The Art Spirit By Robert Henri

1.

It is easier, I think, to paint a good picture than it is to paint a bad one. The difficulty is to have the will for it. A good picture is a fruit of all your great living.

There are terrible pictures that have taken time and pain to make, intricate and difficult, results of grinding patience, research, great amalgamations of material. They frighten the sensitive student for the message they carry is of the pain and boredom of their making.

2.

Don’t take me as an authority. I am simply expressing a very personal point of view. Nothing final about it. You have to settle all these matters for yourself.

3.

Houses, housetops, like human beings have wonderful character. The lives of housetops. The wear of the seasons. The country is beautiful, young, growing things. The majesty of trees. The backs of tenement houses are living documents.

Blunder ahead with your own personal view.

Make the man’s feet grip the ground.

In drawing a tree there is a dominant line of growth throughout. Sometimes your tree must be so specialized that an expert on trees would be fully satisfied. Other times it does not matter if it is even surely a tree.

4.

Your pictures seem to be made up of things seen in nature plus a memory of pictures you have liked. The percentage of the latter is often too great.

Make the hill express its bulk as a hill.

Make the wagon express its carrying power.

I am not interested in color for color’s sake and light for light’s sake. I am interested in them as means of expression.

The eye should not be led where there is nothing to see.

A satisfactory painting of a head is almost the highest piece of composition.

5.

I regard the salons of Paris and the big annuals as institutions detrimental to art. Art should not be segregated to a certain six weeks in the year. Art should be persistent; exhibitions should be small. Everyone enjoys Fifth Avenue, because there a series of very small exhibitions occur in the dealers’ galleries. We enjoy them all, for they are not beyond our endurance and because they are divided into groups, a group in each gallery; we are thus enabled to see more and enjoy more than were they smashed together in one great hodge-podge. And on Fifth Avenue art is persistent; we can always find something there in all seasons.

The Big Show should not be desired. All over the world art has been made into a three-ringed circus with salons. All who are familiar with modern art history know the “salon pictures” as a special and very overgrown and mongrel breed.

6.

Letter, 1916

The question of development of the art spirit in all walks of life interests me. I mean by this, the development of individual judgment and taste, the love of work for the sake of doing things well, tendency toward simplicity and order. If anything can be done to bring the public to a greater consciousness of the relation between art and life, of the part each person plays by exercising and developing his own personal taste and judgment and not depending on outside “authority,” it would be well. Moreover, if the buyers of pictures could be brought to believe that, whatever may be their interest in accredited old masters, they have, equally with the artists, their part to play in the development and the progress of art in our own time and place—that they, too, should enter the struggle for today’s expression, lending a full support by purchasing the works of the strugglers and searchers of our day and risking many mistakes in their purchases, just as the artists are risking many mistakes in their efforts—it would be of public benefit.

To have art in America will not be to sit like a pack-rat on a pile of collected art of the past. It will be rather to build our own projection on the art of the past, wherever it may be, and for this constructiveness, the artist, the man of means and the man in the street should go hand in hand. And to have art in America like this will mean a greater living, a greater humanity, a finer sense of relation through all things.

Few of our art critics are constructive. There is much little quibbling. I should like to see every encouragement for those who are fighting to open new ways, every living worker helped to do what he believes in, the best he can. The man of means should take his chance in the struggle, making mistakes in judgment along with the rest of us—a worker in the developments of his own time.

Out of it all, what is good will survive and will be known later; what is bad or negligible will pass and we shall have lived.

7.

Go and see the picture. I know you will like it. Put on a pair of false whiskers so you won’t be bothered. I am thinking of a series of disguises for myself so that I can go to picture galleries and look at the pictures, and think about them.

There should be an art law prohibiting friends from recognizing each other in art galleries. If space were not so expensive I would suggest a “social” room adjoining each picture gallery where we could retire with friends, and ask and answer, “Where did you go this summer?”

8.

Don’t make your picture like a picture, make it like nature. The result will be a picture just the same, but it will be a new picture.

9.

Don’t let the painting of your background be the technique of seeping rain, nor that of tall grasses. Your background is mainly air in which is enveloped the distant curtain seen not with a direct eye. Your eyes are still looking into those of the model.

10.

Order is perceived by the man with a creative spirit. It is achieved by the man who sincerely attempts to express himself and thus naturally follows organic law.

11.

I think that this search for order, which is the artist’s work, produces orderliness not only in mind, but in body. In my own experience I have sometimes felt all in, disturbed, not fit, but have had to start painting because of an appointment with a sitter. In an hour’s work I have found myself O. K., fine, and at the end of the three or four or five hours’ work have been tired, but altogether in better shape than when I started.

