4.
Historians have often noted that the Western world in the late eighteenth century acquired a taste for the natural in all its major art forms. There was new enthusiasm for informal clothing, pastoral poetry, novels about ordinary people and unadorned architecture and interior decoration. But we shouldn’t be led by this aesthetic shift to conclude that the inhabitants of the West were at this time becoming any more natural in themselves. They were falling in love with the natural in their art precisely because they were losing touch with the natural in their own lives.
Thanks to advances in technology and trade, existence for the European upper classes had become, by this period, overly safe and procedural, an excess which the educated looked to relieve through holidays in cottages and readings of couplets on flowers. In his essay ‘On Naive and Sentimental Poetry’ (1796), Friedrich Schiller observed that the Ancient Greeks, who had spent most of their time outdoors, whose cities were small and ringed by forests and seas, had only rarely felt the need to celebrate the natural world in their art. ‘Since the Greeks had not lost nature in themselves,’ he explained, ‘they had no great desire to create objects external to them in which they could recover it.’ And then, turning to his own day, Schiller drove home his message: ‘However, as nature begins gradually to vanish from human life as a direct experience, so we see it emerge in the world of the poet as an idea. We can expect that the nation which has gone the farthest towards unnaturalness would have to be touched most strongly by the phenomenon of the naive. This nation is France’ – a country whose late queen had only a few years before perfectly corroborated Schiller’s thesis by passing her weekends watching cows being milked in the rustic village she had had built at the end of her garden.
5.
In 1776 the Swiss artist Caspar Wolf painted a picture of a group of climbers resting in front of the giant Lauteraar glacier high in Switzerland’s Bernese Alps. Perched on top of a rock, two of the climbers gaze up at an immense crevasse-pitted floe of ice before them. Their stockings, the shapes of their hats and their expensive-looking and dainty umbrella suggest that they are aristocrats. Below them, at the bottom left of the canvas, oblivious to the view, is a mountain guide, holding a long walking pole and wearing a coarse cloak and a peasant’s hat. The painting is a case study in how differing psychological imbalances may result in contrasting notions of beauty.
Though he must know these mountains better than all his charges, the guide has none of the aristocrats’ interest in the scene. He seems to be hiding by the side of a boulder. One imagines him longing for the excursion to be over and inwardly mocking the gentlemen who knocked at his door the previous day, asking to be led into the clouds for lunch, in exchange for a sum he could not turn down. For the guide, beauty is likely to lie in the lowlands, in meadows and chalets, while high mountains are fearsome places which one would sanely ascend only out of necessity, to rescue an animal or to build a snow barrier to break the fury of avalanches.
Cottages to correct the excesses of a palace:
Marie Antoinette, Prince de Ligne, Hubert Robert,
Queen’s Hamlet, Petit Trianon, Versailles, 1785
Caspar Wolf, The Lauteraar Glacier, 1776
The date of the picture is significant, for it was at this point in the calendar of the Western imagination that mountains, having been dismissed for centuries as monstrous aberrations, began to exert a widespread attraction for aristocratic tourists, who found in their raw appearance and perilousness a welcome relief from the fastidiousness and gentility of their increasingly over-civilised lives at home. A century before and the gentlemen would have stayed on their estates, trimming their hedges in geometric patterns, feeling no call to be reminded of disorder or wilderness. A century later and even the native guide and his ilk would have started to look more benevolently upon the untamed aspects of nature, their newfound interest having been incubated by the spread of central heating, weather forecasts, newspapers, post offices and railway lines running along even the highest of the Alpine valleys.
But at this moment, at the top of a mountain, two assessments of beauty lie side by side, their divergence explained by two different, and differently deficient, ways of life.
6.
In 1923 a French industrialist named Henry Frugès commissioned the famous but still relatively untried architect Le Corbusier, then thirty-six years old, to build houses for a group of his manual workers and their families. Sited next to Frugès’s factories in Lège and Pessac, near Bordeaux, the resulting complexes were exemplars of Modernism, each a series of undecorated boxes with long rectangular windows, flat roofs and bare walls. Le Corbusier was especially proud of their lack of local and rural allusions. He mocked the aspirations of what he called the ‘folkloric brigade’ – made up of the sentimentalising traditionalists – and denounced French society’s intransigent resistance to modernity. In the houses he designed for the labourers, his admiration for industry and technology expressed itself in expanses of concrete, undecorated surfaces and naked light bulbs.
But the new tenants had a very different idea of beauty. It was not they who had had their fill of tradition and luxury, of gentleness and refinement, nor they who were bored by the regional idiom or the detailed carvings of older buildings. In concrete hangars, dressed in regulation blue overalls, they spent their days assembling pine packing cases for the sugar business. The hours were long and the holidays few. Many had been dragooned from outlying villages to work in Monsieur Frugès’s factories, and they were nostalgic for their former homes and parcels of land. At the end of a shift in the plant, to be further reminded of the dynamism of modern industry was not a pressing psychological priority. Within a few years the workers therefore transformed their all-but-identical Corbusian cubes into uniquely differentiated, private spaces capable of reminding them of the things which their working lives had stripped away. Unconcerned with spoiling the great architect’s designs, they added to their houses pitched roofs, shutters, small casement windows, flowered wallpaper and picket fences in the vernacular style, and, once that was done, set about installing a variety of ornamental fountains and gnomes in their front gardens.
The tenants’ tastes might have run in different directions from those of their architect, but the logic behind the exercise of these tastes was identical. Just like the renowned Modernist, the factory workers had fallen for a style evoking the qualities with which their own lives had been insufficiently endowed.
Le Corbusier, houses, Pessac, 1925 and 1995
7.
A grasp of the psychological mechanism behind taste may not change our sense of what we find beautiful, but it can prevent us from reacting to what we don’t like with simple disbelief. We should know to ask at once what people would have to lack in order to see an object as beautiful and can come to understand the tenor of their deprivation even if we cannot muster enthusiasm for their choice.
We can imagine that a whitewashed rational loft, which seems to us punishingly ordered, might be home to someone unusually oppressed by intimations of anarchy. We can likewise guess that the inhabitants of a roughly rendered building, where the walls are made of black bricks and the doors of rusted steel, are liable to be fleeing from feelings of their own or their society’s excessive privilege, just as we can presume that blatantly playful blocks, where the roofs are curved, the windows buckled and the walls painted in childlike colours, will touch an especially powerful chord in the bureaucratic and unimaginative, who will see in them an exuberance that promises an escape from overpowering feelings of inner seriousness.