The Art Spirit By Robert Henri

1.

Painting is the expression of ideas in their permanent form. It is the giving of evidence. It is the study of our lives, our environment. The American who is useful as an artist is one who studies his own life and records his experiences; in this way he gives evidence. If a man has something to say he will find a way of saying it.

The undercurrent and motive of all art is an individual man’s idea. From each we expect what he has to give. We desire it. It is absolutely necessary for him to give it out.

What is the relation of the artist to the community? What good does a man’s art do? There are those in the community who regard the artist as a mere entertainer come with cap and bells to amuse and perform graces before a paying public. The true artist regards his work as a means of talking with men, of saying his say to himself and to others. It is not a question of pay. It is not a question of willing acceptance on the part of the public. If he is welcomed and paid it is very good, but whether or no he must say his say.

Whitman was not paid for his work either in money or in appreciation at the time he did it. What we have from him was a gift, at first—and for long after—unwillingly received. So also with Ibsen. They made good first. They were ridiculed first. Stevenson, the inventor, was laughed at. The Wright brothers were laughed at in the beginning. Men have to give just as the bird has to sing. The artist is teaching the world the idea of life. The man who believes that money is the thing is cheating himself. The artist teaches that the object of a man’s life should be to play as a little child plays. Only it is the play of maturity—the play of one’s mental faculties. Therefore, we have art and invention.

Art in the community has a subtle, unconscious, refining influence.

It is a curious fact that the delicate acoustic arrangements of a music hall can be impaired by the music of inefficient, discordant orchestras, and for this reason poor musical performances have been forbidden in some places. If a poor performance could affect adversely the acoustics of a hall, would not an able performance tend to improve them?

It practically means that the presence of good art will unconsciously refine a community and that poor art will do it incalculable harm.

True art strikes deeper than the surface. There is that which we call the subconscious. We do certain things and are influenced by certain things without knowing why. We hear a band play a military selection, and, though we may not be at all martially inclined, we suddenly become conscious of the fact that we have walked in step to the music. And so with a good picture. Unconsciously we fall in with the rhythm of its music. The man looks at the picture; he attaches little importance to it; but it doesn’t have to hit a man on the head to make an impression. The influence is all the greater because the man doesn’t realize that it’s there. Look at a Homer seascape. There is order in it and grand formation. It produces on your mind the whole vastness of the sea, a vastness as impressive and as uncontrollable as the sea itself. You are made to feel the force of the sea, the resistance of the rock; the whole thing is an integrity of nature.

Landscape is a medium for ideas. We want men’s thoughts. It’s the same in other things. It is said that Wells had the right idea about writing history when he wrote The Outline, for his object was not so much to give us the dates of the various occurrences, as to tell us of the conditions of humanity. And so the various details in a landscape painting mean nothing to us if they do not express some mood of nature as felt by the artist. It isn’t sufficient that the spacing and arrangement of the composition be correct in formula. The true artist, in viewing the landscape, renders it upon his canvas as a living thing. Perhaps he feels the wind blowing across landscape. In this case he may use the tree to express the splendid power of the wind. It is a birch tree. It is a frail tree. It bends before the wind. You see the wind’s effect in the branches and the leaves. Everything about the tree indicates the life and force of the wind. Thus the tree becomes an eloquent symbol; it is the medium through which the idea of the wind is expressed.

The next day the artist goes out again, his active mind open to impressions, displaying interest in all directions. Again the tree attracts his attention. This time it is the tree growing; the tree resisting the wind; the tree with its fecundity; the tree rising and spreading from its roots; the tree undergoing its complete cycle of growth from the roots, deriving its nutrition from the moisture in the ground and the sap in the trunk; the tree with the twigs and the leaves and the final flowering into blossoms; and in this tree the wind is blowing—the wind, which is to the tree as a chasing is to the cup.

There is the heart and the mind, the Puritan idea is that the mind must be master. I think the heart should be master and the mind should be the tool and servant of the heart. As it is, we give too much attention to laws and not enough to principles. The man who wants to produce art must have the emotional side first, and this must be reinforced by the practical.

The man who has great emotions might burst into tears—but that is as far as he will get if he has no practical side. The artist must have the emotional side first, the primal cause of his being an artist, but he must also have an excellent mind, which he must command and use as a tool for the expression of his emotions.

The idea, which is the primal thing for a picture, is all in the air; the expression on canvas is a case of absolute science as it deals with materials. A great artist is both a great imaginer and a great employer of practical science. First there must be the man, then the technique.

2.

There are many ways of seeing things. When you saw the thing and it looked beautiful to you, you saw it beautifully. Paint it as it looked then.

3.

Some students possess the school they work in. Others are possessed by the school.

4.

Let a student enter the school with this advice: No matter how good the school is, his education is in his own hands. All education must be self-education.

