Stephen Shore

1947–

(upbeat piano music)

– [Steven] I think often we make the assumption

that art is beautiful, but is that required?

Must art be beautiful?

– [Beth] We also think, well this is ugly,

so this can’t be art.

As an art historian, it’s become clear to me

that there are many different ideas of beauty,

that every culture has its ideas,

over time ideas of beauty change.

– [Steven] And over my lifetime,

what I consider to be beautiful has changed.

That does suggest that there is not a fixed notion

of what is beautiful.

– [Beth] Nevertheless, most of us would agree

that a rose is beautiful and cockroach is ugly.

– [Steven] And that’s referencing an 18th century

German philosopher who’s name is Kant,

who spent a lot of time thinking about how we define

what is beautiful.

What philosophers call the study of aesthetics.

– [Beth] And there’s been a lot of science about the fact

that human beings seeing attracted to forms

that are symmetrical, forms that have certain kinds

of proportions and so it does seem like maybe

there’s a biological truth about what is beauty

for human beings.

– [Steven] And as a historian, I’m interested in the way

that notions of beauty have changed over time.

The ancient Greek philosopher Pythagoras

thought that beauty was rooted

in kind of a universal harmony

and that when we produced something that reflected

those harmonies we saw that thing as beautiful.

And then there’s the issue of who determines

what is beautiful.

I think in the 21st century I think we’re very comfortable

with the idea that beauty is something that’s determined

by one’s experience that is deeply personal,

but that was not always the case.

– [Beth] Well, we live in an era where the individual

is paramount, old forms of authority

that would have told us what is beautiful don’t exist

in the same way for us.

In the 19th century and hundreds of years before that,

there were art academies that decided what was beautiful.

– [Steven] And it’s interesting to think about

how the academies, the royal academies in Europe

determined on what was beautiful.

– [Beth] And that relied on ancient Greek and Roman culture.

– [Steven] And so artists focused on understanding

a kind of ideal proportion of the human body especially.

That became of paramount concern.

– [Beth] The academies promoted a concept of the ideal.

– [Steven] There was a standard that artists

tried to achieve.

– [Beth] And all of art education

was geared toward teaching one

to be able to achieve that kind of beauty.

– [Steven] But that must have been so oppressive.

It must have been suffocating for artists.

– [Beth] It’s interesting to look back

to the mid 19th century and artists like Courbet

and art criticism by Baudelaire,

both of whom promoted an idea of beauty

that was specific to the time one lived.

That is a beauty that was contingent and not eternal

so that the modern streets of the city

which everyone would normally define back then as ugly,

could be seen as beautiful.

– [Steven] And it’s not incidental

that that writer and that artist lived at a moment

when the authority of the monarch was being challenged.

– [Beth] And challenging a single idea of beauty

was really important for artists.

– [Steven] We’re standing in the third-floor galleries

of the Art Institute of Chicago,

looking at a really famous painting

by Pablo Picasso.

It’s the Old Guitarist from his Blue Period.

We’re seeing the work of a young artist

and although from our position in the 21st century,

it might be relatively easy

to see the painting as beautiful.

For someone looking at this painting

when it was new in 1903, 1904,

it would have been radically ugly

and I can say with certainty because of the way

that the artist is deforming the human body.

– [Beth] And it’s not as though Picasso was the first artist

at the end of the 19th century to do that but he is doing it

to an extreme degree here.

– [Steven] We see a man in rags.

His eye is closed, a reference to his blindness,

but he’s actively playing a guitar.

– [Beth] His neck is inclined in a way

which is impossible but which is also very expressive.

– [Steven] There have been many times throughout history

when artists have distorted the body

for particular purposes.

It’s clear that Picasso is looking back

to the great Spanish painter, El Greco,

who attenuated and distorted bodies

to create a heightened sense of the spiritual.

– [Beth] We are looking at a figure

who’s very close to us,

there’s no space that recedes behind him.

We have these flat planes of color

and the guitar itself is almost also completely frontal

and that neck is inclined down toward the guitar

as though his whole body is absorbed

in listening to the music that he’s playing.

This figure, in his solitude, is finding comfort

in his art.

– [Steven] And is having an aesthetic experience,

engaged in that music that is almost identical

to the aesthetic experience

that I have when I stand in front of this painting.

And so Picasso is doing something extraordinary.

He’s creating a bridge between the melancholic experience

within this canvas and the experience that I’m having.

– [Beth] And in some ways, Picasso gives us a painting

where we can’t see either.

The figure’s enclosed within this rectangular shape.

This is a figure who’s in his own world.

– [Steven] And so Picasso is creating this, I think,

universal experience and because of that,

he heightens my empathy for this man, for his plight,

and he does that in a number of different ways.

He does it through his distortion of the body.

He does it through the use of blues

and browns and greens and blacks.

And he does it through the proximity but also he produces

a sense of empathy because of the evident poverty

of this figure.

– [Beth] This is a man who feels exposed

to the elements of the world

and yet those elements don’t enter this painting.

– [Steven] So let’s go back to this issue

of what beauty is

and whether or not this painting is, in fact, ugly.

I would argue that the empathy that the artist creates

is itself a kind of beauty

and perhaps is actually a more profound form of beauty

than easy beauty, than an image of a rose.

– [Beth] Another image of a blind man playing guitar

might now have that same effect

so the formal elements together with the subject matter

are what move us.

(upbeat music)

Cite this page as: Kayla McCarthy, "Stephen Shore," in Smarthistory, September 30, 2024, accessed February 10, 2025, https://smarthistory.org/artist/stephen-shore/.