Matisse’s “Notes of a Painter” provided an enduring template for a basic understanding of the modern artist’s process of creating an artwork as a constantly negotiated balance between abstract formal requirements and expressive concerns. Not all modern artists followed directly in Matisse’s footsteps, but his description of his own creative process is very useful for conceptualizing a wide range of artists’ working processes in the first half of the twentieth century. Modern artists gave differing weights to the degrees of control, harmony, and self-expression in their works, but their working processes generally involved negotiating these elements to a satisfactory, albeit often provisional, conclusion. There are, however, elements of the modern artist’s process not addressed by Matisse that are crucial for understanding its conceptualization and broader significance. These include the ways in which the modern artist’s process was conceived as a temporal activity; its relation to new modes of industrial production; the importance of the artist’s labor as a specifically manual process engaged with material production; and the ways in which modern conceptions of the artist’s process affected the education of artists and subsequently the art they produced.
In addition to conceptions of the artist’s process pertaining to the creation of individual artworks, it is important to consider the artist’s process over time and how it has been understood in relation to the artist’s oeuvre as a whole or in part. The temporal aspect of the modern artist’s process was an enduring concern, particularly for artists who conceived their work in terms of an ongoing developmental or evolutionary process. Serial production was a common strategy used by many modern artists to give temporal structure to their working process. A series of works devoted to the same subject or issue could not only reveal its different aspects, as in Monet’s series of poplars, haystacks, and images of Rouen Cathedral, it could also display the artist’s work as a progressive development. The most striking series produced by modern artists are those that show the artist’s road to nonrepresentational art, notably those of Kandinsky, Malevich, and Mondrian. Each of these artists conceived their path to nonobjective painting as a spiritual journey with great relevance for humankind, thereby giving their artistic labor a significant social and spiritual dimension. These artists’ work was framed as a struggle for liberation from the physical world, and the seriousness of this struggle is attested to by its duration, comprising many years of devotion to carefully considered, diligent production.
The modern artist’s series of works is interesting to consider in relation to the traditional academic process, in which a number of studies and sketches of various types lead up to a final major work. The preliminary stages were of interest to those, usually artists themselves, who wish to see the artist’s working procedures; preliminary works were exhibited to the public and valued by knowledgeable collectors. Generally, however, prior to the nineteenth century artists created works in series to be exhibited as a group when they created a narrative cycle such as the Stations of the Cross or the Rake’s Progress. Monet’s series paintings, which show the same subjects under different atmospheric and light conditions, may be related to the traditional cycle of images representing the seasons, although these do not typically show the same scene for each season. More significant than the consistency of Monet’s subjects is the degree to which his series paintings are intended to represent the artist’s individual acts of looking and painting in time. Well-known accounts of Monet’s working process describe how he worked on a painting only as long as the light conditions were appropriate, and when they had shifted he would turn his attention to another painting in the series. The series thus not only gives a temporal portrait of its subject, Rouen Cathedral as transformed by the moving sun and changing weather, it also presents a concrete record of the artist’s labor in time.
Monet’s series works are often linked to trends associated with Symbolist developments that also affected the Postimpressionist painters, most notably in terms of their increasing abstraction.1 They may also be seen in this context in terms of the greater systematization of the painter’s working process as discussed above with regard to Neo-Impressionism. This systematization, as well as the notable restriction of subject matter in the series paintings, allowed Monet to develop his focus and to explore the nuances of his perceptual activity in more precise detail. Monet’s series works are exemplary of a shift in the modern artist’s activity as it develops from an approach largely derived from traditional painting methods and products to a more self-conscious and considered attitude toward the artist’s labor.
A series like Monet’s Rouen Cathedral paintings raises interesting issues about the artist’s work and its relation to the artist’s products that are relevant to much modern art. First, the series needs to be considered in relation to more traditional approaches to the production of multiple works on the same subject. Monet’s works are not copies, duplicates of the same image; they are, rather, variations on a theme. What distinguishes them from the work of a successful still-life painter like Claesz or Chardin who produces a group of paintings of the same objects in slightly different configurations in order to satisfy the market for his work? And what distinguishes them from Monet’s own earlier paintings of bathers at La Grenouillère? One difference is a greater consistency of subject; there is minimal rearrangement of the composition. Also distinct from the works of an artist who paints very slightly different works to satisfy the market is the fact that Monet exhibited many of the Rouen Cathedral paintings as a group. He wanted viewers to see them together and to be able to study the differences in paintings of the exact same subject. If the goal were merely to satisfy a market demand there would be no advantage to exhibiting the works together, as their uniqueness would be diminished in the eyes of collectors, resulting in lower prices for each work. As it transpired, the Rouen Cathedral paintings sold at very high prices.2
This is not, however, simply a matter of art market economics. Monet’s Rouen Cathedral paintings are valuable as part of a series because of the way they were created, and because of what was by then widely known about the artist’s working process. Each painting was intended as the index of a temporal moment, what Monet perceived at a given point in time;3 this was key to the painting’s significance. The subject was largely a pretext for the artist’s work; it became a signifier for Monet by simple repetition. A similar effect was achieved in retrospect by Cézanne and his many paintings of Mont Sainte-Victoire as well as those of apples. Thus a certain type of modern artist becomes identified with an intensive focus on a simple subject. Such artists’ work explores the seemingly infinite nuances of representing that subject, wherein each variation has meaning, which is another difference from multiples or copies, where variations are of no particular importance. Multiples and copies also decrease the value of each individual work, while the variations on a theme explored by the modern artist creates a series that reveals the artist’s development, or at least transformations, through time. Each moment may have equal value in relation to its significance. No single work has priority as an original.
The series of images recording changes in time was a pervasive concern in the late nineteenth century, as evidenced by the widely reproduced photographic images of figures in motion by Muybridge, Marey, and Anschutz, as well as early forms of cinematic equipment such as the zoetrope. In painting a series of works showing the changes in the visual appearance of a subject over time, Monet does not merely adopt a popular conceptual format for representing a subject; he also displays the artist’s labor as never ending. There is no completion of an action, no narrative resolution, only the infinite potential of recording the endless variations of appearance. Each moment is of equal interest. On one level the lesson of Monet’s later work, and Cézanne’s as well, is that the representational artist’s process is infinite, restricted only by the painter’s own limitations. A single simple subject provides enough impetus to work for a lifetime. This work is not mere repetition; the successful modern artist is the one whose resources allow for constant variation and development. Resolutions are only temporary; one image in the series may be brought to fulfillment, but it also serves as a stepping-stone for the next one.
