The Art Spirit By Robert Henri

1.

Letter of Criticism - 8

As to your “method” of work try something different. Take a change from your little fragmentary life-studies on a 5-by-9 paper. Cast about a bit.

My advice to you is to venture, meet some other difficulties, be a real student.

Real students go out of beaten paths, whether beaten by themselves or by others, and have adventure with the unknown.

There are few students in the schools. They are rare anywhere. And yet it is only the student who dares to take a chance, who has a real good time in life.

But remember that I say it is even possible for you to follow your old method and have the adventures and come out all right. It’s altogether what you are able to get out of it.

Be sure that your decisions are really made by yourself. Decisions made by yourself may be of a nature very unexpected. In other words, very few people know what they want, very few people know what they think. Many think and do not know it and many think they are thinking and are not thinking.

Self-education is no easy proposition.

Men either get to know what they want, and go after it, or some other persons tell them what they want and drive them after it.

I can’t tell you what you want to do, can’t lay any plans for your doing it. You must surprise me. I am not interested in your being the kind of regular fellow who tells me what I know before. The case is in your own hands. Get as much acquainted with yourself as you can. Question yourself. After a while you may get some answers. They will surprise and shock you, but they will interest you. Maybe you will get so that you will begin to do things for yourself. It will be very fine when you can begin to serve yourself.

After all, your “method” of work is nothing. Why be tied to any method? You will say that when you step out of your rut you don’t do as well. But what does that matter? It may come better later. Anyway, don’t be a slave to a “method,” to a 5-by-9 piece of paper. Don’t let anyone drive you away from your method and your 5-by-9 piece of paper. Don’t be a slave either way. Ask yourself.

There is no school that will exactly fit you. There is no advice made just for your case. The air is full of advice. Every school is waiting, whether it is willing or not, for you to make it your school.

I do not know if this answer to your questions will be satisfactory to you, but it’s the most useful I can give.

Do not let the fact that things are not made for you, that conditions are not as they should be, stop you. Go on anyway. Everything depends on those who go on anyway.

2.

Letter Concerning Prizes and Medals

The pernicious influence of prize and medal giving in art is so great that it should be stopped.

You can give prizes justly for long-distance jumps, because you can measure jumps with a foot-rule.

No way has been devised for measuring the value of a work of art. History proves that juries in art have been generally wrong. With few exceptions the greatest artists have been repudiated by the art juries in all countries and at all times. For a single example I will say that very few if any prizes or medals were awarded to the artists who are now in their old age, or after their death, the glory of France.

In fact most of them did not get past the jury of admission.

It’s not that the juries do not mean well, or at least think they mean well, but it is simply that art cannot be measured. The reason for the survival of the award system is purely commercial.

I suggest that you use the money to buy pictures; that you let this action carry with it the satisfaction which your approval of the artist may mean; that you choose the pictures you buy, yourselves, making your own mistakes, learning the lessons which you will learn from your own mistakes; and that you hang up the pictures you buy in your permanent collection to represent your judgment.

Every community should have its own will, and have the courage of it. Should develop its own power of judgment. Mistakes must be risked.

There are collectors who do not do much or anything for themselves in the field of art. They do not select their own pictures, but they pay another man to make what mistakes are to be made, and this man has a wonderful and improving time doing it.

Perhaps you will see by what I say, that I am more interested in the artistic development of a community than I am in adding titles to artists’ names.

Nothing can help the artist more than such actual participation as I suggest.

I should like every community to have a will of its own; to be distinctly like itself; to make its own mistakes; to make its own discoveries; to choose its own pictures, hang them up, and then take them down again when they no longer like them, and replace them with such others as they have come to like.

To visit such a community would be interesting, would shock or please, would shake us up a bit, and cause revaluation.

There would be some things in that place which one could not find in any other place. We might like or we might not like it, but the place would have its effect on us. It would not be negative.

An artist must educate himself, he cannot be educated, he must test things out as they apply to himself; his life is one long investigation of things and his own reaction to them. If he is to be interesting to us it is because he renders a very personal account. If a community is to be interesting to out- siders or have any sort of an existence, any sort of a good time, it must do likewise.

When a community starts afresh in matters of art, it takes on a big job. Not an outside job, but an inside job, and one that can be most enjoyable and most profitable.

The greatest honor you can do an artist is to buy his picture and hang it up in your gallery.

3.

All art that is worthwhile is a record of intense life, and each individual artist’s work is a record of his special effort, search and findings, in language especially chosen by himself and devised best to express him, and the significance of his work can only be understood by careful study; no crack-judgment, looking for the expected, will do, nor can we be informed by the best critics, for appreciation is individual, differs with each individual and is an act of creation based on the picture which is an organization, not a mirror of the artist’s vision; but the essential principle of it, and therefore of basic value to the creative impulse in the spectator.

All interesting developments in art have at first puzzled the public, and the best appreciators have had to suspend judgment during the period necessary for full consideration.

