Art, Artist, and Layman: A Study of the Teaching of the Visual Arts [Reprint 2014 ed.] 9780674436169, 9780674431485

Table of contents :
PREFACE
CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION
PART I. AIMS IN THE TEACHING OF THE VISUAL ARTS
PART II. A RATIONAL PROGRAM
PART III. CONCLUSION
APPENDIX

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ART, ARTIST, AND LAYMAN

LONDON! HUMPHREY MILFORD OXFORD UNIVERSITY

PRESS

ART, ARTIST, AND LAYMAN A STUDY OF T H E TEACHING OF THE VISUAL ARTS BY

A R T H U R POPE PROFESSOR OF FINE ARTS IN HARVARD UNIVERSITY

CAMBRIDGE,

MASSACHUSETTS

HARVARD UNIVERSITY PRESS 1937

COPYRIGHT,

1937

BY T H E P R E S I D E N T AND F E L L O W S O F HARVARD

COLLEGE

P R I N T E D A T T H E HARVARD UNIVERSITY PRESS CAMBRIDGE, MASS.,

U.S.A.

PREFACE I was acting in an advisory capacity to the Carnegie Foundation and the Carnegie Corporation of New York during the winter of 1934-35, a good deal of random thinking about the problem of art education, occupying odd moments for many years, became crystallized into more or less definite form. The present small book is the result. In it I have attempted to suggest the main lines on which a program of education in the visual arts might be developed, both for the practicing artist and the understanding layman, for, as I have tried to show, these form a united problem. HILE

W

I am indebted to many persons for suggestions — colleagues in Harvard University in and out of the Division of Fine Arts, and numerous friends in other institutions. Some of them have looked over my manuscript in more or less completed form. T o them I am deeply grateful. I wish especially to thank President Walter A. Jessup and Mr. William S. Learned of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Learning for their friendly counsel, and President Frederick P. Keppel of the Carnegie Corporation for countless kindly acts on my behalf and for time always placed

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PREFACE

graciously at my disposal. I am indebted to my friend Dean George H. Chase for a careful reading of my manuscript and the suggestion of various ways to improve it. I am indebted to the following publishers for kindly granting me permission to quote from the books indicated herewith: G. P. Putnam's Sons and Minton, Balch and Company — Art as Experience, by John Dewey; Little, Brown and Company — In Praise of Gentlemen, by Henry Dwight Sedgwick; Charles Scribner's Sons — Design in Art and Industry, by Ely Jacques Kahn; Houghton Mifflin Comp a n y — A nd Gladly Teach, by Bliss Perry. Detailed references are given in the footnotes. A. P. Cambridge,

1937

CONTENTS I.

AIMS IN THE TEACHING OF THE VISUAL ARTS Introductory, 3. Drawing and painting as a normal means of expression, 10. Understanding and appreciation of art as a part of our cultural heritage, 13. T h e raising of standards of production — contemporary art in relation to the art of the past, 20; training of the public in discrimination, 23; training of the artist, 32.

II.

A RATIONAL PROGRAM Scope and limitations, 43. T h e school, 48; summary of work at school level — elementary schools, 61; high schools, 62. T h e college, 65; summary of work at college level, 75. T h e graduate school, 78; summary of work at graduate or professional school level, 109. Schools for workers in various arts or trades, 113. Museums, 119.

III.

CONCLUSION

APPENDIX — THE THEORY OF THE VISUAL ARTS

.

Introductory, 137. T h e terms of vision, 139. Art and aesthetic experience, 141. T h e principles of order, and their application to the terms of vision, 142. Drawing and painting in the mode of pure design, 144. Representation in drawing and painting, 145. Pictorial design, 149. Design in sculpture, 150. Design in architectural and other structural arts, 150. Technical procedures, 150.

INTRODUCTION of Harvard University, spent the academic year 1934-35 in a comprehensive study of art education and community art developments in the United States. T h e Carnegie Corporation of New York, which was responsible for borrowing Professor Pope for this study, has greatly profited by his experience and counsel in appraising its own activities in the field of the arts, and it is a satisfaction that in the midst of these and other demands upon him, Professor Pope has found the time and inspiration to prepare the present volume, which sets forth his own best judgment as to a needed capstone to the structure of art education in America.

P

ROFESSOR ARTHUR POPE,

F. P. October 6, 1936

KEPPEL

PART I AIMS IN THE TEACHING OF THE VISUAL ARTS

AIMS IN T H E T E A C H I N G OF T H E VISUAL ARTS INTRODUCTORY of the increasing apprehension of the fundamental spiritual values embodied in an understanding of the fine arts and the general feeling that "we ought to do something about art," it is important that we know what we are trying to do and how we should do it. In colleges and schools a general need is felt to include "art" in the curriculum in some manner or other; but many college and university presidents and other administrators have very little clear idea of what they are aiming for in this teaching of art or how they should achieve reasonable results. New museums are constantly being established, but the trustees of such institutions are often very vague as to what a museum is for. Many regard an art museum as merely a picture gallery and have little conception of the educational possibilities involved in its relation to the life and culture of the community. Moreover, hundreds of art schools are training the supposedly talented youth of the country as professional practitioners in the most amazingly haphazard fashion, with almost no regard for any genuine standards in the understanding of the arts as a whole or even in technical performance. Education in the visual arts may be said

I

N VIEW

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ART, ARTIST, AND LAYMAN

to be in much the same chaotic state as medical education was a hundred years ago. There is as much quackery and incompetence. A great deal of confusion of thought has arisen from the vague understanding of what is meant by the term "art." It is often taken to mean merely pictures and sculpture, produced by unaccountable geniuses whom we regard as entirely different from the ordinary run of humanity, and housed in museums or the private collections of a few wealthy persons as something apart from the objects and serious interests of ordinary life — to be looked at only in idle moments as articles of luxury which the ordinary person could never hope to possess. But, in a way, the doing of anything to the point of aesthetic satisfaction in the result is an art. I believe that Professor Dewey is quite right when he says: "The intelligent mechanic engaged in his job, interested in doing well and finding satisfaction in his handiwork, caring for his materials and tools with genuine affection, is artistically engaged." 1 What we usually mean by art or fine art is that particular art in which there is aesthetic satisfaction to be obtained in the resulting visual effect, including in this meanings or content expressed in visual terms. Art or fine art is, therefore, visual art. It is 1

John Dewey, Art as Experience

(1934), p. 5.

INTRODUCTORY

5

visual art, and all types of visual art, with which we are concerned in this study. T h e same fundamental aesthetic principles apply in the visual arts as in other arts like music or literature. T h e difference is only in the use of terms — visual terms as opposed to the terms of sound. T h e r e is nothing peculiarly emotional or mysterious about visual art as compared with other arts; but it is, in spite of the popular conceptions noted above, more nearly omnipresent, since artistic judgment is, whether we wish it or not, a constant activity in our life — in the choice of objects that we buy (or possibly the dissatisfaction which we experience in those we are forced to buy for want of something better) and in the satisfaction or dissatisfaction which we take in our everyday surroundings, as much as in the approval or disapproval which we bestow on pictures or other objects in an occasional visit to an art museum. T h e habitual tendency to regard art as something apart from the serious business of life, as a luxury for idle moments, whether as an activity of appreciation only or as one of creation, and to treat the artist (especially the painter and the sculptor) as a special kind of being entirely "outside the rules" of ordinary existence, is one of the principal obstacles in the way of cultural progress at the present day. T h i s idea of the separation of art and industry, of artist and layman, never existed in earlier times. As

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Dr. Coomaraswamy says in discussing the aesthetic ideals of the Middle Ages as revealed by Master Eckhardt, " T h e artist is not a special kind of man, but every man is a special kind of artist. . . . Every activity involves what we should now call an aesthetic process, a succession of problem, solution, and execution. Materials apart, whoever acts, acts in the same way, will following the intellect, whether he makes a house, or studies mathematics, or performs an office, or does good works. . . . Our modern system of thought has substituted for this division of labor a spiritual caste system which divides men into species. Those who have lost most by this are the artists, professionally speaking, on the one hand, and laymen generally on the other. . . . T h e only surviving artists in the Scholastic, Gothic sense, are scientists, surgeons, and engineers, the only ateliers, laboratories." 2 Without doubt the artificial distinction between artist and layman has been fostered, especially in this country, by our inheritance of suspicions as to the moral validity of pleasure derived from seeing — the "lust of the eye." My Quaker grandmother never ceased to have grave misgivings as to the righteousness of her conduct in allowing her portrait to be painted. There are still many persons who have in2

A. K. Coomaraswamy, The Transformation

(Cambridge, Mass., 1934), pp. 64-65.

of Nature

in Art

INTRODUCTORY

7

herited something of this view, perhaps more or less unconsciously, but nevertheless in such a way that it has permeated their thought. Many have felt that art is so closely associated with the senses that there is nothing intellectual about it and that this puts artists into a class by themselves as dependent entirely on feeling and inspiration. But surely no hard and fast line can be drawn, as to intelligence required, between poetic expression in words that are part meaning and part sound, and expression in musical sound, nor, if this be true, between these and expression in form and color. I quote again from Professor Dewey: "Because perception of relationship between what is done and what is undergone constitutes the work of intelligence, and because the artist is controlled in the process of his work by his grasp of the connection between what he has already done and what he is to do next, the idea that the artist does not think as intently and penetratingly as a scientific inquirer is absurd. A painter must consciously undergo the effect of his every brush stroke or he will not be aware of what he is doing and where his work is going. Moreover, he has to see each particular connection of doing and undergoing in relation to the whole that he desires to produce. T o apprehend such relations is to think, and is one of the most exacting modes of thought. T h e difference between the pictures of

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different painters is due quite as much to differences in capacity to carry on this thought as it is to differences of sensitivity to bare color and to differences in dexterity of execution. As respects the basic quality of pictures, difference depends, indeed, more upon the quality of intelligence brought to bear upon perception of relations than upon anything else — though of course intelligence cannot be separated from direct sensitivity and is connected, though in a more external manner, with skill. "Any idea that ignores the necessary role of intelligence in production of works of art is based upon identification of thinking with use of one special kind of material, verbal signs and words. T o think effectively in terms of relations of qualities is as severe a demand upon thought as to think in terms of symbols, verbal and mathematical. Indeed, since words are easily manipulated in mechanical ways, the production of a work of genuine art probably demands more intelligence than does most of the so-called thinking that goes on among those who pride themselves on being 'intellectuals.' " 3 T h e artificial distinction between layman and artist has led to an unfortunate and unnecessary separation in artistic education. There is no reason for separating the fundamental education of the cre3

Art as Experience,

p. 45.

INTRODUCTORY

9

ative artist from that of the patron in the visual arts any more than in the art of writing. We are all potential artists of varying degrees of excellence. We actually exercise our art when we select and arrange furniture and curtains for our houses or offices. T h e mental process involved is different only in degree, not in kind, from that involved in the execution of a building or a painting by what we call an architect or an artist. This study is an attempt to define our aims in the teaching of the visual arts and to show how they should be pursued. Though our goal may be a long way off, and a considerable time required for final attainment, a proper sense of the direction in which it lies will enable us to draw steadily nearer.

I DRAWING AND PAINTING AS A NORMAL MEANS OF EXPRESSION N THE first place we are coming more and more to a realization of the fact that drawing and painting form a perfectly natural means of expression for a large majority of persons, both children and adults. They form a means of training the visual imagination and observation. They are the most effective way of opening the world of visual experience, as opposed to that of abstract ideas which has formed such an exclusive domain of our education in the past. Also, in connection with the terms of drawing and painting it is perhaps easier to gain an idea of what organization means as a basis for all the arts than in connection with the terms of any of the other arts. Practice in drawing and painting may thus be made to play a fundamental part in general education. Methods for doing this are still very definitely in an experimental stage; but with further study and experimentation it is probable that practice in drawing and painting will be properly regarded as a normal pursuit for almost everyone, not merely for those who seem at an early age to display a special "talent," which so often, in the end, proves to be an emascu-

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DRAWING AND PAINTING

11

lated affair hopelessly unaccompanied by other desirable qualities. It may be recalled that President Eliot once remarked that in his opinion the greatest mistake in American education in the last hundred years had been the neglect of free-hand drawing. President Eliot had in mind drawing as a useful means of communication of ideas and as a means of training observation, rather more than as a means of developing understanding of the visual arts. T h e latter use of drawing is, however, of equal importance. Moreover, the practice of drawing or painting as an avocation for the amateur, as well as for the professional as a vocation, deserves serious consideration. Drawing is also the foundation for many other arts or crafts which may be pursued by amateurs as well as professionals. This is quite different from the idea commonly entertained, that ability to draw or paint means necessarily great artistic capacity. Recent experiments both with adults and with children show that a great many people can without much trouble learn to draw or paint to a useful or enjoyable extent. On the other hand, the production of anything significant in the way of a work of art requires something much more than an ability to paint sketches that are passable renderings of a familiar scene, or are mildly effective, perhaps, as objects of interior decoration.

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In the representational arts significance in design depends on complete organization of form and content — organization in the ideas expressed, organization in the form both as to arrangement in space and in surface pattern, organization in the handling and in the procedure, and organization in the relation of all these factors to each other.4 In the structural arts — architecture or crafts or so-called industrial arts — significance depends on comprehensive organization in the relations of materials, structure, form, and function. In both cases such organization requires knowledge and experience not easily or quickly acquired, and high intellectual capacity, as well as genuine feeling for order. That a youth produces pleasant sketches from nature or shows ability to get a likeness is by itself no more reason for encouraging him to become a landscape or portrait painter than for considering a child a great author in the making just because he shows enough coordination of hand and eye to write his name. 4 See Walter H. Abell, Representation 1936).

and Form

(New York,

II U N D E R S T A N D I N G A N D A P P R E C I A T I O N OF A R T AS A P A R T OF O U R C U L T U R A L HERITAGE N THE second place we are certainly aiming for an

I

understanding of the art of the past — not only of the remote but also of the immediate past —

as a part of our cultural heritage. Much of this is the

expression of rare intellects. T o understand it means a definite enrichment of our life. T h i s is the aim which most people have in mind in connection with the study of the history or appreciation of art in schools and colleges. T h e subject of the fine arts in this sense is, as Professor Morey has pointed out, one of the humanities, as opposed to the physical and social sciences. T h e study of the history of art is one of the best ways to gain an understanding of the thought and ideas of various ages. Indeed, in view of the declining emphasis on the study of Latin and Greek, it is possible that the study of the history of ancient art will in a short time be the principal means for preserving some insight into the ideals of classical civilizations.

In all periods of history the

visual arts are often the most eloquent expressions of a people's aspirations; thus the study of art forms a fundamental aspect of the study of history as a whole.

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Genuine understanding of art in this connection means more than a vague sort of appreciation or artconsciousness based on an unstable emotionalism. Before we can understand books written, or poetry or plays spoken, in a language, we must know something of the language. We must have knowledge of its vocabulary, knowledge of its grammar and rhetoric, knowledge of poetical and dramatic forms. Mere knowledge does not necessarily guarantee the desired result of aesthetic reaction, but it nevertheless plays a fundamental part in it.5 T h e more one knows about the principles of versification, about the derivations and meanings of words, about mythology and religion, which enter so much into the allusions of poetry, the more comprehensive will be one's response to the rich overtones in meanings and sounds in poetry, the more sensitive one's reactions to the nuances in the choice of words and phrases. All richness of aesthetic experience in literature depends on knowledge, on knowledge of language, on knowledge of history and life. Our teaching of literature is necessarily based on the teaching of facts. What is thought of as a good teacher of literature is not a person who teaches any fewer facts than the B See W. S. Learned, Study of the Relations of Secondary and Higher Education in Pennsylvania, in the twenty-fifth Annual Report of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching (1930).

