Art and Moralities

   Mark Twain in The Innocents Abroad, the very funny book that first brought him international fame, expressed a low opinion of Florence and its art. “Curse your indolent worthlessness,” he claims to have exhorted the beggars who flocked around him as he left the Duomo, “why don’t you rob your church?” Twain’s pose throughout the book is that of the uber-philistine who delights in speaking ill of the culturally great and good. (I cannot forebear quoting my favorite sentence from Innocents: “I never felt so fervently thankful, so soothed, so tranquil, so filled with blessed peace as I did yesterday when I learned that Michaelangelo was dead.”) Twain took a particular dislike of the Medicis, Florence’s premier family, and when he registered his objection to Renaissance art in general, he zeroed in on two Medici women in particular. He objected to “the trivial, forgotten” exploits of that family being celebrated in grand frescoes “with the Savior and the Virgin throwing bouquets to them out of the clouds and the Deity himself applauding from his throne in heaven! And who painted these things? Why, Titian, Tintoretto, Paul Veronese, Raphael—none other than the world’s idols, the ‘old masters.’”

Three of Twain’s old masters are Venetian, not Florentine, who never painted Medicis, but he probably would have been as critical of the subjects they did paint, typical Renaissance princes who, by and large, were not the nicest people. Specifically: “Raphael pictured such infernal villains as Catherine and Marie de Medicis seated in heaven and conversing familiarly with the Virgin Mary and the angels (to say nothing of higher personages), and yet my friends abuse me sometimes because I am a little prejudiced against the old masters—because I fail to see the beauty that is in their productions. I cannot help but see it now and then, but I keep on protesting against the groveling spirit that could persuade those masters to prostitute their noble talents to the adulation of such monsters as the French, Venetian, and Florentine princes of two and three hundred years ago, all the same.” Exaggeration not precision being Twain’s strong suit, I’ll have to point out that Raphael painted neither of these Medici queens of France, Catherine only one year old when the artist died and Marie not born for another half century. Had he wanted to cast his net a little wider, Twain could certainly have indicted Rubens who did, in fact, paint nineteen excessively celebratory and epic scaled canvases of Marie’s career as queen, (now in the Louvre) one, indeed, The Council of the Gods, depicting her conferring, on equal footing, with Olympic divinities about French foreign policy. Neither queen really qualifies as a monster; Twain could certainly have picked better, more lurid targets, like Cesare Borgia or Henry VIII or Sigismondo Pandolfo Malatesta, whom the pope assigned to Hell even before he died, “as comrade of the devils and the damned.”

Still, given the often tongue-in-cheek nature of his outrage, he has identified one criterion for censuring art—that the person in the frame is a bad person who should not be depicted, certainly not celebrated. That kind of ire that Twain directed toward flattering pictures of bygone baddies has little purchase nowadays, perhaps because we no longer envision divine sanction as a probability for our politicos. (A possible exception might have been suggested by Governor Rick Perry who declared Donald Trump God’s chosen one: the artist who depicted the reception of The Donald into heaven, God open armed, angels chorusing, might expect some strenuous Twainish push-back.) Perhaps the closest parallel in recent times comes from the brush of Andy Warhol, his silk screens of Chairman Mao. Mao was the evilest man of the last half of the last century, if body count be our measure: tens of millions of people died in the Great Leap Forward. That fawning pictures of him still infest China doesn’t surprise; but that Warhol’s “glammed up” multi-colored images converted him into a 1970s pop icon might. No nimbus of divine approval, of course, surrounds Warhol’s Chairman, but his silk screen’s appearing alongside those of Marilyn and Liz might constitute the modern equivalent of consorting with the Virgin Mary.

The test case for our time, however, is probably Leni Riefenstahl’s 1935 paean to Hitler and Nazism, the film Triumph of the Will. Widely considered the greatest propaganda film ever made, it occupies an elevated rank in the history of cinema, despite its toxic message, for its innovation and technical skill, not unlike D. W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation, equally ideologically noxious.. Supposedly a documentary of the 1934 Nuremberg Rally, many of the scenes were staged, rehearsed, re-shot until the right effect was achieved: the effect being presentation of Hitler as Germany’s savior. From the long opening shot of Hitler’s plane descending over Nuremberg, its cathedral draped with Nazi flags, the message reads, as the Führer proclaims in one of his speeches, that the order imposed on Germany “was given to us by God.”
Granting the film the artistic status claimed for it, what ought one’s moral response be? Put most simply, ought it still be shown—if it were possible to control its distribution? Not so long ago it seemed that the artistic merit of the film elevated it, if not above censure, above censoring. The film was included in the Anthology of Film Archives’ canon of “essential cinema.” Film Culture put Riefenstahl on the cover of its Spring 1973 issue, that included a dozen articles on her. John Simon called her “one of the supreme artists of the cinema.” Susan Sontag in her (critical)1975 essay “Fascinating Fascism” claimed Riefenstahl’s defenders “include the most influential voices in the avant-garde film establishment.” Mick Jagger confessed to her that he had seen the film at least fifteen times. That was then. In June, 2019 You Tube removed Triumph of the Will from its offerings in its effort “to reduce more hateful and supremacist content.” Had the woke ethos caught up with this “essential” film? Had morality finally trumped aesthetics? Opinions differed on the rightness of the move, but can we agree that, were he alive today, Twain would, mutatis mutandis, still applaud the banning of favorable depictions of rotten people?

