Ugliness Is Underrated: In Defense of Ugly Paintings

By Katy Kelleher
July 31, 2018
ARTS & CULTURE

THE MUSEUM OF BAD ART

The Museum of Bad Art (MOBA) is a privately owned museum which is 'dedicated to the
collection, preservation, and exhibition of really awful artwork' and celebrates the 'labour of
artists whose work would be displayed and appreciated in no other forum'. Many of the
works in the collection could be described as ugly and break the formal 'rules' of beauty
(presumably unintentionally). It has three branches with a total collection of 500 works.
Their collection can be viewed online at: http://www.museumofbadart.org/

The inspiration for the museum came from what would be its first acquisition - Lucy in the
Field with Flowers (right). It was found in the trash and originally valued for its frame alone
until it prompted a wider discussion of 'bad' art between the museum's founders and his
friends and led to the founding of institution.

To be included in MOBA's collection, works must be 'original and have serious intent, but
they must also have significant flaws without being boring; curators are not interested in
displaying deliberate kitsch'.

Inside an old brick building in Somerville’s Davis Square, below the gilded stage and the red
velvet seats, there is an unusual museum. Hidden in the basement of the 1914 Art Deco
building is a collection of hideous paintings and disturbing drawings otherwise known as
the Museum of Bad Art. “You won’t ever see this stuff in the Museum of Fine Arts,” the
curator Michael Frank says. Frank is the kind of guy who can’t pass a yard sale or a flea
market without stopping to browse. He loves ugly things, but for him, ugly is a problematic
word. “When I read your email, I thought, Uh-oh,” he admits. “Calling something ugly is like
calling something beautiful. The minute you say it, you’re in a difficult spot, trying to define
what that really means.”

Frank prefers to think of these paintings as “badart,” one word, no hyphen. Badart is not the
inverse of “good art”; it’s the inverse of “important art.” Some might call these pieces
outsider art, and in the past, many of them could have been termed primitive or art brut. I
prefer to think of them as ugly. Charming—like the dancing dog wearing a tutu or the
nineties eyebrows on one particularly serene Virgin Mary—but ugly nonetheless.

However, I understand where Frank is coming from. For Frank, ugly is a word that
suffocates, depriving his favorite paintings of their rightful playful air. Ugly is also a word
that carries hard moral implications; for centuries, ugliness has been associated not only
with sickness and deformity but also dishonesty, violence, aggression, and bigotry. Consider
the term ugly American or the repeated critique of Trump’s “ugly” acts. The word itself
comes from the equally discordant-sounding ugga and uggligr, two Old Norse adjectives
that mean “dreadful, fearful, aggressive.” (Other words that bloomed from the “dreadful”
root include loath and loathsome.) The meaning changed only in the fourteenth century,
when uglike stopped meaning “terrifying” and began to mean “unpleasant to look at.”

Even though the word ugly is now primarily used to describe the unaesthetic aspect of
things rather than their deep moral fiber, it retains elements of its original meaning. Using it
can shift a well-meaning aesthetic critique into the realm of moral judgment. This is
unfortunate for those of us who genuinely enjoy, and celebrate, ugly things. If you, too,
want to appreciate ugliness, the first thing you have to do is stop assuming that it is the
inverse of beauty. We tend to talk about aesthetics as though the categories are locked in a
battle: good versus evil, light versus dark. But opposites are a crutch. Beauty and ugliness do
not negate each other.

LUCY IN THE FIELD WITH FLOWERS, ANONYMOUS. IMAGE COURTESY OF THE MUSEUM OF BAD ART.

Science supports this idea. Studies done in the emerging field of neuroaesthetics (studying
how the brain responds to aesthetic stimuli) have found that beautiful paintings and ugly
paintings light up the same regions of the brain: the orbitofrontal, prefrontal, and motor
regions of the cortex. Oddly enough, the pictures ranked most beautiful activated the
orbitofrontal region most and the motor region least, whereas the pictures ranked ugliest
activated the orbitofrontal region least and the motor region most. The author of this
particular study, Semir Zeki, tentatively suggests that perhaps ugly things mobilize the
motor system so that we can flee from the unwanted stimuli. The same study has led Eric
Kandel, author of The Age of Insight, to argue, “Beauty does not occupy a different area of
the brain than ugliness. Both are part of a continuum representing the values the brain
attributes to them.” Although we experience them differently, beauty and ugliness both tap
into our emotional center, an area deeply involved in analyzing other’s motives and actions
and generating both sympathy and empathy. Kandel writes:

Our response to art stems from an irrepressible urge to recreate in our own brains the
creative process—cognitive, emotional, and empathic—through which the artist produced
the work. This creative urge of the artist and of the beholder presumably explains why
essentially every group of human beings in every age and in every place throughout the
world has created images, despite the fact that art is not a physical necessity for survival. Art
is an inherently pleasurable and instructive attempt by the artist and the beholder to
communicate and share with each other the creative process that characterizes every
human brain—a process that leads to an Aha! moment, the sudden recognition that we
have seen into another person’s mind, and that allows us to see the truth underlying both
the beauty and the ugliness depicted by the artist.

