Art’s return to passion

“Passionism” is a current in contemporary art that addresses basic existential themes like death, time, istory, pain over loss, longing for what is lost or unattainable, uncertainty about the choices in life – but also love, hope and poetry. These themes are conveyed through figurative and narrative painting, and characterized by solid craftsmanship.

“The passionists” are usually seen as recluses on the art scene, but in my book ”Sorte billeder – Kunst og kanon” [’Black Pictures – Art and Canon’], I have considered them as an artistic current in order to show how they constitute a tendency in contemporary art that has been overlooked for a long time. This is a deliberate and existentially vital current in art with a living relation to the historical traditions of painting. At the same time, the work of the passionists is intrinsically imbued with the experiences, history and artistic development of the 20th and 21st centuries. 

With their intensely serious relationship to figurative, narrative painting and its ability to convey general existential propositions, these artists are generally relegated to the periphery of the art world, and the art establishment has difficulty recognizing their work as contemporary. Many of them are self-proclaimed outsiders, stamped as kitsch painters or Rembrandt clones, and they are often accused of uncritically championing forms of art that the rest of the art world has long abandoned. In this article, I will argue that passionism is misunderstood when it is thought to cling to antiquated art traditions and cultivate a sentimental view of what is “beauty”.

An idea closely associated with this is to view passionism, with its high level of craftsmanship and immediately readable paintings, as an attempt to return to a time when the role of art was to make the world beautiful. As a case in point I have been invited to write about passionism for a an issue of Axess with the theme “The Return of Beauty”. But the work of the passionists is not about reincorporating beauty in art – rather, it is about having an uninhibited relation to the traditions of art history and producing new, updated interpretations of content that is timeless and basically meaningful. Beauty was never lost, I might add. Beauty is always present in the sense that beauty is found as a condition in the extension of knowledge, and so can thus be defined as something other than pretty, decorative or aesthetic. Beauty is an image of all knowledge combined, and thus a free and fluid quality.

Beauty What does beauty mean in a contemporary sense? In everyday speech, the word is used to describe anything from the glory of nature to an attractive woman. Yet if we look at the world of art, it is not a word that is used very frequently today, which may seem surprising. But the Western concept of art in recent centuries has developed an increasingly problematic relation to beauty in art: Compared with previous eras in the history of aesthetics, the 20th century is distinguished as having abandoned the discussion of beauty. In the aesthetics of the 19th century, the discussion revolved around the decline of the philosophy of beauty. Once this tradition was declared dead, the focus shifted to what was called the crisis of aesthetics, but even this theme died away.

The paradox in the world of 20th century aesthetic theory is that beauty as a concept has slipped out of the theoretical discussion. Contrary to our expectations, we do not find any consideration on the theoretical-philosophical level of beauty and its essence. The key concept of aesthetics has been transformed into a theoretical taboo. In the past, beauty was something one could expect in a work of art – in Swedish de sköna konsterna, or fine arts, were literally ‘the beautiful arts’, which obviously included the visual arts. The art of Classical Antiquity, with sculptures like Venus of Milo, Apollo Belvedere and Doryphorus, was thought to provide eternal images of beauty and thus constituted the norm following a rigid set of aesthetic rules. Antiquity represented the ideal, the art of harmony and dignity, and ever since then artists have striven to produce works of art based on these Classical models – perfectly balanced, flawless and noble, depending on the shifting taste of various periods.

The sublime In the early 19th century, there was a significant change in the way beauty was represented in art. Artists and poets from the Romantic Age abandoned the notion that they could achieve some kind of perfect beauty in their creations, and instead made it a virtue to create paintings and poems that were incomplete, disconnected, lacking in har- mony and unity, and characterized by violent contrasts and fragmentary elements. Compared with the Classical aesthetic, the Romantic aesthetic was ugly because it depicted reality in all its variety and imperfection instead of trying to capture something absolute and ideal.

