Scandal
Scandals bring about downfalls, don’t they? In the world of business and politics (certain twenty-first-century American presidents aside) this is the general rule. When was the last time you heard about a scandal that was not detrimental, much less truly benefited the individual implicated? Scandals can sometimes be beneficial in that they can summon up enough fury that a necessary sea change comes about. The scandal around the 1986 Woburn, Massachusetts, water contamination case that led to the book and film A Civil Action is but one such example. When the story broke, it triggered outrage.1 The public rightly considered it scandalous that major companies were dumping toxic chemicals that entered the groundwater and led to numerous illnesses and deaths among residents. The scandal severely damaged the companies involved: It made the companies household names, but in an entirely and lasting negative context. It also led to a broader crackdown on industrial chemical disposal—a good thing for all involved, aside from those found guilty and the bottom line for major companies with toxic materials to get rid of.
A more recent example may be found in the 2015 Volkswagen emissions affair, in which around eleven million cars were programmed to misrepresent their emissions levels to appear ecologically acceptable when they were not.2 This was clearly an illegal action that a major company sought to get away with. When it came out, there was widespread moral outrage, and laws had been broken. The result was 100 percent disastrous for Volkswagen—the CEO resigned, governments investigated, $19 billion was spent fixing the issue. The brand was hugely damaged, though it was established and powerful enough, and the damage-control PR response was sufficiently believed that the company remains a power player in the long run. The affair remains a black mark on the company, but its sales are back up and the public doesn’t seem particularly bothered anymore.3
These two examples are, of course, unrelated to art, but represent what we tend to associate with the only good that can come of significant scandals (as opposed to gossipy ones driven by curiosity, like the “leaked” sex tapes of quasi celebrities). Outrage leads to punishment of transgressors and hopefully a sea change for the better—certainly no plus for those outed, but perhaps a resulting positive shift more globally.
Politicians and public figures seem to suffer from scandal. Anthony Weiner’s sending photos of his nether regions, Harvey Weinstein’s sexual assaults, Mel Gibson’s antisemitic outbursts, Lance Armstrong’s doping. All harmed the one scandalizing, either irrevocably or for an extended period. There are, of course, people who seem to hover through life with a Get Out of Jail Free card in their pockets,4 but it cannot be said that their scandals really benefited them in the long run, merely that they did not suffer repercussions to the level that the objective viewer might deem appropriate. It is important to distinguish scandals from shock. “Accidentally” released sex tapes can make beautiful people who were not previously famous into household names. Most such examples so benefited the naked person featured that they look more like a shock tactic, a publicity stunt. For it to be a scandal, by our definitions, it must lack intentionality on the part of the person at the scandal’s heart.
There are several types of possible reactions to scandal, and they tend to vary based on whether the scandal rises from (A) someone trying to get away with something and having that scheme revealed, (B) someone going about their business and a resulting explosive response seems, to the public, disproportionate or inappropriate, or (C) something private being leaked and resulting in public moral outrage. Outrage is the most frequent response to a scandal, but some “lighter” affairs, particularly those that qualify more as gossip (or sexual escapades) rather than objectively harmful and widespread, can provoke a luscious giggle (“Isn’t that just scandalous,” perhaps mentioned by ladies-who-lunch over their martinis). But whether dealing with lighter gossip or a powerful organization or individual caught trying to get away with something, scandal almost always destroys, doesn’t it?
In art, things function in a different way. Art is its own bizarre microcosm, with rules that follow their own paths. Scandal can help its protagonist by generating promotion—this is the point of intentional actions that shock. Do something that will get you talked about, and you will remain recognized and in the public mind beyond that shock event. But as we will see, scandal—unintentional and apparently detrimental—also seems to help advance the course of art as well as the careers of individual artists.
There are too many examples of art world scandals to attempt an encyclopedic approach. Instead, let us examine a selection of incidents that represent categories of beneficial art scandal.
Guernica and the Monumentalizing of Scandal
An art world example of version A comes in Pablo Picasso’s seminal Guernica. This was a scandal when it came out because it revealed a scandal the perpetrators hoped would be forgotten.
On April 26, 1937, during the Spanish Civil War, a swarm of fighter planes attacked the Basque town of Guernica, killing hundreds of civilians. The town was an important strategic center for the Republican forces, who were fighting against the Nationalist forces, the ultimate victors, led by General Francisco Franco. Guernica was the traditional meeting place for a Basque governmental body, but it was also the last defensible town for the Republicans, standing between Franco’s forces and the Basque capital, Bilbao.
Pablo Picasso, Guernica (1937).
PHOTO COURTESY OF WIKICOMMONS FROM USER LAURA ESTEFANIA LOPEZ.
Franco’s Nationalists were aided by German and Italian Fascists, and it was planes of the Italian Fascist Aviazione Legionaria and the German Luftwaffe Condor Legion that provided the aerial assault ahead of Franco’s infantry, in an attack that was called Operation Rügen. In terms of military history, this was an important strike because the target was not military; it was, rather, a terror bombing assault on civilians in a town with no military presence. The world looked upon the action with horror, recognizing that innocent civilians would not be protected from war. The attackers even chose Monday, the local market day, for the strike, to maximize potential civilian casualties.
By June 1937, Picasso had completed his monumental painting of this attack, Guernica, considered by many to be his greatest painting, for the Exposition Internationale des Arts et Techniques dans la Vie Moderne at the Paris International Exposition, part of the 1937 World’s Fair in Paris. The painting was then sent on a brief world tour, displayed in London and New York. It helped to raise international awareness of the Spanish Civil War and in the process spread Picasso’s fame.5
To talk about war, to prompt change, to get the viewer to engage fully, a more cerebral, less Romantic approach tends to be more effective. As Rene G. Cepeda wrote, Picasso in Guernica used “art as a weapon for social change.”6 In this way, Picasso was Brechtian. The playwright Bertoldt Brecht felt that walloping the audience with emotion resulted in a defensive reaction, a desire to say, “How horrible!” but to then turn away because it is too horrible to engage with. Both Picasso and Brecht used their “soft” weapons—pens and brushes—against Fascism. Cepeda cites Brecht’s text, “In the Fight against Injustice Even Weak Weapons Are of Use.” The paintbrush or pen can be mightier than the sword, provided said sword is not about to strike you and your pen down.
The chaotic nature of the scene depicted can make it difficult to pick out specific figures. The chaos is intentional, and wonderfully evokes the horror and disarray of the attack by disorienting the viewer into sympathy with the victims. The overall feeling of horror and chaos is more important than what the component parts symbolize.7
Picasso shifted through a number of stylistic periods, his work growing ever more abstract. His concept of Cubism, in which naturalistic images (such as still lifes or portraits) are broken up into constituent basic geometric forms that are then shuffled like a dropped deck of cards, later shifted into puttylike shapes and bodies, without weight, with elastic boundaries that could be altered and twisted at Picasso’s will. The goal was to create a work more dynamic, absorbing, and inspiring of wonder than any realistic painting could achieve. For this work, a realistic image of the bombing of the town of Guernica, with corpses and screams in the night, would likely have felt melodramatic, saccharine, difficult to look at. It might have been Romanticized or it might have been so gritty that our reaction would be to shut down our ability to sympathize as a defense mechanism. The figures are almost cartoonish, but then, of course, when you look more closely, when you know the context, they are not. But the childlike abstraction pulls us in, whereas the same subject handled as a photorealist blood-fest would repel us.
Throughout its existence, this painting has been at the heart of drama and controversy. While living in Paris during the Nazi occupation, Picasso was harassed by the Gestapo. In a possibly apocryphal story, one officer is said to have seen a photograph of Guernica in Picasso’s apartment and asked, with disgust, “Did you do that?” Picasso responded, “No, you did.”
Like all great art, the power of Guernica transcends time and can symbolize something current and topical for individuals of any era. During the Vietnam War, the painting became the backdrop for antiwar vigils in the museum. These were quiet, poignant protests against the horrors of war. But in 1974 an Iranian political activist, who claimed to be protesting Richard Nixon’s pardon of William Calley after his role in Vietnam’s My Lai massacre, vandalized the painting, using red spray paint to write “KILL LIES ALL” across it. The paint was easily removed and the work undamaged. The vandal, who ironically later became an art dealer, waxed philosophical when interviewed six years after his attack. When asked why he did it, he said:
I wanted to bring the art absolutely up to date, to retrieve it from art history and give it life. Maybe that’s why the Guernica action remains so difficult to deal with. I tried to trespass beyond that invisible barrier that no one is allowed to cross; I wanted to dwell within the act of the painting’s creation, get involved with the making of the work, put my hand within it and by that act encourage the individual viewer to challenge it, deal with it and thus see it in its dynamic raw state as it was being made, not as a piece of history.8
In this quote, he shows the slanted rationale of so many aggressive political protesters trying to gain attention by scandalizing. He does not possess the subtlety to recognize that Guernica has been alive and pertinent to every generation since its creation and has never been relegated to mere history. And while his action was damnable and, for all he knew, could have ruined the masterpiece forever, the fact that Guernica inspires such passions is a testament to its power and its enduring resonance in all eras.