Art, both badart and “important art,” can reveal the inner workings of artists’ minds.
Beautiful art is at its best and most useful when it illuminates truths about the human
condition, but badart can reveal the inner workings of one individual’s mind—their strange
lusts, their disturbing daydreams, their antisocial desires, and their nonsensical fears.
Beautiful art can speak to the general trials and triumphs of being human, but badart can
speak in equal eloquence to the highly specific neuroses and joys of one singular mad mind.
After all, we all like sunsets.

Ugliness has never been the subject of much scrutiny. For the most part, artists and thinkers
have treated ugliness as an immutable category, filled with things they simply didn’t like.
These included dangerous landscapes, people with disabilities, and objects that showed
signs of too much use. When survival was a number one priority, people viewed anything
potentially threatening as ugly. And for the most part, ugly works, particularly pieces that
were unintentionally ugly, were forgotten to history.

As a result, the most significant ugly works created before the nineteenth century were
intentionally ugly, created by technically skilled painters who decided, for whatever reason,
to depict an ugly subject. Often, ugly art was created as a warning. There but for the grace
of God go I, screams the gargoyle clinging to a medieval facade. To contemporary eyes, the
art of the Dark Ages looks ugly as a whole (consider this great Vox explainer about ugly
babies in medieval paintings.) At the time, however, people didn’t consider the malformed
dogs or awkward hat-wearing crows to be ugly, though they did know that doom paintings,
which depict the worst-case afterlife scenarios, were hideous. Doom paintings highlight the
difference between heaven and hell in order to strike fear into the heart of viewers and thus
discourage them from, say, coveting their neighbor’s hot spouse or lying when the tax
official came around to collect coins. Sometimes these paintings function like the medieval
version of Jonathan Edward’s hellfire-and-brimstone sermons: they actually make the
afterlife look interesting, stimulating, and perhaps even a little bit appealing.
HIERONYMUS BOSCH, THE GARDEN OF EARTHLY DELIGHTS, 1500.

Painted in the late fifteenth century, Hieronymus Bosch’s The Garden of Earthly
Delights takes from the tradition of doom paintings to create a strangely humorous and
oddly enticing image of the Netherlands. Bosch was warning viewers not to be too tied to
earthly pleasures, and yet looking at his painting is so much fun. Despite the masterful
composition, the painting is ugly—or at least, it contains bright spots of ugliness. It is
dappled with barbarity and splattered with joy. Heaven, shown on the left side of the
triptych, looks rather boring and notably empty. Hell, shown on the far right, has fornicators
and flute-assed musicians.

LEONARDO DA VINCI, GROTESQUE HEADS, CA. 1490.

Bosch showcases how ugliness can be playful, but other Renaissance artists approach
ugliness with a more serious and steady hand. When Leonardo da Vinci began his search for
beauty through interrogating a “series of disgusts,” as the historian Walter Pater terms it, he
began by painting deeply misogynistic images and people with diseases and disabilities.
These bruttezza drawings were intentionally unattractive; the supposed ugliness of these
individuals was intended to contrast with the beauty of Leonardo’s other sitters. Quentin
Matsys’s 1513 painting A Grotesque Old Woman can be located in this same tradition of
grotesques. Known more commonly as The Ugly Duchess, this work shows a woman in a
tight bodice and regal headdress. “The sitter is now diagnosed as suffering from Paget’s
Disease,” Stephen Bayley explains in his 2011 treatise Ugly. Despite the fact that we now
“know better” than to gawk at the suffering of others, Bayley claims there is a “magnificent
absurdity” to this painting’s popularity. It is, he notes, “one of the most popular postcards
sold in London’s National Gallery Shop.”

QUENTIN MATSYS, THE UGLY DUCHESS, CA. 1513.

MASTER OF THE ROUEN ECHEVINAGE, CITE DE DIEU FOL, CA. 1460.

