The Art Spirit By Robert Henri

1.

I love the tools made for mechanics. I stop at the windows of hardware stores. If I could only find an excuse to buy many more of them than I have already bought on the mere pretense that I might have use for them! They are so beautiful, so simple and plain and straight to their meaning. There is no “Art” about them, they have not been made beautiful, they are beautiful.

Someone has defined a work of art as a “thing beautifully done.” I like it better if we cut away the adverb and preserve the word “done,” and let it stand alone in its fullest meaning. Things are not done beautifully. The beauty is an integral part of their being done.

4.

Color

The possibilities of color are wonderful. A study entrancingly interesting and unlimited. It is a wise student who has a perfectly clean, well-kept palette—glass over a warm white paper on a good-sized table, always clean—and uses such a palette to make continual essays with color—thousands of little notes, color combinations, juxtapositions of all the possible intensities of a well-selected spectrum palette. Many artists just paint along, repeat over and over again the same phrases, little knowing the resources of the materials before them, and in many cases simply deadening their natural sense of color instead of developing it.

The backgrounds that are dark are very difficult to paint. That is, to make them seem like fine, breathable air. Of course it is easy to get away with a dark background, and it by its nature cannot be crude, but it can be heavy, snuffy, black.

The effect of brilliancy is to be obtained principally from the oppositions of cool colors with warm colors, and the oppositions of grave colors with bright colors. If all the colors are bright there is no brightness.

However much you may use “broken color,” hold on to the few simple larger masses of your composition, and value as most important the beauty and design of these larger masses, or forms, or movements. Do not let beauty in the subdivisions destroy the beauty or the power of the major divisions.

Whatever you feel or think, your exact state at the exact moment of your brush touching the canvas is in some way registered in that stroke. If there is interesting or reasonable sequence in your thoughts and feelings, if there is order in your progressive states of being as the paint is applied, this will show, and nothing in the world can help it from showing.

There is a super color which envelops all the colors. It is this super color—this color of the whole, which is most important.

Dirty brushes and a sloppy palette have dictated the color-tone and key of many a painting. The painter abdicates and the palette becomes master.

Employ such colors as produce immensity in a small space. Do not be interested in light for light’s sake or in color for color’s sake, but in each as a medium of expression.

There is a color over all colors which unites them and which is more important than the individual colors. At sunset the sun glows. The color of the grasses, figures and houses may be lighter or darker or different, but over each there is the sunset glow.

A human body bathed in the color of the atmosphere surrounding it, luminous and warm in its own color.

The color of a background is not as it is, but as it appears when the artist is most deeply engaged with the figure in front of it. It is not seen with a direct eye.

If you look past the model at the background it responds to your appeal and comes forward. It is no longer a background.

Get a right height of chair and sit at your painting table. Take as true a Red, Yellow and Blue as you can choose. Mix neighbor with neighbor until you have three new notes, Orange, Green, Purple. Set all six in a line and mix neighbor with neighbor until you have six more—RO. OY. YG. GB. BP. PR. You have now before you a homogeneous palette, analogous to the spectrum band. They are PR. R. RO. O. OY. Y. YG. G. GB. B. BP. P.

This is a first step taken in the direction of an acquaintance with the possibilities of pigment colors.

You can make hundreds of experiments on the glass of your palette the memories of which will sink into you to come into service in cases of actual need when at the work of painting.

The studies H. G. Maratta has made in the formation of palettes and generally in the science of color are of a decided educational value. Many of us have benefited greatly through his work. He told me many years ago that his first intention was to write a book, but decided, upon consideration, that a practical demonstration with colors instead of the names of colors would be better. So he made the colors and they were his book. Many artists bought his colors and opened the box thinking the magic of picture-painting would jump out. Others bought them knowing that they would have to dig, and they dug. It was mighty well worth while.

The works of such men are available to the student and the wise student will be keen to know what is going on in the world.

Such works are really gifts, for the making of them represents much study and is certainly not a commercial proceeding.

If you have not read, and studied, for here again you must dig, the works of Denman Ross, get them by all means, for you must want to get the wisdom and the practical advice they contain, and what they suggest.

Understand that in no work will you find the final word, nor will you find a receipt that will just fit you. The fun of living is that we have to make ourselves, after all.

It is a splendid thing to live in the environment of great students. To have them about you in person if you can. If not in person, in their works. To live with them. Great students agree and disagree. They stir the waters.

