The Art Spirit By Robert Henri

1.

When we know the relative value of things we can do anything with them. We can build with them without destroying them. Under such conditions they are enhanced by coming into contact with each other.

The study of art is the study of the relative value of things. The factors of a work of art cannot be used constructively until their relative values are known. Unstable governments, like unstable works of art, are such as they are because values have not been appreciated.

The most vital things in the look of a face or of a landscape endure only for a moment. Work should be done from memory. The memory is of that vital movement. During that moment there is a correlation of the factors of that look. This correlation does not continue. New arrangements, greater or less, replace them as mood changes. The special order has to be retained in memory—that special look, and that order which was its expression. Memory must hold it. All work done from the subject thereafter must be no more than data-gathering. The subject is now in another mood. A new series of relations has been established. These may confound. The memory of that special look must be held, and the “subject” can now only serve as an indifferent manikin of its former self. The picture must not become a patchwork of parts of various moods. The original mood must be held to.

The artist sees only that in the model which may help him to build up the look he would record. His work is now very difficult. With the model before him he works from memory. He refers to the model, but he does not follow the new relations which differing moods establish. He chooses only from the appearance before him that which relates to his true subject—the look which first inspired him to work. That look has passed and it may not return. He is very fortunate if he can evoke again that look in the subject.

It is very difficult to go away from a subject after having received an impression and set that impression down from memory. It is yet more difficult to work from memory with the “subject” in its changing moods still before you. All good work is done from memory whether the model is still present or not. With the model present there is coupled with the distracting changes in its organization which must not be followed, the advantage of seeing, nevertheless, the material—the raw material one might say—of which the look was made.

Were the student constantly in the habit of memory-practice there is little doubt but that he would dispense with the presence of the model at the time of the actual accomplishment of his work. But this would mean a form of study which has not yet come in vogue. There is no form of study more fascinating than this—that is, after the first disheartening steps are taken. The first steps are disheartening because while we may have learned copying right well the effort to put down what we actually know—that is, what we can carry away with us—is often a revelation of the very little understanding we had in the presence of the model.

I think it is safe to say that the kind of seeing and the kind of thinking done by one who works with the model always before him is entirely different from the kind of seeing and thinking done by one who is about to lose the presence of the model and will have to continue his work from the knowledge he gained in the intimate presence.

The latter type of worker generally manifests a mental activity of much higher order than his apparently safe and secure confrère. He must know and he must know that he knows before the model is snatched away from him. He studies for information.

A good painting is a remarkable feat of organization. Every part of it is wonderful in itself because it seems so alive in its share in the making of the unity of the whole, and the whole is so definitely one thing.

You can look at a good painting in but one way. That is, the way it is made. Whether you will or not you must follow its sequences.

There are some paintings, very remarkable for the skill they display, which are, however, a mere welding together of factors which belong to many different expressions of nature. Many a school drawing of this character have I seen held up as an example, given a prize, and yet being but a mere patching together of many concepts—unrelated factors nevertheless cunningly interwoven—there is not in them that surge of life, that unity which is the mark of true organization.

If you wish your work to have organization your concept of the motive which is the incentive to your flight must be as certain and you must hold as well to it as you would have your organization certain and true to itself in all of its parts.

No vacillating or uncertain interest can produce a unity.

I have often thought of an art school where the model might hold the pose in one room and the work might be done in another. The pupils would have their places in both rooms, one for observation and the other for work. The pupil could return to the model room for information. In getting the information he could view the model from his place or could walk about and get an all-around concept; he could also make any sketches he might desire to make—for information—but these drawings are not to be carried into the work room. Into this room he only carries what he knows.

It would be a wonderful school and the pupils in it would not only enjoy their work and profit more but they would be a much better class of students. For this class of work would demand such activity of mind and such energy that the practitioners of idle industry that now occupy so many places in school studios would eliminate themselves.

One might ask why this plan is not tried. The reason is the usual sad one. Good art schools are generally self-supporting. They barely pay their expenses. Innovations are financial risks. Besides, in this case the students have to be convinced, and, as I have said before, the initial steps in this kind of study are very discouraging.