UNDERSTANDING AND APPRECIATION

15

dry-as-dust pedant. He merely teaches more kinds of facts; he is more comprehensive in his point of view and brings out the fundamental relations between the different sorts of ideas that all together go to the making of good literary composition. In its subtler aspects we may call this feeling, but there is little significant feeling that does not depend on precise knowledge. Real appreciation, depending on an apprehension of orderly relationships of all kinds, is an intellectual affair as well as emotional. In music, in a similar way, in order to appreciate we try to understand. We study harmony, counterpoint, musical forms. We acquire precise knowledge about these things, and the subtleties of our distinctions and the richness of our musical experience are increased by this knowledge. Knowledge doesn't guarantee our enjoyment of any particular work; but all enjoyment of higher forms of music is based on this knowledge, no matter how it may be acquired, whether by study accompanied by the insight that may be gained by actual performance, or mainly by listening. In exactly the same way our understanding and discrimination in the visual arts are based on knowledge. In architecture there are structural and utilitarian as well as formal considerations, the appreciation of which depends on definite knowledge. The more we know about the architecture of the past,

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about the way the forms have been derived, and about the closely knit relation of form and structure, the more sensitive and complete will be our understanding and judgment of all architecture. In painting we must first understand the language: knowledge of it must often be consciously acquired. We must understand its terms, and we must know how these terms may be used by the painter. T h e more we know of how these terms have been used in the past, the more we know of the vocabulary of painting and of the limitations of its technical procedures — in regard to a particular painting the more we know of the conditions which account for its production — the surer will be our judgment, the richer our appreciation. It is sometimes thought that the history of art is of little importance in relation to art appreciation; and the teaching of the history of art does, it is true, sometimes degenerate into a concern with extraneous facts in regard to artists' lives and their social habits, sometimes into mere gossip, or it may become pure archaeology in which critical judgment of aesthetic value is almost completely in abeyance; but the complete or even partial understanding of a work of art necessarily involves some knowledge of its original environment, of the conditions which determine its peculiar character. T o the average undergraduate in college, or to the average citizen with-

UNDERSTANDING AND APPRECIATION

17

out much knowledge of art, a Flemish painting of the fifteenth century, placed in a museum or in a house amidst present-day surroundings, may seem entirely incongruous, completely out of harmony with the people about it, perhaps awkward and grotesque, and, superficially at least, altogether ugly and absurd. On the other hand, to one who has learned something about the age in which the work was produced, the antecedents of the artist, his aims and procedures, the sort of position in which the painting was originally placed, the architectural enframement it once had, the sort of people for whom it was executed, there is nothing strange or incongruous about it: it is a natural performance of its time, and, with these limitations assumed, still to be judged and enjoyed as a masterpiece of art and compared with work produced at the present day. Without some such knowledge the appreciation of it is likely to be superficial or mere pretense. Such superficiality is often displayed by "arty" persons in their miscellaneous admiration of art of all times and places. On the other hand, to the person who has acquired a sound historical background, the differences which at first seemed so great between schools and periods tend to fade away, and the true connoisseur comes to think in terms of the quality of the particular work. Without affectation he may place a Greek Aphrodite, a Gothic Madonna, a Chinese Kuan Yin, and a Bath-

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ing Woman by Degas side by side as comparable manifestations of the same fundamental aesthetic principles. This is one of the principal justifications of the study of art history and of archaeological research. It is fundamental as a background for the understanding of the art of the past and of contemporary art as well; for one of the principal things that makes contemporary art of an abstract or semi-abstract type so mystifying to many people, and one of the reasons why they find it so difficult to make any judgments about it, is that they know so little of the peculiar conditions that have brought it about. Some historical knowledge is an essential basis for the development of discriminating appreciation. It must be recognized, however, that mere history, although dealing with established masterpieces, would not get very far in the training of critical judgment if it were not accompanied by some study of artistic theory. As a matter of fact, the teaching of art history usually includes a good deal of critical discussion involving general principles; but this is often vague and uncertain, and sometimes arbitrary. It is taken for granted that the student of literature should learn something of the principles of rhetoric and that the student of music should study the theory of musical composition. Though much research in the theory of the visual arts is still needed in order to

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obtain a thorough understanding of underlying principles of design and of representation, and although one has to guard against numerous "half-baked" theories and devices recommended like patent medicines for all artistic ills, we can even now go a long way in its study, and it is as essential in this as in the other arts. T h e development of a more complete understanding of the visual arts as exemplified in the masterpieces of the past and of the present day, and the study of the theory of art, may be made to occupy a perfectly normal place in general education in schools and colleges.

III T H E RAISING OF S T A N D A R D S OF PRODUCTION CONTEMPORARY ART IN RELATION TO THE ART OF THE PAST TILL

S

a third aim, and one of special importance

at the present moment, is the raising of standards of performance in all the visual arts. W e

want to produce art that will enrich our everyday life; for, although we have so much of the art of all times and places to study and enjoy in a way quite unknown in any previous epoch, we yet realize that it is by the buildings that we erect, the cities and parks that we plan, the natural beauty that we preserve, the pictures, furniture, and other objects that form a part of our everyday environment, that our cultural level and our essential happiness are measured. Fine examples of the art of the past we may acquire to some extent for our houses and for our museums;

but these lose something of their total significance when removed from their original environment both of place and of people. T h e y require a good deal of study and imagination for even partial understanding. W h e n of good quality, they serve well as standards of design and performance, since they admit us

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21

to the thought of some of the finest creative minds. They are in fact an essential basis on the understanding of which the art of our own time must be formed, just as art of all ages has been formed on the basis of the traditions of earlier art. But they are only by inheritance a part of our life, and they form only a small portion of the art that we necessarily have about us. If we want really to improve our life, we must make our buildings, our paintings, our furniture, as good as the best of such things produced in the past; we must make them satisfactory for their purpose from every point of view. On the basis of what we learn by the study of the finest examples of the past, we must raise the standards of design and performance in the things produced today. This does not imply that we must go about making replicas or superficial imitations of the forms of older art that we may happen to admire; on the other hand, it does not mean that we must create entirely new forms that have no relation to the past, just so that we may, as the current phrase goes, "express our own age." We cannot help expressing ourselves no matter what we do. What we must do is to design the particular buildings and objects of all kinds which we need, or desire, in a sensible way, making them as satisfactory as we possibly can from both the visual and the structural points of view. We may use old forms or adaptations of these if that is sensible; we

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may create new forms if that seems wise. When we study the art of the past in any aspect we must understand it thoroughly, instead of superficially, so that in the designing of our own work we adopt the principles on which it is based rather than copy merely the superficial effect. Much of the art of the last hundred years has been marred by the tendency toward only superficial study and hence only superficial result. If the architects of the Gothic Revival, for instance, had studied Gothic art thoroughly, they might have produced buildings in which there was little imitation of Gothic forms but which would have been actually more like Gothic fundamentally, in that they would have shown a regard for the relation of form to structure and purpose in connection with the conditions of the nineteenth century instead of the thirteenth or the fourteenth century. Many of our contemporary painters have copied the surface of primitive art of various kinds without in the least attempting to understand its complete character, and have achieved correspondingly superficial results. It may be objected that what I am advocating is eclecticism, and it is. But all art of the present day is eclectic — none more so than that of our so-called modernists.6 What I am advocating is that we replace " See Francis Henry Taylor, "The Dilemma of the Modern Artist," Atlantic Monthly, December 1935.

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shallow and unintelligent eclecticism with rational eclecticism. The latter term would define fairly accurately almost all the really good art that the world has produced. TRAINING OF THE PUBLIC IN DISCRIMINATION

One would naturally suppose that the proper and most direct way to accomplish an improvement in the quality of what we produce would be to improve the training of the artist, and no doubt this is one factor in the problem; but, as a matter of fact, the question of training the professional artist is really of less importance at the present moment than the training of the public in understanding and judgment. For even if it is merely a question of improving the quality of work done by professional artists, the best way to accomplish this is to raise general standards of discrimination and, by improving the quality of the demand, inevitably improve the quality of production. This means something different from "encouragement of art" in the ordinary sense. There are some persons who seem to think that we should try to get people to buy more "art," meaning by this especially pictures. Promotion schemes undertaken on this assumption, for the sake of the too-numerous indigent painters and sculptors in our midst, take on something of the nature of the commercial "Drink More

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Milk" and "Eat More Cranberries" campaigns. They put a wrong emphasis on "art," as if it were a distinct commodity instead of a quality inherent in almost everything about us. I mean, rather, an improvement in visual discrimination in connection with all the objects which necessarily go to form our environment. We hardly need to worry very much about producing artists. If our demand for good performance is sufficiently strong, the superior artists will almost inevitably come along to supply it, while our poor artists will find less sale for their work and will necessarily turn to other callings. It is sometimes forgotten that discouraging bad artists is just as important as encouraging good ones. Of course, one often hears the remark that we should hesitate to pronounce judgment in regard to works of art produced by our contemporaries, for we may make mistakes, as people did in the nineteenth century. But there were people in the nineteenth century who did discriminate very soundly between what was good and what was mediocre or bad. As we get further training there will be more of us who can discriminate wisely. In the meantime, it is pure cowardice and stupidity to have no opinion at all for fear that posterity may show that we had poor judgment. Can one imagine Charles V or the Earl of Arundel hesitating to buy a picture, or possibly a

STANDARDS OF PRODUCTION

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chair, or table, for fear of posterity's estimate of his taste two hundred years later? If we improve the quality of our demand, many who now hardly find it worth while to practice an art like painting will turn to it as a career, instead of turning as they now do — many of our potential masters — to other fields, like scientific research, or medicine, or business, or teaching, where they actually have an opportunity to use their intelligence and their imagination more fully. I have always felt that Titian, if he had lived today, would have been a banker or possibly a doctor — certainly not an artist. Perhaps in another fifty or hundred years such a man might again find it worth while to become a painter. T h e quality of production has always been intimately connected with the discrimination of the patron. Down to the beginning of the nineteenth century, patronage was, with a few exceptions as in Holland in the seventeenth century, almost entirely dominated by persons who had been brought up for generations to be more or less discriminating judges in the visual arts. T h e r e were, of course, all kinds of variations in fashion from century to century and from generation to generation; but, within the fashion of a particular time, the persons who gave the orders or commissions to the artists were able for the most part to distinguish between good and bad workmanship with remarkable success, and they con-

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stantly patronized the best artists, not merely when these were old but while still young. T h e phenomenon of the great artist necessarily starving in his garret, waiting for recognition of his genius in his old age, or possibly after death, never existed until the nineteenth century. Giorgione was sought out by the patrons of Venice while he was still in his twenties; he was recognized as the leading painter of his time. 7 * T h e persons of all the different ages who exercised this dominant patronage in the arts, as well as in literature and manners, were those who inherited, preserved, and in turn passed on to other generations what we broadly think of as culture. They belonged essentially to that class of persons which Henry Dwight Sedgwick (In Praise of Gentlemen, Boston, 1935) characterizes as the Guild of Gentlemen, "eupatridae, patricians, feudal barons, lords, nobles, aristocrats, or whatever name has been given to them." " H i s character — I am speaking of the ideal member of the Guild, for all wool merchants do not always sell fine wool, nor all apothecaries always furnish wholesome drugs, nor all stonemasons always build everlasting walls — his character was based on the cardinal virtues, Fortitude, Temperance, Prudence, and Justice. And as for accomplishments and characteristics that may be acquired, the Guild prescribed: for the body, quickness, dexterity, control of the limbs, development of the muscles; and for the mind, cultivation of the humanities, of the arts, of knowledge of whatever mankind has done to make our world more beautiful and life pleasanter. And, very much as other guilds were held to justify themselves by what they contributed to society, the Guild of Gentlemen was thought to justify itself, first by public service in war and in government, and secondly by what it did to uphold the higher human values, as by its demonstration of how all human intercourse may be embellished, how conduct may become a fine

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T h e complete reasons for this it is not necessary to enter into here; but it may be added that the power of discrimination seemed to permeate all classes of society within the limits of their intellectual, physical, and social horizons — in other words, within their own traditional environment. T h e bowl of the peasant may have been of heavier material and more coarsely decorated than the cup of the lord; but in its place it was as appropriate, and, in its own surroundings, even as pleasant to look at. art, how animal mating may be idealized by courtly love, how speech may be more than purely utilitarian, and so forth. Such, in a general way, were the fruits of civilization, which the Guild of Gentlemen gathered and contributed to the public good" (pp. 6-7). "Beside rendering . . . active services in war and politics — which, indeed, I think we may take for granted — the Guild of Gentlemen paid its debt to society for privileges received in another and hardly less important way. Its members constituted a body of persons who sympathized, as spectators, audience, readers, with the productions, and efforts at production, of men with special talents — poets, musicians, artists; they lent a ready ear, tendered encouragement, applauded success, criticized defects, and, as dry leaves catch a spark, preserved flashes of genius from passing into nothingness. They were more than useful, they were necessary; not merely as patrons — such as Maecenas, Leo X , Fouquet, for instance — but to provide a motive for the artist, for no piper pipes for long if there are none to listen, no shepherd composes madrigals if there is no shepherdess to blush with pleasure. The Parthenon would not have been built had not the eupatridae already established principles of harmony, proportion, measure, which descended to the so-called democracy of Pericles

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A discriminating patronage thus dominated production in all the visual arts through the Renaissance and into the nineteenth century. But with the industrial revolution in the nineteenth century, dominance in the patronage of the visual arts was gradually transferred from the group of trained connoisseurs to a general public which was raised to a new possession of wealth and an ability to spend this on types of art formerly the more restricted province of royalty and nobility, but which was at the same time lacking in any trained artistic judgment in this as an obligatory tradition, trained Pheidias, Iktinos, and their co-workers, and enabled Athenians of place and power to respect modules, to enjoy the delicacies of curve, the play of shadow upon pillar and cornice. T h e glories of Notre Dame de Chartres would never have been embodied in arch, column, and pier, in statue and window, if the senses of Thibaut de Chartres, Raoul de Courtenay, Pierre Mauclerc, Queen Blanche of Castile, T h i b a u t of Champagne, and such, had not been educated, disciplined, and refined. T h e literatures of Greece, of Rome, of the Italian Renaissance, of the Siäcle de Louis XIV, of Castile in its great days, of all periods distinguished by proportion, measure, and restraint, are builded on the appreciation of a class of cultivated gentlemen. So, by this service of receptivity, the Guild of Gentlemen has contributed its part. It was, of course, highly paid, by privilege, leisure, and luxury, even in times when serfs and peasants were suffering from want, and the burgesses of towns were scrimping and saving; but it paid back pound for pound, florin for florin, ducat for ducat, because it held fast to the great traditions of civilization, because it cultivated and cherished tastes, feelings, standards, that raise men above the savage and the barbarian" (pp. 13-14).

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new environment. There was still a group of intellectuals who inherited the tradition of artistic judgment of the past and were able to distinguish between good and bad in contemporary production; but, in relation to the community as a whole, they were a small and, financially speaking, uninfluential class. T h e general public became the dominant patrons, and they determined production. As a result, to take the field of painting as an example, art came to be judged by superficial qualities which were within the comprehension of the untrained public. Artists who were able and content to achieve these superficial qualities, and to satisfy the new type of critics demanding anatomical and perspective accuracy, and who sent to the large exhibitions pictures making a popular appeal on account of their size, their sentimental or sensational subject matter, or their specious display of apparent technical skill, were able to get high prices for their work. They became the leading artists, controlling juries and prize-awards in exhibitions, and dominating contemporary criticism and "publicity" of all forms. Their works are now for the most part, when not unloaded by government patronage on provincial museums or other public buildings, in attics or cellars of museums or piled up in warehouses. As being out of fashion, they no longer appeal for the most part even to the untrained public; they are

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worthless in the eyes of those with trained judgment, as they were when they were produced. As a further result of this new popular patronage, the regulation modern art school was gradually evolved to train painters to achieve the superficial results in popular demand. One thing which the public could appreciate was verisimilitude, and the easiest way of turning out large numbers of persons to accomplish this was by means of classes making charcoal drawings from casts and from life, and painting from life with occasional criticism. Painters possessing critical discrimination recognized the absurdity of this, and were driven more and more to train themselves by studying the fine paintings of the past gathered together in museums. They became independents, maintaining themselves with difficulty unless they happened to have private incomes. Much the same thing happened in other arts like architecture, furniture, ceramics, etc. I use the example of painting because I am personally more familiar with this than other arts. However, if one were to examine the history of furniture-making in the nineteenth century, one would find the same general change in the character of the dominant demand, the same breaking down of traditions of craftsmanship, and a similar founding of schools for the training of industrial workers in which design of good quality came to be the least consideration.

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At the present day we have not progressed far beyond the condition of the nineteenth century. 8 T h e general public still dominates production, and the only way to improve this production in quality is to train a large enough part of the public in artistic discrimination to dominate the demand. This is a large order. Such a thing has never been attempted before. It can only be accomplished over a considerable lapse of time. But it is fundamentally what we are trying to do in the teaching of art in schools and colleges and in our museums. Looking back over forty or fifty years, it is apparent that during this time we have made some progress both in our understanding of art of the past and in contemporary production. Of the former, the difference in quality between the exhibition of paintings in Chicago in 1893 and those in 1933 and 1934 is evidence; of the latter, even what we can find in the way of Christmas cards, teacups, or glassware (if we search a bit), as compared with thirty or forty years ago, is some indication. This improvement has been due in part to an increase in European travel and also travel in this country, which has given 8 Witness the popular prize picture in the recent Corcoran Biennial — a large "Nude" entirely wanting in organization of form or tone but in its imitative rendering of the texture of naked flesh displaying what to the untrained public looked like technical skill.

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people an opportunity to see and study some of the great masterpieces of art; in part to the multiplication of art museums and an improvement in the quality of their collections; in part, also, to the photographs of works of art which have found their way into our houses, as well as into museums and libraries, throughout the country; and it has been due in large part, as a stimulus for all these things, to the leaven of interest in art instilled into the community in incalculable ways by the teaching of art in colleges and schools, as a normal interest of every intelligent person, pioneers in which teaching forty and fifty years ago were men like Charles Eliot Norton and Allan Marquand. TRAINING OF THE ARTIST

The education of the public as patron of the arts, or a large enough part of it to dominate demand, is then of prime importance. Nevertheless, the education of the artist is intimately connected with the training of the general public, and it should be based on the same fundamental training in discrimination — not divorced entirely from this as it is at present. We now make a business of searching out persons of apparent artistic talent, as if an interest and an ability in drawing or painting were not a perfectly normal thing, and we encourage them to develop their talent, "to get on with their art," as if artists were pe-

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culiar beings who needed nothing of the general education which "less gifted" persons should have; and, since we think of artists as primarily painters and sculptors (it is only when unsuccessful or unambitious that we expect them to turn to other crafts, to "commercial design," or to teaching), we isolate them in art schools to practice exclusively on a technique in which they may never have a significant idea to express, utterly regardless of the tragic disillusionment altogether probable in the end. Even if the individual were a genius and the actual technical training were of the best instead of perhaps the worst possible kind, the prospective artist would find himself, at the completion of his training, with technical ability to draw and put on paint but with little chance of knowing anything even about art. T h e one thing which he ought to have above everything else is critical judgment; and this can be formed only on the basis of serious and prolonged study of masterpieces of the past. Without serious study of such masterpieces, including a considerable knowledge of the history of art, and an understanding of its fundamental principles, the artist of the present day can acquire little ability to judge of his own performance. We assume that a writer knows something of literature; but we expect artists to produce great original masterpieces who know practically nothing about art and little about anything else.

