The Artist. Just what I say. The child is an artist; and the artist is always a child. The greatest periods of art have always been those in which artists had the direct, naïve, unspoiled vision of the child. The aim of our best artists today is to recover that vision. They are trying to see the world as children see it, and to record their vision of it as a child would do. Have you ever looked at children’s drawings—not the sort of things they are taught to do by mistaken and mischievous adults, but the pictures that are the natural expressions of their creative impulses? And haven’t you observed that modern paintings are coming to be more and more like such pictures?
The Questioner. Well—er, yes, I had noticed something of the kind! But is that sort of thing necessarily art? I mean—well, I don’t want to attempt to argue with you on a subject in which you are an expert, but—
The Artist. Oh, that’s all right! The modern artist is ready to discuss art with anybody—the more ignorant of the subject, the better! You see, we want art to cease to be the possession of a caste—we want it to belong to everybody. As a member of the human race, your opinions are important to us.
The Questioner. That is very kind of you. I fear it is rather in the nature of a digression, but, since I may ask without fear of seeming presumptuous,—are those horrid misshapen green nudes of Matisse, and those cubical blocks of paint by I-forget-his-name, and all that sort of thing—are they your notion of what art should be?
The Artist. Mine? Oh, not at all! They are merely two out of a thousand contemporary attempts to recover the naïve childlike vision of which I spoke. If you will compare them with a child’s drawing, or with a picture by a Navajo Indian, or with the sketch of an aurochs traced on the wall of his cave by one of our remote ancestors, you will note an essential difference. Those artists were not trying to be naïve and childlike; they were naïve and childlike. The chief merit of our modern efforts, in my personal opinion, is in their quality as a challenge to traditional and mistaken notions of what art should be—an advertisement, startling enough, and sometimes maliciously startling, of the artist’s belief that he has the right to be first of all an artist.
The Questioner. Now we are coming to the point. What is an artist?
The Artist. I told you, a child. And by that, I mean one who plays with his materials—not one who performs a set and perhaps useful task with them. A creator—
The Questioner. But a creator of what? Not of Beauty, by any chance?
The Artist. Incidentally of Beauty.
The Questioner. There we seem to disagree. If those horrid pictures—