Category Archives: Art

Beauty Lost—Paris in the Meantime

20 February 2026 By in Art Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

Beauty is a leading indicator of a society’s health. When a civilization loses confidence in itself, beauty is the first thing to fade. Beauty cannot be manufactured to restore confidence; it is the natural expression of those who already possess it. Like Michelangelo carving the Pietà, one removes what does not belong; confusion, torment, disbelief, until the form within emerges. Civilizations are no different. When they chip away what obscures truth and goodness, beauty appears as the visible sign of inner clarity.

Beauty shows up everywhere: in human form, in nature, in paintings, and for this essay, in architecture. When a culture believes in itself with unpretentious conviction, it builds boldly with results spanning generations. It invests in the future because it trusts the future. When that belief evaporates, beauty dissolves with it, drifting into the mists of a doubtful future.

The loss of belief begins when a society abandons boundaries and accepts all impressions as equal. A mind without form cannot discern truth or goodness. And beauty requires clarity, clarity requires form, and form requires a frame. When the frame splinters, architecture becomes utilitarian, art becomes cynical, and culture stops believing in greatness. Nowhere traces this rise and fall more clearly than Parisian architecture over the last millennium.

To understand that arc, we begin not with kings or cathedrals but at the beginning with the first simple, rustic settlers along the Seine around 7600 BC, when the landscape was young and belief was simple. Farming had taken root in the fertile soils of the not‑yet‑named Paris Basin, and small cohorts of semi‑sedentary farmers, herders, hunters, and craftsmen gathered along the river to sustain their lives.

By the 3rd century BC, the Parisii: a Celtic tribe, had settled the Île de la Cité, the island seed that would one day become Paris. They were farmers and traders, positioned perfectly between northern tribes and Mediterranean merchants.

Then came the Romans. In 52 BC, Caesar’s legions conquered the Parisii and founded Lutetia atop their settlement. This is often treated as the city’s formal beginning, though it would take until the 5th century AD for the name Paris to take hold, when Clovis I made it his Frankish capital.

Before Christianity, the boatmen of Roman Lutetia erected a temple to Jupiter on the very site where Notre‑Dame now stands. When Christianity took root, a cathedral called Saint‑Étienne rose atop the old Roman temple in the 6th century. By the 12th century, Saint‑Étienne had grown decrepit, and Bishop Maurice de Sully resolved to replace it. In 1163, the first stones of Notre‑Dame de Paris were laid; the beginning of a cathedral that would become one of the great monuments of and to Western civilization.

Here begins the Parisian story of architecture‑as‑art: a chronicle of a culture that once believed deeply enough to reveal the beauty within itself, and then, over centuries, slowly lost that radiance of truth and goodness.

Paris reveals that architectural civilizational arc: from Gothic certainty to Haussmannian order, from Second Empire spectacle to a nostalgic retreat, from iron’s engineering faith to the late‑modern emptiness. Each movement is a confession of what the culture believed about itself, until, finally, belief becomes incoherent.

Notre‑Dame de Paris (1163–1345)

In the 12th century, France was not yet the France we know today, but its culture was beginning to consolidate around a pious Catholic king and a Paris that was rapidly becoming the kingdom’s political and cultural center. The University of Paris was emerging as Europe’s intellectual powerhouse: the renaissance before the Renaissance. The French language was taking shape, the merchant class was rising, and Paris was swelling into one of the largest cities in Europe. The city was bursting with intellectual and artistic energy, and out of that confidence they raised a Gothic cathedral of stone that embodied their faith in God and their belief in a promising future.

Notre‑Dame is the archetype of Parisian architecture‑as‑art. A cathedral that is more than a building; it is a testament to a society that believes in God and in themselves as children of God. A Gothic masterpiece born from greatness, rising stone by stone into beauty made visible.

As Caroline de Sury of OSV (Our Sunday Visitor) writes, Notre‑Dame is “one of the great monuments of human civilization, a work that reveals the ambition and ingenuity of medieval builders.”

Sainte-Chapelle (1238-1248)

If truth and goodness are beauty made visible, then the Gothic masterwork Sainte‑Chapelle is beauty translated into light: a soaring reliquary of faith where daybreak reds and midnight blues radiate with glory through stained glass. A spiritual journey through Genesis, the Passion, and the Apocalypse: beginnings, the Way, and the end of all things.

Sainte‑Chapelle was the natural continuation of the same cultural confidence that raised Notre‑Dame. Before Notre‑Dame was even complete, Louis IX envisioned a new sanctuary worthy of the relics of Christ’s Passion. In 1239 he purchased the Crown of Thorns from Baldwin II, the financially desperate Latin Emperor of Constantinople, for 135,000 livres. Within a few years he added a fragment of the True Cross and the Holy Lance, housing them in a gold‑and‑silver châsse that cost another 100,000 livres. The chapel built to enshrine them required a further 40,000. In modern terms, the king devoted the equivalent of half a billion dollars to gather and honor these relics.

The relics arrived in Paris from Venice in solemn procession, carried by Dominican friars and received by Louis himself, barefoot and dressed as a penitent. The upper chapel, conceived as a two‑story royal sanctuary, rises as a nearly weightless cage of stone and glass, its walls dissolved into color, its architecture awash with light.

To later generations, the result was nothing less than otherworldly. Jean de Jandun, the 14th‑century scholastic, praised Sainte‑Chapelle as “the most beautiful of chapels…its ruddy windows bestowing such hyperbolic beauty that one believes oneself, as if rapt to heaven, to enter one of the best chambers of Paradise.”

Sainte‑Chapelle is a medieval anticipation of Impressionism, a world where form dissolves into light. But where the Impressionists sought the light and color of the natural world, the 13th century sought the prismatic glory of the divine. The Impressionists never turned their canvases toward it, not out of indifference, but because their gaze was fixed on the modern world, while Sainte‑Chapelle belonged to an age where painted light came from God.

Haussmann Renovation (1853-1927)

In the mid‑19th century, central Paris couldn’t breathe. It was taking short, asthmatic gulps of dirty air from dark, narrow medieval streets where sunlight rarely reached, plants withered, and human life was short and precarious. Disease thrived. Childhood was a gamble. The city had no coherent structure; only a tangle of alleys, filth, and improvisation.

And without order, there was no beauty.

For Plato, beauty emerges from the harmonious ordering of the cosmos toward the Good. Aquinas makes the point explicit: beauty requires integritas (wholeness), proportio or consonantia (due proportion, order, harmony), and claritas (radiance). Order is not an aesthetic preference; it is one of the metaphysical conditions for beauty itself. Balthasar later described beauty as the radiant expression of ordered love‑truth‑goodness in the drama of being. Disorder is not neutral; it is the antithesis of form and thus beauty.

Napoleon III wanted a beautiful city, and he sought it through order. And that desire itself reveals something deeper: Paris still believed that beauty was possible, that the city could manifest a visible order. Baron Georges‑Eugène Haussmann became the instrument of that belief. His renovation of Paris was not merely an infrastructure project; it was one of the most ambitious exercises in urban aesthetics in the modern era.

He treated the city center as a single vision rather than a collection of buildings. The result was a radical shift toward ensemble thinking; unified perspectives, monumental scale, and living environments conducive to modern societies.

The wide, straight boulevards created long dramatic sightlines that turned everyday movement into a kind of urban procession. These axes imposed rationality and clarity, echoing the formal perspectives of Baroque urbanism but expanded to a modern scale. Haussmann insisted on light, air, and luminosity in his designs. Building heights were calibrated to street widths, allowing daylight to flood the city and turning the pale limestone facades into soft reflectors. Paris acquired its characteristic glow; an Impressionist atmosphere before Impressionism existed.

The street front became a dignified stage for bourgeois life: tall French windows, wrought‑iron balconies, and a clear hierarchy of floors. Decorative without excess, elegant without aristocratic pomp. A civic beauty built not for kings but for citizens.

Critics at the time called this uniformity authoritarian, monotonous, even soulless. By 1870, the political backlash, mainly the constant, never-ending construction, was strong enough that Napoleon dismissed him. Yet his vision continued to shape the city well into the 1920s. And from today’s vantage point, the achievement is unmistakable: Haussmann created one of the most recognizable and photogenic urban textures in the Western world. A master class in balance of order, livability, and aesthetic coherence.

