The Art Spirit By Robert Henri

1.

Seeing

It is harder to see than it is to express.

The whole value of art rests in the artist’s ability to see well into what is before him. This model is wonderful in as many ways as there are pairs of eyes to see her. Each view of her is an original view and there is a response in her awaiting each view. If the eyes of a Rembrandt are upon her she will rise in response and Rembrandt will draw what he sees, and it will be beautiful. Rembrandt was a man of great understanding. He had the rare power of seeing deep into the significance of things.

The model will serve equally for a Rembrandt drawing or for anybody’s magazine cover. A genius is one who can see. The others can often “draw” remarkably well. Their kind of drawing, however, is not very difficult. They can change about. They can make their sight fit the easiest way for their drawing. As their seeing is not particular it does not matter. With the seer it is different. Nothing will do but the most precise statement. He must not only bend technique to his will, but he must invent technique that will especially fit his need. He is not one who floats affably in his culture. He is the blazer of the road for what he has to bring. Those who get their technique first, expecting sight to come to them later, get a technique of a very ready-made order.

To study technique means to make it, to invent it. To take the raw material each time anew and twist it into shape. It must be made to serve a specific purpose. The same technique must never be used again. Each time it must be made new and fresh. A stock of set phrases won’t do. The study is a development of wit.

An artist’s warehouse, full of experience, is not a store of successful phrases ready for use, but is a store of raw material. The successful phrases are there, but they have been broken down to be made over into new form. Those who have the will to create do not care to use old phrases. There is a great pleasure in the effort to invent the exact thing which is needed. Use it. Break it down. Begin again. It is a great thing to be able to see. Seeing is without limit. It is a great thing when one has a fair measure of seeing. Then to invent the means of expressing it. To be a master of technique rather than to be the owner of a lot of it. Those who simply collect technique have at best only a secondhand lot. A great artist is one who says as nearly what he means as his powers of invention allow. An ordinary artist often uses eloquent phrases, phrases of established authority, and if he is skillful it is surprising to see how he can nearly make them fit his ideas—or how he can make the ideas give way to the phrase. But such an artist is not having a good time. A snake without a skin might make a fair job of crawling into another snake’s shedding, but I guess no snake would be fool enough to bother with it.

I have been trying to make this matter clear—this matter that the whole fun of the thing is in seeing and inventing, trying to refute a common idea that education is a case of collecting and storing, instead of making. It’s not easy. But the matter is mighty well worth considering.

2.

There are men who admire women’s dress. They do not know what the material of the dress is. One may admire a tree without knowing it is a chestnut tree. A boat may be appreciated, painted by an artist, yet the artist may not have a sailor’s interest in knowledge of sails. He paints what and as he sees. He has found it beautiful and it is beauty he has sought to render. The garments of a woman may be fine— rare—expensive—a certain kind, but to the artist the dress may be only part of the woman.

3.

If in your drawings you habitually disregard proportions you become accustomed to the sight of distortion and lose critical ability. A person living in squalor eventually gets used to it.

There are mighty few people who think what they think they think.

There are pictures that manifest education and there are pictures that manifest love.

The ignorant are to be found as much among the educated as among the uneducated.

Education as we have it does as much to thwart the recognition of individual experience as lack of education limits it.

If you want to know about people watch their gestures. The tongue is a greater liar than the body.

There are hand shakes of great variety. Some are warm and mean that you are cared for.

Your enemy is not thinking of the skin on the back of his neck. Watch it.

Artists deal with gestures. They get to know a great deal about people.

A sitter may not say a word for an hour, but the body has been speaking all the time.

A work of art in itself is a gesture and it may be warm or cold, inviting or repellent.

4.

TO THE STUDENTS OF THE ART STUDENTS’ LEAGUE

1917

The exhibition of the works of Thomas Eakins at the Metropolitan Museum should be viewed and studied by every student and, in fact, every lover of the fine arts.

Thomas Eakins was a man of great character. He was a man of iron will and his will was to paint and to carry out his life as he thought it should go. This he did. It cost him heavily, but in his works we have the precious result of his independence, his generous heart and his big mind.

Eakins was a deep student of life and with a great love he studied humanity frankly. He was not afraid of what this study revealed to him.