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As a matter of fact, instead of turning out a few thoroughly trained painters, for whose work there might be some reasonable demand, by segregating all our talented students and all who have any desire to become artists in our art schools, in many of which the instructors are hopelessly incompetent, we turn out quantities of men and women ill-equipped for the practice of painting and unable to make a living by it. They ought to be doing something else, but they are provided with an exclusive professional training. Surveys made within the last twenty years have shown that only from one to three per cent 9 of persons attending our regulation art schools (that is, those placing main emphasis on the teaching of painting and sculpture) are able to "become professional artists and that the remaining ninety-nine per cent either drift without special training into the industrial and commercial arts, or entirely abandon the pursuit of the profession." 10 Some are forced into teaching in other art schools, or in art departments in schools or colleges reflecting somewhat dimly the ° These figures are based on rough estimates. The first figure of about one per cent was given in a report by Miss Levy prepared for the Bureau of Education and published in Art and Progress, June 1915. The figure of three per cent is given me by Mr. Alon Bement, who, with other interested persons, has based his estimate on more recent investigations of some of the leading art schools of the East. For all schools the figure would be less. 10 Art and Progress, June 1915, p. 281.

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methods of the regulation art schools. T h e other ninety-seven to ninety-nine per cent have been given a narrow technical training, not with the idea of giving them an understanding of the visual arts which might enrich their lives and make them useful in the community, or even of turning them into useful workers in the industrial arts, but only of making them technical performers as painters or sculptors. The chances are that their taste has been degraded by the narrow technical training they have been forced to endure and that their time has been almost completely wasted. This waste of time and energy in the lives of many of these students is an appalling tragedy.11 Curiously enough — or perhaps naturally — we have much the same situation in music. Mr. Eric Clarke points out that musical education is thought of mainly as a matter of training every musically talented person to perform in public rather than of teaching him something about music, with partici11

"It makes one dizzy to calculate the number of art schools all over the world, which are training would-be artists, though, alas, only one (or none) among a thousand may really deserve the appellation. If instruction in drawing and painting could be included in every child's normal education (as it should be to inculcate the fine art of 'seeing') standards of accomplishment would be so high that only the inextinguishable genius would survive the inevitable comparisons . . ." (Julie H. Heyneman in Landmark, February 1935, quoted by F. A. Whiting, Jr., in the American Magazine of Art, March 1935, vol. XXVIII, no. 3).

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pation as an aid to understanding and private enjoyment, and of reserving training for professional performance to those of marked ability. "With an idea that music means professional performance, the active amateur has been neglected. T h e conservatory has treated him as though he were intending to become a professional and has taught him a repertoire of solo rather than ensemble music"; 12 and again, "There are . . . many conservatory students who can perform and yet know little about their subject . . .*'13 The active amateur in painting has been treated likewise as if he meant to become a professional performer. The art schools take the ninety-seven to ninety-nine per cent of persons properly intended in art as amateurs, and put them through a training of drawing from casts and drawing and painting from life that has little to do really with the subject, instead of giving them a certain amount of understanding and discrimination which would make them valuable citizens as part of the essential class of trained patrons. At the same time the training is far from satisfactory even for the one to three per cent who are able to pursue art as a career, for, in spite of some atu

18

Music in Everyday Life (New York, 1935), p. 79. Page 71.

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tempts to liberalize the manner of instruction, it is based to a large extent on the false and rigid aims of so-called academic art of the nineteenth century. It does not give a sufficient knowledge of the fundamentals of an art like painting either as to its methods and materials as a craft or as to its vocabulary and rhetoric (if we may borrow these terms) as a means of expression. There is no reason why an art like drawing and painting which forms the basis for all the visual arts should not be taught in much the same way as any other means of expression. It is a language in which some of the greatest ideas have been expressed in past times. It is worth understanding on the part of anyone. It may be taught in schools and colleges in much the manner of a subject like English. There is no need for separating the artist from his fellow beings as a special kind of person.14 14

It may be noted in passing that in China in the Sung epoch the distinction between painter and layman hardly existed at all. The art of painting (or drawing) was closely related to the art of calligraphy, and as every gentleman could write, so he could also paint. Some of the greatest paintings of the Sung epoch were produced by persons whom we should now call amateurs, like the Emperor Hui Tsung. Like many other gentlemen, he was statesman, poet, calligrapher, and painter. In the West the technique of painting has not been so closely related to the art of writing and so not learned as a matter of course by all educated persons. But there is no more difference in essential intellectual and imaginative power necessary than there was in China in the twelfth century.

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For those capable of doing advanced work, the university should provide the opportunity for professional study in the visual arts as it does in other subjects, like medicine or law, whether the special field be architecture, or industrial art, or landscape architecture, or painting, or sculpture, or perhaps the history and theory of art. It may be objected that many persons with a natural gift for artistic pursuits have not the capacity necessary for ordinary academic study. However, it is yet to be proved that persons so exclusively endowed with artistic talent are ever able to produce art of any great significance. They are probably more likely to make expert craftsmen to carry out other people's ideas. But even granting the loss of some assured geniuses (losses of a similar nature are just as likely to occur in the selective process of promotion in other professions), the resulting gain achieved in the raising of standards would far outweigh the loss. We put too exclusive emphasis on natural gift and not enough on the training required to go with this for it to amount to anything. Outstanding genius we probably do not need to worry much about. It will acquire the knowledge it needs in roundabout ways if direct ones prove impossible; and for it the effect of improved standards and educational methods would be of incalculable value. From a thorough training in the university would

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emerge leaders in the different fields of the profession. At the same time, capable students who find it impossible to pursue the long training required in the college and the university might be given more specialized training in various crafts and industries under leaders of broad vision. This would enable those with genuine capacity, although without means or capacity to pursue advanced study of a searching nature for the length of time necessary for thorough training, to lead normal and useful lives instead of turning out every year hundreds and hundreds of pictures which nobody wants. T h e way in which this may be done will be discussed more at length in the following section. A program of education worked out on the lines suggested would provide both for the education of the general public in understanding and judgment and also for the training of professional practitioners who would be able to respond to the higher standards in demand as they are gradually developed, and would, as in the past, act as leaders in the perfecting of that demand. It would at the same time tend to do away with the present unfortunate distinction between layman and artist. Let us now proceed to a consideration of such a program more in detail.

PART II A RATIONAL PROGRAM

A RATIONAL PROGRAM I SCOPE AND LIMITATIONS ET US suppose for a moment that we could dynamite all our present art teaching into oblivion J and consider how, with the ground entirely cleared, we would lay out a program for education in the fine arts in a rational way. This exercise may be useful in showing us the end which we must gradually strive to attain, though actually by more circuitous routes. The problem is first of all, as we have seen, a matter of general education — and we shall not differentiate the training of the professional artist in school or even in college for the most part, any more than we so differentiate the training of the doctor or the lawyer — but finally we shall consider more specifically the training of the professional artist. At the same time we shall find it convenient, as we go along, to consider present conditions to some extent, to point out some of the difficulties in connection with these, and occasionally to suggest actual steps which might be taken leading toward the gradual achievement of our ultimate goal. The problem of teaching in the schools will be

L

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treated somewhat briefly, for inasmuch as one of the principal requirements in the schools is for welltrained teachers, it is obvious that we must provide in the first place some means by which these teachers may get adequate training. The primary consideration, therefore, is the college and the university, and teaching at this level will be considered more in detail. The museum plays a part in the problem at all levels. The more advanced stages in this program are conceived for the person who pursues his education according to what we may. call a normal pattern. There always have been and probably always will be exceptional individuals who obtain their education in more roundabout ways. One can hardly plan especially for them, except that there should be an avoidance of hard and fast rules (as to degrees, etc.) which cannot be modified somewhat for the benefit of those of unusual gifts. For convenience I have divided the teaching into the different levels of school, college, and graduate professional school. The distinction between college and graduate professional school will keep clear the difference which I wish to emphasize between general study for what is usually called culture or cultural background, and the more specific study of some one subject as a basis for a professional career. The distinction is familiar enough in actual practice,

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but it is by no means universal, for in many universities there is a division into vocational or professional schools at the undergraduate level. In such cases the work of the first year or two is usually supposed to be of a broader nature to provide at least something of cultural background, while that of the later undergraduate years is more specific in character and may be continued without a break into the graduate level. Even in universities where a college degree is required for admission to the professional school, the student may often spend his last year or two as an undergraduate in study that is essentially vocational or professional in character, so that his general study for cultural background is limited to the first part of his college career. It should be clearly understood, therefore, that in using the term college, I wish to indicate study aimed to provide a cultural background without regard to special vocation or career, and in using the term graduate professional school, to indicate study designed for training in a specific career, without suggesting that the pattern of college and graduate professional school could be adopted by every institution. Colleges and universities have developed under such varying circumstances that there is no pattern which can be called exactly normal. Moreover, it must also be recognized that no sharp line can be drawn between cultural and non-cultural

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studies; for in a subject like the visual arts, as in the humanities in general, advanced work of a very special nature may have distinctly cultural value, while even very elementary study in this and other subjects, ordinarily included in a liberal education, may have little. Elementary study of a language as a tool, for instance, usually has little cultural value in itself, although it may be a necessary instrument for cultural study. The distinction which most of us have in mind is between study aimed to give an understanding of values and that designed merely for skill or knowledge necessary in a vocation or profession. There is a further objection to this division into school, college, and graduate school (the same objection applies to all fields of education) in that these successive units assume a "graduation" from one to the next on the basis partly of time-serving in a prescribed number of courses. What should be required is rather a fund of knowledge and an intellectual maturity suitable for the more advanced stages of work. T h e investigations which have been carried on under the so-called Pennsylvania Study show that mere graduation from a school or college may mean the greatest diversity among students even of the same institution as to these requisite qualities. One of the pressing problems in education is to establish some method by which more precise measurements of intellectual capacity may be made.

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It is, therefore, for convenience only that we use the terms college and graduate professional school, to indicate a difference in aims to be pursued at different levels of education. Moreover, while it is assumed that the main educational path in the visual arts would lead from the school through the college, and then to graduate professional school, another path is also assumed, leading directly from high or preparatory school to special craft schools for the training of assistants or workers in the various arts. This implies a somewhat arbitrary distinction between leaders trained professionally, and workers or craftsmen who assist in carrying out the ideas of the leaders; but at the same time, as in other fields of activity, it allows for the individual of unusual capacity, starting as a worker, to rise to the level of leader by acquiring much of the necessary broader education in later years.

II T H E SCHOOL UMiNG that we had properly prepared teach-

ers, one of our main aims in the schools would be to develop artistic discrimination in connection with the needs and possibilities of everyday life. The experiments being carried on in the schools at Owatonna, under the direction of the School of Education of the University of Minnesota, aim to do this very directly by having the children deal with problems of discrimination in their actual environment, including houses and their furnishings, gardens, dress, etc. At the same time, the problem may be approached indirectly by having the pupils study, or at least get acquainted with, some of the great masterpieces of art, just as in English they study masterpieces of literature. This is of immediate benefit in widening their outlook, and in giving them an understanding and enjoyment of fine things. It is also one way of giving them standards of judgment which may be applied to the simplest problems of everyday life. The two things go hand in hand, and I am inclined to think that the exclusive dealing with problems of immediate environment might be somewhat narrowing. In connection with such training as this, general

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principles of order or design would also be studied. In the lower or elementary grades, this would be somewhat indirect. In the high school grades, it might be perfectly direct. I believe that we are altogether too afraid of an intellectual approach to art. We are afraid to make it anything but a matter of feeling. Children, especially at high school age, want to know things, and they can often think remarkably clearly. Much of the present suspicion attached to art as an unessential field in education would be removed if it were approached as an intellectual affair instead of as a matter of sentimental feeling suitable only for girls. It is perfectly absurd, for instance, that any of us should go through life thinking of color only in a vaguely emotional way. Children may be taught perfectly definitely about the three attributes of color or tone, even about the difference between additive and subtractive mixing of color, and about the part these play in visual effect both in nature and in art. It is interesting, and no more difficult to understand than lots of things that children study in mathematics or physics as a matter of course; only there is a prevailing superstition that one must leave all thought behind when entering the "art room." T h e general principles underlying all design may likewise be taught in a perfectly definite manner, and the way in which these principles apply in the different types of art: on the

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structural side, in the relation between form and material and function; on the formal side, in arrangement in three-dimensional space, as well as in two-dimensional pattern; in connection with meaning or content in the realm of ideas, and the relation between form and content. This doesn't lessen the emotional content of art at all — it increases it. All such study naturally involves more or less practice in drawing and painting. With younger children, practice is probably the best method of teaching. T h e main principles of design may be taught in the solution of simple problems of pattern designing, while imaginative expression in drawing and painting is helpful in increasing visual knowledge, as well as in developing useful skill. Perhaps still more naturally the two points of view may be combined, especially in the work of younger pupils. A statement written by Margaret H. Stout in regard to work in drawing, painting, and modeling at the Shady Hill School in Cambridge, Massachusetts, is worth quoting in full, for it summarizes exceptionally well the aims and methods to be pursued in the direct teaching of the visual arts in the successive stages of a normal child's development: 1 1 Drawing, Painting, and Modeling at Shady Hill School (published by the school). I have had to omit the illustrations accompanying this article, but I believe that the meaning is clear without them.

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" T h e things that show themselves to the eyes of man are infinitely varied and so are the images that form in his mind. A child, however, does not think about that or allow himself to be confused when he is given the means of making a picture. First, he examines the means themselves. He wants to know how they work. He studies a pencil before he uses it to make a line; he examines a stroke of color left by his brush; he rolls clay in his hands. He gets acquainted with all of these means at his disposal before he arrives at any plan for combining them. " T h e n he directs his efforts, quite simply, towards an orderly arrangement. It appears that his first plan is to produce a broad pattern. In painting he wants to fill a space; in modeling, to form a mass. Unconsciously he desires balance, repetition, and unity. These ends become more important than an object or place which he may have started to depict. An eight-year-old child sets out to make a picture of Mont St. Michel. He has visited the place and has walked up its streets, past small buildings. But as he paints, his idea develops in terms of the paint itself; and his execution of this picture as a design becomes for the moment more important than its relation to the objective facts of Mont St. Michel. T h e picture may not look like the place, but it is a coherent arrangement of tones and lines. For the child it is an establishment of order in the infinity of things seen

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or imagined. For the teacher it is a good piece of work because it is a positive portion of the complete experience of a human being — the satisfactory relation of himself to a segment of the vast existence around him. T h e child's encouragement comes not from being merely amused or from accidental successes, but from improving, all along the way, in his ability. It is the teacher's function to lead him, with appropriate discipline, toward a consistent development of his powers. "In time the broad pattern loses its power to satisfy. A child wants his picture to have fidelity to the thing it represents, and in order to attain this he is obliged to go further into the study of the thing he uses. He develops more skill. His pictures, instead of being broad, become somewhat complex, thoughtful, and calculated, and his ideas soon acquire a narrative purpose. He takes account of time, of other people, and of living things connected with him. Story and drama are his means of stating these connections. He may paint an eventful day on a New Hampshire farm or he may model a dog carrying a ball out to play. Satisfaction in these depends on clear detail — on drawing sufficient for their needs. It must be evident to him that his painted horse is really running away. "In these two phases of a child's experience with art he has not been much concerned with making his

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work clear to other persons. He has, however, become aware of their responses to it. And soon his aim becomes increasingly an aim at communication. Environment is more definite in his experience, and he is more prosaic about it. A New Hampshire orchard must be a particular orchard, and the picture must serve to represent it unmistakably. Next, developing his skill further, he arranges paint into pictures of work-horses in harness, crowds of people in the rain, a house on fire at night, a gull over a stormy sea, or a squash on a kitchen table. These are specific, but the child now brings into them an amount of emotional response. It is different from his early feeling about the character of paint or pencil marks on paper. It is, instead, a control of those materials so that they will explain the character of what he represents — the labor of the horse or the heaviness of people in the rain. "When he passes from one kind of idea to another, the child has to increase his skill in the manipulation of paint and clay, and he is obliged, also, to deepen steadily his knowledge and understanding of their use in design. For his purposes color needs to be well and properly laid on paper, to be studied theoretically, and to be chosen for its meaning. Clay has to be clearly built and formed to appropriate surfaces. As he makes this progress, he requires help from teachers and from all the facilities of the school.

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"At first his demands are only for direction in handling equipment and in getting a proper and congenial place for his work. He is taught to keep his brushes, his paints, and his clay in good order. He is made to know that his plan and execution are respected. His painting of Mont St. Michel is considered, not as a clumsy effort to imitate what he has seen, but as a concept of his own in which are perception and feeling. When he proceeds further, he is taught to mix paint and lay on washes that are satisfactory to his rising standards. Quick outline drawings of his classmates, or of animals at the Zoological Garden, help him to draw more accurately the details of his narrative pictures. On museum trips he sees how such pictures have been made in Persian, Indian, or Mediaeval European manuscripts. When, in a later phase of his progress, he wishes to communicate ideas, he has questions about proportion, perspective, and color. He begins to regard a brush as a tool that has a special use. Quality appears in line. And as these elements are studied and explained, he comes to respond critically to their presence in an early Italian or Flemish panel, in a painting by Titian, in a drawing by Rembrandt, or in a clay horse of the T'ang dynasty. Then he is encouraged to try his hand at other means of design — etching, stained glass, or casting in plaster. "These studies, followed in a school, have to take

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their place and do their share in the general growth of the child. Where conditions permit and the abilities of child and teacher are up to their part of the task, ten years in this kind of experience will probably give the child an acquaintance with the materials and terms of drawing, painting, and modeling, and some amount of skill in the use of them. He will have seen good workmanship through the eyes of a young workman, and he may have begun to understand something of the order and meaning that can be reached in such work." T h e difference in point of view between the work in the lower grades and that in the upper grades, suggested by this statement, corresponds very closely to the difference between the "stage of romance" and the "stage of precision" described by Professor Whitehead. 2 Perhaps emphasis might be placed on the importance of drawing and painting in connection with other studies and possibly a little of the point of view of Whitehead's final "stage of generalization" might be introduced by some study of the theory of design, but the latter comes in more naturally at the university level, along with more intensive theoretical and historical study. This is quite a different matter from the mere emphasis placed on free creative activity which some 2

A. N . W h i t e h e a d , Aims of Education

and Other Essays

York, 1929), Ch. II, " T h e Rhythm of Education."