It might be argued that the later work of Monet and Cézanne is not precisely a new approach to the artist’s labor, but rather a revaluation of it in which the artist’s working process takes a more central position. Formerly, a Chardin still life or a Claude landscape was valued as a product in which the artist’s name served as a sort of trademark or signifier of its quality. These artists created paintings that were dependably excellent in terms of the quality of their craftsmanship. In the case of a Monet or a Cézanne painting, however, the artist’s name is not merely synonymous with the quality of his craftsmanship. These artists’ paintings are inextricably related to the life of the artist as part of their value. To own a Monet or a Cézanne painting is to own a small piece of the consciousness and labor of that artist, the transcription of what he saw and felt at a particular moment in time. While this is true to a degree of all artworks given that they are created by individuals in time, it was not part of the significance of the work in the way that it is for Monet’s and Cézanne’s later works. Awareness of an artwork as signifying a “piece” of the artist’s life is a development of the later nineteenth century.
A different set of issues is raised by artists whose work forms developmental or evolutionary series, notably those pioneers on the road to nonrepresentational art. Throughout his career Piet Mondrian stressed the need for the public’s awareness of modern art’s evolution in stages leading from realism to pure neoplasticism. For Mondrian these stages represented the most advanced phase of human evolution. The modern artist is the representative of the most advanced spirit of the age, intuitively developing consciousness of the laws and true harmonious nature of pure reality underlying the transitory forms of physical objects. Mondrian saw the artist’s work as more than the making of artworks; it also consisted of developing a rational awareness of discoveries reached intuitively during the process of making art and explaining them to the public.4
In his many texts on art Mondrian adopts a Hegelian view of art and the artist as manifestations of the evolving spirit of times,5 and consequently he has a notable tendency to depersonalize the artist’s activity. Art acts in his writings far more than artists do; artistic movements, rather than individual artists, tend to serve as evolutionary markers. Nevertheless Mondrian does describe his conception of the individual artist’s activity based on his own experiences and working process. As Matisse had done, he consistently stressed the intuitive nature of the artist’s labor; for Mondrian the artist does not work from a preconceived theoretical program but discovers truth through the process of painting: “To those who evolved the new plastic out of naturalistic painting . . . [the truths brought to life by Abstract-Real painting] are irrefutable truths—truths that they became conscious of through the process of working. For them those truths can never be preconceived dogma, since they were arrived at only by way of conclusion.”6 The evolution of Mondrian’s painting from naturalistic representation to abstract purity was the result of a developing process of abstraction, which necessarily occurred over an extended period.7 He repeatedly insisted that his abstraction had its origin in his intuitive engagement as a painter with visible reality: “The execution is of the greatest importance in the work of art; it is through this, in large part, that intuition manifests itself and creates the essence of the work. . . . All that the non-figurative artist receives from the outside is not only useful but indispensable.”8 Beginning with naturalistic representation Mondrian slowly freed himself of individualized personal feeling to discover the universal forces underlying particular reality. This evolutionary process of abstracting from nature is documented in his paintings beginning around 1907 and continuing until the early 1920s, when he arrived at the nonrepresentational schema of right-angled compositions of white, black, and primary colors that would preoccupy him for the rest of his life.
During the years of his evolution to pure abstraction Mondrian’s artistic process is notable for its engagement with a much larger goal than the creation of individual artworks. Framed in terms of universal human spiritual development, the paintings represent a developmental process intended to be understood as much greater than that of an individual artist. Artistic process for Mondrian (as well as for the other contemporary pioneers of nonrepresentational painting, Kandinsky and Malevich) was a means to achieve spiritual development that would affect all humanity. It is hard, maybe even impossible, to conceive a greater exaltation of the artist’s labor. But even without considering the elevated terms in which Mondrian saw his process, it is distinctive in its orientation toward a specific goal and its progressive evolutionary nature. Once he had achieved “neoplasticism,” however, Mondrian’s artistic process was comparable to that of many other modern artists, such as Matisse, who were engaged with intuitively creating formally resolved and harmonious works.
The strong trajectory of Mondrian’s development retrospectively creates a remarkably consistent logic. His first important text, “The New Plastic in Painting,” was published in 1917, several years before he reached the plateau of his own evolution, and it laid out the key points of his art theory. It shows that Mondrian saw his work in terms of evolutionary progress well before it reached its final form. Although he claimed the (modern, neoplastic) artist worked by intuition rather than program, becoming fully conscious of the rationale behind the work only after it was created, this is not altogether accurate. Mondrian was consciously directing his work to ever-greater abstraction, and thus he was necessarily viewing each painting in terms of a larger project that was developing over time. The significance and, indeed, the value of Mondrian’s paintings from 1907 to 1923 is conditioned not by their qualities as individual works, but by their location in the artist’s process, what they represent of his path to “pure plastic.” This is not merely the result of an art historical vantage point reinforced by decades of textbooks on modern art and monographs on Mondrian; it is how Mondrian himself saw and valued the works.9
Mondrian’s artistic process in the developmental evolutionary stage of his career may be seen as a microcosm of modern art as a whole, and not only because the artist himself described it in this way. As we have seen, from the mid-nineteenth century onward modern art was conceived as unfinished and evolving. In his art and theories Mondrian proclaimed both the purpose and the conclusion to this historical process, and he posited that the next stage would be the dissolution of art into life, the aesthetically satisfying environment. Many supporters of modern art shared his views. Clement Greenberg followed Mondrian in his conviction that modern art’s historical trajectory led to pure abstraction, as well as the artist’s belief that individual artists’ contributions to this evolution were made intuitively and without predetermined intention. In positing an end to traditional art, separate from life, Mondrian’s views were also aligned with those of the Constructivists in the Soviet Union and certain aspects of Bauhaus thinking, and prefigured key aspects of post-1960s art. It is important then to recognize that Mondrian’s conception of his process, and that of modern artists as a whole, added further depth and dimension to the importance and understanding of the artist’s process. What the modern artist does matters, and it is far from being merely a narrow technical concern of makers of useless commodities. The modern artist’s process reveals and assists in the spiritual development of humanity; it reflects and contributes to the historical evolution of the modern world.
Mondrian’s working process necessarily changed once he achieved his pure plastic art. At that point the evolutionary process to which he had been dedicated for over fifteen years reached, if not precisely an end point, at least a plateau from which there would be no more major developments beyond the theoretical projection of the end of painting at some future date.10 Nothing indicates, though, that the achievement of a pure plastic art raised difficulties for Mondrian’s working process. He seems to have painted contentedly, exploring the infinite variations of his highly restricted approach for the remaining twenty-plus years of his life. In fact, he addressed the change directly: “Generally, once the artist finds the plastic expression proper to himself, he does not push it any further—as it was possible to do until the present. But in Neo-Plastic this is no longer possible because Neo-Plastic is the limit of plastic expression. . . . In Neo-Plastic the question is to perfect the work. . . . Although Neo-Plastic remains within its aesthetic limits, Neo-Plastic work can appear in different ways, varied and renewed by the personality of the artist to which it owes its strength.”11 On one level the ease with which Mondrian shifted from a focus on progressive evolution to exploration of a highly restricted range of options attests to the artist’s intellectual and aesthetic satisfaction with the conclusion of his evolutionary development. On another level the shift in approach is remarkable in that it required what seems to be a radical change in the artist’s own conception of his working process and goal. He appeared to transform himself from a seeker to something closer to a craftsman as defined by R. G. Collingwood, a maker with a comparatively fixed conception of his intended product. Mondrian’s work became engaged solely with manipulating his discovered means to a consistent goal—the attainment of harmony, or “equilibrium,” the term he preferred. In his view this equilibrium was, and always had been, the goal of art, and with the new plastic art it was now clearly visible rather than cloaked in representational forms.