 

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A much more common moral objection, however, concerns less who is in art than what is in art. The most common depiction in Western art is probably the human body, from a variety of moral perspectives, often uncovered, wholly or significantly so. If we imagine, then, the appearance of reproductions of, say, Henry VIII and Adolf Hitler in the full monty, the demand that these be removed from public view would be less because of who they were than what they were exposing. And, further, if they were shown in sexual congress with Anne Boleyn and Eva Braun, respectively, or each other, the outcry, for the most part, would be clamorous.

From the beginning of Western art in Greece, gods were a predominant subject, and the Greek gods, unlike other peoples’ gods of the time who had the heads of animals and multiple arms and legs, were like humans, only more so, humans in perfect form. So they were depicted nude—the males usually, the females occasionally— as evidence of their perfection. The most famous survivors—the Omphalos Apollo, say, or Praxiteles’ Cnidus Aphrodite (original destroyed, but many copies extant) or the Venus di Milo, even minus arms—seem even now examples of ideal human beauty. (One exception, the universally small penises of the male statues, reflection of the classical belief that large penises were a sign of animalism and stupidity, strikes some now as a shortcoming.) This artistic and cultural fascination with the nude or nearly nude body crossed from Greece to Rome, where it flourished, and after the millennium once called the Dark ages re-emerged in that era once called the Renaissance, particularly in mythological subjects. But the intervention of Christianity had denigrated the importance of the body, imposing a morality hostile to its exposure and necessitating the imposition of the fig leaf. When, for instance, in the 19th century, the Grand Duke of Tuscany sent a life-size replica of Michelangelo’s David to Queen Victoria, which she consigned to the Victoria and Albert Museum, a detachable fig leaf accompanied it, which could be applied to cover the statue’s modest genitalia whenever ladies were permitted to view it.

But even in nominally Christian societies nominally Christian artists in the Renaissance discovered that Adam and Eve had, before the Fall, probably gone innocently naked in Eden and felt compelled to depict them that way, probably with her long hair strategically cascading lapward and his privates providentially fig-leaved, but both still, in the best paintings, remarkably nubile. In fact, artists began scouring the Bible for stories involving nakedness, like Susanna and the Elders or Joseph tempted by Potiphar’s wife or drunken Lot being seduced by his daughters. If this were not sufficient, there was always the martyrdom of the saints, which allowed not only for the baring of much flesh, but for the abuse of it as well, for those who got off on pain.

In the Renaissance, certainly in Italy, while the Virgin outranked Venus in painterly popularity, still the pagan goddess of love came close behind. Scenes from classical mythology generally allowed for lots of scantily, if at all, clad bodies cavorting to lascivious piping lutes. The same painters who painted the Virgin also painted the Venuses, and the lines between the two worlds sometimes blurred: if the virgin remained modest, some of the attendant figures showed a lot of skin. This concerned the Catholic church, particularly in the wake of the Protestant reformation that attacked the “idolatry” of its art, and was addressed in the counter-reformation Council of Trent. Michelangelo’s epic Last Judgment, covering the whole altar wall of the Sistine Chapel, painted 25 years after his iconic ceiling there, predated the Council of Trent, but epitomized the problem that the council perceived in Renaissance Catholic art. The painting, depicting the fates of the saved and the damned on judgment day, contains three hundred or so figures, mostly male, mostly nude—originally. Even while it was being painted, the Pope’s Master of Ceremonies complained, according to Vasari, that “it was most disgraceful that in so sacred a place there should have been depicted all those nude figures, exposing themselves so shamefully and that it was not the work for a papal chapter.” (Michelangelo responded by including the Master in the painting, with the ears of a donkey and his privates covered by a coiled snake.) The resulting controversy was such that, after the artist’s death, another painter was instructed to cover some of the genitalia with fig leaves and loin cloths, the poor man—actually an acolyte of Michelangelo’s, who tried to minimize the damage—earning the nickname Il Bragetonne (the breeches maker). Forty figures thus got draped and remain so to this day. The painting survived several serious suggestions over the years in several papacies that it be removed altogether.

