I was reading a wonderful little book* by Mary Whyte when I came across this paragraph:
“Throughout my years in art school, the courses I most anticipated were the painting classes. I was continually disappointed. Most of the teachers seemed focused on abstract expressionism and what was showing in New York, emphasizing the creation of a radical social statement. Little mention was made of sound drawing skill and the fundamentals of composition and design, and never was there any discussion about the painting methods and tools of the early masters.”
As a professional educator, myself, I had to admit it is easy in art to confuse style with substance or the ends with the means. So it got me thinking about the way we learn, and thus about the way we teach.
One of the most powerful tools of learning is categorization, and academia uses it to distinguish disciplines like biology from psychology or history. We even see sub categories to distinguish one period of time from another by the characteristics of its music, art, science, etc. The Baroque verses the Classical, the Renaissance verses the Impressionists, and the Alchemist verses the Physicist. The evolutionary dialectic of each new era seems to condemn its predecessor to antiquity. What we forget is that evolution does not flow in a clean line; it is simply the line remaining after the others dead-ended, and it is always clear in hindsight. In economics, they call it survivor bias where the stock market gains are based on the companies alive today ignoring those that failed. Such evolutionary dead-ends are common but forgotten by history because they add nothing to the present. A stroll through the National Gallery in Washington, DC is all I need to clearly see the path that art took and the contribution of each era to the next. What I do not see are the paintings that did not make it into the gallery.
The abstract impressionism is still popular in many sectors and whole galleries are dedicated to it. But I would not be surprised to see abstract expressionism treated as a dead-end in art history, a distraction, and an act of desperation by starving artists in the age of photography. I remember touring a huge show of the works of Willem deKooning at the National Gallery in the early 1990s. By the time I viewed the sixth roomful of paintings, I turned to my friend and said, “this is pure crap!” You could have heard a pin drop. What my mind saw was an unemployed painter teaming up with an unemployed Madison Avenue marketer during the Great Depression to bilk the surviving industrial robber-barons into thinking such modern art would add to their respectability. Those guys must have laughed their butts off while kicking themselves for not having asked higher prices for these childish tantrums.
The point is that Mary’s teachers taught her the latest style which unfortunately was art based on emotional and fleeting feelings. It is a bit like learning the lingo of the latest management fad to cover the fact that they were promoted into management without a clue of what skills were required. Style replaced substance. Similarly, art schools felt that they had to teach the latest style of art, and discovering that it required no skill, were left with nothing to teach but so called creativity. Creativity is defined as “artistic or intellectual inventiveness,” which left many in the educational establishment with no idea of how to proceed. Mucking around is fun, but as any professional educator will tell you, learning is work. The problem that Mary experienced with her art education was not that we lacked the educational tools; it was that art teachers failed to use them.
Everyone knows that learning is a progressive skill with each step depending on the success with the preceding one, and in the 1950s Bloom's Taxonomy provided us with a coherent set of steps. The six levels are knowledge, comprehension, application, analysis, synthesis, and evaluation. In the first two steps, we learn about the tools of the trade and the context in which they are used and why. In the application and analysis phases we practice using the tools and break the results down into their component part to see what worked and what did not. Then in the synthesis phase, we put things back together in a new way or with different methods. This structured experimentation is real creativity. The last phase, evaluation, is an assessment of the work’s value by us, our peers, or the buying public. Unfortunately, we artists have little control over that last phase. Hiring a good marketing agent or gallery owner can do wonders for an artist’s work and reputation.
Not to belabor the poor Hoboken house painter, but many WPA era painters could paint circles around Willem de Kooning, but as in any game of chance, few come away rich. The 1989 sale of his Pink Lady at Sotheby’s for $3.6 million looks more like asset inflation than intrinsic value. It was a mess when painted in 1944, but it was an original mess! Unfortunately, by many accounts Willem was senile by the time of the '89 sale.
The problem I have is not with the path that de Kooning followed or with abstract impressionism as an art form. My problem is with the abdication of the art instructor’s responsibility to lead and facilitate the development of future artists. The muck-around method is not a teaching style. The ultimate irony in all of this is that de Kooning was formally schooled for eight years at the Rotterdam Academy of Fine Arts and Techniques. He knew how to paint, and then decided to depart from the basics to create his own style. As art teachers, we have a responsibility to first provide the tools and insights on how to use them through the application and analysis phases of learning. We can even facilitate the creative synthesis phase, but that requires some more sophisticated teaching methods that are best described in a separate article. The artist craft is not about natural talent; it is about knowledge, practice, and experimentation. There are no shortcuts.
Now a confession: my personal definition of art is anything that alters my mood. So in that sense, I must admit that my attitude toward de Kooning’s work is proof that it is indeed art, and very effective art at that. I just don’t happen to like it.
* An Artist’s Way of Seeing, by Mary Whyte 2005, Wyrick & Co., Charleston, SC.
