aim of modification from improvement to an art form of self-sculpture, she engages in violence at the hand of the viewer – through the male gaze – and, even more disturbing, the self-violence and mutilation so many other women take upon themselves. When asked by The Irish Critic what her political/ ideological aim is, ORLAN replies that she does not want to tell people what they should do or should not do. “From the very start, my work questioned the social and religious pressures to which the body is subjected. …I try to pinpoint and question, but I can’t know if the message was understood or not” (The Irish Critic).

ORLAN calls herself a feminist, neo-feminist, post-feminist, and alter-feminist. While critiquing the common uses of plastic surgery and the patriarchal social ideal of beauty, she also objectifies herself to the viewer. She says that women have the means to change themselves and make their bodies say anything they want. “And for a woman, her body doesn’t belong to her for long so she has to preserve it and make it say what she wants without any peer pressure or the obligations of dominant ideologies. You can look like a Barbie doll or a big star or you can try to create your own inner portrait.”

The American Society of Plastic Surgeons states that purpose of plastic surgery is to improve appearance and self-esteem. It is “a personal choice and should be done for yourself, not to fulfill someone else’s desires or to try to fit an ideal image.” The portrait she creates, while not following contemporary standards of beauty, still follows various historical ideals only now possible to achieve through surgical means. Yes, she does go beyond beauty to make her point clear, but the violence she does to herself and the alterations she makes to her body may still be a form of giving in to objectification in the guise of authority rather than questioning objectification. By forwarding the notion of women “taking control” of their bodies, ORLAN and many other Feminists also reinforce the falsehood that men are primarily mind, while women are body, and thus easily objectified.

ORLAN, wearing her inner portrait on the outside

She raises more questions. If the true inner portrait of other women happens to look like a Barbie doll, how can other women know she is not just conforming to male dominated ideals? Could this not cause more harm than good to women? If the body is obsolete, the a mount of pain, objectification, and trauma ORLAN goes through is superfluous. She claims she is not seeking suffering, but physical transformation. But when the body is obsolete, the transformation of the body is also obsolete. She is engaging in a thought provoking question, but does not align her reality with her question – but it is the only way to ask such questions. While placing the control of her own body in her hands, she places it in another’s hands – the surgeons. Her surgeon, Dr. Cramer, is a long time Feminist, but she is rarity in a very male dominated field. ORLAN takes control of the situation by directing Dr. Cramer – she reads from scripts, chats by videophone, and announces when she is finished. Other women do not have this luxury and may be hurting their cause by so frequently placing themselves under the knives of men, even if in the future this is often just to release their inner portrait. If a man must be relied upon to make a woman become herself, who is she really? She is what her surgeon makes her. ORLAN questions, but she has not answered.

Before the surgery begins, she reads from a script, in French, “Man treats this skin so cheaply, though it means so much to him. He sheds it at the slightest bidding, for he wants to shed his skin. The only thing he possesses. ‘I only have my skin.’ It is too much since having and being do not coincide.”

She seats herself on the operating table and answers questions asked her through videophone while a woman draws on her face – under her eyes, then outlining her cheekbones, then around the implants as she holds them to ORLAN’s face. “It’s about renaissance and reconstruction,” she says. A skull rests nearby, with blue implants (normally used for enhancing cheekbones) attached to show how her facial structure will change – on the cheekbones, along the ridge of the nose, along the outer edge of the brow bone, and on the underside of the chin.  The first question comes from the New York gallery: “what will the body be in the future?” ORLAN replies, “the body is now obsolete, totally obsolete.”

ORLAN, still from “Omnipresence,” 1993

Only local anesthesia is used throughout the surgery so that she may continue to answer questions even as the surgeon begins to cut around her left ear, then dives beneath the skin. The camera moves in on the gruesome detail. She speaks earnestly about her work while her flesh curls away from her face and hangs limply, like a mask. One interviewer likens her to Van Gogh when he cut off his own ear. She denies this vehemently, “cutting your ear off in a moment of madness or despair isn’t like me.” Instead, she has carefully planned her performance. “I have made it my art, not painting,” she says, as the space between her left ear and cheek remains gaping and bloody. “I believe that, with today’s technology we can reduce the distance between what one has and what one is.”