The Council of Trent, wanting very much to defend visual presentations of biblical doctrine and Church tradition, for instruction of often illiterate communicants, against the deprecations of the Lutherans, established strict guidelines for purging and purifying its art. In Second Decree of Session 25 it declared that “all lasciviousness [should] be avoided; in such ways that figures shall not be painted or adorned with a beauty exciting to lust.” There go all those temptingly nude Eves, all those sexy bound Saint Sebastians, arrows piercing the hunkiness—in so far as Tridentine guidelines were observed. Of course, this prohibition applied only to Catholic art at a particular period, but obviously portends the kind of moral strictures on the content of art that would obtain through most of Western culture in the years to come. The severity of these strictures waxes and wanes in different cultures at different times, but presentation of the body often remains problematic.

In 1866 Gustave Courbet painted a picture for a Turkish-Egyptian diplomat resident in Paris, Khalil-Bey, that depicts the mid-torso of a woman, from just above her navel to her upper thighs, nude, the portrait of a pudendum. If pubic hair renders the merely bare obscene (as is sometimes argued), the painting is super obscene, for there is a plethora of pubic hair. Courbet called the piece, with what degree of provocation we can’t be sure, The Origin of the World. To at least one friend, he declared that it ranked him with Titian, Veronese, and Raphael—“we’ve done nothing more beautiful than this.” The problem was that almost no one could see his shocking masterpiece. Vaginas in art should be, had always been, hairless. (The story goes that the art critic John Ruskin, on his wedding night, fainted when he saw his first real life one.) Kahil-Bey kept it under wraps, almost literally, in a small room in his house under a green curtain, which he pulled aside only for select, aesthetically sophisticated guests, enough of these, however, that the painting gained a tantalizing underground reputation. In 1889, when the painting had passed into other hands, but still kept “secret,” Edmond de Goncourt, no great admirer of Courbet’s, was invited to view it, “a woman’s belly with a dark, prominent mons veneris around the opening of a pink cunt. Faced with this canvas … I have to make my excuses to Courbet: a belly as beautiful as the flesh in a Correggio.” Expressions such as this grew the reputation of The Origin of the World, but for a long time did not bring it out of hiding, still deemed too shocking. By 1995, however, it hung openly in the Musee d’Orsay, for all to see who would, and has been reproduced countless times in publications, scholarly and otherwise. But its unusual career points up two things: the division between the man-in-the-street’s morality at any given time and the aesthetic judgment of artists and their, usually elite, advocates; and the tendency of the latter to prevail in the long run. What damage is done to Courbet’s boast—“when I am no longer controversial I will no longer be important”—by his general acceptance these days is an open question.

A longer running and historically more significant parallel to the career of The Origin of the World occurred over several centuries in Spain, in a collection of art penultimately housed in the Prado’s Sala Reservada. Spain was notoriously disapproving of the nude for a subject of art; only two nudes in its artistic history provide an exception to this rule—Velazquez’s stunning Rokeby Venus and Goya’s rather clunky Naked Maja—while the rest of Europe was replete with them. However, by 1838 the Sala Reserva or Reserved Room contained seventy-four of the most beautiful nude paintings by some of the greatest artists ever, all collected by, gifted to, or in some cases commissioned by their Catholic Majesties, the Kings of Spain. “The history of this collection,” writes its historian, “and its survival to the present day has been complex and stirring, at times one might say miraculous, as it is extraordinary that one of the most repressive of all European countries has been the home to such a wealth of artistic riches.” The avoidance of a clash between public morals and elite aristocratic tastes was achieved by the simple expedient of keeping the paintings secluded in royal spaces, seen only by the select few sophisticated enough to appreciate such license (or perhaps who just wanted to impress the king).

All was not always smooth sailing. While Philip II commissioned important works in this genre, most notably Titian’s six magnificent poesias, episodes of Greek mythology, his scrupulous religiosity not- withstanding, his son Philip III found the works disturbing and kept them out of his sight and Charles III even considered having them destroyed to avoid moral corruption of those who viewed them. But the monarch who seemed to love nudes the most, Philip IV, “one of the greatest collectors and connoisseurs of painting in the history of modern Europe,” added eighteen mostly superb paintings to this collection. He had them moved to his new palace the Alcazar, a select group hung in rooms that came to be referred to as “The Vaults of Titian,” “in which His Majesty retires after eating”: the first explicit sala reservata. Others followed, as the collection passed through other hands in other reigns, until the Prado requested them in 1827 to place in its own reserved room, limited admission, no women. But only a decade later, in 1838, the collection is integrated into the main museum, the various paintings placed with their respective schools and periods. The Origin of the World had to wait over a century and a half longer, but there is no pubic hair in the Old Masters.

