Jon McNaughton: Reactionary Painter As Postmodernist

 Hey, you see the recent output from Jon McNaughton, painter of all values traditional and all aesthetics that uphold the Western Tradition? Yeah, is it just me or is it starting to look a little... you know... degenerate?

Jon McNaughton! Painter of melodramatic christian nationalist right wing agitprop! He perplexes me because he seems to misunderstand his own aesthetic process, his art gets more confused over time, and yet I haven't really seen anyone point out the fundamental contradiction at the heart of his project: he's purported to uphold traditional ideas of aesthetic beauty and the western canon, but his aesthetics collapse into modernist disorder--dare I even say, they degenerate.

McNaughton, for those unfamiliar, paints great big canvasses stuffed to the brim with relatively naturalistically painted political figures and dense symbolism--dense not in the sense of it being multi-layered and nuanced but in the sense that he has to cram every single thing that pops into his head onto the canvas. You can't JUST have Obama stepping on the constitution you've got to have dollar bills blowing around, and The Working Man sitting forlorn on a bench, and also the Founding Fathers decrying it, and also the White House in the background, and Ronald Reagan pointing to the Founding Fathers and everything is at dusk (THE DUSK OF AMERICA?!) but the light is sort of weirdly directionless and inconsistent and and and and and. And.

McNaughton, like a crop of similarly loudmouthed peers, gets a lot of press from conservative pundits for being a brave right wing maverick inside the liberal culture industry hegemony. The liberal culture industry hegemony similarly gives McNaughton ample attention for being a brave maverick inside the liberal culture industry hegemony. Researching this piece, I encountered articles suggesting McNaughton is the "most important living artist" or something along these lines. This feels pretty silly to me, either the product of a clickbait mindset reaching for "bold, controversial" takes, or the result of various cultural myopias. The "actually I'm more honest than you for acknowledging how moving this fascist art is" horseshoe theory of aesthetic appreciation is an old and boring move (e.g. Sontag: "Few people would admit that the manipulation of emotions in Vertov’s later films and in Riefenstahl’s provides similar kinds of exhilaration.") People starstruck by his sales are just over-impressed with the buying tastes of American used car salesmen, a relative minority within the art appreciating public. Are we going to acknowledge the guy who pays people to draw cartoon characters holding white bread as the "most important living commissioner"? Dumb. You may as well say that George W Bush is the most significant artist in America today, because he was the President and who's more significant than the President!?

So, frame everything that follows with the assumption: I think McNaughton is, as a subject worthy of artistic study, certainly above "whoever designs the plates you get at Target". But not that far above. Like his precursor Thomas Kincade Painter of Light, we're talking about a profoundly commercial artist, who sells large volumes of prints based primarily on the virtues they signal to his target market share. His success and business model, at least, are the result of profoundly cynical market factors. Also, he's a lousy painter.

But the aesthetic he arrives at, lousy as it is, is interestingly lousy, in that it is totally and completely postmodern, and he and his fans don't seem to know it. McNaughton seems obsessed with quoting and returning to classical forms, traditional monumental paintings, the whole lineage that his boosters on, say, Fox News see him as upholding. As though postmodernism isn't characterized by historicity and endless remixing and quoting of the past! But when his brush collides with this material, something goes haywire, I mean something just goes really wrong. Look at McNaughton's "It's a Mad Mad Mad [sigh] Mad America" (🙄 1963 was a long time ago Jon):

 

Does this look like classical western aesthetic values to you?

Because to me it looks like the bottom of a bird cage.

And yet, there's all these weird quirks that, in postmodern fashion, feel like "classical art" signifiers bereft of context. Let's take a quick tour through some sources for McNaughton's artistic approach.

His obsession with hand poses stands out to me. It's the most Renaissance coded element of his art. He seems to have internalized that what makes a painting like Raphael's School of Athens so great is that people are posed in these kind of artificial, elegant ways, gesturing one way or another, pointing, indicating, raising their hands in dissent and opposition, signaling to the heavens.

