The issue of creativity and the role of art critics

In the 19th Century, art styles, influenced by the rising merchant class and a growing number of art collectors, began to change, to rapidly go in and out of fashion. Collectors were intrigued by novelty. When a particular art style was in fashion, Seligman (1952) wrote, the “works of all artists directly or indirectly connected with it were almost equally sought…It was almost as if no critical sense existed (p. 4). “Even more surprising,” he continued, “is the sweeping manner in which all were discarded overnight’ (p. 4). “Taste,” he wrote, evolves “by a series of fanatical infatuations and complete rejections” (p. vii).

A few decades after David had painted The Crowning of Bonaparte and his Empress, Constable, viewing this painting, wrote: ”As a painting it does not possess anything of the Language of the art, much less of the oratory of Rubens or Paul Veronese; it is below notice as a work of execution” (December 6, 1822, cited in Goldwater & Treves,1945:268). Almost fifty years after Goya completed his Disastres de la Guerra (Disasters of War, 1810), Edouard Manet dismissed Goya’s work, calling it “inferior” (1865, cited in Goldwater & Treves,1945:303). Innes (1884), in a letter written to the editor of an unknown paper, referred to impressionism as a “humbug,” a mere “pancake of color” (Goldwater & Treves,1945:344).

Narrative paintings (that depicted a story and emphasized subject matter) and naturalistic representations (realism) began to be disparaged, partially as a reaction to the use of art to promote war and revolution. An emphasis now was placed on color, line, and form. Eugène Delacroix became famous primarily for “using a color palette capable of eliciting specific emotional reactions from his viewers” (Fleming 1974:316).

As art began to change, individuals were no longer certain what distinguished good art from bad. Individuals like John Ruskin and Edward Stieglitz would step in and use their influence to develop contemporary art and taste. In the 1850s, painters had doggedly painted according to Ruskin’s precepts. At the turn of the century, collectors bought art only from artists endorsed by Stieglitz (Maas 1984:14).

The unrelenting search for the new characterized this century, as it would characterize the next. Yet, as early as 1821, Ingres issued a cautionary note:
Let me hear no more of that absurd maxim: ‘We need the new, we need to follow our century, everything changes, everything is changed.’ Sophistry—all of that! Does nature change, do the light and air change, have the passions of the human heart changed since the time of Homer: ‘We must follow our century’: but suppose my century is wrong. (cited in Goldwater & Treves 1945:218)

In the 20th Century, Berenson (1948) wrote that visual art should “tune us like instruments--instruments for ecstasy” by stirring “all of our emotions” (p. 147). Ecstasy was aroused, not by the narrative, but by visual art’s “significant form” --the combination of lines, forms, and colors that characterized visual art (1914/1977:40). Recognizing that we did not know precisely why line, color, form could “make people happy, sad, excited, and so on” (Blocker 1979:101), Langer (1953) proposed that the emotional response actually was to the symbols. "Art,“ she argued, “is the creation of forms symbolic of human feeling" (p. 40).

The establishment of the new style of visual art, the avant-garde or modern art, which would come to characterize the early part of the century, was built on the destruction of the visual art that had been done earlier. Men like Edward Stiegliz, Clement Greenberg, and Herman Broch dismissed traditional art, even paintings that prior to that had been considered to be great works. The younger generations of 20th century artists, Seligman (1952) explained, rejected all the work of the prior generations (p. 57).

Artists in the 19th and 20th centuries entered enthusiastically, and with some competitive vigor, into a series of “isms”: Impressionism, Abstract expressionism, Neoprimitivism, Cubism, Fauvism, Futurism, Dadaism, Surrealism, Nonobjectivism. The influence guiding this series of “isms” was competition, wealthy collectors, the words of a few confident men, and disdain for the past (even yesterday’s past An anonymous writer (1918), outraged by artists he felt were compromising their sacred and exalted positions for financial gain, wrote in The Art World:
The field of art is no longer an innocent, Sacred Elysium in which each artist, critic, and aesthetician labors for the greater glory of God and the salvation of mankind…The vast increase in millionaires…[has] opened up to the unscrupulous so many avenues of gain that it has transformed a once sacred field of ideal and poetic aspiration [in]to a sordid mart of financial speculation. The money-changers have invaded and are desecrating the Temple!

Alfred Steiglitz, a leading advocate of modern art and photography, established the experimental art gallery “291” in New York City to create exhibit space for artists who were above commercial considerations (Rodgers 1992:54). Due to the efforts of Steiglitz, both in his gallery and his journal, there was major shift in the role of the artist who now was known more publicly as a seer, a prophet, whose life (if not art) was to be seen as “paradigmatic of the new order they sought for society” (p. 54). The Gallery 291 was “a church consecrated to them who had lost old gods and whose need was sore for new ones” (Steiglitz, 1917). This new “religion” was to lead America away from capitalism towards a utopia.

“The artist,” Seligman (1952) wrote, “far more than the layman is perceptive of his environment and this new potential has allowed to him a new vision of which contemporary art is a materialization” (p. 160). It was this unique knowledge and sensitive, that led artists to be viewed as prophets (Lippman 1929) who could lead us to a brave new world by producing visual art that, Bell explained, “might prove the world’s salvation” (1914/1977:47). What artists did was work to destroy the past. As Hoebel (1949) wrote, visual art…can serve to sustain them [social groups], as Renaissance art served medieval Christianity, or it can strive to destroy them, as does the anarchistic art of the Dadaists who hold modern civilization to be so false and meaningless that the honest artist can only lampoon and destroy it with senseless combinations of line and color. (p. 162)

Narrative paintings continued to be dismissed as lesser forms of art because they were seen as tools used by social and political groups to “rouse us to action” (Berenson 1948:68). From Plato’s day to the latest,” Berenson complained, “states, societies, synagogues, churches, and conventicles have deliberately tried to harness art for their particular advantage and, failing that, suppress it altogether” (p. 147). Berenson did not deny that visual art could influence behavior, he just did not want to see visual art used that way. Narrative paintings, he (1948) explained, “cannot help exercising influence, seeing how prone we are willynilly, to imitate what we see and be affected by what we hear” (p. 22).