(New

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regard as such an important factor in the development of the child and even the adult, and about which there has been so much vague talking and thinking. T h e idea has been carried to an extreme in some of the teaching in our so-called progressive schools and colleges. T h e principle underlying much of this is that study is not primarily a matter of acquiring useful knowledge or discipline, but rather a means of developing personality or emotional poise, or whatever it may be called. Music may be needed for one person, visual art for another, dancing or mathematics for a third. Even assuming infallible judgment on the part of the teacher as to what are a student's emotional needs, the conscious emphasis on all study as more or less therapeutic 3 in aim tends to encourage low standards in the study itself and a general sloppiness both of thought and execution. 4 Moreover, the visual arts are not unique in affording a means for the exercise of creative activity. T o 8

T h e practice of drawing a n d p a i n t i n g may, of course, h a v e

value in the treatment of the mentally abnormal; b u t the consideration of that problem is b e y o n d the scope of this study. * In one .college which I visited recently I f o u n d examples of drawing and painting, executed some in the biology department, a n d others in the art department. T h e former, in which precision in thought and visualization, a n d exactness of statement were essential, were infinitely superior, even in aesthetic result, to the "artistic-looking," free expressions accomplished in the art studios under the guidance of "professional artists."

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quote Dean Haggerty of the University of Minnesota: "There is no reason in a natural program of education why the graphic arts should provide the sole or even the chief means for creative activity. Intellectual activity moving an individual into new realms of experience may be creative in any field, and even arithmetic may be so taught as to provide genuinely creative experiences for a child. Clearly, other subjects can be so taught and the use of language is a peculiarly fertile field for creative experiences. It is by no means clear that the graphic arts have any great advantages over other subjects as an instrument of creative education." 5 In the high school grades, practice might well be subordinated to the understanding of the general significance of art. This is rather the reverse of present custom. Art has been traditionally taught in high schools as a matter of acquiring a useful skill, and the tendency has been to specialize in various types of art which might be taught in a more or less practical way, like the designing of posters and magazine-covers and other forms of "commercial art." When not leaning toward practical performance of this type, it has run into a poor imitation of art-school teaching of imitative drawing and paint' Μ. E. Haggerty, Art a Way of Life (Minneapolis, 1935).

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ing. There has always been a temptation to turn out artistic-looking work for exhibition at the expense of any real understanding. Such teaching has little use from the standpoint of general education. T h e tendency noted in many high schools at the present day to emphasize "appreciation" would seem a move in the right direction; but as it is actually carried out in the form of prescribed courses (as in many of the high schools of New York City, for instance), even in the hands of the best teachers, it is a well-nigh hopeless undertaking on account of the number of pupils and the short time allotted to it.6 Hence more progress in the working out of sensible methods may probably be expected from experiments conducted in the teaching of smaller classes. Many interesting experiments are being conducted to develop more reasonable ways of teaching the visual arts at the high school and preparatory school level. T h e Worcester Museum, cooperating with preparatory schools in its immediate neighborhood, is engaged in the distribution of visual material illustrating the civilizations of various periods, to be used more particularly in connection with the study of history and literature. This is treating the art öf any period as an essential part of its life. This apβ See H . R o s a b e l l e M a c D o n a l d , " A r t Appreciation in the N e w York City Schools," Art Education Today ( C o l u m b i a University, 1935).

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proach is useful in breaking down the distinction between art and life in general. It is probably the most promising experiment that has yet been undertaken in connection with the teaching of art at the high school level, especially among schools too far removed from museums for frequent visits. T h e material is very carefully chosen and is fine in quality. T h e various sets are closely related to the whole program of the study of history and literature in schools preparing for college. T h e brief explanations prepared to go with each set are excellent. Without very great outlay of funds, the idea may easily be copied in other localities with adaptation to special needs. At Phillips Andover Academy an experiment is being conducted in the teaching of the principles of art in connection with its history, beginning with materials and structure, and proceeding thence to formal considerations. This is the sort of course that one at present associates with the college rather than the preparatory school, and it cannot be given except by a thoroughly trained teacher; but it belongs perfectly properly in the preparatory-school curriculum. As more well-trained teachers become available, other schools will be able to offer such instruction. Reference has already been made to the experiment in treating visual art as a definite part of life

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which is being carried on at Owatonna under the auspices of the School of Education in the University of Minnesota. There are also interesting experiments being carried on by certain especially competent teachers in high schools scattered throughout the country. In their smaller classes, composed of pupils particularly interested in the subject, they have often thought out their aims very clearly, even if they sometimes lack proper facilities for carrying them out. They realize that what actual practice in drawing and painting is undertaken is a means toward the end of understanding, and that their teaching is measured by what goes on in the pupil's head and not by the superficial exhibition value of what he produces. In the public schools of Boston, especially in the lower grades, particularly satisfactory results are to be found in the teaching of the principles of design. In some of the New York high schools experiments in line drawing, both from imagination and from life, are noteworthy. Interesting experiments on a small scale are also being conducted in many private schools, like the Shady Hill School already mentioned. One of the principal obstacles to carrying out a reasonable program lies in the difficulty of getting properly trained teachers. It has been pointed out by one of the instructors in the New York high

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schools that the present teachers of art in the schools are either graduates of schools of education who decide they would like to teach art, or graduates of art schools who decide they would like to teach or are perhaps forced to teach to make a living. In neither case are they adequately trained for their jobs, though some have been able to train themselves on the basis of a really inadequate formal preparation. Emphasis should be placed for the time being on turning out properly equipped teachers for the schools, and this is primarily a responsibility of the college. In the meantime, experimentation in methods of teaching should be carried on where opportunity permits. SUMMARY OF WORK AT SCHOOL LEVEL

T o be more specific, our program of art instruction in the schools, assuming properly prepared teachers, would be somewhat as follows: Elementary

Schools

(1) Practice in elementary problems in design to inculcate understanding and feeling for general principles of order. (2) Practice in imaginative drawing and painting based on direct visual experience to develop visual knowledge and, to some extent at least, to develop a vocabulary of form and tone. As noted above, the

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points of view of design and representation may often more naturally be combined in the same exercise. (3) Study of fine examples in connection with both of these objectives, especially for training in discrimination, which should be the principal aim in all this teaching in the schools, and also for widening the child's outlook and increasing the capacity for intelligent appreciation of visual art of all kinds. W h e n opportunity permits, this study may best be done in the museums, for these more and more provide an opportunity for children of all ages to become acquainted with objects of good quality which form an intimate part of the life of different peoples. T h e function of the museum in this particular is quite generally recognized, b u t it will be discussed more at length later on. W h e n museums are not available, the formation of collections of good photographic material is of the utmost importance. High Schools (1) Study of elementary theory of design and of the materials and terms of the various arts. (2) Study of fine examples, as in the elementary grades, b u t possibly in an historical manner, as in the study of English literature, to gain acquaintance with masterpieces that may be used as standards of judgment. Much of this may be embodied in the study of history and literature, with art regarded as

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a definite part of the life of each period considered, as in the Worcester experiment. (3) Application of the studies to problems of everyday environment. T h e way in which this is to be done depends on the teacher's ingenuity in devising problems adapted to individual circumstances. (4) Practice in drawing and painting as an aid in the understanding of principles. Drawing and painting from imagination may possibly be continued at this level, but natural emphasis falls on direct drawing from nature for the sake of acquiring more definite knowledge. Interesting work of this sort is done in some of the New York schools. I should also like to see introduced at this point drawing from fine examples as a means of obtaining an insight into the quality of masterly performance; but this requires, in addition to special materials, expert instruction, or else it becomes a dead thing, and for the present I hardly dare to recommend it at this stage. T h e problem will be discussed later. All this necessarily implies a great deal of experimentation; but that is one of the more hopeful things about the future of art education — that it will for a long time, I hope always to some extent, remain in an experimental state, and that there seems little chance of its ever becoming subject to a special examination of the College Entrance Examination

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Board. The efforts of the Committee on Education of the American Institute of Architects to have art included as a subject for examination by the College Entrance Examination Board seem to me mistaken. As a part of a comprehensive test to describe the individual, as used in the so-called Pennsylvania Study, it would be another matter.

III THE COLLEGE a foundation of some practice in drawing and some knowledge of the art of the past and of the part played by artistic or aesthetic judgment in everyday life, a student would come to college. He might at this stage decide that his main interests were in other fields but that he would like to continue his training in the fine arts to some extent from the standpoint of general culture. Assuming that the college comprises a well-rounded department of fine arts, he could take various courses in fine arts according to his particular desires. If he wished to know more about the general principles of art he could choose courses in general theory and practice. He could develop his technical ability in actual drawing and painting as an avocation, as he might continue the practice of music as an amateur; or he could take courses in the history of art, according to the time which his major studies allowed him for work in this particular field.

W

ITH SUCH

For the student who does not major in art much may also be done outside of the formal teaching in courses. A number of colleges and universities have

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established lending collections of reproductions of drawings and paintings. These are framed, and they may be borrowed, like books from the library, for longer or shorter periods, with the possibility of being exchanged from time to time. Temporary exhibitions of originals or reproductions form another means of informal teaching. These correspond to the occasional concerts which are given in almost all institutions. As in the case of concerts, exhibitions are naturally of little educational value unless high standards of quality are maintained. A student majoring in art, and let us say especially in painting, would proceed to a more complete mastery of the subject as he would proceed to a more complete mastery of the subject of English, or any other language, if he were concentrating or majoring in it. He would go on to more advanced study of the theory of design and of the general principles involved in representation. This would be like studying rhetoric in connection with English. A good deal of his study would take the form of actual practice in drawing and painting. This would correspond to practice in composition in English. T h e student would in this way gain a knowledge of the vocabulary of drawing and painting, and of the methods and procedures underlying good quality of performance. He would necessarily study the general history of art. Assuming that his principal inter-

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est is in painting, he would study especially masterpieces of painting of the past with the idea of acquiring standards of judgment in this art. T h e r e is nothing which makes such a study of art different from the study of any other means of expression as a college subject. T h e r e is no reason for segregating students looking forward to professional practice in painting, or in sculpture, at this stage, any more than there would be a reason for segregating people who are planning to be poets or novelists, with the idea that they should practice all day long in penmanship, or typewriting, without any thought of becoming acquainted with masterpieces of literature. A student trained in this way, if he should then decide to pursue the practice of painting as a career, would have some knowledge of the principles of design underlying all the arts, and he would have some understanding of the art of the past, as well as that of his immediate contemporaries. He would have at least had the opportunity to acquire some critical judgment. He would know something of the history of art, something of the peculiar conditions determining the rather chaotic condition of the visual arts at the present day. He would have some understanding of technical methods and processes, and their relation to the various types of painting. A n d he ought at least to know whether he has any real promise of

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ability in the profession of painting, or perhaps only a superficial talent. A student might come to the conclusion in the process of his college career, or even at the end of it, that, although he had an interest in the fine arts, it did not run as he had thought, earlier in life, toward the actual practice of painting; or he might decide that, on account of the peculiar conditions governing the practice of painting at the present time, it would be futile for him to become a painter of a kind of picture for which there was no serious demand. Or he might decide that the prospect of earning a living in the practice of painting was altogether too risky. Unlike a student who has engaged only in technical practice in an art school, he would know something about the subject of art in general, and he would have at least something of the general education provided by a college course. He would be prepared to turn to careers in other fields requiring a similar sort of background — architecture, museum work, teaching or research in the history or theory of art. In any of these cases, he would go on to graduate study. On the other hand, he might decide at this point on some career not directly related to the study of art at all. T h e study of art as a major subject in a well-organized department in a college is as good a preparation in normal methods of thought needed in

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most pursuits, and in an understanding of spiritual values needed in life, as the study of other subjects — it may be superior to study in many other fields. Thus not one but many careers offer themselves for choice to the student who has majored in the history and theory of the fine arts competently taught in college, and the broad range of his studies has given him the opportunity to acquire what we think of as a truly cultural education. The same thing can hardly be said of a course of study in the narrow routine of technical practice in an art school. T h e director of one of our large museums told me recently of interviewing a graduate of one of the leading art schools of the country who couldn't afford the risk of undertaking the career of professional painting for which he was trained, and was applying for a position in the museum. The applicant in this case was unusually bright and prepossessing, but simply had not had the necessary fundamental training, even in art, that he might have had in a good college, to fit him for work in the museum. For a large majority of its students, the objective of the regulation art school is wrong. Few of its students can ever follow the profession of the practicing artist; but all of them might be turned into useful citizens if they were given, along with the study of other subjects in a normal way, an understanding of

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art as a part of our cultural heritage and as a necessary factor in our everyday life. In other words, most of these students need the liberal education of the college rather than the narrow technical education of the modern art school. The study of art should be treated as a vital part of general education. As in the earlier stages this is the natural function of the teaching of art at the college level, while advanced specialization should be reserved for those adequately equipped to proceed toward professional practice. Unfortunately, however, many of our colleges and undergraduate departments of universities, in undertaking the teaching of art, have, like the art schools, lost sight of what should be their main objective; and these have established departments, or schools, or colleges of art, as if the training of practicing artists was their primary aim. These departments have been simply art schools of the regulation sort, or poor imitations of these (often with lower requirements of admission than are maintained in the college of liberal arts), in which the courses are all aimed toward the teaching of art solely as a vocation. The elementary practice courses in such schools are sometimes open to the students in other departments of the college or university; but they are designed almost exclusively as practice in the technique of imitative drawing and painting, con-

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sisting usually of charcoal drawing from casts and from life. Even if these courses were satisfactory for students going on to advanced work in painting, they are not adapted to the needs of the general student; for, although they may give some practice in one kind of drawing, they give little insight into quality of design and performance which the general student might get out of work of a different type. In some institutions there are separate departments of the history of art and of the graphic arts. This division is part of a general unfortunate tendency toward vocational specialization at too low a level. T h e separation of history from theory and practice in the fine arts is nothing short of absurd. However, it goes with the idea commonly entertained that the non-specialist student needs to know only the history of art, and that the specialist in the practice of art needs to learn the technique, but should not "waste" too much time on the study of history, or even theory. But an understanding of fine examples, which comes only through a study of general principles in connection with the history of art, is as indispensable for the development of critical judgment on the part of the practicing artist as similar understanding is indispensable for the writer; while, on the other hand, a certain amount of practice, in drawing at least, is natural for almost anyone,

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and is, indeed, almost necessary to give full appreciation of quality and design. There is also apparently a widespread idea that a student must be taught specifically all the details of problems which he is likely to run up against in actual life. For instance, some universities maintain separate courses in the fine arts for students in home economics. In these courses, primarily for women (as if man had nothing to do with the house), specific problems dealing with the arrangement of furniture and the selection of rugs, lamps, wallpapers, or curtains, are dealt with as if taste were something to be learned in connection with each individual type of article in the home, and as if a person were helpless in actual life in the presence of some new problem which had not been discussed in the class. Instruction of this sort, if it is to be of value, must be based on a broad training in the fundamental principles of all art as this is manifested in fine examples. As a matter of fact, if a man really learns something about the general principles involved in, let us say, Gothic art, or the art of the Italian Renaissance, he can apply these principles to the choice of a chair, or a chintz, or a dress. This is the way in which taste and judgment in the visual arts have usually been developed; and the person of taste does not reveal it in a wallpaper and not in an ash tray. Taste cannot be divided off into watertight compartments. Moreover,

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when arts like drawing and painting are taught exclusively as manual skills, without reference to examples of high standard and the study of history that is necessary to make them understandable, the result is bound to be performance of low grade. It is not necessary or desirable that all colleges or universities should train students in specific vocations in the field of the fine arts. What we need is a power of understanding and critical judgment in the visual arts on the part of a larger portion of the general public which determines standards of production, and to develop this power is the principal function of the teaching of art at the college level. A college or university which cannot train students in the profession of the fine arts according to the highest possible standards should give its students an understanding of the history and theory of art in connection with practice so planned as to provide greater insight into the underlying principles of design and of performance. Students who then reveal a capacity to do professional work in a particular art should be handed on to institutions properly staffed and equipped to give advanced training, just as in the case of law and medicine. In institutions possessing separate departments or schools of art, it would be wise to change the objective from that primarily of vocational training to one of knowledge and understanding of art as an essen-

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tial factor in general culture. This has been done in the case of music, as at the University of North Carolina, where the former School of Music, with technical training as a principal objective, has been changed into a department similar to other departments, like English and French, with the aim of developing the understanding of music as a vital part of the spiritual life of the general student body. A similar change of objective is advisable for many colleges and universities in connection with the fine arts. As to the existing art schools, some of these might be taken over by the universities and established on a sound scholarly basis as undergraduate departments, or as graduate schools along the lines suggested later on. Some of the schools maintained in connection with museums might change their objective so that, in cooperation with schools and colleges, they might play an active and invaluable part in the education of the public instead of the artist. The museum is probably the best institution to undertake the larger part of adult education in the fine arts. Other schools might change the nature of their objective to train what, for want of a better term, I have called "workers" in the various specialized industries in which ability to draw or paint, and a knowledge of fundamentals of design, are necessary. This will be discussed later.