This spray-paint vandalism was, in itself, a scandal, and interestingly the vandal in question, artist Tony Shafrazi, actually benefited from the publicity that his callous action generated. Shafrazi went on to become an art dealer, but he made his name by attacking Guernica.9 Criminals involved in art seem to reap the same sort of minimal initial negative effects of the scandal around their crime as do artists involved in legal controversies. Such was the case for numerous art forgers, from Eric Hebborn to Wolfgang Beltracchi, to name but a few.10 Criminals involved in trafficking cultural heritage seem to suffer from greater derision (Giacomo Medici and Robert Hecht, for example), but collectors who buy looted art (even if there is a probability that they were aware that what they acquired was looted) tend not to be damaged definitively (with some figures, like Marion True, a curator at the heart of some of the Getty scandals, ostracized by some, defended by others, but still working within the field).11
Picasso’s Cubist abstraction was more powerful and scandalous, at the time, than a naturalistic depiction of the same moment would have been. No naturalistic scene could be as true to the real sensations and feelings of destruction, death, and war as the broken shards of life in Picasso’s Guernica. A portrayal of the gratuitous bombing of the Basque historical town, Picasso’s bent and shattered creatures are made of concentrated pain, which passes on to the viewer, trapped in blocks of line and color, for us always to remember the capability of man to hurt man. It revealed a scandal to many who were unfamiliar with it and created of it a lasting monument so that it would never be forgotten.
In Guernica, an artist made a monument out of a scandalous incident that the perpetrators hoped would be forgotten—forcing us to think deeply about it, to remember, and to forever blame the evil actors in it. There are also incidents in which the larger power attacks artists, a sort of reverse version A, instead of a work of art revealing a horrible travesty pulled off by a larger power (the Fascists who attacked the town of Guernica)—effectively art attacking the dark power. In the following case study, which fits out scandal version B, a well-known artist doing his own thing was attacked by a larger power (those problematic Fascists, once again) and was largely ruined because his art revealed the realities that the larger power wished to smother.
Dix and the Legacy of a Victim of Scandal
The brilliant German printmaker and painter Otto Dix was an established artist and professor at the Art Academy in Dresden. He was not problematic to the Nazis from a racial purity standpoint, and his artistic skill was not in dispute, at least if one were being objective. It was his choice of subject matter and the message it conveyed that led to him being lumped in with Jews, abstract artists, and other modern avant-gardists by the Nazis in the 1930s when they launched a crusade against entartete kunst (“degenerate art”). This became a catchall term for art or artists that did not suit the aesthetic, ideals, or background supported by Nazism—Jews, Catholics, and Slavs were disfavored, but also pure-blooded Germans who worked in styles the Nazi leaders found overly modern. The Nazis preferred a sort of Neoclassical realism that could be used as propaganda: muscly, heroic youths resembling Greek sculptures and showing the inherent superiority of Aryan Germans.
Dix had fought in World War I and was actually a war hero—he voluntarily enlisted, earned an Iron Cross, and was wounded in the neck. The experience, understandably enough, scarred him. He was interested in showing the dark, debilitating, futile side of war. His figures are grotesque, effete, damaged, sometimes overtly, including veterans mutilated by the war. The Nazi Party, however, thought that “all art should present the German values of Kinder, Küche, Kirche”12 (literally, “children, cooking, and church” but meaning family, home, and faith), though it should be noted that religion would also be marginalized. Dix’s works were among those selected for a Degenerate Art exhibit in Munich in 1937, in which art deemed inappropriate by the authorities of the German Weimar Republic were exhibited in the worst possible way, hung in awkward places and flanked by derogatory slogans and wall copy. The exhibit was meant as a hall of horrors showing what sort of immoral infestation the Nazis were saving their people from.
Take his Metropolis (1928), a triptych that shows the glamour of Berlin as a center of free thought and the arts in the 1920s in its central panel—we see a dreamy, slightly grotesque scene of jazz musicians in a nightclub.
But the wing panels show ugly prostitutes and an overweight invalid veteran walking on crutches. The choice of making a triptych, which is traditionally associated with Catholic altarpieces, also made the moralizing in Dix’s painting feel more portentous, likening postwar Berlin to biblical ruinations like Sodom and Gomorrah.13
It was this attitude and the message in his work that led the Nazis to first get him fired from his teaching position in Dresden in 1933 before featuring him in the Degenerate Art exhibition. It would have been wise for Dix to leave Germany, but he did not, as he was “bound to Germany because of his family and his pictorial idiom.”14 He had an audience among sympathetic art lovers in Germany, but he found himself on the Nazi blacklist. When an attempt on Adolf Hitler’s life was made in 1939 (Georg Elser was the would-be assassin in what was known as the Bürgerbräukeller Bombing), Dix was arrested and imprisoned for two weeks, though he had no link of any sort to the scheme. During World War II he was forced to serve in the Volkssturm, a sort of local militia, and was captured by the French as a prisoner of war (ironically, an officer at the POW camp to which he was sent knew his work and commissioned an altarpiece and some portraits from him while he was interred). He returned to Germany after the war and lived until 1969, but his reputation, at least during his lifetime, had been smeared by the Nazis. He was one of hundreds of artists to have their career and quality of life suffer for being tarred as “degenerate.”
Otto Dix, Metropolis (1928).
PHOTO COURTESY OF WIKICOMMONS FROM USER MBENGISU.
The Degenerate Art exhibition caused a scandal within Germany and abroad. Most objective viewers outside of Germany saw it for what it was—a smear campaign based on ideology. The Nazis wanted their people to be scandalized by the sort of art the “degenerates” were creating, while the rest of the world was instead scandalized by the Nazis and their condemnation of what was considered among the greatest art of the day.
Otto Dix suffered, physically and professionally, during his career because of his tarring as a “degenerate,” but his reputation as an artist among art lovers beyond the tentacles of Nazism remained strong, and even improved in sympathy for what he went through. He had admirers and sold to collectors throughout his career, even when he was in the thick of the “degenerate art” affair. And because of what he went through, his art is now, in retrospect, considered unusually powerful and true, so much so that it frightened the Nazi authorities into trying, and ultimately failing, to disqualify it. Had Dix been left alone to proceed with his art unmolested, he might not be considered, today, as the exemplar of the artist as fighter for truth, shiner of a spotlight in dark times. His suffering created a legacy as a sort of artistic martyr, punished for illustrating too accurately the realities of his place and time. Affixing a story of suffering to an ingenious artist helps secure his legacy, which might have been lesser had he not been involved in the “degenerate art” scandal.
Greuze, the Académie, and the Hierarchy of Genres
Another example of eventually beneficial controversy is actually a layer cake of scandal, shock, and rivalry, one that led to a creative revolution against the academic, traditional, conservative power players who determined what sort of art was good or even acceptable.
Paris received its first academy, the Académies Royales de Peinture et Sculpture established by artist Charles Le Brun, in 1648, but it was not until a newer incarnation of this was set up after the fall of Napoleon that it began to draw the finest artists from throughout Europe. It was reestablished as the Académie des Beaux-Arts in 1816.
This national academy was heavily regulated, and there was only a certain, rather narrow concept taught about what great art should look like. Favored were the monumental, naturalistic paintings of Jean Auguste Dominque Ingres and Jacques-Louis David, the preferred painters of the Napoleonic era. Traditionalists could qualify for the annual salon showcase exhibition run by the Académie, but liberal avant-gardists were rarely considered.
Circa 1860, the understanding was that if you, as an artist, towed their line, then the Académie was the best place from which to graduate and embark on a career in art, which could be launched by showing your work at their salon. The Académie was both a school and a sort of club of established artists, so not only did they train the next generation, but they also expected active artists in Paris to join them, which meant following their preferences. A core group of older artists determined what was good, but they also condemned some art as having a corrosive influence on French culture. If you strayed from their expectations, then there was no place for you, and you were sidelined or branded as dangerous.