 

McNaughton's version of this is often pretty funny. Like in his monumental painting of Christ carrying the cross he's got Lenin there exaggeratedly fist pumping (you can practically hear the "BOO YAH!"). On the other side, Stalin indicates Christ to Napoleon, the two of them wearing expressions of "get a load of THIS asshole lmao." Infamously in his painting of Obama stepping obstinately on the constitution, James Madison (yeah I looked this up on his website--couldn't have picked Madison out of a lineup with a gun to my head) crouches down and casts his arms towards the crumpled constitution in a gesture of "aw man what the heck, ah man, ah fuck come on :(". Is it just me or does McNaughton have a penchant for painting his historical heroes as losers getting completely owned and dunked on by the Left?

Take a look at the School of Athens though, like really take some time to pass your eyes across it. Like, note that McNaughtonesque raised gesturing hand on the left, pointing outward from the main mass. Follow the line of that arm. Look how its trajectory continues visually in the breastplate of the next figure, and the two arms after that. In fact there's a coincidence of lines sweeping all across the figures like:

arriving finally in the very center of the composition, between Plato and Aristotle. Search around the composition for more. Look at the stepped pyramidal solid that seems to be formed by the crouching figures on the right side of the composition. On the left side consider the triangle that rises up through lines of heads and backs and arms, its apex at Hypatia's head (tortured to death by a Christian mob! So much for the unified western tradition). Raphael's composition is remarkable for how lively and varied the figures feel, how little repetition there is of pose, and yet how elegantly elements flow together, pass from greater to lesser areas of density.

Scroll back up to McNaughton's monumental work. Take a minute to soak in his work vs Raphael's. How's the Western Tradition looking, folks?

Maybe this is unfair. Raphael is a world historical prodigy, and McNaughton evidently isn't. What about someone who's more on his level?

John Trumbull is an obvious source for McNaughton. He is, after all, the painter of the revolution, his work appearing in front of bored grade-schoolers everywhere to illustrate lessons on the signing of the declaration of independence. When McNaughton turns toward the founding fathers as subject, Trumbull clearly illuminates his path forward.

And you can see the influence in McNaughton's often unimaginative compositions in which guys stand or sit around representatively. Trumbull's famous and most quoted work sits stolidly on the canvas, bewigged Fathers row upon row, or carefully and rationally gesturing their support for the historic documents they're signing. It is bourgeois bureaucracy made as mythic as it possibly can be. I'm sort of ragging on Trumbull here, but look, the man is competent. Consider the large blocks of light and shadow, the gradients that define the work and centralize the figures: 

Raphael's figures dance elegantly across the canvas in antiquarian, otherworldly grace. Trumbull's stand in firmly in Roman Republican majesty. It's this linearity of composition, in which small marks of character or naturalistic quirks of feature stand out, that McNaughton strives for in paintings like his Forgotten Man, where various political figures stand sternly in rows reprimanding Obama. He can't quite manage it, though, can he? Trumbull, for his stuffiness, has such a command over value and layout that his piece never becomes pure monotony or confusion.

This capacity keeps his painting from flying out of his hands, even when he's depicting monumental war scenes like the Battle of Bunker Hill:

 

There's a lot going on, but look at the way he controls the masses of moving figures and the color and light in order to break up the canvas into clashing areas of color, like a tide crashing against rocks. Some of this is surely down to the pigments available to Trumbull, but I don't think it's unreasonable to suggest he does something kind of cheeky with his composition too:

Red, White (or off-white), and Blue. Modulated with the dark masses of shadow that help give form to the composition and clarity to the action. Rippling across the canvas like the stripes on the flag. Again, this is the bourgeois revolution depicted at its most mythic and heroic. It's not my cup of tea, but having done two copies of Trumbull's work, I can't help but respect his compositional abilities, to say nothing of the immaculate designs of Raphael!

Trying to get a grip on McNaughton was less fun.

And yes, this was the last piece of art I did for this article, and yes, it's a little bit phoned in. But there's a real pleasure in figuring out what exactly these classical painters are doing structurally, measuring out their compositions, making sense of the interrelated parts and how things line up. For McNaughton, it's like, ok there's an arm here and a head here and a hand here and a dog (?) here and a cell phone here and a podium here and a hand here and a head here and an arm here. and this is light dark mid dark mid light light mid dark mid dark light dark light. and this is grey grey grey brown grey random red random blue grey white brown grey red brown. I kept staring at it, when I first saw the painting, growing more and more certain that I had seen this kind of compositional chaos before. Not in the works of the Old Masters, though. Far from it.

