Morality and the artist

Caravaggio painted some of the most exquisite paintings in history.  His command of color – back in the era when artists had to create their own pigments, often crafting their own brushes as well, with far less range than is possible in today’s chemical world – is still almost unsurpassed, and his ability to create darkness and light is just breathtaking. Literally: I can remember once about ten years ago when the National Gallery in London had an exhibition of his work, the first time I had really seen it, and I stood in front of Cardsharps and just stopped breathing for a few seconds, taken out of myself by the way the thick black velvet tunic of the mark seemed to shimmer, eighteen different shades of black tuned with what, some grey, some white to indicate the folds?, and took note of how the shadows on the wall were black but not the same kind of black, not the black of Gibson Stuart’s backgrounds on the portraits of the founding fathers but the black you’d see on a badly candlelit stucco wall.  How did he get that right?

His painting of The Calling of Saint Matthew is similarly stunning, using the focused sunbeam coming in from a high window to illuminate Saint Matthew as Christ calls to him from a shadow beneath the light.  Matthew’s velvet tunic is differently sumptuous than the dimwitted mark’s foppish attire from Cardsharps – Caravaggio must have been drawn to the inky darkness of velvet, its impossibility of rendering as a challenge that couldn’t be turned down.  It is the thicker, richer fabric of a Renaissance banker, in the painting the garb of a money changer, and he’s lit up like a fire, while Christ, obviously the Savior because he’s got a young man’s beard and the cosmic certainty of his eyes, stands below the source of the light but nevertheless is obviously the reason for light’s existence at all.  The painting captures the wholly certain, world-infusing, inescapable power of faith that suffused the counter-Reformation Italy that gave birth to the painter and his theme, even though the skill and the mastery of that light was obviously only that of Caravaggio.

And yet, by the standards of our day (and in the eyes of more than a few of his contemporaries), Caravaggio was a world-class jerk.  He’s on the record for killing at least several people, mostly out of pure spite.  His relationships with his “lovers” makes one question whether he was capable of love at all, or simply needed to consume people’s affection the way the slave traders of his time consumed people’s bodies, for personal profit only and with no regard for the Christian certainty of the existence of their souls.  One can perhaps excuse him because the same religiously mad Italian counter-Reformation also succored an abhorrent Church hierarchy that sought to crush non-dogmatic religious thinking more to maintain a monopoly of tithing than out of any particular moral desire for the expansion of Christ’s message of love, but that’s like saying it’s okay to rape when everyone else is doing it.  He was an asshole.

Not long ago, a friend of mine forwarded me an article by Martha Nussbaum, a philosopher at the University of Chicago and a particularly inspired thinker on morality, and in it she makes a passing comment about Gauguin, whose masterpiece Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going? I saw recently at the MFA in Boston.  Reading the article made me do some minor research about Gauguin’s life and sure enough, he was also a world class asshole.  He left his wife and children behind in Paris with barely a word of explanation, with the beginnings of a bad case of syphilis, with borrowed money and an exaggerated sense of self-worth, and went to French Tahiti, where he took a series of barely-pubescent lovers and slept with most of his child-age models, infecting all of them knowingly, and proceeded to do everything he could to make sure his wife got nothing as his reputation and wealth slowly grew.  He was a royal pain in the ass to the local French rulers (admittedly, they weren’t particularly attractive either), complaining about their lax moral standards and oppression of the locals while he lorded it up as a kind of minor scale Kurtz in the more remote parts of the colony.  The locals were used to that sort of rubbish from white people and didn’t make any real fuss, and in any event their sexual mores were rather different, a fact Gauguin took delicious advantage of with no regard to their individuality.

I’m less of an artistic fan of Gauguin but I understand the critical acclaim for his work – he also revolutionized color, taking advantage of the different light available in the south Pacific and the different notions of time and line and form that local artists held as their own.  Indeed, his focus on color and shape are tuned against my own failings, color blindness and a too-precise focus on structure and line, so this may be my own inability to see artistic beauty in forms unrecognizable to me than to anything else.  In any event: he took advantage of his tune-in, drop-out existence to make for himself a much better name as an artist as a colonial than he was able to do in Paris amongst the competition of late 19th century impressionists and early modernists.  He also made a great deal of money (although he borrowed and welched more of it than he earned, despite his constant complaints of poverty), but like most artists of all stripes (including in his day Caravaggio), whinged unceasingly of how the world at large didn’t understand him.