The most evident manifestation of this was the annual salon. This was held in the Salon Carré in the Louvre, and it displayed the winners of a competition to which artists could submit their works. From 1791 the competition was open to all, and it was established as the premier showcase for the best art created that year, launching careers, enhancing reputations, and, of course, leading to sales and commissions. But getting into the salon meant passing muster before that small group of judges from the Académie, which meant painting in a style of which they approved. There was ample reason to want in: From 1740 to 1890, the eight-week-long salon was the most prestigious and high-profile place for anyone to show their art, with fifty thousand visitors a day in some cases. This monopoly on what was considered proper art led to a monotony of style and rubbed many the wrong way.
Occasionally, controversial works slipped into salons, but this was sporadic. An early example came in 1769, with the painter Jean-Baptiste Greuze, whose work was exceptionally popular and whose style was, indeed, traditional and in keeping with the Académie’s preferences. Stylistically, he was fine, but he did not paint “important” subjects, or so the judges of the salon thought. His regular work covered portraits and genre paintings. (Genre painting is a term for subjects from everyday life, considered unimportant historically and therefore of lesser value culturally: scenes of peasants, of ordinary people going about their quotidian routine, of domestic interiors, and the like.) Greuze was accepted as a member of the Académie, but at the lowest level, essentially with the caveat that the judges considered his work of no importance, with the dismissal that he was just a “painter of genres.”
An informal hierarchy of genres was present, dating back to the seventeenth century, with biblical, mythological, and historical events involving kings and battles considered of greatest importance, and landscapes and still lifes of the least.15 Genre painting was low on the list, below history paintings and portraits and only marginally higher than landscapes and still lifes. This condemnation of Greuze’s subject matter caused something of a scandal of its own because Greuze was so popular with audiences. To dismiss his work was to dismiss the tastes of all those who loved it.
Greuze had enjoyed success at the Académie salon of 1755 with a genre painting, A Father Reading the Bible to His Children, which had been recommended to the Académie by one of its prominent members, the portraitist Louis de Silvestre.
This was a genre painting, to be sure, but it had advantages. Because the scene of ordinary life involved the Bible, it was considered more morally elevated. Both this work and The Blind Man Cheated were shown at the salon, and their success led to his acceptance as an associate member of the Académie. His timing was good and his themes well-chosen, as he was considered admirably Christian in his paintings, which were far more moral than the favorite painter of the French court at the time, François Boucher, whose Rococo style featured sexual escapades painted in a flowery manner, whimsical and associated with the frolicking aristocracy. Here, with Greuze, was a painter of subject matter more ethical and resonant with real people, not the frilly silliness of aristocrats at play. His style was influenced by seventeenth-century Dutch genre paintings (by the likes of Jan Steen) and British parallels of moralizing genre scenes (like those by William Hogarth). This success at the salon launched Greuze’s career at the age of thirty, and gave him a boost of confidence that would later lead to a problem.
Jean-Baptiste Greuze, A Father Reading the Bible to His Children (1755).
PHOTO COURTESY OF WIKICOMMONS FROM USER TANGOPASO.
For Greuze was still an associate member and was classified as a genre painter. This meant that he was low on the hierarchy. He was popular with the public, certainly, but among his peers at the Académie, he was considered of minimal importance as a painter.16
Greuze’s genre paintings were successful but were pooh-poohed by critics and peers for not being “serious” enough. This bothered Greuze, but he was torn: He did not, perhaps could not, change his painting style, and he had already found success with it. On the other hand, he was aware of how influential the Académie was, and his own career had been launched through the 1755 salon. When he chose to apply for full membership, he had to submit a “reception piece,” on the basis of which he would become a full member—or not. Greuze submitted his reception piece in 1769. Traditionally artists consulted with an adviser or sponsor, putting their heads together to determine what sort of a painting would have the best chance of success for full membership. Greuze chose not to consult with anyone, convinced that his popular success and experience as an associate member would suffice.17
He strategized, and so shifted toward the preferred subject matter of the Académie. He submitted a painting of two historical figures of importance, his Septimius Severus and Caracalla, hoping it would not only lead to his full membership but also elevate his status to that of a history painter, the highest rank.
Jean-Baptiste Greuze, Septimius Severus and Caracalla (1769).
PHOTO COURTESY OF WIKICOMMONS FROM WEB GALLERY OF ART.
The work looks like something by Jacques-Louis David but precedes this most popular among academic painters by a generation: It is proto-Neoclassical, stylized and melodramatic, as the bedridden Roman emperor Septimius Severus chastises his son, Caracalla, for having attempted to kill him. But the painting was mocked and critiqued from the start. It was too small in scale, the historical moment too obscure, the figures weak, even the outstretched arms of Septimius Severus damned as too droopy for such an authority figure.18 Greuze was accepted, but barely. The painting showed at the 1769 salon but was likewise dismissed by critics. Dismayed, Greuze would not show again until 1800, though popular interest led him to show works in his own studio in the Louvre while the salons were running—a sort of mini, private, alternative salon.
Here we see another incarnation of the multilayered scandal sandwich within the salon and its ultimate rival salons. With the case of Greuze, an established artist (already forty-four) was shamed by his peers, the academicians: punished, in a way, for being too popular.
Even some literati came to Greuze’s aid. The leading intellectual of the day, Denis Diderot, editor of the first encyclopedia, said that Greuze’s work was the “highest ideal” of French painting. The initial scandal was twofold: Greuze’s low-level admission was one thing, and it was much discussed, but also, by dismissing what this popular artist created, the jury of the Académie was effectively shaming the taste of the general public.
The scandal of wrangling for status with the Académie helped solidify his popularity among collectors and led him to double down on what he knew he did best—moralizing, melodramatic genre scenes—rather than seek to please the jurors of the Académie while not being true to himself. Had he been accepted as a full member as a history painter, he would have felt obliged to shift to that genre, and he would not be associated, as he is today, with mastery of what was the most popular style of his era.
Other examples were likewise considered traditional in style but scandalous in subject matter, even if the finished product was of a higher objective quality than Greuze’s ill-fated submission. Several such examples came from the brush of Gustave Courbet, whose career skipped along the boundary between scandal and intentional shock.
Courbet and the Rival Salons
A Burial at Ornans (1849–1850) was a colossal painting (10.5 x 22 feet, or 3.1 x 6.6 meters), and a work of such a scale seemed befitting of important historical or religious motifs.
But Courbet produced a masterfully painted (in the Académie’s preferred style) genre painting, showing not the funeral of some king or pope or saint, but of Courbet’s great-uncle, a man of no particular importance to history. The funeral took place in September 1848, in a village, and Courbet painted exact likenesses of real people from the settlement, rather than models—the vastness of the painting meant that those portrayed were shown life-sized. The willful nature of Courbet’s scandalizing paintings makes this fall into our category of shock, as opposed to the inadvertent scandal that surrounded Greuze, who did not intend to shake things up but wound up sparking debate when his work was accepted only begrudgingly by the salon.
Gustave Courbet, A Burial at Ornans (1849–1850).
PHOTO COURTESY OF WIKICOMMONS FROM GOOGLE ART PROJECT.
Those viewers with traditional expectations were scandalized by the “overblown” importance Courbet gave to an event about a person of “no importance,” or so they imagined. Courbet was playing with this notion, even naming the painting A Burial and not The Burial, as if to underscore that this was just one of many of equal importance (or lack of importance), depending on one’s personal connection to the deceased. But this was not the done thing, and so while the quality of the work was without doubt, its subject matter led to it being the talk of the town, provoking a “how dare he” reaction while simultaneously stirring up the conversation of whether the strict expectations of art were appropriate and valid in the modern era.
The stories of Greuze and of Courbet’s A Burial at Ornans fit scandal version B, in which the artists were doing their own thing, as it were, and were reacted to by the power structure in a way that many found inappropriate—hence the scandal. But Courbet was one of the great revolutionaries of art history, and he knew how to use scandal to his own end, adding shock to his arsenal. A Burial at Ornans was shown in the 1850 salon alongside two other works by Courbet, Peasants of Flagey and The Stone Breakers, which both show sympathy for the backbreaking plight of peasants.