She says that while many people expect her to make her body younger and more beautiful, she is instead taking it so far they will have no doubts about this issue. “My work is a critique on plastic surgery and on cosmetic surgery as it is usually used. “ Her facial implants are not arbitrary, but the nose of Jean-Léon Gérôme’s Psyche, the chin of Botticelli’s Venus, the lips of François Boucher’s Europa, the eyes of a sixteenth-century image of Diana, and the forehead of Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa.  She only goes silent when a chunk of flesh is cut away from the underside of her chin.

Sandro Botticelli,”The Birth of Venus” detail, 1486

François Boucher, “The Rape of Europa,” 1732-1734

The audience sees, again and again, the incision, the tools squirming beneath the skin, the fight between the flesh and the surgeon as the implants are shoved and prodded until they lie satisfactorily beneath the skin, the stuffing of gauze, and the sewing of the skin.  ORLAN explains, her face swollen, stitched, and bloody, that a person puts on new clothes and discards the old. Likewise, the soul accepts new material bodies. It is a living reincarnation.

ORLAN, “The Second Mouth,” 1993

Before the end of the planned surgery, however, ORLAN, in much discomfort, decides to finish the insertion of the implants in ten days’ time. She complains of being hungry, thirsty, anxious, and of suffering. Her head is then wrapped in white gauze and taped across her forehead and under her chin. When, two days later, her bandages are removed and she gets her first look of her puffy face, eyes nearly swollen shut, ORLAN says, “I really like it. It totally changes me. It’s really different.”

ORLAN, in bandages several days after her surgery

Jan van Eyck, “The Arnolfini Portrait,” 1434. Oil on oak panel.

The most recognizable to modern viewers is The Arnolfini Portrait, also known as The Arnolfini Wedding, Portrait of Giovanni Arnolfini and his Wife, and a slew of other titles. Mrs. Arnolfini is not pregnant, but merely showing off her fashionably voluminous skirt.  St. Catherine, a virgin, can be seen wearing a similarly styled dress on the right side of a triptych by van Eyck.

Jan van Eyck, “Madonna and Child with Saints Michael and Catherine,” 1437.

Nor is this double portrait likely a record of a new marriage. The painting is full of meaning and symbols:  the convex mirror is surrounded by images of the Passion of Christ, the cast aside shoes on the floor, the carving of St. Margaret (patron saint of childbirth) on the finial of the bedpost, the single burning candle, and a host of other details have particular meaning and have been speculated upon for centuries. The identity of which Arnolfini the painting depicts is up for debate as well as the state of his wife  (first wife? Second wife? Posthumous portrait of the wife who died in childbirth? The list continues.).  Paul Johnson, in Art: A New History, picks through the details to portray a larger picture,

“But the painter’s main points about marriage—that it is a big step in life as well as a risky one, that the man may command but the woman often gets the last laugh, relished under her modestly downcast eyes, that the bed must never be left out of the picture, that a child (enigmatic in this case) is the true bond of union, and that in the end God’s help is urgently needed to make any marriage a success—all these insinuations come across, if one looks at the painting carefully. Like all great works of art, it is something to cherish and study, to return to repeatedly and to worm out its secrets over time.”

That this is more than a straight up double portrait there is no doubt, but I will leave the arguing to others. When baffled by the complexity of symbolism, consider the modern wedding ceremony with its traditions and symbols and the ease with which they are read. The white dress, rings, flowers, in some cases “something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue,” just to name a fraction of modern symbols, rich in history, we encounter and interpret regularly. All this talk leads me to the reason for my absence from art history writing for the last few months: my own marriage. It happened all in a glorious whirlwind and I moved from Germany to Portland, Oregon to Washington DC in a matter of a few months and still feel like I am just settling in. I am unbelievably happy.

Photo by Jenna St. Martin, 2012.

Museum visits aren’t always ideal. And sometimes you have one day in the Louvre, or a few hours at Orsay, or you stumble into an unknown collection just before closing. There are a few different ways people choose to cope with this: ignoring, highlighting, sprinting, or combining. The Louvre is a perfect example, because, unless you are in Paris for quite a long while, no one has time to enjoy the collection in the “ideal” manner.