Oddly, I can enjoy Caravaggio even while being aware of how horrid a person he was; my ability to enjoy Gauguin is now severely limited.  I used to linger in front of Where Do We Come From? when I’d visit the MFA when I was in university, blissfully unaware of his personality (which ignorance was assisted by the MFA catalog materials, which largely passed over any discussion of his moral choices in life), and enamored of his strange but immediately powerful combinations of rounded bodies, blended but shockingly accessible jungle backgrounds that once I had visited Tahiti seemed to capture both the color and the sense of daylight over an entire tropical day, with light both sharpened and diffused by the inescapable reflections off the Pacific.  Two weeks ago, though, I looked at it for a few moments, thought “what a jerk, even if the colors are nice”, and moved on, rushing as quickly as I could to the Sargents.  On the other hand, I’m looking forward to my next trip to London, whenever that may be, and the chance to see the Caravaggios again.

Part of this is the difference in era: Gauguin is a post-Enlightenment painter, who read the great critical journals of his day (well, the French ones anyway) and who thus would have been aware of the emergence of a morality that endowed everyone – including prepubescent non-white illiterates, including women, including people who might not be endowed with genius – with moral agency and standing.  Caravaggio was firmly rooted in a time which did not, and thus his actions are somewhat more – well, not understandable to me, but I can understand the mindset that would emerge in such a setting can’t be held to account by modern standards.  With that, though, there is also a question of will.  Caravaggio’s actions seem almost will-less – they seem the mindless flailing of someone who never was given moral agency himself, and as such couldn’t be expected to exercise it.  Gauguin’s actions seem willed, and therefore capable of blameworthiness in a way which I can’t put aside.

But both are, ostensibly, great artists (although everyone has different views on artistic greatness, so I’ll state this as a given even though I know there’s a world of possible debate).  That’s unsettling to me.  Is artistic merit simply a function of the work produced, without reference to the artist as human being at all?  Or is there a cumulative function at work?

Historically it truly didn’t matter; artists were judged simply by their artwork, and their private lives (so long as they stayed private and weren’t flaunted to require public consumption and assessment) were largely irrelevant.  Content, on the other hand, played a much greater role.  I enjoyed a tour of the National Gallery last year where a feminist art historian led a few of us around on a very alternative set of viewings of some of the galleries.  She pointed out that quite a lot of the 16th and 17th century grand art was thinly disguised pornography, commissioned by wealthy patrons for placement in their drawing rooms where men – only men – would retire after dinner to drink, smoke, and look at the photos.  The themes were classical – to my eyes and mind, tiresome Greek mythologies and quasi-historical Rapes of the Sabine Women were common – but the themes, by being classical, enabled really dirty erotic paintings to be “acceptable” for commission by the rich and famous.  I took that eye with me to the MFA and noticed quite a lot of that in their European galleries, but unlike the National Gallery in London – where less than 1% of the collection was by female artists – I got to compare the male artists’ themes to a much larger selection of paintings by female artists.  They all focused on non-raunchy subjects.  I wasn’t particularly surprised.  Caravaggio focused on religious subjects for religious (if ridiculously elite and wealthy) patrons; Gauguin showed “primitives” to a Western audience that expected exoticism and sexual torpor.  They were firmly in the content realm of the norm for their times.

In any event, plenty of male artists also chose actual pornography as their themes, and sometimes they would try to sneak them into formal showings, or would brush outside the expectations of their audience out of a sense of either ignorance or shock value – and their reputations would, almost without exception until the modernist era, be ruined, reducing the value of their other works as well.  My home page for Wikipedia had one such work today, The Dawn of Love by William Etty.  It’s in theory a depiction of Venus awakening Eros in a kind of Greek temple, but no one thought it was remotely classical enough to hide the fact that Etty clearly just loved painting a ripplingly voluptuous female model.  It’s also beautiful.  The painting was shunted away into a private gallery where it has remained ever since.  Etty is known as the “almost” father of British realism, a precursor of sorts to the Pre-Raphaelites, but his reputation was stained throughout his career and afterwards by allusions to his willingness to paint not just realistic nudes, but rather wanton ones at that.  Despite this, his private life was about as boring and morally simple as one could imagine.  He was, by all accounts, rather ugly and painfully aware of the fact that it made him repellent to anyone as an object of human desire; yet, unlike most other aesthetically minded people of his era, he seems to have not slept around with poor models and servants.  He was deeply devoted to a niece who was his companion and whom he tended to in her illness in later years, and was drawn to a kind of intellectual religiousity as he grew older.  He certainly didn’t kill anyone, or infect islands with European sexually transmitted diseases for fun and profit.