I recognized the composition of the very artists that the Nazis called "Degenerate".

Max Beckmann's The Night is a grotesque masterpiece. I'm actually not sure whether this german expressionist scream of horror was specifically part of the touring Nazi exhibition of "degenerate art", but Beckmann was one of the artists they singled out. It's not hard to see why, and I think you could pretty easily do a Daily Show thing where you get a bunch of modern day right wingers to call it "degenerate" on video, oblivious to the significance of the word. It's a weird phantasmagoria of torture and sexual violence, depicted in stark and disorderly colors, space collapsed towards the camera haphazardly and ruinously. Instead of linear lines of sight that carry across figures harmoniously, the harsh lines of stretched limbs cut across the canvas, unconnected to anything else. Beckmann depicts a world profoundly in crisis. A "Mad Mad Mad Mad" world. A head here and an arm here and a hand here and a candle here and a table here and grey brown grey black red white green searing light smothering dark bloody mid bile dark.

Beckmann's The Night is a weird example of modernist art whose time seems to have come in the form of memes: doesn't it have the same distortive appearance as those content aware scaling video memes people make? The whole scene seems to distort and compress in around the figures, whose every agony or cruelty press forward toward the front of the picture plane, scaling up to fill the space with horrors. The diagonals of the piece create an effect like the teeth of a deep sea fish, up and down again in sharp spikes. For Beckmann, this disjointed composition and compressing space, paired with a macabre subject matter, were necessary to artistically express the horrors of modernity he experienced in the First World War. Actually, I don't think it's even that far a cry from those weird content aware scaling memes: they employ distortion to amplify a particular emotion to grotesquely caricatured proportions. Content aware scaling is right. A century later, Beckmann's art feels just as vital, even for its deeply unsettling contents.

This, and other modernist works, were anathema to the nazis, however, who carted works from a dizzying array of styles--expressionism, cubism, dadaism, surrealism, post-impressionism, de stijl, constructivism, the bauhaus--around the countryside for their repulsive followers to jeer at. The list of artists in the exhibition is, accidentally, a brilliant introduction to everything I adore about this period of art. Wide ranging in style, the pieces respond to the rapid transformation of the world by embracing new aesthetics, often breaking radically with the "canon and heritage", but just as often discovering idioms suited to this new age in the art of the distant past (consider how many sculptors visibly take influence from Etruscan art!). For expressionists like Beckmann, it meant depicting the world through a new lens of emotional subjectivity, paired with unflinching realism in its depiction of the violence of life. Little wonder that a regime dedicated to stamping out "degeneracy" found this art, which held up a mirror to the grotesquerie and derangement of bourgeois society, unacceptable.

What's striking to me about these three case studies is just where McNaughton winds up aesthetically. Set aside the fact that Trumbull and Raphael have naturalistic figures and poses. Set aside the clear aspirations McNaughton has to this Western Tradition. Consider the compositions themselves, how disjointed his piece is, how it leaps from light to dark haphazardly, how it has these masses of neutral tones spotted with highly saturated color, how every gesture is a thing unto itself, not extended through the bodies of the figures but arrested, at each and every turn, by some opposing jamming elbow or slapping arm or intruding head. Look at his paint, laid down roughly, the underpainting showing through all over the place as he blots in midtones and highlights. It's not renaissance or neoclassical smooth but chalky and impressionistic. Figures pop up in the background like cardboard standees or target practice dummies on springs; there's no attempt to rationalize how many of the figures could be standing/sitting/kneeling in the place he's decided to cram their faces in. Space must bend and compress in order to cram in every single person he's mad about, and they seem plucked from a thousand disparate moments and emotions, not responsive to each other but each in their own mental world.

Isn't all of this closer in aesthetic spirit to Beckmann than to Trumbull?