 

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A new moral criterion for judging art has come to the forefront: not who is in the frame, not what is in the frame, but who put it there. Largely, no doubt, due to the political “woke” movement concerning social and racial justice and the #MeToo movement more specifically concerned with sexual exploitation and abuse, greater stress falls on the moral character of the artist than in the past. Such has been the case particularly in film of late. Roman Polanski, director of such outstanding films as Chinatown and The Pianist, has pled guilty to sex with a young girl and can’t return to the United States for fear of being sent to prison. He still works more or less freely in more pedophile-friendly France, even recently won an award at Cannes. Woody Allen, a zany genius with a repertoire of comic gems to his credit, has been plausibly accused by his daughter, Dylan Farrow, of sexually abusing her. My wife like other women I know won’t go to his films anymore: “They’re just not funny now,” she says. And certain major actors refuse to work with him as well. Watching the documentary Farrow v Allen has brought me, reluctantly, but decisively, around to that refusal.

We have seen moral judgments of art weaken and compromise over time, past to present; but what about present to past: what criteria apply? Consider some of the most infamous cases concerning some of the greatest artists. To switch arts for a moment: Carlo Gesualdo, the most innovative figure in 16th century music, composed madrigals of startling originality, bending the rules of harmony to a degree that remained unmatched until Wagner; both Stravinsky and Schoenberg heralded him as model for their own radical 20th century innovations: a major figure in the history of music. He was also the Prince of Venosa, one of the richest and most powerful nobles in Naples, and on October 16, 1550 burst into the room where his wife was in the arms of a handsome young duke, shot them both in the head, hacked their bodies to pieces, taking care to detach the genitalia, and returned after a respite to hack some more to make sure that they were completely dead. It was also rumored that he had murdered an infant that the lovers had borne, but then a lot of bad stories circulated about him. Because of his prominence—and the in flagrante delicto circumstances—Gesualdo suffered no legal consequences, and remarried, but kept a band of young men around to beat him every day, him smiling the while, it was reported, until one day, when he was 47, they went too far and beat him to death.

In a profile in The New Yorker entitled “Prince of Darkness,” the critic Alex Ross wrote, “say what you will about Gesualdo, he was irrefutably badass.” No quarrel there, but very much the same can be said about Caravaggio. Along with being the last great Renaissance artist (or first baroque), he seems to have been a pretty tough street thug; had they had rap sheets in those days, he’d certainly have had one, in and out of jail more than once. Caravaggio’s dramatic artistry defies description; his influence on the artists of his era was enormous. One of my favorite paintings, The Conversion of Saint Paul in Santa Maria del Popolo, still has the power to awe me after repeated viewings. A rising star in the Roman art world, with major commissions from important patrons, he could not stay out of trouble and one day killed a man. The story repeated for centuries held that they quarreled over a tennis game, but recent research has discovered that his victim was a pimp and they were fighting over a prostitute, the tennis game only a pretext. Caravaggio apparently wanted only to prick his opponent’s genitalia, but severed an artery instead, which killed the man, bringing down on his head a bondo capitale which meant that anyone in the papal state had the right to take his life. He left Rome in a hurry and spent the rest of his life as an exile in the south of Italy, hoping to find a way to reverse his banishment—and producing some of his greatest works in Naples and environs. He ended up in Malta, achieving a knighthood there for his painting that would have allowed him to return to Rome, had he not quarreled with one of the senior Knights, been stripped of his title, and driven out of Malta too. He died trying to get back to Rome, his body never found, although it is now believed he died somewhere in Tuscany; his career had lasted only fifteen years.

One would not be so quick to label Gianlorenzo Bernini a badass. He worked for several popes, designing important parts of St. Peter’s, and creating the sublimest statuary since Michelangelo. The six mythological pieces in the Villa Borghese and his Saint Theresa in Ecstasy would alone qualify him as one of the greatest sculptors since antiquity. One piece, done not on commission but apparently for his own delectation, is a bust of a young woman, Costanza Bonarelli, whose eyes look frighteningly apprehensive, as, it proved, they might well have been. Costanza, although married, was Bernini’s mistress; she was, however, sharing her bed with his younger brother, Luigi. When Gianlorenzo discovered this, he attacked his brother with a lead pipe, breaking his ribs, and chasing him through the streets of Rome with the intention of killing him. Luigi took refuge in Santa Maria Maggiore where the priests dissuaded his brother from fratricide. Still enraged, however, Bernini turned his attention to Costanza, hired a thug to appear at her door with the pretext of presenting her a present and slash her face, thus destroying her beauty. This plan worked. Bernini, a papal darling, suffered no consequences from this attack, continuing to create great works; and even Costanza, scar and all, led a long and seemingly successful life as an art dealer. All’s well, apparently, that doesn’t end too badly.