In the matter of ways and means of expression—the science of technique—he studied most profoundly as only a great master would have the will to study. His vision was not touched by fashion. He cared nothing for prettiness or cleverness in life or in art. He struggled to apprehend the constructive force in nature and to employ in his works the principles found. His quality was honesty. “Integrity” is the word which seems best to fit him.

Personally, I consider him the greatest portrait painter America has produced. Being a great portrait painter, he was, as usual, commissioned to paint only a very few. But he had friends and he painted his friends. Look at these portraits well. Forget for the moment your school, forget the fashion. Do not look for the expected, and the chances are you will find yourself, through the works, in close contact with a man who was a man, strong, profound, and honest, and, above all, one who had attained the reality of beauty in nature as it is; who was in love with the great mysterious nature as manifested in man and things, who had no need to falsify to make romantic, or to sentimentalize to make beautiful. Look, if you will, at the great Gross clinic picture for the real stupendous romance in real life, and at the portrait of Miller for a man’s feeling for a man. This is what I call a beautiful portrait; not a pretty or a swagger portrait, but an honest, respectful, appreciative man-to-man portrait.

But I have no intention to specify. I simply ask you to look. I expect the pictures to tell you, if you can but see them from out of yourselves, and I expect them to fill you with courage and hope.

Eakins many years ago taught in the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, and in those days it was an excitement to hear his pupils tell of him. They believed in him as a great master, and there were stories of his power, his will in the pursuit of study, his unswerving adherence to his ideals, his great willingness to give, to help, and the pleasure he had in seeing the original and worthy crop out in a student’s work. And the students were right, for all this character you will find manifest in his work. Eakins’s pictures and his sculptures are the recordings of a man who lived and studied and loved with a strong heart.

5.

There are many craftsmen who paint pleasantly the surface appearances and are very clever at it.

There are always a few who get at and feel the undercurrent, and these simply use the surface appearances selecting them and using them as tools to express the undercurrent, the real life.

If I cannot feel an undercurrent then I see only a series of things. They may be attractive and novel at first but soon grow tiresome.

There is an undercurrent, the real life, beneath all appearances everywhere. I do not say that any master has fully comprehended it at any time, but the value of his work is in that he has sensed it and his work reports the measure of his experience.

It is this sense of the persistent life force back of things which makes the eye see and the hand move in ways that result in true masterpieces. Techniques are thus created as a need.

It is necessary to work very continuously and valiantly, and never apologetically. In fact, to be ever on the job so that we may find ourselves there, brush in hand, when the great moment does arrive.

It is very possible that you know all these things and know them to be true. I simply recall them to you, to make them active again, just as I would like you to recall them to me, for sometimes our possessions sleep.

6.

All the past up to a moment ago is your legacy. You have a right to it. The works of ancient masters, those of the student next to you, the remark let drop a moment ago; all is experience, race experience.

Don’t belong to any school. Don’t tie up to any technique.

All outward success, when it has value, is but the inevitable result of an inward success of full living, full play and enjoyment of one’s faculties.

A man cannot be honest unless he is wise. To be honest is to be just and to be just is to realize the relative value of things. The faculties must play hard in order to seize the relative values.

7.

The very essential quality of all really great men is their intense humanity, and they all have an unusual power of thinking.

In these times there is a powerful demarcation between the surface and the deep currents of human development.

Events and upheavals, which seem more profound than they really are, are happening on the surface.

But there is another and deeper change in progress. It is of long, steady persistent growth, very little affected and not at all disturbed by surface conditions.

The artist of today should be alive to this deeper evolution on which all growth depends, has depended and will depend.

On the surface there is the battle of institutions, the illustration of events, the strife between peoples. On the surface there is propaganda and there is the effort to force opinions.

The deeper current carries no propaganda. The shock of the surface upheaval does not deflect it from its course.

It is in search of fundamental principle; that basic principle of all, which in degree as it is apprehended points the way to beauty and order, and to the law of nature.

On the surface, disaster is battled with disaster. Things change. But all improvement is due to what of fundamental law rises to the surface, through the search made by those of the undercurrent.

The law of the surface is a failure for the same reason that the Wright brothers could not have made their machine fly on the laws of Blackstone, which were not based on fundamental principle but rather on certain rights of man, which rights are now questioned.

The artist of the surface does not see further than material fact. He describes appearances and he illustrates events.