Many things that come into the world are not looked into. The individual says “My crowd doesn’t run that way.” I say, don’t run with crowds.

I suggest many other books. There are many theories on color. Look them up. Get acquainted. There may be something you want to know.

Personal experimentation is revealing, and, once you get into it, immensely engaging.

Remember that pigment is one thing and light is another. A palette is set in accord with the spectrum band. But combinations of light and combinations of pigments produce differing results.

Signac’s book Néo-Impressionnisme is a book that should interest any student. It is a pity it has not been translated into English. But if you know French it will be good to read. It is an argument in favor of the total division of color in painting, but that does not matter. In making his argument he tells in a simple way many valuable things.

I think the true Yellow is rather more green than the yellow generally accepted as “true.” I am speaking of paint and I am thinking of the functioning power of the pigment.

Black is always thought of as a neutralizer of color. It should be better remembered that white is also a neutralizer of color, except perhaps in its effect on a very deep blue, blue purple, purple or purple red, so deep that their color cannot be appreciated. In such cases the neutralizing white has a reverse effect when only a slight quantity is added. It serves to bring the color up out of the depths. Except for this service white is a neutralizer.

In the painting of light, in modeling form, keep as deep down in color as you can. It is color that makes the sensation of light. Play from warm to cold, not from white to black.

The tendency to put in more and more white is so usual that it would be well to restrict the white. Keep it off the palette. Allow only so much of it in the pigments which must have it, and allow them much less than you think they should have.

A set palette may look quite impossible for its want of white in comparison with the subject before you. It certainly is, any paint is, if you expect to reproduce the thing in nature. But your work is not, and cannot be, a reproduction. Nature has its laws. Your pigments and your flat canvas have other laws. You must work within the laws of your material.

Your palette may look impossible but it may be that by adding more white you will make it more impossible. The pictures that produce the sensation of light and form are really deep in color. Try something white against them. The pictures which are overcharged with white paint look whiter but they do not have the look of light.

Form can be modeled in black and white, but there are infinitely greater possibilities in modeling through the warmth and coolness of color.

There are three methods. The first is black and white modeling. This was largely practiced by the old masters who relieved themselves of a double difficulty by building their pictures up in monochrome and later applying glazes of transparent color. Form was almost wholly dependent on the monochrome substructure.

The second method is color modeling to the exclusion of black and white monochrome. Many have professed this method, but few have practiced it.

The third method is the union of the first and second. In this method there is a recognition of advantages to be derived from both, requiring a wise proportioning and selection in order that the two methods may amalgamate in such a way as to strengthen each.

For the motives of the old masters their choice of technique was undoubtedly well made. Their works evidence it.

For our time other choices may be necessary, for we are different. We may be better or worse in being different, but so we are, and our methods must be suited to our needs.

As an example let us take a hand. With a great old master the hand becomes a symbol. He made the symbol by making a hand magnificent, monumental, but of such a material definiteness that it is photographically perfect.

The hand made by a true modern will not lend itself so readily to the black and white reproduction. It is made with different agents because it is conceived in a new way.

What the modern man finds of interest in life is not precisely the same as of old, and he makes a new approach, deals in another way because the symbol to be made is not the same.

The old method, great as it was, required a mode of procedure which I believe is rarely practical in these days. It meant a building up in black and white, the design finished in this medium. Then weeks of drying. Then a return to the subject and the color applied. It was a cool and calmly calculated procedure.

It seems to me that the present day man, with all his reverence for the old master, is interested in seizing other qualities, far more fleeting. He must be cool and he must calculate, but his work must be quick.

All his science and all his powers of invention must be brought into practice to capture the vision of an illusive moment. It is as though he were in pursuit of something more real which he knows but has not as yet fully realized, which appears, permits a thrilling appreciation, and is gone in the instant.

At any rate the best things in the best pictures of these days are not seizable by the old methods, nor do they seem to come through the agents that symbolize for the men of the past.

In speaking this way I do not mean by my “modern man” anyone who is in or out of the “modernist school” or in or out of any school. I mean the modern man whoever or wherever he may be. Nor am I speaking of the generality of work as it appears in our exhibitions. I am speaking of something of which we have a glimmer, sometimes very faint, here and there.

For the same reason that I have indicated my preference for the employment of both methods in the matter of color values and black and white values, I prefer the use of pure colors together with grave colors.

There are artists who declare with almost a religious fervor that they only use “pure colors.” But generally in seeing their pictures I find that they have more or less degraded these colors in practice.