One of my friends chose to ignore most of the art and focus on only a few pieces that tugged at his heart. One could say that he doesn’t know much about art, and he didn’t know the artist or title, but he found one piece and let it completely capture his emotions. He was several days in Paris, and returned to the painting to sit and to weep. By ignoring most of the works, you can know one or two pieces, but at the price of missing out on billions of dollars worth of incredible art, that waits, literally, just around the corner.

Visitors crowd in front of Mona Lisa

Most tourists choose the highlight method. They grab a map, draw a little trail, and rush to the big names. They see Psyche and Cupid, Mona Lisa, the Nike of Samothrace, Gabrielle d’Estrées and Her Sister, Venus de Milo, and not much else. They are expectorated from the museum doors and head to the next attraction. To be completely unfair, these are the people who tour the salt mines immediately following Auschwitz.

Another option is to sprint through the museum and try to see everything, while really seeing nothing. While much ground is covered, even the tourists who just see the big names have a tiny chance at actually seeing. This one also has the potential to make docents quite nervous.

The fourth method is about as ideal as you can get in an un-ideal situation. The combination method. Map in hand, plan which areas of the museum are most important to you. Of course you should see the Mona Lisa, but with elbows jabbing into your ribcage and a bouffant somewhat obscuring your view, this is not the place to linger. While you will race through some areas, leave time to wander through others and settle in front a few pieces to really enjoy them for a few minutes. If at all possible, know what the museum has in its collection beforehand.

Jan Fabre, I Let Myself Drain, 2006 – if only we could actually get this up close and personal in museums!

With online museum catalogs and virtual tours, it’s common to see more details in a painting when you aren’t physically in front of it. For this reason, be aware of the things you can’t get from prints, books or digital sources. Be overwhelmed by the size of a Rubens and surprised by the largeness of a Dali. Notice the intricate detail in a tiny portrait. Move around paintings to catch the light playing on the texture. Know that you have seen the true colors. Think of the physical hands that have touched these painting, the monarchs, merchants, or heiresses who may have owned them, and what it took for this painting to survive wars. Look at the vast collection of frames, something you rarely see without being physically in front of a painting. If the work has been around for more than a few years, these could be ornately hand carved, covered with gold leaf, or hundreds of years old.

Use the time you have to enjoy art museums as thoroughly as possible. With a little strategy and a conscious effort to look, you will leave without massive regrets of what you didn’t have time to see.

Luigi Russolo, primarily involved in the Futurist ideas of noise, holds his spot in history as the creator of the Intonarumori, or “noise machines.” His interest in noise is clear, even in his early days in Futurism. He began as a painter –  “Music,” displays his interest in combining multiple senses and in a sort of cross-portrayal of sound through sight.

Luigi Russolo, “Music,” 1911

The Futurists claimed “we do not draw sounds, but their vibrating intervals.” Sound vibrations are suggested in this work through the ripplings of rings originating from the musician. The figure playing music on a keyboard has five hands, communicating the rapidity of his musical performance. Both the music emanating from the figure and his hands are examples of this repetition suggesting movement and change, whether sound waves or action. Futurist paintings often portrayed action through the multiplication of form, as in the dog’s legs in the always delightful “Dynamism of a Dog on a Leash.”  This technique of showing motion is natural to the modern viewer, but was new in the early 20^th century and comes from a little invention called “photography,” which allowed for the study and capturing of motion in a completely new way.

Giacomo Balla, “Dynamism of a Dog on a Leash,” 1912

The Futurists wanted to show art as one experienced it, not as it was. “The construction of pictures has hitherto been foolishly traditional. Painters have shown us the objects and the people placed before us.” Color, line quality, and form were meant to appeal to the emotional experience of the viewer. “Music” accurately displays the Futurism in all its movement and repetition, attention to sound, and use of color as an experience rather than true to life.

Russolo’s Noise Machines

Boredom surrounded by Rubens

The room immediately following was dedicated to the education of children. Each display was interactive and evidence of art classes hung about the room. But where is the link? Children are encouraged to interact with museums – they are entertained, but are expected, only a few years later as young adults, to be quietly respectful and have little to bridge the gap. We could, instead, continue to encourage interaction with new displays that replace Saskia van Rijn’s face with your own, or edible displays where you eat your way through a Dutch still lives (sans moths, flies, and freshly killed pheasant).

