Ho!—there is no tomorrow.
Blessed are the young in heart for they shall be God.
“A. E. D.”
Henri and Manship
One grows weary of the quibbling, the petty running about in circles of critics, would-be-critics, and students with the eyes of their teachers disputing “techniques,” values, and standards in regard to paintings that somehow seem to live outside any limits pedants have placed. Out from the noise the voice of the artist arises with a strength and clearness in words similar to the quality of his paintings. Writing in the February Craftsman of this year, telling of his work, his ideas, and his “people,” Robert Henri has this to say:
“My love of mankind is individual. I am patriotic only about what I admire, and my devotion to humanity burns as brightly for Europe as for America. It flames up swiftly for Mexico if I am painting the peon there; it warms towards the bull fighter of Spain if in spite of its cruelty there is that element in his art which I find beautiful; it intensifies before the Irish peasant whose love, poetry, simplicity, and humor have enriched my existence just as completely as though these people were of my own country and my own hearthstone. Everywhere I see at times this beautiful expression of the dignity of life to which I respond with a wish to preserve this beauty of humanity for my friends to enjoy.... The Chinese American girl who has found coquetry in new freedom; the peon, a symbol of a destroyed civilization in Mexico, and the Indian who works as one in slavery and dreams as a man in still places ... all their lives are in their expression, in their eyes, their movements or they are not worth translating into art.”
He very simply tells what he feels about technique, which ought to quiet the objection to his or any individual’s methods:
“Technique is merely a language, and as I grow older and see more and more clearly I have but one intention and that is to make this language as clear and simple and sincere as is humanly possible.... It is a language of no value for its own sake.... It must be so translucent that it can be forgotten, the value of the subject shining through it.”
A woman who sat for Henri last year for her portrait has this to say of him in a recent letter:
“To me he is quite the most wonderful man among American artists; so very big yet simple as a child; so very human yet utterly unconscious of his humanity. He is much like Whitman only more tender, more subtle. To Henri life is his art. That’s what makes him truly great. That’s what made him go to the Ferrer School and awaken talent and even genius where no one else would have seen anything to awaken. As a teacher Henri is perhaps even greater than as a painter. I heard him explain things to his class only twice, but I have never heard anything more fascinating and vivid. His greatest worth, however, is his sense of freedom, his fervent belief that only freedom can bring out the best in the individual. He is really an anarchist though he does not label himself one.”