This added fuel to the scandal, because it muscled sociopolitical commentary into art. State-run institutions were not welcoming of art that discomfited viewers as to the unfair imbalance of quality of life among its citizens, and Courbet, a self-proclaimed anarchist who enjoyed stirring things up, wanted to highlight just this.19
One might think that such a scandal, and the wrath of traditional critics pummeling the painting in newspapers, would ruin Courbet. Not so. In art especially, two parallel quotes ring consistently true. Oscar Wilde wrote, “The only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about,” while P. T. Barnum is credited as having said, “There is no such thing as bad publicity.”20 While many careers that scandal dashed against the rocks might be summoned as counterarguments, in the art world, at least, this has proven true. Courbet’s was one among some two thousand pictures displayed, but the scandal he knowingly provoked led to his grabbing the headlines. This was quite literally the case, as Paris was a center for newspapers in the second half of the nineteenth century, and some that are still in print, like Le Figaro (founded in 1826) and L’Indépendant (established in 1846) were active opinionmakers in the 1850s. Media organs like these would prove crucial to the history of scandal and shock because they were the vehicles through which these incidents came to the attention of the wider public—and, although many newspapers have professed subjectivity, their authors in fact passed judgment for or against what they critiqued, and so not only did they announce incidents, but they also weighed in with their opinions on them, thus encouraging their readers to think likewise.
Gustave Courbet, The Stone Breakers (1849).
PHOTO COURTESY OF WIKICOMMONS FROM ETSU.
Courbet emerged from this premeditated scandal of his established as the leading painter of his era. While the naysayers tend to be louder and better archived in traditional news media, for every person who was dismayed by Courbet’s paintings, others admired them and him for the same actions. No one doubted his technical superiority as a painter; it was just a question of whether a viewer was conservative and pro-state, preferring the official line and the status quo, or more liberal and inclined to tip their hat at Courbet’s courage in lifting the veil and telling the truth about the difficult lives of a social caste that had no practical way of broadcasting their strife to the public, since the mainstream media did not offer them such a platform.
This incident was also important to the course of art history, as A Burial at Ornans and The Stone Breakers pioneered a movement of artist Realism. A work of art that is “realistic” (looks like a photograph or like real life) should not be confused with the artist movement Realism. This truly began with Adoration of the Mystic Lamb by Jan van Eyck (1426–1432), which is considered the first work to bear a level of illusionary realistic detail: identifiable portrait faces of more than one hundred figures in the painting, botanically identifiable plants, an observation of the natural world down to the reflection of light in a horse’s eye and the pores on someone’s face. But Realism as a movement began here, at the salon of 1850, with Courbet’s combination of scenes of everyday life shown unadulterated, as they were, with an unpainterly style as close to photorealism as the art world had seen. This was also a precursor to the movement of Social Realism, which we associate with art that promoted social consciousness and highlighted marginalized people, groups, and issues, which took hold in the 1930s in the United States. It was a strong shift away from the two prior preferred movements: Romanticism (embodied by Eugène Delacroix) and Orientalism (Jean-Léon Gérôme), both of which opted for exoticism and drama of historical moments in distant lands. Suddenly, Courbet was aggrandizing the everyday at home, and pointing out social issues on the front doorstep of those visiting the salon, issues that they preferred to overlook.
This incident of shock, intentionally induced scandal (of which much more in the next chapter), on the part of Gustave Courbet, is but one of many such stories woven into the history of the salon. Perhaps this is no surprise, when we must keep in mind that there were several thousand works selected each year for display, from a pool of as many as five thousand submissions. That amounts to a lot of case studies and many potential issues, dynamics, and brouhahas.
In 1863, there were 2,218 pictures selected from more than 5,000 submitted, the largest number of rejections to date, outraging those rejected and leading to claims (quite rightful) that the salon was heavily prejudiced in favor of one style and was not keeping up with the times. This led to a surprisingly liberal act on the part of Napoleon III, the emperor at the time, a man who was always conscious of the rumblings of the public and willing to act to calm . . . or crush them. For instance, he ordered the reconstruction of much of the center of Paris, which was on the one hand progressive—Baron Haussmann’s new urban plan was more hygienic and modern, brighter and more livable—but it was also designed to make guerilla fighting in the streets impossible, widening avenues so that small gangs of peasant fighters stood no chance at barricading against the national army, as had been the case of the Paris Uprising of 1832 (made famous in Les Misérables).21 From 1860 until his reign ended in 1870, Napoleon III made a series of liberal concessions to appease the public as his popularity waned. One such was his decree that a parallel salon should be set up to feature those artists of merit who were rejected. This became known as the Salon des Refuses (the Salon of the Rejected). This act would offer a sense of equality to the public and also allow the public to judge for themselves which styles they preferred, taking the power out of the hands of the selection committee of the main salon and giving it to the audience.
The first Salon des Refuses included 366 painters and 64 sculptors, with a total of 780 artworks displayed.22 A who’s who of important artists, from the perspective of historical hindsight but also in terms of contemporary popularity, appeared, including Courbet, Cézanne, Pissarro, Whistler, and Fantin-Latour.
This new rival salon drew around one thousand visitors a day. It was much discussed because of its novelty and the very fact that Napoleon III had shifted power away from the monolithic institution, the Académie, and allowed creative voices beyond its narrow definition of what was good and right to have a public venue. Many traditionalists were dismayed by this fact alone, and so the Salon des Refuses became a talking point. But when viewers and critics saw what was on display, new scandals launched and the “other salon” became that much more au courant.
Out of the 766 works that were displayed, two in particular ruffled conservative feathers but also became the darlings of the more liberal-minded, progressive viewers and artists.
Whistler and the Weight of Rejection
James McNeill Whistler spent the winter of 1861–1862, when he was just twenty-seven, painting a portrait of his mistress, model Joanna Hiffernan. The American painter had moved to Europe to make a name for himself as an artist, for America would not become a center for fine art for nearly another century. Paris was the place to be, and Whistler lived there, but with this painting, he tried his luck in London. The annual Royal Academy of Arts exhibition in London was the British equivalent of the French salon. Inclusions were selected by a jury of traditional academic artists and professors, and variation from the artistic norm of the era was discouraged. But a good showing at this exhibit could make a career. In an attempt to establish his name in London, Whistler submitted this painting for the 1862 exhibition. The work, known initially as The Woman in White (now called by art historians Symphony in White No. 1, The White Girl), was sent to the jury, but Whistler never heard back about whether it had been accepted. So he traveled to London a week before the grand opening.
It was heartrending for him to meander from room to room in the expansive exhibition in search of his painting. He eventually stumbled upon it in a room at the rear, among a stack of rejections leaning against a wall. He reclaimed the painting and arranged for it to show at a commercial gallery, Morgan’s. This was a bold move, for having once been rejected, he risked the same thing happening a second time. But he believed in his work, once saying, “She looks grandly in her frame and creates an excitement in the artistic world here. . . . In the catalogue of this exhibition, it is marked ‘Rejected at the Academy.’ What do you say to that? Isn’t that the way to fight ’em!”23 It was a clever and brash bit of marketing, choosing to wear the badge of rejection proudly. It was true that the style of the work, very loose and impressionistic (long before Impressionism had caught hold), appeared unfinished, at least to the stylistic eye of the time.
His second attempt made a splash and a scandal, but not the way he had hoped. The press used terms such as “incomplete” and “bizarre” to describe the work, and it did not go unnoted that this rash young American was throwing the rejection by the authorities back in their faces as a sign of honor. It just wasn’t cricket, as the British like to say. It was not sold, though Whistler might have taken some comfort in the fact that it did gain attention, albeit entirely negative at the time.
James McNeill Whistler, Symphony in White No. 1, The White Girl (1862).
PHOTO COURTESY OF WIKICOMMONS BY EASTTN.
What constituted good art during this period in London and Paris was consistent—the Neoclassical likes of Ingres and David (which Greuze had foreshadowed with his failed 1769 submission) were still what was predominantly taught and appreciated. Saccharine, melodramatic works were in favor, the likes of John Everett Millais’s Trust Me, which shows an aristocratic man in hunting uniform holding out his hand to retrieve a letter that a young woman, perhaps his daughter, hides behind her back.24 A realistic, unpainterly painting that allows viewers to “read” a whole soap operatic story into it was à la mode. The most popular painting of the era in London was Derby Day by William Powell Frith, a work that took him fifteen months to finish and was called “the definitive example of Victorian modern-life genre.”25
Whistler’s Woman in White does not differ as much at second glance from these most popular works at the time, the ones showered with praise when shown at the academy exhibition. Frith and Millais offer genre paintings of everyday Victorian life, with many details to unpack and plots and character studies to “read.” In this way, they mirror Dickens novels. Whistler’s work is far more stark, minimalist, not only in terms of painting style (that impressionistic finish, the painterly brushstrokes visible), but also in terms of offering nothing but the model, standing atop a wolfskin rug, against a white curtain, not in a realistic room or space. Viewers are not peering at an unfolding drama but are clearly staring at a posed model. There is a literal resonance in the title—the mystery novel The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins had been a sensational hit when it was released three years before, in 1859. But it is not a scene illustrated from the novel, but rather a posed portrait resonant with it. The title of the painting would inevitably summon the novel in the minds of viewers, and it was up to them to interpret anything further. This was a step too abstract, stylistically and intellectually, for the preferences of the time.