I have had the same experience when I have had to talk to a class of students. Often I start, very tired from other work, or distracted by little annoyances, with nothing to say and no invention in saying it, but am forced by the engagement to go on. Presently, as I make the struggle for orderly and relative ideas, the fatigue rolls away, order begets order, and a healthy state of mind and body exists. And again at the end I am tired, but in better condition than when I started. There is more than one way to rest and to recuperate, and it amuses me to say the paradox—that resting is often very fatiguing.

Of course, on the other hand, we find among artists and art students many who, instead of thinking and searching order, dash at their work in a wild splashing frenzy, without reason, without an interest in finding the way, just wanting the goal, screaming and stamping their feet to get it—not interested in the process of getting it. Such as these, practicing in disorder, wear themselves out, destroy.

To study art is to study order, relative values, to get at fundamental constructive principles. It is the great study of the inside, not the outside of nature. Such a pursuit evokes justice, simplicity, and good health.

12.

Berthe Morisot learned a great deal from Manet, but she expressed her own, a woman’s, vision.

Art is not in pictures alone. Its place is in everything, as much in one thing as another. It is up to the community as a whole, in conduct, business, government and play.

We will never have an art America until this is understood, and when this idea is really understood it will bring us about as near the millennium as we can hope to get.

13.

I believe very much in the importance of a thorough study of the materials used. Their quality as to durability. An artist may not be a chemist but he can ascertain much from the books written by authorities.

I believe in the study of technique. One should know as far as possible all the possibilities of a medium.

I am not interested in technical stunts, in bravura. I am interested in simple expression. Not interested in painting the surface of things.

Paint must be so simply managed that it will carry understanding past the material fact.

Painting should never look as if it were done with difficulty, however difficult it may actually have been.

Motive demands specific technique.

Without motive, painting is only some sort of difficult jugglery.

The finer the motive, the more the artist sees significance in what he looks at, the more he must be precise in the choice of his terms.

14.

Individuality and Freedom in Art*

It seems to me that before a man tries to express anything to the world he must recognize in himself an individual, a new one, very distinct from others. Walt Whitman did this, and that is why I think his name so often comes to me. The one great cry of Whitman was for a man to find himself, to understand the fine thing he really is if liberated. Most people, either by training or inheritance, count themselves at the start as “no good,” or “second rate” or “just like anyone else,” whereas in everyone there is the great mystery; every single person in the world has evidence to give of his own individuality, providing he has acquired the full power to make clear this evidence.

Twachtman was one of the men in America who could see the greatness of life about him. It chanced that he lived much in Connecticut and saw it there, but he would have found it in Spain or France or Russia, and had he gone to paint in those countries his art would have still been American. To me Twachtman is one of the giants in America. He got at the essential beauty of his environment and developed for himself a matchless technique. It is thus that art history must grow. There is no one recipe for this making of American artists, beyond affording to the men who have the gift the opportunity for supreme development and the right expression of it.

For instance, contrast the work of Twachtman and Winslow Homer. The same scene presented by these two men would be not an identical geographical spot but an absolutely different expression of personality. Twachtman saw the seas bathed in mists, the rocks softened with vapor. Winslow Homer looked straight through the vapor at the hard rock; he found in the leaden heaviness a most tremendously forceful idea. It was not the sea or the rock to either of these men, but their own individual attitude toward the beauty or the force of nature. Each man must take the material that he finds at hand, see that in it there are the big truths of life, the fundamentally big forces, and then express in his art whatever is the cause of his pleasure. It is not so much the actual place or the immediate environment; it is personal greatness and personal freedom which demands a final right art expression. A man must be master of himself and master of his word to achieve the full realization of himself as an artist.

That necessity is the mother of invention is true in art as in science.

It is a question of saying the thing that a person has to say. A man should not care whether the thing he wishes to express is art or not, whether it is a picture or not, he should only care that it is a statement of what is worthy to put into permanent expression.

In my understanding of color, there is absolutely no such thing as color for color’s sake. Colors are beautiful when they are significant. Lines are beautiful when they are significant. It is what they signify that is beautiful to us, really. The color is the means of expression. The reason that a certain color in life, like the red in a young girl’s cheek, is beautiful, is that it manifests youth, health; in another sense, that it manifests her sensibility.

We want inventors all through life; the only people that ever succeed in writing, painting, sculpture, manufacturing, in finance, are inventors.