An intriguing insight into Mondrian’s attitudes toward his process was given by Carl Holty, who described Mondrian working on his late Boogie Woogie paintings in New York. When he saw that the paintings were constantly changing he was dismayed at the loss of so many beautiful compositions, and he asked Mondrian why he didn’t make a new, different painting for each change. Mondrian replied that he didn’t want paintings, he wanted to find things out.12 This statement reveals that Mondrian, despite his highly restricted means, continued to view his work as a process of discovery. The product, however carefully finished, was merely an instance of his work and not a final goal. To a degree this attitude is explicable in terms of Mondrian’s acute awareness of the very limited appreciation for his art. From the beginning of his evolutionary journey to pure plastic art he had to produce marketable art in addition to what he considered his important work in order to support himself. His neoplastic work was labor undertaken solely out of personal interest and conviction. It was thus doubly pure, free of naturalistic form and free of commercial worldly expectations.
General public awareness of the artistic process increased during the 1930s, prompted by more detailed information and discussion of how modern artists worked. Articles on modern art brought the reader into close proximity to the stages of the artist’s creative process. From its inception in 1926 Cahiers d’Art, the leading French magazine devoted to modern art, was committed to the presentation of modern artists’ work, and regularly published the most recent productions of leading artists, particularly Matisse and Picasso, in extensive layouts.13 These presentations were often made in the context of textual debates on Surrealist automatism that explicitly addressed the artist’s means and the creative processes appropriate to the creation of successful modern artworks.14 In Cahiers d’Art detailed documentation of the work of the masters of modern art was intended to demonstrate both their inspired development and the creative control and technical achievements that were the foundation of their art. The magazine’s editor, Christian Zervos, also published Picasso’s catalogue raisonné between 1932 and 1978. These presentations of living artists’ work allowed readers to witness the artists’ processes and creative development. They also affected artists, who became increasingly self-conscious of their own work processes. Jeffrey Weiss has discussed the ways the catalogue raisonné project affected Picasso; the artist began to date all his works, and he also seems to have begun to work faster, often producing several works a day, as well as emphasizing the formal effects of rapid creation.15 Such changes suggest a self-conscious effort to present himself as an inspired and fecund creator, possibly one who works automatically. Cahiers d’Art’s reproductions of living artists’ most recent works portrayed the modern artist as a constant laborer, someone exploring a theme or idea over and over in slight variations. Individual works were presented as part of a series and yet significant in themselves. They were printed in large format on consecutive single pages, even when the works were small, rapidly created sketches made on vacation. Such reproductions enhanced the value of modern artists’ work while promoting the image of the modern artist as a tireless worker always engaged in the creative process of exploration and elaboration.
It was in this context that first Matisse and then Picasso published photographic documentation of stages of their work in progress.16 Matisse began having photographs taken of the creation of his paintings in the mid-1930s, and eight stages of his Large Reclining Nude of 1935 were published in Roger Fry’s monograph on the artist that same year.17 Matisse’s assistant later stated that Matisse wanted to document each “significant stage” of provisional completion before he discovered an imperfection that would lead him to revise the painting the following day.18 He continued to document his paintings in this manner for the remainder of his career. The photographs were published on several occasions and were exhibited with the final paintings in the 1940s. Matisse stated that he wished to exhibit the photographs of the stages of his paintings in 1945 to show younger artists how hard he worked, and it is now well known that he took many months to complete some of his paintings.19 What appears to be a simple, rapidly executed painting was in fact often the result of extended labor and multiple revisions.
The photographic documentation of Matisse’s paintings indicates that the painter’s process remained consistent with what he had described in his 1908 “Notes of a Painter.” Although the first stage seems successful, the artist does not accept it as fully expressing his thought. Each stage appears plausibly finished in accordance with his stated belief that a painter must maintain the overall harmony of the painting throughout the painting process. The different stages also show the artist sacrificing accurate naturalistic depiction for pictorial expression. There is, however, no consistent progress from one stage to the next—neither the traditional progress from loose sketch to finely finished work, nor a consistent reversal of this approach, although some viewers have claimed to see the latter as the overriding principle. It is true that often the first stages of the painting have the most naturalistic detail, and subsequent stages eliminate detail in favor of a more broad treatment of the subject. This is in keeping with Matisse’s description of his process of condensing the subject to its essential lines in order to make it more effective in communicating his sensations.20 But this is not by any means the painter’s sole concern, and many stages of the work show marked alterations in tone, design, and likely color as well (though the photographs are monochromatic), not a progressive distillation.
In 1936 Matisse made a statement that attests to the continuity of his process as he had described it in 1908:
The reaction of each stage is as important as the subject. For this reaction comes from me and not from the subject. It is from the basis of my interpretation that I continually react until my work comes into harmony with me. Like someone writing a sentence, rewrites it, makes new discoveries. . . . At each stage, I reach a balance, a conclusion. At the next sitting, if I find a weakness in the whole, I find my way back into the picture by means of the weakness . . . and reconceive the whole. Thus everything becomes fluid again and as each element is only one of the component forces. . . . The whole can be changed in appearance but the feeling still remains the same. . . . Basically the expression derives from the relationships.21
As the photographs of the states of his paintings show, Matisse’s labor follows no easily described path. The changes to his paintings reflect his own idiosyncratic requirements and cannot be reduced to a formula or program. In this very lack of a definable program they provide an example of a creative process, the artist’s labor that follows no rules but those dictated by the artist’s own feelings. Perhaps even more important, they show, as Matisse intended them to, how hard the artist works to achieve his goals. The artist’s difficult labor was a persistent theme for Matisse, who wrote in 1935, “I have always believed that a large part of the beauty of a picture arises from the struggle which the artist wages with his limited medium.”22 In displaying the signs of that struggle Matisse contributed to a broad midcentury effort to place the artist’s process at the center of artistic significance.
Matisse described the exhibition of the stages of his work as didactic, and it is certainly instructive regarding the artist’s working process. The presentation of the photographs of earlier stages with the final work, however, raises complex issues regarding the nature of the completed artwork. An insistence on resolution and pictorial harmony is a constant throughout Matisse’s career, as is the implication that an artwork is finished when it accurately expresses the artist’s feeling. Equally important, however, is the artist’s ongoing exploration of different solutions to a given pictorial project. This is evident in his long-term engagement with specific subjects, his tendency to make different versions of the “same” painting, and his late-career preoccupation with recording the different stages of his work through photographic documentation. There is in the end no solution, no resolution, no final work, just an ongoing and laborious process. Matisse himself seems to have become increasingly aware of this later in his career as he displayed his process to the public. In the brochure for the large 1945 Galerie Maeght exhibition of six paintings accompanied by framed photographs of their multiple stages he was quoted as saying, “Every time I’ve done something successfully, I say to myself, ‘that’s it, I’ve got it, I understand’; but no, nothing has been learned. The conclusion of a picture is another picture.”23 This conception of the artist’s labor as a never-ending process will become central to modern art in the ensuing decade.