William Powell Frith, Derby Day (1856–1858).
PHOTO COURTESY OF WIKICOMMONS FROM ART UK.
There were also details that seemed indecorous to prurient Victorians. This model was not dressed formally but was clearly someone being painted at home, in a casual dynamic with the painter. She is shown wearing a light summer dress (called a cambric), which was for spending time at home in warm weather—not acceptable for the public. Victorian women wore their hair in tightly done-up buns, not down and loose, as the model has here. Her face looks blank, not trying to win us over or indulge, and it is up to us to read expressions into her face, rather than her catering to us with obvious emotion. These may seem like subtle and unimportant distinctions now, but they were problematic for Victorian viewers.
Whistler did not seek scandal (that is why his story is not in our section on shock), but the work he fervently believed in made waves because his confidence pushed it forward. Had he slunk away after the initial rejection from the Royal Academy exhibition, that would have been one thing. But he turned around and showed the work at a commercial gallery, trumpeting its rejection in the catalogue, and that is what flustered many.
His American confidence encouraged him further, and he submitted the same work to the 1863 salon in Paris. It was rejected there as well. And so he tried again, now at the Salon des Refuses. Courbet and his fellow organizers accepted it, and it was displayed beside the most scandalous work shown there, the work that was the talk of Paris and beyond and makes for a stark contrast to The Woman in White, for the two are of similar artistic quality and style, but of a very different agenda. For on the same wall of the Salon des Refuses stood Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe by Edouard Manet.
Manet and the Prostitutes
The informality of the model in The Woman in White is taken a large step further by Manet’s Luncheon on the Grass.
Edouard Manet, Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe (1863).
PHOTO COURTESY OF WIKICOMMONS FROM GOOGLE ART PROJECT.
Originally called Le Bain (“The Bath”), this large-scale painting was designed to shock, and so it could fit into our next chapter. The obviously odd element is precisely what caused such a fuss. What is a naked woman doing sitting at a picnic in a park with two clothed men? One might think it would have been more scandalous had the men also been naked, but that would have projected a sense of equality of class, perhaps even a reference to the classical world or mythology, with idealized nude gods and goddesses frolicking. But here, in the context of Victorian-era Paris, it broadcast a single message to audiences: This painting pulled aside the veil and showed a prostitute—or perhaps two, if we include the scantily clad woman wading in a stream in the background—and a pair of johns.
The two men, well dressed in a dandyish manner, are engaged in lively conversation and seem to ignore the woman. But the woman makes eye contact directly with us, confronting the viewers and forcing them to stare back, though Victorian prudery instilled the idea that they should not let their gaze linger on nudity, at least not in the public context of an art exhibition. The canvas is substantial (81 x 109 inches), of a scale normally reserved for “important” subjects like religious or mythological paintings. The brushstroke is present—the style is painterly, which was not preferred at the time. While it is not clear from historical documentation whether Manet sought to shock or simply to use this painting to comment and provoke debate (a milder intention), it certainly raised eyebrows and stoked outrage.
Prostitution was rife in this period throughout Europe, but it was not discussed. A skin of propriety was of the utmost importance, and what one did behind the scenes should never come to light. Thus, to essentially point out the prevalence of prostitution among the apparently high-class public was a step too far. The work is not realist, as the naked woman was not a prostitute. It was Victorine Meurent, a redheaded model nicknamed “the shrimp” for her petite size; she would also play the role of an empowered female prostitute in Manet’s later work Olympia (begun shortly after Déjeuner sur l’herbe was finished, in 1863, and displayed at the 1865 salon, which by that time exhibited surprising liberalism in selection). Another aspect that dismayed Victorian viewers is the confidence, the strength, the empowerment of a prostitute. Sex workers were expected to be ashamed of their profession (acting out the shame that their johns perhaps should have been feeling) and were meant to be submissive. Not only are Manet’s painted prostitutes present, highlighting this aspect of society that was meant to be hidden, but they were brash and powerful in their sexuality, the opposite of what was expected of them. That power is most evident in the eye contact that the nude seems to make with the viewer—this is the case in Déjeuner sur l’herbe and Olympia.
The great minds of Paris weighed in on Manet’s work. Zola wrote of the painting as “the greatest work” of Manet.26 The great novelist was so inspired by the work that he modeled his novel L’Oeuvre on the story of Manet showing at the Salon des Refuses. Proust recalled spending time with Manet by the Seine when they saw a young woman bathing in it. Manet said to Proust, “I copied Giorgione’s women, the women with musicians. . . . It’s black, that painting. The ground has come through. I want to redo it and do it with a transparent atmosphere with people like those we see over there.”27
Prostitution has been an important part of life and culture throughout human history, but it was rarely something that was permissible to speak about in a public way. Art has occasionally transcended this unspoken boundary, and scandals have ensued. Caravaggio’s Madonna of Loreto (1603–1605), mentioned in the introduction for the artist’s very intentional use of a prostitute as the model for his Virgin Mary, is a case in point. Engagement with prostitutes was the norm in nineteenth-century Paris, but it was simply not something one talked about. Pictorial equivalents, paintings meant to titillate, were likewise acceptable if consumed in private: Ingres’s La Grande Odalisque (1814) and Jean-Honoré Fragonard’s The Shirt Withdrawn (1770) are other examples of works that are, simply put, sexy, and would have been fine for exclusively private consumption, but which crossed a line in public opinion. La Grande Odalisque was also scandalous because of the overtly, intentionally distorted nude body it featured—an almost grotesque departure from the academic style of Ingres’s teacher, David. The most overt of all is Courbet’s L’Origine du monde (1866), a naked woman with her legs spread, no part of her visible but her pudendum—this was just too realistic, and was meant to shock, as we will see in the next chapter.
Edouard Manet, Olympia (1863).
PHOTO COURTESY OF WIKICOMMONS FROM GOOGLE ART PROJECT.
Manet’s choice of subject matter was topical and of the moment, and he would stick with it in his next significant painting, Olympia.
It was exhibited in the 1865 salon (not the Salon des Refuses). Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe had been rejected by the salon, but in this case the technical brilliance of Manet and the direct reference to important works of art history (Titian’s Venus of Urbino and Ingres’s La Grande Odalisque), coupled with Manet’s popular and critical interest (in no small part fueled by Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe) as well as his society connections (his father was a judge and chief of staff at the Ministry of Justice, and he had studied under an admired academician, Thomas Couture), led to its acceptance in the main salon.28 Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe had broken the ice with a nude painting of a prostitute, and so this second one, very different but of a similar category, was less shocking. But it would make even choppier waves.
It shows Manet’s frequent model Victorine Meurent as an empowered prostitute, Olympia, approximately life-sized, lying naked—aside from a bracelet, sandals, and a choker—on an elaborately unmade bed. A maid brings her a grandiose bouquet of flowers, doubtless from a male admirer. A green curtain is pulled aside behind her, a reference to backgrounds in many a Renaissance portrait of a noble or member of the clergy, which were frequently set again a lush velvet curtain pulled off to one side, as if standing in front of a theatrical set. (The most direct inspiration was Titian’s 1534 Venus of Urbino, but there is a long tradition of elegant reclining nudes throughout art history, with Ingres’s 1814 Grande Odalisque the one likely to be freshest in the memory of the Parisian public.)
Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres, La Grande Odalisque (1814).
PHOTO COURTESY OF WIKICOMMONS FROM WEB GALLERY OF ART.
Olympia is shown full of power, seeming to make eye contact with the viewer, who, it may be inferred, is the male admirer who sent that bouquet—her latest john. She is clearly a very high-class prostitute, but she offers her naked body and stares at us with a mixture of emotions that can be read into her eyes. Her posture suggests power and comfort in nudity—she recognizes that her sexuality is her strongest attribute. But her eyes contain a softness and unhappiness somewhere deep inside them. She would not have chosen her profession, had she another viable choice, but she has decided to make the best of it, to own it rather than let it own her.