We live in a moment in time where the morality and moral choices of public men and women – whether artists or businesspeople or politicians – are considered open game when assessing their real prominence or importance as individuals.  Thomas Jefferson, who helped implement the most radical experiment in individual liberty on earth, is now so heavily footnoted for sleeping with his black female slaves that it’s hard to dig through the caveats to find the Declaration of Independence at all.  And given the nature of that document, maybe that makes sense.  But in other cases – and art, to me, is the sine qua non of what is to be asked of whether the creator’s nature has anything to say about the creation – the personal actions of the artist does not, really, affect the artwork itself.  Among the artists I know, in fact, there is a bit of a distinction between those for whom art is an all-encompassing act – they craft their lives, as it were, with an artistic eye, down to the choices they make as moral individuals – and those for whom art is an instrumental activity, no different from a moral perspective from, say, the question of pricing deposits at a bank.  Art may be a more universally appreciable activity, something with the power to influence and the power to enlighten that no banking activity will ever do, but for those latter artists, it’s still fundamentally a task, not a moral imperative.

I’m just a banker, and Caravaggio had more artistic ability in one of the hydrogen atoms in his toenail than I have in my entire body.  So I’m perhaps not qualified to comment on this.  But as I learn more about the world, I’m increasingly of the view that there are no instrumental activities.  All of our actions have deeply embedded within them a set of moral statements about what we value, and how we value ourselves and our place within the world – and by extension, how we value others – humans, creatures, things – within the world that we find ourselves inhabiting.  As a banker, I find that deposit pricing is a deeply moral activity: managing a balance sheet – either for shareholder value maximization; for personal bonus maximization; for long-term value sustainability; or, for a concept of “fairness” where depositors, borrowers, and shareholders each have a moral claim to the exchange of value implicit in a balance sheet – is in fact a richly complex moral enterprise, varying in terms of impacted actors, time, and motivation.  Ignoring that reality is done out of actual intellectual ignorance (no excuse but sometimes just a fact), laziness (the manager is capable of recognizing the presence of the moral element but doesn’t want to deal with it and fobs off their choices on others – “competitive pressures” or directors or regulators or what have you – so as to avoid facing their own complicity), or hypocrisy (the manager is actually maximizing their own value but doesn’t want to admit it because that is a kind of fraud where they use other people’s money for their own gain and they know it).

Admittedly, even when banking decisions are taken with full moral agency, they are still done in an environment of incomplete information and constantly emerging externalities which may lead to an immoral (when considered in retrospect) outcome: not therefore rising to the level where blame can be assessed, but where a moral imperative to learn and improve decisioning next time still exists.  The act, though, of making an instrumental decision with a conscious, responsible awareness of our moral agency – without ignorance, or laziness, or cynicism – affects the act itself.  Those who make reasonable decisions which are subsequently viewed as wrong, who take action with knowledge of their own responsibility for their actions, should be viewed with forgiving, gracious eyes.  And those who cynically take advantage of others, either as agents for others or maybe especially for their own benefit, deserve to be viewed through a lens of moral skepticism or accusation.  The ignorant we have to consider – were they really ignorant?  If they were, we should indulge them like the moral children they are.  And if they are lazy, well, if they are truly lazy, their actions will probably be mediocre as well, and won’t survive for us to consider them in posterity.  Most bankers I know are in that last category.

I don’t think art is any different.  Indeed, I don’t think life is any different.  All of the decisions we make are embedded in a matrix of moral choice.  And therefore I think it is reasonable to look at the entirety of a person when assessing the goodness – the brilliance, the impact, the beauty – of their supposedly merely instrumental choices in what they create.  But that doesn’t mean we get to be lazy about that assessment.  We don’t get to just say “because Jefferson was a jerk who used his economic and instrumental power over his slaves to gratify his sexual needs, his work is fundamentally suspect.”  Easy judgment is bad judgment, and if we’re going to live, as fully as we can, a life in which we act with positive moral intent in all ways, we need to be gracious, understanding, forgiving in examining how lives create the entirety of their expression.