Time seems to erode or even dissolve moral censure. Not many today, even the wokest, would refuse to attend a concert that included a Gesualdo composition, his murders notwithstanding. Not many art loving tourists would deny themselves entry into San Luigi des Francesi to savor the Caravaggios, certainly not for a dead pimp, nor bypass St. Peter’s, so much the work of Bernini, for a scar across a mistress’s face. Benvenuto Cellini’s gorgeous golden Saliera, described as the Mona Lisa of sculpture, has suffered no ignominy, so far as I know, for its maker’s having killed three men, by his own account, and sodomized many more. Art appreciation has a statute of limitations: the farther back, apparently, the less the offense matters. It is rather like that exchange in Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta: “‘Thou hast committed fornication.’ ‘But that was in another country—and besides, the wench is dead.’”

But what about a nearer-in-time figure, say, Gauguin? Gauguin looms large in the history of modern art, the peer of contemporaries like Van Gogh and Cezanne, a major influence on Picasso and Matisse, what one critic has called the Zelig of Modernism. His works hang in most of the major museums of the world, popular with viewers; special exhibitions of his work are frequent. A naive expression of the popular view can be found in Philip Roth’s first novel Goodbye, Columbus, where a young black boy comes into the Newark library where the protagonist works to look through a book of Gauguin’s paintings, excited to see people of color depicted so positively, in a happy state in such beautiful surroundings, although he acknowledges that a “white man musta took these pictures.” Gauguin’s celebration of the beauty and mystery of an exotic, if sometime fearsome, world was the prevailing, generally positive image. But: “Is it time to stop looking at Gauguin altogether?” asks a voice on the audio guide of visitors to the (November, 2019) exhibition “Gauguin’s Portraits” at London’s National Gallery. For an article in The Telegraph on an earlier (2010) exhibit at the Tate Modern, the headline read: “Is it wrong to admire Paul Gauguin’s Art?” What’s happening?

For one thing, #MeToo inspired an increased sensitivity to the exploitation of women. Gauguin left his wife and five children in Europe, never to see them again after 1891, that is, for the last twelve years of his life, to live first in Tahiti and then on Hiva Oa, a French Polynesian island. There he “married,” as the euphemism has it, serially three very young girls, ages 13, 14, and 14, much in the manner of Pinkerton in Madama Butterfly, except he never cared much for any of the five children they bore him. Syphilitic himself, he presumably infected them as well. These girls often served as the models for the beautiful, alluring, if emotionally closed figures of his paintings, some of the most easily recognizable in modern art, which even the least knowledgeable neophytes would immediately recognize as his. But who he is—this biography—has come to color how many view what he has put on canvas. Ashley Remer, who maintains an online museum focusing on the representation of girls in history and culture, maintains that his actions toward them were so egregious that they overshadow his work. “He was an arrogant, overratred, patronizing pedophile, to be very blunt.” One curator who has put on several Gauguin shows acknowledged, “What is left to say about Gauguin, is for us to bring out all the dirty stuff.”

Correlative with the criticism of his treatment of women, in and off canvas, stands the offense he gives on the issue of race, specifically colonialism. Like Roth’s fictional Black boy’s insight, the recognition now holds that these “pictures” could have been “taken” only by a white man, as the identity politics and postcolonial studies since the 1980s reveal. “Gauguin milked his colonial privilege for all it was worth,” Holland Cotter, the New York Times art critic wrote, not only bedding local teenagers, but “having islanders cater to his material needs.” Gauguin’s interaction with the natives was more complex and nuanced than this suggests, but, absent the knowledge of what kind of white man he was, does the gravamen against him not depend on the fact that he was any white man?

If one knew nothing of who painted these pictures, would they remain problematic? In my youth, as a student of literature, I was schooled in what was called the New Criticism. The New Criticism, to render it simply, taught that the text alone mattered, a self-contained artifact: no biography of the author, no literary history, no social criticism of the times, nothing that Freud or Marx or the Bible had to say ought to be brought to bear on interpreting the work. The New Criticism has gone the way of the manual typewriter and the rotary telephone, but sometimes I miss it. What if, applying it to art appreciation, we gave students just the print of a typical Gauguin painting—no name, date or context—and asked them to analyze their own response to it? Would that be a fair trial of his appeal? What if then we gave them a copy of the painting Gauguin called The Child of God, a Polynesian woman who has just given birth, her baby in the hands of a nurse? Both mother and baby have halos. And then told them that the girl was Gauguin’s 14 year- old mistress Pahura, that he was the father, that the baby died four days after birth, that he was a white man in his fifties—and he called the painting (to repeat) The Child of God? Does that make a difference in one’s evaluation of the art? How about the artist? What if bringing out “the dirty stuff” has an effect similar to my wife’s reaction to Woody Allen: would the paintings just seem not beautiful anymore? Would the insistence on applying a moral criterion be worth the aesthetic forfeit?