He redesigned central Paris as a single, harmonious work of civic art, where beauty arises not from isolated monuments but from the collective whole.

Aquinas would have recognized instantly what Haussmann achieved: a city where order becomes radiance. A city that believes that order can create beauty.

Palais Garnier (1861–1875)

On a dreary winter night in January 1858, with a light, bone‑chilling drizzle misting the streets of Paris, Napoleon III and his wife, Empress Eugénie, arrived at the old opera house, the Salle Le Peletier, to attend a performance of Guillaume Tell. As their carriage pulled up to the entrance, Italian anarchist Felice Orsini and his accomplices hurled three bombs at the imperial couple. The Emperor and Empress survived, but eight people were killed and roughly 150 injured.

Shaken by the attack, Napoleon III insisted that a new opera house be built, one in which his safety was not an afterthought but a built-in design principle. He loved the opera and wanted to attend without fear, so his instructions to Charles Garnier concerned security, circulation, and protection. The aesthetics he left entirely to the architect.

Amid Haussmann’s orderly redefinition of central Paris, Garnier revealed a society that still believed in beauty and in itself. He created a solid, physical embodiment of the Gesamtkunstwerk: a total work of art, a fusion of architecture, sculpture, painting, ritual, and movement into a coherent, immersive whole. Gesamtkunstwerk: Everything all at once. The term, popularized by Wagner, described the union of architecture, poetry, staging, gesture, and sound into a single living concept of beauty. Garnier achieved the impossible: he made society come alive in stone, marble, and gold.

The architect constructed a monument that proclaimed a cultural confidence that Parisian society may not have fully articulated, but only a civilization still open to greatness could have built what this opera house became. A loving spectacle of marble, gold, and fresco, choreographed like a Tchaikovsky ballet: complete with cannon, procession, and royalty.

Sacré-Coeur Basilica (1875–1914)

Sacré‑Coeur, a travertine wonder of white absolution, was a national act of catharsis. A reliquary of past beauty and honor. In 1871, Otto von Bismarck goaded a militarily weak France into declaring war on a superior Prussian empire. The conflict lasted barely six months, during which France suffered three‑quarters of a million casualties, the capture of Napoleon III, and the collapse of its regime, while Prussian losses remained comparatively light. It was a bloody, humiliating defeat that ended the French monarchy and, more importantly, shifted the balance of European power from France to a newly unified Germany. A realignment that would shape the grotesque catastrophes of the twentieth century.

In the aftermath, Paris reached backward for comfort. The city sought a therapeutic vision of an older, less violent world: Romano‑Byzantine domes, shimmering mosaics, and a vernacular of sacred purity untouched by the modern machinery of destruction. Sacré‑Coeur is beautiful, but its beauty is retrospective and prophetically tentative. It looks for solace in the rearview mirror because the future felt too dangerous to contemplate. In the long arc of Parisian architecture, the basilica is a holding pattern; a pause in the light built from the hope that the coming century might offer more than the dark silhouettes of humiliation and destruction.

Sacré‑Coeur contains a trace of the old Parisian confidence, a belief that beauty could be recovered by reaching backward into older, protective forms. The Catholic Church, convinced that the nation’s defeat was divine retribution for moral decline, proposed a new basilica on the highest hill of the city. Conceived as the antithesis of the secular opulence of the Palais Garnier, it emerged as a sacred neo‑Byzantine tapestry of color and pattern; a deliberate return to the safety of inherited forms. It was, in truth, a brief fling with the past, a luminous attempt to steady a wounded nation while the future was already projecting unfamiliar forms.

Opposed from its inception, sometimes violently, the basilica nonetheless became one of Paris’s most visited sites. It did not erase the humiliation of 1870, but it offered a place to set it down, closure, a brief, consoling pause before the city stepped into a future it no longer fully trusted or orchestrated. Sacré‑Coeur was a last, luminous fling with the past, a moment when Paris tried to steady itself by returning to forms that once offered meaning. But the modern world was already unwinding beneath its domes, carrying architecture toward a new purpose: not the revelation of beauty through form, but the expression of a deeper, more unsettled consciousness. In that sense, Sacré‑Coeur stands as the final exhale of an old metaphysics, just before the Eiffel Tower announces the beginning of something entirely different.

Eiffel Tower (1887–1889)

When I look at the Eiffel Tower, I don’t see a piece of 19th‑century whimsy or a symbol of Parisian romance. I see Rome. Not in style or material, but in spirit. The Tower rises from four sweeping iron legs that form, at their base, a kind of elongated, quadripartite arch; the same structural logic that held up aqueducts, amphitheaters, and triumphal monuments two thousand years earlier. Strip away the iron lattice and the modern height, and the underlying gesture is unmistakably Roman: an engineer’s declaration of what a civilization believes it can build.

The Tower is not beautiful in the Gothic or Baroque sense. It has no ornament, no narrative program, no sculptural allegory. Its beauty is structural, not decorative. The kind of beauty the Romans understood instinctively. They built in stone what Eiffel built in iron: arches, vaults, and exposed frameworks that celebrated the triumph of engineering over gravity. The Tower is simply the Roman impulse stretched upward, essentially a triumphal arch turned vertical, raised not to an emperor but to the idea of progress itself.

It was built for the Exposition Universelle of 1889, a centennial monument to the Revolution, but it functions more like a modern Column of Trajan: a national exclamation point. It is the last moment Paris built something with imperial confidence, before the long slide into the functional neutrality of the 20th century. The Tower does not seduce its viewers; it asserts a dominance of French will. It does not charm; it declares. It stands not as a palace of beauty but as a monument to the audacity of engineering; the final great structure of a civilization that still believed in its own strength.

In hindsight, the Eiffel Tower reads like a perfect exclamation point at the end of an era; the last moment Paris could still build with civilizational confidence, yet at the turn into the modern age, unable to express beauty from within. Its grandeur is external, not internal: a feat of engineering rather than a revelation of beauty or meaning. The Tower celebrates structure for its own sake, a Roman impulse translated into iron, but it also marks the pivot toward a new architectural age in which engineering replaces art, and performance replaces symbolism. Seen from the present, it feels less like a continuation of Parisian beauty than the hinge on which the city swings toward modernism, functionalism, and eventually the exposed ducts and structural exhibitionism of the Centre Pompidou. It is both the final shout of a culture that still believed in its own strength and the first unmistakable sign that it no longer knew how to build something beautiful. A celebration of the past with an unmistakable unease for the future.

Centre Pompidou (1977)

Contemporary art, the world French President Georges Pompidou championed with such confidence and enthusiasm in the late 1960s and early 1970s, was still in its formative slurry of dissociative forms when he embraced it. It was a movement emerging just as the last metaphysical foundations of Western art had quietly dissolved into the mists of an artistic tradition already deemed superannuated. Modernism had exhausted its internal logic: revealing beauty had become a secondary objective, while experimentation without rails had become its primary engine. Its successor inherited that momentum but none of the metaphysical grounding. Contemporary art had not yet discovered a voice of its own, yet the improvisation continued. What passed for innovation was mostly provocative drift and grift, gestures searching not for meaning but for acceptance. A tragedy of novelty as farce.

The Centre Pompidou emerged from this vacuous experimentation with almost comic inevitability. What began as a playful provocation; a design submitted with a wink, more dare than proposal, was suddenly embraced as the future of French culture. A joke, once accepted in earnest, just had to be retrofitted with meaning, and so a narrative was hastily draped over a building that had no internal logic to support it. Its exposed pipes and skeletal frame were praised as transparency, its industrial scaffolding as democratic openness, its externalized systems celebrated as newfound functionality, though this was mostly justification layered on after the fact. The truth was simpler: the Pompidou embodies the moment when architecture no longer knew what it meant to finish anything, because it no longer knew what it meant to begin with an idea of beauty and proceed to its revelation. It was, in spirit, a retelling of The Emperor’s New Clothes: a building so brazenly inside‑out that it dared the world to call its bluff. No one did. No child shouted out. And Paris was left with a structure that looks permanently under construction, as if the scaffolding were never removed because there was no final form waiting beneath it; the builders went to lunch and never came back.

