The Crisis of Ugliness
추함의 위기
A critique of modern art published in Moscow by Iskusstvo in 1968 by the Soviet aesthetician Mikhail Lifshitz and his wife L. Reinhardt, subtitled "From Cubism to Pop Art". It deals in turn with the myth of Cubism, modernism after the Second World War and pop art, and includes Lifshitz's 1963 essay "Why Am I Not a Modernist?". Because it criticised modernism as bound up with the irrationalism and cult of force of the twentieth century, it has been called both "the bible of anti-modernism" and a work of reactionary conservatism.
In depth
Why did this book become so controversial?
The Soviet art world of the 1960s breathed the air of the Thaw. From the 1930s to the 1950s the official attitude had been to mock the Western avant-garde as "decadence" or "trickery", but as international contacts grew the tone softened. Within Western communist parties, too, voices such as that of the French Communist theorist Roger Garaudy, who called the revolution made by Picasso the greatest event of the age, grew louder in favour of admitting modernism into Marxism. For young Soviet artists and intellectuals, modernism stood for freedom from the uniformity of the Stalin years.
The Crisis of Ugliness went straight against this current. It brought together Lifshitz's essays of the early 1960s on Cubism and pop art, his wife L. Reinhardt's 1949 study of postwar modernism, and his essay "Why Am I Not a Modernist?", which had caused a scandal in Literaturnaya Gazeta in 1966. The manuscript was ready in 1967 and the book appeared in 1968, where liberal readers read it "to the accompaniment of the rumble of Soviet tanks crushing the Prague Spring". From then on Lifshitz was long regarded as a pillar of official orthodoxy.
The Russian bezobrazie means ugliness in the sense of deformity, and in everyday speech also "a disgrace, an outrage". The English edition renders it "ugliness" and the 1971 German edition "the ugly" (das Häßliche). The Korean headword of this dictionary translates the original title directly; no Korean translation has been found.
What did "Why Am I Not a Modernist?" argue?
Lifshitz wrote the essay in 1963 for the Prague journal Estetika; it appeared there in Czech in 1964, in German in the East German journal Forum in 1966, and in Russian in Literaturnaya Gazeta on 8 October 1966. The title imitates Bertrand Russell's "Why I Am Not a Christian", and Lifshitz announced that, following the laws of the genre, his answer would be "paradoxically sharpened". The answer: because modernism "is connected with the darkest psychological facts of our time", namely "the cult of force, the joy of destruction, the love of cruelty, the thirst for a thoughtless life and blind obedience".
Потому что, в моих глазах, модернизм связан с самыми мрачными психологическими фактами нашего времени. К ним относится — культ силы, радость уничтожения, любовь к жестокости, жажда бездумной жизни, слепого повиновения.
He insisted at once that he was not claiming Matisse or Modigliani as relatives of Nazi storm troopers; judging a historical phenomenon is separate from judging a person's morals. His example: when the Nazi government of Anhalt closed the Bauhaus in Dessau in 1932, the Paris journal Cahiers d'art, a champion of Cubism, commented that it could not understand why a party seeking to attract youth and vitality should be hostile to truly modern art. Lifshitz read in this comment the mood of an age prostrate before the false youth of the barbarians. A philosophy that set vital force and instinct above reason and demanded the blind obedience of the masses bore a tragic responsibility for the results; his remarks on Bergson and Nietzsche follow the same line.
The most quoted passage runs: if modern aesthetics sees art as acting hypnotically, shocking or numbing a mind deprived of its own life, then it is "the art of a crowd steered by suggestion". "Faced with such a programme I vote for the most mediocre, most epigonic academicism, for that is the lesser evil. But of course my ideal lies elsewhere." The ideal comes at the end: Caesar is moved before the sacred crowd, but "the communist has no need of a crowd blinded by myth. He needs a people made up of conscious individuals." Lifshitz backed this with the Communist Manifesto's line that the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all.
Цезарь умиляется перед священной толпой, коммунисту толпа, ослепленная мифом, не нужна. Ему нужен народ, состоящий из сознательных личностей.
How did it read Cubism and pop art?
