What Is Kitsch?
In everyday speech, kitsch means cheap sentiment. In the vocabulary of the figurative revival it means something almost opposite: the deliberate pursuit of feeling, skill and beauty that modernism ruled out of bounds.
The ordinary meaning of the word is well known. Kitsch is the porcelain figurine, the sunset greeting card, the too-sweet melody — art that wears its emotion on its sleeve and is therefore, in polite critical company, not really art at all. For most of the twentieth century "kitsch" was the label used to dismiss anything sentimental, decorative or popular. Understanding the redefined term means first understanding the wall that the ordinary term was built to guard.
The modernist border
In 1939 the critic Clement Greenberg published the essay Avant-Garde and Kitsch, which drew a hard line between genuine, difficult, advanced art and the debased popular product he called kitsch. That border became one of the governing ideas of modern art: to be serious was to be austere, self-critical and preferably abstract; to be emotional, illustrative or crowd-pleasing was to have fallen. Museums such as the Museum of Modern Art were in part built to tell that story. The figurative painter working with warmth and narrative found themselves on the wrong side of the line.
Nerdrum's inversion
The painter Odd Nerdrum accepted the border and then simply changed which side he wanted to be on. If everything he valued — technical mastery, storytelling, pathos, beauty, the eternal subjects of birth and death — had been exiled to the territory called Kitsch, then he would plant his flag in that territory and defend it. "I am not an artist," he liked to say; "I am a kitsch painter." It was a provocation, but a precise one. It turned a term of dismissal into a positive identity with its own criteria of excellence.
What the redefined Kitsch values
In this redefinition, a Kitsch painting is judged by standards the modern museum had set aside:
- Skill — the visible evidence of a trained hand, in drawing, glazing and the handling of light.
- Emotion — the picture is permitted, even required, to move the viewer.
- Narrative and the eternal theme — love, death, birth, exile and time, rather than commentary on art itself.
- Beauty and pathos — sentiment is a legitimate aim, not a failure of taste.
- Craft and permanence — the work is built to last, in materials chosen for the long term (see Materials).
Not a lowering of standards
It is easy to misread the argument as a licence for schmaltz. In practice the opposite is true: Kitsch in this sense sets the technical bar extremely high, because skill is one of its central values. A painter who claims the tradition of the Old Masters is inviting comparison with the surfaces hanging in the National Gallery, and the comparison is unforgiving. The redefinition is less a rebellion against quality than a rebellion against the idea that quality of feeling and quality of craft are somehow beneath serious art.
A word worth reclaiming
Whether or not one accepts the whole polemic, the reframing has been useful. It gave a scattered community of figurative painters a shared vocabulary and a sense of belonging to something rather than merely lagging behind something. The movement that grew around the word is the subject of the next essay.