Institut du Monde Arabe (1987)

When I look at the Institut du Monde Arabe, I find myself at a loss for words; not because it overwhelms, but because it offers so little to respond to. There is no beauty here, and not even the consolation of provocation. It is simply a box wrapped in a pattern of dots, a techno‑mashrabiya that repeats the symbolism of privacy and modesty after the conditions that once gave those meanings a living visualness have disappeared. The facade behaves like a piece of needlepoint stretched across a five‑and‑dime tin: a surface treatment meant to suggest depth, enclosing a void no one dares open for fear that what lies inside might be as stale as the gesture that contains it. The building promises intricacy and depth but delivers only process; it gestures toward tradition but speaks none of its language. Even its celebrated diaphragms; those photo‑sensitive apertures that, on paper, were the building’s great promise, the mechanism that justified its existence, produced little more than a momentary novelty, a gesture that quickly settled into a kind of architectural ‘whatever.’ They jammed long ago, and no one was moved enough to repair them. Their failure revealed what the building had always been: a technological simulation of a symbolic language that no one spoke.

And this muteness is nowhere more striking than in its placement. The Institut du Monde Arabe faces Notre‑Dame across the Seine, a cathedral whose every arch and proportion bursts with metaphysical drama. Yet the IMA offers no counter‑narrative, no dialogue, not even a gesture of acknowledgment. It simply sits there, mute before a building that still knows how to radiate meaning. A patterned box across from a cathedral, its mechanisms and symbolism inert and frozen, a structure of indifference that neither provokes nor participates, content to remain unopened, like a tin whose contents everyone quietly suspects have long since gone stale.

Louvre Pyramid (1989)

The Louvre Pyramid was born of a practical need: the museum had outgrown its entrances, and the over-flow crowds pleaded for a solution. In that narrow sense, the pyramid succeeded; it streamlined circulation, clarified access, and organized the subterranean lobby with admirable efficiency. But in reaching for transcendence, it failed as art. The glass pyramid, often praised as a dialogue between past and present, is in truth a structure that reflects because it cannot speak a language of its own. Its transparency is not revelation but absence, a geometric gesture that offers no symbolic meaning of its own. Placed at the heart of the Louvre’s courtyard, a space saturated with centuries of artistic conviction; it behaves like a visitor rather than a participant. It mirrors the palace because it has nothing to add to it. The entire structure could have been placed discreetly below the courtyard and left at that; instead, it rises into view as a polite confession of modernity’s exhaustion, a form that admits its own emptiness with immaculate clarity.

Opera Bastille (1989)

Opera was once the sound of beauty, an art meant to be absorbed, felt, seen, and heard as a single ascending experience. It needed a setting equal to its purpose, a space that prepared the soul for what it was about to encounter. The Opéra Bastille offers the opposite. It treats opera not as revelation but as logistics, a cultural event to be processed with the architectural vocabulary of airports and modern shopping. At street level it doesn’t merely echo retail; it becomes retail, its façade functioning like a mall’s frontage: glass bays arranged for transaction rather than transcendence. Its square entrance, the same monumental outline that defines the Grande Arche completed that same year, behaves like a photographer’s finger‑frame: a device for excluding everything beyond the immediate now. What might have signified clarity or democratic openness becomes instead a gesture of erasure, geometry used to forget rather than remember. The square here is not neutral; it is the architectural form of a culture rejecting its inheritance. The vast glass facade and anonymous granite curves reinforce this absence of beauty, evoking commercial neutrality rather than the dignity of a house of art. Inside, circulation and efficiency dominate, as if the highest aim of opera were the smooth movement of crowds. What was once a ritual of ascent has been reduced to a pedestrian experience, a building that confuses functionality with meaning. If the Palais Garnier is a palace for opera, the Bastille is a shopping mall where opera happens to occur. A structure that shows, with painful clarity, what happens when a civilization forgets that beauty was the purpose.

The Cost of Forgetting:

What began as a civilization’s attempt to reveal beauty, successfully I might add, slowly unraveled into a search for novelty that mistook disruption and provocation for depth. The great works of the past were not beautiful by accident; they were the outward expression of an inner confidence; a belief that the world possessed order, meaning, and purpose waiting to be disclosed. But as that confidence faded, art turned away from revelation and toward experimentation for its own sake. In its hunger for the new, it discovered only decadence and despair. And the despair was not in the forms themselves but in the culture that produced them; a society that no longer believed in its own metaphysical foundations. The darkness that followed was not dramatic; it was quiet, incremental, a slow drift into soullessness. Architecture became little more than gesture, spectacle, logistics, branding. The pursuit of beauty gave way to the performance of innovation. And in that exchange, something essential was lost: the sense that art could still reveal truth.

Graphics: Notre Dame de Paris by Ali Sabbagh. Public Domain. Sainte-Chapelle by Unknown. Public Domain. Halevy Street by Gustave Caillebotte, 1878. Public Domain. Palais Garnier Grand Staircase. Photo by Benh Lieu Song. Public Domain. The Basilica of Sacre-Coeur photo by Oliveira TP. Public Domain. Eiffel Tower, photo by Paul 012. Public Domain. Centre Pompidou. Copyright Independent UK. Institut du Monde Arabe photo by Fred Romero. Public Domain. Opera Bastille photo by IronGargolyle. Public Domain.

Art as Philosophy

8 February 2026 By in Art, Philosophy Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

Since the earliest times of conscious thought, man has asked not only “Who or what am I?” but “Why am I here?” And the answer is both circular and logical at once: we are because we can ask. I think, therefore I am. But consciousness alone does not tell us what existence is for. And if the question of existence is humanity’s oldest query, beauty is one of its oldest replies. Beauty made existence feel meaningful rather than merely the repetition of appetite and rest; it revealed that life pointed beyond itself. Our Stone Age ancestors were not finger‑painting on cave walls 50,000 years ago for fun. They were attempting to make the invisible visible.

Beauty in being says that existence is not enough. Beauty discloses purpose, and in doing so, it provides it. It is one of the ways human beings make that purpose visible, a sign that we participate in an order of reality greater than ourselves.

Art as Philosophy begins with beauty: an act of existential revelation. Morality and aesthetics often appear in art as emotional or epistemic, yet both are fixed in an ontological core. Beauty is a metaphysical center made visible through existential experience; it discloses the shape of human existence and binds aesthetics and morality to the deeper question of what it means to be human. It provides purpose.

From the earliest myths to the highest metaphysics, beauty has never been treated as a garnish. Long before philosophy had a name, ancient cultures intuited beauty as the signature of an ordered world and cosmos rather than chaos. Harmony in music, proportion in the human form, symmetry in temples: these were not aesthetic add-ons, but revelations of a deeper structure woven into reality itself.

Plato gave this intuition its first philosophical clarity. For him, beauty was not accidental but the radiance of the Good, the Form that awakens desire and draws the soul upward. Encountering beauty in the world triggers anamnesis, the recollection of what the soul already knew. Beauty was not subjective; it was participatory. To encounter beauty was to brush against the eternal. Beauty is the condition under which truth becomes visible and knowable. Without beauty, the intellect cannot ascend; it stalls, and ultimately, descends.

Neoplatonic Plotinus (3rd century AD) deepened Plato’s vision. Beauty, he argued, is the soul’s recognition of its origin in the One. The beautiful is not merely pleasing; it is the way the intelligible realm shines forth, emanates, into the sensible. Without beauty, the mind loses its orientation toward the intelligible and shatters into fragmentation. To perceive beauty is already a kind of knowing, a moment of noesis, a reminder that all things flow from a single source and long to return to their origin. As Plotinus put it, “the soul must be made beautiful to see beauty.” An ordered soul has the clarity to perceive beauty.

Aquinas immersed this lineage into Christian metaphysics. Beauty, for him, is a transcendental of being coextensive with truth and goodness. Beauty is rooted in being itself; consciousness merely receives it. Aquinas’s point is not that beauty is a mental event, but that it is an ontological property: the radiance of form made visible to a perceiving mind. Plato locates beauty in transcendent Forms; Aquinas locates beauty in the immanent form of the thing itself. To call something beautiful is to say that its form reveals its purpose, its integrity, and its participation in the act of existence itself. Beauty incorporates wholeness, proportion, and radiance into being. Beauty pleases, but it requires perceptive judgment; it is the condition under which a being becomes delightful, showing itself to be both knowable and lovable.