Matisse was the first important modern artist to have the stages of his painting published, but Picasso soon followed his lead. Picasso had used photography in his work beginning around 1900,24 but he does not appear to have documented states of works in progress until the 1930s. His first publication of an in-progress drawing was an illustration accompanying a 1935 interview in Cahiers d’Art in which the artist stated, “It would be very interesting to preserve photographically, not the stages, but the metamorphoses of a picture. Possibly one might then discover the path followed by the brain in materializing a dream. But there is one very odd thing—to notice that basically a picture doesn’t change, that the first ‘vision’ remains almost intact.”25 Like Matisse, Picasso stresses the importance of the artist’s initial conception as a guiding force in the creation of a work. However, Picasso’s statement is also imbued with Surrealist ideas regarding the painter’s image as the transcription of a dream, and consequently he downplays the artist’s creative labor as manifested through the metamorphoses of the picture. Picasso’s working process, when later documented, is notably different from that of Matisse. It is more traditional in revealing the artist progressing from a less complete to a more finished final work. The presentation of the creative processes of the leading masters of modern painting thus revealed two very different methods of working: one that used constant revision to achieve an aesthetic goal, and one that demonstrated a cumulative progression to a final product.
Although Matisse preceded Picasso in publishing states of his work in progress, Dora Maar’s photographs of Picasso’s creation of Guernica became the emblematic images of a modern artwork in the process of creation. Eight stages of Guernica were published in Cahiers d’Art in July 1937. Many more working images, studies, and later developments were subsequently published, culminating in Rudolf Arnheim’s 1962 psychological study Picasso’s Guernica: The Genesis of a Painting.26 The political significance and ambitious scale of Guernica made its fame inevitable in the context of modern art, which very rarely produced works that met the requirements of traditional masterpieces. The documentation of its creation served as the ultimate example of the modern artist’s labor to find satisfactory expression of feeling. The painting was, however, unusual for modern art in its attempt to communicate widely shared emotions in response to a tragic public event. Its creation thus was an anomaly, and the staging of its creation for photographic documentation makes it doubtful as an authentic representation of Picasso’s process in general.
The published stages of Guernica’s creation were the most explicit attempt to reveal Picasso’s working process until the artist was filmed painting in 1949,27 but Picasso’s creative process had long been the subject of scrutiny. By 1937 his work had been meticulously documented and published for years, and Jeffrey Weiss has discussed how the reproductions of Picasso’s work in the Zervos catalogue raisonné represented “an interpretation of process.”28 By arranging the works sequentially the catalog suggests development and the continuity of the artist’s production. This affected the artist’s perception of his own work; as noted above Picasso began to date everything he produced, suggesting explicit engagement with a temporal view of his labor. Given his great fame it is likely that his entire creative process had long been a self-consciously staged series of events enacted with full awareness of being observed. This would inevitably affect any view of his work as the product of liberated and authentic self-expression. Once the entire creative process becomes an object for observation and analysis its significance undergoes radical changes, an issue that would be taken up directly by subsequent generations of artists.
Interest in the modern artist’s process was promoted in the United States beginning in the 1940s, most notably by the magazine ARTnews, which would become a key supporter of the New York school artists. In the 1940s the magazine published several articles on Matisse’s painting process. The first, “Mr. Matisse Paints a Picture: 3 Weeks’ Work in 18 Views,” published on a single page in September 1941, reproduced Woman with a Necklace in black and white with seventeen photographs of early stages, all of which were exhibited at the Albright Art Gallery (now the Albright-Knox Museum). The brief unsigned text made a passing comparison to the many alterations of Picasso’s Guernica, also painted in a short period of time. Several articles in the April 1948 issue, published to coincide with the Matisse retrospective at the Philadelphia Museum, also stressed the painter’s working process. Thomas Hess’s article reproduced three photographs of the artist standing and painting murals or a large canvas. This was a distinct choice to emphasize his painting as a physical activity, given that Matisse did not typically work at large scale and usually painted while seated.29 Albert Frankfurter’s article reproduced ten photographs of different states of The Lady in Blue, dated between February and April 1937. The caption for these reproductions reads, “Matisse’s technique is one of continual recreation.”30 This observation neatly coincided with the magazine’s brief review of Willem de Kooning’s first one-man show, in which Renée Arb wrote that his abstractions were “the result of months of sketching and alteration.”31 Years of emphasis on the working processes of the great modern masters had paved the way for a generation of artists whose work would be at least as famous for its process of production as for the artworks produced.
While many modern artists in the early twentieth century echoed Matisse in stressing the expressive and intuitive aspects of their work, others espoused rational modes of artistic production. Among the most prominent of these were Amédée Ozenfant and Charles-Edouard Jeanneret, who developed Purism in the years immediately following World War I. The Purists denigrated idiosyncratic emotional painting and promoted a rationally conceived art that would be executed with a scientifically based technique. They saw their paintings as part of a general mechanical evolution, a process they defined as the progressive development of utilitarian objects to their most efficient and essential forms. Purist paintings both illustrated this evolution and participated in it; they represented standard household objects as essential geometric shapes, while the paintings themselves were precisely designed to communicate harmonious emotions efficiently through mathematical proportions and carefully structured color relationships.
Rational preconception was a key component of Purist paintings, and the Purists rejected outdated notions of the artist’s genius in favor of the artist as an industrial artisan. They believed that the modern artist’s quest for originality and genius had resulted in a pernicious loss of technical ability, and they particularly singled out Fauvism for its detrimental influence on modern artists.32 As we have seen, Matisse, the leading Fauve painter, had explicitly described the need for an intelligent and controlled artistic technique in his “Notes of a Painter.” His insistence on the importance of expression and intuition, however, had helped to foster the popular notion that these were the most significant aspects of the artist’s process. The Purists were unrelenting in their critique of the loss of technical rigor among modern artists and unflinching in their embrace of a solution they derived from industrial production processes:
The habit of painting without preliminary research, under the sway of emotions that we try to express in fits and starts, is too pervasive. We believe, by contrast, that a work should be completely set in the mind; in which case technical realization is merely the rigorous materialization of the conception, almost a matter of fabrication. In this way the shocking approximations found in so many works of the period, their tentative, bristly, or febrile craftsmanship, will be avoided. . . . In sum, artists who analyze like scientists will advance farther. . . . Painters should propose constructions that are as clear as geometry. . . . Nothing being left to chance. Chance is what art casts out.33
The Purists believed that aligning artistic production with the progressive achievements of modern technology, science, and industry was the means to create a properly modern art. Like all modern achievements, art production should rationally maximize its outputs for optimal efficiency.
