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)