Even Kant, who tried to bracket metaphysics and leave beauty suspended in an onto‑epistemological limbo, could not escape the pull of beauty’s universality. His “purposiveness without purpose” is an admission that beauty feels ordered even when we cannot articulate the order. In trying to deny beauty a purpose, he inadvertently gave it one: beauty reveals a structure of meaning that reason cannot fully justify yet cannot ignore.

Heidegger returned beauty to ontology by insisting that art “unconceals” being. Beauty is not decorative but disclosure, the world showing itself as meaningful. He rejected aesthetics as subject‑centered and sought to recover the original Greek sense of aletheia, unconcealment. Heidegger critiques Plato and ignores Aquinas, yet his account of Being as unconcealment resembles Aquinas’s act‑of‑being far more than Plato’s transcendent Forms. He retrieves, but cloaks, the spiritual dimension of ontology in a deliberately unspecific, non‑theological way. For Heidegger, beauty is how truth happens: an event in which being clears a space for beings to appear as what they are, unconcealed and encountered truthfully. Art, especially poetry, is privileged because it lets being shine most intensely. In this sense, beauty comes full circle: it is the radiance of truth and the invitation to goodness.

And Balthasar, gathering the entire philosophical tradition, argued that beauty is the glory of being, the radiance that makes truth lovable and goodness desirable. Without beauty, truth becomes abstract and goodness becomes coercive. His entire theology revolves around the transcendentals of truth, goodness, and beauty, inseparable properties of being that reflect the nature of God. He argued forcefully that in the modern era beauty has been severed from truth and goodness, often reduced to mere aesthetics or subjective preference, and that this breach damages all three. Without beauty’s radiant, attractive power, truth collapses into dry intellectualism and goodness into moralism or duty. Beauty, he insisted, demands as much “courage and decision” as truth and goodness do, and when banished, beauty takes them along in a “mysterious vengeance.” Balthasar absorbs Plato’s intuition within Aquinas’s ontology, locating beauty not in a distant realm of Forms but in the immanent radiance of being itself: the “Glory of Being.”

Across millennia, the consensus is unmistakable: beauty is not subjective preference but the visible expression of an invisible order.

Beauty is the first principle in ascertaining the health of a society. Beauty is the outward sign of truth and goodness in both the individual and the collective. Beauty is not a matter of taste or form but a universal reality, perceptible wherever the soul is clear enough to perceive it.

Civilizations have always intuitively known this, even when they lacked the vocabulary to name it, and one can argue that we still don’t. They built temples, carved statues, raised cathedrals, composed hymns, and painted frescoes not as decorative motifs but as necessity. A necessity of revealing a world ordered enough to trust and beautiful enough to love. Beauty was the first language of meaning, the earliest evidence that reality was intelligible, logical, and worth living in.

To encounter beauty is to encounter a world that makes sense.

Beauty does not precede truth and goodness in God, but it precedes them in the order of human perception. It is the first contact point between the soul and being itself, the moment when beauty discloses its radiance before the mind has time to analyze it or the will has time to respond. Beauty is an invitation to recognize truth and respond to goodness. Reverse the order and the entire structure folds into incomprehensible abstraction. Begin with truth and you end up defending the truths you already prefer. The mind simply reinforces its own assumptions, allowing nothing genuinely new to appear. Begin with goodness and you get moralism. Begin with beauty and find transcendence, an ascent that brings illumination.

But the modern world, unlike every age before it, has attempted to sever beauty from consciousness, from the human capacity to perceive what is objectively there.

Yet modernity, with its suspicion of universals and its allergy to transcendence, has tried to demote beauty to a matter of taste. “Beauty is subjective,” we are told, as though the human longing for harmony, proportion, and radiance were nothing more than a cultural preference. But this claim sinks under its own weight. If beauty were merely subjective, then the Parthenon would be no more meaningful than a strip mall, Michelangelo’s Pietà no more weighty than a child’s clay doodle, and Leonardo’s Vitruvian geometry of the human form would carry no hint of a deeper order in being. The human heart knows better. Even in our most cynical age, people still travel across oceans to stand before the great works of the past, hoping, often without knowing why, to feel again the presence of something real.

Beauty is not an opinion. Beauty is recognition of transcendent qualities.

And recognition implies that something is there to be seen.

This is why the loss of beauty is never merely aesthetic. It is metaphysical. When a civilization can no longer create or perceive beauty, it is not because beauty has vanished but because the soul has clouded. The organ of perception has dimmed. The world has not changed; the viewer has.

This is the quiet tragedy of the modern age: we have not lost beauty, but we have lost the capacity to see it, to create it.

If beauty is the form in which truth and goodness appear, then the loss of beauty is not a stylistic shift: it is a lament of civilizational change. It signals that the culture no longer believes in the radiance of being, no longer trusts that the world is ordered or intelligible. Beauty requires confidence in form. It requires the belief that reality is not arbitrary, that meaning is not an illusion, that the human soul is capable of perceiving something beyond itself.

When this confidence erodes and falters, beauty becomes impossible.

This is why the modern era, for all its technical brilliance, is marked by profound aesthetic exhaustion. The great artistic movements of the twentieth century did not abandon beauty because they discovered something truer; they abandoned beauty because they no longer believed in the metaphysical order that makes beauty possible. Fragmented order, chaos even, replaced harmony. Sensory shock replaced radiance. Psychological intensity replaced form. Beauty was replaced by raw power: a confirmation that the artist could impose meaning rather than receive it. The artist, once a witness to transcendence, became a fabricator of worlds.

And nowhere is this shift from order to chaos more visible than in the work of Pablo Picasso. Picasso is not the cause of the aesthetic shift; he is its herald. His cubist renderings of fractured forms, dislocated bodies, and jagged planes are not innovations in beauty but revelations of a world that no longer seems logical. His paintings do not disclose harmony; they expose unremitting loss. They do not reveal order; they reveal its absence. They do not manifest radiance; they disclose bewilderment and torment. And yet, people call it powerful; and powerful it is. But beauty it is not.

People pay staggering sums for canvases that scream with his dislocations of form, as though truth could be bought. They stand before the broken bodies and insist they see something profound. But what they are seeing is not truth in the classical sense. They are seeing realism rather than reality: accuracy without truth. They are seeing psychological exposure, emotional intensity, historical impact, the perverse thrill of transgression. They are seeing the festering wounds and raw scars of a civilization, mistaking them for truth, but thankfully, never confusing them with goodness.

When beauty fades from consciousness, as it did in the era that slipped away at the dawn of modern art, truth turns upside down and inside out. A culture that cannot perceive beauty begins to call its own fragmented reality honesty writ large. But if art loses beauty, truth is also lost. Truth and goodness are visible to a clear soul. Distortion leaves us guessing.

Picasso’s Guernica is the perfect example of this distortion: a masterpiece of torment and bewilderment elevated to the status of beauty by a culture that no longer knows how to recognize beauty: not out of malice, but from a dullness of spirit, the kind that mistakes sophistication for wisdom and complexity for truth.

For the capacity to perceive beauty is not automatic or axiomatic. It must be formed, protected, and kept clear. When it erodes, truth becomes inverted and goodness becomes opaque. Painted in 1937 in response to the bombing of the Basque town of Guernica during the Spanish Civil War, Picasso’s mural is enormous, over 25 feet wide, and simply overwhelming. It is a world shattered into jagged shards: a horse screaming in agony, a mother wailing over her dead child, a soldier’s broken body strewn across the ground, a bull looming with an ambiguous menace, a light bulb glaring like an unblinking mechanical eye. There is no center. There is no harmony. There is no rest.

The painting is a visual, unrelenting scream, a deliberate assault on the viewer’s sense of order. It is not meant to be contemplated; it is meant to shock. And in this sense, Guernica is a perfect expression of its age; an age in which suffering no longer appears within a meaningful frame but erupts as raw, unmediated violence.

The crucial point of Guernica is that it is evocative and powerful, but it is not beautiful.

Its power comes from its honesty about fragmentation, its refusal to offer consolation, its unflinching portrayal of torment. But power is not beauty. Beauty reveals the radiance of being; Guernica reveals the failure of being. Beauty discloses order; Guernica discloses chaos. Beauty invites contemplation; Guernica demands only what the painter wants you to see, annihilation of being, and he gives you only one way to go. His way… a rejection of the past.

