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Peeks and Piques!
Looking
at Roses Through World-Colored Glasses
By
RAYMOND J. STEINER
ART TIMES April 2007
AT
A RECENT lecture I gave at the Bruce Museum in Greenwich, Connecticut,
on William Merritt Chase, Robert Henri and the Art Students League of
New York, I elaborated somewhat on the contention that had erupted between
the two artists and which was the subject of their present exhibition:
“Painterly Controversy: William Merritt Chase and Robert Henri.” In brief,
I touched on Chase’s “old world” style as opposed to Henri’s “common man”
image (the ultimate kernel of difference that lurked behind their controversy).
As we all know, Henri ushered in what had become known as “The Ashcan
School” of painting, theoretically a more down-to-earth, “nitty-gritty”
kind of aesthetic vision that flew in the face of Chase’s traditional
“pretty art” (a phrase of George Luks, one of Henri’s coterie that also
included John Sloan and Everett Shinn — two more advocates of what
they liked to call “art for life’s sake”). In later years, Sloan, Shinn
— and, yes, even Henri — distanced themselves from such appellations
as “The Ashcan School” of painters, each in their own way appalled at
what their move from “pretty art” spawned as younger artists strayed farther
and farther from anything that smacked of “beauty.” Art became a veritable
grab-bag of the seamier side of life, all ushering in the spate of social
and political posturing that frenetically posed as art for the “caring”
classes. Whatever your particular brand of politics, I have little sympathy
for the move to make art serve as a handmaiden for the rectification of
our many social ills. Racial tensions, economic inequities, gender bias,
political party differences, wars, earthquakes, tsunamis, plagues —
or the latest scandal du jour
— are both daily and endlessly trumpeted in the media. Why must
we also include it in our art? Do we really
get the message any clearer by having it shoved into our faces in galleries
and museums? Who can possibly believe that we do not hear and see it ad
nauseam on the television, the radio, the internet, or on whatever
new electronic toy now on the market? “Human life,” Gustave Flaubert once
wrote in a letter to Bosquet in July 1864, “is a sad show, undoubtedly:
ugly, heavy and complex. Art has no other end, for people of feeling,
than to conjure away the burden and bitterness.” Are we so different that
we do not deserve the same consideration today? Why cannot we expect art,
music, dance, film, or literature to add to
our lives — to, in the words of Bernard Berenson, be “life enhancing”
— rather than to compound our daily dose of negativity? Where is
it written that our sensibilities — our souls (to use an old-fashioned
word) — must be sullied by the seamier side of life along with our
intellects? We know the world is a vale of tears. Must art pile it on in
yet heavier doses? We know how
stupid we can be. Must the artist follow suit? There was a time when the
world thought that the artist was chosen — that he or she was “called”
to the profession — that he or she was “inspired” (literally, in
the Renaissance mind, “breathed into” by some Divine Source) — that
the artist was on a mission not to tell us what we have but what we might have if
we’d only get our act together and see beyond the obvious. In brief, art
was supposed to transcend life,
not imitate it. Crap is obvious
— and I for one am wearied by its presence. I want my head out
of the ashcans, out of the dumpsters, out of the landfills of the “nitty-gritty” world. Show me
— please — the light at the end of the tunnel. Show me yet
once again how beauty — how “pretty art” — can nourish my
inner being. Don’t show me what is —
show be what can be, and
how I might get there — even if only in my mind — as I lose
myself in a painting, a musical score, a poem.
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