Or, perhaps, art is not a form of entertainment. Perhaps museums are more like sanctuaries or libraries – places to be quiet, to reflect, and to learn.

Enthusiasm for art history does not usually begin with mere exposure to fine paintings, but a knowledge of these works. Seeing paintings after studying their history, technique, symbolism, sponsor or sitter, and artist is absolutely wonderful. To change your mind while surrounded by portraits and decide, “no, I actually prefer Rubens to van Dyck,” that is really something.

There are many options and methods for the education departments of museums, visits to schools, and classes, but this does not address the 10 year old or 14 year old visitors in school groups or dragging their feet behind their parents.

Unfortunately, there isn’t much a museum can do for young adults to coax them into understanding in a single visit. Their parents and schools have the responsibility to begin an early cultivation for art. Museums need not grovel before children with promises of entertainment – we all know they would be better entertained elsewhere, and frankly, it’s embarrassing.

The Tearful Bride, Jan Sander van Hemessen, c1540 – the most entertaining painting I saw at the Schwarzenberg Palace, Prague

Don’t forget to look up, Schwarzenberg Palace, Prague

Note: My best friend grew up mainly in Europe. I remember her writing to me as a junior higher, saying that she and her sister were scolded by a tour guide on a trip to Versailles. Apparently the wall they were leaning against was gold.

Leonardo da Vinci, Lady with an Ermine, Portrait of Cecilia Gallerani, 1496

I will see this da Vinci in Krakow at the Czartoryski Museum next week. I cannot contain my joy! Art lifts the spirit and delights the soul.

Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, 2012, Jan De Cock

In each room was a small book of seemingly unrelated photographs to accompany the text and sculptures. One seemed to be filled with images from a school field trip, another of young people playing guitar.

Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, 2012, Jan De Cock

The wall texts mention specifics about the installation and explained them: why a basket of sunglasses sat near a door, what the gold dust floating down meant, why there were photographs of Marilyn Monroe dressed as Jackie, why the floor was covered with photographs that you literally have to walk over, the walls spanned with silk, a black monolith flanked by two life-size wax figures, a horse saddle, and so on. None of which appear in the exhibit.

Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, 2012, Jan De Cock

I don’t mind the installations. And I don’t mind the text. But together, they are absurd. This is the kind of artwork that people nod in agreement with as they go through the museum, yet no one can explain. This is the crowd all smiles as their haughty and nude emperor struts past them. If it came out later that the text belonged to one show and the physical show to another, I would not be at all surprised.

Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, 2012, Jan De Cock

The work claims to be “a landscape of splintered units that seemingly has neither a point of departure, nor one of arrival.” At what point does it become so fragmented it is meaningless? We’ve already seen meaningless art. When does it become too much? This is not a complicated idea expressed here, but a childish one. Just as shock art has become soporific, this exhibit turned out to be boring.

“As a spectator, one is left to waver from one fragment to the next, in search of the narrative offered by an all encompassing interpretation. Lastly it might be exactly this quest itself, with which the artists [sic] manages to map our contemporary crisis-ridden society.”

Our lives are filled with chaos and piecing together fragments and commercialism. When I want to see a reflection of modern life, I can look in the mirror. I am ready for something that brings us up, warms our souls, and enlightens. It is time to reject our tradition of absurdity. When it comes, it will not be new for the sake of new, but a rejection of meaninglessness.

I’ve seen Soup Cans.

Campbell's Soup Cans, 1962, Andy Warhol

I’ve seen Film Stills.

Untitled Film Still, no. 21, 1978, Cindy Sherman

I’ve seen Elvis.

Elvis, Mr. Brainwash, 2008

The guest book at the museum contained mostly scoffing remarks. This may be the art of the elite, but the public knows when you are only wearing your own vanity. The time is ripening.