The adoption and promotion of the attitudes and processes of industrial technology in the production of art represented a radical about-face in modern art theory. While there was a precedent in the employment of scientific theories of optics and color by Neo-Impressionists, modern art theory was dominated overwhelmingly by the embrace of broadly Romantic attitudes that stressed individualism, emotion, inspiration, and originality. These attitudes were implicitly, and often explicitly, conceived as countering the inhuman values associated with modern industrialization. The qualities and values Ruskin had associated with art and modern technology in the mid-nineteenth century endured and changed very little—that is, until they were directly challenged in the 1910s. The first challenge was offered by the Futurists, who embraced industrialization along with violence; both were conceived romantically and vaguely as means to destroy the weight of the past and its failures and to usher in a new era of promise. With Purism (and also Russian Constructivism), though, the romantic values of the past were abandoned, and what was once perceived as the inhumanity of industrial production was reconceived as the most effective means to realize a truly modern, efficient, and ideal world. One corollary to this shift in attitude is an embrace of collective values over the individual. For the Purists and many others the artist’s individual aesthetic sensitivity is instrumental to artistic creation; it is not, however, in itself the purpose of artistic creation. The individual artist serves society.
The Purists modeled their conception of the artist as a collective worker on the organization of modern factory workers in the production process. In their magazine L’Esprit Nouveau they published admiring articles about Taylorism, the industrial organization strategies invented by Frederick Taylor, which were widely employed in American factories.34 Like Taylor, the Purists saw scientific efficiency as a means for restructuring not just industry but society as a whole. Ozenfant and Jeanneret acknowledged the historical critiques of industrial labor, and proposed a counterargument in which the fragmentation of the industrial labor process and the alienation of the worker from his product is redeemed by his pride in the products created by collective labor:
Today, it must be acknowledged, mass production methods imposed by the machine effectively hide from the worker the final result of his efforts. However, thanks to the rigorous programs of modern factories, manufactured products are so perfect that they give labor teams cause for collective pride. A worker who has executed only a single isolated component understands the interest of his labor; the machines covering the factory floor make him perceive power and clarity, make him feel at one with work of such perfection that his mind alone would never have dared even aspire to it. This collective pride replaces the old artisanal spirit by elevating it to more general ideas. This transformation seems to us an advance; it is an important factor in modern life.35
According to the Purists, modern industrial society, regulated by science and mathematical principles, was positioned to realize the eternal ideals of classical Greece in the creation of a perfect, healthy, rational, and harmonious environment and society. Purist art was to be the decorative analog to this rational perfection, and its production was the result of careful preconception. The Purists believed that mathematical harmony provided the highest form of human aesthetic satisfaction, and thus by implication that the Purist artist in the process of creating mathematically harmonious designs was experiencing great pleasure.
The Purist artist’s pleasure was theoretically limited to the conceptual stage of the painting; its physical creation was simple manual labor comparable to that of a builder following an architect’s plan. In this, Purism embraced the much-critiqued division of industrial labor between management and the worker, the mental and the physical. The individual artist is a microcosm of the industrial production process—and as in that process, the highest value is placed on management, the brains of the factory, while manual skills are relatively negligible. The Purists likewise conceived aesthetic satisfaction in a limited manner, largely discounting the physical and material in favor of the mental and conceptual. Their valorization of mind over material in the creative process was, however, notably distinct from their contemporaries associated with Constructivism and the Bauhaus. Although similarly engaged with geometric abstraction and developing a rational approach to creative production appropriate for modern industrial society, both the Constructivists and the Bauhaus artists and designers made physical materials a central concern. They did not situate their endeavors in relation to a disembodied ideal of pure mathematical harmony as the Purists did; rather, they sought to establish greater sensitivity to, and consciousness of, the physicality of creative work and to make this awareness central to the artist’s working process.
Among the major shifts represented by modern art in relation to its predecessors are not only the shift away from conceiving and evaluating the fine arts of painting and sculpture in terms of naturalistic representation and the reconceptualization of the artist’s process, but also the related change in attitudes toward the artist’s materials. Previously considered merely instrumental material vehicles for the artist’s conception, and as such fully understood and attended to only by the trained artist/artisan, the artist’s materials increasingly took center stage as the physical manifestation of the artist’s process. Maurice Denis’s 1890 formalist statement that prior to representation a painting is “a plane surface covered with colors assembled in a certain order” directly called attention to the importance of the painter’s medium. Matisse’s 1908 “Notes of a Painter” provided a more detailed account of the central significance of the modern painter’s means. The increasing valorization of the artist’s means as a complex mode of signification rather than a transparent vehicle for a preexisting message created a new field of operation for the artist. Not only did it allow for a wider latitude of approaches to traditional media, it also became possible to consider the signifying potential of nontraditional media, the most famous of which is the introduction of collage into the arena of the modern fine arts.
The elevated status of the fine arts traditionally depended on their intellectual and immaterial qualities and carefully ignored the fundamental reality that artists work (hard) with physical materials that are often messy and intractable. The Purists’ dedication to the ideal and conceptual character of their paintings, and their devaluation of the painter’s physical labor, is the exemplary modern instantiation of a long tradition with roots in the values of ancient Greece. Unlike earlier intellectually oriented approaches, however, the Purists were working in the context of the new modern developments that began in the nineteenth century. These developments included novel approaches to valorizing art that emphasized the artist’s labor and material techniques, as well as new understandings of the purpose and meaning of art that replaced moral education and spiritual uplift with more pragmatic physical and emotional goals.
Matisse conceived the painter’s role as providing therapeutic relaxation to the modern bourgeois worker, and this paralleled the social goals of the Arts and Crafts movement. Even the idealist Purists considered art as a means to create a salubrious material environment that actively promoted the health of its occupants. Their ideal harmonious paintings were intended to be instrumental and efficient, qualities that depend on physicality. They also depicted the ideal modern shapes of ceramics and glassware that they claimed had evolved to their most pure and efficient form through centuries of use. Thus, although the Purists ignored the materiality of painting as a craft in their theoretical texts, the subjects of Purist paintings were physical objects designed to be perfectly adapted to manual use. Furthermore, Purist paintings were designed, often very specifically, to complement and decorate modern homes, contributing to the healthy and harmonious modern environment.