I believe that great pictures can be painted with the use of most pure colors, and that these colors can be so transformed to our vision that they will seem to have gradations which do not actually exist in them. This will be brought about by a science of juxtaposition and an employment of areas that will be extraordinary.

But even so, there is a power in the palette which is composed of both pure and grave colors that makes it wonderfully practical and which presents possibilities unique to itself.

In paintings made with such a palette, if used with great success, we find an astounding result. It is the grave colors, which were so dull on the palette that become the living colors in the picture. The brilliant colors are their foil. The brilliant colors remain more in their actual character of bright paint, are rather static, and it is the grave colors, affected by juxtaposition, which undergo the transformation that warrants my use of the word “living.” They seem to move—rise and fall in their intensity, are in perpetual motion—at least, so affect the eye. They are not fixed. They are indefinable and mysterious.

In experimentation I have seen an arrangement of a bright color and a very mud-like neutral pigment present the phenomenon of a transference of brilliancy—the neutral presenting for a moment a sizzling complementary brilliance far overpowering the “pure color” with which it was associated.

On a picture, because there are many conflicting associations, such an extreme occurrence could not be possible, but the fact exists and the impression is made on our keener consciousness.

If new colors were made far more brilliant than the present “pure” colors; then the present colors would fall into the rank of neutrals, and when juxtaposed with their superiors, which would be more or less static, the same change might be effected in them.

It would be their turn to make this thing happen in the eye of the observer. For it is an effect on the sensitive eye and a consequent stirring of the imagination which produces the illusion.

The fact is that a picture in any way, in color, form, or in its whole ensemble but sends out agents that stimulate a creation which takes place in the consciousness of the observer.

That is the reason association with works of art is enjoyable.

It is also the reason they tire some and irritate others.

Generally in pictures which give the illusion of fine color and form we find one, less often two, areas made up of pure color. This, or these notes are possibly the most obvious and striking notes, but it may be found that however beautiful they are in themselves they are only foils to the mysterious tones they serve to complement. It is these ever-changing mysterious tones which keep up the interest in the picture.

Have you not seen many pictures that bowled you over at first sight, staggered you on the next, and did not stir you thereafter?

Artists have been looking at Rembrandt’s drawings for three hundred years. Thousands and thousands of remarkable drawings have been made since, but we are not yet done looking at Rembrandts. There is a life stirring in them.

If it is possible that there are “mysterious” colors in a picture it is also possible that there are “mysterious” lines and forms.

The picture that bowls you over at first sight and the next day loses even the power to attract your attention is one that looks always the same. It has a moment of life but dies immediately thereafter.

5.

All manifestations of art are but landmarks in the progress of the human spirit toward a thing but as yet sensed and far from being possessed.

The man who has honesty, integrity, the love of inquiry, the desire to see beyond, is ready to appreciate good art. He needs no one to give him an art education; he is already qualified. He needs but to see pictures with his active mind, look into them for the things that belong to him, and he will find soon enough in himself an art connoisseur and an art lover of the first order.

Do not expect the pictures to say the expected; some of the best will have surprises for you, which will, at first, shock you. There are many surprises to come to the most knowing, just as Wagner opened new roads in music and disturbed to dis- traction those who believed no further roads were possible.

There will be new ideas in painting and each new idea will have a new technique.

6.

Art is the inevitable consequence of growth and is the manifestation of the principles of its origin. The work of art is a result; is the output of a progress in development and stands as a record and marks the degree of development. It is not an end in itself, but the work indicates the course taken and the progress made. The work is not a finality. It promises more, and from it projection can be made. It is the impress of those who live in full play of their faculties. The individual passes, living his life, and the things he touches receive his kind of impress, and they afterwards bear the trace of his passing. They give evidence of the quality of his growth. The impress is made sometimes in material form, as in sculpture or painting, and sometimes in ways more fluid, dispersed, but none the less permanent and none the less revealing of the principles of growth.

Art appears in many forms. To some degree every human being is an artist, dependent on the quality of his growth. Art need not be intended. It comes inevitably as the tree from the root, the branch from the trunk, the blossom from the twig. None of these forget the present in looking backward or forward. They are occupied wholly with the fulfillment of their own existence. The branch does not boast of the relation it bears to its great ancestor the trunk, and does not claim attention to itself for this honor, nor does it call your attention to the magnificent red apple it is about to bear. Because it is engaged in the full play of its own existence, because it is full in its own growth, its fruit is inevitable.