The Deceitful Artwork: Beautiful Falsehood or False Beauty?

• Author: Groarke, Louis

Formalists such as Dziemidok, Greenberg, Fry, Bell, Prall, Fried, Fiedler, Kant and others separate the aesthetic and the ethical. In this article I argue that moral considerations may play a decisive role in our appreciation of particular works of art. My argument involves a close examination of a particular painting, La mort de Marat (The Death of Marat) by the French painter Jacques-Louis David. (See page 72 below.)

A Brief Overview of Formalism

Bohdan Dziemidok, in a scholarly paper, has proposed an "aesthetic formalism" based on the primacy or exclusivity of the perceptual or sensual structure of art. [1] Invoking David Prall's notion of "aesthetic surface," Dziemidok favourably reviews the claim that "the aesthetic strictly (properly understood) is what is apprehended directly and immediately by sensation." [2] This formalist view of painting is hardly unprecedented.

Willful reductionism?

Although Clement Creenberg complained that the term "formalism" had "acquired ineradicably vulgar tones in English," [3] a similar emphasis on the perceptual aspects of painting led to his indefatigable defence of abstract art. [4] Greenberg goes so far as to recommend that we ignore the subject matter of representational work. He points out that Baudelaire was better able to appreciate the paintings of Delacroix when "he was still too far away ... to make out the images [they] contained, when [they] were still only a blur of colours," [5] and that "critics and connoisseurs ... consciously dismissed from their minds the connotations of Rubens' nudes when assessing and experiencing the final worth of his art." [6]

Clive Bell, the famous proponent of "significant form," likewise argued that the perceptual aspects of a work are what count. Bell distinguishes between pictures that "convey information" and works of art. The former "leave untouched our aesthetic emotions because it is not their forms but the ideas or information suggested or conveyed that affect us." [7] According to Bell, "To appreciate a work of art we need bring nothing but a sense of form and colour and a knowledge of three-dimensional space." [8] "Subject matter is unimportant. It is the formal elements of pictorial design which engender an emotional or perceptual experience that is valued in and of itself." [9]

English art critic and painter Roger Fry also identified perceptual experience as uniquely and properly aesthetic. Fry limits aesthetic appreciation to an awareness of "order and variety in the sensuous plane." The artist "arrange[s] the sensuous presentment of objects ... with an order and appropriateness altogether beyond what Nature herself provides." [10] The connoisseur, in recognising this superior order, enjoys an exalted emotional state that arises solely from the visual facts of perception.

The views of Dziemidok, Prall, Greenberg, Bell and Fry echo the thought of earlier formalists like Conrad Fiedler, Robert von edler Zimmermann [11] and Eduard Hanslick. [12] Inspired by Kant and writing in 1867, Fiedler identifies artistic creation with "perceptual experience." According to Fiedler, such experience is "an impartial, free activity, which serves no purpose beyond itself." [13] Fiedler dismisses the subject matter of representative work. That part of an artwork "that can be grasped conceptually and expressed in verbal terms does not represent the artistic substance which owes its existence to the creative powers of an artist." [14] For the true artist, "the world is but a thing of appearances." In true artistic appreciation, "interest in literary content vanishes."

Stefan Morawski has argued that Fiedler and Hanslick are the true authors of an artistic formalism that is, more commonly, attributed to Kant. [15] If, however, Kant does not focus on art but, more broadly, on our appreciation of natural beauty, he does argue that aesthetic judgements are rooted in the immediate sensible particular and must be "disinterested" or disengaged from considerations of subject matter. [16] As Paul Crowther explains:

In the case of [Kant's category of] pure aesthetic judgement ... our pleasure in beauty is purely a function of how the object appears to the senses. What kind of thing the object is, its relevance for our practical interests ... whether the object is real or not, are [irrelevant] questions. [17]

Modern Art as Contributing to the Rise of Formalism

The rise of formalism in modern aesthetics was partly due to the nature of contemporary practice. In divesting their canvases of subject matter, modern abstract painters emphasized form and repudiated any overt preoccupation with content. Artists and critics of various schools--abstract expressionists, minimalists, action painters, conceptual artists and so on--argued that the business of painting was not mimesis (imitation). Art made available an experience of pure aesthetic facts which were valuable in themselves. It was only secondarily, in some very subordinate way, a means of reproducing something else in the outside world. When it came to art criticism, questions about subject matter were at best a distraction.