Symbolically, “The Two Fridas” represents the harsh reality of an emotional state. It was painted while Kahlo and Rivera were divorced. On the left, Frida wears a European dress ripped open, exposing her heart. On the right, she is clad in traditional Mexican clothing. Her heart is shown, but not exposed. The two Fridas not only hold hands, but also are dramatically connected at the heart. The European Frida clamps hemostatic forceps on the end of a bloody artery. The Mexican Frida’s artery encircles her arm down to an image she is holding of Rivera as a child. It seems that the Mexican Frida is the woman Rivera loved, while the European Frida is the woman he divorced and no longer loves.

The Two Fridas, 1939

In an attempt to file this work into the archives of art history, two movements suggest themselves: Symbolism and Surrealism. The symbols of the Symbolist movement were not the easily interpreted images of the past, but often had personal or obscure meanings. Gauguin was an inspiration to the movement, as “he wanted above all to convey character, to express the ‘inner thought,’ even in ugliness” (Theories of Modern Art).

Te aa no areois, Paul Gauguin

Symbolists wanted to convey feelings rather than just visual images. They claimed, “Works of a personal vision alone will live.” Although Kahlo fills her work with personal symbolism, “The Two Fridas” effectively captures the divided feelings and heartbreak anyone can relate to.

The Two Fridas detail

As Edvard Munch said, “Art is the form of the image formed from the nerves, heart, brain, and eye of man.” This certainly describes her work, but she is most closely associated with Surrealist art. Although her works do display a dream-like quality that fits in with the Surrealist movement, Kahlo rejected this label, saying, “I never painted dream, I painted my own reality.” While her works do portray her feelings, they also include a sensible story quality that is directly biographical and does not seem to fit in with Surrealism. “To become truly immortal a work of art must escape all human limits: logic and common sense will only interfere.” While the double self-portrait and superimposed hearts of “The Two Fridas” appear Surrealist, Kahlo’s work is best understood as biographical. But, as the Surrealist themselves said, “Whether Utrillo is still or already a good ‘seller,’ whether Chagall happens to be considered a Surrealist or not, are matters for the grocers’ assistants.”

The Three Fridas

Wayne Thiebaud, Cakes, 1963

To AmyGrace and Joseph.

Catherine and Firefly 1905 Oil on Canvas

Pictured here is Catherine, the artist’s niece, and later the mother-in-law of the current owner. As a young woman, Catherine was “set up” by a friend to exchange letters with a young man who had been awarded the MBE, the lowest in the British Empire’s order of chivalry. The two continued to write and did not meet face to face until their wedding day. As the portrait’s owner says, “I think it’s romantic as hell!”

Priscilla Densmore, sister of Catherine

This grainy photograph is presented with pride, as the painting of Priscilla Densmore does not appear in the catalog of Sturdevant’s work.

Matthew Gunton 1905 Oil on Canvas

The Glassblower's Daughter 1895 Watercolor

Sturdevant’s father, Amos Densmore, along with his brother Emmett, invented the original commercial typewriter, the Densmore. She painted several of his portraits. Two of the first Densmore typewriters remain in existence: one is at the Smithsonian, the other is in this collection, along with several more of Sturdevant’s portraits and drawings. Not exactly art history, but vastly interesting.

Amos Densmore 1893 Oil on Board

Densmore Typewriter, one of the remaining two

The Scream, 1895

Symbolist painting attempts to capture an emotion rather than reality. “Reason is the enemy of art,” James Ensor says, “artists dominated by reason lose all feeling” (Theories of Modern Art). He believes that Impressionists did not understand vision, while Pointillists were cold and methodical.

James Ensor, The Dangerous Cooks

Like The Scream, The Dead Mother captures denial and confusion. The child stands with her back to her mother and covers her ears in disbelief—she can neither see the body nor be told the reality of her mother’s death. Paint swirls around her, furthering the image of her self-exclusion. Her own skin tone is warm and she stands on warm, living orange tones, while deathly blues take over the rest of the painting and reach for her feet. She portrays the emotional rejection to death and change. This girl is certainly not acting on reason, but pure emotion.

The Dead Mother, 1899

“The Symbolist viewpoint asks us to consider the work of art as an equivalent of a sensation received; thus nature can be, for the artist, only a state of his own subjectivity” (Theories of Modern Art). The Dead Mother effectively draws the viewer in to partake in the girl’s reaction of confusion, denial, and the struggle between life and death.

