The Likeness of a Beautiful Thing - 09

    During the past several weeks, Johannes gave detailed descriptions of Basic Design courses. Here, after some final thoughts, the essay returns to philosophical topics - aesthetics.             (NINTH of eleven sections)

      I.   Basic Design within the Foundation Program

        Within the Foundation Program the two semesters of Basic Design are by themselves a compact summary of an artist’s purely visual work of form and color, as opposed to figure or landscape drawing. 

        Apart from the special mission of three-dimensional composing, the Surface Designs divide the language of their visual domains very carefully into the parts of art and gradually join them toward a plane of competence where the student will be no longer a beginner.

        To summarize the tasks of a two-semester Basic Design course:

        Basic Design I:

• Shape arrangement compositions without color.
• The optical behavior of colors and precision training in their use.
• Color composition ending with incipient training in careful observation, but starting with no demands concerning shape 

        Basic Design II:

• Freehand Construction of geometric solids.
• Volume perception and delineation through geometric sections of the whole.
• Composition of volume combinations to articulate spatial advancing and retreating in the action of describing.

    
  J.   Historical Study
      
     1.  Artists need a grounding in Art History to see how cultural excellence – due to causes
            that fundamentally can never vary – appears in every period and all kinds of places.

• Technical knowledge is good – even indispensable – to have for themes involving the especial difficulties technical knowledge must be relied upon to master. Technical knowledge enlarges our range of action rather than improving upon the excellence of our action.

• However, excellence in art essentially does not depend on technique, but rather on the just interpretation of a subject combined with genuine achievement in design. Art History does not equal composition as an essential study, but it does help us and is therefore good to have. Other times and other places had not the learning of the modern West and thus not quite its range, but had equal excellence.

 
     2.  Besides needing the History of Art to train their eyes at discerning other workers’ best
             creations – regardless of how unfamiliar may be the face they wear – artists want this study,
             as every man must want the history  of  his own kind, for the assuring companionship it offers.  

• For all such learning reveals how others – very much like ourselves – have lived and what they did. 

• In our calling we may thus share the triumphs and frustrations of our brother artists through the ages and so take our places in a greatly lengthened life made stronger by a little faith in ourselves and a hope we owe to their example. 

There is no time for me to treat in our framework any useful portion of the History of Art. But we can deal here with the major steps in the development of Western Writing, whose dual heights of excellence must substitute for the miraculous abundance of the history of art which, alas, at present, poses an unwieldy horn of plenty.


        1.  Our Alphabet is the lineal descendant of Phoenician characters, which are thought to go
             back to Egyptian pictographs, or to have been independently contrived in Phoenicia.
             Aleph the bull became Alpha and “A,” Beth – the house, Beta and “B,” Gimel – the camel,
             Gamma and “G,” so that our word “Alphabet” itself is of this North Semitic origin.

        2.  Pictographs are unevenly exact sound-alikes. A picture of a deer could do duty for
              addressing some we are fond of, as in “my dear” and, less precisely, a “gull” as in seagull
              might mean a “girl.” 

             When Aleph, Beth and Gimel turned into Hellenic Alpha, Beta, and Gamma, their names
             became mere pronunciation keys for the initial sound and the Phoenician meanings
             disappeared. Along the way the pictographs grew simpler and more geometric in design,
            and so became true letters.

       3.  Around 200 BC, ill-crafted linear letter skeletons, more of a Latin than of Greek
            appearance, assumed truly geometric character in the centered horizontal bar of “A”
            and the semi-circles of “C, D, S and R.”
 
              The geometric character since then has been preserved, but was modified correctively to
            give aesthetic satisfaction. These changes produced in A.D. 100 the Monumental
           Stone-Carved Roman Capital, with the thicks and thins, as well as serifs of our present day.

       4.  The monumental Roman Capital is the first of two lettering masterpieces we have in
           Western Europe.

• It is, however, a letter suitable for carving but cumbersome to write. Only its thicks and thins – the results of preparatory writing with a chisel-form brush – endure, when the chisel-edged nib takes over throughout the whole development of our second alphabet, of the letters we call “small.”
• The path was gradual, with beautiful pen-forms on the way. Letter shapes grew rounded, in part longer, and eventually slanted, for rapid writing by the pen. The end-product was the Chancery Hand of the High Renaissance, and marks the second crest of excellence in Western writing:
• The whole alphabet went through the paces of my “M” and “F” skeletons, which mark the pathways followed by the pen, without thick and thin resulting from the width of the pen.

