The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
Let’s embrace the unsightly
A new exhibition traces the efforts we’ve made throughout history to hide ugliness from view – but what if we celebrated it instead?
Years ago, I had an argument with an American friend. My friend is a kind, socially conscious person, and keen to avoid causing needless offence to others. But we got into a spat because he kept posting on Twitter that Donald Trump was ugly, and that his being fat and old revealed how pathetic he was. It wasn’t that I objected to the rudeness towards Trump himself, I said, but rather with the conflation of unsightliness with immorality. He was demonstrating Trump’s qualities (among other things, his monstrous entitlement and casual barbarity) by his ugliness. I doubt many would explicitly say that beauty is a marker of goodness – but an instinct that this is true still drives us.
A new exhibition at London’s Wellcome Collection, The Cult of Beauty, adopts a historical perspective on how good looks have been idolised. Drawing on artefacts, art and beauty products across the centuries, the show asks: can we still believe in the myth of universal beauty when its standards can be seen to have changed so much over time?
As it happens, I’ve thought for a while that this contemporary insistence on beauty standards being radically different from generation to generation is a little overblown. I remember as a teenager in the 2000s, whenever I went on the internet, I would encounter strident memes about how Marilyn Monroe would be shunned by society if she were a celebrity now because she was so much larger than today’s waifish actresses. She was a size 16, these things would say over and over again, which doesn’t seem to be an assertion grounded in reality (see for instance the fuss around Kim Kardashian having to crash diet to fit into Monroe’s dress for the 2022 Met Gala in New York). It is hard to imagine that if a woman of Monroe’s beauty and charisma were around today she would not be worshipped.
Of course trends come and go. In my own lifetime the pendulum has swung from size zero frailty to the equally unachievable ratio of a tiny waist and enormous bottom, and recently back around again in the Ozempic era’s nostalgic rush to skinny. Around the world, there have been discrepancies between which body types are the most prized – though globalisation has softened even that truth.
But female physical beauty has been difficult to achieve in any era, unless you were genetically exceptional and fortunate. It is striking, looking at what’s on display in The Cult of Beauty, how often through history we have warned against striving toward beauty. See the marvellously titled Death and the Devil attack two women who are looking in a hand-held mirror, a German etching from the 16th century, in which the two women are idly enjoying their hard-won appearances in fine costumes and standing before a table of jewellery and ointments. Death and the Devil loom behind them: a reminder that all their little adornments will come to nothing. She who strives for beauty which is not naturally possessed is not only a failure but a moral pestilence.
Yet some of the more remarkable historical objects in the exhibition contain a viciousness that’s almost a comical rebuttal to the idea that beauty is natural. A brass corset from the 1800s is a fascinating thing to behold – it’s unclear as to whether it’s designed to treat a spinal deformity, or to create a fashionably cinched waist, or both. It’s as brutal-looking as medieval armour, but its starkness is stunning too. There’s a part of me which can’t help but wonder what it would feel like to be inside of that, the discipline required to bite into your body with such force. Another corset is one I had no idea existed – made of pink, padded cotton specifically for maternity use – which made me think about those who like to argue that, rather than a cultural construct, the pursuit of beauty is merely a signifier of evolutionary success (hence the attractiveness of the most reproductively capable symmetrical young women). This seems a little difficult to argue when pregnancy has also historically been perceived as unruly and ugly.
To opt out of beauty is a dangerous choice. If you have been born with none of the characteristics commonly judged to be visually pleasing, you can mitigate the distaste with which you will be seen with the appearance of effort. Finely tailored clothing, expert make-up and expensive haircuts tell a hostile audience that you are
at least trying. “There are no ugly women, only lazy ones,” declared the early-20th-century PolishAmerican cosmetics mogul Helena Rubinstein – shown, in this exhibition, testing out one of her lotions on herself in her Long Island factory. Rubinstein’s face cream, which she claimed was made from rare Carpathian herbs, was a sensation in the early part of the 20th century (the cream’s actual ingredients – mostly comprising lanolin – were rather more prosaic).
It is those who have completely failed to participate in the agreedupon methods of aesthetic niceties who arouse true hatred. This is clear in the inexplicable rage some people express when they see someone unkempt or ungroomed in public, even though the person’s appearance or presence has no material impact on the viewer. It is not a coincidence, perhaps, that some of the mythological female creatures who are not just belittled but deeply feared are witches and crones and crazed elderly women who are not only oblivious to their own ugliness but actually revel in it. They celebrate its ability to revolt.