“The person I can totally abhor and loathe, but the work is the work,” states the curator of the Tate Modern’s Gauguin show. “Once the artist creates something, it doesn’t belong to him anymore: It belongs to the world.” That is the art-trumps-morality stance, insofar as the current who puts what on the canvas matters more than what’s on the canvas. Otherwise one would have to argue that Gauguin’s paintings are intrinsically nugatory, if not worthless then at least not worth the fuss. But Holland Cotter, aware of all the controversy, probably speaks for the majority of art lovers when he concludes that “at least some of his art is still, a century on, stop-and-stare beautiful, and in ways no other art is.”

But what if the artist was a Nazi, like—surprisingly—Emil Nolde? Surprisingly because Nolde, one of the outstanding Expressionist artists in Germany in the 1920s and 30s, was condemned as “degenerate” by the Nazis and figured prominently in the 1937 exhibit Degenerate Art, designed by Joseph Goebbels to remove Modernism from the Third Reich. More of Nolde’s paintings were confiscated than those of any other artist, and he was forbidden to exhibit his work. More of his paintings would have been destroyed by the regime, had it not found it profitable to sell them abroad. Thus he came to be seen, particularly after the war, as a victim of the Nazis, even an heroic resistance figure. In fact, however, a virulent anti-Semite, Nolde joined the Party early and remained a loyal member through the war. He never suffered any personal consequences for the art he created and claimed to all who would listen that his art was echt-German. Only after the war was over, in an attempt at “reputation laundering,” first Nolde himself and then—after his death in 1956—the foundation managing his estate played down his complicity with the Nazis and played up his victimization at their hands.

Most of the major artists who went fascist in the low dishonest decades of the 30s and 40s were writers: Knut Hamson, Norway’s most famous novelist and 1920 Nobel laureate; D’Annunzio and the Futurist Marinetti in Italy; Celine, “the most anti-Semitic Frenchman of his day,” considered by many second only to Proust in 20th century French prose; and Ezra Pound, the American poet enamored of Mussolini. Writers are more likely than painters to have their views known, so no great mystery shrouds where these figures stood and why. True, some figures seem to have suffered what came to be called Waldheimer’s disease, named for the Austrian diplomat who became the United Nations General Secretary but “forgot” that he had been a Nazi S.A. officer under Hitler: Gunter Grass, for example. But Nolde’s views—he had his own plan for the “dejewification” of Germany, for instance–were apparently not widely or well know. This began to change in 2013 when a new manager of his foundation, Christian Ring, opened its archives to scholars.

What two of the researchers found in the 25,000 plus unpublished letters and documents proved, as one of them said, “jaw dropping.” The illusion nourished since the war of Nolde as a resister of the Nazis was quickly dispelled, and the exhibition of his work at the Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin (2019) was designed to deconstruct that illusion; the subtitle of the exhibit was “The Artist During the Nazi Regime.” As news of this reevaluation spread, Chancellor Angela Merkel, who had called Nolde her favorite painter, removed two of his paintings from her office, one to go into the exhibit, neither ever to return. Reaction seemed to divide between generations: the older generation, who had wanted to find some redeeming elements in those terrible days and viewed Nolde as a noble survivor, expressed some anger at his exposure by curators “who knew nothing of the war.” The younger generation of Germans, as seems to be true generally, were more receptive to the truth about the past, even about a revered cultural icon. The headline of an article in The Independent expressed the conundrum we face: “Can you enjoy great art created by a Nazi?”

 

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To this point we have considered three moral criteria for judging art; first, who is in the picture; second, what is in the picture; and third, the most current, who put it there. I would like to consider a fourth criterion, also current: who hung it. The name that will immediately suggest where I am going is Sackler. The Sackler family, or certain members of it, through their control of the company Purdue Pharma, developed and pushed the pain killer drug OxyContin leading to the opiod crisis that claims approximately a hundred victims a day. They are currently engaged in heavy-duty litigation establishing responsibility, which has revealed a record of greed and perfidy that has rendered them as notorious and reviled as Bernie Madoff. The Sacklers, however, even before Oxycontin, proved to be major philanthropists, gifting universities, hospitals, research institutions, and museums with sizable donations, usually with their name attached.

