‘A Broken Beauty’: suffering as art

Beauty, and the question of what is beautiful, troubles art, and has been doing so for a long time. You might even say that many contemporary artists have gone out of their way to separate themselves from its problematic place in aesthetics in modern times. Art criticism is scared to even mention the word, because, intellectually, it’s very difficult to talk about beauty if you are fully conscious of suffering. This has been true since the end of the second World War, as artists became resistant to creating what Oscar Wilde would call “beautiful things” in the face of the Holocaust.

That’s why the current exhibition at the Laguna Art Museum is not only bold but brave, demonstrated from the start by its title: “A Broken Beauty.” The exhibit is a collection of works by some 15 artists, all addressing Beauty -- with a capital B -- in ways both interesting and unconventional.

It’s difficult to represent a beautiful person -- that is, a person of striking physical beauty, without idealization. Idealization obliterates individuality. To eliminate qualities that make up an individual, be they physical or spiritual, is to remove all sense of humanity, which tends to be found in our imperfections. This is why questions of beauty often involve religion, because, historically, our objects of worship contain both moral and physical perfection. But where, then, is the humanity in beauty?

This is just one of many questions asked by “A Broken Beauty.” But they are not questions of high philosophical ground, no Burkean separation of the sublime from the beautiful. The questions here are moral: How can there be beauty when we suffer? What do we gain or lose when we call something beautiful? What relationship does horror have to beauty?

The exhibition is divided into categories that suggest these questions: “After the Fall,” “Presence Encountered,” “The Terrors of History,” etc. But the rooms each address interrelated and multifarious problems that connect beauty and religion, beauty and gender, beauty and violence, beauty and ugliness. Gordon Fuglie, curator of the exhibit, described “beauty” in the exhibition as “a way of understanding the world.”

Nowhere is this better represented than in two paintings that address the subject of a little-known Catholic saint, Agatha. When Agatha, who was known for her beauty, refused to renounce her faith, she was imprisoned in a brothel. When she refused to accept customers, her breasts were cut off and she was eventually tortured to death.

Patty Wickman’s 1996 oil on canvas, “Anonymous (with St. Agatha),” takes on both the past and present meanings of being mutilated in the name of beauty. Wickman reproduces a Baroque Spanish altarpiece (a painting within the painting) on the right of the canvas, an idealized and richly dressed Agatha demurely holding her amputated breasts on a tray. But treading boldly toward us is a naked woman, all individuality removed by a mock-digital “censoring” of her face, breasts and genitals. She holds a silicone breast implant in each hand, extending them toward us, an offering not unlike Agatha’s.

The implications are painful and shocking. Agatha’s violent transformation is juxtaposed with this anonymous woman’s elected mutilation. What then is the meaning of being beautiful? Is it the agony of Agatha, or our modern distortions of what constitutes a beautiful woman? Can both exist simultaneously as beautiful, or do they cancel each other out?

Compare this to Melissa Weinman’s “St. Agatha’s Grief” (1996, oil on canvas). Weinman’s canvas is narrative, with a before-and-after depiction of Agatha as a modern, average woman in a white tank top with cropped blond hair. She is back-to-back with herself, eyes closed in both depictions. The Agatha before her mutilation is slouched, resigned, calm. The Agatha after, white top soaked in crimson, is equally passive and hunched: flushed, open-mouthed, but with no tears on her cheeks. The difference here is that she raises her face toward the source of the painting’s light, almost asking a question of that light: Why?

The question then is not how can we speak of beauty when there is suffering, but can there be beauty without suffering, and why should that be true?

Richard Harden’s monumental “My Breath” (which is flanked by two canvases, both titled “Falling”) is a direct indictment of painting’s relationship with beauty, in its tendency to deny or repress violence. If you only glanced at the huge panels, saw them from across the room, you might think you’re looking at an Impressionist field of flowers, with a pair of odalisques on either side. These are possibly the most cliched subjects of painting: flowers and naked women. But the flower field executed in Monet-like strokes is askew: The flowers are opium poppies, and the colors are dark. Amid the blades of grass, you can see human remains: a skeleton left on the field of war. The languid women aren’t languid at all; they are falling through dirty air, all smoke and ash, luridly lit, in postures expressing anguish. There is anger in this canvas, anger at the willful naiveté of “beauty.”

The exhibition does not attempt to represent “stages,” either historical or otherwise, in its narrative line. Instead, religion, war, race, and gender address each other across the room, or even on the same wall. In the section entitled “Ecce Homo” (the words of Pontius Pilate when presenting Christ to the mob: “Behold the Man”), all of these issues collide.

Central to this “argument” is John Nava’s oil on canvas study for the “Baptism of Christ” tapestry (complete with scale grid: the final result is 40-feet high and hanging in the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels). Here is Christ as human perfection, an idealized and pure male form, softly muscled, Caucasian. Next to it is Jerome Witkin’s “Perfect and Me” (oil on canvas, 1998), where the title alone might suggest to you its darkness and violence: a portrait of a bound and bearded Semitic Christ, with a gun pointed at his head.

On the other side of Nava’s study is another painting by Weinman, “Study for Christ: Matthew” (oil on canvas, 1998), portraying Christ as a strong and modern man, with a tidy fashionable beard, utterly devoid of any suffering at all, but also devoid of idealization. It seems to be simply a portrait of a friend in an evocative pose.

But Gaela Erwin presents herself as Christ in “Self-Portrait as Jesus” (oil on canvas, 2003). She does this on a small scale, alluding to Renaissance canvases done for personal devotion, a blond woman in a crown of thorns, a “man of sorrows” reference. How far can our idealizations go if we remove Christ’s humanity? How far can we take it if we return that humanity? Erwin’s tearful, ruddy face is moving. But is this still transcendent? In other words, does it have to be beautiful to be transcendent?

Above and beyond all of this, of course, is the idea of art as something that raises questions. Does it have to, in order to be good? Does it have to, in order to be beautiful?

IF YOU GO

*WHAT: “A Broken Beauty”

*WHERE: Laguna Art Museum, 307 Cliff Drive

*WHEN: 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. daily through Feb. 26

*COST: $10 general; $8 seniors, students; free for children under 12

*CALL: (949) 494-897120060113isyi76nc(LA)Three works from “A Broken Beauty”: from left, Bruce Herman’s, “Bonhoeffer,” Melissa Weinman’s “St. Agatha’s Grief” and Jerome Witkin’s “Entering Darkness.”20060113isyi65nc(LA)20060113isyi6znc(LA)Patty Wickman’s, “Anonymous (with St. Agatha).” 20060113hamo6rkf(LA)