After the dissolution of Purism in 1925 both Ozenfant and Jeanneret turned their attention to an often-aggressive engagement with tactility and the physicality of materials. In this they were in accord with the reigning attitude of the period, which is marked by artistic preoccupations with the physical and material. From the heavy painterliness of expressive modern painting, commonly denominated art vivant,36 to the more radical concerns of the Surrealists, modern artists in the later 1920s and 1930s were engaged with material physicality. This is evident in styles that emphasized the materiality of paint and other materials employed by the artist, and in themes that stressed the brute physicality of the earth and the (often overtly sexualized) human body.37
One of the most significant considerations of the period’s preoccupation with art’s materiality is Henri Focillon’s 1934 book The Life of Forms in Art, which declared the paramount importance of the physicality of art: “A work of art is not the outline or graph of art as activity; it is art itself. . . . Art is made up, not of the artist’s intentions, but of works of art. . . . In order to exist at all, a work of art must be tangible. . . . It is in this very turning outward that its inmost principle resides.” “Without matter art could not exist.”38 For Focillon art is the metamorphosis of forms, and he considered the artist’s process as a key to understanding the concrete artwork. He stated that the study of technical phenomena allows “entrance to the heart of the problem, by presenting it to us in the same terms and from the same point of view as it is presented to the artist. . . . In viewing technique as a process and trying to reconstruct it as such, we are given the opportunity of going beyond surface phenomena and of seeing the significance of deeper relationships” (36). Focillon is careful to distinguish basic craft techniques (which he calls craft) from the specific creative processes that create artworks (which he calls technique). He likens the latter to biological development and claims that the artist’s technique goes beyond the limitations of craft—often, in Focillon’s view, as a result of attempting to make one medium produce the effects of another.
Focillon not only emphasizes the literally physical, he also defines the artist’s thought as fundamentally an activity of forming. All mental processes are, according to Focillon, formal activity: “The mind is a design that is in a state of ceaseless flux, of ceaseless weaving and then unweaving, and its activity, in this sense, is an artistic activity” (44). What the artist does is develop “the very technique of the mind” in material form. Indeed, the artist thinks in material form: “In the mind it [form] is already touch, incision, facet, line, already something molded or painted, already a grouping of masses in definite material. It is not, it cannot be, abstract. As such, it would be nothing. It calls importunately for the tactile and the visual” (46). Focillon lays great stress on the importance of the artist’s touch, which he defines as the meeting point of form, matter, tool, and hand. Touch imbues the artwork with the quality of life. His 1936 essay “In Praise of Hands” further developed his belief in the importance of touch for the artist: “Art is made by the hands. They are the instrument of creation, but even before that they are an organ of knowledge. . . . [The artist] touches, he feels, he reckons weight, he measures space, he molds the fluidity of atmosphere to prefigure forms in it, he caresses the skin of all things. With the language of Touch he composes the language of Sight” (70). The essential nature of touch, its foundational importance for the human species, is a point Focillon reiterated as he described the artist as a link to the origins of man: “The artist, carving wood, hammering metal, kneading clay, chiseling a block of stone, keeps alive for us man’s own dim past. . . . Is it not admirable to find living among us in the machine age this determined survivor of the ‘hand age’? . . . In the artist’s studio are to be found the hand’s trials, experiments, and divinations, the age-old memories of the human race which has not forgotten the privilege of working with its hands” (71). Gauguin is Focillon’s primary example of the modern man who rejects the abstract preoccupations of the modern office worker, the stockbroker playing with “the void of numbers,” and returns to his basic human desire to work with his hands. In doing so he restored intensity to an overrefined artistic tradition.
One of the primary achievements Focillon ascribes to the artist as a hand maker is the ability to exploit the accidental, which he sees as counter to the automatic and mechanical as well as to reason. The artist “takes advantage of his own errors and of his faulty strokes to perform tricks with them . . . he never has more grace than when he makes a virtue out of his own clumsiness.” This must be done almost without thought as an instinctive physical response: “Woe to the slow gesture and to stiff fingers!” (74). The artist’s mind, manual skills, and technical ability are a fully integrated method of creative action that extends beyond the literally physical. The artist thinks in terms of materials and even without touching them is able to create works of art.39
Focillon’s 1936 text reflects contemporary artistic debates, most notably those raised by Surrealist automatism and the development of Surrealist objects, both avenues for exploiting the significance of chance forms and material encounters. Unlike the Surrealists, though, Focillon is directly concerned with the artistic meaning of these occurrences, and he rejects the Surrealist notion of automatism, wherein artists passively transmit inner visions.40 It is the encounter between matter and mind that creates art: “As accident defines its own shape in the chances of matter, and as the hand exploits this disaster, the mind in its own turn awakens. This reordering of a chaotic world achieves its most surprising effects in media apparently unsuited to art, in improvised implements, debris and rubbish whose deterioration and breakage offer curious possibilities. . . . Such an alchemy does not . . . merely develop the stereotyped form of an inner vision; it constructs the vision itself, gives it body and enlarges its perspectives. The hand is not the mind’s docile slave”(76).41 Prefiguring ideas later developed by Merleau-Ponty, Focillon locates the artist’s activity as the intersection of the mental and physical, the body and the world: “I separate hands neither from the body nor from the mind. . . . The mind rules over the hand; hand rules over the mind. . . . The creative gesture exercises a continuous influence over the inner life. The hand wrenches the sense of touch away from its merely receptive passivity and organizes it for experiment and action. . . . Because it fashions a new world, it leaves its imprint everywhere upon it” (78). The exalted tone and sweeping universalist claims that characterize Focillon’s text should not obscure the fact that his ideas are deeply engaged with contemporary issues regarding the nature of art and art making. The period between the two world wars is remarkable for its radical reconsiderations of the social role and significance of art and the artist’s labor. Focillon’s claims for the nature of art and art making are in many ways typical of this period and its pervasive concern to identify the fundamental purpose and meaning of art as human creative activity.
The attention to the significance of manual manipulation of physical materials so prominent in Focillon’s writing reflects a major trend within early twentieth-century modern art, particularly developments in modern sculpture. Beginning with Gauguin’s engagement with ceramics and sculpture, many modern artists, including Degas, Matisse, and Picasso, turned their attention to new approaches to the creation of three-dimensional artworks. Influenced by the example of non-Western artifacts entering European museums and galleries, modern artists sought to expand their creative identities beyond the limiting parameters of traditional Western art forms. Just as Gauguin had carved decorative panels and created furnishings and pottery in addition to painting, the artists of Die Brücke created sculptures, decorative panels, and woodcuts that reflected their “primitive” identities. Conceiving the roughly worked surfaces and crude carving as indicative of the honesty of their expression, Die Brücke artists claimed the kinship of their works with those created by the artists of African and Oceanic cultures. Their assessment of the significance of these putatively primitive art forms shows the persistence of Ruskin’s notion that crudely carved forms were honest reflections of the artist’s thought uncontaminated by the false refinements of academicism.