The entire essence of Romanticism lay in a painful realization that this ideal could never be attained. Whereas Classical beauty can be defined as a delimited, harmonious form, the sublime represents the unbounded, shapeless, magnificent and downright frightening, what people experience when they are confronted with the grandeur and violence of nature or with their own feelings of doubt, hate, love and desire: in short, phenomena that bring about an awareness of the human inability to ultimately understand the meaning of existence. Romanticism’s cultivation of the sublime was closely associated with the aesthetics of the fragment, and resulted in works of art which in an un-Classical manner remained open and incomplete, as an expression of the boundless nature of the sublime.

Modern beauty With 19th century realism, of which the French painter Gustave Courbet was a provocative representative, the distance from the Classical concept of beauty grew even further. Realism redefined beauty as nature depicted without any idealization. The French poet and art critic Charles Baudelaire was in deep disagreement with his friend Courbet, but advanced an even more radical reassessment of beauty. His version of beauty was imbued with the energy, disharmony and artificiality of the modern metropolis. In sharp contrast to the Classical ideal, Baudelaire proclaimed that beauty was dangerous; at the same time both diabolically seductive and repulsive, it created doubt, uncertainty and madness rather than calm, wisdom and dignity.

Modern beauty challenged this belief instead of confirming it. With Baudelaire, beauty became decadent. What had once been ugly was transformed in the 19th century into beauty, while the 20th century eventually abandoned beauty altogether as an essential aspect of art. In light of the many violent changes that hte 20th century witnessed, it became common to maintain that beauty was no longer a valid criterion, much less a possibility for art. Modernism’s foremost philosopher, Theodor W. Adorno, concluded that “ugly” modern art, that was hermetic and distanced itself from familiar, mundane reality, constituted the only possibility to express something true about our modern, alienated existence. In parallel with this, the avant-garde staged an attack on Classical beauty by challenging and transcending the boundaries between “art” and “reality”. Here, realism took on completely new meaning, with everyday objects simply being taken and placed in an artistic context.

The French avant-garde artist Marcel Duchamp became a pioneer by turning his choices and actions into the essential quality of art, rather than the products that these choices and actions resulted in. A good example is his readymades – massproduced objects which he selected, set in an artistic context and signed as works of art. It was the idea or concept that was key, not the object or work of art – an approach that took on great scope and meaning for artistic currents like surrealism, pop art, minimalism and concept art.

The institutionalized avant-garde As the avant-garde entered the annals of art history, craftsmanship lost its importance as a guarantee of a work’s authenticity and quality. It took only a few decades for Duchamp to be canonized; this took place in the late 1950s and early 1960s, when a new generation of artists – called the neo-avant-garde – rediscovered his concepts from the early 20th century and incorporated them in their own work. This presaged a virtual institutionalization of the avant-garde, who was originally highly critical , even destructive, towards the art institution, was gradually appropriated and proclaimed the most important catalyst for art in the 20th century. The institutionalization of the avant-garde has led to a broad understanding that the artistic concept has precedence over craftsmanship, and even makes it superfluous.

It has become a kind of basic requirement in art to challenge prevailing conventions whereas traditional artisanal skill is almost a disqualification because it has come to be seen as synonymous with being reactionary. It has also resulted in beauty in the Classical sense being considered an obsolete category, one that can no longer capture the complex reality we live in. But the breaking of the norms and traditions of art that have prevailed until now has itself been transformed into a new norm. As one can read in the generational ”bible” of 1980s Danish art, ”Billedstorm” by Poul Erik Tøjner and Frederik Stjernfelt, the avant-garde has become mainstream: “Statens Museum for Kunst [the Danish national gallery] is arranging happenings, while the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts is training the vanguard.”