And yet, in the modern imagination, the two, power and beauty, have become confused. People stand before Guernica and insist they see beauty of form and execution. But what they are seeing is intensity, authenticity, historical weight, emotional force.

They are seeing the wounds of the world and mistaking those wounds for wisdom.

This confusion is not Picasso’s fault. Art precedes culture. Picasso anticipated rather than directed. He diagnosed the symptoms but offered no cure. For beauty is not something an artist creates; it is something he reveals. And when an artist refuses revelation, or can’t, he produces not‑beauty; a world in which being cannot be perceived. Guernica reveals nothing of being, only fractures and faults.

Where beauty is absent, not‑beauty remains. Guernica is not‑beauty.

Caravaggio’s Judith Beheading Holofernes confronts the same violence, but within a world where being is still intact, where justice is truth made visible and beauty perceptible.

The story itself is a parable, a theological narrative. In the biblical Book of Judith, the city of Bethulia, perhaps Shechem in the hill‑country of Samaria, is under siege by the Assyrian army led by Holofernes, general of Nebuchadnezzar, because they didn’t support his wars. The people are losing faith and preparing to surrender. Judith, a devout widow, rebukes their despair. She prays, disguises herself, and enters the enemy camp. Over several days she wins Holofernes’ trust. When he collapses in drunken sleep, she takes his sword and beheads him. She returns to Bethulia with his head, and her people rally and rout the invaders.

Caravaggio’s painting (c. 1599) captures this moment of judgment with hyper‑realistic detail and dramatic chiaroscuro. Judith’s face is composed, almost detached, the instrument of justice. Holofernes screams in agony as blood spurts across the canvas. And beside Judith stands the maid, her expression a moral counterweight: not horror, not pity, but a grim, knowing resolve, as though she alone feels the full weight of what justice demands.

Yet the scene rises beyond horror. It embodies a metaphysical beauty because it reveals justice as an eternal, harmonious truth. Beauty here is not mere aesthetic pleasure but the radiance of the Good and the True. Judith’s act is a moral triumph: her faith and courage overcome tyranny, restoring order. Violence serves a higher purpose, not chaos, but a necessary catharsis that discloses transcendental harmony. Even the composition’s balance, with light piercing darkness, symbolizes truth emerging from brutality. Caravaggio turns judgment into revelation: beauty as justice made visible.

The contrast with Picasso could not be sharper. Guernica presents the bombing of the Basque town as a fragmented, monochromatic nightmare; suffering without resolution. It is not‑beauty in the metaphysical sense because it rejects transcendence. There is no redemptive justice, no higher truth to personify. Its cubist abstraction amplifies universal horror, trapping the viewer in an existential downward arc that mirrors war’s senseless destruction. Unlike Caravaggio, where violence leads to truth, Guernica offers only loss. It critiques rather than affirms, making it a powerful ethical statement but not a vessel of transcendental beauty. It is the absence of the divine order that Judith reveals. And where that order collapses in Picasso, it is restored in Michelangelo.

Michelangelo’s Pietà brings an act of violence and suffering into a realm of peace, order, truth, and goodness: into beauty. 

Carved in 1499, when the Renaissance still believed that beauty was the visible form of truth, the sculpture depicts Mary cradling the dead Christ, her face serene, her posture composed, her sorrow dignified. Christ’s body is lifeless yet harmonious, the lines of his form flowing with a quiet grace that seems to transcend death itself.

The Pietà depicts beauty. It manifests it. Michelangelo did not infuse the marble with beauty; he allowed beauty to escape from it. The sculpture stands as the Renaissance ideal crafted in stone: beauty as the visible form of truth, truth as the expression of goodness, goodness as the radiance of being. The Pietà is not an image of beauty; it is Beauty itself, the transcendental unity of form, meaning, and love. It stands above all other works in this triptych of form because it reveals what the others only mimic or lose entirely.

All three works depict suffering and violence. But they inhabit different metaphysical planes.

In the Pietà, suffering is real but not absurd.  Mary’s sorrow is profound, yet her face is serene, not because she is unfeeling, but because her grief is held within a larger meaning. The sculpture suggests that even in death there is dignity, coherence, and hope. Suffering is transfigured but not denied.

In Judith, suffering is the moral weight of the violence she must commit. Yet violence is framed by justice, and justice by truth. It is still a logical world where meaning still governs.

In Guernica, suffering is unmoored from truth and goodness.  The figures scream into a void that offers no escape. There is no frame of meaning, no horizon of hope, no suggestion that agony is anything but senselessness. It is an irrational world without any existential foundational support. A world that makes no sense.

Together, the Pietà, Judith, and Guernica form a kind of metaphysical triptych. Michelangelo’s Pietà stands at the summit, where beauty is the first principle of existence, where form, harmony, and radiance disclose a truth deeper than suffering and a goodness that holds even grief within order. Caravaggio’s Judith occupies the middle panel, where truth is the second principle, where justice becomes visible, where violence is not chaos but judgment, and where goodness emerges through the restoration of order. Picasso’s Guernica completes the sequence not by fulfilling it but by negating it: a world where beauty has withdrawn, where truth has withered, where goodness is impossible. The Pietà transfigures suffering; Judith interprets it; Guernica renders it senseless. In the Pietà, harmony governs. In Judith, justice governs. In Guernica, nothing governs. Beauty, truth, and goodness appear in their proper order in the first two; in the last, they are absent, inverted, or broken. It is a triptych of being, and Guernica is the panel where being loses meaning.

Art is never merely art. It is a civilization peering into a crystal ball and seeing what is to come. It reveals not who people are, but what they are becoming. Art stands upstream of culture because it expresses a civilization’s posture toward being before that posture becomes conscious. The artist feels the tremors before the quake; culture only notices when the ground finally breaks.

Society’s art is therefore its earliest confession.

When a culture produces works like the Pietà, it is not simply exposing beauty; it is expressing metaphysical confidence. It believes the world is ordered, that truth is radiant, that goodness is real, that suffering can be transfigured. It builds cathedrals because it believes heaven is near. It carves marble into harmony because it trusts that form is trustworthy and good.

When a culture produces works like Guernica, it is not merely innovating stylistically; it is confessing metaphysical exhaustion. It no longer believes in order, so it paints fragmentation. It no longer trusts form, so it breaks it. It no longer sees radiance in being, so it reveals only distortion. It no longer believes suffering can be redeemed, so it depicts suffering as absurd.

Beauty has not disappeared from the world; we have simply lost the clarity to perceive it. The modern mind, dazzled by science and flattered by its own mindful openness, has mistaken boundlessness for wisdom, a mind without borders believes everything and sees nothing. Yet this distortion is not permanent. The capacity for beauty can be restored because beauty is not a human invention but a feature of reality itself, the radiance of being waiting to be seen again. To recover beauty is to recover orientation, to remember that truth is luminous, and goodness desirable. And when a civilization regains the ability to see beauty, it regains the capacity to hope.

The soul must be made beautiful to see beauty.

Graphics: Judith Beheading Holofernes by Caravaggio, c. 1598. Pieta by Michelangelo c. 1499. Both Public Domain. Guernica by Picasso, 1937. Art Print. Copyright is likely held by Picasso’s family.

Color in the Eye of the Beholder

15 September 2025 By in Art, Philosophy, Physics, Physiology, Science Tags: , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

Ansel Adams (1902-1964), photographer of the majestic, was exceptionally elusive when it came to why he preferred black-and-white photographs over color, offering only a few comments on his medium of choice. He believed that black-and-white photography was a “departure from reality” which is true on many levels but that is also true of most artistic efforts and products. He also held the elementary belief that “one sees differently with color photography than black-and-white.” Some have even suggested that Adams said, “…when you photograph them in black and white, you photograph their souls,” but this seems apocryphal since most of his oeuvre was landscape photography.

Adams’s black-and-white photography framed the grandeur of the mountainous West in stark, unembellished terms. Yet without color, a coolness loiters, untouched by human sentiment or warmth. As an unabashed environmentalist, maybe that was his point, the majesty of the outdoors was diminished by human presence. In black-and-white, the wilderness remained unsullied and alone.

