The Art Spirit (Icon Editions)

by Robert Henri

There are moments in our lives, there are moments in a day, when we seem to see beyond the usual. Such are the moments of our greatest happiness. Such are the moments of our greatest wisdom. If one could but recall his vision by some sort of sign. It was in this hope that the arts were invented. Sign-posts on the way to what may be. Sign-posts toward greater knowledge. — Robert Henri

Do some great work, Son! Don’t try to paint good landscapes. Try to paint canvases that will show how interesting landscape looks to you—your pleasure in the thing. Wit.

(There is a time and place for all things, the difficulty is to use them only in their proper time and places.)

The most vital things in the look of a face or of a landscape endure only for a moment. Work should be done from memory. The memory is of that vital movement. During that moment there is a correlation of the factors of that look. This correlation does not continue. New arrangements, greater or less, replace them as mood changes. The special order has to be retained in memory—that special look, and that order which was its expression. Memory must hold it. All work done from the subject thereafter must be no more than data-gathering. The subject is now in another mood. A new series of relations has been established. These may confound. The memory of that special look must be held, and the “subject” can now only serve as an indifferent manikin of its former self. The picture must not become a patchwork of parts of various moods. The original mood must be held to.

THERE IS NOTHING in all the world more beautiful or significant of the laws of the universe than the nude human body. In fact it is not only among the artists but among all people that a greater appreciation and respect for the human body should develop. When we respect the nude we will no longer have any shame about it.

If a man has the soul of an artist he needs a mastery of all the means of expression so that he may command them, for with his soul in activity he has much to say. If he refuses to use his brain to find the way to signify the meaningful depth of nature on his flat canvas with his colors, he should also refuse to use his hands and his brushes and his colors, and the canvas itself. However, all these, the canvas, paints, brushes, hands and brains are but tools to be guided by the soul of man. The brain can prove to be a wonderful tool, can be a willing slave, as has been evidenced by some men, but of course it works poorly when it has not the habit of usage.

The mind is a tool, it is either clogged, bound, rusty, or it is a clear way to and from the soul. An artist should not be afraid of his tools. He should not be afraid to know.

If you want to know how to do a thing you must first have a complete desire to do that thing. Then go to kindred spirits—others who have wanted to do that thing—and study their ways and means, learn from their successes and failures and add your quota. Thus you may acquire from the experience of the race. And with this technical knowledge you may go forward, expressing through the play of forms the music that is in you and which is very personal to you.

Dirty brushes and a sloppy palette have dictated the color-tone and key of many a painting. The painter abdicates and the palette becomes master.

Many things that come into the world are not looked into. The individual says “My crowd doesn’t run that way.” I say, don’t run with crowds.

The picture that bowls you over at first sight and the next day loses even the power to attract your attention is one that looks always the same. It has a moment of life but dies immediately thereafter.

The stroke which marks the path of a rocket into the sky may be only a few inches long, but the spirit of the artist has traveled a thousand feet at the moment he made that stroke.

Strokes which move in unison, rhythms, continuities throughout the work; that interplay, that slightly or fully complement each other. See pictures by Renoir. Effects of perspective are made or defeated by sizes of strokes, or by their tonalities. There are brush handlings which declare more about the painter than he declares about his subject. Such as say plainly: “See what vigor I have. Bang!” “Am I not graceful?” “See how painfully serious I am!” “I’m a devil of a dashing painter—watch this!” Velasquez and Franz Hals made a dozen strokes reveal more than most other painters could accomplish in a thousand. Compare a painting by Ingres with one by Manet and note the difference of stroke in these two very different men. The stroke is like the man. I prefer Manet of the two. But that is a personal matter. Both were very great artists. Compare the paintings if they are within your reach, if not compare reproductions. Compare also Ingres’ drawings with those of Rembrandt. Manet’s stroke was ample, full, and flowed with a gracious continuity, was never flip or clever. His “Olympia” has a supreme elegance.

The man who has something very definite to say and tries to force the medium to say it will learn how to draw.

These students have become masters of the trade of drawing, as some others have become masters of their grammars. And like so many of the latter, brilliant jugglers of words, having nothing worthwhile to say, they remain little else than clever jugglers of the brush. The real study of an art student is more a development of that sensitive nature and appreciative imagination with which he was so fully endowed when a child, and which, unfortunately in almost all cases, the contact with the grown-ups shames out of him before he has passed into what is understood as real life.

The habit of digression—lack of continued interest— want of fixed purpose, is an almost general failing. It is too easy to drift and the habit of letting oneself drift begets drifting. The power of concentration is rare and must be sought and cultivated, and prolonged work on one subject must not be mistaken for concentration. Prolonged work on one subject may be simply prolonged digression, which is a useless effort, as it is to no end.