I value the effect of new notes on myself. I believe in constant revaluation.

To appreciate and get a great deal from a work of art does not mean to find the expected in it, nor does it mean, necessarily to accept or follow it wholly, in part, or at all. Every work is one man’s vision, an outside experience, useful to us in our own constructions. The wisdom and the mistakes of the past are ours to build on, and the picture painted yesterday, now hanging on the wall, is already of the past and is a part of our heritage.

I regard the battlers for ideas and the builders of new roads with enthusiasm and reverence. Their works (the record of their struggles and findings) are things to watch and to cherish. This is the way I feel about the works of serious men whether they be of the past or of today.

I am not interested in any one school or movement, nor do I care for art as art. I am interested in life. The most we can desire of men is that they be masters of such as they have, and then we should be highly satisfied with them, and regard them as neither less nor greater than any. Place them as themselves.

I claim for each one free speech, free hearing. I am interested in the open forum, open for every man to come with his word and for every man to come to hear the evidence, unticketed, unprejudiced by jury or critic.

4.

If you want to be a historical painter, let your history be of your own time, of what you can get to know personally— of manners and customs within your own experience.

John Leech was a comic artist on Punch, and while no one would care much to look over the Royal Academy catalogs of his time, the pages in Punch by John Leech hold our interest to this day. Leech is known as a “comic” artist, but his pictures went deep into life, and the choice of his expression, was noble. He is one of the greatest artists England has had, and because he was so interested in life as he found it his works have a great historical value.

Rembrandt did not go out of his own sphere to make his religious subjects—he applied the ideas to the materials of his own life. That is one of the reasons his work is so lasting in our interest.

If you must paint a “Good Samaritan” do not paint the old story, in the old form, but let your subject be the recurrence of the spirit of the good Samaritan as it presents itself to you in your own environment. These great moments didn’t happen just once—they still continue to happen.

Perhaps some of you will recall seeing a picture painted by John Sloan of the backs of the old Twenty-fourth Street houses with the boys on the roof startling the pigeons into flight. It is a human document of the lives of the people living in those houses. You feel the incidents in the windows, the incidents in the construction of the houses, the incidents in the wear and tear on them; in fact, the life of that neighborhood is all shown in the little line of houses, yellow and red houses, warm in the sunlight. And the quality of the sunlight is that of a caress; the houses, the atmosphere are steeped in its warmth. That canvas will carry into future time the feel and the way of life as it happened and as it was seen and understood by the artist.

Sometimes in looking at the people of an old Chinese painting I have felt how close in human kinship these ancients were to me. In all other forms of record they appear remote. The artist, who is not a materialist, sees more than the incident. He puts in his work, whether consciously or not, a record of sensibilities, and his work bridges time and space, bringing us together.

There are the beautiful drawings William Glackens has done of the children in Washington Square, and his streets on the East Side with their surge of life. In being great works of art they are none the less documents of life. Even the prints of these, clipped from the magazine in which they were published, are now treasured, mainly, of course, by artists (for artists do know something about art) and are shown to friends with a great pride in their possession.

Ever since the beginning there have been artists who have found in the simple life about them the wonderful and the beautiful, and through the fact of this inspiration have sensed the way to make the combinations of form and color we know as art.

5.

Genius is not a possession of the limited few, but exists in some degree in everyone. Where there is natural growth, a full and free play of faculties, genius will manifest itself. The disposition to preconceive one’s degree of genius, or the quality of it, is a mistake, for this preconception is a limitation.

The results of individual development cannot be foreseen, nor can these results be estimated by one in whom such development has not as yet taken place.

It is useless to study technique in advance of having a motive. Instead of establishing a vast stock of technical tricks, it would be far wiser to develop creative power by constant search for means particular to a motive already in mind, by studying and developing just that technique which you feel the immediate need of, and which alone will serve you for the idea or the emotion which has moved you to expression. You will not only develop your power to see the means, but you will acquire power to organize the means to a purpose. In this form of study there will be no less familiarization with what is generally found in all technical study. You will acquire a habit and ability to select and correlate. You will become a master and organizer of means, and you will understand the value of means as no mere collector of means ever can.

I have known many men who have read everything, have what is called a perfect education, and who while knowing everything know little of the essential qualities, or the possibilities, through organization, of anything. Such as these while appearing learned through familiarity with learning make no constructions of their own, for the genius in them is still dormant.

6.

To be an artist is to construct, and to whatever degree one shows the genius for construction in work of any sort, he is that much an artist.

The artist life is therefore the desirable life, and it is possible to all.

7.

Letter of Criticism - 9

Both yours received and the last understood in all its loneliness. You have a hard proposition, but I believe if you fight it through it will be all the better.

Of course you can’t expect to go out and paint masterpieces every day, and you can’t expect to equal steadily what you have already done.