But to Claude Monet (1840-1926), founding French Impressionist, color and light, was everything in his eye. Color defined his paintings, professing that “Color is my day-long obsession, (my) joy…,” he confessed. Color was also a constant burden that he carried with him throughout the day and into the night, lamenting, “Colors pursue me like a constant worry. They even worry me in my sleep.” He lived his aphorism: “Paint what you really see, not what you think you ought to see…but the object enveloped in sunlight and atmosphere, with the blue dome of Heaven reflected in the shadows.” His reality was light and color with a human warming touch.

Adams and Monet’s genius were partially contained in their ability to use light to capture the essence of the landscape, but Monet brought the soul along in living color. Monet’s creed, “I want the unobtainable. Other artists paint a bridge, a house, a boat, and that’s the end…. I want to paint the air which surrounds the bridge, the house, the boat, the beauty of the air in which these objects are located…”

Color is a defining quality of humanity. Without color life would be as impersonal as Adam’s landscapes, beautiful, majestic even, but without passion or pulse. A sharp, stark visual with little nuance, no emotional gradations from torment to ecstasy, just shadows and form.

Understanding color was not just a technical revelation for 19th-century French artists, it was a revolutionary awakening, a new approach to how the eye viewed color and light. The Impressionists and Pointillists brought a new perception to their canvases. And the catalyst for this leap away from the tired styles of Academic Art and Realism was Michel Eugene Chevreul, a chemist whose insight into color harmony and contrast inspired the Monets and Seurats to pursue something radically different in the world of art. His chromatic studies inspired them to paint not for the viewer’s eye, but with it, transforming perception from passive witness into an active collaboration between painter, subject, and observer.

Chevreul’s breakthrough was deceivingly simple. Colors are not static blots on a canvas but relational objects that come alive when surrounded by other hues of the spectrum. A hue in isolation is perceived differently than when seen next to another. Red deepens next to green; blue pulsates with enthusiasm against orange. This principle, simultaneous contrast, revealed that the eye does not just passively accept what it sees but synthesizes it to a new reality.

Chevreul’s theories on complementary colors and optical mixing laid the foundation for painters to forsake rigid outlines, often rendered in the non-color of black, and embrace Impressionism: not merely an art style, but a promise of perception, a collaboration between painter and viewer. Rather than blending pigments on a palette, artists like Monet and Seurat placed discrete strokes side by side, allowing the viewer’s mind to complete the image.

This optical mixing is a product of the way the eye and the brain process the various wavelengths of white light. When complementary colors are adjacent to one another the brain amplifies the differences. Neurons in the eye are selfish. When a photoreceptor is stimulated by a color it suppresses adjacent receptors sharpening the boundaries and contrast. And the brain interprets what it sees based on context. Which is why sometimes we see what is not there or misinterpret what is there, such as faces on the surface of Mars or UFOs streaking through the sky. There is also a theory that the brain processes color in opposing pairs. When it sees red it suppresses green creating a vibrancy of complementary colors when placed together.

The Impressionists intensely debated Chevreul’s concepts then they brushed them to life with paint. They painted not concrete objects, but forms shaped by light and color. Haystacks and parasols within a changing mood of contrasting color. . Interpretation by the eye of the beholder.

Chevreul’s collected research, The Principles of Harmony and Contrast of Colors and Their Applications to the Arts, originally published in 1839, remains in print nearly two centuries later.

Source: The Principles of Harmony and Contrast of Colors and Their Applications to the Arts by Michel Eugène Chevreul, 1997 (English Translation). Graphic: Woman with a Parasol by Monet, 1875. National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC. Public Domain.

A Revolution in Paint

6 September 2025 By in Art Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

“One must either be one of a thousand or all alone,” declared Edouard Manet (1832-1883). Critics and even some among the Impressionist circle believed Manet lacked the courage to be truly alone, both with his art and his essence. And they were half right. He was an extrovert, a social creature drawn to the vivacious pulse of Parisian life, its salons, cafes, and couture. He wanted to belong.

Through his art he sought recognition. He wanted not necessarily respect, but rather something simpler: acceptance. Yet they misunderstood his paintings. He was alone. His canvass spoke volumes to him, but the critics saw only muted, unfulfilled talent. Paintings adrift in a stylistic wilderness. The arbitrators of French taste, the Salon jury, repeatedly rejected him. In 1875 upon viewing The Laundress, one jury exploded: “That’s enough. We have given M. Manet ten years to amend himself. He hasn’t done so. On the contrary, he is sinking deeper.”

Manet longed for approval, and he could deliver what the critics wanted, but the moment he picked up his brush something else took over. He painted what he saw, but never fully controlled the production. His canvases resisted labels. A modern Romantic, a Naturalist with a Realist bent, urban but Impressionistic. A cypher to the critics but true to himself.

Like his friend Degas, he painted contemporary city life. The country landscapes of Monet, Renoir, and Pissarro couldn’t hold him. The color and light of the Impressionists intrigued him briefly, but stark lighting and unconventional perspective held him fast. He used broad quick solid brush strokes and flat, cutout forms.

Manet’s style was rebellion. The critics sensed it, and hated it, but they never understood it. He couldn’t digest academic art, so revered by the Salon. His mutiny was expressed through paint, not polemic. His only verbal defense was a cryptic comment that “anything containing the spark of humanity, containing the spirit of the age, is interesting.”

Nowhere is humanity, the spirit of the age, more hauntingly distilled than his masterpiece, his Chef-d’oeuvre: Berthe Morisot with a Bouquet of Violets. Dressed in black, her face half in shadow, Morisot peers questioningly at the viewer, asking what comes next. Manet paints what he sees. And he sees the mystery of femininity. Her green eyes painted black providing an opacity to her gaze, deepening the ambiguity: a comicality behind an expression of curiosity.

Critic Paul Valery wrote, “I do not rank anything in Manet’s work higher than a certain portrait of Berthe Morisot dated 1872.” He likened it to Vermeer, but with more spontaneity that makes this painting forever fresh. It is a timeless, loving portrait that transcends style.

Source: The World of Manet: 1832-1883 by Pierre Schneider, 1968. Graphic: Berthe Morisot with a Bouquet of Violets by Edouard Manet, 1872. Musee d’Orsay, Paris. Public Domain.

Windows into the Soul

4 August 2025 By in Art Tags: , , , , , , Leave a comment

Francisco de Goya, court painter to the late 18th century Spanish royalty, was no great admirer nor groveling sycophant of his patrons. He portrayed them, literally and figuratively as pretentious hypocrites and regal bores. Somehow, he was able to convince the king and queen that his paintings embodied their imagined over-hyped majesty. They did, just not in the way the royal couple envisioned.  Goya sold the fiction ‘the king has no clothes but isn’t he marvelous’ with the aptness of Hans Christian Andersen, and it likely paid handsomely.

Modern portraitists of the rich and famous seem to follow a similar creed. A veiled contempt that comes through in their brushwork.  Faces frozen in contempt for the world beyond the palace, bodies wrapped in pop-art symbolism, palates of unmistakable gauche screeching, all undermining an uplifting narrative of benevolent power and grace. And, like Goya, they persuade their patrons that all is light and beauty, even though the cracks and shadows are front and center.

A portrait is not just posture, paint, and brushwork; it is an appointment with truth. Maybe just one minor truth, but truth none-the-less. The true artist illuminates the soul where he finds it. An artist’s symbolic performance can flourish in irrelevance of style, but the truth must come out.

Kehinde Wiley’s 2018 portrait of Barack Obama is a curious specimen. It goes beyond tradition into overt symbolism that lands in a duality of truth. It’s a disruptive panel bordering on cartoonish messaging. Botanical motifs of chrysanthemums and lilies in the background, engulfing Obama seated on a wooden chair with six fingers. A portrait not of a President but a topiary clipped into a pose of nonchalance and a distant soul focused on…nothing. The overall effect is one of mockery. Is Wiley mocking the President or is the President mocking his audience, maybe both. Wiley sold it as an informal symbol of a great man but maybe he was painting what he saw. A man whose legacy, much like the foliage behind him, now blooming with grandeur but fading to irreverence over time.