Some tentative efforts have been made in memory study but perhaps the nearest we have come to it in any effective way has been through the introduction of the five, ten, or thirty minute poses. In these, mental activity, alertness, the quick seizing of essentials have been stimulated. We have proved that thirty minutes of high-pitch mentality and spirit is worth more than a whole week below par. And in such rapid work where seeing and doing is accomplished in five, ten, or thirty minutes the seeing must be certain, selective, and the memory must be good. This system of quick action has been of service.

In the old days, when a drawing was begun on Monday and finished on Saturday, the student who did not know how to begin a drawing “began” one a week and spent a week finishing the thing he had not known how to begin. A thing that has not been begun cannot be finished.

But it took a terrible battle to introduce the Quick Sketch. It will not be easy to introduce this Concept-and-Carry method of study. A few individuals throughout the history of art have adopted this method in spite of the school conventions and these individuals are known to us through their works.

It should be noted that in this memory form of study it is not proposed that the model should be used less. It is proposed that the model should be used more. This is a thing that it would be well to understand. In fact, in observing the work of many students or artists where the model is before them for every stroke we may be impressed with the idea that it is the model who is using the artist instead of the artist using the model. This is certainly the case where the artist is following the moods of the model. Sometimes we see that the artist is not a willing slave, however, for we hear him complaining that “the model has moved,” showing that somewhere in his mysterious consciousness there is a desire to do that thing which he started out to do.

The development of an ability to work from memory, to select factors, to take things of certain constructive values and build with them a special thing, your unique vision of nature, the thing you caught in an instant look of a face or the formations of a moment in the sky, will make it possible to state not only that face, that landscape, but make your statement of them as they were when they were most beautiful to you.

By this I mean that you will make an organization in paint on canvas; not a reproduction, but an organization, subject to the natural laws of paint and canvas, which will have an order in it kin to that order which has so impressed you in nature—in the look of a face, in the look of a landscape.

Faces are not permanently beautiful to us, nor are landscapes. There seem to be moments of revelation, moments when we see in the transition of one part to another the unification of the whole. There is a sense of comprehension and of great happiness. We have entered into a great order and have been carried into greater knowledge by it. This sometimes in a passing face, a landscape, a growing thing. We may call it a passage into another dimension than our ordinary. If one could but record the vision of these moments by some sort of sign! It was in this hope that the arts were invented. Signposts on the way to what may be. Signposts towards greater knowledge.

There are those who have found the sign and through their works we can to some degree follow, as we do at times when hearing music or in association with the works of the masters of other arts.

Everyone in some measure has these moments of clearer understanding, and it is equally important for all to hold and fix them.

It is really not important whether one’s vision is as great as that of another. It is a personal question as to whether one shall live in and deal with his greatest moments of happiness.

The development of the power of seeing and the power to retain in the memory that which is essential and to make record and thus test out how true the seeing and the memory have been is the way to happiness.

2.

What were the signs in that landscape, in the air, in the motion, in our companionship, that so excited our imagination and made us so happy?

If we only knew what were those signs we could paint that country, could paint what it was to us.

What delight we have had in the memory of it! What is that memory?

We do not remember it, nor did we see it as any single thing, place or time.

Somehow times, places, things overlapped. Memories carried into each other.

That time we sat in the evening silence in the face of the mesa and heard the sudden howl of a pack of coyotes, and had a thrill and a dread which was not fear of the pack, for we knew they were harmless. Just what was that dread— what did it relate to? Something ’way back in the race per- haps? We have strange ways of seeing. If we only knew—then we could tell. If we knew what we saw, we could paint it.

3.

LETTER TO THE CLASS, ART STUDENTS LEAGUE, 1916

I offer you this process of making a study. It is a process I might or might not use myself. It is one way of doing the work, but there are many ways. This is only one of them. And it may prove a good experiment to you. One advantage the process has is that it is economical as to paint, and another advantage rests in the fact that you may accomplish drawing and design first, and later develop the color to its completion, thus separating two difficulties.