Let him realize the truth of this, and no school will be a danger to him. The school is a thing of the period. It has the faults and the virtues of the period. It either uses the student for its own success or the self-educating student uses it for his success. This is generally true of all schools and students of our time.

It is up to the student whether he becomes a school-made man or whether he uses the school as a place of experience where there are both good and bad advices, where there are strengths and weaknesses, where there are facilities, and much information to be had from the instructors, and much to be gained by association with the other students. He may learn equally from the strong and the weak students. There are models to work from and a place to work in.

The self-educator judges his own course, judges advices, judges the evidences about him. He realizes that he is no longer an infant. He is already a man: has his own development in process.

No one can lead him. Many can give advices, but the greatest artist in the world cannot point his course for he is a new man. Just what he should know, just how he should proceed can only be guessed at.

A school should be an offering of opportunity, not a direction, and the student should know that the school will be good for him only to the degree that he makes it good. It is a field for activity where he will see much, hear much and where he must be a judge, selecting for his special need, and daily discovering his need.

When we have bred a line of self-educators there will then be no fear of schools. Those who have done distinguished work in the past, who have opened new roadways of vision and invented techniques specific to such visions have done it in spite of environment. They have learned what the schools had to offer, how much, how little. Strengths and weaknesses have alike been material to their progress.

Different men must learn different things. Each man must put himself as far as possible in the way of knowing what is known and he must make his choices. Everything back of him is his heritage to use or to leave. The school is a place of strengths and weaknesses. There are things insisted upon and there are things omitted. There are all sorts of advices, good and bad, and there are advices that will serve one and not another.

The man who goes into a school to educate himself and not to be educated will get somewhere. He should start out a master, master of such as he has, however little that may be. By being master of such as he has in the beginning it is likely he may later be master, after years of study, of much.

He should not enter the school with any preconceived idea of his destiny. In fact he should be open and free. His aim should be to search deeply and work hard and let the outcome be what it may.

The best art the world has ever had is but the impress left by men who have thought less of making great art than of living full and completely with all their faculties in the enjoyment of full play. From these the result is inevitable.

5.

The technique of a little individuality will be a little technique, however scrupulously elaborated it may be. However long studied it still will be a little technique; the measure of the man. The greatness of art depends absolutely on the greatness of the artist’s individuality and on the same source depends the power to acquire a technique sufficient for expression.

The man who is forever acquiring technique with the idea that sometime he may have something to express, will never have the technique of the thing he wishes to express.

Intellect should be used as a tool.

The technique learned without a purpose is a formula which when used, knocks the life out of any ideas to which it is applied.

6.

The great artist has cast a glow of romance over the café and Bohemia. It is not that he has spent much time there. He was always too busy with his work for that. It is because when he did go for relaxation he put his wit, his humor, his vitality and all himself into it. He made things hum, turned the sordid into romance, then disappeared back to his work leaving a memory in Bohemia.

7.

Age need not destroy beauty. There are people who grow more beautiful as they grow older. If age means to them an expansion and development of character this new mental and spiritual state will have its effect on the physical. A face which in the early days was only pretty or even dull, will be transformed. The eyes will attain mysterious depths, there will be a gesture in the whole face of greater sensibility and all will appear coordinate.

About the portrait Whistler painted of his mother I have always had a great feeling of beauty. She is old. But there is something in her face and gesture that tells of the integrity of her life. There is nothing wabbly about her face as there is in the faces of those whose integrity has been uncertain. A wonderful record of woman’s beauty would have been lost to the world if her son had seen fit to look for any other beauty than that which was present. There she sits, and in her poise one reads the history of a splendid personality. She is at once so gentle, so experienced, and so womanly strong.

She may have had other beauty in her youth, but it could not have surpassed this, which charms and fills us with reverence.

It is more the gesture of a feature than the feature itself which interests and pleases us.

The feature is the outside, its gesture manifests the inner life.

Beauty is an intangible thing; can not be fixed on the surface, and the wear and tear of old age on the body cannot defeat it.

Nor will a “pretty” face make it, for “pretty” faces are often dull and empty, and beauty is never dull and it fills all spaces.

8.

The lace on a woman’s wrist is an entirely different thing from lace in a shop. In the shop it is a piece of workmanship, on her hand it is the accentuation of her gentleness of character and refinement.

9.

Perhaps whatever there is in my work that may be really interesting to others, and surely what is interesting to me, is the result of a sometimes successful effort to free myself from any idea that what I produce must be art or must respond in any way to any standard.

It must be old fashioned, or new fashioned or no fashion at all. It must be what it is and must have been made because it was a great pleasure to make it.

Whatever is worth while I am sure must be made this way, and the influences should be all the influences, little and big, of a lifetime.