Compare this to Jonathan Yeo’s two portraits of King Charles III and Camilla. The former awash in crimson ambiguity, with vague lines of demarcation. Its symbolism is gaudy and obtuse: the lone butterfly, the seeping reds, the gaze misplaced: together, a haunting emergence from a bloody mess. A reliance on cryptic visual metaphors over soulful revelation. A painting wishing to express depth, and it does, but as a downward drift into circles of Dante rather than a royal crimson of empire. Yeo does not explain much of his trajectory of the portrait. He seems satisfied to leave the interpretation to others. Camilla says it captures him perfectly. But what it captures is not a dignified, confident king, but one who bartered his soul for the crown which Yeo captured impeccably, consciously or not.

Yeo’s 2014 portrait of Camilla, HRH The Duchess of Cornwall, compliments his painting of King Charles: another study of a lost soul. A picture of non-essence. A painting of emotional neglect. Blotches of earth tones for blood and straight lines of iron and fog for character and birthright. In the background vertical lines of changing width suggestive of a perspective view of Camilla sitting in the corner of a prison cell, trapped in a unwanted life, with sub-horizontal lines crossing her clothing like lines of filtered light originating from a broken, tilted structure of casements in disrepair. Windows into a soul without balance or integrity. A blotchy face, pressed lips and the piercing eyes of disgust are the caricature of woman who finds the world a bore and the artist gives wholehearted ascent to her wishes.

Yeo’s portraits of the royal dyad are of tragic symmetry. Charles as an entitled blood-soaked monarch, lost in a mythic realm of post over duty. Camilla is a shadow brought along for form without script, shadow without light.

Each of the three portraits in the triptych, at first blush, are merely lacking in technique or likeness and immensely soulless. With further exposure and examination, the artists have captured their subject’s essence. They are gauche and grotesque, but the painter’s truth is bleeding through. They portray their subjects as an antithesis to their public persona. Wiley’s Obama is lost in symbolic foliage, Yeo’s Charles stands embalmed in a crimson history of unrestrained desire, and Camilla appears accidentally sentenced to royalty by an artist barely able to contain his disdain.

Symbolism, when wielded well, lives in the background, like Botticelli’s Primavera, where flora guides the viewer through renewal without eclipsing the figures themselves. Art that elevates does so through integration, not ornamentation. Symbolism must serve beauty, and beauty must point toward goodness. But if the truth isn’t of beauty, what then?

True portraiture captures the soul and, if need be, is not afraid to offend. It does not flatter blindly, nor does it subtract without cause. It seeks something elemental. It lets the canvas speak, the brush guide, and the palate reverberate with reality. Great portraits are a reckoning of the soul, not decoration of form.

Graphics: President Obama by Kehinde Wiley, 2018. King Charles and Camilla by Jonathan Yeo, 2023 and 2014. All copyrighted. Used for purposes of critique.

Goya: Beauty Unmasked

16 July 2025 By in Art Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

Francisco de Goya, a late 18th to early 19th century Spanish painter of the Romantic school, is a fascinating study in evolving style, a visual descent into deafness, isolation, and existential dread, though more philosophically, his lifelong disillusionment with civilization’s failure to embody the Enlightenment’s promised ideals of reason, justice, and human dignity. His art swung like a pendulum, from crisp detail to loose rendering to the raw emotion of a mind increasingly separated from reason.

As a court painter to the Spanish monarchy, Goya’s portraits became canvases for cynicism, derision, and paradox. He offered scathing critiques hidden beneath formal composition, and the court loved him for it. They mistook his precision for praise, even as he quietly dismantled their poise and splendor.

His colossal canvas Charles IV of Spain and His Family (110 × 132”) does not illustrate majesty or brilliance; it immerses the senses in familial estrangement and tedium. Awkward poses; lifeless gazes; a composition emotionally hollowed, drained of vitality and intent. These are not confident rulers but bored figures waiting for the dinner bell to summon a distraction: ceremonial chatter over fish soup and presentation of chocolates. In the background of the painting, Goya includes himself, brush in hand, an artist caught in the act of witnessing. It was a nod to Velázquez’s Las Meninas; Goya once said he “had only three masters: Nature, Velázquez, and Rembrandt”; but here, reverence turns to scorn. Goya didn’t flatter his subjects; he distorted the real, undermining not his own reverence for form, but theirs. His royal figures do not speak; they stare blankly, confirming that the emperor wears no clothes. He looked beneath the surface in search of beauty and instead found something far less attractive, an insignificant echo of a tired reality.

Goya’s notion of beauty, conventionally understood, remained intact. But in his subjects, he saw hypocrisy, a lie, elegantly draped, concealing the moral disfigurement beneath. This critique finds haunting expression in his etching Nadie se Conoce (“Nobody recognizes himself”), Plate No. 6 of Los Caprichos, where masked carnival patrons drift like phantoms of untruth. On the reverse of the plate, Goya inscribed his chilling reflection: “The world is a mask; the face, the costume, and the voice are all feigned. Everyone wants to appear what they are not, everyone deceives, and no one knows himself.”

Goya painted the existential. His late works: The Disasters of War, The Black Paintings, The Madhouse, Saturn Devouring His Son, reveal more of his suffering psyche than his technical ability. Anthony Cascardi argues in Francisco de Goya and the Art of Critique that Goya’s entire oeuvre is a sustained confrontation with Enlightenment ideals. Reason and beauty dissolve under his brush. Societal decay no longer whispers, it screams.

In style, Goya stands at the edge of the Impressionist movement, decades before its arrival. His gestural freedom, emotional brushwork, and psychological texture prefigure the rawness of Manet and even hint at Bacon’s existential grotesque. Paint becomes not just medium but mood, an extension of perception unraveling. Form overrides detail. But Goya moved to a darker rhythm, his brushwork shades where theirs shimmered. Where Monet dances with light, Goya wrestles with darkness. The Impressionists chose beauty over Goya’s emotional appeal, which ultimately served to mock his subjects’ feigned grace.

Unlike Picasso’s theatrical mockery, Goya’s assessment is surgical. He dispenses with pretense and seeks truth, not a truth easily embraced, but one rooted in the soul’s unpleasant, hidden recesses. Picasso once echoed a similar sentiment in a 1923 interview with The Arts: “Art is a lie that makes us realize truth, at least the truth that is given us to understand.” Art distorts to reveal what reality conceals, truth not always visible, but deeply felt. Superficial beauty without the soul is not art, it is a lie.

In contrast to today’s symbolic excess, where the subject is buried beneath concept and symbols, Goya’s portraits are revealing to the point of brutality. He doesn’t idealize; he removes the layers of deceit. The beast within becomes the subject. His cynicism is constant, his honesty sometimes absurd, but always truthful.

Goya takes a moral stance. His genius lies in the ability to paint the conscious with the unconscious, to render not just what he saw, but what he felt and feared, the form with the spiritual. His style matched his psyche. He painted the perceived rot beneath grandeur, the weariness behind powdered wigs, the absurdity beneath court spectacle.

Goya’s fame was built and balanced on a knife’s edge: he gave the rich what they wanted in form, while seeding beneath it a quiet, damning truth. That duality, beauty as lure, truth as blade, is Goya’s lasting contribution to art.

Graphic: Self-Portrait at 69 Years, by Goya, 1815. Museo del Prado-Madrid.

The Many Colors of Slavery

27 May 2025 By in Art, Novel, Philosophy, Philosophy Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

“Those who deny freedom to others deserve it not for themselves.”—Abraham Lincoln

“Whoever does not have two-thirds of his day for himself, is a slave, whatever he may be: a statesman, a businessman, an official, or a scholar.” — Friedrich Nietzsche

As the great continental glaciers receded at the end of the Pleistocene, fertile land emerged, allowing for the transition from hunting and gathering to agriculture. Farming was labor-intensive, and with the rise of permanent settlements came the demand for constrained and controlled labor. Slavery, likely with first roots in Mesopotamia, though independent manifestation by the Pharaohs in ancient Egypt and other early civilizations, made it ubiquitous, and it has never disappeared.

From the bonded laborers of the Pharaohs to the structured servitude in Greece and Rome, from the transatlantic trade that brutalized African populations to the modern exploitation of migrant workers in sweatshops and the sex trades, slavery has evolved rather than vanished. Each era refines its own form of servitude; forced labor, insurmountable debt, bureaucratic entrapment, or corporate exploitation. It is a practice as ancient as prostitution and taxation, deeply embedded in human society, yet constantly shifting into less visible but equally insidious forms. As long as slavery remains profitable its existence will continue to indelibly stain humanities’ collective soul.