What would it take to escape this cult of beauty? Could one way out lie in embracing its antithesis? Ugliness has not been well studied as its own subject, instead considered only as the absence or negation of beauty. The design critic Stephen Bayley wrote in his 2012 book Ugly: The Aesthetics of Everything: “You can’t write a historical narrative on ugliness, at least not in the academic sense. The books simply do not exist: appropriate to its aggressive nature, ugliness is a subject writers have generally avoided. Perhaps they have avoided it like a plague.”
But the more time I spend looking at objects and instruments designed to induce beauty, the more I am drawn to endorse ugliness on its own terms. There is always something wearying about consuming a lot of beauty all at once. Last summer in Madrid after hours in the Prado I found I couldn’t focus on the sumptuous Rubens painting The Three Graces, and needed to take a break to look at a bad café, or my lover’s imperfect face, or at least Goya’s comparatively raucous Saturn Devouring His Son. Beauty is stimulating, it compels us to admire and even to fall in love, but it is repetitive. Ugliness, conversely, troubles us in a way which is exhilaratingly infinite. True ugliness (as opposed to alternative or unorthodox forms of beauty) may be disturbing but it is rarely dull.
Even merely considering the many objects we use to beautify ourselves is a gruelling task. Much is made of the positive side of beauty rituals nowadays. And I love the Wellcome exhibition’s assortment of compact mirrors – including a gorgeous “bird-in-hand” compact of streamlined bronze (and two pinprick red enamel eyes) designed by Salvador Dalí in the 1950s – because they reminded me of the small pleasure of stealing 30 seconds at the bar before a date arrives to check your lipstick. But if I’m honest, I don’t enjoy doing my make-up every day for 30 minutes – I find it intolerably boring. What I enjoy is the absence of discomfort I feel when I’m not as vulnerable to the scrutiny of others.
The internet has not helped things, as one might imagine, though even here one can surely draw a historical line. While contemplating the exhibition’s Victorian pamphlet for an “electropathic belt”, and its range of artificial noses from the 18th century of ivory and plated metal, I was reminded of the Instagram advertisements I am constantly served for “facial gymnastic” programmes to define jawlines, and LED lights to strap to one’s face for wrinkle reduction. I think, too, of how a friend and I once discussed a certain expensive exfoliant which is supposed to reduce fine lines around the mouth.
“It kind of…” she began, and I finished her sentence: “It hurts, doesn’t it? And that’s why we like it,
‘There are no ugly women,’ declared Helena Rubinstein. ‘Only lazy ones’
we feel that because it hurts it must be working.”
I don’t like living this way, in such opposition to the things I really feel. And what makes things ugly – the revelation of inadequacy, its acknowledgement of decay and death – are the things that actually make me feel most connected to the earth and to other people.
Art is not simply the production of beauty (though this is not obvious from the way we learn about it in school). Art’s great potential is in the unveiling of another person’s subjectivity: the eeriness of seeing or feeling something as a stranger does. This achievement can be wrought of beautiful art, of course, but in ugly art it is all the more affecting – because to conceal ugliness is the life’s work of so many.
There is a certain kind of stateliness that only ugliness can confer. Quentin Matsys’s The Ugly Duchess (1513), one of the most famous representations of ugliness in painting – the subject of which, it has been speculated in modern times, suffered from a rare form of Paget’s disease – has this quality. I think we feel the same thing when we watch David Lynch’s The Elephant Man and see John Hurt’s John Merrick insisting on his humanity. In their ugliness, there are no edges to blur, because there are no edges at all, only an elegant and total irrefutability; strident, seductive.
Ugliness, and specifically the creation of ugliness through distortion, is a powerful tool too. The artist Mike Kelley’s stuffed toy sculptures were created using handmade dolls and craft objects. These are the ham-fisted idols of infancy, and Kelley wanted to see, he said, just how strange their “signifiers of cuteness, like big eyes or big heads” really were.
Today, blatant prejudice – homophobia, racism and misogyny – runs rampant across the internet, and all too often it is accompanied by a hateful insistence on the supremacy of a narrow kind of beauty. At a time when anything that is seen to defy the natural order of things is derided, to defend instead the merits of ugliness feels all the more necessary. It’s important to say that ugliness – as much as beauty, maybe more so – matters too.
The Cult of Beauty is at the Wellcome Collection, London
NW1 (wellcomecollection.org), from Thursday to April 28. Megan Nolan’s latest book is Ordinary Human Failings (Jonathan Cape, £16.99)