There is neither ugliness nor beauty, but only truth

“There is neither ugliness nor beauty, but only truth” expresses Philip Carey’s rejection of prettiness as the measure of art and his early commitment to confronting life without idealization. Its significance lies in the change it cannot contain: Philip first treats unvarnished realism as an artistic principle, then recognizes in El Greco a way of seeing that accepts life’s contradictions while carrying reality to a more profound pitch.

The creed of realism

In Paris, Philip had become impatient with idealism as he understood it. He associated it with withdrawing from ordinary human life, and took the opposite position: art should show people in their unvarnished condition, including what is mean, cruel, selfish, or lustful. The maxim distills that stance into a refusal to sort experience into the pleasing and the repellent before representing it.

His practice reflected this rebellion against prettiness. He had painted a Menier chocolate advertisement into a landscape to escape what he regarded as the tyranny of the picturesque. In the cafés and studios of the Latin Quarter, artistic value was also being argued through changing allegiances: Impressionists such as Manet, Monet, and Degas had gained ground against older academic standards, while the young painters dismissed Raphael when he seemed to repeat himself. Philip moved from initial amazement at Impressionism to emphatic admiration, and kept photographs of Ingres’s Odalisque and Manet’s Olympia side by side above his washing stand.

How the maxim is tested

The principle’s limits emerge through Philip’s experience of art and artistic judgment. When Foinet tells Fanny Price that her drawing is wholly unsuccessful and should be torn up, the bluntness offers no easy equation between severity and insight. Fanny objects that humiliation is not teaching; the episode shows that an uncompromising verdict alone does not establish artistic truth or help an artist advance.

Foinet later gives Philip a similarly hard assessment. He recognizes manual dexterity, industry, and intelligence, but no talent in the work Philip has shown him, and predicts that Philip will remain mediocre. Philip accepts the judgment with composure. The encounter deepens the distinction between a creed about what art should seek and the practical question of whether the artist possesses the ability to achieve it.

From truth to transformation

Philip’s encounter with El Greco unsettles his confidence that realism means simply presenting life as it appears. Looking at photographs Athelny has gathered, he is first struck by elongated figures, small heads, and extravagant poses. The work is not realistic in a literal sense, yet it gives him an impression of troubling reality. The portraits, religious figures, and night skies seem to carry a meaning that he cannot immediately explain.

That uncertainty becomes a threshold rather than a rejection of realism. Philip begins to sense an art stronger than the realism he had admired, but unlike the evasive idealism he had distrusted. It accepts life in its vitality and in its squalor and heroism, while transforming observed facts through a more vivid vision. The maxim therefore remains a necessary first correction to prettification, but El Greco suggests its fuller possibility: truth in art need not be a choice between ugliness and beauty, or a passive copy of appearances. It may disclose more of life by seeing it differently.