“Nature is not only what is visible to the eye—it also shows the inner images of the soul—the images on the back side of the eyes.” – Edvard Munch

Self-Portrait with Burning Cigarette, 1895

Venus of Urbino

Compared with the verticality of Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus, the Venus of Urbino’s prone posture sexualizes her. However, she retains her status as goddess and remains unattainable. Her face is calm, wise, aloft. She has not been reduced to physicality, but is the pinnacle of womanhood and beauty, like the Virgin Mary. This, Scruton argues, is erotic art. “She is being withheld from us, integrated into the personality that quietly looks from those eyes and which is busy with thoughts and desires of its own.”

The Birth of Venus

As Manet’s Olympia is clearly a prostitute, sex is more than a suggestion. While the Venus is peaceful in her ownership of her form, Olympia retains fierce ownership – unless one offers the right price. Her hand is protective rather than relaxed, as is her whole, tense body. She has a challenge in her eye, not the soft, alluring gaze of the Venus. Her guarded posture makes this not the pinnacle of womanhood, but a portrait. Her face is particular, not idealized.

Olympia

Scruton argues that the face portrays much – Francois Boucher’s round, voluptuous women have essentially the same face. The draw is purely physical, not a spiritual, higher standard. As Boucher’s figures are faceless, shameless bodies, they are uninhabited and soul-less. Scruton believes these paintings to be charming and attractive, but without the portrayal of soul, they cannot be beautiful. As a spiritual force, “beauty is a universal, which can be neither consumed nor possessed but only contemplated.”

Portrait of Louise O'Murphy

The Venus of Urbino and Olympia are both inhabited bodies. Boucher’s Portrait of Louise O’Murphy, is sexuality without soul, and without the title, is no woman in particular. Her body is not reclining naturally, but instead is available and fleshy for flesh’s sake. While decent compared to the images we are bombarded with daily through entertainment and advertisements, Louise O’Murphy’s form is naked – a little less than nude.

Picasso drew with figure study at age 15

As Virgil Elliot says, “There is no real danger of an inspired individual with a strong personality losing any of his or her distinctiveness due to thorough training in the technical aspects of art-making. All too often, focusing too much on style and too little on skills results in a set of handicaps that place a low limit on what a person can effectively express through art.”

Pablo Picasso is a classic example of form deconstructed. His early works display an expert understanding of form and matter. As he matured as an artist, he removed the superfluous, moved around the form rather than capturing it from one angle, and explored other various theories. If he had not had a solid understanding of transferring reality to canvas, he could not have succeeded in Cubism.

The Old Fisherman, 1895

For perspective, I offer a personal story. In my early teens, I took to writing poetry. I did not know any poetic forms – other than that a sonnet contained 14 lines. In an effort to preserve my originality and stream of consciousness, I purposefully did not edit my poetry. Years later, like the artist who has always relied on their own style, who operates outside of the traditional methods of art-making, and who has never actually learned to paint, the results are quite laughable.

Science and Charity, 1897

Unfortunately, the efforts of those trying to preserve ancient sculpture also contributed to destroying it. Upon the first inspection of the Elgin Marbles for traces of color in 1836, Lord Elgin’s former secretary, W.R. Hamilton, admitted, “the whole surface of the marbles had been twice washed over with soap lyes as that, or some other strong acid, is necessary for the purpose of removing the soap which is originally put on the surface in order to detach the plaster of the mould.” This easily caused the loss of remaining pigment.

Lapith and Centaur

As the Greeks had a very limited array of paint colors, their use of color seems garish to the modern aesthetic. Recreations of their original coloring results in an optical flattening of the rounded forms.  Imagine the battle of the Lapiths and Centaurs shown in Lego brick colors.

Mock up of original color

As the Smithsonian magazine points out, Euripides’ Helen of Troy laments:

My life and fortunes are a monstrosity,
Partly because of Hera, partly because of my beauty.
If only I could shed my beauty and assume an uglier aspect
The way you would wipe color off a statue.

Original brush stroke found on Greek sculpture

Granted, our modern sensibility is driven by Greek form, sans color. We have been viewing Greek sculptures this way for thousands of years. If the Greek paint had remained, would Renaissance sculpture also be brightly colored? The loss of artwork in its original condition is always tragic, so it is not without guilt that I say: thank goodness the “unsophisticated” paint has faded away and the marble endures.