The scandals produced by this painting were manifold. As in Caravaggio’s Madonna of Loreto, the model was a known figure. Victorine Meurent was a society woman, a model in many well-known paintings and also a fine painter herself (some of her works were likewise shown at the salon). To portray a known, respected figure as a prostitute was one issue. But more theoretically, it was considered indecorous that a recognizable contemporary woman should stand in for a mythological or historically significant figure. This is, after all, a sort of Venus picture, and as it was objectionable to have a known prostitute used for the Virgin Mary, so it was problematic and new to have a recognizable model as Venus.
The inclusion in the main salon further fueled the scandal. It was one thing for Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe to appear in the Salon des Refuses—that was the other salon, and the more conservative element dismissed what it included as of secondary importance, anyway. But now the main salon included a work that appeared even more overtly on point, and those who objected might well have seen a mirror held up to their own frequenting of prostitutes like Olympia. There were calls for the work to be burned, and one journalist wrote, “If the canvas of the Olympia was not destroyed, it is only because of the precautions that were taken by the administration.”29 Another wrote of its “inconceivable vulgarity,” while elsewhere it was written that “art sunk so low does not even deserve reproach.”30 Manet complained to his friend, poet Charles Baudelaire, that “insults rain down on me like hail.”31 But Émile Zola, champion of Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe, called Olympia Manet’s masterpiece, and he recognized its scathing honesty: “It will endure as the characteristic expression of his talent, as the highest mark of his power. . . . When our artists give us Venuses, they correct nature, they lie. Edouard Manet asked himself why lie? Why not tell the truth; he introduced us to Olympia, this daughter of our time, whom you meet on the sidewalks.”32
Both Olympia and Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe went on to be considered among the most important in the history of art and feature in any Art History 101 course. Olympia was, stylistically and in terms of content, indicative of its time, which is usually the key to a work’s endurance. Such masterpieces offer time capsules. By examining them, we can travel back to a specific place and time long past, and understand it from all disciplines through the lens of a work of art. The “scandalous” nature of it, in this instance one of those more gossipy, sexually charged, “isn’t it simply scandalous” reactions—rather than the deeper, darker issues surrounding, say, the degenerate art exhibition—helped its notoriety and extended its influence. It was a double scandal: To conservatives, the very fact that it appeared in the salon made it problematic. But among those who jostled to admire it, another scandal arose, borne of interpretation of an intentionally riddling work, but one the theme of which was clear enough, peeling away the skin-thin veil to show the taboo subject of the time and place: prostitution. One could argue that Manet was intentional in his scandalousness, making this fit our category of shock. But he was not as brash a figure as Courbet. This is more in line with a version B scandal, doing your own thing and telling it like it is, than an attempt to stir up publicity through a shock bomb.
The Salon des Refuses proved an important touchstone for the legacy of art from 1863 forward. Before that date, art was chained to the academy system. Academies in various cities and countries taught what they (usually the state) considered to be good and appropriate art, and anything that fell outside of its institutionalized definition had a much harder time finding audiences. The Salon des Refuses was no guerilla rebellion but was officially mandated by the emperor, and yet it announced that academies no longer held monopolies on what art could and should be. This lesson emanated from Paris throughout Europe. From that point forward, it was no longer the mark of sophistication to be an “academic painter” but, in many cases, it was considered old-fashioned and stodgy, and the artists of the avant-garde would not have even wanted to be associated with an academy. That it was an official, imperial mandate also helped legitimize the artistic styles shown there, giving wings to the new movements that were first shown in later Salons des Refuses (in 1874, 1875, and 1886), most notably Impressionism. Seeing the writing on the wall, the Académie relinquished their control over what could be featured in the salon in 1881, yielding the decision-making to the Société des Artistes Français (Society of French Artists), which was more democratic and functioned more like a union. Other alternative salons rose up in an unofficial capacity. Pointillist painter Georges Seurat established the Salon des Indépendants in 1884, and the Salon d’Automne followed in 1903. These newer salons were less rebellious, since they followed the footsteps in the fresh snow of the Salon des Refuses, and so they were not considered scandalous.
Koons, Leaks, and Misunderstandings
Version C involves something private “leaking” and resulting in public moral outrage. In the realm of news, this could be anything from a senator’s wiener being photographed and sent to a “friend” to just about anything from Wikileaks. In art terms, this sort of scandal is more often associated with the trade—consider the various scandals involving Sotheby’s (though Christie’s was also implicated multiple times) in selling illicit antiquities, or indeed of major museums, most frequently the Getty but also the Met and scores of others, involved in buying them. These scandals initially broke when experts in looted art spotted objects in auction house catalogues that appeared to match objects listed as missing by police. In the case of the Getty’s acquisition of looted antiquities, including famous pieces like the so-called Getty Aphrodite, it was not a question of whether the artifacts had been looted but of whether the Getty knew they were looted and acquired them anyway. This was proven by investigative journalists who found internal e-mails proving as much.33
An alternative version C scandal can be found in the outrage born of an inaccurate understanding of art world traditions, when “revelations” that major artists, like Damien Hirst and Jeff Koons (the two highest-earning artists in the world), are not actually involved in the physical assembly of most of the art they produce.34
News broke in 2017, via a leak from a fired worker, of a scandal involving Koons laying off much of his staff.35 In a series of downsizing moves, Koons fired some thirty members of his painting staff, which at one time numbered one hundred. This was the third round of layoffs since 2015. Most of those painters were brought on to work the Gazing Ball series, in which they hand-copied thirty-five Old Master paintings, to which a shiny, metallic colored sphere was added. There were grumblings that they were vastly underpaid (Artnet reported that some were earning just $21 per hour, while Koons’s works fetch millions at auction).
But what surprised (and scandalized) many was not that Koons would so underpay the people actually creating his works, nor that he would downsize his staff, but rather how an artist produces works that are labeled as his own when he may not actually have any hand in their making. Much was made of a series of Damien Hirst paintings because he had actually painted them all himself.36 This may indeed sound like an odd statement: Don’t all artists create their own works?
This is actually part of a long art historical tradition, and it is not in the least unusual or surprising. We have the Romantic era, with a dose of Giorgio Vasari’s Lives of the Most Eminent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects, to thank for the general misconception that major professional artists create their works alone. The idea of the lone brooding artist, possibly depressed and drinking absinthe in a Parisian garret while wearing a black beret and chain-smoking, is actually the oddity. Most professional artists through history ran studios, often called bottegas.
To understand how studios work (and worked), we might look at a Renaissance master—or we might look at one of the most popular painters in the world, though nary a critic would raise their eyes to give him the time of day: Thomas Kincade. The “Painter of Light,” as he is sometimes called, employs an army of staff to paint his mildly cheesy, homey landscapes, the artistic equivalent of the Saturday afternoon made-for-TV Christmas films on Lifetime. Depending on how much you wish to pay, a sliding scale of options depend upon how directly the master himself would be involved in your commission. You could get a work entirely hand-painted by Kincade himself for a small fortune, or for very little money you can get a work designed by the main man but painted entirely by staff.37 For even less money, you can buy a print of one of his paintings, touched up with hand-painted “highlights.”
This is simply a continuation of the tradition of great Renaissance artists, like Domenico di Ghirlandaio (whose work opens chapter 3). Commissioning a work by Ghirlandaio did not mean that the master would paint the work entirely himself, but rather that it was the product of his studio. The more one paid (or the more prestigious the patron), the more the master would work on the painting hands-on.
Jeff Koons is best known for his monumental sculptures resembling balloon animals but made of glossy metal. But for most of his works, he might best be considered a conceptual artist in that he conceives of the works and designs them, but he rarely actually participates in their creation on a hands-on basis. For this, he employs a vast staff, making him perhaps more like an architect than our traditional image of an artist.
Vasari’s 1550 Lives, considered the first work of art history, is originally responsible for our idea that an artwork is the complete creative expression of a single mind and hand. Most of how we think about art and museums today has its origins in Vasari’s hugely popular and influential group biography of Renaissance artists, many of whom he knew and worked with. By featuring masters of studios and weaving a cult around them, he downplayed the collaborative aspect of their work—this may have been a sort of defense mechanism, as he was sometimes accused of being lazy and relying too much on his own assistants. Then the Romantic era promoted the idea of lonely, forlorn, brooding artists struggling to make ends meet but producing powerful art at great personal sacrifice. This idea has melodramatic appeal, and it stuck in the popular imagination. While it has been true for many artists, particularly those in the modern era, before they make it big, the truly big-name artists, from ancient times to the present, have been more like architects or film directors, designing and supervising but not always getting their hands dirty.