The maddening thing about McNaughton is I'm not sure he cares. Perhaps the smoking gun puffs away somewhere on his website, buried amongst all the words words words McNaughton weighs down every piece with. I could not locate a statement of artistic/aesthetic theory, however, among all the "Jesus Christ is Savior"ism and "Mr Obama How Dare You Sir"osiity.

Still, he's part of the Classical Values milieu, held up by people like Sean Hannity as what art SHOULD be. These people always strike me as pretty ridiculous. No one is stopping you from learning the drawing lessons of the Old Masters. I have like 10 relevant books on my shelf, I can give you recommendations if you really want them. If you're so concerned with saving western civilization, pick up a chisel and start carving some marble yourself! you're a 4chan neet, what the hell else do you have to do with your time, stupid baby bitch?

And yet, McNaughton seems to try and try again, yet wind up in a profoundly postmodern place. I have to reconstruct his aesthetic reference points from his weird quirks and mannerisms, like the gesturing hand thing, or the constant direct quoting of revolutionary war history paintings. He jumbles together references to the past, turning them into a theme park simulacrum of themselves. There's even something irritatingly savvy about this: McNaughton is too busy crusading for western civilization to worry much about whether his art actually upholds that tradition of beauty.

McNaughton vexes me. Is he trying to RETVRN and failing because he's ultimately a subject of his historical moment and can't be anything but a Modern Man? Because he's just personally psychologically ill suited to classical art? Or because he's just not a very competent or introspective artist? His religious paintings suggest he's not completely incompetent. He's capable of arranging figures in classical relationships, though the more figures there are the more he starts to lose track of them and linear coincidence starts to become arbitrary and disjointed. Leonardo this ain't--while I like the overall structure of the piece, which turns the apostles into a kind of dome (a basilica dome?) around Christ, there's a sort of half gesture towards directing all attention, via hands and arms and so on, toward the goblet of wine in the center of the composition, but McNaughton just doesn't really bother to develop the composition in this way. Yet, the figures remain, as in all McNaughton pieces, rather stiff and formally posed, so what's the point of not trying for true high renaissance formalism?

His work exudes a slapdash sensibility, undisciplined. Which, hey, I get it, I too am trying for the minimum viable product here (that's not completely true--I wouldn't have spent so much time doing cartoon copies of art and staring at bad christian glurge if I didn't care) but then I'm also not trying to exalt the majesty of Christ unto Heaven, or take back America, I'm just blogging and cartooning. It doesn't surprise me though that when compositions get more complicated, he places figures in arbitrary ways, leaves underpainting showing, and simply gestures at form.

In this sense McNaughton thrives in modernity, even as he decries it. Many of his paintings try for a Thomas Kincade affect [makes gagging noises], but that aesthetic owes its whole color theory to the incredible eye of Monet. Where would his gestural (or slapdash) treatment of the under and overpainting be if not for "degenerates" like Lovis Corinth, or his precursors Van Gogh, Manet, or Courbet? In fact, hey, let's take a moment to talk about Courbet, an artist who hasn't come up yet. Look at Burial at Ornans, one of Courbet's masterpieces, a work which pissed off practically everyone and remains contentious among critics trying to pin down Courbet's exact attitude towards his subject. A monumental canvas dedicated to peasantry, a monumental crucifix that remains resolutely not the focal point, a composition that crowds the front of the picture plane, order derived not from linear relationships but from the naturalistic interactions of people in the crowd, it repulsed traditionalists, and galvanized the next generation of modernists (realists and impressionists).

 

Socialists, rootless cosmopolitans, bohemians all: Jon McNaughton couldn't get away with his own haphazard approach to his compositions and paint strokes if not for the path these degenerates laid for him!

As Rachel Wetzler points out in the Baffler, there's a fundamental tension between the conservative love of competitive markets and the conservative professed love of traditional standards and values. They might hate that the Market has spawned so much degenerate art, but McNaughton, following in the footsteps of artists like Kincaide, don't seek to return to a feudal patronage system but instead turn their art into mass market commodities. Within that market, I think there's an incentive to work in a tradition far closer to, at the very least, the realists and impressionists, than to classical and renaissance artists, or the mannered formalisms of Turnbull and his contemporaries. That takes too much time, and conservative artists have product to move.