Slavery, and its ultimate contrast, freedom, was a persistent theme in the works of sci-fi author Robert A. Heinlein. With a piercing social awareness, Heinlein, who, in his early years, was described by Isaac Asimov as a ‘flaming liberal’—picked up the theme and horrors of slavery with his 1957 juvenile novel “Citizen of the Galaxy”; bringing the many forms of servitude into the personal history of a precocious kidnapped boy named Thorby. Citizen of the Galaxy is a planet-hopping, spacefaring critique of oppression, class structure, and the nebulous concept of freedom. Heinlein crafts a future where contrasting societies across the galaxy reflect varying degrees of servitude and autonomy, if not necessarily total freedom. Man rarely allows himself complete independence.

Heinlein through the lens of Thorby explores the various shades of slavery, beginning with the brutal, controlling enslavement and continuing to more subtle forms that the individual may not even recognize as confinement. (Partial plot giveaways beyond this point.) Escaping his initial enslavement by the graces of a kindly, strict, but loveable old cripple named Baslim, Thorby moves into a hierarchical, structured existence of spacefaring traders then onto a self-imposed, due to a thirst for justice, straitjacket of a corporate bureaucracy on his birth planet of Terra. A life story of how control can be imposed by others or by ourselves.

As Heinlein’s social perspectives evolved, his libertarian leanings took greater prominence in Citizen of the Galaxy. Through Thorby’s life journey, Heinlein emphasizes personal autonomy, resistance to tyranny, and the moral duty to fight injustice. Baslim, Thorby’s first mentor, symbolizes the idea that one person can stand against oppression and make a difference, even if it takes many miles and years to materialize.

This theme runs through much of Heinlein’s work, but here, it’s especially poignant because Thorby is powerless for much of the novel, making his eventual triumph all the more meaningful. Heinlein’s novels, Farnham’s Freehold, Friday, and Time Enough for Love, explore slavery and control, reinforcing humanity’s inherent need for freedom, or at the very least, breathing space.

Source: Citizen of the Galaxy by Robert A. Heinlein, 1957. Graphic: Joseph Sold into Slavery by Friedrich Overbeck, 1816. Vanderbilt University. Public Domain.

Kinder Surrealism

21 May 2025 By in Art, Art Tags: , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

“I feel the need of attaining the maximum of intensity with the minimum of means. It is this which has led me to give my painting a character of even greater bareness.” Joan Miro.

Joan Miró (zhwahn mee-ROH, 1893–1983), a Catalan artist, began his career exploring Expressionism and Cubism before rejecting the rational world, which he found suffocating possibly depressing. He turned inward, merging an abstract dreamworld with Surrealism, ultimately evolving into a minimalist, conveying deep meaning through sparse, naïve brushstrokes and colors.

Symbolism became his hallmark; for Miró, the image was secondary to the message which was always open to interpretation. Initially inspired by Van Gogh and Cézanne, he later grew enamored with Picasso and Dalí, but it was Sigmund Freud who awakened his subconscious, plunging him into the mysteries of dreams and hallucinations. In pursuit of these visions, Miró intentionally induced states of hunger and exhaustion, risking madness to capture the fleeting essence of his dreamscapes. His dreams produced a primitive, childlike, whimsical innocence, with no explicit instructions for interpretation.

Miró’s early masterpiece, The Farm (1921–22), serves as a biographical snapshot of his life at 29, capturing the essence of his Spanish countryside upbringing and young adult life. This highly detailed precursor to his later Cubist and abstract works was purchased by Ernest Hemingway for 5,000 francs as gift to his wife.

By 2024, Miró’s works continue to command prices that place him among the top 25 most valuable artists worldwide. His Peinture (Étoile Bleue), or Painting (Blue Star), one of his best-known dreamscapes, sold for £23.6 million at a London Sotheby’s auction in 2012, equivalent to $37 million at the time, or approximately $31.5 million in today’s dollars.

Source: Miró by Gaston Diehl, 1979.  Graphic: The Farm (1921–1922), National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C. (Public Domain)

Swollen Caricatures

8 April 2025 By in Art, Art, Biography Tags: , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

Fernando Botero Angulo, 1932-2023, was a Columbian practitioner of figuraism in paint and sculpture, a style where reality is discernable but changed to reflect the artist’s interpretation of his or her world. His unique style has taken on a life of its own and has become known as Boterismo where he exaggerates reality by inflating his objects, mimicking a fat farm on a carbo diet, injecting, according to some, a humor inherent in his plus sized models but it all seems so melodramatic. A melancholic need to explore life’s downsides, forcing the viewer to share not the beauty of life but its complexities and vulnerabilities. There is no happiness in his paintings, just a humorless life.

His style, not far removed from Legar’s Tubism, was the artist’s attempt to find himself and to relieve the self-inflicted anxiety that came from his mode of outward expression not matching his inward vision. He states that “…the moment comes when the painter manages to master the technique and at the same time all of his ideas become clear: at that point his desire to transpose them faithfully onto the canvas becomes so clear and compelling that painting becomes joy itself.”

Botero’s 1999 painting, “The Death of Pablo Escobar”, a mafioso interpretation of Chagall’s “Fidler on the Roof”, was an attempt to capture the violence that the drug kingpin brought to Columbia and the world. Standing atop Columbian society, Escobar was laid low by his chosen swordian method of rule: bullets. The artist’s son Juan Carlos Botero states that his father wanted to reflect on the magnitude of the tragedy that Escobar’s actions meant for Columbia, but he also magnified the beast in the man, reminding the world that Columbia and Escobar were once synonymous. A cruel man ruling over a dysfunctional society that he created.

Source: Botero by Rudy Chiappini, 2015. Graphic: The Death of Pablo Escobar by Botero, 1999.

Paris in the Evening

31 March 2025 By in Art, Art Tags: , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

Henri Toulouse-Lautrec, born in 1864, was a unique figure among French nobility and artists. Despite his diminutive stature and aristocratic lineage tracing back to Charlemagne, Lautrec defied conventional expectations with his eccentric, mischievous character, and individualistic style. While influenced by the Impressionists, exemplified by masters like Monet and Degas, he later embraced the Post-Impressionist movement alongside Gauguin and Cézanne, leaving a distinctive mark on the art world. Post-Impressionists diverged from their predecessors by infusing their work with deeper emotion, personal experiences, and greater individualism. Their bold brushwork, exaggerated colors, and unconventional techniques laid the groundwork for the future, anticipating Expressionism.

Parisian nightlife was a cornerstone of Lautrec’s art, and At the Moulin Rouge: The Dance stands as his most famous painting, portraying fashionable society and featuring many of his friends and family in a composition of overlapping planes with a perspective that subtly defies reality and logic. The artwork is divided into three distinct planes. The static background features figures such as Lautrec’s father, the poet Yeats, and Jane Avril, a renowned can-can dancer nicknamed “Crazy Jane,” who was both a close friend of Lautrec and a frequent model. In the center, the action unfolds as Valentin le Désossé, a gentleman in a top hat, instructs a cabaret dancer in new steps. The foreground is a detailed study of a contrasting passivity from the central swirl. The viewer’s eye swings between the galloping dancer in earthy tones accented by orange stockings and the quiet, introspective woman in pink.

Lautrec intentionally distorted the painting’s perspective, evident in the mismatched linear lines of the floorboards and fluid, swaying shadows that resemble a confused liquid more than lighting effects. These artistic choices enhance the surreal atmosphere of the scene, amplifying the contrast between the hyper-dynamic dancer and the passive, tranquil surroundings. Through At the Moulin Rouge: The Dance, Lautrec masterfully evokes the opposing vibrant activity and a ‘to be seen’ spirits of Parisian nightlife, providing a vivid outline while inviting viewers to interpret the finer details themselves.

Source: Toulouse-Lautrec by Doughlas Cooper, 1982. Graphic: At the Moulin Rouge: The Dance, Toulouse-Lautrec, 1890. Philadelphia Museum of Art. Public Domain.