You start by making a very simple drawing on your canvas, paying particular attention to the exact location, size and shape of all the larger masses: the face, its light and shade masses, the hair, collar and shirt, the tie, his coat and the background. In this I have named seven areas, and together they cover the total area of the canvas. You do not go into details, but you devote yourself to making the finest design you can possibly make with the seven named shapes.

Your palette is clean. You now estimate the value and color of each of these seven areas, and you mix a tone for each of them, allowing for each a quantity of pigment a little in excess of your estimate of the quantity necessary to cover generously the area in question.

You work at these seven tones on your palette until you are quite sure you have made mixtures that closely approximate in color and value the (1) light of the face, (2) shade of the face, (3) hair, (4) collar and shirt, (5) tie, (6) coat, (7) background. Of course each of these areas, or parts of the picture, have variations of light and shade, and of color, but at this stage of your work you disregard them. Your palette presents but seven notes, each to represent flatly its corresponding area.

In making these notes you will find advantage in trying them out by assembling them, maybe several times, in a miniature picture on the palette, until you are sure you have made the most distinguished assemblage possible in this way. Seven notes which are effective and beautiful in their relation to each other and which, assembled, will give the clarity of the flesh and the collar and shirt, and the richness and contrasting power of the darker notes, the hair, tie, coat, background.

Let us assume that the model is a man of good healthy complexion, black hair, a soft shirt and collar nearly white but of a blue-green tint. A rich purple tie rather deep in tone, a gray coat, and the background a rug designed in dull red, dull yellow and green-blue low in tone and unified by obscurity.

Now, all of the areas of the subject having their correspondents in color, value and quantity on the palette; and no other pigments allowed to remain, the palette presents in a general way precisely the notes that are to be employed in the picture.

The palette itself already looks like the subject, and the student who having drawn, leaving only essential lines, the placement, proportions and essential movement of the subject, will be able to proceed to lay these colors on the areas for which they are intended with a greater attention to their shapes, their drawing power, their fullness and purity as pigments, than would be possible were they mixed in the usual way.

My suggestion that you might use such a mode of set palette is addressed to you after seeing you at your work, gathering somewhat your aims, and observing your need of a more simple process in the doing of what you are trying to do.

This process is only one out of hundreds of processes. There are many ways of painting pictures, and there are many kinds of pictures, each claiming special procedure.

I offer this one process, without prejudice, because I think that it will fit the ends I see you working for. You will find that by its use you will be able to acclaim the notes which give life to your subject; to make your canvas more rich and full, with harmony and contrast of color. It will help you in the simple and net statements of value whether they be values of color or values of black and white.

I think you will see that by this detached painting of the picture on the palette in terms of color and of value, freed from the struggle with drawing, you will be able to weigh the powers of the colors and values; to establish the harmonies and contrasts; to become simpler; clearer; more positive in your transitions and to have, when the palette is thus set, a free mind to deal with the designs of forms, drawing and the characterization.

There will be less confusion, less likelihood of falling into exasperated and partial efforts to cover areas with insufficient quantities of paint, and these quantities of paint will have been better considered as to their general color and value in relation to the other colors and other values.

I do not say that with the few flat tones I have indicated for this portrait, a Monet-like impressionistic picture may be painted, but I do say that any one of you who might desire to paint such a picture, or one with a full iridescence of color, would do well first to acquire the ability and habit of registering on your canvas, in any way you can, an impression in large of the general shapes which go to make up the character of the subject.

On the other hand, I am ready to say that with the palette carefully built on this principle, the foundation of a picture that is to be a brilliant and forceful statement in color, color- vibration, mass, mass organization, in character, character-signification, may be laid, and after the first lay-in with this palette the palette may be augmented and arranged in the same way as before with additional divisions of color and value, to vitalize and complete the work already established in its broader planes.

For the present, however, you as students should devote yourselves to the power of simple expressions, to do all that can be done and learn how much can be said with the simpler and more fundamental terms.