Some fractional part of him flows in the undercurrent. It is the best part of him but he and his surface public underestimate it. He may be conscious of it. He may be conscious of it and ashamed of it. Or, he may repress it because it hurts his surface interests.

There are painters who paint pictures with spiritual titles but whose motives are purely materialistic.

Goya painted events, some of his subjects were historical, but I find his obvious subject a thin veil. Beyond the veil we see his realities. They are immeasurable.

We have seen superficial painters rise, have a storm of public approval, and then disappear from notice.

Even that other and very different popularity recently given Renoir and Cézanne I question.

If they had not been idealized out of their true characters, they might never have had such vogue as they have had.

Perhaps in order to make them as popular as they now are, it has been necessary to deny them the very most striking qualities; the very qualities which were necessary to them in doing the fine work they have done.

They have been stripped of humanity. We are told they had no interest in the personalities they painted, and this and that has been taken from them until they are only half themselves.

I have been told in face of one or other of their works that these men had no character interest, that in fact they loftily avoided seeing any such base element in the “motive.”

And yet, of course, on the canvas before us there was a marvelous characterization, an employment of material, the paints and the model, in such a rare way as to make us realize deep down into the life of the subject.

The great masters in all the arts have been whole men, not half men. They have had marvelous fullness in all human directions, have been intensely humane in themselves and in their interests. And if they seem to select, it is because they have so much to select from.

It may be that what we take for absence of humanity is the very presence of it, our understanding of the word, or the emotion, being so different, so materialistic.

Renoir and Cézanne are quite unalike, yet an important likeness does exist in that their search has been toward a truer realization.

Renoir is rather Eastern in his sensibility, and Cézanne possesses qualities both Eastern and Western, and is of the future type. He had intense realization of what is beyond material and intense powers to employ materials constructively.

8.

People say, “It is only a sketch.” It takes the genius of a real artist to make a good sketch—to express the most important things in life—the fairness of a face—to represent air and light and to do it all with such simple shorthand means. One must have wit to make a sketch. Pictures that have had months of labor expended on them may be more incomplete than a sketch.

9.

Letter of Criticism - 1

This to me is the most beautiful in color. It has a fine quality of light and atmosphere. The sky is fine, and has an area in good measure with the other forms. The several echoes of this blue sky in the lower blues of windows, umbrella and ground are effective—helping the sky and being helped by it. The roof and the reds of the foreground are excellent in effect on each other. This naturally includes the effects that the colors have in contrast, and the play in this way of the three big color areas of the picture, red, yellow-green and blue, is fine.

The sketch is an excellent impression in the key most true to the gayety of the subject and its warm light.

It remains, however, a slight sketch, made slight more because of lack of organization and concentration in the forms than that the forms are not much finished. Concentration; the play of one form into another, the balance of one form, or incident, or idea, or material, with the others, and all leading to one central interest. This is what the study lacks. All satisfying things are good organizations. The forms are related to each other, there is a dominant movement among them to a supreme conclusion.

Study some good satisfying pictures or reproductions of pictures that you very much admire and you will find this to be one of their great secrets. Some pictures, as portraits, are so organized that you are directed not only by obscure but by very obvious influences to the head.

In a composition like yours, it is rather by subtle influences that the eye of the spectator and his interest is guided, because in such a subject there are many rests for interest all over the canvas, but these are only rests. One must, in the good composition, go on to the supreme climax. It is in this way that a sense of fulfillment and completion is accomplished. These are things you must study. You can study them in all good and satisfying works of art. No receipt about it. Just a principle. One finds it in great music. It is a question of getting results through balance, rhythm, cumulation, opposition, etc., and this applies to all the agents you employ in your work. I have remarked some good balances, but you have engaged other agents—such as figures, figures doing things, windows, etc., etc., and these, while serving well in certain color-notes, say at the same time too much and too little in themselves.

If you introduce an agent, that agent must enter into the order of things, must attain in its character a right amount of balance with the other things. If the agent is a figure and there are other figures, it must take its place in degree of prominence with the other figures as well as its degree of prominence as a color, form or line-note in the whole composition.

Your picture may express the idea of dazzle and confusion, but the picture must not be confused. What I have said is the most important criticism I have for you. It is an understanding of this principle that will make you progress not only in the way you have already attained, but in all other ways.

