In this matter, most decidedly, we need expert advice. Let us start
with Beauty. The one who best understands Beauty is undoubtedly the
Artist. Let us call in the Artist.... Will you question him, or shall
I? You prefer to do it yourself, I see. Very well, then--but please try
to get to the point as soon as possible!
THE QUESTIONER. What we want to know is this: is it possible to teach
the child to become an artist?
THE ARTIST. He is an artist already.
THE QUESTIONER. What do you mean!
THE ARTIST. Just what I say. The child is an artist; and the artist is
always a child. The greatest periods of art have always been those in
which artists had the direct, naïve, unspoiled vision of the child.
The aim of our best artists today is to recover that vision. They
are trying to see the world as children see it, and to record their
vision of it as a child would do. Have you ever looked at children’s
drawings--not the sort of things they are taught to do by mistaken and
mischievous adults, but the pictures that are the natural expressions
of their creative impulses? And haven’t you observed that modern
paintings are coming to be more and more like such pictures?
THE QUESTIONER. Well--er, yes, I had noticed something of the kind! But
is that sort of thing necessarily art? I mean--well, I don’t want to
attempt to argue with you on a subject in which you are an expert, but--
THE ARTIST. Oh, that’s all right! The modern artist is ready to discuss
art with anybody--the more ignorant of the subject, the better! You
see, we want art to cease to be the possession of a caste--we want it
to belong to everybody. As a member of the human race, your opinions
are important to us.
THE QUESTIONER. That is very kind of you. I fear it is rather in the
nature of a digression, but, since I may ask without fear of seeming
presumptuous,--_are_ those horrid misshapen green nudes of Matisse, and
those cubical blocks of paint by I-forget-his-name, and all that sort
of thing--are they your notion of what art should be?
THE ARTIST. Mine? Oh, not at all! They are merely two out of a
thousand contemporary attempts to recover the naïve childlike vision
of which I spoke. If you will compare them with a child’s drawing, or
with a picture by a Navajo Indian, or with the sketch of an aurochs
traced on the wall of his cave by one of our remote ancestors, you
will note an essential difference. Those artists were not trying to be
naïve and childlike; they _were_ naïve and childlike. The chief merit
of our modern efforts, in my personal opinion, is in their quality as a
challenge to traditional and mistaken notions of what art should be--an
advertisement, startling enough, and sometimes maliciously startling,
of the artist’s belief that he has the right to be first of all an
artist.
THE QUESTIONER. Now we are coming to the point. What _is_ an artist?
THE ARTIST. I told you, a child. And by that, I mean one who _plays_
with his materials--not one who performs a set and perhaps useful task
with them. A creator--
THE QUESTIONER. But a creator of what? Not of Beauty, by any chance?
THE ARTIST. Incidentally of Beauty.