GENDER NEUTRAL in heart and mind, children are most uncomplicated in their relationship with pretty things and places (Riverside Main Library children’s library, Riverside, CA).
For men in our time to be, dress or care about being pretty or appreciating pretty seems transgressive. We see everywhere among men that prettiness has taken on an air of protest, self-liberation through exaggeration and irony. It has got mixed up (and confused) with a hyper-awareness of gender identity and sexuality, controversies over masculinity (toxic and otherwise) femininity (feigned and otherwise) and even misogyny. Among young men and boys, the embrace of pretty in dress and manner--once unthinkable, certainly marginal even dangerous-- has quickly evolved from daring to somewhat acceptable, assuming the manner assumed is just so.
VICTORIAN WALLPAPER was the effect we wanted to capture in the treatment of the backside of the barrel vault in this gallery in this city, one of the few in southern California with a well-preserved Victorian heritage (Museum of Redlands, Redlands CA).
SHAPES THAT SWELL seem gravity defying like puffy clouds and billowing sails, an effect that is pleasing and pretty without relying on ornament.
ARABESQUE is the old school term with which to refer to a pretty ballet move, cursive writing (first practiced by the Arabs), and flourishes of the pen (Saul Steinberg, right).
By pretty, we mean not quite unicorns and rainbows, but perhaps orange blossoms and dandelions, butterflies and peacocks, the colors pink and chartreuse, sparkling pearls and glitter. We mean profiles and proportions that are delicate, attenuated, fluid and gravity defying—vines seeking sunlight, leaves fluttering in a breeze, rolling golden fields of wheat, waterfall mists at dawn. Pretty can take on characteristics of elegant, refined, fancy and cute or striking, robust, saturated and bold or any or all of those characteristics. Pretty is fixed in neither time nor place.
MALE AND FEMALE BIRDS confound our contemporary association of pretty and gender (Female left, male right).
WE ADMIRE Michael Jordan’s masculine grace (left) and Dennis Rodman’s transgressive cross-dressing (right)—the former for his mastery, the latter for his disinhibition.
TRANSGENDER exaggeration in dress is a form of expression rooted in a complex (and relatively recent) interplay of aesthetic values and gender identity (Characters of “Pose” Ryan Murphy’s recent TV show).
CELEBRITIES EXPLOIT our fraught relationship with expressions of pretty to capture and keep attention (Bad Bunny above, Lil Nas X, lower left, Beyonce lower right).
Pretty was not always associated with gender or gender transgression, it was a pleasure that everyone could enjoy regardless of sex (race, ethnicity, socio-economic condition or class). It conveyed not gender identity but learnedness, sophistication and grace-- ease with and in the world—something we all could aspire to. Sociologists and cultural historians can explain where and how we got to where we are in the west but it probably had something to do first with country life on English estates, then colonialism, then our 19th century agricultural economy and the usurpation of the American west. We see it in the refined masculinity of the earth-toned tweed and plaid of English haberdashery (much admired by continental modernists like Adolf Loos) and in the hyper masculinity of 19th century American cowboy dress (jeans and boots).
CONTEMPORARY ARTISTS have only recently reengaged in conversation with traditional art and in so doing have achieved without irony or cynicism new kinds of pretty (David’s 1801 portrait of Napoleon Bonaparte above left; 18th C Rococo interior décor below left; Kehinde Wiley, above right; David Wiseman, below right).
SERIOUS DRESS by authoritative people gravitates toward somber and avoids pretty (Curators pictured with pretty Fragonard paintings at the temporary Frick Collection Met Breuer home, left; President Obama in a pretty portrait by Kehinde Wiley, right).
When we experience the array of pretty in architecture, we see it in buildings’ shapes, details and surface treatments. The Greco-Roman classical orders offer the simplest example: the Doric order is stout and robust, the Corinthian order attenuated and pretty. The Greek Revival in 18th Century America favored the Doric order for its appeal to the severe sensibilities of Puritan descendants while the Corinthian order appealed to the frillier aesthetics of Victorians, European immigrants and the fancy Gilded Age.
THE CLASSICAL ORDERS offer the simplest demonstration of how we apprehend in shape and decor the spectrum of pretty.
OUR PRETTY PREDELICTIONS go back far as demonstrated in this floor mosaic from Pompeii.
MONKS AND THEIR MANUSCRIPTS were the keepers of pretty for almost a thousand years—the urge so great as to thrive even within the restrictions of monastic life.
The great balancing act that was the Italian Renaissance pretty much nailed pretty without veering toward either too severe or too fancy. We see it in a Botticelli painting, a Donatello statue and a Brunelleschi building. The Florentines were aware of the goal--harmony and delight-- and the skill required—discipline and equanimity. It did not hold for long, both the interest and the effort too tricky to maintain. After Michelangelo’s exploits, we got exuberant Baroque then over-the-top Rococo followed by the backlash of Neo-Classicism then the permissiveness of Revivalism and Art Nouveaux then finally the moralist prohibitions of Modernism.
15th CENTURY FLORENCE was probably more of a tough place than a pretty one even as its artists strived for grace and harmony in their art (Botticelli, Donatello, Brunelleschi; clockwise from upper left).
FLORENCE AND VENICE differed in their vulnerability to outside attack rendering: Florentine buildings more defensive in character, Venetian ones prettier (Palazzo Medici above; Ca d’Oro below).
Our art historians (if they were interested in the topic) might point out that we have always and everywhere in both the east and west oscillated between the polarities of pretty and sober but what happened in the 20th C here in the west was especially extreme. Not only was all ornament—regardless of its aesthetic aspirations-- drowned in the bathtub but so too were aspirations of pretty. The shapes of buildings, their details and surfaces were instead meant to convey noble simplicity and natural masculinity. Modernism was not interested in the give-and-take conversation of the last 500 years and instead in revolution and ending the conversation. Our problem now is that the aesthetic ideal of modernism proved too boring to maintain even as the prohibition against pretty has stuck. And now we are stuck.
SHAH JIHAN, the 17th C ruler over almost all of what we know as India today, had no problem with pretty dress and design (Portrait, right; Taj Mahal and the Peacock Throne above and below left).
WESTWARD EXPANSION, AGRICULTURAL AND CORPORATE LIFE among other forces embedded strict definitions of masculinity and masculine aesthetics in American society.
GERMAN MODERNISTS were especially severe in their quest for a new architecture severed from its pretty past—not surprising in the land of Martin Luther—and some contemporary American modernists have kept up the crusade (Bauhaus, Dessau Germany, Walter Gropius above; Cal Trans District 7 Headquarters, Los Angeles, CA, Morphosis, below).
The exaggerations and acrobatics of free form, neo-constructivist and biomorphic architecture—the excesses of which there is seemingly no limit-- are all attempts to find aesthetic satisfaction in anywhere but pretty. The simple prohibition against it has forced a quest for satisfaction elsewhere in either more austerity or agitation. Our goal is different. We are seeking presence of mind and peace of mind, the grace to re-establish a relationship to our world in which we are in harmony with it.
AMERICAN ADOLESCENTS are hyper-sensitive about what they perceive as inauthenticity or condescension in environments designed with them in mind--pretty and cool do not yet readily mix, although it is worth trying (Costa Mesa Library young adult library, Costa Mesa, CA above; Glendale Library youth services library, Glendale, CA, below).
A DOZEN YEARS AGO, we initiated our first experiments with the reintegration of pretty as a quality worth pursuing in the articulation of a room (West Hollywood Library, West Hollywood, CA main reading room above; ceiling design, below).