SMITH TEACHER HITS ART INSTRUCTION

The following article on the place of the fine arts in a university was written at the request of the CRIMSON by Professor Oliver Larkin '18, head of the Fine Arts Department at Smith College. Professor Larkin was an assistant in Fine Arts here in 1919, 1920, 1922, and 1923.

You have asked me to contribute to the present discussion with regard to the teaching of the fine arts in the university, a discussion provoked by the recent decision of Harvard's Department of Fine Arts concerning Mr. Robin Feild. What I have to say is, of course, the personal opinion which I hold as an individual. The whole foundation of my own fifteen years of teaching in art was acquired at Harvard; much that was taught me there I have taught to others during this period. Experience, however, tests theories and modifies the practice based on theories; and my present conception of what a college or university art faculty owes to the student varies in important respects from that which prevailed at Harvard during my years of study there.

It is obvious that, in a world which undergoes so many major changes and which faces, ill-prepared, so many crucial dilemmas, men should begin to reconsider not only the meanings of art in our time, and the place of the creative artist, but also the purposes and desired results of education in the fine arts. Certain traditional functions of the college art department have a degree of usefulness, to be sure, which is relatively independent of these world changes, because they have a value which remains relatively constant. I refer to the preparation of the scholar-specialist whose activity will add to the sum total of what is known about a man, a work of art, a period, a school. The future scholar learns the methodology of research; he acquires precision and a scrupulous honesty in using his materials. To delicately sharpened powers of analysis and appraisal he adds ability to perceive qualities in works of art. So far as concerns Harvard, the distinguished careers of hundreds of scholars, museum workers, teachers and technical research men bear witness to what has been accomplished in this field.

Present Taste Judges Past Art

It is rather with respect to those educational functions which, because most intimately linked with world change, stand most in need of continual revision, that I believe our colleges, Harvard among them, have been content with less than real accomplishment. For every potential specialist in art, undergraduate classes include many young men and women who are not there because they wish to lay the basis for a professional career in art, nor even purely for the sake of the intellectual discipline involved, but rather as persons whose taste in art, though they will never be artists themselves, will be of consequence in the creative expression of our time and the future. By "taste" I do not mean the knowledge of what it is permitted for a gentleman to admire, nor the ability to employ correct terminology in describing one's aesthetic experiences, but rather that synthesis of knowing, of intuition, of critical awareness, which becomes part of one's permanent equipment in dealing not only with aesthetic experience but with experience in general. Many teachers who have worked with young people during these later years will recognize that I am not describing a mythical individual. The student of today desires the rich personal satisfactions which works of art can give, but he desires something further. He feels, often unconsciously, the need for establishing, in Dewey's phrase, "the continuity of artistic experience with normal processes of living" in order that his experience of art may become a part of the equipment with which he is to establish a sound, happy and useful integration between himself and his world--that present world in which, quite naturally, he is primarily interested. He rather resents the academic habit which separates past and present and ignores their reciprocal relationship. He wants taste in the present tense, in the sense implied by Lionello Venturl's remark, "the history of criticism teaches that the critic has need of a present taste to direct his judgment even upon past art . . . the intuitive consciousness of art in the making that is to say, contemporary art."

Wide Knowledge of Background Necessary

To what extent are these functions of art instruction given place in our curricula and in our class-room methods? Only too frequently works of art are presented to students as aesthetic fragments torn from, their context in the lives, the ideas, the social habits, the cultural practices which produced them--very much as works of art are presented in a museum. This procedure, often necessary for the investigator-scholar, is a great disadvantage to the general student of art. His ignorance of the circumstances in which a great picture was painted, or a building constructed, not only limits the range of "enjoyment" it can bring him, but falsifies his whole notion of the basic relationships between art and society in all times, including the present.

The teaching of art history is discontinuous, ignoring the ground swell but making much of the wave-crests--schools, movements, isms, styles, which succeed one another much like the ducks in a shooting-gallery. To evolve a philosophy of art history which would give meaning to change and value to accomplishment, often requires that we study phenomena which are not, in the orthodox, artistic at all. How much simpler to build stone walls that make teaching easier though they make learning more difficult. Thus one avoids the charge of being an academic jack-of-all-trades, and remains the specialist behaving as though his field of knowledge existed for its own sake.