An art student should read, or talk a great deal with those who have read. His conversations with his intimate fellow-students should be more of his life and less of paint. He should be careful of the influence of those with whom he consorts, and he runs a great risk in becoming a member of a large society, for large bodies tend toward the leveling of individuality to a common consent, the forming and the adherence to a creed. And a member must be ever in unnecessary broil or pretend agreement which he cannot permit himself to do, for it is his principle as an art student to have and to defend his personal impressions. Somebody, I think it was Corot, said that art is “nature as seen through a temperament.” There are, however, societies of a very few—little cliques which form by sympathy and which believe in and sustain the independence of their members, and which live by the variety of individualities expressed. Such was that coterie of which Manet, Degas, Monet, Whistler and others of special distinction were the outcome. Rossetti, Burne-Jones, the pre-Raphaelites, formed another. Many are the little congresses among the students in Paris made up of men from all countries, who draw together through similar sympathy.

Walt Whitman was such as I have proposed the real art student should be. His work is an autobiography—not of haps and mishaps, but of his deepest thought, his life indeed. No greater treasure can be given us. Confessions like those of Rousseau or those of Marie Bashkirtseff are thin in comparison with this life expressed by Whitman, which is so beautiful, in the reading of which we find ourselves.

The ignorant are to be found as much among the educated as among the uneducated.

Thomas Eakins was a man of great character. He was a man of iron will and his will was to paint and to carry out his life as he thought it should go. This he did. It cost him heavily, but in his works we have the precious result of his independence, his generous heart and his big mind. Eakins was a deep student of life and with a great love he studied humanity frankly. He was not afraid of what this study revealed to him. In the matter of ways and means of expression—the science of technique—he studied most profoundly as only a great master would have the will to study. His vision was not touched by fashion. He cared nothing for prettiness or cleverness in life or in art. He struggled to apprehend the constructive force in nature and to employ in his works the principles found. His quality was honesty. “Integrity” is the word which seems best to fit him.

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It is very possible that you know all these things and know them to be true. I simply recall them to you, to make them active again, just as I would like you to recall them to me, for sometimes our possessions sleep.

Finish with many “artists” is to smooth over, close up—in fact it is a negation of all that brilliant courage of the original sketch. The finish I ask for is the fuller carrying out of the spirit and the fulfillment of the organization that is hinted at in the sketch.

There are two classes of people in the world: students and non-students. In each class there are elements of the other class so that it is possible to develop or to degenerate and thus effect a passage from one class to the other. The true character of the student is one of great mental and spiritual activity. He arrives at conclusions and he searches to express his findings. He goes to the market place, to the exhibition place, wherever he can reach the people, to lay before them his new angle on life. He creates a disturbance, wins attention from those who have in them his kind of blood—the student blood. These are stirred into activity. Camps are established. Discussion runs high. There is life in the air. The non-student element says it is heresy. Let us have “peace!” Put the disturber in jail. In this, we have two ideas of life, motion and non-motion.

EVERY MOVEMENT, every evidence of search is worthy of the consideration of the student. The student must look things squarely in the face, know them for what they are worth to him. Join no creed, but respect all for the truth that is in them. The battle of human evolution is going on. There must be investigations in all directions. Do not be afraid of new prophets or prophets that may be false. Go in and find out. The future is in your hands.

I would like to be in many activities. I think that anyone who has had the pleasures of study and work for years may be full of regret because he cannot practice in all the arts.

The man who goes into a school to educate himself and not to be educated will get somewhere. He should start out a master, master of such as he has, however little that may be. By being master of such as he has in the beginning it is likely he may later be master, after years of study, of much. He should not enter the school with any preconceived idea of his destiny. In fact he should be open and free. His aim should be to search deeply and work hard and let the outcome be what it may.

Yet more important than the lifelong study of technique is the lifelong self-education. In fact, technique can only be used properly by those who have definite purpose in what they do, and it is only they who invent technique. Otherwise it is the work of parrots.

You can do anything you want to do. What is rare is this actual wanting to do a specific thing: wanting it so much that you are practically blind to all other things, that nothing else will satisfy you. When you, body and soul, wish to make a certain expression and cannot be distracted from this one desire, then you will be able to make a great use of whatever technical knowledge you have. You will have clairvoyance, you will see the uses of the technique you already have, and you will invent more.

Find out what you really like if you can. Find out what is really important to you. Then sing your song. You will have something to sing about and your whole heart will be in the singing.

For instance, contrast the work of Twachtman and Winslow Homer. The same scene presented by these two men would be not an identical geographical spot but an absolutely different expression of personality. Twachtman saw the seas bathed in mists, the rocks softened with vapor. Winslow Homer looked straight through the vapor at the hard rock; he found in the leaden heaviness a most tremendously forceful idea. It was not the sea or the rock to either of these men, but their own individual attitude toward the beauty or the force of nature. Each man must take the material that he finds at hand, see that in it there are the big truths of life, the fundamentally big forces, and then express in his art whatever is the cause of his pleasure. It is not so much the actual place or the immediate environment; it is personal greatness and personal freedom which demands a final right art expression.

EVERY STAVE in a picket fence should be drawn with wit, the wit of one who sees each stave as new evidence about the fence. The staves should not repeat each other. A new fence is rather stiff, but it does not stand long before there is a movement through it, which is the trace of its life experience. The staves become notes, and as they differ the wonder of a common picket fence is revealed.

attention to detail. dliberateness

A man must become interesting to himself and must become actually expressive before he can be happy.

