“We have civilization; they have culture. Culture becomes a new name for barbarism.” Terry Eagleton.
A Great Man of Art I knew—flawless liberal reputation, supported Amnesty, PEN—would occasionally kick back in private to praise some sordid celebrity or other: “Of course he threw his enemies to the crocodiles, but what a man!” I suspect his logic ran backward from appearance: “Of course he was a great man! Just look at his barbarity!” He loved Art not in spite of barbarity, but for barbarity’s sake.
I get the same sense reading the latest piece of barbarism from the New York Times.1 The spur is the war against Ukraine; the grounds are a lengthy, shallow analysis of Rubens’ painting of The Horrors of War of 1638, and the critic’s stated intention is to affirm the superiority of pure aesthetic performance over sordid, literal, political art with its low, pedestrian call to do something:
“The best art depicting war matters for its own sake, and its full value lies in a realm beyond communication or advocacy. Implicitly, we already know this.”
Explicitly, we don’t. And the writer ensures that we don’t. His interpretation of the Rubens painting has no factual basis, and few facts. Once again the New York Times falls back on the feuilleton, the French and German tradition of short articles that dole out gossip, personal opinion and, of course, art criticism, as a substitute for accountability. Given that hard facts are easier to come by today than at any time in History, it's a difficult position to maintain, but our critic holds the line, denouncing “the daily tide of images and insanities” […] "more than a stream of words and images,” […] “an undammable river of content.” His own task, he claims, is “made harder with every meme-burst and iPhone rollout.” Of course the Times opposes meme-bursts, rollouts, Twitter, and the like: they serve to expose articles like this one for the farrago they are.
Nevertheless, a distinction must be made between the lies denounced by the Times and the lies of the Times itself. The lies denounced by the Times are acts of commission; the lies of the Times are acts of suppression; they consist, not in misstatement of fact, but in restricting the facts available to the reader, the “Fit to Print” philosophy. This is the inevitable effect of a Positivist ideology: unable to accept the relational truth of data, it must exclude all inconvenient data from its own system of relations. Like a seventeenth-century inquisitor our critic is reduced to keeping his audience in ignorance of Galileo’s work; begging them not to stray into impure thoughts. He reminds me of those museum docents I see scanning through their index cards, so terrified that they’ll be caught saying the wrong thing that they can’t say the right thing any more. Confronted with more and more, they end up with less and less.
Ignorance, recklessness, or contempt for the reader? No choice is less appropriate than Rubens and his paintings to justify the critic’s premiss:
“These war works are not important because they are “topical” — or, to use the vacuous catchphrase of our day, ‘necessary.’ They are important because they reaffirm the place of form and imagination in times that would deny their potentialities.”
It would be hard to find a painting by Rubens that wasn’t necessary or topical, though this hasn’t prevented many from trying. We have plenty of information about his public persona and production but very little that reveals a life of the “imagination.” Even among those paintings he produced for himself we are hard put to detect an individual sensibility. (His drawings are another matter.) The Met’s self-portrait with wife and child (Rubens, Helena Fourment and Their Son Frans) is not so much a testament to love and concern as carefully staged bid to ensure the legitimate rights of his progeny.
Rubens was a successful man of his time; and that time, the Counter-Reformation, remains unsurpassed even to this day for the degree of control attempted by religious and political authorities over each individual psyche. It was his skill at evading surveillance that made Rubens so prized, not only as a painter but even more so as a roving diplomat among the courts of Europe, often charged with delicate peace missions, attempting to patch up relations among the warring crowns of Europe. Paintings like The Horrors of War must be understood today as they were then: not as personal statements but extensions of his diplomatic activities. Kristen Lohse Belkins, in an attempt to drape some individualistic flesh over the hard, protruding bones of Rubens’ own careerism, suggests The Horrors of War cannot have had the same political urgency as other war works since Florence was not at war when the painting was executed, at the behest of the Grand-Duke of Tuscany, Ferdinando de’ Medici.2 Nevertheless, every such painting must be understood a priori to be meant to glorify the ruler for whom it was intended. The Horrors of War is not painted to denounce the practice of war, but to praise the ruler who has kept his people out of war. How else to explain the figure of Venus as the focus of the canvas, sex and voluptuousness as a a symbol of the blessings of Peace? As a topos (Ackiespeak for “meme”) this one’s not unusual, witness Shakespeare’s image of “grim-visaged war” who “capers nimbly in a lady’s chamber” in the opening monologue of Richard III.
Yet our critic falls for it like a teenage boy:
“Look past the faces, look to the bodies [...] The big gods writhe and corkscrew as they tumble from left to right. The lesser, innocent figures skid and shatter. here it’s as if paint itself has gone to war…. the best art depicting war matters for its own sake.”
Panicky, voluptuous, half-naked women in rich, sexy colors; children trampled underfoot. War and destruction. What a man!
As Rubens’ near-contemporary, Blaise Pascal, put it, “What vanity is painting, which draws admiration by the likeness of things that one doesn’t admire in themselves!”3 The philosopher-mathematician was reacting to the Baroque practice of art laid out by the Catholic Church at the Council of Trent: all means, fair and sexy, bloody or violent, were encouraged to draw the faithful to the image. Rubens was admired for his mastery of the means, not for the meanings themselves. The man could make you lust for a ham sandwich with golden hair—oh, right.
It’s hard to endorse this critic’s claim that the purpose of “Rubensian allegory” (not to mention the purpose of sexy nudes caked in lush colors) is to dispense us from engaging. He’s simply lifted Matthew Arnold’s injunction that the purpose of Culture itself is to prevent us from political engagement and applied it, grotesquely, to Rubens—a very poor choice. (There are other borrowings from Arnold in this article, not so much unacknowledged by the author, as unknown.) Art, for our critic, as for my Artworld friend, is not relief from horrors but an excuse for horrors, and in this case the horrors perpetrated by the Russian State on the People of Ukraine. Unsurprisingly, this article is in line with the Party Line at the New York Times: to resolutely deplore the War against Ukraine while resolutely throwing up one’s hands at the inevitable need for reconciliation with the Russian State.
A few decades after Rubens’ death the Duke of Parma, concerned about war encroaching on his territory, sent an emissary to the Duke of Vendôme, commander of the French armies. The Frenchman received the emissary while sitting on the can: « il se torchait le cul ». The emissary was about to walk off in disgust when his assistant rushed up and—“Culo de angelo!”—kissed the commander you know where and you know when but you don’t want to know. Within a few years the emissary had made it to Prime Minister. An inspiration for every writer at the New York Times.
Next week: The Thomas Crow Affair.
What do the Salons of the French Revolution share with a hipster gallery show on Ave. C?
Jason Farago, “The Role of Art in a Time of War.” New York Times, July 28, 2022. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/28/arts/design/ukraine-war-art-culture.html
Kristin Lohse Belkin, Rubens (New York: Phaidon Press, 1998), 285-291.
Pensées; quoted in John D. Lyons, "Speaking in Pictures, Speaking of Pictures: Problems of Representation in the Seventeenth Century," in John D. Lyons and Stephens G. Nichols Jr., ed, Mimesis: from Mirror to Method, Augustine to Descartes (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1982), 169.