*From article in The Craftsman, 1909.

15.

Every stave in a picket fence should be drawn with wit, the wit of one who sees each stave as new evidence about the fence. The staves should not repeat each other. A new fence is rather stiff, but it does not stand long before there is a movement through it, which is the trace of its life experience. The staves become notes, and as they differ the wonder of a common picket fence is revealed.

16.

Artists are sometimes asked, “Why do you paint ugly and not beautiful things?” The questioner rarely hesitates in his judgment of what is beautiful and what is ugly. This with him is a foregone conclusion. Beauty he thinks is a settled fact. His conception also is that beauty rests in the subject, not in the expression. He should, therefore, pay high for Rembrandt’s portrait of a gentleman, and turn with disgust from a beggar by Rembrandt. Fortunately Rembrandt is old enough not to have this happen, and the two, the gentleman and the beggar, flank each other on the walls in fine places. But the lesson has not been learned. The idea still remains, that beauty rests in the subject.

The artist wants to paint the baby as he has seen it in the naturalness of its usual clothes. The mother wants it painted in its new dress and cap. There is nothing left of the baby but a four-inch circle of a fractional face, all the rest is new clothes.

Many things pass in the course of a day.

17.

Idle philanthropy is a sort of disease.

It is all very well to form societies for the Encouragement of Deserving Young Artists, and people go at these things with a spirit of benevolence and a faith in their infallibility that is appalling. They seem to think that benevolence will do the whole thing, and do not realize that what they have undertaken is as much a matter of mind as it is of heart.

The plan is usually to pick out the deserving and presently to give prizes to the most deserving.

I ask, “How are we old fellows to know when a young fellow is deserving?” and the stare I get as an answer means, “Why, who should know if not we great old fellows?” and they say, “We will have a committee, a jury!”

Throughout the whole history of art, committees and juries, whoever composed them, have failed to pick winners. Oh yes, there are a few instances, but they are so few that they only serve as exceptions to prove the rule.

To cite one great instance. Take the history of art in France. Practically every artist who today stands a glory to French art was rejected and repudiated by the committees and juries.

So the young artists are to be noticed, and if they are deserving, we, the old fellows, are to hand down by our judgment encouraging awards to the little fledglings.

How does the young artist look at it?

If these young artists are really deserving it must be because they have already ideas and opinions which belong to them, and their generation. It is quite likely they don’t want our judgment.

Are we not too anxious to have our fingers in their pie as well as in our own?

Can’t we ever realize that it is not for the old to judge the young—that it is the young who must judge the old?

To award prizes is to attempt to control the course of another man’s work. It is a bid to have him do what you will approve. It affects not only the one who wins the award, but all those who in any measure strive for it. It is an effort to stop evolution, to hold things back to the plane of your judgment. It is a check on a great adventure of human life. It is negative to the idea that youth should go forward. It is for the coming generation to judge you, not for you to judge it. So it must happen, whether you will it or not.

If you want to be useful, if you want to be an encouragement to the deserving young artist, don’t try to pick him or judge him, but become interested in his effort with keen willingness to accept the surprises of its outcome.

To struggle for an open forum for exhibition without the control of juries, and for greater opportunity to all for self-education, means an exercise not only of benevolence but of mind. To do this is not to be an old fellow reposing in the past and interfering with the future. It is part of the building of greater opportunity, and whoever participates in it is still alive and young, and will profit by it, for in the field he has helped to open there will grow new and wonderful things, and among them he may choose and judge in the way which is his right, that is, for himself, not for others. He may award with his personal appreciation, or pass money by purchasing, but this will be a personal affair.

I repeat, if our attempt to help young artists is to be by giving them prizes which we award, we demand of them that they please us—whether they please themselves or not. Let the work they do get its honor in being what it is.

Prizes generally go amiss. The award of prizes has the effect of setting up a false discrimination.

We must realize that artists are not in competition with each other.

Help the young artists—find for them means to make their financial ways easier, that they may develop and fruit their fullest—but let us not ask them to please us in doing it.

If we find, individually, that any of their works please us, let us buy as far as we can, and rouse others to buy from them according to their personal choice. In doing this there will be quite enough judgment exercised. In fact if we become in this way participators in the new adventures, it is likely that our powers of judgment will broaden. I cannot conceive of myself as a buyer only of old pictures—turning my back on the adventures of today.

Finally, I say—don’t force the prize game on the “deserving young artist”—leave it for the old children of our own generation to play with and let it die with them.