It should be well understood that the principle of this form of set palette is that a totally new palette is organized and set for each subject. It is possible to set a palette, very scientifically arranged, that will be serviceable for many subjects, but in presenting this I have looked to economy of paint and to the powers of concentration on a certain scheme.

Note also that after the palette is arranged you have in reserve your full set of colors, in their tubes, so that if in practice a note you have made should prove false, you can mix a new one to replace it, removing of course the false note from the palette. It is at all times important to remove any colors or mixtures that have no place in the scheme.

Your regular stock of colors should be as nearly as possible a well-balanced

Red (R)
Red-orange (RO)
Orange (O)
Orange-yellow (OY)
Yellow (Y)
Yellow-green (YG)
Green (G)
Green-blue (GB)
Blue (B)
Blue-purple (BP)
Purple (P)
Purple-red (PR)

in correspondence with the spectrum band, and with these you may have pigments that will serve as neutrals.

You will find at first that the study of your color scheme and the setting of your palette will take considerable time. With experience this time will be lessened. But in any case do not think you are wasting time because you are not fussing paint on your canvas. What you are doing has to be done anyway, and it will take its time whether you do it in the beginning or through the work. I am safe in saying it will take less time and be better done if done at first.

Before closing this letter I want to state again that this form of set palette I have proposed is only one of many forms. I do not want to limit you to it. I offer it rather as a starting point for those of you who wish to use it as such. Nor do I want to disturb those who are satisfied with their present mode. I want you to act on your own judgment.

4.

Backgrounds

With the model before it, the background is transformed.

Before the model takes his place, the wall is an identity in itself and is forward.

When the model takes his place, the background recedes and exists only as a compliment to the figure.

Do not look at the background to know its colors or its shapes. Look at the model. What you will see of the background while looking at the model will be the background of that model.

All the beauty that can exist in the background rests in its relation to the figure. It is by looking at the figure that you can see this relation.

With your eyes well on the model, the value, tones, shapes which you apprehend in the background are those only which are complementary to the figure.

The shapes, tones and values you will apprehend in the same background will differ with each new subject you place before it.

The characters of each new subject before the background will claim of it their complements.

We are instinctively blind to what is not relative. We are not cameras. We select. We do this always when we are not painting. When you are sitting in conversation with a young girl and are thinking the while how beautiful she is, suddenly stop and ask yourself what has been her background. Surely it was not all those incongruous things that are now leaping into your consciousness from behind her. And surely, too, while you were sitting there and thinking her so beautiful you had created (unconsciously) out of chaos a wonderfully fitting setting which was back of her and around her and fully sufficient to her.

In ordinary life we see backgrounds right—in fact, as they are. When we start painting we are apt to destroy the background by looking at the multitude of things behind the model.

Behind the model there are a multitude of things subject to all sorts of change according to our interest in them. They are the raw material of a background. The background is a creation in our consciousness.

Another way of saying it is to say that the head in space creates its own background. That the background becomes an extension of the head; and that it is all the canvas that is the head—not just that part the material head occupies.

The background of our beautiful girl is a continuation of her. If her beauty is one of great dignity the forms of our background will be in harmony with or will be gracious complements to this dignity seen in her face.

If she is merely chic, we will find in the background the echoes and the complements of chic.

This will happen even though the material background is precisely the same in each case.

All things change according to the state we are in. Nothing is fixed. I lived once in the top of a house, in a little room, in Paris. I was a student. My place was a romance. It was a mansard room and it had a small square window that looked out over housetops, pink chimney pots. I could see l’Institut, the Pantheon and the Tour Saint Jacques. The tiles of the floor were red and some of them were broken and got out of place. There was a little stove, a wash basin, a pitcher, piles of my studies. Some hung on the wall, others accumulated dust on their backs. My bed was a cot. It was a wonderful place. I cooked two meals and ate dinner outside. I used to keep the camembert out of the window on the mansard roof between meals, and I made fine coffee, and made much of eggs and macaroni. I studied and thought, made compositions, wrote letters home full of hope of some day being an artist.

