The Creative Will (continued)
Published in: 35. If…Presentation
- EVOLUTION IN THE INDIVIDUAL. — The entire past progress of an art is condensed and expressed in each of its great exponents.
- TALENT AND GENIUS. — Talent is the ability to express effectively the mere material of human experience. Genius is the ability to divine and to give expression to the forces which underlie and co-ordinate this material. Thus genius is essentially a philosophic process which finds expression through talent. Every great work of art is a statement of the plastic unity of existence.
- LIFE AND THE ARTIST. — There can be no great ascetic artist. The richness, variety, and contrast which are necessary to the nature of the artist who achieves great organizations of form, must have resulted through much contact with the many phases of life. Even the life of the mind is wholly dependent on objective nature for both its most obvious and its most remote ideas. There is, of course, a quality of mind which is inherently rich; but the material thought must needs be gleaned from life. All other things being equal, the artist who has had the more febrile life of body and brain will create the greater art. By life is not meant merely physical adventures — the superficial experiences of indulgence. The life indispensable to the artist is that which calls upon him for the exercise of his powers, which teaches him the necessity of intellectual combat, and which therefore develops his consciousness and teaches him the laws of poise, balance, and plasticity.
- THE PART AND THE WHOLE. — Hand in hand with an artist’s vision of the whole must go an infinite capacity for fitting together the most meticulous details. A great work of art is great in any one of its parts, for in every detail is embodied the whole.
- CHILDREN OF THEIR EPOCHS. — The painter or sculptor who, endeavoring to belittle modern efforts in art, asserts that he is a child of Egypt, Assyria or Greece, reveals at once his complete ignorance of the art of those countries. In order to produce work such as the ancients produced, one must of necessity possess the same type of temperament and mentality which the ancients possessed. Such a mental parallel is obviously impossible between two totally different ages, for attitude and temperament are governed by the organisms of environment. A painter or sculptor who lays claim to these temperamental affinities is unable to grasp the foundations of modernity. And since those foundations were laid in the ancient and medieval worlds, the “modern primitive” can probe no deeper than the superficial aspects of those early works with which he claims relationship. At best, he can give birth only to a bastard and weakened art. He who is not of his own age belongs to none.
- EGO. — It is only when the love for and confidence in oneself dominate the reverence for others that the artist is free to create.
- NEED OF THE PAST. — The past is a very necessary foundation on which to build the structure of contemporary art; but, for those who have what might be called artistic self-respect, past achievements can be only a starting point. In order to add to a structure which ever rises higher the architect must thoroughly know the base. It is a lack of comprehension of art’s forerunners that results, on the one hand, in the spurious anarchy, and, on the other hand, in the infantile timidity, of the so-called artists of today. The anarchs, looking only as far as the superficial aspects of their antecedents, call for an auto-da-fé of all the art which has preceded them. The timid ones, having no initiative or penetration themselves, merely accept the conventional dictum that the aesthetic foundation of the past is correct; and, since they are beyond art’s immediate surroundings, they raise their voices in praise of reactionary impulses. Both are wrong because neither has any profound understanding. The former should realize that it is impossible to produce in one generation a world of entirely new beings — that changes are the result of a slow building-up process. The latter would do well to cease their attacks on the more advanced ones long enough to consider where art would now be if man had always been content with the heritage of the past.
- THE IMPRÉVU IN ART. — Many mistake the “unforeseen” in art for greatness. But this imprévu is a result of the greatness in the great — not a goal toward which they work. The quality in itself is a nugatory one, and, as a rule, is the label of those artists who wish primarily to attract attention. These arrivistes take many roads to notoriety. They count almost wholly upon a bizarre effect (spurious radicalism) to create a vogue. The true radicals of the day, however, have for every step a reason which is deep-rooted in the experiences of aesthetic emotion. Their desire is to construct a permanent art — to unearth the laws which govern our enjoyment of beauty. The false radicals desire only to dazzle us for the moment. It is such men who cry out against any precise analysis of art. When a critic approaches the shrine of their hypocrisy, they cry “Systematiser” and “Theorist.” The genuine artist invites analysis. There are hardy roots at the base of his imprévu.
- MODUS OPERANDI. — In all art the end justifies the means. Conscientiousness, sincerity, sacrifice, lengthy endeavor, idealistic tenacity — these things are of no value without consummation. A magnificent result, no matter how hastily, carelessly, or falsely achieved, is the sole test of greatness. Only failures, and the weak who instinctively sympathize with failures, make an artistic virtue of laborious intentions.
- AN ANALOGY FOR IMITATORS. — No one believes that a photograph of a clock will tell time. Yet there are those who assert that imitation of nature is the life of art!
