DutchessAbroad Here & There

Ben Shahn, The Shape of Content

Intuition in art is actually the result of a prolonged tuition.

I’ve had several artist friends recommend this to me over the years — it’s a collection of lectures Shahn delivered at Harvard in the mid-50s, many of them, appropriately, dealing with the education of the artist. (Since it questions the artists place in the university, we’ll include it in the unschooling tag.) The text is sprinkled with Shahn’s fantastic drawings. 

My notes below. 

Whether inside or outside of school, it is the artist’s job to get an education. 

“Attend a university if you possibly can. There is no content of knowledge that is not pertinent to the work you will want to do. But before you attend a university work at something for a while. Do anything. Get a job in a potato field; or work as a grease-monkey in an auto repair shop. But if you do work in a field do not fail to observe the look and the feel of earth and of all things that you handle—yes, even potatoes! Or, in the auto shop, the smell of oil and grease and burning rubber. Paint of course, but if you have to lay aside paintings for a time, continue to draw. Listen well to all conversations and be instructed by them and take all seriousness seriously. Never look down upon anything or anyone as not worthy of notice. In college or out of college, read. And form opinions! Read Sophocles and Euripides and Dante and Proust. Read everything that you can find about art except the reviews. Read the Bible; read Hume; read Pogo. Read all kinds of poetry and know many poems and many artists. Go to an art school, or two, or three, or take art courses at night if necessary. And paint and paint and draw and draw. Know all that you can, both curricular and noncurricular—mathematics and physics and economics, logic, and particularly history. Know at least two languages besides your own, but anyway, know French. Look at pictures and more pictures. Look at every kind of visual symbol, every kind of emblem; do not spurn signboards or furniture drawings or this style of art or that style of art. Do not be afraid to like paintings honestly or to dislike them honestly, but if you do dislike them retain an open mind. Do not dismiss any school of art, not the Pre-Raphaelites nor the Hudson River School nor the German Genre painters. Talk and talk and sit at cafes, and listen to everything, to Brahms, to Brubeck, to the Italian hour on the radio. Listen to preachers in small town churches and in big city churches. Listen to politicians in New England town meetings and to rabble-rousers in Alabama. Even draw them. And remember that you are trying to learn to think what you want to think, that you are trying to coordinate mind and hand and eye. Go to all sorts of museums and galleries and to the studios of artists. Go to Paris and Madrid and Rome and Ravenna and Padua. Stand alone in Sainte Chapelle, in the Sistine Chapel, in the Church of the Carmine in Florence. Draw and draw and paint and learn to work in many media; try lithography and aquatint and silk-screen. Know all that you can about art, and by all means have opinions. Never be afraid to become embroiled in art or life or politics; never be afraid to learn to draw or paint better than you already do; and never be afraid to undertake any kind of art at all, however exalted or however common, but do it with distinction.”

“Art and artists often exist within a public climate that is either indifferent or hostile to their profession.”

However glorious the history of art, the history of artists is quite another matter. And in any well-ordered household the very thought that one of the young may turn out to be an artist can be a cause for general alarm. It may be a point of great pride to have a Van Gogh on the living room wall, but the prospect of having Van Gogh himself in the living room would put a good many devoted art lovers to rout.

Just because art is popular doesn’t mean it sucks, and just because it’s unpopular doesn’t mean it’s good. 

One of the very recherche bases of evaluation but still one that dominates both the world of criticism and that of creative art is an inversion of the common standard of popularity. The reasoning goes something like this: public taste has often failed to understand very great art, has indeed violently rejected it. This very art, however, so often has been richly vindicated by time and subsequent tastes. Logically, then, it seems to follow that if a piece of work is truly great it will necessarily be rejected by the public. Here the inversion begins to emerge, for the belief has thus become universal among refined people that if a work of art is thoroughly incomprehensible to the public it must automatically be good. And out of that non-Aristotelian reasoning comes the following principle widely proclaimed by artists and by critics: the work of art must not appeal to the public, or be understood by it. “I hope,” says one artist, “that I will never win public approval, for if I do I know my work is bad.” “I tremble,” says an eminent poet, “when I think of what will happen if the classics become available to the masses.”