10.

Develop your visual memory. Draw everything you have drawn from the model from memory as well.

Realize that a drawing is not a copy. It is a construction in very different material.

A drawing is an invention.

The technique of painting is very difficult, very interestinging.

There is no end to the study of technique.

Yet more important than the lifelong study of technique is the lifelong self-education.

In fact, technique can only be used properly by those who have definite purpose in what they do, and it is only they who invent technique. Otherwise it is the work of parrots.

You can do anything you want to do. What is rare is this actual wanting to do a specific thing: wanting it so much that you are practically blind to all other things, that nothing else will satisfy you. When you, body and soul, wish to make a certain expression and cannot be distracted from this one desire, then you will be able to make a great use of whatever technical knowledge you have. You will have clairvoyance, you will see the uses of the technique you already have, and you will invent more.

I know I have said a lot when I say “You can do anything you want to do.” But I mean it. There is reason for you to give this statement some of your best thought. You may find that this is just what is the matter with most of the people in the world; that few are really wanting what they think they want, and that most people go through their lives without ever doing one whole thing they really want to do.

An artist has got to get acquainted with himself just as much as he can. It is no easy job, for it is not a present-day habit of humanity. This is what I call self-development, self-education. No matter how fine a school you are in, you have to educate yourself.

There is nothing more entertaining than to have a frank talk with yourself. Few do it—frankly. Educating yourself is getting acquainted with yourself.

Find out what you really like if you can. Find out what is really important to you. Then sing your song. You will have something to sing about and your whole heart will be in the singing.

When a man is full up with what he is talking about he handles such language as he has with a mastery unusual to him, and it is at such times that he learns language.

11.

Don’t follow the critics too much. Art appreciation, like love, cannot be done by proxy: It is a very personal affair and is necessary to each individual.

12.

A SKETCH

It is only some people sitting down out-of-doors. There is the sensation of comfort under the trees, the baby carriage, the bloom of flowers, the women’s clothes, green trees. The man has disposed his legs along the line of greatest comfort. He won’t keep them long that way but just for the moment he has the expansion of a dog in the sunlight. It is all a matter of the sense of these things and it is very beautiful. It is not the kind of art that is painful either in its conception or its doing. It seems to have been born of wit, and good-humored love of people and things—seems to have come forth spontaneously—a love song. It seems so easy and it seems so glad to exist.

Beside it, the bitter duty thing, made of painful hard labor, of grinding and irritating patience; the thing great only because of the agony it took in its making, the dully labored, witless thing, the thing without love, the thing made not for itself but to win a prize, hangs ill at ease.

13.

I do not want to see how skillful you are—I am not interested in your skill. What do you get out of nature? Why do you paint this subject? What is life to you? What reasons and what principles have you found? What are your deductions? What projections have you made? What excitement, what pleasure do you get out of it? Your skill is the thing of least interest to me.

Don’t be a high-key or a low-key artist. Both keys belong to you. Use the key that fits.

Form enveloping form. The over-modeling.

I can feel the sogginess of that man’s footsteps as he comes along. He seems to be the spirit of dreary rain.

A sketch that is the life of the city and river.

So you are after the Japanese? Well, don’t be so superficial about it. Get the principle of it, but not the mannerism.

14.

No one should be asked to write on any artist or art movement unless he likes the work of the artist or the effects of the movement very much, and has in his liking none of that propagandist spirit which boosts to the skies his idol and lays everything else in the dust. We have had much of this in recent times. Nor should the “Honor List” be taken too seriously as an indication of worth.

I venture to say that Thomas Eakins will be spoken of in times to come as one of the very great men in all American art, but he died practically unknown and received only an “honor” or two.

I wonder what part in an encyclopedia of American art the truly decorative and significant work of the Indian will play. It is interesting to find that there has been going on for centuries a very remarkable art expression right here—pure art, not imitation, and related, somehow, to the more ancient art that existed beyond the Pacific.

In a great many writings and in much conversation I have noted a tendency to consider the paintings of a man who has never been abroad more American than those of a man who had been abroad. May as well say that Benjamin Franklin left his American spirit in Philadelphia when he went to Europe.

It is quite possible for a man to live all his life in California and paint as a disciple of the Barbazon school and for another to spend most of his life in the forest of Fontainbleau and show his California birth from beginning to end.

After all the error rests in the mistaken idea that the subject of a painting is the object painted.

Some men are so provincial that, put them where you will, they will be and do according to their home kind. Others will react to the outside world as the men of their nation feel. But in the great ones, of which a nation may be proud, the race speaks.

The greatest American, of whom the nation must be proud, will not be a “typical” American at all, but will be heir to the world instead of a part of it, and will go to every place where he feels he may find something of the information he desires, whether it be in one province or another.