ARTIST versus CRAFTSMAN
by David Beasley
April 4, 2009
In the course of vacationing recently, I visited the usual tourist places such
as Sedona and Scottsdale in Arizona and Cannery Row, Monterrey and
Carmel in California.
Interested in art, I was struck by the derivative nature and the cloying
sameness of the “art works” in the galleries of these places. In the galleries
featuring “modern art” such as works by Alexander Calder, Joan Miro and
some surrealists, all long dead [surrealism remains popular because it uses
representational and recognizable figures], I saw nothing original and much
that was facile and superficial as if someone had badly copied their work
and brightened the colors for commercial reasons.
The representational art was faux-impressionist or banally realistic or ugly
fantasy as if Odilon Redon and Salvatore Daly were combined in one mad
mind or an American Indian were jazzing up the myths of his ancestors.
There was cowboy art as well as if Remington had superimposed his spirit on
hundreds of people with paint brushes in hopes of making money. Does all
this represent modern bourgeois taste or is it a result of the uneducated
and tasteless minds of the art dealers who want to form that taste?
Or is it that the artist is rare and the craftsman who claims he is an artist is
common?
It reminded me of the words of Clay Spohn, a
great artist of the twentiethcentury.[I say this based on the judgment of several “great” artists who
regarded his inventiveness and honesty as essential to the breakthroughs in
painting which he achieved before his death in 1977. Douglas MacAgy “one
of the great moving influences in art” hired Spohn first to the California
School of Fine Arts to begin the revolution in 1945 that made the school
world famous and brought in Still, Rothko, Motherwell et. al. later on.]
Spohn said that “impersonal art was the work of craftsmen.” The true artist
breaks through the conventions of his day, he expands the consciousness of
his time. As I wrote in my biography of him, he “regarded the artist
ʼs role asbreaking through barriers to the human consciousness.”
As a young artist who spent time in Europe, he returned to San Francisco
where Diego Rivera, because of their common interest in the Italian
primitives, gave him the rare honor of asking him to sit on the scaffolding
with him while he painted a mural. An English artist who assisted Rivera,
Clyfford Wight, told him of the months he had lived among the Indians of
the southern part of Mexico “in the wildest and most primitive parts. They
were all craftsmen of one kind or other but they had no word for artist. In
fact, they didn
ʼt know what you meant when you tried to explain themeaning of the term.” Spohn recalled that Aristotle called the men who did
the mosaic work or painted on walls “day laborers” as he thought of them
“when years ago in North Beach and elsewhere I used to see the Italian
cement workers (day laborers) set tile and mosaic work in the entrance
halls of apartment houses.
And then when I was in Southern France on the Riviera one season, in and
around Villefranche and Nice, Nime, Cagne, etc., I used to watch the house
painters decorating the pink, white and yellow houses with standardized
ornamentation, simpler but somewhat in the same sense as did the artisans
who decorated the less expensive houses of Pompei and elsewhere
throughout the Mediterranean... And these men and workers were always
(or most always—until they became really good like Phidias or Praxiteles)
considered to be only workmen and day laborers, nothing so highly
specialized and exalted as to be given the title ‘artist’ ”. It is, therefore,
the detached, impersonal style of work [painting, sculpture etc] that Spohn
regarded as craftwork, definitely not art. He criticized a fellow artist for
moving from “a moving and personal” style to “a detached, sterile style”
that reminded him of the depersonalized works of Ancient China, Aztec Art,
and frescoes in the caves of Adjanta, India. An artist must dig deep into
himself, paint from the gut, search his soul to create an original work that
can be called “art.” In his own case, Spohn painted the work that most
represented his being and expressed what was deepest in him, in 1961,
with “In the Bright Light of the Living Moment; or, the Death of Beethoven,”
which I reproduced in the biography. He told me that Beethoven, who was
deaf, thought he heard thunder on his death bed and sat up to shake his fist
at the ceiling when he fell dead. The artist was defiant to the end. This is
the spirit it takes to produce art; the rest is craft.
Spohn was always searching, always looking into the “unknown”, an
obsession shared by the curator, Douglas MacAgy, who sought out the
original artists and explained their work to a public bewildered by the fast
pace of innovation in the twentieth century. To how deep a low have we
sunk now that these men are long dead and the inflated and quick buck
determines the taste of the tourist hordes looking for some inspiration,
some beauty, some meaning in their lives that only true art can provide!
ut, you argue, we have reproduced drawings of Pablo Picasso that we can
buy for much moola. But his work palls. Spohn considered Picasso [who did
good work at first] as caring more for the sensation than for the statement
like so many artists who forsook their identities and took up the art that
feeds on art—”a mere innovative art which dehumanizes, or rather
depersonalizes itself and the artist as well.... Picasso was painting or
recreating art. He was not painting his own truth”, he said. While Spohn
was penetrating beneath the surface of the painting, Picasso was playing on
the surface and making the moola. As long as money rules, we shall have to
avoid the art galleries and seek the artists’ rooms in the poor sections of
town. And we won’ t confuse craftsmen with artists.