Like most artists I am deeply offended by the application of public approval as a standard for the evaluation of art. But I am certainly equally in disagreement with that curiously perverse standard of nonapproval. For however degraded the public intelligence may have become through long-term, calculated efforts to pander to it, or however spoiled the public eye, it is still the public itself that is the reality of our culture. Here is the fertile soil in which to sow your lilies. He is the source of manifold instances of art, the wellspring of emotions that are not warmed-over, and of unexpected, unique detail. We, as artists, may exist upon the fringe of this reality or we may be an essential part of it; that is up to us.”

There is no security or guaranteed success for the artist.

No one can promise success to an intended painter. Nor is the problem of painting one of success at all. It is rather one of how much emphasis one places upon self-realization, upon the things that he thinks. I believe that the individual whose interests are measurable primarily in terms of money, or even of success, would do well to avoid a lifetime of painting. The primary concern of the serious artist is to get the thing said—and wonderfully well. His values are wholly vested in the object which he has been creating. Recognition is the wine of his repast, but its substance is the accomplishment of the work itself.

There are many kinds of security, and one kind lies in the knowledge that one is dedicating his hours and days doing the things that he considers most important. Such a way of spending one’s time may be looked upon by some as a luxury and by others as a necessity.

Art has its roots in “real life” — the artist must be both “deeply involved” in the world and somewhat “detached” from it.

Shahn emphasizes over and over again that the artist must be part of the world, but at the same time, he must be able to step back and observe it for what it is. 

He must never fail to be involved in the pleasures and the desperations of mankind, for in them lies the very source of feeling upon which the work of art is registered. Feeling, being always specific and never generalized, must have its own vocabulary of things experienced and felt.

What I think he’s talking about is what Postman & Weingartner in Teaching As A Subversive Activity call “the anthropological perspective”:

We are talking about the schools’ cultivating in the young that most “subversive” intellectual instrument—the anthropological perspective. This perspective allows one to be part of his own culture and, at the same time, to be out of it. One views the activities of his own group as would an anthropologist, observing its tribal rituals, its fears, its conceits….

If there is a danger of school, it’s that it takes the artist away from the world. 

While Shahn praises the university as a “community in the fullest sense of the word, a place of residence, and at the same time one of personal affirmation and intellectual rapport,” he cautions against setting up an insular “nursery school” environment for artists. “I am generally mistrustful of contrived situations,” he writes. “That is, situations peculiarly set up to favor the blossoming of art.” He also has problems with artist colonies: 

They become almost monastic in the degree of their withdrawal from common society; and thus their art product becomes increasingly ingrown, tapping less and less the vital streams of common experience, rejecting more and more the human imperatives which have propelled and inspired art in past times.

Shahn laments the “teacher who was formerly an artist”:

What if Goya, for instance, had been granted a Guggenheim, and then, completing that, had stepped into a respectable and cozy teaching job in some small—but advanced!—New England college, and had thus been spared the agonies of the Spanish Insurrection? The unavoidable conclusion is that we would never have had “Los Caprichos” or “Los Desastres de la Guerra.”

He writes that if the “university’s fostering of art is only kindly, is only altruistic, it may prove to be also meaningless.”

It is only within the context of real life that an artist (or anyone) is forced to make [choices about his own values and wants]. And it is only against a background of hard reality that choices count, that they affect a life, and carry with them that degree of belief and dedication and, I think I can say, spiritual energy, that is a primary force in art.

Self-education is not out of the question.

There is no rule, no current, about self-education any more than there is about advantages or disadvantages of birth. It is historically true that an impressive number of self-educated individuals have also been brilliantly educated: widely read, traveled, cultured, and thoroughly knowledgeable, not to mention productive. The dramatist who has had perhaps the greatest influence upon the contemporary theater stopped school at the age of thirteen. The painter who has set world taste in art is almost entirely self-educated. That does not mean uneducated, for each of these two people is almost unmatched in versatility of knowledge.

“Nonconformity is the basic pre-condition of art, as it is the precondition of good thinking and therefore of growth and greatness in a people.”

To create anything at all in any field, and especially anything of outstanding worth, requires nonconformity, or a want of satisfaction with things as they are. The creative person—the nonconformist—may be in profound disagreement with the present way of things, or he may simply wish to add his views, to render a personal account of matters.

“Craft is that discipline which frees the spirit; and style is the result.”

Craft itself, once an inexorable standard in art, is today an artist’s individual responsibility. Craft probably still does involve deftness of touch, ease of execution—in other words, mastery. But it is the mastery of one’s personal means.