Emile Nolde’s text on the virtues of primitive art is representative of many modern artists’ views:
We do not care for Raphael, and are less enthusiastic about the statues of the so-called golden age of Greece. Our predecessors’ ideals are not ours. . . . It is the ordinary people who laboured in their workshops and of whose lives scarcely anything is now known . . . that we love and respect today in their plain, large-scale carvings in the cathedrals. . . . Why is the art of primitive peoples not considered art at all? . . . In our own time, every earthenware vessel or piece of jewellery, every utensil or garment, has to be designed on paper before it is made. Primitive peoples, however, create their works with the material itself in the artist’s hand, held in his fingers. They aspire to express delight in form and the love of creating it. Absolute originality, the intense and often grotesque expression of power and life in very simple forms—that may be why we like these works of native art.42
For certain modern artists, classical ideals and the related tradition of divorcing artistic conception from the craftsman’s labor were no longer viable means of creative production. Direct physical engagement with matter is the route to expressive power and originality. Centuries of aesthetic refinement, of making matter reflect the mind, were rejected by the modern artists who embraced the crude physicality of materials as a direct means to express physical and emotional vitality.
The modern sculptor’s direct contact with the medium was a marked shift from traditional academic practice. Prior to the revival of direct carving in stone and wood in the early twentieth century, sculptors worked primarily in clay or other malleable media such as plaster or wax to create models and maquettes for final works cast in bronze or carved in marble. Craftsmen, not the artist, created the final physical work of art, which in many instances was refined and polished to a state of ideal perfection or striking realistic representation, rather than displaying the signs of its material construction. Artists were not trained in the casting of bronze or the carving of stone in the academic system, and most were presumably content to maintain their position as the brains behind the manual labor of craftsmen. Given this situation it is hardly surprising that painters made so many major innovations in early modern sculpture. Penelope Curtis has pointed out that the most innovative sculptors working in stone in the early twentieth century came from artisanal backgrounds and peasant roots rather than from art academies and their more intellectual approach to making sculpture.43
In turning their efforts to developing a more direct physical relationship with their work, modern sculptors necessarily made significant changes not only in traditional working processes but also often in the amount of time and labor involved in the creation of individual works. The extremely slow labor of direct stone carving changed what it was possible for a sculptor to achieve in terms of both quantity and quality of work. Whereas sculptors previously took the material of the final work largely for granted—either bronze or (typically) Italian marble—in the early twentieth century direct stone carvers began to investigate the qualities of local stones and to consider their variations as integral to the qualities of the final sculpture. The change in the artist’s process not only changed the types of artworks created, it became one of many new signifiers of the artworks. Whereas previously a sculpture would be evaluated for its design, its conception, and its solution of a representational problem such as a monument, a portrait, or a mythological reference, the modern sculpture was to be evaluated by the artist’s engagement with the medium. Crude carving and simplified forms were the obvious results of honest labor, a loving and sensual attention to a particular piece of stone or wood, which had released its encased figure at the insistent tapping of the artist’s chisel.
Modern artists’ embrace of more primitive or elemental approaches to the creation of sculptural and decorative objects was an outgrowth of ideas developed in the context of modern painting and literature, but another important influence was a set of ideas and attitudes developed in the context of design and the decorative arts. Ruskin’s notions were foundational for the broad conception of a more honest, direct form of art making in contrast to the classical and academic system of idealization and intellectual refinement. Supporting those ideas were not only the widespread ideals of the Arts and Crafts movement as promoted by William Morris and others, but also approaches developed within the German system of design education that culminated in the innovative educational programs of the Bauhaus. By the early twentieth century there was a systematic effort to train designers for modern industry in Germany by integrating theory and practice; students not only learned theoretical principles of design but also served apprenticeships to learn professional practices.
The growing importance of design, particularly industrial design, in the modern world had enormous effects on thinking about the process of making. Previously, a broad and largely undertheorized distinction had arisen between the fine arts and the artisanal crafts, where the former were considered to be founded on more intellectual and conceptual concerns.44 The introduction of modern production techniques, the division of labor in the factory, and the use of machines led to further distinctions. The earliest was the distinction so influentially described by Ruskin between the direct labor of the traditional artisan who implements his own ideas and designs in the hand making of an object and the “slave” labor of the craftsman who makes objects designed by another person. Other significant distinctions between handmade and factory-made objects arose from the differences between the object made by a single individual and the object made by divided labor in a series of steps effected by different individuals. The object made by a single individual revealed knowledge of the material and also displayed the artisan’s pride in the final product, while the object produced by divided labor could not be the result of a full understanding of the material, its working, or pride in production. All of these distinctions led to novel forms of valuing work processes. Handwork, long considered a low form of labor compared to less physical, more intellectual work, acquired significant value in modern industrialized society, not only in terms of art made by professional and amateur artists. The French, for example, faced with the success of German industrial design and production in the late nineteenth century, decided to focus their energies on luxury commodities produced by traditional time-consuming artisanal processes.45
One of the interesting effects the broad social revaluation of working processes had on the art world was an enormous increase in attention to materials. Media for the fine arts had been well established since the later Renaissance, but by the beginning of the twentieth century there were many new additions. Each of these new materials was subjected to careful scrutiny and experimentation. What were the potentials of these new media? How could they be manipulated to expressive ends? Emile Nolde’s emphasis on the modern artist’s appreciation of close contact with materials and their potential for direct expression is exemplary. Even traditional media were reexamined for their expressive potential through direct manipulation. Sophisticated technical processes for realistic representation were ignored or abandoned as modern artists discovered new approaches to the use of oil paint and marble. Long-established processes were broken down to basic components, which were then reexamined from every possible angle. The overall approach to the education of the modern artist became a novel amalgamation of traditional artisanal training in the properties and potentialities of materials, largely acquired through direct experiment, and the much more vaguely defined project of fostering the development of a creative and expressive personality.
A key locus for the development of modern artist training and its focus on developing the artist’s sensitivity to materials was the Bauhaus, particularly in its foundations class (Vorkurs), as well as in the focus on a single craft in the workshop training that followed. The Vorkurs, initially conceived by Johannes Itten in 1919 and later largely taught by Joseph Albers, incorporated progressive approaches recently developed for the education of young children.46 Both Itten and Albers had taught elementary school prior to their employment at the Bauhaus, and they used new educational strategies that promoted immediate hands-on experience and direct exploration of materials.47 This was in direct contrast to the emphasis on drawing in traditional academic art instruction. The Bauhaus, which unified two previously separate institutions, an Academy of Fine Art and a School of Arts and Crafts, was not a school for training traditional fine artists; its goal was to train artist-designers who would have the intellectual and creative skills traditionally associated with the fine artist combined with the technical and mechanical knowledge of the industrial designer and artisan. The ultimate goal was the integration of all art forms and the fulfillment of fundamental human and social requirements.
The Bauhaus embrace of hands-on experience in the initial “foundation” stages of art education was not an arbitrary import from progressive educational theory; it was part of the assumptions that lay at the basis of modern art. First, it was a natural outgrowth of Ruskinian notions regarding the sincerity and honesty of direct handwork. By emphasizing hands-on experience Bauhaus educators sought a fusion between mind and matter, the reciprocal effects of the artist on the material and the material on the artist. Second, the Bauhaus foundations class reflected prevailing notions that the modern artist needed to rediscover fundamental artistic and emotional truths that had been lost or obscured by an excessively narrow, regimented, and intellectualized Western fine arts tradition. In attempting to return to a state of ignorance and carefully investigating the material properties of a common object—a newspaper, to take one example—the Bauhaus student was led to discover new ways to understand and employ matter. Nothing was taken as given, and such an approach fostered original questions and solutions as well as an attitude of ceaseless exploration.