The repudiation of beauty has resulted in a clear “antiaesthetic”, which is expressed in the predilection of much of leading contemporary art for trash aesthetics, the mundane and unpretentious. The paradox is that the avant-garde is legitimized by its rebellion against prevailing conventions and traditions. But with this institutionalized, canonized practice, the avant-garde itself very much constitutes a tradition, which sets rules and guidelines for today’s generations of artists. And that brings us to passionism. Just like the artists today who follow in the steps of the avant-garde, the passionists are both the heirs and rejuvenators of an established tradition in art history. Thus, when they are marginalized, it is an expression of the difference between various positions or, in more down-to-earth terms, an expression of power relations on an art scene that is thoroughly theoretized and institutionalized.

Passionism The term “passionism” is an attempt to grasp and seriously examine an alternative current in contemporary art that has yet to attract attention. In my book, I called the eight artists Odd Nerdrum, Thomas Kluge, Ulrik Møller, Preben Fjederholt, Peter Martensen, Balder Olrik, Martin Bigum and Michael Kvium passionists, but there exists a considerable undergrowth of related painters on the current art scene – beyond the Nordic countries as well. The passionists all explore fundamental existential conditions and questions, which are often realized as large-scale figurative and narrative paintings, and take themselves and their passion-filled content in great earnest – even when the artists add nuance to their work by using irony and elements of black humour.

The passionists are normally not seen as belonging to any group, but on closer inspection they are united by a number of key stylistic and thematic elements. They have their roots planted in a tradition of painting that depicts existence in a language that is readily accesible; they thus work through mimesis and narrative. They use familiar genres like landscape, historical painting, portraiture and still life, working and challenging from within rather than rejecting them as worn-out categories. This makes their paintings trenchant and broadly appealing, but at the same time they often surprise a contemporary art audience by insisting on painterly craftsmanship and on the exploration of serious themes that transcend the transience of the moment. Their images are often heartbreaking, sombre and melancholy, and while they can be considered beautiful simply by virtue of their high level of artisan skill, it is instead horror, pain, sorrow and disgust that one encounters in their works, not har- monious beauty – thus my characterization of them as “black images”.

Tradition and the contemporary era What kind of artistic tradition does passionism ascribe to? The passionists see themselves as heirs and rejuvenators of an uninterrupted tradition of painting that stretches from the Renaissance up to about 1900, before the avant-garde began to examine the possibilities of the autonomous work of art. Since then, this tradition has been neglected in the writing of art history, whereas the passionists perceive of it as a living tradition, despite the numerous times it has been declared dead and buried. One misunderstanding often encountered in the reception of the passionists is that they uncritically reproduce artistic forms of the past – an assertion that turns their work into anachronistic kitsch. But just as other strategies in art become meaningless when they are seen through the eyes of one’s adversary, this criticism is primarily an expression of differences in a postmodern art world that essentially accommodates all possibilities.

Passionism is a “postmodern” current in the sense that it has an uninhibited relation to the traditions of art history. Criticizing a passionist approach to art, from this perspective, is reactionary in nature. This criticism is primarily an expression of an ambition to maintain a position that gives one the power to define and delimit what art is today. This article provides no in-depth analysis of the individual passionists, but I will briefly touch on their concept of beauty. Over the years, many of the passionists have repudiated the idea that their artistic driving force was to create something beautiful. Many observers have also characterized the works of the passionists as the opposite: alarming, melancholic, creepy, indeed downright repulsive. Michael Kvium is well-known for his paintings of frightening monstrosities, which confront the viewer with the ruthless conditions of modern existence. Odd Nerdrum, whose human figures seem to balance between profound understanding, ecstasy and madness, challenges many people’s taste.

The superior painterly qualities of these pictures likewise challenge many, filling some with respect and others with loathing. Ulrik Møller, whose quiet, desolate motifs lie at the other end of the passionist mood spectrum, paints landscapes and cities with an aesthetically subdued palette. This has encouraged some to see him as a direct heir of the tradition of the Danish Golden Age, in which the painter depicts a local landscape in a sentimentally embellished glow. Møller, however, declares that beauty does not interest him. On the other hand, one of the fundamental driving forces for him and other passionists is to depict their own existential despair and pain in pictures that are readily accessible, as a way to communicate with other individuals and come to terms with the world. Hence, the passionists are consumed not with beauty but with the sublime – reflecting on the difficult conditions of life that hold true today just as they always have.

