Every time I walk into a museum, I find myself stopping in the same place: where there is a butt. Sometimes it is a bronze figure, polished smooth by centuries of admiring touches. Sometimes it is marble, glowing under gallery lights. And sometimes, as with Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres’ La Grande Baigneuse (1808), it is oil on canvas, a curve caught forever in paint. I am not, as people say, a “butt man.” I simply find the human form endlessly fascinating. And if we’re honest, butts are funny.
There is something irresistibly comic about them. Mark Twain once quipped, “The human race has one really effective weapon, and that is laughter.” In front of a painting like this, I sometimes wonder if that weapon isn’t just the sight of ourselves from behind. The butt has a built-in levity. It wiggles, it jiggles, it is the seat of slapstick and the source of many jokes. Comedians have known this forever—Charlie Chaplin falling on his rear, or Groucho Marx’s crack about “behind every successful man is a woman, and behind her is his wife.” The humor arises because the butt is the most ordinary of parts, one we all share, yet to see it isolated and displayed in polished marble or in the idealized smoothness of Ingres’ brush makes it absurd in its elevation.
But the laughter does not cancel the beauty. If anything, it sharpens it. Ingres’ bather sits poised, her body turned away from us, her face obscured by a turban, so that the eye is drawn unavoidably to the expanse of her back and the soft roundness below. The paint is so smooth that it seems to deny fleshiness itself, a porcelain sheen that transforms the body into an ideal. And yet, it is not the stern beauty of Apollo, nor the coldness of marble—it is soft, intimate, strangely vulnerable. As if the act of turning her back exposes not only her body but her humanness.
I think of Oscar Wilde’s line: “It is only shallow people who do not judge by appearances.” Ingres knew what he was doing. He gave us the appearance of flesh in such a way that we cannot help but dwell on it. There is reverence here, not only for the erotic but for the form itself—the way skin stretches over bone, the way weight bends a mattress, the way one curve leads into another. To laugh at a butt is to affirm it, and to affirm it is to acknowledge the beauty of being embodied.
Psychologists remind us that humor and beauty often emerge from the same source: incongruity. The body is both ridiculous and sublime. The philosopher Blaise Pascal once wrote, “Man is neither angel nor beast, and it is unfortunately the case that whoever wants to act the angel, acts the beast.” The butt is perhaps the perfect illustration of Pascal’s paradox. It is base, earthy, comical. And yet in the hands of an artist, it becomes angelic. We look at it and find ourselves laughing and longing in the same breath.
This is why I always stop where there is a butt in the gallery. It is not only funny, though it is that too. It is also beautiful in its ordinariness, in its refusal to be anything but what it is. A butt is a reminder that art, like life, is about embodiment. It is about carrying weight, about being seen, about the strange dignity of flesh. And perhaps this is why Ingres chose not to show us the bather’s face. Faces lie; faces pretend. But the back and the curve of the hip, those are honest. They tell us what it means to be human.
Or, to borrow the comedian Steve Martin’s simple wisdom: “A day without sunshine is like, you know, night.” A gallery without butts is like, you know, missing something essential.