Oh, let me speak for a moment about this fellow named Ingres. What comes to mind when you hear his name? Perhaps nothing at all. If that is the case, it matters not one bit. However, one must, at least once, take a long, meditative look at that “slippery-smooth” texture found in his paintings.
There is such a thing in this world as clumsy passion, but in Ingres’s case, it transcends that and reaches the realm of “obsession.” He convinced himself that drawing was the alpha and omega of art, and he drew lines with such fervor that he seemed to forget even to breathe. And those lines! They are so smooth, so utterly devoid of gaps, that it feels as though he had stripped away every last ounce of friction from this world.
Consider, for example, one of his masterpieces, “The Spring.” You know the one—the young lady standing there holding a pitcher. Gazing at it, one begins to feel a strange sensation, as if looking not at a human being, but at a piece of finest marble, polished to a mirror finish and flickered with a faint, ghostly spark of life. It is less a body and more a sculpture. And not just any sculpture, but a craft-piece of flesh, fashioned by a man possessed by the malady of perfectionism, who refused to permit even a hair’s breadth of error.
Ingres reigned as the standard-bearer of Neoclassicism, hailed in the French art circles of the time as the second coming of Raphael. His rival was Delacroix, who fought with reckless, unrestrained color. The animosity between the two was far beyond a mere childish spat. To Ingres’s ears, Delacroix’s paintings were nothing more than playing in the mud. The forms are collapsed, the lines are chaotic—it is an insult to art! So he would fume, knitting his brows in righteous indignation.
Yet, here is the delightful twist: while Ingres pursued “correctness” to such an extreme, he was actually telling a colossal “lie.” Look closely at the famous “Grande Odalisque,” that painting of the woman with her back turned. Look very carefully. She has three or four more vertebrae than a normal human being. Anatomically, such a body is impossible. If such a person truly existed, she would likely find it difficult even to walk.
But Ingres added those bones as a conscious criminal. Why? Because it was more beautiful as a line. While being called the demon of drafting and the god of realism, he nonchalantly remodeled the human anatomy to achieve the “ultimate curve” of his ideals. This is not a mere matter of technique. It is the pinnacle of egoism and, at the same time, the terrifying “karma” of an artist.
We often find ourselves searching for the “correct answer.” Things should be this way; rules must be followed; reality ought to look like this. Ingres, too, appeared before the world wearing the mask of the guardian of such “correctness.” However, what he truly chased was not the correctness of reality, but the “madness named Beauty” that resided within him.
Rather than bending himself to fit reality, he added a bone or two to reality to fit his own aesthetics. What audacity! What shamelessness! Perhaps that very brazenness is the boundary that separates the genius from the sea of mediocre painters. Behind that slippery, perfect canvas, he was actually boiling down a dark, thick, and lingering obsession.
If, standing before an Ingres, you feel that it is “perhaps too beautiful and therefore cold,” you are correct. But try to imagine the desperate countenance of the man behind that coldness—the man who went so far as to fabricate bones for the sake of beauty. When you do, doesn’t that smooth skin suddenly seem to pulse with a raw, vivid heat?
In life, when one tries to live too earnestly, too fastidiously, a strain inevitably appears somewhere. Yet, knowing full well that strain exists, one might try adding a single bone of one’s own ideal. There is a warped beauty that is born only through such an act. I feel that Ingres, with that unnaturally long back, is teaching us exactly that.
Should you ever feel like lamenting that your own life is failing to take proper shape, please remember Ingres. Then, in the quiet of your heart, try adding a single vertebra to your own spine. Reality, after all, might be something that can be changed by just that much selfishness. Of course, it would require the effort to polish it until it is so slippery-smooth that no one could possibly complain, just as Ingres did.
In that sense, Ingres is not merely a textbook painter of a bygone era. He was a dreamer—the most stubborn, the most constrained, and yet the most free dreamer in the world—who sought to depict his own fantasy more “correctly” than reality itself. While gazing at that supple, impossibly long back he painted, perhaps we might allow ourselves to love our own misshapen realities just a little bit more.