The preface opens with the German fairy tale of One-Eye, Two-Eyes and Three-Eyes, in which One-Eye and Three-Eyes torment their ordinary sister and come to ruin. Lifshitz and Reinhardt explain that One-Eye and Three-Eyes stand for the artistic currents dominant in the West, but add two things: today's storytellers slide into relativism, saying two eyes are no better than any other "way of seeing"; and the ending in which a knight punishes One-Eye with a stick is no better. "One-eyedness and three-eyedness did not stop being deformities because they were treated with a stick. A truth proved in this way loses more than it gains." The sentence is aimed at the administrative repression of the Zhdanov years.
Одноглазость и трехглазость не перестали быть уродством оттого, что их лечили палкой. Истина, которую доказывают таким образом, больше теряет, чем выигрывает, — вот и все.
The first chapter, "Myth and Reality", deals with Cubism, born in 1907–1908. The authors treat the story of the artist mocked by the philistines and later worshipped as a genius as a modern myth, and revive Plekhanov's early negative verdict on Cubism. They interpret Cubism as a "revolt against things" arising from the "sweet life" of an early-twentieth-century Europe grown fat as a parasite on the rest of the world. Reinhardt's second chapter criticises postwar abstraction and counterfeit realism. Lifshitz's third chapter, "The Phenomenology of the Tin Can", deals with pop art: a can that sells for twenty cents in a shop sells for two thousand dollars in a gallery with a famous artist's signature, and art magazines discuss it alongside Ming porcelain and Giotto's frescoes. He analysed this through the economics of taste and the "malaise of reflection".
Who reacted, and how?
When "Why Am I Not a Modernist?" appeared in Literaturnaya Gazeta, readers were shocked. Letters from art historians, painters, physicists and schoolchildren poured into the editorial office, many of them damning the author. The critic Grigory Pomerants regretted that Lifshitz would not see whom his war on modernism served, and Lev Kopelev, back from Stalin's camps, sent him a letter likening him to the archpriest of an aesthetic Old Belief. The paper had planned a debate, but the invited opponent backed out at the last moment, so the essay came to look like an official directive. On 20 December 1966 Alexander Dymshits, a leading campaigner against formalism in the 1940s and 1950s, published a rebuttal.
To the charge that he had made painters like Picasso accomplices of fascism, Lifshitz replied: "I wrote about tragedy, not about complicity." Translating the language of theory into that of criminal law was a trick, he said. In "Liberalism and Democracy" (Voprosy Filosofii, 1968) he insisted that the aesthetic question be separated from the question of the artist's civil rights: those who like Cubism, abstraction and pop art should have the civil right to enjoy them, and "why not open to view all the Maleviches and Kandinskys kept in our storerooms?"
Я писал о трагедии, а не о пособничестве
This distinction was alien to the official camp too. The official press ignored the book; the only favourable review came from the writer Ivan Shevtsov in the nationalist ("soil-bound") journal Oktyabr. Shevtsov, author of an anti-formalist and antisemitic novel of 1949, rejected the authors' "condescending reservations and compromises" and wrote that the spreaders of alien ideas must bear moral responsibility for corrupting souls. Lifshitz's critique of modernism stood apart from those who wanted administrative bans.
How is it read today?
Paradoxically, the book served a generation of Soviet artists as a textbook of modern art. Here they first saw small black-and-white reproductions of Duchamp, Pollock, Warhol and Rauschenberg, and read descriptions of the first performances of Yves Klein and Nam June Paik and quotations from the latest Western magazines. It was translated in Dresden in 1971 as Krise des Häßlichen, and an English edition translated by David Riff appeared in 2018; its publisher presented it as a broadside against modernism in the visual arts that nevertheless resists the dogmatic complacencies of Stalinist aesthetics. The artist Dmitry Gutov called it "the true bible of anti-modernism, the main theoretical work of Soviet Marxism".
The dispute around the book shows an old fork in Marxist aesthetics: on one side those who, like Lukács, defended realism and criticised Kafka and Joyce; on the other those who, like Bloch and Adorno, read in modernism a resistance to a broken reality. Lifshitz was the most extreme spokesman of the first side, but the edge of his critique was turned not toward a state that rules art by force but toward a culture that glorifies thoughtless obedience and myth. Miss that distinction and the book looks like a relic of Stalinism; hold on to it and it can also be read as an early critique of mass culture and the art market. This dictionary's entry Marxist Aesthetics (Lifshitz) covers its theoretical background.