My friend in London recently posted an essay on who is to blame for the financial crisis, the most interesting part of which is a very strong framework to understand not just who is to “blame”, but what blame is and when it can be assessed and when it can’t.  Click on the link – it’s a fantastic essay.  That piece has been flipping around in my head lately while considering all of this with respect to art, and it leads me to vastly different conclusions in different settings.  To wit: Caravaggio has to be understood as a product of his times.  Many of his moral actions are abhorrent – his killings in particular – but in its time they were neither uncommon nor outside the boundaries of moral behavior.  They were considered to be all too common human liabilities, for which grace and forgiveness through the Church existed.  We can – and should – fault the Church itself for setting aside the foundations of its message in Christ, which is simply that of love and personal responsibility, but the fact remains that the Church in 1600 did countenance far too much human fallibility.  Instead of addressing the roots of human evil and offer us a path towards love, as one might argue Christ tried to do, the Church sought to contain the inevitability of human failing on this earth, which in its eyes was corrupt anyway, and focus believers on the offer of eternal salvation that was part two of Christ’s message.  Caravaggio acted in this tradition, and painted as a means of exulting that potential for salvation (The Calling of Saint Matthew) even as he portrayed the irony, the humor, and the ugly downsides of life on this earth (Cardsharps).  Love the sinner, as it were, and condemn the institution that instructed him that sinning was inevitable and thus on some level acceptable.

Etty, on the other hand, got a bad rap.  His work is beautiful – not all of it, but then no artist produces universally perfect work.  For example, Sargent is probably my favorite painter, but some of his portraits – in particular the ones he did on commission for rich robber barons of their wives – come across as hack jobs, the brushwork looking slapdash but not in an insouciant or deliberate way, but just like he was trying to get the damn thing over with.  I’m also not a fan of his watercolor landscapes; watercolor was clearly an exercise, a practice for him, but it wasn’t his calling.  Sometimes he captures a scene well – the ex-girlfriend really liked a watercolor he did of a small stream high in the Alps, and it was really quite good – but mostly the colors are beautiful but the content is off point.  And since I’m color blind, and content and form and line are more impactful to my eye than color, that really throws me off.  Etty, on that score, is really a very good artist, particularly in his middle age works after he had toured Italy and gotten a sense of the Renaissance use of line and figurative arrangement.  But because he liked painting nudes – both male and female – in a realistic, fleshy, in-the-moment way, he was condemned by a prurient (and hypocritical) audience.  This is even though he seems to have been respectful as a painter – not just obtaining models to get some quick action in the sack, like a Klimt or a Schiele, but because he wanted to truthfully record the beauty of the human form.  He deserves, and gave to his subjects, more respect than he received.

And we get back to Gauguin.  Moral awareness?  Yep, he had more than the capacity for being aware of the moral impact of his actions; he was well-read and an active participant in the emerging debates of his day about the impact of one’s actions on others.  He was the product of mid-century France, which was deeply hypocritical but also aware of its own hypocrisy, as the popularity (if somewhat factionalized) of Victor Hugo and Emile Zola reveals.  He had a wife and children whom he at one time respected and loved, and while he was a bit of a womanizer, in that day and age it was expected and thus he cannot be blameworthy for that alone.  But ditching the wife and kids, and actively withholding the means of their support while he pursued a libertine lifestyle beyond his means?  Knowingly infecting thirteen year olds with syphilis?  All to pursue a vision of “primitivism” which denied those primitives a human voice or expression?  Yeah, world-class dick.  He makes Caravaggio look like a wayward, if heavily armed, schoolboy.  And we are not just allowed to view Gauguin’s art through a skeptical eye: his actions compel us to do so.

There was a sculpture in Saint-Paul-de-Vence three years ago when I was visiting the town, a really well-crafted but artistically awful thing.  It was of a barely pubescent girl stretching her arms upward in a kind of ecstasy, while meanwhile a giant spear was slicing through her torso, from her shoulder through to her sex, with a kind of shower of copper indicating some sort of orgasmic explosion.  I suppose it wasn’t porn, sort of, maybe.  But it was crap.  I’m sure it now graces a billionaire’s yacht, or was in the entryway of a Mayfair hedge fund office until about a month ago, when a female staffer raised a #MeToo complaint and it was shunted off into the principal’s private office.  The dog peed on it during an afternoon walk; I made no effort to stop him.  The art was beyond measure – it was terrible.  The mind that could have created it was reprehensible by its expression.

And I don’t feel uncomfortable saying the same about Gauguin and his artistic eye.  His art – portraits of children that he willfully infected with death, painted as he took pleasure from them without regard to their being as humans – is no different from the garbage on the western walkway of a Provencal tourist village.  I actually don’t care that it has had an impact in Western art.  I’d rather we didn’t have it at all.  I’d rather Gauguin stand trial for his crimes against his family, against the people of French Tahiti, and be accountable for his disrespect of the human form in all its beauty, which requires no painter to reveal.

I think the jury’s still out on Picasso.