It requires knowing the history of art to realize that there really is no “scandal” in Koons, Hirst, or any other artists employing staff to create the works that they may only design and supervise the completion of. But for the underinformed public, assisted by en-gorging headlines run by clickbait-seeking media, it can become a scandal of our C variety.
Scandals in the art world can take many forms, and sometimes the line between inadvertent scandal and intentional shock is unclear. It also may be seen as an unimportant distinction, one that is purely academic. The distinction for the public may simply be that what befell the artist was either out of their control, making them essentially innocent, or that they were “asking for it” by proactively seeking to scandalize through shock tactics. The main conclusion, however, is that, whether scandal or shock, these two traditional negatives were both positive for artists and their legacies. They provided promotion and did not bring about long-term ruination, so many would argue, based on this evidence, why not scandalize?
Malevich and Attention Seeking
It is difficult to say whether there are some artists whose careers would have gone largely unnoticed, and certainly not included in the canon of artists to be studied, had they not been involved in a scandal. That game of “what-if” altered history is too speculative to reasonably play. But there are some artists who are known beyond art historical circles largely because of the “I can’t believe they did that” effect. Their actions fall into the shock category. Consider Sebastian Horsely, an artist whose merit is arguable but who is known primarily because, as a work of performance art, he arranged to have himself crucified (but only for twenty minutes—after which he was efficiently uncrucified and attended to by doctors). This is actually very interesting in terms of the history of art, since entire books and courses can and have been taught and written about artwork of Christ crucified. But whether arranging to have oneself crucified qualifies as significant art or is merely attention grasping is another matter.38
In many examples it is too tricky to distinguish between scandal and shock. They might fall into the category of “they should have known,” but the actions of the artist were designed to make a statement, not primarily to shock.
Kazimir Malevich’s Black Square (1915) was hung in a high corner of a room at the Dobchina Art Bureau gallery space when it was first displayed.
This odd location made it more resonant, as this corner by the ceiling was where, in traditional Russian homes, gilded religious icons were hung. Malevich’s concept was to replace the icon (formal, stylized paintings of saints against gilded backgrounds) with his anti-icons, stripped of any formal imagery. Placing his anti-icon painting in the space where a traditional religious icon would hang further hammered home his point. This was a form of iconoclasm (destroying or defacing icons), but a subtle one—although not subtle enough to avoid enraging the clergy and the masses. He surely knew that this would scandalize religious conservatives, but it cannot be said that he did this in order to shock. It was entirely in stride with his artistic concept, and that this was considered scandalous (more so than had he simply displayed Black Square in the middle of a gallery wall) was a side effect of his following his artistic vision.
Sometimes the public gets their knickers in a twist for reasons that are not logical. They are more about a general frustration at not getting a work of art, and resulting aggression, lashing out against it to compensate for a feeling of inferiority because others seem to get it, and if I don’t then perhaps I’m not smart enough. This happened often with the married artists Christo and Jeanne-Claude.
Kazimir Malevich, Black Square (1915).
PHOTO COURTESY OF WIKICOMMONS FROM TRETYAKOV GALLERY, MOSCOW.
The couple are famous for large-scale public temporary installations involving huge swaths of fabric: wrapping the Reichstag in Berlin or the Pont-Neuf in Paris with cloth, for instance. They would plan these installations years, sometimes decades, in advance, because of the time it took to navigate the bureaucracy required to pull them off in famous public spaces. Christo has always paid out of pocket for his installations (the money he earns from selling his work is reinvested in future projects), and he has never accepted public funds, but that has not stopped conservatives and enraged taxpayers from trying to block his progress. Before he could wrap the Reichstag (1995), he was obliged to fully wrap two other buildings, so authorities could see what it looked like. His Surrounded Islands (1982) installation met angry protest from ecologists, concerned that the floating pink fabric around the Florida islands would disturb wildlife. The main objection was from people who didn’t understand why anyone would want to create such installations—Christo liked to call them “gentle disturbances”—and the confusion was only multiplied when it was clear that the artist paid for everything, at the cost of millions, and spent years in legal battles in order to bring artworks to a public that largely seemed in principle against them.39
On other occasions, an artist might expect a scandal and even court it, but it rears its head in a place the artist did not expect. Czech artist David Cerny’s Shark (2005), a riff on Hirst’s The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living (1991), swapped out a pickled shark floating in a tank of formaldehyde for a lifelike model of a nude Saddam Hussein. Critics objected to the work as overly humanizing Hussein, causing a scandal but of a different sort than the artist predicted. The same work was removed from an exhibit in Poland by Polish vice president Zbigniew Michniowski on the grounds that it insulted religion. This confused the artist, who said, “I don’t get it. I know that in Poland it is illegal to insult anyone’s religion. Okay. Now what about the character in Shark? I mean, is Saddam Hussein a religious figure? Does anybody worship him? Do the Poles put Saddam on the same pedestal as Christ or does this just reflect the ignorance of a couple of politicians?”40 It was meant to shock, of course, but this work shocked in ways that the artist had never imagined.
Bronzino and Shifts in Morality and Politics
Scandals can rise with the passing of time and new moral and aesthetic rules that accompany them. In Victorian London, Bronzino’s Allegory of Love and Lust (1545) was considered too sexy for public consumption, and the extended tongue and bottom of Eros and erect nipple of Venus were painted over (they were only revealed in a conservation of the painting in 1980s).41
Prudishness was often to blame for such scandals in the name of censorship. Pope Paul IV was known for being an utter prude, and he did not approve of all this nudity found in the art of the papal collections. So, he ordered the “naughty bits” to be covered over—in the case of Michelangelo’s Last Judgment (1534–1541), drapery was strategically added, very much against the will of Michelangelo, whereas fig leaves were affixed to key anatomical points of nude sculpture like the Apollo Belvedere, a process begun in 1541 under Cardinal Carafa and Monsignor Sernini, the Ambassador of Mantova.42 Centuries later, this censorship of visible extremities was continued by Pope Pius IX (ruling 1846–1878), who had genitalia chiseled or smashed off of statuary.
Thus several popes were scandalized by seeing all of these penises in the Vatican, and art lovers—both contemporary (Michelangelo, for instance) and subsequent—were scandalized by the fact that popes had ordered great artworks adulterated by drapery and fig leaves and mutilation because of squeamishness. After Michelangelo died in 1564, his pupil Daniele da Volterra was ordered by Pope Pius IV to add those draperies (usually described as “breeches”), which led to him acquiring the nickname Il Braghettone, “the underwear maker.” He further had to entirely remove the figure of Saint Blaise and part of Saint Catherine because viewers thought their relative positions suggested sexual intercourse, and Saint Blaise appeared to be staring at Saint Catherine’s bottom.43 In a parallel mini-scandal, a plaster cast of Michelangelo’s David was sent as a gift to Queen Victoria in England from the Grand Duke of Tuscany in 1857. The queen found the statue’s nudity to be unsuitable for the morality of the time, so a plaster fig leaf was made and kept in storage at the Victoria and Albert Museum, which housed the cast, to be fitted into place whenever she visited.
Bronzino, Allegory of Love and Lust (1545).
PHOTO COURTESY OF WIKICOMMONS FROM NATIONAL GALLERY OF ART, LONDON.
The issue remains present today, though these days it is the prudishness and catering to it that make headlines more than the nudity itself that is covered up. In 2016, the Capitoline Museum in Rome put “modesty boxes” around classical nude statuary in its collection ahead of a visit by the president of Iran.44
Michelangelo, Last Judgment (1536–1541).
PHOTO COURTESY OF WIKICOMMONS BY FLICKR USER ANDRE FISCHER.
This history of Michelangelo scandals continued when the Sistine Chapel was subject to a hot debate born simply of what people were used to. In 1990, the chapel reopened after an extended cleaning of centuries of grime from the frescoes that decorate it. When visitors returned to the chapel, they were astonished to find paintings entirely different from the way they had been before, and had been studied, viewed, and understood for centuries. It was now so bright, the colors nearly neon—it looked far more like the proto-Mannerist masterpiece that it is, but to viewers who grew up admiring it covered in soot that made it dark, muted, and brooding, it looked all wrong, like it had been overcleaned or, even worse, touched up with new colors as a publicity stunt for Kodak, which sponsored the restoration.45
When politics slips into art, particularly in a subtle way, controversy can strike when those who feel accused by the commentary get it long after the fact. Théodore Géricault’s Raft of the Medusa (1819) does not look like a painting rife with political commentary.