        5.  I am indebted here a second time to John Howard Benson – who was the greatest writing
             master this country ever had – for my brief history of lettering. In his understanding, Chancery
             Cursive is the finest possible compromise between the needs of the reading eye and our rapidly
             writing hand.

        6.  Should we venture, perhaps rashly, to design an alphabet of our own, we must consider this
              historic line in order to remain inside the bounds of legibility.

• Yet there is, within those limits, much we can create with the thicks and thins, with clarifying and widened endings modeled by the serif, and with the curving strokes of the rapid, running hand.
• The visual correction taught to us by Rome is simply the design of legible, well differentiated, and yet consistent, elements belonging to one family of forms. And, when we go our own way, we should seek to equal that especial excellence instead of copying the Roman shapes.

 
        If we paint and draw still lifes, landscapes, or the human face and figure and think that lettering can teach us nothing, then we are not true students of the arts we practice. For an excellence a little off-side of our personal striving allows us to dismiss for a while our own designs and can refresh our fatigued and clouded minds, thus crystallizing our judgment and brightening our vision.
        To perceive in other disciplines how he may improve within his own, characterizes the ardent student and true learner.
 
 
 
III   The Likeness of a Beautiful Thing

     A.  Two Questions 

         You owe this portion of the series to a one-time student who wrote me letters with questions about art to which I replied in essay form. One exchange dealt with the theme: “Why do we make art?” Two questions reside within the one:

1. First, what is a work of art? Or, better, what, in the realm of art, is a beautiful thing – as opposed to a beautiful face that is a gift of God?
2. And second, what benefits can a beautiful thing supply that we should feel a powerful compulsion to make a place for it in life?

        Both of these are philosophical concerns, and a philosophic bent of mind will help us to consider them. But philosophic learning all alone cannot succeed, because the task requires also the experience of a working artist.
        Because of this, my discourse will not be exclusively a set of philosophical reflections, nor center only on artistic action. But, giving both their due, we may achieve right understanding and thus reveal most clearly what an artist will find proper and worthwhile to do.


     B.  The Meaning of the Term “Art”  

        Art is a strange word, not for what it means, but what it fails to mean.

1. There are three closely related Latin verbs – “aptare, arctare, and artare.” All mean to join together, as does “articulate” in our tongue.
2. In German, the word “Kunst” is also notable for what it does not mean. It derives from “können,” the German verb for “possibility” – to be able to, or “can.”
3. If we extract meaning, as best we may, from the Latin and the German, a work of art will be a thing ably joined together. Neither the depth of feeling we experience nor that which we express through art are at all delineated by this definition.

           In the great puzzles of existence, groping in the dark may be common in Philosophy. But otherwise, so much groping in the dark is not altogether usual, because language strives for our understanding, and not to deepen the confusion. For example, “lawnmower” and “dishwasher” proclaim at once what these appliances are and the service they deliver.
         My task is to make as precisely clear what art is and it does for us, as the names lawnmower and dishwasher make clear the function of those objects. To make as clear, however, does not mean to state as briefly. On the contrary, I must, to some degree, become substantially long-winded.                   
 
 
    C.  The Claim Implied through Showing Art

1. There is implied a declaration when works of art go on exhibit. The artist tells the viewer: “This is a beautiful and very valuable thing; and therefore I am sharing it with you. For it is something you truly ought to have.”
2. From this claim follows a rule an artist breaks only at great cost. His work – for the purpose of being seen – must outstrip reality. A coffee pot, painted just as it appears, is less than the coffee pot we can also use as well as see. Thus, to be genuinely beautiful, a picture must surpass its subject.
3. We often fail to reach such excellence when we make fervent emotional appeals.  Sweetly sensitive or pompously heroic striving – while design and form are weak – cannot justify the response of feeling they demand. It is this kind of sentimental and heroic overloading which produces what Germans have named “Kitsch” and Americans call “Corn.”

           But learning that a picture of a coffee pot may be worth painting, and worth seeing, can be a
           rich reward.

1. In the Coffee Pot still life, my patterns based upon the play of light are a specialized abstraction. They are a chosen derivation from my scrutiny of nature, which informs me that all the world consists of fields of color whose tonal values I may reduce to black and white.

Comment:
   Has some other discipline offered you insight into the practice or appreciation of visual art?