Artist, patron and critical seeing

There are many artists in the online shops where I’ve been selling my own paintings, who offer to do commissions. My early background was spent studying and producing portraiture and there was even a stint in the late 1970’s when I traveled to various cities to sketch ‘caricatures’ at sprawling automobile conferences. I couldn’t do exaggerated caricatures to save my life, but some of my better portrait sketches were created at those behemoth and noisy gatherings. During my early days of exhibiting, a gallerist complained that she couldn’t sell ‘those green’ paintings and asked me to change my palette, my style and everything else at the time that was making my painting my own. I can readily say that I won’t be joining the willing online ranks.

Meyer Shapiro debunks the theory about early artists having to specifically conform to a patron’s desires in his 1994 book ‘Theory and Philosophy of Art: Style, Artist, and Society’.  The relationship dramatically changed from Greek and Roman times, when almost every work of art was made to order for a purpose, to the Renaissance and beyond, when art became ‘art for art’s sake’. Or in other words, art for enjoyment. Meyer suggests that the artist and even artists’ guilds had more power than has been commonly thought. He talks about monk-artists not being paid but producing spontaneous ‘products of delight’ and ‘often unconstrained by the religious natue of the objects in which these were expressed.’

And in spite of the surviving contracts that show many artists were commissioned by wealthy and powerful individuals or corporate groups, ‘this dependence on an order did not mean…that the patron specified precisely the end product’. He rightly speculates that an artist couldn’t say for himself how a work would turn out and our interpretation of these relationships and the end product has incorrectly been supposed to be less autonomous than they actually were.

Even so, there were patrons who demanded adherence to their own standards. ‘When Nicholas Poussin’s patron, Chatelou, complained in 1647 that the picture Poussin had done for him pleased him less than a painting the same artist had created for another patron, Poussin replied: this is what you asked for.’

Times haven’t changed so much in the modern corporate world, when designers are forced to create by committee consensus, always resulting in the most mediocre of ideas and decisions.

‘Paintings and sculptures, let us observe, are the last hand-made objects within our culture. Almost everything else is produced industrially, in mass and through a high division of labor. Few people are fortunate enough to make something that represents themselves, that issues entirely from their hands and mind, and to which they can affix their names. . .’  This paragraph, reprinted from Marshall Berman‘s rapturous essay on Shapiro, states what we artists intimately know and why it’s so difficult to give up the freedom to create, either for a patron or a job or whatever constricts a heartfelt outpouring of immediate response to the world. Berman himself writes the following as one distillation of Shapiro’s definition of modern art: ‘…this very loneliness gives modern artists the power to see through their culture, a culture based on class and lies.’

Shapiro at 89, on the ‘Theory and Philosophy of Art’ book jacket cover. 

Shapiro: ‘Modern art is a liberator of human feeling from social and cultural repressions, a breakthrough to the self’s deepest unconscious sources, and an ongoing force for transparency, gaiety and joy in modern life…Modern art, in both production and consumption, is intensely private and individualized.’  Berman goes on to align Shapiro’s theories with the young Karl Marx’s ‘Alienated Labor’, presenting ‘an indictment of contemporary life’. 

Shapiro: ‘What is most important is that the practical activity by which we live is not satisfying: we cannot give it full loyalty, and its rewards do not compensate for the frustrations and emptiness that arise from the lack of spontaneity and personal identifications in work: the individual is deformed by it, only rarely does it permit him to grow.

. . . All these qualities of painting may be regarded as a means of affirming the individual in opposition to the contrary qualities of the ordinary experience of working and doing.’

From Berman’s essay: ‘He (Shapiro) compares the experience of a work of art as a whole to a mystic’s experience of oneness with God: both experiences may lead to ecstasy, but both leave a great deal out. “We do not see all of a work when we see it as a whole.” Instead of wholeness, he says, we should aspire to fullness; instead of zaps of ecstasy, we should aim for a sensibility that he calls “critical seeing”:

Shapiro: ‘Critical seeing, aware of the incompleteness of perception, is explorative….It takes into account others’ seeing, it is a collective and cooperative seeing and welcome comparison of different perceptions and judgments.’

That sentence, for me, does not describe a committee consensus or a reliance on the notions of an audience or patron, but instead is a continuation of Andre Malraux’s claim in his magnificent ‘Voices of Silence’, that all artists are aware of the whole of art history before their time. Art as history infiltrates our psyches and we can’t completely deny or resist the implications.

Berman suggests that Shapiro is telling us not just how to visit a museum, but how to live our lives more fully, including moments of ‘sudden revelation’. Berman’s own definition of  modernism is eloquent and timely: 

‘To be modern… is to experience personal and social life as a maelstrom, to find one’s world and oneself in perpetual disintegration and renewal, trouble and anguish, ambiguity and contradiction: to be part of a universe in which all that is solid melts into air. To be a modernist is to make oneself somehow at home in the maelstrom, to make its rhythms one’s own, to move within its currents in search of the forms of reality, of beauty, of freedom, of justice, that its fervid and perilous flow allows.’

And finally, Shapiro quoted from his New York Times 1996 obituary. “Our concern with the work of art, however touched by vanity or greed, is a homage beyond self-interest,” he continued. “Through it we surmount, if only at rare moments, the limitations of our striving, possessive selves and, as an old poet says, ‘into glory peep.’ ”