That standard of excellence in art—that a picture or statue should “be true to life”—has befogged too many of us. Art is in its essence and in its finality—artificial. And proficiency is nothing if the obvious, the non-essential and the trivial have been relied on to convey the artist’s idea.
Reproductions of Michelangelo’s and Holbein’s finest drawings are usually hung in most art schools—as examples of how to draw I suppose. But, with curious inconsistency, the masters teach their students to do it by a system of straight-line-scaffolding known as blocking in; a method that has never been used by any of the greater draughtsmen, but which was, I believe, imported from Paris in the ’seventies or ’eighties; as an antidote, no doubt, to the “poisonous miasma” that Fenollosa condemns! However, competent draughtsmen are, of course, produced by art schools here, as in other countries in considerable numbers, but it is scarcely a debatable point that what modern art most lacks is tradition. Present day conditions make the old system of apprenticeship almost impossible—students are too numerous and the artists too varied and contradictory in their opinions for any workable system of apprenticeship to continue. The few attempts that are made in this direction usually come to an unsatisfactory end. And so tradition is dead or lost. The system as it was practised in the days of the Renaissance—in conserving tradition—was of immense value to the continuous progress of art; but in these days the student is thrust from the art school into the world to make his way—as innocent of traditions as a newly-hatched sparrow is of feathers. He is equipped with the experience and opinions of his fellow students and the maxims that are the stock in trade of the professional art-master; who—though he is sometimes a real teacher and even an inspired and inspiring teacher—is far more often merely an artist earning his living by instructing his pupils in a system that he has himself evolved, and which he is quite unable to demonstrate has ever been used by any great draughtsman or painter.
To quote an example—no doubt an extreme case but a fairly typical one—the student will be shown, as I have already said, a fine Holbein drawing, and urged to emulate and study it with the closest attention; but to do so he is given a blunt stick of charcoal and a piece of white machine-made paper and initiated into a system of indicating measurements and directions with heavy black lines. It is implied that all the great masters began their careers by working in this way though, for obvious reasons, no proof of this can ever be produced. It is further implied that if he will apply himself to the art-master’s method with real zeal he will in time be able to produce drawings like Holbein, Ingres or Leonardo. If the student is a natural draughtsman he invariably breaks away from the art school’s set of rules; and the master generally has wit enough to let him go his own way. But the others—well the others generally learn later in life with some bitterness how they have been duped; unless they have had the good fortune to be the pupils of Mr. Walter Sickert or Professor Tonks—who both really have traditions from the old masters.
It would be wiser and better that the proprietors and governors of most of our art schools should say frankly—“we cannot teach drawing as the great draughtsmen were taught, we teach a fairly serviceable method of drawing which it must be clearly understood is intended to be painted over.” However—their system of teaching drawing seems to be much sounder than their system of teaching painting.
At this point I want to say too, that though the word “rhythm” is often uttered in the schools very little that is useful or illuminating is taught there about this most subtle and essential quality in art. Essential in drawing, in line, in spacing, in chiaroscuro and in composition. It is always present in the work of the greater masters. Curiously enough, too, it is often the one quality that causes a lesser man to hold rank among them. A drawing can hardly be stated by one line, usually it needs many, and rhythm is the principle whereby the draughtsman can make a number of complex statements in a drawing synthetically an harmonious whole. It is by rhythm that every line is related to every other line: they have the same relation to each other on the paper as dancers have one to another in a ballet. When a ballet—such as The Humorous Ladies—has been danced to its conclusion, though there may have been many movements, each and all were in sympathy with each other and with the main theme.
Rhythm is, I think, the secret of the charm or power in the work of artists as widely different as M. Leon Bakst, Lovat Fraser and Claude Shepperson.
The modern art school seems to be a sort of clearing house for the elimination of the student who thinks the life of an artist more attractive than—say—life in an office. This type predominates in practically all art schools. He (or she) is intensely serious about being an artist, but is not seriously interested in art. After a period more or less prolonged, this kind of neophyte discovers that the work of an artist is not materially assisted by sombrero hats, flowing ties, bobbed hair, corduroy trousers, fancy-dress dances, views about free love, all night discussions about ethics—and so on, one need not continue the familiar list. Having, I say, discovered that the most assiduous cultivation of these exciting manners and customs does not constitute the life of an artist this neophyte drops out of the race, as far as the art world is concerned, and disappears. Years of hard work and perhaps actual privation were not in his contract with the Muse, at least—he did not notice the clause! If that hard-work business was the game then no candle was worth it! Is there any harm done. As far as the unserious student is concerned, I suppose there may have been some good, but his effect on the art school is wholly bad. It makes anything approaching to the old system of apprenticeship impossible; and we have any number of proofs that this old system was the right one.
Whether art is national or personal in its message there is no doubt that its artists are a peculiar people; they consist of two kinds (but many sects): one—the craftsman—has a mission to create exquisite things and the other has a mission to see exquisitely and to teach others to see exquisitely too. It is not possible to predict what new thing the craftsman will next make beautiful or what new thing the artist will next interpret as beautiful. They are inspired by a spirit that bloweth where it listeth. How great the power of this spirit in us still is is proved by the astonishing number of unlovely things that have been lately revealed to the world as beautiful, through the mysterious alchemic process of this spirit of vision working in the artist. But the spirit of inspiration did not always work thus. Some centuries ago—when we had not so long emerged from Greek thought and the influence of Plato—the process was almost the reverse. It required that the artist should first see beautifully on the plane of ideas some mental conception and then give it birth in a material form. In those days the æsthetic sense was the guiding intelligence that moulded man’s civilization and environment. In other words art produced the environment that produced the artist. Communing with the spirit, the artist, looking inward and not out, sought his subject in his own mind or soul; and only through his art did it become an objective reality for others. But now, to-day, the æsthetic principle no longer moulds our civilization; has but a negligible influence even on our thought and no effect upon the practical affairs of life. We train our workers to live and labour without a knowledge even that such principles exist or that in past ages such ideas controlled the growth of nations.
That era is now closed, for “no phase or school of art in human society, however beautiful, but contains within itself the germs of its own destruction.” From the beauty of the past comes the grim battle-field of to-day—where we wage our keen struggle for existence. Governments cannot be taking architecture seriously when they are too out-at-elbows to find housing accommodation for their populations—even in thea meanest huts. And so it follows that their smaller buildings—such as their post-offices, labour exchange bureaus, etcetera—are quite unashamedly practical; in the most commonplace sense. Meanly designed and economically executed to the lowest contractor’s tender, ignoring even the simple, strong beauty that can be achieved merely by mechanical efficiency (except recently in a few local housing schemes) they hedge us about on all sides against the old æsthetic sense. Dimly we are aware that we have lost that guiding intelligence—the spirit of art—that lighted the path for our forefathers; and shamelessly we ignore all the wealth of tradition we inherited from the preceding eras of their greatness.