Protests have demanded that further contributions to museums from the Sacklers be refused and already existing ones be … well, no one’s quite sure what. On the first count, the protests seem to be succeeding: the Metropolitan Museum and the Guggenheim in New York, the National Portrait Gallery and the Tate Group including the Tate Modern in London, and the Jewish Museum in Berlin count among the more important venues that, having taken Sackler money before, claim they no longer will. But what about all the Sackler galleries and wings and courtyards, usually well blazoned, already there? First, some discrimination is called for. The Arthur M. Sackler Gallery of Asian Art, part of the Smithsonian, named for and endowed to the tune of $50 million by the eldest Sackler brother, was built, also with his money, in 1982—four years before his two younger brothers launched Purdue. The demand made by one Senator that his name be removed from the museum thus seemed problematic. Likewise, his daughter established the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art at the Brooklyn Museum—the most eminent institution of its kind—with no taint of Pharma, OxyContin, or her uncles whose actions she has called “morally abhorrent.”

The case of the enormously popular Sackler Wing at the Met, housing the reconstructed Temple of Dendur in a huge glass enclosure, proves more problematic: all three of the brothers funded its construction in 1974, pre-Pharma. In law a crime cannot be prosecuted ex post facto: what about moral outrage? Are the Sacklers “guilty” for what they contributed in pre-Oxy dollars? Legal entanglements aside, ought the Met to remove the Sackler name now from the wing, rewrite the history of how the temple came to be at the Met in the first place? Slightly less perplexing, perhaps, are instances like the Serpentine Sackler Gallery in London, opened as recently as 2017, with museum officals agreeing to accept no more Sackler money, but keeping the name in bold letters across its front; or the Victoria and Albert Museum’s recently opened and much ballyhooed, ultra- chic Sackler Courtyard, a centerpiece in its advertising. The director of the museum, Tristram Hunt, mounted a strong defense of the Sackler family and its relation to the Victoria and Albert: “We are not going to be taking names down or denying the past.” That was of July 10, 2019, before Nan Goldin, the artist who has led the anti-Sackler crusade in America, staged a die-in in the courtyard, thirty or so people lying for five minutes covered with red-stained Oxydollars, to represent the tens of thousands of victims of the opioid crisis. Eventually Hunt cared, and the Sackler name was removed.

The Sackler saga, however, may portend a more general rectification of museum boards and donors, usually the same. The vice chairman of the Whitney Museum resigned after protests that his company manufactured tear gas canisters used against migrants. More protests were staged against a director of MoMA because his company, Black Rock, had holdings in private prison companies. Even more recently the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco removed a bust of one of its founders, Avery Brundage, for his racist views and practices. Few capitalist enterprises and their entrepreneurs may prove innocent enough to ‘scape whipping, in the woke morality, especially if one shares the sentiment of the Adages of Erasmus: “The rich man is either an unjust man himself or the heir of an unjust man.” Even on the art front, the 1%, it seems, has much to answer for. Such constitutes the theme of a full- page article in the Sunday New York Times of December 15, 2019, “How the Superrich Captured the Art World.” Although the Times boasts of presenting all the news that’s fit to print, is this really news?

Consider the first Gilded Age, a century and a half ago. In the 1870s, America had no art collections of any significance: any art lover or student would have to go to Europe to encounter an Old Master; sixty years later there were almost a score of world class collections, most open to the public. This transformation of the aesthetic landscape was the work of (mostly) men who came to be termed the Robber Barons. (The Baronesses, so to speak, were Isabella Stewart Gardner, christened delightfully by Bernard Berenson, “the serpent of the Charles,” who opened her own museum, a unique gem, in 1903 ; and Louisine Havermeyer, one of the first major collectors of Impressionist art, whose children bequeathed her collection, thought by some the finest in America, to the Metropolitan.) In 1910 Henry James published a short novel The Outcry, a best seller in its day, although now pretty much off the lit. crit. radar. The criers-out were the British outraged that a famous painting was being sold by a needy peer to an American millionaire who would whisk it off to darkest America. That the painting, although fictional, was Italian, itself presumably at some earlier point whisked off to darkest Albion by a young milord on the Grand Tour, or that real peers were reduced to selling off their patrimony to Americans at the end of the 19th century by the ruinous death taxes imposed on great estates, does not signify in James’s account. More Anglophile than American by 1910, James embraces, even encourages the outraged British response, and presents the composite Robber Baron figure, Breckenridge Bender, as the novel’s baddy. In an essay I published some years ago, I defended Breckenridge Bender and the cohort for whom he fronted—J. Pierpont Morgan and Henry Clay Frick, Benjamin Altman and Henry Walters, P.A. B. Weidner and Andrew Mellon, the Havermeyers and the Huntingtons: “I honor Breckenridge Bender, I laud Breckenridge Bender, I celebrate, even this far after the fact, every success he had in wrenching an Old Master from an old peer and shipping it off to America.”

