Van Gogh:Good and Beautiful

Sure it’s good, but is it good for you? Since Aristotle, philosophers have puzzled over the question “What is beauty?” The basis of aesthetics, up until the early 20^th century, was the pursuit of an answer to this age-old question. In the early decades of the last century, artists and philosophers alike expended considerable energy coming up with one theory after another, all ultimately to fail in getting down to the essence of beauty – beauty itself, without any need for an object of beauty.

I find that the greatest pleasure in my pursuit of the beautiful is my discovery of what is moral. I think beauty is good in that sense; it leads people to contemplate basic questions of how to live a good life. That is why I want to surround myself with art, because not only does it fill me with pleasure, it also creates in my mind a version of the good which is, at least, worth testing.

May I offer an example?

Here is something that is good on a painterly level. It shows skilled craftmanship plus an extraorindary ability at self-expression. Van Gogh painted “Gauguin’s Chair” during one of his manic periods when he made dozens of paintings a month. This one was done after he and Gauguin went their separate ways, an event that troubled Van Gogh for the rest of his short life. The painting is rich, it is good, and it is suffused with grief. The empty chair becomes a universal symbol of loss and it fills me with strong, resonant emotion, as I reflect on the people I’ve lost.

An eminent art historian, connoisseur and appraiser in the first decades of the 20^th century, Bernard Berenson wrote, “art must be life enhancing”.