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SUMMARY OF WORK AT COLLEGE LEVEL

T o sum up this program of art education in the college, one should have: (1) Courses in the history of art. The usual practice is to have some of these serve both as a general introduction for students majoring in the visual arts, and as broad surveys for students majoring primarily in other fields. Personally, I am becoming more and more sceptical of the usefulness of broad surveys as introductory courses. Often, I think, it is better for the student to delve rather deep in one field — the Italian Renaissance, for instance, as representing the heart of all later European art — before going on to others, which then have more significance, even if covered less thoroughly. Even the student who can take only one course in art may "get more out of it" if he takes a course in a special field rather than one in which he merely accumulates a lot of facts that give little insight into more specifically artistic qualities. Other courses would be in special fields or in special arts, as in departments of history or literature, according to the capacities of the faculty; but also, as in these departments, there would be the aim of providing, at least by tutoring or seminars, an adequate covering of the subject. (2) Courses in theory and practice. These would give an understanding of the terms of

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drawing and painting, including the general theory of color or tone relations; the different modes of drawing and painting; the theory of design in its relation to all the visual arts, including the theory of architectural design; the various processes and materials used in drawing, painting, and engraving, and in other arts. They would also give an opportunity for practice, corresponding to practice in writing provided by courses in English composition. In many colleges at the present day the teaching of art is restricted to courses in the history of art. Sometimes, along with this, a few courses in drawing on the regulation art-school model are offered. In other cases, as noted above, there is a whole department or school of art of the regulation sort (or a separate school of architecture, sometimes associated with a school of engineering), and it has been pointed out that work in schools of this kind is of little value from the standpoint of general education. In only a few colleges is there work in theory and practice of what I should consider a reasonable type as part of a general education — courses which, taken together with courses in history, assist the student in acquiring a better understanding of design and of performance, and hence sounder judgment. 7 ' Because what is meant by theory in connection with the visual arts is not as well understood as what is meant by theory in music;

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The general treatment of practice in drawing and painting as an aid to understanding had, I believe, its inception in Harvard College some forty or fifty years ago. T h e elementary work in theory and practice is now well established. More advanced work still needs further study and experimentation to make it thoroughly satisfactory; but the idea underlying it, to treat practice in drawing and painting in much the same way as practice in writing, is, I believe, thoroughly sound. In some other colleges, courses with a similar aim have been established, but this sort of work has not been developed as rapidly as might have been hoped, due, no doubt, to the fact that an instructor competent to carry it on has to have a rather special advanced training for which no provision is made at the present time. T h e graduate of the art school is ordinarily not competent for this kind of work. or by rhetoric (which corresponds to theory) in writing, a discussion of the subject is added in the appendix.

IV T H E GRADUATE SCHOOL N OUR ideal program we should have, after the

I

college, a graduate school for all phases of the fine arts as we now have graduate schools of law and

medicine. This suggestion seems almost revolutionary to

persons who have accepted the orthodox point of view of the nineteenth century that the creative activity of the artist is somehow of an entirely different nature from that of persons in other pursuits, and that a prospective artist should, as soon as his "talent" is recognized, waste no more time in the "routine" of general education. T o be sure, there is difference in people in their ability to use their hands; and not all who can use them readily have the special capacity necessary for acquiring learning in the manner typified by ordinary academic study. However, as pointed out by Professor Dewey in the passage previously quoted, the proper practice of drawing or painting or of any of the visual arts requires intelligence quite on a level in its demands with the pursuit of so-called intellectual subjects, and it is perfectly possible — I believe probable — that we have limited our education in college too exclusively to

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persons who can use their minds in one particular manner, though even now we have to make a certain allowance for the student who is "good at languages" and "bad at mathematics," or the other way round. As to the person who is afraid that knowledge of the history of art and of its theory may harm his originality and retard his inspiration — much the same thing may be said of him as Bliss Perry says of the poet: " T o the sentimentalists who believed, in Stuart Sherman's phrase, that attention to linguistics was 'killing the poet in them,' I pointed out that if a poet could be killed by a year or two of hard work on the early stages of Germanic or Romance languages, the quicker he died the better." 8 In a great many cases, the talented youth who leaves college for the art school is attracted by the glamour of the artist's apparent freedom of life, or possibly he has been unduly praised by friends and relations for his talent and so considers himself "above" the college type of education. The consequence is that he loses interest in college and does poorly, when, as a matter of fact, if he wanted to buckle down to it, he could in nine cases out of ten do perfectly good work and with more satisfactory results in the end. In any case, more is required of a really significant artist than mere talent in the use of hand and eye. 'And Gladly Teach (Boston; New York, 1935), p. 251.

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An artist, as well as a writer, must not only have a gift for expression, but he must have a thorough knowledge of his craft, and, if painter or sculptor, he must also have some ideas worth expressing; if architect, some underlying philosophy of the proper relation of form and function. Bosworth and Jones refer to the lack of such a philosophy on the part of many architects and teachers of architecture, 9 while on the side of painting, one is constantly struck by the lack of anything to say on the part of many painters brought up in the imitative training of the art school to sketch from nature in a perfectly competent way. In the "Corcoran Biennial" of the year 1935, for instance, it was almost impossible to find a painting which revealed on the part of the author any genuine interest in the subject painted. Painters out of the art schools tend to wander about looking for "effective" subjects, which become merely excuses for putting on paint in the manner they have learned. T h e greatest technical skill is of little use to an artist unless he has acquired in some manner or other some genuine purpose. So it is, if possible, to produce thoughtful as well as technically accomplished men that a sound general education is proposed as a foundation for artistic as well as other professions. * F. H. Bosworth, Jr., and R. C. Jones, A Study of Architectural Schools (New York, 1932), p. 185.

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A graduate school of the type suggested might be made up of separate schools of architecture, painting, archaeology, and so on, or, better, it might be all one school with closely related departments. What we need most at the present time is to train leaders in the whole subject of the fine arts as a profession, as we train leaders in a profession like medicine. T h e fundamental training of a doctor is along much the same lines whether he later specializes in surgery, or in general medicine, or in research work in bacteriology. In the same way, there is much overlapping in the study required of specialists in various phases of the arts. T h e architect, the painter, the sculptor, the art historian, are all dealing with the same fundamental principles of design. Their basic education in an understanding of the problems of the visual arts as a whole should be much the same. If, finally, they could work together in a comprehensive graduate school, with frequent personal contacts, sometimes in the same courses, they would develop a mutually beneficial sense of cooperation, derived from the consciousness that they were all working toward much the same general goal. Let us take first of all the training of the painter, not because the training of the professional artist would be the most important function of this school (we have seen that the training of the artist is really of less importance than the training of the public —

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and teachers and museum workers who are going to train the public), but because the suggestion of training the painter in a graduate school, along with the architect and art historian and museum worker, is less usual, and because, as suggested above, painting happens to be the field to which I have devoted most thought. In the first place, in assigning the painter to the graduate school of a university for his advanced training, it might be objected that we have assumed that every artist should have a broad liberal education as a foundation, and that artists in the Renaissance, whom we have been taking more or less as models, had no such liberal education. But didn't they, in a sense, have much more than the students segregated in our art schools at the present day? They certainly did not have a formal education in school or college; but we must remember that cities like Florence, or Venice, or Bruges, or Antwerp, in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, were comparatively small, and that the artists in them were not only craftsmen but often prominent citizens. As friends of poets, scholars, and scientists, they had the opportunity to acquire considerable learning; and often they took their place among the leading intellectuals of their day. T h e liberal education of the painter may have been informal, but it was often on a level with that of poets and statesmen. Learning does not guarantee

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great art; but it is doubtful if uneducated and ignorant painters and sculptors, no matter how well provided with talent and scholarships, can ever produce art of any great value. Obviously, training in a graduate school in which high standards were maintained would not provide for all persons who would be needed for work in the visual arts. How additional workers might be trained is suggested later on. At the same time it must be remembered that if our whole program were in effect, a student might obtain considerable practice in drawing and painting in school and college. There are already many schools and colleges where he can get a good deal. For many uses of drawing and painting the college or even the high school training might be sufficient, just as school or college training in writing is sufficient for many authors. T h e graduate school which I have in mind would be for the definitely superior students who could reasonably be expected to take a place as leaders in their profession, either as practicing artists, or as teachers, for whom there is at present an especial need. For such students a thorough knowledge of the terms and materials of their art is essential. Much of this, like technical knowledge of any kind, can, of course, be picked up informally; but a certain number of students trained in a thorough knowledge of the materials and principles of their art would set a standard which would be of

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enormous benefit to professional practice as a whole — even to those unable to pursue such a training in thorough fashion. Admission to advanced professional study for the painter, as for students in other fields, would be limited to students of high intellectual standing. The mere possession of an A.B. or S.B. degree would not be sufficient evidence of this, for, as pointed out by Dean Ackerman of the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism in his annual report for 1935, a degree does not guarantee high intellectual standing or even any real education. Admission would necessarily be selective, with the aim to admit only students competent to carry on advanced work. It is even possible that some scheme could be devised by which exceptional students, though not provided with a college degree, might be admitted. These students would have acquired in the college, or in something equivalent, along with a sound general education, some definite understanding of the visual arts. They would also, if our whole program were in effect, probably have had practice in drawing and painting from the time they first went to school, and would have acquired some, perhaps considerable, technical skill. Actually, however, long continued training in technical skill for an intelligent student is often not as essential as is usually supposed. In this connection it is significant to recall the investigation conducted

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in a western university as to technical skill in musical performance. One reason usually given for sending students to conservatories of music, instead of to college, is that, in order to acquire proper technical skill, a prospective performer should spend practically all of his time in technical practice. This investigation showed that students in college, spending only a rather small portion of their time in technical practice, made just as much progress in proficiency as students devoting most of their time to it.10 T o take another example, the technical skill required of a surgeon is certainly very great, and it no doubt requires a certain amount of natural coordination of brain and hand and eye; but this coordination is not uncommon (it is required in all games like tennis or baseball or golf), and a surgeon develops his skill gradually through work in the laboratory in college. T h e surgeon needs, most of all, precise anatomical knowledge. Painting is, in a similar way, as much a matter of knowledge of what to do, as it is a 10 Philip G. Clapp, "The Dilemma of Crediting Applied Music in the Bachelor of Arts Course of Study," Conference on Music in Liberal Arts College (Music Teachers National Association, Oberlin, 1935). Mr. Clapp writes: "This comparison seems to indicate that students make good use of limited time for practice, but tend to kill time if they have to fill long periods; and, further, that a general course of study does actually stimulate a good mind, in spite of the flabby nature of some items traditionally prescribed in liberal arts colleges" (p. 22).

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matter of mere physical practice. Complete mastery, both in understanding what to do and in physical technique, comes usually only after some years of mature experience. Many of the greatest painters have indeed lacked any great natural dexterity of hand; and great admiration for mere dexterity has, as in the case of later Japanese painting, almost always been accompanied by a decline in content. 11 T h e professional study of painting in a graduate school would be pursued in much the same manner as the professional study of architectural design, by means of problems in painting for specific places and specific purposes. Drawing from life would then be practiced as a means of acquiring exact information about figures and objects toward the end of the creation of a definite composition, just as was done in the Renaissance. T h e procedure would then be the universal aesthetic process defined by Dr. Coomaraswamy as "a succession of problem, solution, and execution." In the Renaissance, a painter usually began with a sketch of the main arrangement of his composition as conceived imaginatively. He would then proceed to a working up of this composition with precise 11 "Extreme straightness is as bad as crookedness. Extreme cleverness is as bad as folly. Extreme fluency is as bad as stammering" (Brian Brown, The Wisdom of the Chinese, N e w York, 1920). This saying is attributed to the philosopher Lao-tse.

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definition o£ forms. Much of this precise definition was a matter of imagination based on definite visual experience — a matter of visual memory which his training had developed. For more detailed information, he might turn to the study of a model. He might make a drawing of a leg, a hand, a torso, or of a detail of drapery. These drawings were made as a means for the completion of his imaginative conception, and were entirely different in purpose from the completed art-school drawings from life, done in mid-air, so to speak, as practice in imitative rendering.12 On the basis of this precise definition of form in his composition (usually embodied in a full-size cartoon) he proceeded to the performance of the finished work in terms of paint in a perfectly methodical manner. Moreover, his first essays as an apprentice were directed toward the acquiring of definite methods of drawing. On arriving in the workshop, the apprentice was ordinarily set down to the copying of his master's drawings, many of which would be scattered about in the workshop. By this It is to be noted that there are almost no completed drawings left from the Renaissance, except in the form of engravings which, like paintings, were imaginative affairs. Many of our contemporary artists seem to have been struck by this, and there has developed a vogue for unfinished drawings. They are made, however, from a point of view often entirely different from that which produced the unfinished drawing of the Renaissance master.

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means he acquired technical skill and, at the same time, a manner of expressing form which amounted to a vocabulary. As time went on and he acquired individual visual experience, he would probably develop this vocabulary into a manner of his own. In a similar way he acquired a vocabulary of color, or tone, on the basis of his master's work. His expression was always in the terms of these vocabularies, expanded or contracted according to his individual ability. A t the same time, he learned the details of the technique, or the craft, of painting. Aside from his preliminary drawings made as a means of acquiring a vocabulary, all his work was directed toward helping his master in the production of a particular piece of architectural painting — either a painting on the wall of a building, or a painting on the panel of a piece of furniture, like an altarpiece, or a cassone. Practically all the painters of the Renaissance were trained in this way to be architectural painters. It meant that they were always thinking of the use of their visual experience in making completed compositions. Painting was never a mere superficial imitation of visual effect. Practically down to the beginning of the nineteenth century this was true, even in the case of portraits and of still-life or landscape subjects. Even when paintings were produced as independent things to be hung on walls, the painter al-

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ways envisaged a particular type of wall and room which would form their environment, and he painted for this special environment. This point of view, maintained throughout the training of the artist and throughout his whole practice, turned out painters who knew their job as craftsmen thoroughly, and it enabled a few to be great creative designers on their own account. It is diametrically opposed to the imitative study from life in the modern art schools, and the imitative procedure of direct sketching from nature, employed in professional practice. T h e significance of this imaginative procedure is a thing that even the modern non-naturalistic painters have hardly begun to understand, although they constantly imitate the superficial effect of the result as found in so-called "primitive" art of various types. In an attempt to achieve something of the non-naturalistic effect obtained in all earlier painting, the modernist often merely "backs away" from the nature which he nevertheless has in front of him. The Renaissance painter, working in an imaginative way on the basis of visual experience, strove to express his ideas as definitely as possible. Although he worked in a non-naturalistic mode of expression, his non-naturalism was an unconscious result of a traditional manner of expression, rather than something consciously affected. Within the limits of his knowledge and of his vo-

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cabulary, he tried to be as exact as possible, rather than inexact. The training of the artist in the Renaissance (and the artist was trained in much the same way in other periods and in other places — in China and Japan and India, for instance) was, of course, intimately connected with the apprentice system, and it has occasionally been thought that we ought to revive that system. Attempts to do this have necessarily resulted in failure, and it should be recognized that it is impossible to restore the system under present conditions. Nevertheless, by careful consideration of its real advantages, we can reclaim a good many of these in a perfectly reasonable way. Instead of basing our craftsmanship on purely empirical experimentation, we may, by means of scientific study of pigments and media, arrive at sound methods of work. By a study of the various factors in color or tone, we may arrive at satisfactory vocabularies for painting. A good deal may be learned about handling by studying the works of various masters. This is the method of study which the more intelligent painters of the nineteenth century adopted. We may also recover much that is valuable in the imaginative procedure involved in all the great painting of the past. This does not mean that we should train painters to do only architectural or decorative painting; but practice in an imaginative procedure, with emphasis on design, forms

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probably the best training for all kinds of painting. A master like Holbein was trained in his father's workshop as an architectural painter. As it happened, in after life he was called on to paint mostly portraits; but he could have painted on walls, or on the panels of sacristry cupboards, if it had been necessary, and he actually designed title pages for books and made drawings for small woodcuts which as illustrations were subordinated to the composition of the book as a whole. T h e design which is such an important factor even in his portraits could hardly have been achieved without this preliminary training in "decorative" painting and imaginative procedure. Much of our painting at the present day naturally has its point of departure in things seen in nature rather than in things imagined; but this has been true in all naturalistic art. Training in an imaginative point of view would result in a more orderly and well thought out presentation of one's subject, no matter of what type, even in the case of painting done more or less directly from nature. No painting could be more realistic than that of Degas; but Degas' painting was at the same time imaginative in conception and in procedure. His compositions were based on drawings made for the sake of information in the manner of those of the Renaissance; and his finished pictures were based on carefully thought out

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design. T h e education which Degas was forced to acquire independently for want of anything of the sort in the regulation ateliers, we may adopt, if we like, as a definite method of instruction. Like all education, it would not be completed with study in a college or graduate school (even the Renaissance artist was only at the beginning of his real education when he left the workshop of his master); but this study would be in harmony with that which a painter would pursue throughout the course of his life; and it would, in the manner of all sensible education, give him a definite basis for continued individual study. T h e r e is another point to be considered in connection with the teaching of drawing and painting. It has been noted above that the first practice of Renaissance, as well as Asiatic, artists was a matter of copying drawings of preceding masters. In a similar manner many of the best painters of the nineteenth century made copies of both paintings and drawings of Renaissance masters as a means of study. T h u s Manet made copies of paintings by Velasquez, Rembrandt, Titian, and Tintoretto; and Degas not only copied paintings by Ghirlandaio and Holbein and Lawrence, but made dozens of drawings after masters like Botticelli, Benozzo Gozzoli, Credi, etc., some of these meticulously exact facsimiles. T h e r e has in recent years developed a strong preju-

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dice against copying, principally because a fear is entertained that it might destroy originality; but certainly no painter of the nineteenth century was more original than Degas, and mere copying does not appear to have hurt the originality of Manet or Whistler. T h e prejudice against copying is, I believe, entirely mistaken; it is due to the fact that in the nineteenth century such a lot of bad copying was done, and often from a mistaken point of view. The revulsion that one feels against the sort of copying one sees being carried on in the European galleries by unsuccessful artists is perfectly natural. Most of this is done in an unsystematic, imitative fashion, merely to reproduce in a thoroughly specious fashion the superficial effect of the original, without any attempt to achieve its quality. Moreover, copying, so far as it has been practiced in our art schools and in children's classes in museums, has often emphasized the reproduction of superficial effect, rather than an attempt to get at the essential quality of the original. Copying from poor examples is, of course, useless. Nevertheless, the intelligent copying of a masterpiece of drawing or painting, as a means of thorough understanding, can hardly be equalled by any other method of study. It is useful for the general student of art as well as for the special student of painting. Its value, however, depends on how it is done, on the attitude of the student, and how touch thought he