I find as I go out, from one land to another seeking “my people,” that I have none of that cruel, fearful possession known as patriotism; no blind, intense devotion for an institution that has stiffened in chains of its own making. My love of mankind is individual, not national, and always I find the race expressed in the individual. And so I am “patriotic” only about what I admire, and my devotion to humanity burns up as brightly for Europe as for America; it flares up as swiftly for Mexico if I am painting the peon there; itwarms toward the bullfighter in 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 each of 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.

cruel patriotism

Technique is to me merely a language, and as I see life more and more clearly, growing older, I have but one intention and that is to make my language as clear and simple and sincere as is humanly possible. I believe one should study ways and means all the while to express one’s idea of life more clearly.

All my life I have refused to be for or against parties, for or against nations, for or against people. I never seek novelty or the eccentric; I do not go from land to land to contrast civilizations. I seek only, wherever I go, for symbols of greatness, and as I have already said, they may be found in the eyes of a child, in the movement of a gladiator, in the heart of a gypsy, in twilight in Ireland or in moonrise over the deserts. To hold the spirit of greatness is in my mind what the world was created for. The human body is beautiful as this spirit shines through, and art is great as it translates and embodies this spirit.

Each man must seek for himself the people who hold the essential beauty, and each man must eventually say to himself as I do, “these are my people and all that I have I owe to them.”

There are two classes of human beings. One has ideas, which it believes in fully, perhaps, but modifies to bring about “success.” The other class has ideas which it believes in and must carry out absolutely; success or no success. The first class has a tremendous majority, and they are all slaves. The second class are the only free people in the world. Some are kept under the grind of poverty. Some are sent to jail, but they are still the only free class. But the latter class does not always get ground under the heel, nor sent to jail. People are not always fools.

Like to do your work as much as a dog likes to gnaw a bone and go at it with equal interest and exclusion of everything else.

Those who live in full play of their faculties become master economists, they understand the relative value of things. Freedom can only be obtained through an understanding of basic order. Basic order is underlying all life. It is not to be found in the institutions men have made. Those who have lived and grown at least to some degree in the spirit of freedom are our creative artists. They have a wonderful time. They keep the world going. They must leave their trace in some way, paint, stone, machinery, whatever. The importance of what they do is greater than anyone estimates at the time. In fact in a commercial world there are thousands of lives wasted doing things not worth doing. Human spirit is sacrificed. More and more things are produced without a will in the creation, and are consumed or “used” without a will in the consumption or the using. These things are dead. They pass, masquerading as important while they are before us, but they pass utterly. There is nothing so important as art in the world, nothing so constructive, so life-sustaining. I would like you to go to your work with a consciousness that it is more important than any other thing you might do. It may have no great commercial value, but it has an inestimable and lasting life value. People are often so affected by outside opinion that they go to their most important work half hearted or half ashamed.

There is weakness in pretending to know more than you know or in stating less than you know.

Judging a Manet from the point of view of Bouguereau the Manet has not been finished. Judging a Bouguereau from the point of view of Manet the Bouguereau has not been begun.

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lithographs of Daumier.

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I would call your attention to the reproductions of those children’s heads done by Renoir. They are easily obtainable and they are very beautiful, even without the Renoir color.

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Rembrandt’s beggars are wonders of life. He did not pass them on to us saying simply, “They are vulgar fellows.”

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I advise the study of the works of the masters. Titian is a good one, for he understood organization, as his works demonstrate, and he happens to be available in many reproductions.

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We read books. They make us think. It matters very little whether we agree with the books or not.

IT IS A BIG JOB to know oneself, no one can entirely accomplish it yet—but to try is to act in line of evolution. Men will come to know more of themselves, and act more like themselves, but this will be by dint of effort along the line of humble self-acknowledgment. Today man stands in his own way. He puts a criterion in the way of his own revelation and development. He would be better than he is and because man judges poorly he fails to become as good as he might be. He should take his restraining hands off himself, should defy fashion and let himself be. The only men who are interesting to themselves and to others are those who have been willing to meet themselves squarely. The works of the masters are what they are because they are evidences from men who dared to be like themselves. It cost most of them dearly, but it was worth while. They were interesting to themselves, and now they are interesting to us.

IF YOU HAVE THE IDEA that an artist is not a decidedly practical person, get over it. Don’t think that Frans Hals was drunk when he painted his vital pictures. Let the romancing historians think so, but just look at one of his heads and realize what cool generalship and positive, immediate decision were necessary to place those solid forms in action and to render so much completion with such simple strokes.

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The subject of the charge was a collection of modern pictures with which the artist was not familiar. There were pictures by Matisse, Cézanne and others. Works of highly intelligent men; great students along a different line. The works, whatever anyone might think of them, were the results of years of study.

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THERE IS A PORTRAIT in the Louvre which has a great abrasion on the face, but somehow the abrasion does not spoil the work. It is there but it does not count. The picture is the work of Tintoretto—a great master. His organization of forms is so powerful that it carries through the obliterated place.

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