The Beauty of the Devil in Art? Noah Charney’s “The Devil in the Gallery”

Noah Charney. The Devil in the Gallery: How Scandal, Shock, and Rivalry Shaped the Art World. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2021.

“Rivalry, scandal, and shock are negative things, aren’t they?” It is often said that beauty is a pathway to God. After all, the emphasis on Beauty and God, the Good, is a hallmark of Platonic, Neoplatonic, and Christian thought. And while Platonism and Christianity have been tremendous, if not essential, influences on the development of the Western artistic tradition, Noah Charney offers some “sympathy for the devil” in his new work The Devil in the Gallery. Many of the great works of classical art, and almost all of modern art, is moved by those negative emotions and passions that have long been derided as the road to hell; yet, as retold by Charney, they also provided the energy to produce the countless works of art that have mesmerized generations down through the ages.

Art has long had its admirers and detractors for a myriad of reasons. It has also had strange bedfellows. For a long time, the great patron of the arts was the Catholic Church. Even so, the Church was filled with admirers of progressive artistic advances while others were stingy, prudish, and sought to censor the very art and artists they commissioned. Conservatives have also championed art—or at least a certain form and style of art. Yet it is unarguable that art has generally been the domain of “liberals,” here defined by Charney as those who push the boundaries of morality and societal norms. Art, as such, has generally been the field in which liars, swindlers, murderers, and other individuals outside the social norms of respectability have dwelled and flourished.

Noah Charney charts the course of art in three chapters, devoted to three aspects of “the devil” influencing art: scandal, shock, and rivalry. In each chapter he highlights select art and artists and how they manifest scandal, shock, and rivalry. It is also noteworthy to highlight that much of our celebrated religious artwork was, in its day, often scandalous, shocking, and the product of rivalry. While such religious conservatives or generally religious individuals nowadays hold an appreciative disposition toward, say, the works of Caravaggio, Michelangelo, or Raphael, not to mention Peter Paul Rubens, Charney highlights how the best of religious and baroque artwork was often—in its time—the playground of the devil’s emotions and values (scandal, shock, and rivalry). More on this in a moment.

Apart from artwork dealing with sacred matters, Charney also deals with modernist and postmodernist art, the truly shocking and grotesque that have roiled the art world. Marchel Duchamp, Chris Ofili, Andres Serrano, all make the appearance with insightful ruminations from our guide through “base materials” and “[s]emen, urine, excrement, vomit—these are not materials we have come to expect in high art.” Definitely scandalous and shocking.

Here we may disagree with our guide about what constitutes high art. I certainly don’t share the absurd celebration of the mundane and base as particularly artistic. But there is a certain truth that certain base emotions and even innuendos do appear throughout what all would regard as high art. In his best moments, of which there are many, Charney challenges us to consider what is appropriate, say, for high art—especially in its sacred form—from the lower forms we might more regularly attribute to Gabriel Orozco or Damien Hirst. The crypt of the Church of Santa Maria della Concezione de Capuccini in Rome, with its adornment in the skulls and bones of martyrs, doesn’t strike us as grotesque as the decorated skulls of Orozco or Hirst. Why? I think we can intuit why, but Charney offers a great challenge as to why do we draw that boundary.

Let us now return to the blurred lines in sacred art that caused scandal and shock but today get a pass.

Caravaggio, a murderer and undeniably immoral man in the eyes of the Church, nevertheless produced some of the greatest works of religious art in the early baroque period to which later baroque art stands in the shadow of everywhere one looks. His famous Madonna of Loreto, Charney reminds us, modeled the Virgin Mary after a local prostitute whom he was a friend with (and possibly more than just friends). In his even more famous The Death of the Virgin, Caravaggio “employed as the model for the body of Mary the corpse of a prostitute that Caravaggio saw dredged out of the Tiber River.” Shocking, undoubtedly. Does knowledge of these realities diminish the transcendental feeling we experience when being enraptured by his art? I don’t think so. At the same time as Caravaggio pushed the boundaries of the shocking in his art, he was also among the first artists—Charney reminds us—to take seriously the Council of Trent’s call for “meditation and realize them in paintings.” Caravaggio as artist is arguably a deep theologian too, all things considered.

Given the nature of this book and what Charney wants to convey, it is scandalously and shockingly appropriate he starts it with Caravaggio and his sacred art.

And this is where Charney shines in his message. That blurring of sacred and secular art, the fondness to “high art” we almost all universally agree upon and the often-dismissive attitude to “low art” many of us—minus, perhaps, the critics and Avant Garde—have when looking at what fills the modern or contemporary art gallery and symposium, is challenged by the implicit question: why? In its time, Jean Fouquet’s Virgin and Child was shocking. As Charney writes, the painting contains “a far sexier Virgin Mary with a floating, gravity-defying boob that has broken free of its garment.” Yet when looking upon Fouquet’s masterpiece we are often not filled with the same feelings as when looking at Chris Ofili’s Holy Virgin Mary. If Caravaggio embodied Trent’s proclamation to create art that invites meditation, Charney has—subtly and slickly, if not ironically and possibly unintentionally—invited that same spirit of meditation in his book.

By the time our masterful guide concludes his tour he notes that in the history of art, “There is a devil lurking in the gallery. And thank goodness.” Without that devil he asks, “What would our history have looked like stripped of rivalry, in a world in which everyone got along and maintained the status quo?” We certainly wouldn’t have had many of the masterful works of art that attracts the gaze of all. Charney wanted to “shed light upon [the Devil]” who “lurk[s] in dark corners of the art world, morphing into many forms.” And he certainly accomplished that. Though we may not all agree what constitutes high art after this shockingly brilliant expose.

But then I can say to those who may hold religious and otherwise conservative attitudes to art and aesthetics—hey, I studied with Sir Roger Scruton so that disposition does hold sway over me—that we ought to be, indeed, thankful that some of the venom and animosity that moved Milton’s Satan poured itself into the art world and produced works of art that have undoubtedly drawn souls closer to the Transcendental Beauty that sits beside Truth itself as Plotinus said and understood. If we take theology and art seriously, we can agree that God likes to let the Devil have his moments from time to time; and thank God! Any lover of art—and I certainly count myself as one as someone often led private tours through the National Art Gallery in London when studying in England and even convinced some fellow co-religionists of the sublime wonder of some of the very pieces of art sampled in book and why they should love them—needs to add this book to their library. They won’t be disappointed—even if they may be shocked at some of things and revelations Charney says and highlights. Above all, Charney’s work invites us to meditate and wrestle with the complex but undeniably sublime history of art. That isn’t a scandalous thing to consider, is it?

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