Since I returned to New York I have done a good deal of work, but it has been discouraging because nothing yet has happened to put me beyond my rank and file of work; nothing that I will care to pick up and show and show again, as I do some things. Like some of those I did last summer.

But you have got to think there alone, and work to keep yourself company, and thinking and working is what counts. In the cities, in the studios, there is usually too little time to think matters through. Most things are skimmed, and people often believe they are doing quite a good deal themselves when they are only being jostled by others.

Up there, whatever will be interesting will be your ideas, and whatever will be done will be your work. But a man is human. Well, you are going to Boston to a genial friend for a few days. Have a good time!

Coming down from the school with L—— the other afternoon we got talking of how free we were to work and think in dead old Haarlem; how it seems, eliminate and shirk as you will, there is no time here to do one’s work. Trouble, friends, business, distances to travel, a million things great and small, no time to be long enough on any one idea.

Last summer was a good one. Looking back on what it forced on us; a dead place to work in, with that bunch of children, and you, your landscape, occasional flights for mild change to Amsterdam. And then after the long season of dead Haarlem and work, the solid bunch of simple amusement in Paris.

It looks to me as though you might break your long quiets by letting loose occasionally. But you are up against it and it is up to you.

You have gone there to find yourself. What you have started, this thing of becoming an artist, a real one, almost every man fails at. Few have the courage or stamina to go through the parts one has to go through alone in more ways than one.

I don’t believe in being inhuman. I should feel sorry for the man who would not cry for company and for sympathy. The human creature must have these things, and when you can’t stand it you will have to dig out and get your belly full—and then go back.

If you go through this winter you will come out a strong man and you will be well acquainted with yourself.

It’s hard. I shiver with the cold. It is easy maybe to sit here and write this, seated by a steam radiator. But I know what it is to be in the cold and alone in both ways. I have lived, a little younger than you, where there was equal cold and more exposure. I have known ever since what it is to be in the cold and alone, and sometimes desperately so, because I have believed what I believe and have stood by my believing.

You go on. The country is full of men who are working in the cold, or worse—too much heat—just to get enough to purchase a day’s miserable existence. You are working for your character, and your pay is to last you all your life.

I admire you for your start and I like to see men do these things so much that I shall be shouting with joy when I see you win out.

Of course I do not believe in the place you have chosen more than another place. If you should think a warmer or a more populated place would be better don’t consider stubbornness a virtue.

To work, mind and body, and to be alone enough to concentrate is the thing. I think you will like it there, though mind you, you have only been there a short time. You are not yet used to the weather. You can’t jump from comfort into the conditions of such life. And then the show is to come. Get ready for the wonder of it, and paint like a fiend while the ideas possess you.

I write so much because I admire you for the stand you have taken and I want to shout with joy because a man has taken the bit in his teeth.

As I said before, we can’t hope always to succeed. But by fighting for it, out of the whole crop of a season’s work there are surely some things that look like one’s simple healthy view of life. If you paint two or three hundred canvases this winter and a dozen of them are really good and say your say of yourself, time and place, you can be happy.

8.

Purposes of an Art School

That of interest in the work. Development of a strong personal art in America through stimulating in students a more profound study of life, the purpose of art, a real understanding of Construction, Proportion, Drawing—stimulating activity, mental and physical, moral courage, invention in expression to fit the idea to be expressed; the study, therefore, of specific technique, not stock technique. Impressing the importance of the Idea, that it must have weight, value, be well worth putting forth and in such permanent medium. The development, therefore, of individuality, search for the just means of expressing same simply and fully. The development, therefore, of artists of mind, philosophy, sympathy, courage, invention. Taking their work as a matter of vital importance to the world, considering their technique as a medium of utterance of their most personal philosophy of life, their view of the subject—one that must be important and worthy of their powers of seeing and understanding. Drawing that is solid, constructive, fundamental, inventive, specific, adapted to the special needs of the idea to be expressed; such drawing as can come only from one who has a decided and special purpose, profound understanding, a realization of the importance of his word, and the evidence he has to give.

A school where individuality of thought and individuality of expression is encouraged. A school and instruction which offers itself to the student to be used by him in the building of himself up into a force that will be of a stimulating value to the world. That he may use the school, its facilities, its instruction, that he may know that the school and the instructors are back of him, interested, watching, encouraging, as ready to learn from him as to teach him, anxious for his evidence, recognizing in him a man—another or a new force, giving him the use of its knowledge and experience, only demanding from him that he work both mind and body to the limit of his endurance to find in himself whatever there is of value, to find his truest thoughts and find a means, the simplest, straightest, the most fit means to make record of them. To be the deepest thinker, the kindest appreciator, the clearest and simplest, frankest creator he can be today, for by so doing he is the master of such as he has today, and that he is master today is the only dependable evidence that he will be master tomorrow; that he has dignity, worth, integrity, courage in his thought and action today proves that he is today a student such as is worthy of the name in its fullest meaning.