ROBERT HENRI - The Art Spirit

Notes, Articles, Fragments of Letters
and Talks to Students, Bearing on the
Concept and Technique of Picture
Making, the Study of Art Generally,
and on Appreciation.

NO OTHER AMERICAN PAINTER DREW UNTO HIMSELF such a large, ardently personal group of followers as Robert Henri, whose death, July 12th, 1929, brought to an end a life of uncontaminated devotion to art.

Henri was an inspired teacher with an extraordinary gift for verbal communication, with the personality and prophetic fire that transformed pupils into idolators.

Not only so but he ardently believed in the close relationship of Art to Lifebelieved that Art is a matter in which not only professionals and students, but everyone is vitally concerned; and his contention is supported by the immense benefit that has accrued to France through its devotion to art and its production.

The list of men now eminent who developed under Henris precepts is a long one. He sought, above all things, to cultivate spontaneity. He always attempted to bring out the native gift. He gave his followers complete respect for an American outlook. He showed them the Frenchmen but he did not encourage them to imitate the Frenchmen. Without jingo Henri taught them artistic self-respect. It was not a crime to look at American material with American eyes.

Yet, for all the impulsion which he gave toward what might be called a native school, Henri was the first artist to spread in any broad way the news of the great French painters who made the nineteenth century such a glorious epoch. It is hard for us to realize that only a short generation ago changes in French art were not registered in New York with anything like the present rate of speed. New York had not then become the great financial centre of the world. French paintings were not then bought at such dazzling prices or in anything like the same quantity as now, nor had the collecting of Parisian art, popular as it was more than ten years ago, become the social mania in America that it is today.

Curiously, although William Chase and other prominent American painters and painting teachers, who belonged to the period immediately preceding Henris reign, might have brought back from Europe for their future pupils the fresh news of Manet, Degas and the others, it remained for Henri, the great protagonist of a new American school, to be the first prophet to bring to students in any great numbers, both a sense of the importance of the last half of the nineteenth century in French painting and a knowledge of the revived interest in such old masters as Frans Hals, Goya and El Greco.

To be sure Chase talked to his students about El Greco before Henri started teaching, and other painters of Chases generation knew these things. But Henri was a far more dynamic teacher than Chase. It required his extraordinary per- sonal magnetism, his fervor, his passion for the verbal communication of his ideas to place before a vast succession of eager youth the new world of vision and to make general, knowledge which before had been too special to be effective. No one who has not felt the magnetic power of Henri, when he had before him an audience of ambitious students hungry for the masters moving words, can appreciate the emotional devotion to art which he could inspire as could no other teacher. One had to know those students to realize how it could have been possible at that late date for a young painter to combine genuine painting eagerness with a sublime ignorance of the whole world of art that had its being outside of the Henri class. This ignorance in many of his students Henri set himself to overcome by opening their eyes to the fundamental meaning of art. But he did not hold up to them the art of the past or the great contemporary art of France as an ideal to imitate.

One can hardly believe now, were the facts not so easy to establish, that many of the young men and women who studied under him, although so passionately interested in painting, first heard the names of Daumier, Manet, Degas, Goya and a host of others from the lips of Robert Henri. One wonders how some of them ever came to painting at all after exhibiting such surprising ability to dodge knowledge. Henri was not on the lookout for cultivation. Native talent, in whatever crude disguise it might appear, was what he sought. Let the untrained student be as nave, as profoundly illiterate, as filled with aesthetic misconceptions as possible, Henri disregarded the outward dress and pointed lack of polish. He looked to the mans potentialities, which he attempted to develop without regard to himself in time and energy. He demanded from his students a first hand emotion received not from art but from life.

When Henris classes were at fever heat, impressionism was already being taught in the Pennsylvania Academy. Twachtman, who died in 1902, had inculcated impressionist theories of light in his students at The Art Students League. But Twachtman was an unwilling, comparatively inarticulate teacher, capable of communicating only to the few some sense of his rare and subtle spirit. Henri, on the other hand was, as I have said, an inspired teacher, with an extraordinary gift for verbal communication.