Some say that beauty is in the eyes of the beholder, but is this really true, or have we come to accept such a statement without much reflection or analysis? Are we concerned with beauty in this chaotic, digitized world? Have we lost the ability to see beauty, or is this desire laying dormant, waiting to be awakened and experienced?
In his book Seeing Like an Artist: What Artists Perceive in the Art of Others, the painter and sculptor Lincoln Perry explores such questions by taking the reader on an exploration of artistic expression. Perry is aware of the pitfalls of artists “explaining” art, yet he defends his desire to write about art, which is a “visual meditation on life, available to all.” But Perry doesn’t tie himself in knots by trying to define capital-A Art, and the text is mercifully free from jargon and ideology. Instead, his beautiful reflections offer insight into not only the mind of an artist but also how we, as human beings, relate to painting and sculpture.
Perry’s reflection on beauty turns into an enjoyable travelogue. As an artist, he walks (both in reality and in his imagination) through the museums and galleries of paintings and sculpture. Sometimes he walks with the great masters, sometimes he views them from a distance.
Perry covers a lot of ground. He walks the towns and streets of Italy, tours great and small chapels, and visits the Louvre and America’s Museum of Natural History. He wonders at the mystery of art, but he never romanticizes. After all, human beings have a tendency to bring disappointment into the fold of the contemporary art world experience. We witness the museum’s commercialization of art by making it palatable for tourists, or the museum’s placing of ideology on full display, giving it precedence over the actual paintings. On one occasion, Perry describes a guide in Florence’s Brancacci Chapel, who was spouting some words about “social injustice,” and “maybe even referencing Marx,” only to be interrupted by an angry priest clearly displeased with an ideological assault on the frescoes.
So much of art has been downgraded by critics who appear to dislike the idea of being human. Reflecting on Bernini’s famous sculpture Ecstasy of Saint Teresa (1647–52), Perry points out that Bernini and “Italy’s Sacri Monti would have given [Clement] Greenberg a coronary, as they leak over into life rather than standing aloof as pure form. He believed that art should aspire to the purest distillation of its material nature, so painting needed to assert its flatness and sculpture had to be self-contained,” revealing its presumable Heideggerian “bronze-ness, clay-ness, or steel-ness.” Greenberg’s theory, Perry argues, in which art is limited to its form, only moves us away from our humanity.
Greenberg’s view of art is something Perry cannot accept. Reflecting on Giovanni Francesco Caroto’s Portrait of a Young Boy Holding a Child’s Drawing (ca. 1515) and Albrecht Dürer’s watercolor of “a hare rendered in perfect furry detail,” Perry gets to the heart of the matter, namely the inevitability that art is relational. He sees art as an “accessible human experience and—in Picasso’s sense—alive in the present.” The past is not merely about chronology. In fact, it’s almost always about the perennial experience that connects us to the long-dead artists. As Perry writes, “I find it reassuring, not creepy, when the dead speak to me.”
Perry fully accepts the uneasiness and pleasure of experience. The point is not to check seeing Brunelleschi’s dome off the list but to live inside of art to the extent that we can. The journey is worth it, and as Perry writes, “to see deeply and moving art in situ, all your senses participating, from the smell of the flowers to the sound of the birds, is to both see and feel art.” Are we still capable of such an act? Just as it takes courage to create art authentically (something Perry clearly does), it also takes courage to stand before a painting or sculpture in our bare existence, seeking only its beauty and validation that indeed we are human.
Even in his despair (and perhaps even more so), man yearns for beauty. We seek it without knowing what it is because we are constantly looking for ways to humanize ourselves. We feel fragmented, and we spend our lives trying to put the pieces together. Seeking wholeness, we make a silent reply to art. As Perry writes, “We respond to Bellini’s St. Francis as a tender meditation, a credible human moment of ecstasy.” It brings us closer to Bellini and St. Francis and also speaks a multitude of meanings and possibilities about our interior lives. A true artist must create without a shred of fraudulence, and our response and relationship to art must be free of masked existence, of hiding and avoiding life itself. We must come face to face with beauty.