The key phrase in my testimonial now may be “this far after the fact.” In his own day, Frick—whose attempt to buy a duke’s Holbein was the cause of the cause celebre James exploited—was known as “the most hated man in America,” a pre-echo of a recent BBC headline about the Sacklers: “Is This America’s Most Hated Family?” His hard- nosed labor practices, his role in the Homestead strike—in which ten miners were killed by Pinkertons, and three Pinkertons were killed by miners—his conspicuous consumption and public- be- damned attitude rendered him despicable to that public. When his erstwhile business partner Andrew Carnegie, on his death bed, sought a reconciliation with Frick, from whom he had been estranged for two decades, Frick refused. “Tell him I’ll see him in Hell”—where, presumably he thought both would end up. For the philanthropic Carnegie, there might be some doubt; for Frick, not so much.

Today, strolling through Frick’s Fifth Avenue mansion, now a museum since the death of his wife in 1931, one is aware only of the magnificence of his collection of art, which ranks as one of the premier small, individually assembled museums in the country, even the world. When one New York Times critic once wrote, “But who wouldn’t enjoy seeing some of Frick’s great paintings … free of the trappings of Henry Clay Frick’s robber baron life style?” I must admit the thought never occurred to me; I was simply glad that the old bastard shared them with the likes of me. And I had much the same reaction to the role of J. P. Morgan in endowing the Met and Andrew Mellon’s crucial gifting of twenty-one magnificent paintings leveraged from the Hermitage to form the nucleus of the National Gallery in Washington (as a way, true, of resolving his tax problems). Rockefeller money largely funded MoMA; Nelson and his brothers often referred to it as Mother’s museum. Of the $450 million recently spent to renovate MoMA roughly half was provided by David Rockefeller, the other half by four other multimillionaires. And the sources of all this munificence? … well, that was in another country, and besides the wench is dead.

The motives attributed to the Gilded Age’s art collectors have often been deemed less than wholly admirable: conspicuous consumption of the most rarefied sort, what with the supply of Raphaels and Rembrandts, unlike mansions and yachts, being finite; status climbing, the way the Lords of Pittsburgh, as old money Edith Wharton tartly dissed the newly rich , could elbow their way into the best society; or even a kind of social redemption for their less savory economic practices when they donated their hard got treasures for the public good. For, surprisingly in a sense, almost without exception, all the great collections were assembled with the intent or, in any event, the eventuality of gracing American museums, vastly increasing the aesthetic capital of the nation. Thus the Lords of Pittsburgh became our Maecenas, our version of the Medicis.

 

When still a student and semi-socialist, on my first visit to Rome, I went one evening to the Tivoli Gardens at the Villa d’Este outside the city, for the son et lumiere that they still did then. The five hundred fountains at play in the beams of light were a stunning, awe-inspiring sight; I felt almost transported to another dimension by so much beauty. But then, social conscience rearing its unwanted head, I began to wonder how much deprivation in how many lives had been necessary to pay for all this extravagance—and could it have been worth it? I remembered this experience when I came to this passage in Henry James’s The Princess Casamassima when a young radical visits Paris for the first time: “What was supreme in his mind to-day was not the idea of how the society around him should be destroyed; it was much more the sense of the wonderful, precious things it had produced, of the fabric of beauty and power it had raised.” In some natures, the aesthetic sense can contravene moral judgment, preferring beauty over right. One understands, in this context, Lenin’s famous statement to Maxim Gorky that he could not listen often to his favorite music, Beethoven’s Appassionata sonata, because it would make him soft: you can’t be soft and make a revolution.

The fact is that almost all the great art in almost all ages depends on the one percent of each of those times and places—the pharaohs and the popes, the rajahs and princes and peers, the autocrats and the plutocrats, those with the wealth and power. They were not themselves, of course, the artists who created the objects of great genius and beauty, but they were the patrons and payers on whom the artists depended. And they provided the venues in which the art would be created and preserved and presented. In short, most of the world’s great art was made possible by the hierarchies, the inequalities, the deprivations and degradations that make a one percent possible. And even if their conduct now, individually or collectively, seems morally reprehensible, they did leave a great aesthetic legacy—the Sistine Chapel and the Taj Mahal, the Hermitage and the Louvre, Raphael’s Madonna of the Goldfinch and Velazques’s Las Meninas.

 

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The subject of art and morality is an old one; a number of works with that title exist. I wanted my slightly different title “Art and Moralities” to consider the differing moral criteria that have been used to judge art through the ages: Who is in the picture? What is in the picture? Who produced the picture? Who hung the picture? The values we assign in answering these questions shift, reconfigure, look simplistic, even foolish to another age. Our own criteria, then, are probably best understood as provisional, mutable, subject to tomorrow’s revisions. Or perhaps we should just accede to Baudelaire’s view, justifying himself to his mother: “I have always considered that literature and art pursue an aim independent of morality.”