The scene of desperate sailors stranded on a raft after their ship sank is one of the greatest works of Romanticism. It shows the true story of survivors from the Medusa, wrecked off the African coast and stuck on a raft without any supplies for two weeks. One hundred fifty sailors began on the raft and only ten were rescued; they had survived thanks to cannibalism. But hidden within is a sharp political commentary that was ill met. The painting became the center of a debate between royalists (pro-monarchy) and antiroyalists (Bonapartists, who favored the rule of a relative of Napoleon). This was because the ship that saved them, to which they desperately wave as it appears, hopelessly tiny, on the horizon, was a British ship, Argosy. When the painting was shown at the salon in 1819, it was almost universally denounced—not for its artistry, but because of the message they felt that it sent.46 King Louis XVII had appointed the captain of the Medusa, Duroys de Chamareys, whom many contemporaries viewed as inept—a disaster waiting to happen. And the survivors of the wreck felt that he had run the ship aground through his incompetence. This accusation indirectly confronted the king, whose favoritism, it might be argued, resulted in the disaster. And because it seemed to speak against the king, it seemed to favor the Bonapartists. As Julian Barnes wrote, “The Medusa was a shipwreck, a news story and a painting; it was also a cause. Bonapartists attacked Monarchists. The behavior of the frigate’s captain illuminated a) the incompetence and corruption of the Royalist Navy; b) the general callousness of the ruling class towards those beneath them. Parallel to the ship of state running aground would have been both obvious and heavy-handed.”47 This political commentary is not recorded as having been Géricault’s main interest in painting the work, but it became, in the popular consciousness, the only thing the work was about.
Théodore Géricault, Raft of the Medusa (1819).
PHOTO COURTESY OF WIKICOMMONS, PHOTOGRAPHER UNKNOWN.
Public grumblings may also be heard about things other than the art itself, especially its value. Many are dismayed by the prices for which art sells, particularly nontraditional, nonformal works that do not exhibit classical skill on the part of the artist but are sold for mind-numbing figures. The wealthiest artist in the world, Damien Hirst, was criticized for his sculpture of a human skull studded with 8,601 diamonds, For the Love of God (2007).
Damien Hirst, For the Love of God (2007).
PHOTO COURTESY OF WIKICOMMONS BY USER AARON WEBER.
It was seen as a tasteless attempt to profit without regard for artistic content, particularly since he actually was part of the conglomerate that bought the statue, effectively re-investing in his own creation. It cost £14 million (around $18 million) to make and was sold for £50 million ($67 million).48 Hirst’s 2017 Venice Biennale show, Treasures from the Wreck of the Unbelievable (which we examine in chapter 3), was likewise seen as a sort of shopping mall of art for the nouveaux riches, without much in the way of artistry on display.49 But these low-level scandals, more gossip and dismissive mutterings than anything more elaborate, did nothing to inhibit Hirst’s sales, and the critics had already weighed in, either in praise or in condemnation of the statues, so the controversy did not affect Hirst in any way beyond churning up more attention for him and his work.
“Bad” Artists and the Fame of Scandal
The extent of a scandal in the art world is directly linked to the amount of publicity it generates, which, in the modern era, is lashed to exposure in the media.
When scandal is negative for those involved, it is usually because the person scandalizing is already an established figure whom the public sees as trusted or morally upright, and that image is shattered because of the scandal. Whether it is a big company, like the chemical company in the water contamination case immortalized in A Civil Action or Volkswagen in the emissions scandal, or a person, like a politician or member of clergy found to be lying or to be sexually aggressive, these are figures or institutions of authority who are supposedly setting strong moral standards to which we, the public, hold them.
Artists do not bear that burden. The clichés about artists include that they are liberal, edgy, and morally questionable and that they do things that are on the verge of good taste and sometimes even sanity. Every era has had its own moral boundaries, and yet artists were almost expected to confront and push beyond them. If there was ever a profession that was generally respected but that was considered liberal and off-the-wall enough to push moral boundaries, then it was that of the artist. So scandal did not have the same devastating effect on an artist’s personal life or career as it might have in other, more traditionally upstanding professions. Rarely have artists been held up as beacons of moral virtue, the way clergy or politicians are. For this reason, the artists themselves rarely stand upon a moral cliff off which they can fall. If anything, they are already standing in the lowlands, sometimes with their feet a few inches down in the mire. Artists are almost always individuals (a few collectives aside), not associated with institutions. This means that from a moral standpoint, they really can only go up, and that they are not representing some larger power, company, or country that requires they behave “appropriately,” whatever that might mean in a given era and situation.
Being a bad person, even a murderer, does not seem to negatively impact an artist’s legacy. It only adds an asterisk to it, a whispered caveat. Caravaggio was a pugnacious murderer. Bernini ordered a servant to disfigure his lover’s face with a razor and would have murdered his own brother in a jealous rage (regarding the lover) had his mother not intervened.50 Hugo Boss may have been an enthusiastic Nazi, but he was a wonderful fashion designer (for their infinite faults, the Nazis were smart dressers), and we continue to buy clothing that bears his name because we like the way it looks, choosing to overlook the politics of the founder of the company. Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, aka Lewis Carroll, may have had interest in young Alice for very wrong reasons, but Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland is still praised and beloved.51 British sculptor Eric Gill was a pedophile who serially abused his own daughters, but his statues are admired and he is considered a brilliant typographer (you will certainly have read many a text printed in his Gill Sans, with variations, and Perpetua fonts, which are staples of Microsoft Word and ubiquitous in global printing).52 Artists can do bad things, even be objectively bad people, and yet we still tend to look upon their art in a vacuum, gazing past the misdeeds, mentioning them only in passing, if at all.
Past eras considered the role of artists somewhat differently from the way we do today. In the Renaissance and Early Modern periods, some artists were members of court, or adjunct members (summoned to fulfill commissions), and were expected to behave with politesse in keeping with the standards of their environment. Artist guilds likewise kept behavior somewhat in check. These were periods of more rigid etiquette, but what went on behind the scenes, as long as it remained behind the scenes, was fine. Depraved behavior was rampant in the shadows and behind locked bedroom doors. The “age of morality” really came to the fore in the nineteenth century, with the Victorian era—the story of David being fig-leafed to “protect” Queen Victoria is a case in point. Morality became both a sword and a shield, something that immoral people could hide behind while wielding accusations of immorality as a weapon.
This was also a time when mass media was establishing itself through newspapers. This allowed a scandal that might otherwise have been limited to a specific locality, or even to the small group of individuals affected, to reach the widest possible audience, even spreading out internationally. This infinitely expanded not only the promotional possibility of scandal but also its potential devastation, exponentially increasing exposure to news, and therefore scandals, which have always been popular reads. The only farther leaps, in terms of the spread of information after the age of newspapers, was television in the 1960s and the internet in the 1990s. The internet era democratized breaking news and commenting on it. It was no longer the realm of editors and professional journalists and critics; now anyone with an internet connection could weigh in. This has resulted in far more scandals (not all of them real) coming to light, but it has also diffused the impact of any one scandal. There is now such a tidal wave of information available that scandals are often forgotten within a matter of days as newer news takes its place. This is the case in the art world as well as the general news cycle.
On August 29, 2019, news broke of a “scandalous” statue erected in a village in Slovenia. It was called Kip Svobode (Statue of Freedom), but it bore a suspicious resemblance to President Donald Trump portrayed as a colossal wooden nutcracker. The artist, Tomaž Schlegl (full disclosure: he is a friend of mine), was surprised with the avalanche of media interest. After the story broke in a Washington Post article it was picked up by hundreds of media outlets, large and small—in print, online, and televised—around the world.53 But in a matter of weeks, it was already old news. When it was threatened with destruction by upset local conservatives, it no longer qualified as newsworthy, and none of the journalists contacted who initially reported on the statue’s existence decided to follow up on the story and report on its new twist.54 The statue was designed to shock (we will examine it in the next chapter), but the waves did not echo beyond announcing its existence. At least, that is, until it was destroyed—and once again was newsworthy. This is indicative of news in the internet era, in art and beyond.
Particularly during the age of international media, which coincides with the morality of the Victorian age, a scandal could make someone instantly a household name around the country and, in fact, in much of the world. The upset about a scandal involving art tends to recede quickly, but the name of the artist involved resounds and endures, not only during their career, but well beyond it. In this way, a scandal helps extend an artist’s long-term name recognition and reputation. Some artists were damaged in the short term but found scandals beneficial to them in the long run. It is difficult to think of any artist who was involved in a scandal that proved their absolute ruin both in the short and long term.