It was wonderful. But days came when hopes looked black and my art student’s paradise was turned into a dirty little room with broken tiles, ashes fell from the stove, it was all hopelessly poor, I was tired of camembert and eggs and macaroni, and there wasn’t a shade of significance in those delicate little chimney pots, or the Pantheon, the Institut, or even the Tour Saint Jacques.

The material thing is the least part of a background or an environment. And it should be noted, too, that a background is also an environment, for when you paint a background you are painting all that volume of space which is the setting of your subject. And this fact should never be lost sight of.

The background is more air than it is anything else. It is the place in which the model moves. It is the air he breathes.

The dimensions of a background are of very great importance. The spaces on either side of the head and above the head can do so many things good and bad to the head and the figure that it is remarkable how little attention is generally paid to them. A figure can be dwarfed by its placement, and if there is no sense of distance back of it and on this side of it it will most surely be flattened.

From my point of view the simpler a background is the better the figure in front of it will be, and also I will add, the better the figure is the less the observer will need entertainment in the background.

I am quite sure many a gold chair has been hauled in because the artist has failed to get distinction and richness in the mien of the sitter, and he counts on the chair to supply the deficiency. But a cocked hat won’t make a general.

There are backgrounds so well made that you have no consciousness of them.

The simpler a background is the more mastery there must be in it: A full and satisfying result must be accomplished with extremely limited means.

At times secreted in the appearance of a simple tone there is a gamut of color, a shifting across the spectrum which keeps the thing alive, illusive, and creates the mystery of depth.

On the other hand, one tone with the very slightest change will do the thing. In this case the tone is in the finest choice of relation to the dominant color of the figure.

A background is not to be neglected. It is a structural factor. It is as important to the head before it as the pier is important to the bridge it carries. The background is a support of the head.

Many an artist has fussed all day with a face, changing and changing and never getting it right because the fault should have been found in the background which he has neglected.

The background must travel along and keep pace with every advance of the picture. A right eye travels all over the canvas, for it is an organization of the whole that makes any part.

There are echoes everywhere of the feature you are making. A touch on the face may be the causation of a touch on the foot or, on the contrary, may demand its removal.

The eye must be alert; must see the influence of one thing on another and bring all things into relation.

The background as put in in the beginning may have been excellent, but the work that has gone on before it may demand its total reconstruction. Nothing is right until all is done and a total unity has been accomplished.

It is important to stress attention to the background, for it is a most common habit to neglect it.

If there are objects in the background they must not be painted because they are interesting in themselves. Their only right of existence is as complementary or harmonic benefits to the head or the figure. In other words: when you are painting the background or the things in it you are still painting the head. Your eye is still on the head, you see these things of the background in a relative way only.

To paint otherwise is to digress and shift from one subject to another, to paint many pictures in one.

When we delight in a thing in nature all our accounting of its environment is selective.

Seeing beauty in nature is a compositional act. Two people may declare to each other the wonder of a sunset or the loveliness of a woman, but, although they agree, each has made his own selection.

Two painters before a sunset or a woman put down on canvas the order of their seeing, and thus they communicate to each other their separate ways.

In drawing, Rembrandt with a cast shadow or just a line or two realized for us the most complete sense of space, that is, background, environment. He could do this because he saw and he had the genius of selection. Look at his simplest drawings and you will see that he was a supreme master in this.

A weak background is a deadly thing.

Every head claims its own kind of background.

There are backgrounds that should seem only to be air. It takes some consideration, not only of color and value, but as well of the way the paint is applied, and the thickness or thinness of it, to make such a background.

Many a background has been spoiled simply because the artist has tried to cover it with an insufficient amount of paint; because it was a trouble to paint it all over, because his brush strokes were too much in evidence, because he thought too little of it and did not realize the function it had to perform.

The commonest fault is that he determines its color, its value, and its content by looking at it and does not realize its marvelous power of change, and that it is wholly a matter of relation.