Bayley does identify a few other peak eras for ugly art, including the Baroque period, which
spanned from around 1600 to 1750. During this time, artists were very into ornamentation,
and every surface that could be fluted or gilded or scalloped or molded was, with a very
heavy hand. Baroque artists were the original maximalists. But while many consider
Baroque art to be rather unappealing or “ghastly” or “gag-makingly hideous,” as Bayley puts
it, I have trouble calling this art ugly. The word baroque means “a deformed pearl,” yet
there is order in most Baroque art—the ornamentation and uneven surfaces on Francesco
Borromini’s buildings do not appear at random but rather undulate like a slithering snake.
Caravaggio’s dramatic canvases feature classically inspired compositions and high levels of
technical skill. They are extra, certainly, but they’re not really ugly. And for my money,
Bernini’s Apollo and Daphne is the most beautiful sculpture ever created, so I suppose I
quibble with Bayley’s distaste for the baroque. I certainly prefer it to what came next: the
prettified fluff and saccharine frills of Rococo-crazed Europe.
CASPAR DAVID FRIEDRICH, THE SEA OF ICE, 1823.

But slowly, these decorative phases fell out of style, and with the advent of Romanticism,
European artists began to turn toward a more naturalistic form of painting. This coincided
with a newfound desire to define both beauty and its opposite. In the early
nineteenth century, theorists began approaching ugliness as though it were its own
aesthetic category. In 1853, Karl Rosenkranz published one of the first deep
dives, Aesthetics of Ugliness. This picks up the aesthetic baton from Hegel and attempts to
figure out how negative aesthetic categories—like the uncanny, the grotesque, the ghastly,
and the ugly—relate to one another and how they differ. For previous generations, a
mountainous landscape would have been viewed as rather ghastly—it was ugly simply
because it was scary. The Romantics challenged this notion and began to create scenery that
was both beautiful and frightening (i.e., sublime). Caspar David Friedrich’s paintings are an
excellent example of this. They’re beautiful and frightening, but few would call these
landscapes ugly. What had once been terrifying was newly approached as aesthetic, and so
ugliness was pushed into another realm. The new home for ugly art became the big tent of
the abstract.
MARC CHAGALL, HOMMAGE À APOLLINAIRE, 1911.

Even though today we’re perfectly capable of finding beauty in Rothko, when it arrived on
the scene in the nineteenth century, abstraction felt like a deviant impulse. And as
Impressionism gave way to Expressionism and the nineteenth century turned into the
twentieth, the impulse to label these artistic experiments as morally wrong or degenerate
grew greater. In July 1937, the Nazi-curated “Entartete Kunst” (“degenerate art”) exhibit
opened in Munich, featuring works by Karl Schmidt-Rottluff, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Edvard
Munch, Emil Nolde, Franz Marc, Lyonel Feininger, and Marc Chagall. Were these works ugly?
Some of them were. But they were not nearly as ugly as the Nazi’s genocidal vision. The
paintings were also part of a new art world, one in which categories of ugliness and beauty
didn’t hold so much importance—at least, not to the makers. Some of these works were
ugly, and that was the point. They were intentionally strange, surreal, and disorienting. They
showed a chaotic and fragmented society. They were broken mirrors for a broken world.

In our postmodern or post-postmodern art world, it can be hard to remember why ugliness
matters because ugly paintings are now everywhere. Ugly paintings hang in every major
museum, and ugly work has been accepted as part of the canon. But while ugly art crosses
genres and time periods, it can still be useful to think of ugly art as falling into its own
unified aesthetic category. Like zany, cute, and interesting, the three labels defined and
clarified by Sianne Ngia in her book Our Aesthetic Categories, ugliness plays a pivotal role in
art history and in contemporary design.
Unlike grotesques, which elevate their subjects until they approach the beautiful, truly ugly
works aren’t about pleasing anyone. Ugliness is about discomfort. It makes us feel a little
unsettled—not because we’re looking at a depiction of something unsettling, like a gory
religious scene or a photograph of a war zone or a painting of a warted nose, but because
we’re confronted with a sense of disorder.

OTTO DIX, WOUNDED MAN (AUTUMN 1916, BAPAUME), 1924.

This can be intentional, or it can be the result of badly applied technique or poorly chosen
colors. Typically, the ugly art we see in museums was made that way consciously, either to
highlight the artist’s abilities (like with Leonardo’s elegantly drawn caricatures), to rebel
against the conventions of the art world (for example, Philip Guston or the contemporary
painter Neil Jenney), or to reveal something about the world and our place in it (Hieronymus
Bosch, Otto Dix, and Francis Bacon and their stomach-turning depictions of bodily pain).

There’s a sense of brazenness to unintentionally bad art—it embodies desire gone awry.
And being able to enjoy ugly art isn’t simply about making fun of it. It’s also about being able
to sit in discomfort and recognize mistakes. Ugly art demands a sense of looseness; it asks
you to dip into a slippery state of mind where you can hold multiple beliefs simultaneously.
The piece can be both ugly and unappealing, and it can also delight and appeal for those
very reasons. It can pull you closer—you want to know why this ugly art was made, what it
means, and what the artists were thinking. And if you let yourself get unbalanced enough,
you might just find yourself a little bit in love.