Survey Gives Recognition But Not Understanding

A thin and superficial continuity, to be sure, is often attempted in what are known as "rapid survey" courses, where innumerable slides appear in swift succession upon the screen, with equally swift comments by the instructor. At the end of such a course, the victim of this "speed-up" system is expected to "identify" a goodly number of slides, and will doubtless pass the rest of his life comfortably unaware of the distinction between recognition and understanding. In such fashion, as one college catalogue once stated, "the student learns to recognize the old masters upon sight." To be on speaking terms with Raphael is the beginning, but surely not the end of a liberal education in the arts.

Students are sometimes given the opportunity to handle, themselves, the tools and materials of the artist, in studio practice with line, forms and colors which is intended less as preparation for a professional career than as a means of gaining insight into the line, form and colors of the great masters. Too often this analytical approach becomes merely a series of five-finger exercises, an attempt to put the Principles of Design through their paces, to make drawings and paintings which will be illustrations of basic principles of order, not an attempt to explore the relation between what the artist wants to say, to describe, to express, and the particular means he chooses with which to do it. If art is a language, then one can scarcely hope to learn its words without their meanings.

Art Must Not Live on Past Reputation

Modern art has too long remained a "not un-feared, half-welcome guest" among art teachers, a testimony rather to our caution than to our sense of responsibility to the world in which we live. Contemporary art is likely, among teachers, to be regarded as a trouble some continuation of nineteenth century art, rather than a phenomenon which requires not only special knowledge but a rather unusual critical equipment for its comprehension or its appraisal. Few college graduates can say that they have given much time or much thought, in their fine arts courses, to Surrealism, the murals of Orozco, or the Federal Art Projects. Few scholars feel that these are fruitful subjects for scholarly investigation. In a publication which contains the results of scholarly research, I recently found, for the period between 1925 and 1930, forty-eight articles on mediaeval art, twenty-two on Renaissance and Baroque Art, and one on Modern Art. Perhaps it is because the critical apparatus of most scholars is so beautifully equipped to deal with Masaccio and Piero della Francesca that it finds itself at a loss when confronted by Dali and Gropper. At a symposium on Modern Art some years ago, I heard a scholar who has written much and wisely on the art of the Italian Renaissance attempt, quite unsuccessfully, to cope with some of the more extreme forms of modernism; I concluded that his powers of connoisseurship were not translatable into the present tense. Not the least "dangerous" thing about the arts in our time is their demand that we see in them something more than the application of age-old principles to now materials, their claim that the new forms must inevitably change old conceptions of what constitutes "beauty", what constitutes indeed a work of art. Since it is quite probable that there are as many masterpieces ahead of us as behind us, and that present and future accomplishments in art depend on the degree to which the layman can develop an intelligent, imaginative and critical attitude toward, the work of contemporary painters, sculptors, architects and designers, it would seem desirable that we cease oncourag- ing art to live on its reputation, and insist that' it earn one in our time and with our help. I do not believe it a less scholarly enterprise to investigate the effects of aluminum on sculptural form, the relation between function and proportion in the automobile, or the color dynamics of the animated cartoon, than to explore the use of oil medium by the Van Eycks, the color-orchestration of the Venetians, or the perspective of Piero della Francesca. The question, to me, is not whether the work of Disney is art or non-art, but whether we can bring to fruition the seemingly unlimited formal and expressive possibilities which, even in its present state, it so clearly reveals.

Feild One Who Restores Context to Art

Every experiment in art is a collaboration between artist and layman. Artists now realize this. For the artist, as Holger Cahill wrote, "a new concept of social loyalty and responsibility, of the artist's union with his fellow men in origin and destiny, seems to be replacing the romantic concept of nature which for so many years gave to artists and to many others a unifying approach to art . . . an end seems to be in sight to the kind of detachment which removed the artist from common experience, and which at its worst gave rise to an art merely for the museum, a rarified preciousness." If the layman is to meet the artist half way, we must include among the scholars, the research experts, the technicians on our faculties, men who can bring past and present into meaningful relationship, restore to past works of art their lost context and meaning, relate art to the common run of experience, override the compartments we have built for convenience, recognize the present as a legitimale subject for investigation, and cultivate in themselves and their students an intellectually alert relation to the kinds of experience which not only the past has bequeathed us, but which also the present makes possible.

All that I know concerning Mr. Robin Feild, as a result of talks with him and opinions concerning his work which students have expressed to me, leads me to suppose that he has that rare kind of usefulness which I have described; that his teaching at Harvard has in a very real sense contributed to the necessary task of facing the present with whatever intellectual equipment both past and present can provide; and that Harvard cannot afford to lose him