For the designer or architect, an open and creative approach to materials allows for novel and ingenious solutions to given problems. For the modern “fine” artist, however, problems are rarely externally imposed, and the Bauhaus foundations approach adopted in almost every artist education program in the West would ultimately become a generator of individual artists’ programs in itself. This is particularly apparent in the work of the first generation of fine artists to be educated in the Bauhaus-derived art programs of American art schools and university art departments. Artists who came to maturity in the 1960s, such as Donald Judd, Richard Serra, Eva Hesse, and Josef Albers himself, developed mature work based on Bauhaus foundations exercises that focused on the process of exploring the potential of materials. This points to a much broader and pervasive influence of Bauhaus foundations on the overall conception of the artist’s work. In emphasizing primary forms, colors, and concepts as the basic building blocks for artistic creation the Bauhaus foundations program and its many imitators and offshoots fostered a deeply self-conscious awareness of artistic process in modern artists.
Prior to the twentieth century artists were trained to master the skills required to produce specific products, typically representational paintings or sculptures. In the twentieth century previous artistic standards were rejected in favor of originality, primitivism, sincerity, and expression. This presented enormous challenges for anyone attempting to devise an educational system to train modern artists. The Bauhaus foundations course was widely adopted as the most flexible system to develop sensitivity to materials and unrestricted imaginative approaches to employing them. When Itten assigned his students exercises to discover what was essential and contradictory in a material, the project was both specific and abstract; it required a consideration of a given material’s properties but lacked a framework for determining whether an answer was correct. In terms of the open-ended requirements of modern painting and sculpture, sensitivity to materials and analysis of color and form offered a rudimentary vocabulary with little or no direction on how to employ it and to what ends. Facing a lack of external goals or requirements, the modern artist was left with the means and processes of artistic creation as a primary subject and focus of attention.
Modern art education focused on developing an abstract approach to conceptualizing what a given material was capable of communicating; it purposely kept open what the artist should communicate or express. Artistic creation was largely conceived as natural, at least for certain individuals, and care was taken not to overeducate would-be artists for fear of blocking or corrupting their individuality. Thus art students were taught a broadly scientific approach to analyzing and experimenting with materials while at the same time directed to develop highly personal goals and methods to achieve them. In the difficult position between these contradictory attitudes, artists often developed a quasi-scientific approach to their own processes of creation. This was a logical solution. The modern artist was conceived as the mysterious locus of creative production, which cannot be generalized beyond the individual; it was thus appropriate for artists educated to analyze materials, colors, and primary forms to turn their analytic attention to their own activities; the creative process in itself thus became the ultimate significance of the artist’s work.
In 1938 the philosopher R. G. Collingwood published his Principles of Art, a text that outlines an influential philosophy of art as expression.48 It also reflects the common understanding of the modern artist’s process as it had developed over the previous decades. Collingwood began by defining a separation of art from craft, or “the technical theory of art,” based largely on differing processes of production. Collingwood asserted that the craftsperson is wholly concerned with the creation of a predetermined product in which a known end determines the technique or means of production. This is not only true of utilitarian objects such as pots, furniture, and clothing, but also applies to any work created for a specific purpose, be it a poem written to commemorate an event, a commissioned portrait, a play written and produced to entertain, and so forth. In the creation of such works technique is effective; it gets the job done.
The artist, by contrast, is engaged in an experiential process of making; unlike the craftsperson, for the artist the means are at least as important as the end product because the artist’s defining act is expression of emotion. In his notion of the artist’s goals and labor Collingwood largely conformed to the influential ideas first thoroughly described in Matisse’s “Notes of a Painter” and later generally accepted as fundamental to modern art. The artist’s product is the result of an open-ended engagement with the material, one that fosters a more personal and psychological approach to the creation of the work, which, in turn, becomes an exploration and instantiation of the artist’s feelings. Collingwood believed the specificity of the artist’s emotion was discovered during the process of creating the artwork, and he was careful to distinguish between mere “ranting” or venting of emotion and art that is created “deliberately and responsibly, by people who know what they are doing, even though they do not know in advance what is going to come of it.”49 For Collingwood artistic production is defined by the specific qualities and attitudes of the artist. It is not the act of making a picture, poem, or sculpture that determines the making of an artwork, but psychologically and emotionally how and with what intentions the work is created. Art is thus the result of a certain successful process that relies on a very specific mental and emotional engagement with the creation of a product.
Collingwood’s discussions of painting as an art are notable for their emphasis on the physicality of the painting process, an approach he acknowledged derived from Bernard Berenson’s views on the importance of tactile values in painting.50 He particularly stressed Cézanne’s painting as representing the experience of touch, not vision: “Cézanne was right. Painting can never be a visual art. A man paints with his hands, not with his eyes. . . . What one paints is what can be painted, no one can do more, and what can be painted must stand in some relation to the muscular activity of painting it” (144–45). Rejecting what he called the nineteenth-century formalist notion that painting can be understood as the arrangement of two-dimensional colored shapes on canvas, Collingwood insisted that the experience of painting (and subsequently the experience of viewing the painting) involved the full range of sensory experience, “an imagined experience of total activity” (149).
The education of the artist was not a topic Collingwood addressed at length, but he did briefly refer to it in a way that revealed how he understood the artist’s process: “The watching of his own work with a vigilant and discriminating eye, which decides at every moment of the process whether it is being successful or not, is not a critical activity subsequent to, and reflective upon, the artistic work, it is an integral part of that work itself. . . . What a student learns in art school is not so much to paint as to watch himself painting; to raise the psycho-physical activity of painting to the level of art by becoming conscious of it” (281). For Collingwood the artist’s activity is a formative experience, never a mere technical procedure. In making art the artist learns, and such learning never ceases for the artist since the growth of greater knowledge and understanding is basic to Collingwood’s definition of the artist’s work: “Only a person with experience of painting, and of painting well, can realize how little . . . [you see] compared to what you come to see in it as your painting progresses. . . . A good painter . . . paints things because until he has painted them he doesn’t know what they are like. . . . [For a painter seeing includes tactile values that can be] sensuously apprehended only through muscular motion. . . . It is a comprehensive awareness” (303–4).51 The process of art making is a form of developing self-knowledge, a coming together of physical, mental, and emotional being in relation to the perception of an external object. In this holistic understanding of the artist’s process Collingwood defined not only what art was, but also how it could be understood as a model for the construction of a fully conscious and experienced mode of living.52 It is this view that lies at the foundation of the inextricable connection often made between the artist’s process and the artist’s life.