I Love All Beauteous Things

I Love All Beauteous Things

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As a musician and writer born and raised here in America, I am used to the
freedom to pursue the meaning of music and art according to my own understanding relatively untrammeled. I take it for granted much of the time.

Tonight, I am feeling just what a precious gift that freedom is.

In my wikipedia travels I stumbled across this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Degenerate_art

Prior to the Nazi’s ascension to power, a series of challenging shifts occurred in German high art. During the Weimar period between WWI and the Nazi’s rise, Germany became a center for the avant-garde movement that included the a series of movements that opposed and reinterpreted conventional notions. Jazz and atonality came on the music scene, while a variety of artistic movements such as surrealism and impressionism came to dominate the visual arts. Most German people found these movements morally suspect and incomprehensible, and often resented them as elitist.

According to Emperor Wilhelm II, this is an example of "Gutter Painting."

The Nazi regime exalted traditional styles that espoused the values of obedience, militarism and racial purity that it propogated. It held the classical Greek and Roman styles as expressions of their racial ideals, and characterized all works deviating from that ideal as symptomatic of inferior racial contamination. To that end and capitalizing on the broader sentiments of the German people, it censored and banned many individual artists and even entire movements from working within Germany. 

An example of Expressionism, which the Nazis particularly hated.

Hitler’s rise to power coincided with a purge of the influences of “modernist” art, with his 1934 declaration that there was no place in German society for modernist experimentation. They dismissed teachers, banned many artists from painting even in private, and closed schools. In 1937, Nazi authorities raided museums of art deemed “modern,” displaying them in a humiliating exhibition named “Entartete Kunst” (Degenerate Art.) Of the hundred or so featured artists, only a few were actually Jewish. Most were German. One, Emil Nolde, had been a faithful member of the Nazi party. Subsequent to the display, the Nazis continued their raids, ultimately seizing thousands of works. It sold as many as it could and burned the rest, including one burning that destroyed almost 4000 paintings in 1939, and another in 1942 that included works by Picasso and Dali. Ironically, some of these paintings (such as a few by Cezanne or Van Gogh) were taken for personal use by high-ranking Nazi authorities.

Many of these German artists faced harassment from authorities, were banned from painting and subject to surprise raids, or died in concentration camps if they were Jewish. The Nazis killed one painter who experienced schizophrenia as a result of her “madness.” Others emigrated to other contries such as the United States, including surrealist Max Ernst who established an artist’s retreat near Sedona, Arizona, and bauhaus architect Mies van der Rohe, who took up residency in Chicago and later designed some of the United States’s most famous Modernist skyscrapers. 

How's this for degenerate?

As a musician and artist, I thrive off independence and experimentation. While I love my traditional and conventional pieces, I also love the fresh and bold sounds and challenging ideas often presented by new or differing art styles. As I write, I’m listening to the beautiful sounds of Brian Eno’s “Music for Airports,” an orchestrated rendering of Brian Eno’s “Ambient Music 1,” written for public spaces. The wacky and wild and whimsical of my own culture, and the ideas that come from many cultures other than my own have blessed my life and artistry in a variety of ways.

In other words, I am degenerate.

I am an insult to purity of race.

I am adulterated by inferiority.

The fact that such fear-based thinking about new and challenging is even a thing flabbergasts me. I love all things that are beautiful and I love the challenge of attempting to understand them even when I don’t completely. As Robert Bridges once said:

“I love all beauteous things,

I seek and adore them;

God hath no better praise,

And man in his hasty days

Is honoured for them.

I too will something make

And joy in the making;

Altho’ to-morrow it seem

Like the empty words of a dream

Remembered on waking.”

ALL. Beauteous things.

I relish in them.

They’re everywhere in art and architecture and from all eras and cultures. The mandirs of India and the stupas of Pagan. The ruins of the Ani Cathedral. The ancient mosques of the Arabic and Persian worlds. The bronze sculptures of ancient China. The overpowering creations of ancient Greece and Rome. The poetry of Whitman or Tagore, the music of Vaughan Williams or Steve Reich. The red rooftops of Dubrovnik, the spires and stained glass of Notre Dame, the outpourings of the Renaissance, and the works featured in our little art museum here on the river.

Stupas of Bagan, 9th-13th centuries, Myanmar

They’re in the movements of the wind through the willow tree on my father’s property. The smile and laugh of my transgender friends. The faith of my Latter-day Saint friends. The drive of my military friends. The hugs of my fellow gay friends. The sound of my niece and nephews’ raucous laughter as we play. The hue of the cars passing me in the street. The drive of my special needs clients to accomplish their work tasks. The snow as it expands and recedes on the hillsides. The miles of sage and grass. The peaks covered in scraggly pines. The silent solitude of the lavas. My mother’s laughter at some stupid joke I make. ALL beauteous things.

Art, to me, is meant to be challenging. When it merely becomes an outlet to feeding my worst impulses such as confirming my sense of superior identity over others, it loses its very soul, and so do I.

I’m in gratitude to the degenerate art. It invites me to expand my soul to see the beauty in it all...even in the things that sometimes are not on first appearance.

The Savior does that to us. He sees all the beauteous things about us, and chooses to focus His attention on those even when we are laden with examples of the opposite. That is the nature of His soul, and it’s the divine nature He invites us to cultivate within ourselves.

And one of my worst fears is that the political biases of those whose motions of spirit are dull as night will one day attempt, by the force of politics, law and violence, to stopper the outpouring of artistic beauty.

Perhaps that will happen one day. I cannot much control the politics of insanity.

But I can keep them from infecting myself. I will continue on my joyful way to experience all the beauteous things I can possible collect to myself. And even if I’m locked in a cell for my artistic degeneracy, my memory and my love for the beautiful will endure. Between stimulus and response there is a space, and I claim it as mine.