The Art Spirit (Icon Editions)

by Robert Henri

There are many kinds of study. Those whose study is of the real and rare kind get the habit. They can’t throw it off. It’s too good. They go on studying all their lives, and they have wonderful lives.

Isadora Duncan dances and fills the universe. She exceeds all ordinary measure.

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Nobody wanted Walt Whitman, but Walt Whitman wanted himself, and it is well for us that he did.

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When art has attained its place, surfaces will be infinitely less broken. There will then be millions less of things, less words, less gesture, less of everything. But each word and each gesture and everything will count in a fuller value.

“Have you seen the Goyas! A wonderful genius! What a pity he couldn’t draw!” Goya drew well enough to make this man think he was a genius, anyhow.

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It is characteristic of the masters who have the ability to now and again succeed, that they profoundly study the means and ways of their expression. They insist on good tools, and they develop a remarkable order in their preparation for work, and this order continues throughout their performance.

To have ideas one must have imagination. To express ideas one must have science. All this is to urge you to investigate, to read, to think. You will understand what the word technique refers to. You will wake up to the fact that the only education that counts is self-education. There are the facilities of the school, its advices, there are books, strengths and weaknesses of those about you. All these things are good materials to the one who will use them constructively.

Be sure that your decisions are really made by yourself. Decisions made by yourself may be of a nature very unexpected. In other words, very few people know what they want, very few people know what they think. Many think and do not know it and many think they are thinking and are not thinking. Self-education is no easy proposition. Men either get to know what they want, and go after it, or some other persons tell them what they want and drive them after it.

Do not let the fact that things are not made for you, that conditions are not as they should be, stop you. Go on anyway. Everything depends on those who go on anyway.

I value the effect of new notes on myself. I believe in constant revaluation.

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There are the beautiful drawings William Glackens has done of the children in Washington Square, and his streets on the East Side with their surge of life. In being great works of art they are none the less documents of life. Even the prints of these, clipped from the magazine in which they were published, are now treasured, mainly, of course, by artists (for artists do know something about art) and are shown to friends with a great pride in their possession.

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I have known many men who have read everything, have what is called a perfect education, and who while knowing everything know little of the essential qualities, or the possibilities, through organization, of anything. Such as these while appearing learned through familiarity with learning make no constructions of their own, for the genius in them is still dormant.

Art is simply a result of expression during right feeling.

I think the real artists are too busy with just being and growing and acting (on canvas or however) like themselves to worry about the end. The end will be what it will be. The object is intense living, fulfillment; the great happiness in creation. People sometimes phrase about the joy of work. It is only in creative work that joy may be found.

We will be happy if we can get around to the idea that art is not an outside and extra thing; that it is a natural outcome of a state of being; that the state of being is the important thing; that a man can be a carpenter and be a great man. There is a book about a fisherman written by Jeanette Lee, called “Happy Island”—a very simple little book, but it is worth reading apropos, for that fisherman was a great man and had in him the secret of a great nation. I think a great nation must be a happy one.

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THE ONLY SENSIBLE WAY to regard the art life is that it is a privilege you are willing to pay for.

that. If a new movement in art comes along be awake to it, study it, but don’t belong to it. Have a personal humor about things. You will never know your calibre until you have tried yourself. Avoid idle industry. Always leave out the padding. Be venturesome. Try new things that appeal to you. Examine others. Have a pioneer spirit.

Don’t ever stock your head so full of “learning” that there will be no room left for personal thinking. Develop your power of seeing through the effort and pleasure of seeing. Develop the power to express through the effort and pleasure of expression.

The school is not a place where students are fitted into the groove of rule and regulation, but where personality and originality of vision are encouraged, and inventive genius in the search for specific expression is stimulated. The real study of technique is not the acquirement of a vast stock of pat phrases, but rather the avoidance of such, and the creation of a phrase special to the idea. To accomplish this, one must first have the idea and then active inventive wit to make the specifying phrase. This places the idea prior to the technique as a cause for the latter, contrary to the academic idea, which is the reverse.

The man who becomes a master starts out by being master of such as he has, and the man who is master at any time of such as he has is at that time straining every faculty. What he learns then from his experience is fundamental, constructive, to the point. His wits are being used and are being formed into the habit of usage.

It was the attitude of Velasquez toward his model that got for him the look which so distinguishes his portraits. The people he painted were conscious of the humanity and the respect of the man before them. They knew that he could pierce masks and that he could appreciate realities with unbounded sympathy.

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Whoever approaches a child without humility, without wonderment and without infinite respect, misses in his judgment of what is before him, and loses an opportunity for a marvelous response. Children are greater than the grown man. All grown men have more experience, but only a very few retain the greatness that was theirs before the system of compromises began in their lives.

After laughter one should feel full, not empty as one feels after fireworks.

DO WHATEVER you do intensely. The artist is the man who leaves the crowd and goes pioneering. With him there is an idea which is his life.