While a number of new ideas were introduced during 20th century (e.g., art as expression; ideas of detachment, disinterestness, and psychical distance, and various permutations of postmodernism), artists continued to be seen as talented, sensitive, and as having a unique vision. Art has largely come to be seen as idiosyncratic, creative, costly, symbolic, and insightful, and likely to arouse an aesthetic emotion. Many would agree that artists have a special intelligence. Seligman (1952) wrote,

The ‘genius’ is a rara avis whose meteoric appearance revolutionizes the artistic world and, often unbeknownst to himself, adds a new and brilliant star to the aesthetic constellation. He has a message with which to astound the world and for which the technical means at his command may be too limited…Alone in his ivory tower of thoughts, alone with his torments, unconscious of the outer world’s appreciation or deprecation, he follows his divine mission. (p. 153)
The idea of the artist as a mad man, introduced by Veronese after the Council of Trent, was fine tuned around the time of Freud; mental illness, became linked with the creative process. Some felt that there was a causal connection between the psychic illness of the artist and his artistic power. Saul Rosenzweig (1943) refers to this madness as the “sacrificial roots” of art (cited in Trilling, 1971). Artistic power was gained through mental suffering (Trilling, 1971).

The issue of what creativity is/isn't

Although the ancestors have probably been intentionally discarded thousands of time, there is an association between a breakdown in traditions, kinship, and the flourishing of the arts. By flourishing of the arts, I am not referring to such things as the vast number of art forms used by the traditional people of Bali, or to the process of producing a work of art, I am referring to dramatic changes in style. Most call this rapid and dramatic change using the term: creativity.

My grandfather's shoes

My grandfather, Francis Jackson, died over 80 years ago, when my mother was eight years old. He is buried, if not in a pauper's grave, as is the rightful place for the poet he was, then with a poor man's marker. That is, from what we know, the way he would have wented things to be.

Not only was he buried with a poor man's grave marker, but he was buried, at his request, without his shoes. He wanted his shoes to be given to someone who could not afford them. In the early 1920s, a good pair of men's shoes cost $4.85.

That is the end of the story we were told. What was his worlkd like as he lay dying.

According to http://www.bbc.co.uk/schools/gcsebitesize/audio/history/pdf/america_in_ the_1920s_triumph_or_disaster.pdf

For me, the theme of the decade is economic prosperity: technological innovation, especially in the motor industry – by 1925 Ford were producing a car every 10 seconds; a burgeoning synthetics industry … the invention of nylon;. a revolution in communications, and in electrical goods; a doubling of the number of telephones and radios, and a tripling of the number of cars. Causes? To a degree, government policy – isolation and protective tariffs – the Fordney-McCumber Act of 1922. But more particularly, the rise of a consumer economy, especially the development of advertising and hire purchase, and the growth of the first share-holding economy in the world. For me, the overriding image of 1920s America is a glossy automobile, rich young men and fashionable young women relaxing by a swimming pool, and the legend ‘The Better Buick’.

VS.

I think – by contrast – I would stress the FRAGILITY of the American economy. Tariffs were ultimately going to harm trade, not help it. Agriculture was in crisis --half a million farmers a year were going bankrupt – and the coal and textiles industries were in decline. Prosperity was an illusory crust on the top of the American pie: the richest 5% of the people earned a third of the income, and in the meantime 42% per cent of the population were living below the poverty line. The 1920s was not about prosperity, it was about over-heating–over-production, over confidence, and of course the completely mad speculation in shares, and bogus companies, and bad banking that led to the 1929 depression. It all ended in tears.

VS.

Flappers! The Roaring Twenties! I’m sure that economy is important, but it’s all dreadfully boring, isn’t it, and if you’re looking for where 1920s America made its mark, surely it’s got to be its social impact? I mean, this was THE age of revolution … of liberation. Jazz … Benny Goodman and Fats Waller. Films – the coming of the talkies … Mary Pickford and Charlie Chaplin. And dances! – the Charleston and the Black Bottom. And most of all, a REVOLUTION in the role of women. The advent of the ‘working girl’, and – after 1920 – the VOTING girl. Coco Channel and the ‘garconne’ look, short skirts, those AWFUL hats, smoking in public, playing tennis – these developments have formed our world as it is today, and they were born in American society in the 1920s. So my icon for the 1920s would be film goddess Clara Bow in the film ‘It’, as the self-confident shopgirl Betty Lou Spence, who has ‘it’ and is ‘it’, as she chases rich businessman Cyrus Waltham.

The reality, for most Americans....
To be a widow with a young child in the 1920s was not a position one would desire, had one a choice. There were almost no funds available for widows with dependent children. Many children were put into orphanages, despite the fact that they had a living parent but that parent could not afford the keep the child. One paper said that people would rather give 100 dollars to support an orphanage than 10 dollars to a poor widow with children. What a curious species we are, touched by the children, not so much the mother. Few jobs were open to women.