This is a guest post by artist and critic Brian Prugh, at least partly in response to a discussion we recently had on art criticism that I recently wrote about.
The triumvirate of the true, the good and the beautiful is oft-repeated in calls for a rejuvenation of a genuine Catholic art. But when critics get going, the emphasis often falls on these terms in the reverse order: Beauty first, getting most of the press, then goodness, and finally, if mentioned at all, truth. And the secret to a renaissance of a new Catholic art, we are told, is beauty [see Scruton].
Image from Vogue
This common approach to art is actually backwards—distorting our sense of the Catholic art of the past and of our task as Catholic artists and critics of the present. To get a sense for the problem, let’s consider art that wants to be (1) beautiful, (2) good and (3) true.
There are two definitions of “beautiful” that I find helpful – St. Thomas Aquinas says that the beautiful is “what gives pleasure on sight” and the Platonists define beauty as “the splendor of truth.” In any event, if the focus is on beauty first, the natural emphasis is on the pleasure and the splendor. The problem with art that primarily creates pleasure and is splendid is that there’s nothing to keep it from being vacuous. Jacques Maritain somewhere defines academic art as art that seeks to be beautiful first—and I think he’s right. If you strive to be beautiful you will almost certainly succeed in being vacuous. Consider Bouguereau or Vogue: both are full of beautiful, empty images. If you model your life on the Truth, you might (and often do) appear ugly. The danger of an obsession with beauty is that it can overestimate the value of appearances.
The Madonna of the Roses by Bouguereau
The second term, “good,” implies something that is good of its kind. If I want my painting to be good, it needs to be a good painting. This has lots of craft connotations – it needs to be well made. But let me tell you what happens when the exclusive focus of your artistic formation is to make a “good painting” or a “good poem”: you get lots of extremely well-constructed things that look really good, but are meaningless or achieve dubious or potentially devious ends. Frankly, I think the world is flooded with “good” works of art, but is none the richer for them. The danger of an obsession with goodness is to overestimate material values.
Alberto Giacometti
The only term that is meaningful to me in my making or critical writing life is “truth” – I ask of my work, is it true? When I encounter other work, I ask whether it is true–and if so, what the truth is. The role of criticism is articulating the truth of the work. I’ve been looking at Giacometti’s portraits lately, and those are paintings that seem true to me–true about what a human is. They are, in a way, not “good paintings,” they are, in a way, not “beautiful,” but there’s more truth in them that I can bear to look at. And it is this truth that confers goodness on them; it is this truth’s austere splendor that I seek to become better able to see.
Alberto Giacometti. I believe this is one of many portraits of the artist’s mother? [ed.]
I’ll take Eliot’s humility here:
But to apprehend
The point of intersection of the timeless
With time, is an occupation for the saint—
No occupation either, but something given
And taken, in a lifetime’s death in love,
Ardour and selflessness and self-surrender.
For most of us, there is only the… (The Dry Salvages)
The responsibility of the artist is to make visible the very small thing that has been given, particularly, to that artist. We should expect that it will look like nothing given to any other artist that has come before (Christ is that big). It is the job of the artist to make it visible. It is the job of the critic to see it and fumble toward the best expression of it that he or she can. Beyond that there is nothing we can do: goodness and beauty will take care of themselves. They will be perceived when the truth is perceived. And greatness – that is not our business. We should neither desire it nor demand it.
“Goodness and beauty will take care of themselves. They will be perceived when the truth is perceived. And greatness – that is not our business,” beautiful! Thank you for the article.
I find truth in Giacometti, and Bouguereau as well. The only way for artists to tell the truth is to be themselves and truthfully interpret the world as best they can.
What I like about your approach to truth here is how you “ask of [your] work, is it true?” rather than “is it saying something true?”
Obviously saying true things is good, but perceiving truth as something proceeding not so much from a statement as from the *very core* of a piece plumbs the depths of this reality with much greater clarity and grace. When we tie a concept like truth to a shallower concept, closer to mere ‘veracity,’ that’s when people start confusing things and shuffling stuff out of order.
I guess I feel the same about beauty and goodness, and if we see them as just meaning “pleasure/splendour” and “technical prowess” (respectively) then, yeah, they totally pale next to the resonance of truth. But when people talk about beauty saving the world (to use the cliche), aren’t they talking about beauty in the sense of being arrested by something transcendent and opened to the world, being made raw in ways Scruton refers to in the essay you link to above?
I love the meditation here on the splendour of truth (as well as a very well-timed admonition against Christians who think they “have” the Truth [rather than, themselves, being held by it]), and there’s also something essential in how we can let beauty eclipse her two sisters, but, maybe not intending it, beauty and goodness end up seeming sold a little short here.
Josh, I think you’re right that, understood in their theoretical purity and contextualized within the specific domain proper to works of art, goodness and beauty could be upheld as equally valid ways to unpack an experience of being deeply moved by a work.
That said, I have emphasized truth because I think it is the most trustworthy category for making sense of a work of art and the one least likely to yield unthinking approval or disapproval of works according to one’s taste. It opens up a conversation between the audience and the work and is the critical question that artists ask themselves (or at least, in my view, should be asking themselves).
It’s very easy to say “This is beautiful,” without engaging with the work at all. If asked why, I can legitimately say, “Because it gives me pleasure,” and have answered the question. The deep accounts of beauty identify the ways that experiences of beauty deepen one’s experiences and explain why some people are better judges of beauty than others. But the odd thing about judgments of beauty is that justification for the judgment lies wholly within the person making the judgment (the problem between the subjectivity of the judgment and its universal application having led to a not insubstantial amount of philosophical puzzling). Additionally, claims to beauty more often end a conversation about a work than begin it—and I think this is especially worth attending to in a discussion about moving Catholic art forward.
If I claim, “This work is true,” I immediately open myself to the question, “What is the truth of the work?” And because I have said that the work is true, I am accountable for being able to answer this question. It’s a hard question to answer—even for the most experienced critic. I find that when I begin to write about a work, and fix this question as my goal for the review, I inevitably end up learning something about the work through the looking at it—and usually about myself and the world, too.
This little manifesto was written with a practical edge—asking, of the theoretical categories commonly employed in Catholic criticism, which will help us press onwards toward a more vital Catholic art? An art that would rival the seriousness and intensity of the best secular art being made today? I think that sticking to the truth of the work has greater potential to deepen the conversation about Catholic art than yet another paean to beauty—however valuable such investigations are in their own right.