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puts into it. For this reason, the transposition into another medium, as, for instance, a Japanese print, based in the first place on brush drawing, into a line drawing in pencil, has definite advantages; or a study of the general tone scheme of a painting, done on a smaller scale, and possibly in a different medium. Such transposition necessitates thought. T o get consistent organization of pencil lines in the one case, or indication of main relations of tone in the other, is not at all an easy matter to be accomplished heedlessly. In a similar way, mere imitation of the superficial effect of a painting surface, without regard to materials or procedures, may be quite valueless, and may be achieved in the course of time with little real understanding; hut a study of a detail of a fine piece of painting, executed with an attempt to discover the palette and the procedure, and to approach the handling, used in the original, may be most instructive. In this instance we are speaking of the study of fine examples as a matter of acquiring a sound and comprehensive background. What I have said does not mean that an artist should go about all his life borrowing motives from pictures which he sees in museums. By an intelligent study of masterpieces of design, he should acquire an understanding of fundamental principles which apply to all artistic expression. As he becomes more mature, he may possibly need this study less, though it is almost always a

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profitable experience to take a little time off occasionally from a narrow routine of work to see really fine things. It enables one to get a more just perspective in regard to one's own performance. T h e fear of losing one's originality in such a process is only a confession of weakness. Rubens, for example, did not hesitate to copy Titian's "Europa" and "Adam and Eve" when he was fifty. We cannot at the present day escape some knowledge of the art of the past; but, to be of any use, this knowledge should be thorough rather than superficial, or it will be reflected in superficial qualities in our own work. As to some of the difficulties with the methods of teaching at present in vogue in the regular art schools, and especially in connection with drawing and painting, even the best of such teaching is a hang-over from the methods worked out in the course of the nineteenth century — largely a result, as pointed out above, of the dominance of a new, undiscriminating patronage which set up standards for judgment now generally recognized as unsound. T h e method of training adopted by the art schools was almost as far removed as possible from the training that artists had had up to that time. It was based on the curious assumption that learning to paint consists in learning to make on canvas or paper an imitation of the superficial effect of a subject, in the manner of a color-photograph. After the artist had

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learned to make such an imitative rendering fairly successfully, all that he had to do was to go out and look for a subject, or arrange one in his studio, and paint it. I am told that a certain English artist, when he wanted to paint the interior of a peasant's cottage, had to knock out the end wall of his studio so that he could arrange his whole scene down to the least detail in order to paint directly from nature in what seemed to him the only proper manner. T h e result, of course, was a typical Royal Academy picture. Needless to say, such a procedure would have been incomprehensible to any European painter before the nineteenth century, to say nothing of any Asiatic master. That this imitative procedure was accepted as the usual one is illustrated in the literature of the nineteenth century by the various stories in which an artist is described as in despair of finishing his picture until by chance he meets on the street exactly the right face, the owner of which is dragged into the studio; after securing the proper model in this way, the painter proceeds to finish his masterpiece without difficulty! Even in the recent motion-picture, "The Private Life of Henry VIII," where apparently great pains were taken to be historically correct, Holbein is shown painting directly from life, in a series of sittings, in a manner directly opposed to his prac-

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tice of deliberate building-up of the painting on the basis of a drawing made in a single sitting. As opposed to the imaginative conception of design in earlier painting, in this regular procedure of the nineteenth century (and it still forms the essential basis for teaching in the usual art school) design or composition became a matter of choice or arrangement of the subject, or a slight shifting of details, in painting otherwise carried out in a straight imitative fashion. "Emphasis is placed on drawing and painting the human figure with study of design and such accessories as may be necessary to perfect the composition." This statement taken from the catalogue of a well-known art school is typical. Granted that this is the proper aim in the teaching of painting, there have been art schools that have done a pretty good job. In such schools the student has proceeded from rubbed-in charcoal drawing, first from casts and then from life, to painting from stilllife and painting from life, until he has achieved considerable, sometimes extraordinary, dexterity in the imitative matching of the tones and the shapes of whatever model he may have in front of him. He has been taught above all to achieve anatomical and perspective accuracy in order to win the approval of juries, and critics, and the public, brought up to judge painting on that basis. Without question, there have been a few great artists in the last hundred

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years, and a great many others who have produced work that is decidedly worth having, who have had at least part of their training in such schools. But it is a question whether these artists have not emerged in spite of the training rather than because of it, for the best of them have usually got a large part of their education independently by study in museums or private collections. There is also no question that the work of the typical artist of the nineteenth century who received popular acclaim was decidedly inferior both from the point of view of design and of craftsmanship to even the average work of earlier centuries. One objection to the ordinary method of teaching in vogue in the art schools, and also in many college departments of art, is not ordinarily noted, namely, that, although the rubbed-in method of charcoal drawing enables almost any pupil to get in time a fairly respectable result, and with a minimum of instruction, it is very poor training as a basis for the acquiring of good technical performance. All the great painters of the past learned first of all to use a point, whether pencil, pen, chalk, or brush. By learning the possibilities of expression by line, they learned something of the fundamentals of expression, as opposed to imitation, of form in all the visual arts. By learning to shade with a definite repetition of hatched strokes, they learned something of the

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"legato" touch that is the basis for all satisfactory quality in drawing and painting. Charcoal drawing, as ordinarily practiced in the cast and the life-room of the art school, with its emphasis on imitation, gives almost nothing of this fundamental training in genuine technique and in understanding of the basic conventions of artistic expression. The general reaction against the nineteenth-century point of view has, of course, had a considerable effect on inherited methods of teaching, and all sorts of experiments are being tried. Even those art schools which according to nineteenth-century standards have done a pretty good job are beginning to feel that there is something wrong with their methods, and to pursue their traditional aims in a halfhearted fashion, or to replace these nineteenth-century methods with all sorts of haphazard schemes. For instance, because Cezanne often painted still-life subjects without regard to exact perspective, but ran his table uphill, if he wanted to, in order to get a satisfactory arrangement of areas within the enframement, I have found students in art schools in various parts of the country painting still largely in an imitative fashion, but with all their still-life subjects arranged on the floor to ensure the up-hill effect! In other classes students were painting from life, but, as I said above, "backing away" from the model into abstract two-dimensional pattern, determined

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to be non-natural at all costs, although it is obvious that such improvisation is far removed from the orderly succession of "problem, solution, and execution" essential to any first-rate achievement. In one of the most conservative art schools in the country, exercises in imaginative pictorial design have been introduced alongside of the regular charcoal drawing from casts and painting from life, but without a proper teaching of the fundamentals of design and color on which these should be based. In other cases, the unfinished drawing made from short poses of the model, revealing often a superficial influence of Renaissance drawing, has taken the place of the elaborately finished drawing from life made from the same pose retained for a week or more. In some of the more "liberal" schools, a student may enter at almost any time and stay as long as he likes, working as much as he likes. Some of these places are lively and stimulating; but the teaching in them is hopelessly lacking in system. T h e students are supposed to learn from each other, but this learning is too often a matter of passing on tricks in momentary favor. Waves of enthusiasm for various "stunts" pass through such institutions and the groups of artists connected with them. They are not based on any thorough understanding of the principles involved. In the teaching of painting in the art schools, emphasis has been placed on the imitative technique

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of painting, and there has been too little attempt to give any sound training in the history of art or the critical study of masterpieces of the past, or in the fundamentals of the theory of painting — the theory of color, for instance. T h e typical instructor in the art schools has been pretty ignorant of such things himself, largely on account of defects in his own training. There have been art schools in this country where the students have actually been discouraged from going into the museums for fear that they might lose their originality! There has been almost no attempt to study the painting of the past in any systematic and thorough way. Even where courses on the history of art have been given, these have usually been quite inadequate. Also, very slight attention has been given to matters of materials and procedure which are vital factors in performance. As opposed to the haphazard experimenting or the rigid training in imitative rendering of the regulation art school, a course of study in painting, such as I have suggested, begun in the college, and completed in the graduate school, would be systematic without necessarily being at all rigid, and it would be based on knowledge and understanding. The graduate of such a course would, in the first place, be assumed to know something of the history of art, and a great deal of the history of painting, especially as this implies an understanding of the different points of view

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underlying different modes or styles of painting. He would, in the second place, be assumed to have an understanding of the general theory of design, and especially of pictorial design. In the third place, he would be expected to have a knowledge of materials and processes. Fourth, he would have had practice in drawing and painting based on an understanding of methods of expression used in various types of painting. Fifth, he would have had two to three years of practice in pictorial design, using this term as analogous to architectural design. In this work his practice would not be confined to one manner or mode, or one technique; but he would not proceed in a purely haphazard fashion. He would be expected to acquire an understanding of the principles underlying different modes of painting, as these have been used in the past, or are used by contemporary artists, so that he could adapt his manner of expression to his individual purpose, or perhaps to the particular occasion. Such a training would be designed to give above everything else a knowledge of fundamentals which are just as essential in painting as in writing — or football. One of the principal objections to the present system of art education is that it does not teach these fundamentals. T h e object of such an education would be to provide the student with fundamental knowledge on the basis of which he might develop his powers of in-

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vention and expression as far as his individual capacity would allow. He would not be a great master when graduated, and he might never become one — not every product of the Renaissance workshops became a great master — but he would have a foundation for further study and self-development to the limit of his ability. He would really be a master in the sense that the artist of the Renaissance, on completing his apprenticeship, was a master. So far, in this plan for graduate work, we have been considering only the training of the painter. T h e training of the sculptor would be laid out on somewhat similar lines. Indeed, our whole proposal is simply to put the training of the painter and the sculptor on the same basis as the present training of the architect, landscape architect, or the specialist in city planning. These professions are acknowledged to require a broad education as a basis, with specialized professional training reserved for later years as advanced work. 13 Such systematic training is equally essential for the painter and the sculptor. Although in the teaching of architecture as a pro13

As in other professions, this may seem to m a n y persons to p u t

too great a p r e m i u m on degrees a n d credit in courses, b u t this difficulty with our whole educational system is recognized; a n d experiments are b e i n g conducted and investigations made with the view to its correction, especially so that intellectual maturity a n d capacity may be recognized regardless of mere time-serving. I refer to what is k n o w n as the Pennsylvania Study m e n t i o n e d above.

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fession present methods often leave much to be desired, there is on the whole a much more thorough understanding of proper aims and methods than in the teaching of painting or sculpture. T o be sure, much of the recent practice of architecture in this country has been a sort of elaborate building-block affair in which form has had little organized relation to structure, and attractive details of the design have been filched from older buildings and fitted together without much understanding of the significance of their original use. Moreover, architects in general are just beginning to discover that buildings made of steel or concrete do not have to look as if they were made of stone. Nevertheless, in the better architectural schools more and more emphasis is placed on planning and structure, and on the determining influence which these necessarily exert on form in any completely thought out and satisfactory design.14 " As a matter of fact, architectural schools in this country have been in much the same situation as the art schools in which drawing and painting have been emphasized — only that, on account of the close connection of architectural design with engineering and the obvious requirement on the part of the architect of intellectual capacity and education, the architectural school has been commonly accepted into the university. In spite of this, it has often remained a separate and isolated department. The idea of requiring a general education in college as a background for architectural training is of comparatively recent origin, and many of the architectural schools still require only graduation from high

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On the other hand, it is possible that the architectural school has confined its attention too narrowly to mere building and its general design, without giving sufficient attention to other arts, closely related by structural and functional considerations, which go to the making of our complete environment. school for admission. T h e obvious tendency is more and more to push professional architectural training into the graduate school, with a general education in college as a prerequisite. Like the graduates of the conservatories of music with little knowledge of music, and the graduates of art schools with little knowledge of art, graduates of architectural schools have often had little knowledge of the fundamental principles of artistic design and little genuine artistic judgment. This accounts for the lack of distinction in much of our architectural design. Facility in capping off even a perfectly sound plan and structure with details borrowed from a variety of historical monuments, no matter how good each may be in itself, can hardly be called architectural design in any genuine sense, though it may produce results that are mildly acceptable. Certainly the best schools and the best instructors aim for something more than this; but they have a long way to go to ensure that their students study the monuments of the past for the sake of fundamental principles in the relation of function, materials, structure, and form which they manifest, rather than as a collection of motives to be freely exploited. Even to approach this goal necessitates a better understanding of the principles of architectural design on the part of the layman as well as the professional architect, and a breaking down of the barrier between the two. This is largely a matter of general education. It is touched on by F. H. Bosworth, Jr., and R. C. Jones in their Study of Architectural Schools. They write: "Architecture has not as yet explained, in language the layman can understand, what its aims and ideals are, to the extent that painting and sculpture have explained theirs" (p. 123).

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There is at present probably an over-specialization of artists in restricted fields. In the Bauhaus founded by Gropius at Dessau and the Kunst-Gewerbe Schule in Vienna, attempts have been made to overcome this obvious defect of modern training. " I n the Viennese School," writes Mr. Ely Jacques Kahn, "the various studios devoted to painting, sculpture, enamel work, metal work, pottery, furniture design, and architecture, to mention the important divisions only, are under one roof, and the student is thrown into contact with every variety of activity." 15 Mr. Kahn, in his study of the training of the craftsman in Europe in the Renaissance, and in various countries in the East at the present day, seems, like many other persons, to reveal a nostalgic longing for the master and apprentice system. Under present conditions of existence, however, this is as impossible to restore in the industrial arts as it is in painting and sculpture. Yet, as in the case of painting, it is possible to regain many of the advantages of the apprentice system by working out the problem in a rational way. It should be remembered that doctors and surgeons were not so long ago trained by an apprentice system very similar to that of the medieval artists; but no one would for a moment suggest that we 15 Ely Jacques Kahn, Design in Art and Industry 1985), p. 176.

(New York,

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should go back to such a system in medicine. Rather, in place of the purely formal textbook instruction of our earlier medical schools, we have actually regained some of the advantages of the earlier method of training by means of clinics and interneships in hospitals, just as we have worked through to a case system in the teaching of law and business administration. Many of the advantages of the earlier method of training, depending on the close relation of master and apprentice in the solution of actual problems, have thus been regained, but in a method adapted to modern conditions of society, and with certain advantages over the older system in the way of greater breadth of vision and greater variety of opportunity. The problem of training designers in the industrial arts may be approached in much the same way. At present, design is usually taught in the art schools in a purely formal way, just as architecture was taught in this country a few years ago, with little reference to the actual materials and processes which are determining factors in all such design. On the other hand, in the schools devoted to technical training in various industries, like textiles, ceramics, metal-work and so on, design, if thought of at all, is treated as of secondary importance or as a matter only of meeting changing fashions of the day; while the arts and crafts movements, which in a way com-

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bine the two points of view, are cursed with the desire to produce museum or collectors' pieces, priced often beyond a reasonable figure for the average person as compared with manufactured articles of ordinary commerce. Thus, when not a matter of semiamateur dabbling with old-fashioned handicrafts, the manufacture of furniture, glassware, silver, jewelry, etc., is thought of purely as a matter of business, with design of any kind dragged in only as a means of promoting sales — usually mainly as a matter of novelty. Here again, what we need most is a raising of standards in the demand; but, to meet improved quality in demand, we need also well-trained designers in all the arts. If the students in our architectural schools and possibly allied schools were properly trained in the fundamentals of design in all the structural arts, they could turn, as occasion or inclination demanded, to industrial art of various types as well as to architecture. At present, design in the industrial arts may not seem to be so dignified a career, but a few welltrained leaders in this field could give it as much dignity as any other. Cellini was not above designing a saltcellar. We need thoroughly trained leaders in this field. Some of them might become heads of workshops employing many specialized workers. Others might supply the need for well-trained men and women in

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positions like those of "buyers" in our large stores; for on them, to a large extent, depends the proper meeting of improved standards of taste on the part of the public, and they may even play an important part in the training of this taste. T h e leaders in design in all the visual arts should have a thorough professional training on the basis of a broad general education. They should be thoroughly intelligent and cultivated persons — the kind of persons that we now as a matter of course expect as leaders in law and medicine and other professions. Adequate training for such persons could be provided in professional schools which maintained the same intellectual standards as schools of law, medicine, and architecture, or the standards already established in the graduate schools of arts and sciences in which advanced study in the field of archaeology and the history of art is at present ordinarily pursued. SUMMARY OF WORK AT GRADUATE OR PROFESSIONAL SCHOOL LEVEL

T h e whole program of advanced study either in a graduate school or the later years of a special school, according to the various fields, might be summed up somewhat as follows: (1) Advanced study of the history of art. A general knowledge of the history of art would be assumed. Advanced courses in this field would

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be designed primarily for teachers or writers or museum workers, but would in many instances be taken by students in other fields, such as architecture or painting. Many of the courses would naturally be seminars. (2) Advanced study of the theory of art; research in theory of design, etc. Understanding of the general theory of design would be assumed in the case of all students as a fundamental background — this would be obtained ordinarily in the college. Advanced research in this field by competent students is a pressing need. Even from the point of view of science, the theory of color is still in an elementary state. The application of this to the visual arts has hardly been touched. (3) Architectural design and construction, landscape architecture, city planning, as already established. Some of the work in these fields would be open to students in other fields. For instance, an elementary course in architectural design would be useful for a painter or a sculptor. (4) Other structural arts. Study of the principal materials and processes used in the so-called industrial arts, and of design related thereto. (5) Drawing and painting, or pictorial design (corresponding to architectural design).