You will see that it means drawing, not imitative drawing but constructive drawing, and it means finish, but not the finish that is the ideal of the ignorant.

This sketch of yours could, for instance, be a finished work of art with no more detail, some less in parts, than it has now.

Work for order and balance of the excellent factors already on the canvas, the whole concerted, and every factor playing its part up to the dominant, as though every part were willed to move towards the central idea. It could be a complete work—complete as art and even appreciable by the most ignorant art judge, who would like it deep down in his consciousness even if in the top of his head he were still begging for what he calls finish (more detail or more smoothness). And this same sketch could be carried much further as a statement of various interests, and if the organization, the concerted movement, were kept, the thing would still be large, full, a more complex subject, but equally simple.

Now, after all this, your sketch is very handsome, fine in color—showing your talent admirably. Why don’t you take it as a subject to work out, to study, and to bring to a full completion. Suppose you take a larger sized canvas—say 26 by 32, or some such size, and go at this very subject—not in a flighty, hurried way, but as a student—like a builder—to make something that will be wholly satisfying to you. Not a picture to be more “finished” in the common sense, but one to be finished in this other sense, which will please you. You have the data for it in the sketch. If you can fight this thing out you will find yourself much advanced at the end of the fight even if you have failed in making a picture of it. But you won’t fail if you keep your mind about you and work on the canvas only to get what you like. To do this there must be no flighty dashing at the thing. You must lay your plans and know what you are doing. You must determine the central motive to which all evidences converge (some convergences will be literal, others will not), and you must determine the lesser centres. You must make up your mind what work in the whole each part is to play. You can always scrape, or let dry and work over. It can’t be done in an afternoon. It may take some time and many intervals for consideration. The time does not matter if by it you get your whole idea of art moved forward.

On your big canvas you can decide to have practically no more detail than you have on this panel. This will mean that you must make the forms in their present state just as significant as they possibly can be.

A fine drawing by Phil May has very little detail in it, but what lines he did put down were so significant of his quality of idea that no more lines, or no more details, were necessary.

Of course, what I suggest will mean a battle for you—not a test of your grit in a sprint, but it’s a good six-day go. It will take courage and it will take common sense. Don’t begin to paint before you have quite satisfied yourself as to the placement of everything. You can make numerous little drawings, or panel sketches of the various parts. For instance, the people on the benches, no more finished, but better concerted.

Make up your mind what you want to put down and don’t let anything prevent you from putting down just that. The big picture should be as charming and as free as the little sketch—but more concerted.

You have a lot of talent, a real flair for color, and you should be willing to work to a conclusion, to fight things out.

Study reproductions and pictures you like in this matter of rhythm, organization, concentration, balance, dominance. It’s not so easy to do, but it can be done and it will be of very great service to you.

These suggestions I have given you are easily written and quickly read, but what they mean for you is a lot of hard concentrated work, and if you do it you will pass on from the tentative, the touch-and-get-away state. You are not to give up the quick sketch. That work is to go on always. Some things can only be seized in that way. This other work is the rounding out, and completing, from memory. When I say “completing,” remember that I do not mean conventional finish.

I admire this other sketch of yours very much. The group of Indians has the burn of color. As a critic, I might say I wish they would turn around more, or, as they are doing something, there together, do it more to the observer’s satisfaction.

As to the piano picture, there has been more thinking about the style of art the picture is in than thought of the subject. The subject has been bent to the manner rather than that the manner has been the outcome of the needs of the subject.

The red interior is vigorous, promising, but too much a riot of color—is more riotous in the painting than suggestive of the riot in nature.

I have seen many artists develop. I have seen many who have failed to push on although possessed of this brilliant talent for the noting of fresh and valuable sketches. There are many who make near masterpieces, near complete statements. That final bringing of things together, tying up, accentuation of the necessary, and elimination of the unnecessary, requires a force of concentration that few are capable of attaining. It’s the last, final spurt of energy—the climax of all that has gone before. The majority fail at this point. Those who become masters do not. Finish with many “artists” is to smooth over, close up—in fact it is a negation of all that brilliant courage of the original sketch. The finish I ask for is the fuller carrying out of the spirit and the fulfillment of the organization that is hinted at in the sketch.