“One has no right to love or hate anything if one has not acquired a thorough knowledge of its nature.”

Freud claims that a person’s character is often determined by the over-development of a single part – in the case of da Vinci, knowledge. “We look for the explanation in a special disposition—though about its determinants scarcely anything is yet known.” Freud then claims (he begins by saying it is “probable,” then states it as fact) that da Vinci’s thirst for knowledge is aroused by the influence of his early childhood and is furthered by the forces of sexual instinct. It is “foolish” to hope for proof of this, however, “when the accounts of his life are so meager and so unreliable,” Freud says, right before he relies on these paltry sources.

In one of his notebooks, da Vinci relates a strange memory from his childhood of a vulture (according to Freud) forcing open his mouth with and then hitting his lips with its tail. Freud believes it is not a memory, but a fantasy transposed to his childhood. He says that while not literal, these memories still represent the reality of the past.

Freud says: turn this sideways to reveal a vulture in the Virgin's robes

One cause of homosexuality in men, according to Freud, is too great of an attachment to their mother during very early development. A boy represses his love of his mother and loves other boys as a way of rejecting other women, thus remaining faithful to his mother. Freud claims “he loves in the way in which his mother loved him when he was a child.” (Let us hope his mother did not love him this way!)  It is a way of substituting figures of himself in childhood – he not only relates to the boys as lovers, but as projections of himself.

Freud concludes that, based almost entirely on this single, distorted memory, da Vinci was a repressed homosexual due to a sexual focus on his mother and that he threw himself into research because “tormented as he was by the great question of where babies come from and what the father has to do with their origin.” Assumptions abound, as well as phrases such as “this seems a slender and yet a somewhat daring conclusion to have emerged from our psychoanalytic efforts, but its significance will increase as we continue our investigation.”

Freud also touches on several accounts of da Vinci’s diary where he lists money spent on a gift to a male pupil and another list of expenses for the funeral of a woman named Caterina. It is known that da Vinci was a bastard child and grew up in his father’s household. There are no mentions of his biological mother other than her name. Freud assumes that because it is not likely that da Vinci exposed accounts of little import, the Caterina here must be his mother. He thus bares da Vinci’s love for his mother and little boys. Great work, Freud.

Freud assumes that Mona Lisa’s smile triggered in da Vinci an old memory of his mother’s smile.

As David Stannard wrote in his article “Culture Vulture,” Freud “is dazzlingly dismissive of the most elementary canons of evidence, logic, and, most of all, imaginative restraint.” While I concede that the fellatio story likely means something, I cannot imagine that this jotted down thought was the climax of understanding da Vinci’s life or proves much of anything. It is very difficult to retain memories from such a young age and a bird prying little Leonardo’s mouth open with his tail seems quite unlikely. Freud based his entire psychoanalysis thinking that the bird da Vinci mentions is a vulture, an ancient Egyptian symbol relating to motherhood. Rather, the bird has now correctly been translated as a kite. And with that, Freud’s little theory, while amusing, completely flies away.

A Scene in a Library

As an art form, it poses little threat. We think we are “seeing,” rather than seeing through someone else’s perspective. Historically, however, it can be quite dangerous. Take Alexander Gardner and his dramatic scene of Gettysburg. A dead man lies behind his cover – two huge boulders and a pile of smaller rocks in between – with his face toward the camera, mouth open and a rifle dramatically propped up against a boulder in “The Home of the Rebel Sharpshooter’s Den.” Distributed with the image was a woeful tale of the life of a sharpshooter. The body had been moved 40 yards from where he had fallen and arranged by Gardner and his assistant, Timothy O’Sullivan, and the rifle propped up artistically. Another photograph of the same body was published side by side with it and implied these were the dead of the opposing armies.

The Home of the Rebel Sharpshooter’s Den

In the digital age, it hardly becomes necessary to move bodies to create a dramatic scene. Yet photographs give the illusion of a transparent access to reality. What did the photographer choose not to capture – what lies beyond the frame? Photography should be looked at with a discerning eye. It is a creation, just like any traditional still life or portrait and comes with an agenda.  There is always someone behind the curtain.