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The training in this field would be conducted, as outlined above, by means of a series of specific problems. There would be study of different modes of expression and of materials and processes. Some of this work would be open to students in other fields. Needless to say, there is no such advanced work in painting established in any university at the present time; but there is the suggestion of an approach to it in one or two institutions. At Yale, for instance, the problem method is employed, but the technical work is based on inadequate preparation in theory and history, and many of the students admitted lack sufficient general education. At Harvard an effort is made to teach the fundamentals of theory, as well as history, in a thorough fashion; but there is no attempt to carry on advanced professional study. (6) Sculpture. Much of this work would be open to students in other fields, like architecture or painting. (7) Museum administration and curatorship. The curator or director of a museum needs first of all to know his subject, so his main work would be in the fields of history and theory. (8) Technical care of works of art. This is now recognized as an important concern of museums and collectors. T o become competent for this work requires a sensitive eye, manual skill, and a knowledge of physics and chemistry, as well as of the

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history and theory of art. The time will no doubt come when museums will seek for this work men who have had a thorough training in a university. (9) Teaching in all fields. The training of competent teachers is of fundamental importance, for on the quality of the teaching in universities, colleges, and schools depends the training of both public and artist. Therefore, in many fields of the visual arts, the training of teachers (including those in museums) would, for the present, be almost the principal concern of a graduate professional school.16 I find that I have neglected stage design as a distinct subject altogether, and yet among the visual arts I believe this is today a more really vital art than the arts of painting and sculpture. The general principles involved bring it into close relation to architecture and painting. T h e physical aspects of lighting and color are fundamental. However, the art of stage design is so much a part of the art of the drama as a whole that it can hardly be taught independently of work in the drama, to which it must always be subordinated. The appropriate place for the study of stage design is in the workshop of the professional school of drama, according to the plan in actual practice at Yale University and some other universities. A study of the fundamentals of architectural and pictorial design necessarily involved in stage design might well be achieved by cooperation with a comprehensive school of the visual arts. M

ν SCHOOLS FOR WORKERS IN VARIOUS ARTS OR TRADES HE program of advanced training in a graduate school suggested above has mainly in view the training of leaders in the different fields of the visual arts. In many of these fields it would be necessary to have workers and assistants of various sorts, and these might in many cases be given a less elaborate training. A division between workers and designers may seem artificial, and, of course, it would be, if the designers knew nothing of materials and processes, and the workers knew nothing of design; but if each group were trained properly, this would not be the case. T h e leaders or directors of workshops would be assumed to have a longer training which would give them a broader horizon and knowledge of design in many fields (though they would be no less craftsmen for that), whereas the workers (for want of a better term) would have a shorter training in more special fields, but would be provided with a sound training in design at the same time. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the distinction was common. It still exists in certain other fields.

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T o turn again to medicine, for example, nurses are needed to carry out the doctors' orders. They may be given a sound training for this purpose, but without any idea of making them doctors. A similar idea is already pursued in some independent art schools. For instance, in the architectural department of the Pratt Institute, students who are graduates of high schools are trained primarily as architectural draftsmen rather than as architects. Other students are trained for positions in the departments of interior decoration in stores and for similar positions. This seems to me a very sound procedure, provided the instruction is offered by competent teachers. Such training would be adapted for students who for various reasons are unable to go to the college or the university. It would not necessarily be of inferior quality. It would merely have a different objective. I have referred to the training of the nurse in the medical profession. Since 1890 the training of nurses, like that of doctors, has been improved in quality; but this has been possible only on account of the higher standards established throughout the medical profession. With the raising of standards in artistic training, a higher level of attainment could be expected of workers in the field generally, whether designers of advertisements or book-jackets or magazine covers, cartoonists, interior decorators, workers in silver, potters, makers of furniture, or workers in

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any of the other numerous branches of the visual arts. This suggests a real function for the established art schools of the country. It means a shift in objective from the routine training of painters and sculptors to a thoroughly adequate training in the theory of design and in the technique of special crafts and industries. Training of this sort is actually provided to some extent in art schools but usually as a subordinate part of their work. If this were offered frankly as the main objective of these schools, we should then have the talent of their students directed into lines of useful work, promising not, perhaps, fulfillment of adolescent dreams of a romantic life with final achievement of everlasting fame and great fortune, but the means of making a decent living, as in the case of artists and craftsmen in other ages. They could be employed in factories and shops under thoroughly trained leaders, and always with the possibility of educating themselves further, to emerge as leaders themselves. This would return the artist to a normal point of view and a normal life. T h e definite possibility of achieving this sensible modification in the aim of the established art school is suggested by the superiority to be observed in many of the art schools of this country, of the work in abstract design over that of representation. In visits to various art schools during the last few years I

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was constantly struck by this fact. The work in design, though mostly a matter of mere pattern on paper, to be sure, was amazingly good; while almost always the regular painting was amazingly bad. On the whole, the formal principles of design are probably taught by instructors who in this field are more competent. What is needed especially is to bring this design into more direct contact with the materials and processes of modern commerce. In that direction lies the real possibility of the new Renaissance that people talk about so glibly. It might be objected that in thus disposing of all the regular art schools devoted to the turning out of professional artists (in the popular sense), we are doing away with the possibility of learning to draw and paint on the part of a portion of our public who now want seriously to know how for their own enjoyment, or as an aid in some occupation, if not as a principal vocation, and that art schools are needed for such persons. But it must be remembered that in the program we have laid down the opportunity for everyone to learn to draw and paint is taken for granted both at the school and at the college level. Everyone connected in any way with the practice of the arts must of course be able to draw and paint to some extent. So the students attending our art schools converted into schools for workers would draw and paint as a necessary part of their work.

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There would even, as suggested above, be no obstacle set in the way of an unusual genius's emerging as a leader in this field. But for the majority, the plan would mean direction of their talent and interest into useful and normally remunerative work, instead of leading them on into a hopeless struggle to produce masterpieces of painting, with the inevitable result that they merely pile up unwanted canvases in their studios and achieve no normal remuneration for their activities. Drawing and painting, and sculpture also, would then be recognized as requiring, for any high achievement, both background and thorough training, but would be regarded as things to be practiced on a modest scale by almost anyone. These arts would then rightly be placed in the same category as the arts of poetry or the drama. With our present emphasis on painting and sculpture as if they alone mean art in any important sense, there is too much demand on the part of the public that an artist be a great genius; and too much temptation for persons gifted with only a modicum of talent to develop ambitions not warranted by facts. A realization of the knowledge, involving sustained intellectual effort, necessary to become first-rate in the arts of painting or sculpture would exercise a wholesome restraint on those inadvisedly setting out on a professional career. On the other hand, many of

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these could be made into useful citizens either by being given some understanding of art as a basis for judgment in connection with their everyday life (with possibly some amateur practice pursued as an avocation) or by being provided with a sound training as workers in various crafts and industries. Although hope of honors, fame, and fortune might be sacrificed, there would be a much better chance of achieving some of the "durable satisfactions of life."

VI MUSEUMS HE carrying out of teaching like that outlined above assumes adequate collections of original works of art, readily accessible, just as the teaching of medicine assumes an adequate supply of clinical material. In the case of graduate professional schools, original material is almost essential; and such schools could be established only in a limited number of places where there are large museums. Extensive libraries and collections of photographic reproductions are also essential for advanced work.

T

Museums with collections of original works of art are also of advantage for teaching in colleges and schools for all ages of pupils, but much can be done by means of reproductions of good quality. From the standpoint of teaching, whether of children or adults, the library and the photographic collection are of fundamental importance in the small museum. It goes without saying that a college must have such collections available in its own buildings or in a nearby museum. In the case of original works of art, a small collection of high quality is of much greater value than a large collection of mediocre quality housed in impressive galleries.

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T h e museum of art is now generally recognized as an educational institution. In its collections of original works of art for people to study and enjoy, it is like a library. But it is more than a place for exhibition. It offers opportunity for more formal education both for the child and the adult, and museums recognize this more and more as an important part of their function. Classes in the history and principles of art, single lectures or lecture courses on special topics, classes in drawing for both children and adults, special exhibitions, and docent work, are all a means toward the end of training the public in understanding and judgment, and hence increasing its enjoyment of the visual arts not only as housed in the museum but outside as well. Many persons regard a museum as a place of refuge where one can retire if one wants to see beautiful things; but unless it acts on life outside in producing a more just discrimination in connection with our immediate surroundings, it is really of little use. Therefore, the cooperation of the museum with schools and colleges and universities plays an essential role in our whole program. As in the case of teachers in schools and colleges, this assumes that the curators and instructors in the museums shall have a thorough training in the history and theory of art. T h e curator must not only have sound judgment when it comes to the acquisi-

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tion of wörks of art, but he must be a scholar and to some extent a teacher as well. For his training one must look to a well-rounded graduate school of fine arts, just as in the case of other members of the profession of the visual arts.

P A R T III CONCLUSION

CONCLUSION L THE foregoing discussion implies a change in our general attitude toward the visual arts and toward the interrelation of artist and layman. T o bring this about requires education of the public on the one hand, and, on the other, of the artist as only a special part of that public rather than as a distinct and separate kind of being. I believe that the visual arts should be treated, like the art of writing, as a normal and vital part of our experience and that they should be taught in much the same way in our schools and colleges. So in laying out what I have called a rational program of education in the visual arts I have tried to make it conform to our general scheme of education in other fields. This seems to me sensible and economical. This is, however, quite different from the usual solution of the problem offered by persons concerned with education. Usually a sharp line is drawn between the training of the public in so-called "appreciation" and the training of the professional practitioner in technical skill. Such a distinction results in an attempt to flood the public with popular books and popular lectures more or less "diluted" or "denatured" in order not to tax the lay mind, and also to circulate exhibitions of pictures of the sort that the

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layman likes, or, with a little "salesman's talk," can be made to think he likes or ought to like, regardless of any real understanding or power of discrimination. Much of this, done in the name of making the public "art-conscious" — often "pictureconscious" only —has been fostered by our art organizations of one kind and another. This seems to me the wrong way to go about the matter. Actually, one person in a community with genuine knowledge and understanding is worth more than a thousand vaguely "picture-conscious" but possessing no basis for discrimination. As time goes on, the one person with genuine knowledge acts as a powerful influence in the community having its effect especially in succeeding generations, while undiscriminating enthusiasm leads nowhere. As to the artist, the present system is to take all supposedly talented students and put them into art schools of the "academic" type planned especially to turn out painters and sculptors. This necessarily results in an appalling waste in that most of these students can never pursue painting or sculpture as a career, and are forced finally to pursue other careers for which, unfortunately, in their years devoted naturally to education, they have had no preparation; while at the same time the narrow technical routine of the art school in no sense provides them with what we think of as a liberal education designed to give a

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general sense of values. Even for the painter and sculptor this education is too narrow to provide a proper background, and it is inadequate in respect to actual instruction in technique and design. T h e program which I have proposed, if it could finally be worked out, has definite advantages which may be summed up as follows: (1) It provides for the education of both artist and layman as one united problem. (2) In the earlier work, both at school and college levels, for all classes of students, the emphasis is placed on the cultural value of the study of the fine arts or visual arts as one of the humanities. Such study is a definite means, therefore, of giving students some sense of fundamental values in life as a whole. (3) As an introduction to the visual arts as a profession, it provides in its earlier stages a general foundation for all the various careers in the field of the visual arts instead of providing merely a narrow training in imitative painting and sculpture. At the end of college a student would have, in the first place, a sound general education; in the second place, he would be prepared to go into advanced professional study for any of the different professions of architecture and other structural or functional arts, painting, sculpture, history of art or archaeology, critical writing, museum work of various kinds,

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care and preservation of works of art, theoretical or technical research, or teaching in its various phases. (4) Advanced study in a professional school could be maintained at a high intellectual level as opposed to the hopelessly low intellectual standards which at present prevail in the regular art schools. (5) Advanced study would be conducted in a comprehensive professional school based on the fundamental interrelation of all the visual arts, as opposed to the present tendency to separate them into independent vocations. (6) For students unable to pursue a liberal education in college, the special schools would give training in particular crafts or techniques, and thus provide needed workers in various industries involving artistic skill of one kind or another. Such students would be prepared for normal and reasonably remunerative activity in the arts in place of the abnormal pursuit of fame and fortune with seldom reasonable remuneration. High standards could be maintained also in these schools, but the training would be limited in scope and in time. Competent instructors for such schools would require the broader and larger training provided in the advanced professional schools. One difficulty that we have to face is that at present, with the exception of architecture and the allied

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arts of landscape architecture and city planning, all professional study of the visual arts is conducted in "academic" art schools of the nineteenth-century pattern; and that even teachers for courses in practice in schools and colleges have to be recruited largely from the graduates of such institutions, in which the particular needs of the general student are not taken into account in any sound fashion. As has been pointed out, in such schools the objective is wrong; the instruction, even for the professional artist, is inadequate; and the standards are hopelessly low. Indeed, many of the independent art schools are principally money-making concerns, organized and maintained by persons trained in other art schools who are unable to make a living in the practice of their art or who wish to eke out a meager and uncertain income by means of teaching, and find also, perhaps, a chance of furthering their prestige and enlarging their clientele by means of the authority pertaining to their positions as teachers. None of them can personally be blamed for this, of course; and it must be recognized also that there have been outstanding teachers in the art schools, as well as many others equally conscientious, if not so well equipped, who, often at great personal sacrifice, have maintained the highest ideals and exhibited unselfish devotion to their task, and that many of these accepted the responsibility of keeping alive a genuine

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interest in the visual arts when colleges and universities persistently refused their responsibility in this direction. Nevertheless, the whole system is unfortunate, and it is evident that with our quantities of art schools scattered throughout the country, we have, as suggested at the beginning of this report, an exaggerated form of the situation that existed in medicine fifty or seventy-five years ago. The remedy for this situation seems to lie in the same direction as in the case of medicine some forty or fifty years ago. Abraham Flexner, in an article in the Atlantic Monthly,1 refers to the fact that the number of medical schools in the United States and Canada has been cut down from one hundred and fifty-five, mostly of low standards, in 1890, to about fifty at the present day, almost all maintaining high standards of scholarship. T h e establishment of graduate medical schools of highest possible standards, first of all at Johns Hopkins, and then in a few other universities, was responsible for the general improvement in quality of instruction, in research, and in practice, throughout the medical profession. It is probable that much the same result could be accomplished in the artistic profession by the establishment of a few graduate schools of the visual arts in which highest possible standards were 1

"Private Fortunes and the Public Future," August 1935.

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maintained. In fact, if one such school could be established, the solution of the rest of our problem would follow as a matter of course. For instance, the lack of properly trained teachers to head departments of art in some of our universities and colleges is a striking and embarrassing phenomenon. It is possible to obtain men who can teach the history of art in a thoroughly scholarly way; and it is easy enough to find graduates of art schools who can teach the practice of drawing and painting in the regulation manner, or in various experimental methods developed in reaction to the regulation manner. But to find a man with real vision as to the aims of teaching art in a college and with thorough knowledge of his subject, especially on the theoretical side, is extremely difficult. At present there is no place where such a man can obtain adequate instruction. A graduate school such as I have suggested would provide this. Naturally all the second-rate and third-rate art schools could not be wiped out of existence all at once. At present they often serve a useful purpose. A reasonable system of education must gradually be set up to take their place. This depends largely on our ability to train teachers with a rational point of view to undertake the instruction in our schools and colleges. The fact that so much progress in teaching in schools along intelligent lines has already been

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made encourages one in the belief that it is not an impossible, though distinctly a "long-term," project. As to the feasibility of setting up a comprehensive graduate school of the fine arts, I believe it could actually be done within a reasonable time, though it would probably be better to develop such an institution gradually, making sure of each successive step, than to attempt to do it all at once. The main difficulty would be in finding competent instructors, for the teaching in such a graduate school would be of a different kind from that offered in the usual art school, and broader in scope than that now offered in the art departments of our universities. But even this difficulty would not be insurmountable. T o carry out such a program will require on the part of the university a greater sense of its responsibilities in the field of the visual arts than it ordinarily exhibits at the moment. Many college presidents and administrators believe that, because they cannot be certain of turning a given number of students into the same number of great masters, they should keep their hands off the professional training of artists, and stick to the training of scholars and scientists, about whom they feel more confidence. They are even inclined to advise students of talent not to go to college at all, but to get on with their art — which at the present day means attending an art school of the regulation sort.

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They do not realize the almost criminal responsibility for wrecked lives which they assume in advising — indeed practically compelling — these young men and women to enter into a narrow routine of work which in the majority of cases is a complete waste of their most precious years. This responsibility must be recognized and faced. The point of view of these administrators is due to the mistaken idea, developed especially under the peculiar conditions of the last century, that the only artist of any value is the outstanding and unaccountable genius. Naturally, a university cannot set up any system of instruction that will guarantee to produce great masters out of all of its students, no matter how carefully selected, any more than it can do this in writing or even in law or medicine. What it can do is to provide a place where men studying for the profession of the visual arts may obtain a thorough knowledge of the materials and the technique of their craft, along with a broad cultural background, as necessary to them as to other men. It can turn out men who in their various fields have a thorough knowledge of their subject and may directly and indirectly exert an enormous influence on understanding and discrimination in the community as a whole. Such men are as valuable products as scholars and scientists in the narrow sense of the term. T o provide for them is, I believe, a definite responsibility

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of the university. By so doing, it may bring about a recognition of the fact that only out of a background of broad understanding on the part of the layman and thorough knowledge on the part of the artist do the leaders whom we think of as great masters finally emerge. It may bring a recognition of the fact also that the aesthetic factor may enter into all our activities and that visual art may be something besides painting and sculpture. T h e university has it in its power to return the visual arts to their normal place in life as a whole.

APPENDIX

T H E T H E O R Y OF T H E V I S U A L

ARTS

INTRODUCTORY

N THE foregoing study I have referred frequently to the teaching of the theory of the visual arts. As what is meant by theory in this connection is often not well understood, I have thought it advisable to give in this appendix an outline of the general content of this phase of the subject.