Emphasis on form a kind of purism.

This emphasis on form was championed as a kind of purism. When we pay attention to the formal qualities of a painting, we experience the painting itself; when we pay attention to the subject matter, we focus on something outside the painting. Art critic Fairfield Porter, for example, in a typical statement, confidently proclaims the superiority of American non-objective painting because it "stands by itself, and one remembers it on its own terms." [18] According to Porter, European abstract painting is of poorer quality because it still refers to something that exists outside the canvas. [19] It would seem to follow, on this logic, that representative painting is of even poorer quality than European abstract art, because, in an even more necessary and obvious way, it "still ... stands for something outside itself." This is, of course, to overlook the possibility that some kind of external reference may enrich rather than impoverish the meaning and power of particular works of art.

What Is the Role of Morality in Art?

In restricting the spectator's attention to considerations of shapes, lines, textures, values and colours, formalists eliminate any consideration of moral content from the act of aesthetic appreciation. If a painting portrays morally offensive subject matter, this will not detract from its aesthetic value, for it is only its formal qualities that make it a worthwhile piece of art. Perhaps this is what Greenberg means when he (rather obliquely) remarks that "Art can get away with anything." [20] Other formalists are more explicit.

Dziemidok claims that when we look at an artwork from an aesthetic point of view, "we consider irrelevant its pernicious or beneficial influence on man." [21] Bell insists: "Once we have judged a thing a work of art, we have ... put it beyond the reach of the moralist." [22] And Fry, in a succinct and definitive phrase, declares that "In art we have no moral responsibility." [23]

Formalism precludes any union of the moral and the aesthetic. Kant does argue that our capacity to feel pure aesthetic pleasure renders us more susceptible to moral feeling and leads to the development of greater moral awareness, whereas Bell claims that artworks are a "direct and powerful" means to the good. [24] If, however, formalists argue that art is a moral preoccupation, they exclude moral considerations from specific acts of aesthetic or artistic appreciation.

I believe that all works of art raise moral issues, directly or indirectly. The moral and the aesthetic go together in all art criticism above a certain level. Even the formalist account, which derives ultimately from Plotinus, could be fleshed out in moral terms. In this article, however, I want to propose a specific counter-example to formalism. As we shall see, David's painting La mart de Marat cannot be properly appreciated in purely formal terms, in part because there are overwhelming moral issues which arise from any informed contemplation of the work.

A Criticism of Formalism

Formalism has, of course, its critics. Crispin Sartwell writes: "The program of critical formalism ... is a classic case of over-enthusiasm. To claim that the presentational content of a work is never a significant aesthetic feature of the work ... is ludicrous." [25] Sartwell points to art forgeries as paradigmatic counterexamples to formalist theories. Suppose an original painting and a forgery are visually (i.e., formally) indistinguishable.

That one of the paintings is a forgery ... means that there are innumerable aesthetic differences between the two: for example, one is original, ingenious, a product of the seventeenth century, and a work by Franz Hals, while the other is a slavish copy made in the twentieth century by George Ersatz. [26]

If, however, these objects possess different aesthetic traits, they should elicit different aesthetic responses. It follows that we must pay attention to other factors over and beyond the formal or perceptual qualities of a work when engaged in the act of artistic appraisal.

But Sartwell's criticism is not conclusive. Real-life forgeries usually do present us with an inferior visual effect. More importantly, the formalist can always argue that we disapprove of the forgery on moral rather than aesthetic grounds. We value the original more than the forgery, not because it affords a different aesthetic experience (they are, after all, identical), but because the latter is associated with a sense of moral condemnation. It is like eating a fine meal in a blood-stained execution chamber. Our appetite palls before even the most savoury offering. The problem is not, however, the meal. It is the setting in which the meal is offered.

If, however, formalism can make sense of our reaction to an artistic forgery, it cannot make sense of...