'Yet the Painting Was Beautiful'

Boswell reports that he and Dr. Johnson dined on March 31, 1772, with General Pasquale Paoli, the Corsican patriot exiled in London. The conversation, always fluid and expansive with Johnson, moved on from the naturalness of marriage to aesthetics: 

“We then fell into a disquisition whether there is any beauty independent of utility. The General maintained there was not. Dr. Johnson maintained that there was; and he instanced a coffee cup which he held in his hand, the painting of which was of no real use, as the cup could hold the coffee equally well if plain; yet the painting was beautiful.”

 

As Boswell relates it, the next subject of conversation at General Paoli’s was “the strange custom of swearing in conversation,” but on the question of beauty I’m with Johnson. To risk a rhyme, beauty is a gratuity, perhaps chief among life’s consolations. To be without an aesthetic sense is to be impoverished. The absence of such a sense and its impact on the moral life would make an interesting study and might help explain much human behavior.

 

Fortunately, beauty and utility are not mutually exclusive. I bought a new claw hammer last year for mundane household projects. I’m no handyman but this hammer of nicely tooled wood and forged steel is a pleasure to hold, admire and use. I like its heft and balance and the grain of the wood. The old one we’ve used for years is tarnished and the handle is made of molded red plastic. It’s gratuitously ugly, though it usually gets the job done.

 

For 50 years my brother has worked as a picture framer. Many of his big corporate jobs call for the framing equivalent of that ugly hammer. They are more like assembling a plastic model kit than creating a frame and mat from scratch that complements the photo or painting. Years ago he framed for me Carl Van Vechten’s photo of Paul Desmond and Dave Brubeck (1954). Above my desk hangs a reproduction of Rembrandt’s etching “Self-Portrait Leaning on a Stone Sill” (1639). The frame is fluted and finished in dull gold. Into the bottom piece of the frame I’ve wedged a postcard with the photo of Louis Armstrong taken by Philippe Halsman that appeared on the cover of Life magazine in 1966. I could live without these objects in my house but life would be poorer.

 

Let’s not even get started on modern architecture, the true blight in most cities. In the final chapter of The Pleasure of Ruins (1953), Rose Macaulay reminds us to look at new buildings geologically, beyond the scale of a single human lifetime:

 

“Very soon trees will be thrusting through the empty window sockets, the rose-bay and fennel blossoming within the broken walls, the brambles tangling outside them. Very soon the ruin will be enjungled, engulfed, and the appropriate creatures will revel.”

 

It’s a chastening thought (and goes on for another half-page), like the Time Traveller’s view of the dress shop across the street from his lab in George Pal’s film of The Time Machine (1960). Macaulay gets even more apocalyptically inspired in her final sentences:

 

“Ruin must be a fantasy, veiled by the mind’s dark imaginings: in the objects that we see before us, we get to agree with St Thomas Aquinas, that qua enim diminutae sunt, hoc ipso turpia sunt, and to feel that, in beauty, wholeness is all. But such wholesome hankerings are, it seems likely, merely a phase of our fearful and fragmented age.”

 

Macaulay takes her Latin phrase from this passage in Summa Theologica (translated by T.C. O’Brien): “Beauty must include three qualities: integrity, or completeness--since things that lack something are thereby ugly; right proportion or harmony; and brightness—we call things bright in colour beautiful.”

 

I think immediately of Matisse and Klee. In his essay “The Faire Field of Enna” (The Geography of the Imagination, 1981), devoted to Eudora Welty, Guy Davenport writes:

 

“Art is the attention we pay to the wholeness of the world. Ancient intuition went foraging after consistency. Religion, science, and art are alike rooted in the faith that the world is of a piece, that something is common to all its diversity, and that if we knew enough we could see and give a name to its harmony.”