I

It is a curious fact that for anyone interested in music, either as performer or listener, the study of theory has always been considered as important as the study of historical development and has been recognized as a necessary basis for intelligent practice in singing or in playing an instrument as well as for composition. But in the visual arts there has been practice on the one hand, and the history of art on the other, with theory largely neglected. This is perhaps due in part to the fact that the scientific basis of music is well understood, while that of the visual arts has been very imperfectly understood even by physicists and psychologists. Musical harmony is founded on definite mathematical relationships; but harmony in color or tone depends on relations of a different nature. It is largely a matter of relations of contrasts or intervals between tones, measured in terms of the three psychological attributes and, since visual art is spatial instead of temporal, of quantity. It is also possible that certain other factors which may be called psychophysical are involved. Even to the scientist the

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exact nature of the connection between the physical stimuli and the psychological attributes is, in spite of the accuracy of measurements of light, a matter very imperfectly understood. Few artists, to say nothing of laymen in general, have anything but the vaguest notions even in regard to the psychological attributes of color which form in part the terms with which a painter must express his ideas. T h e practice of the visual arts was for a long time based on empirical knowledge acquired in the workshops and passed on from master to apprentice in a continuous tradition varied according to the needs of succeeding generations of artists. When the workshop tradition, which involved a knowledge of materials and processes and orderly procedures, finally broke down in the nineteenth century, there was no scientific knowledge either of color theory, or of pigments, media, and technical procedures, to fall back on. Artists were unable to obtain the sort of information in regard to the use of their materials and to methods of expression, which they had formerly received as a matter of course in the workshops, and, since they had to get along as best they could without it, they came finally to think all theory superfluous and the only essentials, inspiration and personality. Nevertheless, in the last few years we have come to know a good deal about the terms of vision, about the possibility of their organization from the point of view of abstract design, and of their use in connection with representation; we know also a good deal about the materials and procedures of the various arts from a scientific point of view. Our understanding of theory is at least well advanced. I believe that, with the disappearance of

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the traditions of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance during the last century, the lack of understanding of the theory of art to take their place has been a considerable obstacle both to sound criticism and to sound technical performance. As I have tried to point out in the main body of my study, history, theory, and practice are vitally connected; and it is absurd to teach the layman only the history of art and the artist only technical procedure of a very limited type, with the study of theory largely ignored. T h e following is a brief outline of the subject. 1.

THE TERMS OF

VISION

T h e image projected on the retina of the eye, by the interpretation of which visual apprehension is secured, is made up of two-dimensional areas distinguished from each other by variations in what we may call tone, or color (if we use the latter term in an inclusive sense). W e may define any area of the visual image by defining its spatial position in relation to the center of the field of vision, its relative size or measure, and its shape, and also its degree of lightness or darkness, its specific color or hue, and the intensity of its specific color or hue. These different factors may be called spatial attributes on the one hand and tonal attributes on the other. For the tonal attributes we may conveniently use the words value, hue (or specific color), and intensity (or chroma). 1 1

Relations of these different attributes may b e expressed in a

three-dimensional diagram k n o w n as a tone solid.

T h i s may be'

based on additive m i x i n g of hues, as in the M u n s e l l solid, in which the measurements are at least approximately accurate for surface colors; or, for purposes of practical use in painting, what I h a v e called a working tone solid, based on approximate

subtractive

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We define any area of the visual image by defining its value, hue, and intensity, and its position, measure, and shape. We define the whole of the visual image by defining all its areas with regard to each of these spatial and tonal attributes. These may be called the terms of vision. What we see depends on the arrangement of these terms. Certain kinds of art, like drawing and painting, are two-dimensional in character. By means of pigment materials we may make on the surfaces of paper, or canvas, or walls, or textiles, arrangements of areas varying in position, measure, shape, value, hue, and intensity, corresponding to the terms of vision. Other arts like architecture and sculpture in the round, although seen by means of these terms, involve apprehension of three-dimensional objects or of objects existing in three-dimensional space, and, like painting in which space is represented, are in part a matter of two-dimensional arrangement of the terms of vision and in part, also, a matter of arrangement of positions and measures in three dimensions. In the case of architecture, for example, a building may be apprehended as an organized relationship in three dimensions. At the same time, from any one point of view it may be thought of as a two-dimensional pattern. Any of its surfaces may involve merely an organization in two dimensions, except as a three-dimensional element is involved in what we think of as texture. T h e same thing is true of threemixtures, may be used (see Arthur Pope, An Introduction to the Language of Drawing and Painting, vol. I, "The Painter's Terms," Cambridge, 1929).

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dimensional objects of the so-called arts and crafts or industrial arts. All visual art is, therefore, a matter of arrangement apprehended on the part of the observer primarily by means of the visual terms. 2. ART AND AESTHETIC EXPERIENCE

There is no generally accepted definition of the term art or of the term beauty, b u t for the purposes of this study we may make the following assumptions as working hypotheses. T h e practice of visual art is the doing of anything to the point of aesthetic satisfaction in the contemplation of the visual result — including in this any arrangement in three dimensions that is visually appreciable and any relation of ideas expressed by means of visual terms. Aesthetic experience depends on the emotional appreciation of organization in the object contemplated. Aesthetic value may be said to depend on the quantity of emotionally appreciable order manifested by any object at any given moment to any individual observer. This allows for variations in our reactions from time to time, and variations in the reactions of different individuals, but recognizes the factor of apprehension of organization as fundamental. Professor Birkhoff's formula, Μ (aesthetic measure) equals Ο (order) divided by C (complexity), is correct for perfection of order, b u t is not, I believe, entirely accurate for emotionally appreciable order. 2 Complexity or variety (including con2

G. D. Birkhoff, Aesthetic Measure (Cambridge, 1933), and Arthur Pope, "A Quantitative Theory of Aesthetic Values," Art Studies, vol. I l l , pp. 133-139.

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trast) is at times a necessary means or condition of emotional apprehension. A fundamental factor in the aesthetic reaction is that it is not predictable for any given person at any given moment. T h e infinite variety of the personal element is always a controlling factor. For instance, we all have prejudicial associations of a good or bad nature with all sorts of things which we see in regard to both their shapes and their colors. If we associate a given color with a person whom we dislike, our distaste for that particular color may be so strong as to preclude any satisfaction in contemplating the object or objects in connection with which it is employed, while agreeable association with the same color may predispose us to greater satisfaction in the object than we might ordinarily experience. Such likes and dislikes, with colors, with shapes, with types of people, with kinds of places in landscape, play an active part in aesthetic reaction, though often we may be entirely unconscious of them. Such associative prejudices are, however, to be regarded merely as conditions of aesthetic experience, rather than part of it; and an intelligent person may overcome such prejudices to some extent — he may get beyond the "know what I like" stage until he finds aesthetic satisfaction even in what superficially he dislikes. 3. THE PRINCIPLES OF ORDER, AND THEIR APPLICATION TO THE TERMS OF VISION

All apprehension of organization apparently involves an apprehension of uniformity of some kind. T h e principles of order or organization may be conveniently classified as of three main types, which we may dis-

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tinguish arbitrarily as harmony, sequence, and balance. By harmony we mean uniformity of any kind (as uniformity in measure, or in shape, or in value, hue, or intensity, in arrangements of the terms of vision); by sequence we mean uniformity of a special kind — uniformity of change in a gradation or an alternation; by balance we mean uniformity of another special kind — in this case uniformity in opposition, antithesis. Specifically in the visual arts each of these principles of order may be applied to each of the terms of vision. The areas — "visual areas" — dealt with in the visual arts may be classified roughly as dots (position without extension), lines (extension in one direction), or areas in the ordinary sense (extension in two dimensions). Areas may be defined by a difference of tone (as compared with surrounding areas) or by outline. Position involves, with regard to any "visual area," direction and distance from a premise point, like the center of the field of vision. With regard to a line, it also involves the direction of the line in relation to the vertical and horizontal, and with regard to an area, the direction of its main axis in relation to the vertical and horizontal — what we may call the "attitude" of the line or area. With regard to a group of dots, lines, or areas, we may consider not only the distance from a premise point, but the intervals between adjacent dots, lines, or areas. Position thus becomes a matter of direction (or attitude) and distance (or interval). The spatial attributes, or factors, are thus: _ . . 1 Direction — Attitude Position T . Distance — Interval Measure Shape

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The tonal (or color) attributes, or factors are: Value Hue Intensity (Chroma) W e may have harmony, or sequence, or balance of any of these attributes or factors. In connection with tone or color, there are also other factors to be considered. One of them is contrast or interval between tones; another is quantity. The contrast of a tone with surrounding tones, together with its quantity, determines the relative "attraction" of the given tone. W e may have harmony, sequence, or balance of attractions. W e may have also harmony, sequence, or balance of contrasts or intervals. These are questions that have received very little attention, and much research remains to be done on this part of the subject.3

4 . DRAWING AND PAINTING IN T H E MODE OF PURE DESIGN

W e may have drawing and painting in which the main interest is in the formal arrangement without regard to representation or expression of ideas. In reality we seldom have any drawing or painting without some representation or some suggestion of ideas; but these may be subordinated to the formal arrangement, as in " Almost the only definite study of the law governing contrasts and quantities in connection with tone attractions is to be found in an article by Morton Bradley, Jr., in Technical Studies, July 1933, pp. 3-11.

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the case of formal patterns. We may classify such drawing and painting into the following modes of design: (1) All-over repetition (repeating pattern with no limits). (2) Progressions — linear or area (limited in one dimension, as in border patterns). (3) Composition within outline, or otherwise definitely limited area (limited in two dimensions). Formal or abstract design is a matter of achieving organization in these various modes along with interest in the way of contrast or variety appropriate to the particular occasion or situation. 5 . REPRESENTATION IN DRAWING AND PAINTING

At the present day we have most of us been brought up to think of painting in any complete sense as a matter of the rendering on canvas or other surface of the appearance of objects or figures of any kind as they are seen in nature. Learning to paint is supposed to mean learning to reproduce the superficial effect of nature so that what we paint on our canvas may look as nearly as possible like what we see. The layman, for instance, usually thinks of painting as something which might be "put out of business" by a perfected process of color photography, just as reproductive engraving of paintings was superseded in the nineteenth century by the perfecting of black-and-white photography. As a matter of fact, however, much of the painting of the past has been far removed from the rendering of the complete visual effect, and in comparison, the kind of painting which renders the visual effect fairly completely is found to have distinct limitations from the

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standpoint of expression both of form and color, and of idea. For instance, there are distinct and special advantages, from the point of view of clarity of expression, in the Egyptian manner of painting, and, from the point of view of rendering of dramatic narrative, in the Japanese method, although in them there is no resemblance to the visual effect in nature at all. Still other advantages over the imitative rendering of visual effect appertain to Italian painting of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Painting, therefore, instead of being an imitation of visual effect, must be thought of as a use of visual or painting terms for the expression of certain facts and certain ideas. Sometimes it may approach the rendering of visual effect; sometimes it may be far removed from this; while even in the rendering of the complete visual effect many limitations and conventions are usually involved. In dealing with the theory of representation, it is convenient to consider first of all the varied factors involved in the total visual effect. W e may then proceed to classify our different ways of drawing and painting as different modes. Such a classification is perfectly arbitrary but is necessary as a convenience for clear thinking and discussion. In the rendering of the total visual effect, the following principal factors must be considered: (1) The local tones (or colors) of objects. (2) The modification of these local tones by variations in illumination produced by modeling from light into shadow or by variations in distances from the source of illumination. The general principle governing

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such changes involves a proportional diminution of contrasts as objects model from light into shadow or are removed farther from the source of light. T h e working of this principle may be qualified by reflection, or by variations in hue in the sources of light. (3)

T h e modification of local tones and also tones of shadow by recession into the distance. T h e general principle governing these changes involves proportional diminution of contrasts from foreground into distance. This is qualified by the law governing the reflection and transmission of varying wavelengths, or what is known as "scattering" of the shorter wave-lengths (as in the blue of the air in front of distant dark objects).

(4) T h e modification of the local tones by shadows cast by other objects, as well as by modeling of the surface of objects. (5)

Perspective projection as opposed to geometric or diagonal projection.

A l l of these factors must be considered, although the subject need not necessarily be imitated exactly, in the rendering of the complete visual effect; but in certain types of drawing and painting one or more of these factors may be disregarded. T h e s e other types of drawing and painting may be thought of as separate modes or dialects of the language of drawing and painting. T h e s e modes may be classified conveniently as follows: I. Drawing. a. Delineation — expression of form by line. b. Form Drawing — rendering of the relative illumination of surfaces to express modeling of surface or general effect of illumination.

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c. Color-Value Drawing — rendering of the variations of the local tones as well as the relative illumination of surface. A variation on this mode involves the rendering of the variations of local tones without regard to relative illumination of surface. II. Painting. a. Line and Local Tone. It is also possible to have painting in local tone without any use of line, but this is a rare type. b. Relief — modeling of surfaces of individual objects without regard to cast shadows and usually without regard to the problem of proportional diminution of contrasts in modeling from light into shadow. c. Venetian or Later Renaissance — imaginative conception of effect of light and shadow but without consistent regard for diminution of contrasts. d. Total Visual Effect. Some abstraction is necessary even in this mode on account of the limitations of ranges of value and intensity as compared with ranges of value and intensity in nature. Values and intensities may be handled in arbitrary ways, and color ranges may be limited also in arbitrary fashion. These may be thought of as the principal modes, b u t many variations are possible within each mode. I n certain types of painting, such as Byzantine, Romanesque, and various kinds of modern painting, there is a hybrid mixture of some of these modes. Much of this may be thought of as a hybrid mixture of linear and plastic points of view. I n painting and drawing, as in other arts, complete satisfaction is possible only when the materials or processes and the technical procedure are harmoniously

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related to function (if the painting is architectural or decorative in character) and to general conception. Also the technical procedure must be properly related to the mode employed. 6.

P I C T O R I A L DESIGN

This ordinarily involves an arrangement of tones within a limiting outline, but in the case of scroll paintings of China and Japan there is a progression from a definite beginning to a definite end, and there is no suggestion of a limiting outline except above and below. In painting within an enclosing outline, three principal factors are involved: (1) Arrangement of areas in two dimensions on the flat surface, with regard both to space and tone. (2) Arrangement in the three-dimensional space which is represented. (3) Arrangement in the realm of ideas expressed or suggested by the objects represented. There is also involved a comprehensive organization in the appropriate relation of these three factors to each other and to the medium and handling employed in the execution. In any completely thought out picture or composition, arrangement in two dimensions, arrangement in three-dimensional space, relation of ideas, and relation of all these to technique are such closely interknit factors that they cannot be entirely separated. Painting may be architectural in aim, so that it may serve as one element in general architectural design even in the case of an individual painting hung on a wall, or it may be purely narrative or descriptive in

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aim, without any decorative intent, as in the case of the scroll paintings of China and Japan and of much of the landscape painting of the early nineteenth century. Most painting combines a representational and architectural function. 7 . DESIGN IN S C U L P T U R E

This involves formal consideration in the relation of position, measure, and shape in three dimensions, as well as in two-dimensional pattern from different points of view, and also consideration of the relation of form to material and handling. 8 . DESIGN IN A R C H I T E C T U R A L AND O T H E R S T R U C T U R A L ARTS

The formal consideration in this case, as in the case of sculpture, is a question of organization in positions, measures, and shapes in three dimensions, and also a question of two-dimensional patterns from different points of view. Tone or color may be involved in these patterns. Comprehensive organization in the relation of form to structure and materials employed and to function is also involved. The same considerations apply in the case of other structural arts, usually known as arts and crafts and industrial arts. Q. T E C H N I C A L PROCEDURES

The foregoing outline indicates briefly the content of what I should consider the major part of the theory of the visual arts. It would also include as a primary con-

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sideration a knowledge of the materials and technical processes of the various arts. In connection with painting, for instance, any true understanding begins with a knowledge of the possibilities and limitations of the materials and the procedures necessarily involved in securing a sound structure of surface and the consistency of texture usually spoken of as "good quality." Study might well proceed from fresco and tempera, in which the procedures are fairly direct and simple, to the oil technique, which, while often more complicated, requires equally systematic methods. Ordinarily at the present day little attention is paid to this fundamental matter of structure either in the teaching of painting or in professional practice. 4 After one has acquired an un* For instance, in examining a painting by one of our wellknown portrait painters — one very satisfactory as a likeness — I found the surface almost completely disorganized. There were thick blobs of paint in places, thin films in others entirely unrelated (as such variations in thickness would be related in a Renaissance painting) to expression of form. T o cite a single example, where the shoulder came against the background, the tone of the coat had been carried too high, the tone of the background had then been brought down over it too far, the tone of the coat had been painted on top again, and so on, in layer after layer, until there was a thick ridge of paint running along the canvas, when to achieve good quality and structure the two tones should have been brought together in clean edges, without overlapping, with the paint thinner (if anything) than in other places. T h e artist had not thought out his work before he started to paint, and so naturally could not produce a consistent surface; in addition, he obviously had no knowledge of his materials or of the procedure necessary to apply these on the canvas to achieve a sound and consistent structure. In comparison, a small portrait head by an unknown Flemish master (not an exceptional work by

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derstanding of the principles underlying the use of terms and modes of expression in connection with simple materials of drawing and water-color, the first step in learning to paint —either for the student of painting from the historical and critical point of view, or for the professional practitioner — should be a study of the materials of painting (grounds, pigments, media) and of sound procedures in their use. This does not mean that to be systematic we must necessarily revive tempera and fresco processes for contemporary work. Fresco is possibly not the best process to be used in much wall decoration of the present day, for, as Lewis Mumford points out, our architecture is largely ephemeral in character, and painted decoration must likewise be ephemeral. Nevertheless, such painting may be sound in structure and executed in a systematic procedure if the painter has acquired a knowledge of his pigments, media, and technical procedures, even if these, instead of being traditional, are the product of the modern research laboratory. A comprehensive professional school, such as I have proposed, would provide laboratories for research in the various phases of abstract theory and also for firsthand experience in dealing with the principal materials and techniques of all the visual arts. any means) involved a complete understanding of what was going to be done before the work was started, and a knowledge of a sound method of applying the paint to the carefully prepared ground. The result was a surface (regardless of the distinction in the rendering of the form and color) lovely to look at in itself.