- INSPIRATION. — Inspiration is the moment of realization. For instance, we know a fact about art; we speak of it; we recognize it in pictures. Yet that fact remains something apart from us, something which has not been incorporated in our being, something superimposed upon our consciousness. Then, without warning (we may be thinking perhaps of other things), suddenly a certain thought will come to our minds, and, with it, a great realization of the fact. The knowledge will blind us mentally for a moment with its colossal reality, with the impressiveness of its truth. In that moment we have ceased merely to know the fact: we have come to experience it. It has become a part of our being. At that moment we are inspired. At that moment we may cry, “Eureka!”
- THE REVOLT AGAINST CULTURE. — There are certain modern artists who, realizing the futility of merely following the accepted academic standards, seek to give art a rebirth by reverting to archaic beginnings. Such artists deny all value to sophistication and knowledge, believing that intellectualization tends to lead one away from profound emotions. They place spontaneity above analysis, and naivete above culture: thus they attempt to repudiate the development of thought in aesthetics. Their ideal is the simplicity of the child; and therefore, either consciously or unconsciously, they apotheosize the primitive artlessness of the early epochs in creative expression. Stravinsky and other modern Russian composers (together with a few ineffectual imitators of other nations) are substituting time signatures for harmonic and thematic scoring in an endeavor to strip music of the formal attainments of centuries and to make it once more a wholly rhythmic art. Painters, also, like Zak and Rousseau, are purging their canvases of order and sequence, and substituting a primitive imagery of the most static kind. As a result, a spurious revolution is noticeable in certain quarters; and this revolution is hailed by a band of unthinking radicals as a salutary and progressive manifestation. But progress in art cannot be accomplished by ignoring the evolution of knowledge. Reverting to the naïf is only begging a complex question. Form in all the arts has followed the growth of human consciousness and needs; and the truly great and progressive artist is the one who, after he has absorbed and mastered all the learning which has preceded him, can create new forms in line with that evolution. The composer of the future must be colossal enough to surpass Beethoven: a repudiation of him leads only to decadence. And the painter of the future must be sufficiently great to transcend Rubens. Art, like life, is a pushing forward, with the whole of the past as a stepping-stone. The top of the mountain will never be reached by him who deliberately seeks the lowest valleys and is content.
- ART COMMUNITIES. — Great artists are never the products of the community spirit. In all cities, there exist “quarters” in which the shallow iconoclasts, the failures, and the imitators congregate for the purpose of exchanging their ineffectual ideas and of consoling one another for their poverty of mind. Such places are the breeding grounds of incompetency and of “schools” of art. The great creative artist could not exist in such a milieu. His nature is necessarily solitary: his gregariousness is only on the surface. He has an instinctive antipathy to the puny souls who need companionship and support.
- TARDY APPRECIATION OF GREATNESS. — The great artist is rarely appreciated at once, for his work is the result of years of study and experimenting; and, in order to understand it, one must have followed the same tortuous and vicissitudinous road.
- ORDER AS DISTINGUISHED FROM GRAPHIC ABILITY. — The creative, as distinguished from the transcriptive, artists of the past placed models before themselves, not for purposes of inspiration, but as formal restraints on their expression. The posed human body was merely the material shape through which the order of the artist’s mind became visible. This is why correct (“right”) drawing has nothing to do with artistic ability. The ignorance of this fact impels many painters and draughtsmen to continue their trade instead of changing to a more congenial one. These latter men select a model which appeals to them physically, and then strive to portray it. Their work results in a more or less sensitive reaction to what is before their eyes. They are only human mirrors who have the ability of setting down their reflections on canvas.
- POETRY. — The ability to write great poetry is an excellent preparation for the writing of great prose. Indeed, fundamentally they should be synonymous.
- TRADITION. — Unless we define our use of the word “tradition,” we will always be at cross-purposes in our discussions of art. Already there has grown up two schools — the traditionalists and the anti-traditionalists. Conceivably both are right: in fact, many critics belong to both schools without knowing it. Tradition may mean two things according to one’s capacity or incapacity for deep thinking. If by tradition we connote the fundamental and fixed laws governing art — that is to say, the basal need for form, composition, poise, and the like, then all art which is genuine (not excluding the most modern and audacious works of the younger men) must adhere to tradition: it must follow the principles to be found in the older art. But if by tradition is meant the mannerisms of art — the aspect which is the result of a certain age, then each new step in aesthetic evolution has deliberately gone against tradition. Haydn, and not Beethoven, is the greater symphonist. Cimabue, and not Rubens, is the greater painter. All the genuine modern painters, composers, and writers are, in the profounder definition of the word, traditional. They abide by the inherent classicism of art.
- ON BURNING ONE’S BRIDGES. — In art, as in life, if one aspires to innovation, to new and undiscovered heights, the safety of old foundations and the security of old charts must be forgone. Steps must be taken in the dark. Those who cling with one hand to the old while groping toward the new can never reach their desires. High courage, immunity to isolation, fearlessness in the face of the unknown, a belief in one’s power to find new stepping-stones, a readiness for self-sacrifice — only with these traits can one push forward the bounds of human knowledge.
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