And at the end of the day, who really cares? There's nothing particularly traditionally beautiful about, to pick another subject from Wetzler's article, a cartoonish canvas slapper like Steve Penley. What he offers is Correct Ideas and Proper Signifiers. The issue they take with conceptual art isn't the conceptual part, it's that the concepts aren't reactionary. Any and every pretense of classicality gets dropped like its hot the minute they can jam in something else they're just fuuuuuurious about. Case in point: I went looking for some examples of people elevating McNaughton's classical traditional aesthetics and found a dopey piece on this from the Epoch Times, naturally lol. But then I went and looked up the author of the article, and found out he's the head of a traditionalist poetry association (that he founded, and seems to be the main member of), and also a poet in his own right. Scope a few lines from a poem that is, I shit you not, about how great it would be if America had a fucking hereditary monarch:

They must directly through their bodies try
Reflecting in themselves God’s holy image.
Oh sure, they’ll sink but also they’ll rise high
And save us from the idiocrats who pillage

From our pockets for the latest trend—
True greatness isn’t what vagabonds intend.

Nothing says "traditional aesthetic values we all have agreed for millennia meant Good Art" like opening a sonnet line with "Oh sure," or dropping a classic word like "idiocrats". "Good authors, too, who once knew better words/now only use four letter words" indeed! This evinces the same slapdash quality as a McNaughton painting: he jettisons everything from good prosody to good taste the second he gets hot under the collar about having to pay more taxes--famously something no feudal subject ever had cause to resent!

Like how conservative comedy collapses because they get too mad at a dozen things at once and forget to actually deliver a punchline corresponding to where the joke started, the centers of these other conservative artworks cannot hold. They just get too damn hopped up and start cramming the work with their every grievance! It's this, more than anything I think, that renders McNaughton incapable of expressing both classical values and political editorials at once. Unlike someone like Ben Garrison, though, who's achieved a kind of postmodern hallucinatory genius by fully embracing aesthetic derangement, McNaughton keeps trying to fuse the two together, with results that trend ever towards compositional degeneracy. And unlike Beckmann, who demands chaos of his canvas, McNaughton simply gets swept away.

Does the critique hit? I think McNaughton could brush it off, in part because he'll still be laughing all the way to the bank, and in part because of the effective cognitive dissonance blinders conservatives have where they can spout Hitlerite beliefs from dawn till dusk, then have dreams of personally killing Hitler and ending the scourge of National SOCIALIIISMMMMM. "Hitler would hate your art" I suspect is a high compliment to McNaughton, notwithstanding the fact that if you held up an Egon Schiele to him he'd react with the exact same disgust as the nazi.

Modernism itself was of course historically no inherent blood enemy to fascism, or even reactionary values. Especially now, it can be recouperated: the man who trained me in the Techniques of the Old Masters was happy to rant about what Rush Limbaugh said on the radio that day, then turn around and rant about the genius of the Cubists.

I still can't help but wonder about McNaughton's future, though. Consider the case of Emil Nolde, one of the founders of German Expressionism. Nolde's work, deeply influenced by things like stained glass and woodblock printing, is striking, and in his estimation represented a uniquely German art form. Nolde saw his work as exemplary of aesthetics free from corrupt Jewish decadence. He was shocked, upon the rise of Hitlerite aesthetics, to find his work confiscated and destroyed, his name listed in the program for the Degenerate Art exhibit, and himself banned from painting. One consequence of the reactionary cognitive dissonance blinders--call it the "leopards won't eat my face" phenomenon--is an incapacity to recognize where the winds of taste vs disgust are blowing, and whether an exception will be carved out for them.

And if the winds turn, well, it just takes looking at the art side by side, as we have, to see the canyon that divides Jon McNaughton from the canon of western beauty.

Hey it's been a while. Google broke my website for a bit. And then I was posting a bunch on Cohost. But now they're bulldozing THAT site so I'm back here I guess, for now. But you can, as always, see the other stuff I've been posting on my Patreon and support my work there.