The role of outsider Several of the passionists have a reputation as outsiders, a role they have cultivated more or less deliberately in an attempt to mark their disassociation from a tradition of art that has difficulty accepting their projects as “contemporary art”. Odd Nerdrum and Thomas Kluge are best known in this context, but over the years most of the passionists have expressed the view that the art establishment favours certain traditions and forms of art at the expense of others.

A typical example is Balder Olrik’s work Die Toteninseln [‘The Isle of the Dead’], where he has set the names of some of his own sources of artistic inspiration – from the Romantics Friedrich and J. C. Dahl to fin de siècle painters like Arnold Böcklin and Sargent to neg- lected Danish artists like Janus la Cour and Thorvald Niss – on dreary barracks in a concentration camp, as a sign that he sees them as being “eliminated” from art history. On the whole, what the passionists share is their identification with the more peripheral figures in art history. It has increased their relatively peripheral position on the art scene that several of the passionists have themselves cultivated the role as outsiders. But this alone cannot explain why the art establishment has not previously recognized that these artists are not exceptions that confirm the rule, but rather that they constitute a genuine current along with other currents in contemporary art.

A more satisfying answer should be sought in the demise of Classical beauty in art as delineated above. This has entailed a transition from a rule-governed conventional aesthetic to an experimental anti-aesthetic that transcends boundaries. Today this anti-aesthetic has to a large extent come to define what art is, and this entails certain professionally established expectations towards contemporary art. Even though it is often repeated that in theory everything is allowed today, in practice, there is clear agreement that it is progressive to challenge tradition, whereas artists who take seriously the traditions of painting, craftsmanship and basic existential content are conservative and reactionary. As a distinct current in contemporary art, passionism goes against the canonized history of art that has come to be represented by distinct, privileged parts of 19th and 20th century art.

True diversity in art Some people claim that artists, who deliberately place themselves at the periphery by carrying on traditions and art forms that are considered outdated by the art institution, are today’s true avant-garde: it is they, rather than the institutionalized avant-garde, that break with prevailing institutional conventions. As I see it, this analysis is completely uninteresting and unfruitful. We are now in a unique situation historically, one in which we have recognized that art is open to all possibilities. There has been broad theoretical agreement on this since the 1980s.

So it is not just ingrained thinking but also a demonstration of power when some people in practice cling to the obsolete view that certain artistic traditions are more modern than others. We would gain a great deal by taking the artistic revolutions of the last two hundred years seriously and recognizing that the idea of a particular privileged and canonized aesthetic prevents us from really recognizing that art is unpredictable and heterogeneous. The history of art consists not of a single history, but rather of many different offshoots and currents that run parallel and continue, beyond the artificial historical highlights that art historians tend to construct. Figurative, narrative painting constitutes one current that stretches far back in time and is still alive today; the avantgarde current has existed for a good hundred years and is still producing acutely critical, marvellous and substantial works, even though a lot of critics over the years have predicted that this tradition would conquer itself to death.

A distinctive feature of the avant-garde tradition is its demand to continuously transcend boundaries and develop – the concept that once a person has done something, it can not be done again. But why should this demand govern the possibilities of different forms of art? The relative nature of beauty also becomes clear here. Everyone is working with one aesthetic or another, and if the art establishment is to live up to the postmodern understanding of the diversity of art, which it has long dedicated itself to in theoretical terms, it must allow the various parallel tendencies in art to express themselves and be examined and conveyed based on their own aesthetic criteria – especially today, when the establishment has or should have put the notion of a single privileged aesthetic behind it.