The Art schools should be discouraged

                                              By Leon GARD

LE Degas painter which is the author of the maxim above was a terribly perspicacious spirit, and when he says that one can believe that it is not a joke.

Admittedly, it did not wish, one suspects it, the disappearance of the art of the company, but it noted that today the alleged encouragements of the fine arts are not really exerted with the profit of the fine arts and are not, in practice, that gestures of which the only goal is to justify an excessive number of various civils servant of the fine arts, around of which are agitated a mob of artists without gifts, intrigants, avid of orders and places.

Moreover, without effervescence, the vanity and the ambition relentless of poor, one can hold to ensure that there would be hardly what is called pompeusement " artistic movements ", and if they disappeared, the raison d'être of a whole heading of press known as of artistic information disappears at the same time. The encouragement of the fine arts, it is, today, all that, i.e. the encouragement of what is opposed in fact in the most virulent way to the existence of true art.

Lastly, the print and the intervention of an indifferent, unable and uncomprehending State in the questions of art became so stupidly demagogic and the problem of the life of the artists is posed by him with such a coarseness that its attitude is practically equivalent to a judgment: the purer the artist is, the more it is tall, the more it is crushed by this drunk machine.

The situation is so serious that it should be denounced in front of youth intending itself for arts, which is perhaps the part of youth containing what there is moreover more authentically enthusiastic, and we should not allow that one ridicules such exquisite qualities.

In our company, one makes pretence make nice smile with the artist, one flatters it sometimes as a horse of the neck is flattered when it is supposed that it can save to us the race, but there is at the bottom the least regard neither for his spirit nor for his person.

Official or semi-official schools? What does one teach you there? Things which the processors do not know themselves. The traditions are lost there; the doctrines à.la.mode find there some favour with thirty years of delay, when these doctrines start to collapse: thus the schools offer any chance of unspecified success to you, neither by a major teaching, nor by the formulas of the vogue, because the talents as successes are always established in spite of them and against them.

Young too sensitive people, too noble, too refined, too méditatifs, do not become artists: our company cursed. It makes more than to curse them: it rents them, the caress, from of draws substance, sucks them as an orange which one throws finally the skin. Be thus diplomats, farmers or heads of department, but do not fall into deception to want to make trade of what cannot be for it any more one with manners of.......

Do not believe in the sentences lullabies. The speculator hides everywhere: he will smile you if he hopes to be able to draw something from you, if not, he will crush you. Do not seek pearls to throw them to the crocodiles. If you feel the heart of Corrège or of Rembrandt, start initially by making conceal your heart, which is an excellent philosophical exercise, and say you then that the majority of people for whom you will give your invaluable sweat, if not your blood, are not worth the sorrow of it.

If you want absolutely to make works of art for you, for the pleasure, do not believe that it is necessary to make some all the day. That is not even possible; in spite of the kilometers of painted fabrics, including one great part fails the flea market, there is only one Mona Lisa, and of the hundreds of thousands of people move whole world to see it.

It is necessary to work a long time to acquire science, one repeated you. How, then, you will say, will find us this time if we must make another trade which ensures our material existence?

Do not forget, will answer you I that in our art, to work is often to intensely look at. Moreover, if one needs time and work, is it necessary some as much as one claims it? See the portrait of Ingres by itself at twenty four years: admittedly, it other masterpieces thereafter, but did he made make much better than this portrait carried out at twenty four years?

At all events, it is necessary to draw some with the means from the edge, i.e. to operate depending on the current state of the things. For me, I propose to you to save a considerable time: do not go in any art school or of painting, they all are today execrable and the least bad are useless. None them had the intelligence to react effectively against the jokes of some malicious characters who, even if their vogue declines, even if they " are more or less excommunicated ", for reasons besides as odd as those which raised them, earned however money, ensured their old days, bottled the ways during years, and make fun many broken pots that they do not pay, quite to the contrary. Therefore, time that you will have saved not to listen billevesées that one outputs in these schools, that it of the fine arts or the academy of Mr. André Lhote, it is that will be already an excellent business. Then, if you are firmly, really endowed, if you like really that, a few hours per week will enable you, despite everything, to express you with more force than well of others.

And you will have avoided this humiliation, if dreadful and if degrading for a true artist, to have to go to flatter such or such critic ignare, but influence, such or such civil servant of the fine arts, likely to make you buy or order something by the State, such or such merchant without entrails, but capable " to be interested " in your production.

You will have acquired the right to peacefully scorn a company which is not worth you, which is wild and coarse, whereas you are generous.

Think although the current company does not deserve that one is given, because itself devours all and does not give anything: if you throw some rays that it is only in spite of you, insofar as it is impossible to be completely other than oneself; yes, you included well /understood, are miserly of your gifts.

And even if these gifts remained in you without benefitting anybody, say you finally that it is the company which would lose there and not you.

Here are what I believe necessary today to say to young people; by entreating them not to embrace the career of arts, I have the conviction to have defended the cause of the art of my better.

L G.

         Role of the School of the Art schools

                                   By Leon Gard

  " immorality ", said Napoleon, " is to make a trade which one does not know ".

  Any man claiming to do a work, must be able to ensure that it is indeed ready to do it. The painter must show that it can paint and draw. That which teaches the fine arts must give pledges which it can teach the fine arts.

  However, too often, one is satisfied to propose oneself to occupy a place, as if it were as clear as the day as one is able to hold it.

  In the field of arts, it was imagined since of the years, under various influences, of which some rather suspect, that one did not know of what the talent consisted, and which it was " a enigma ". It is resulted from it that, instead of recognizing the talent in accordance with the code of practice, one took the practice, while waiting for that the enigma is bored, to decree it according to the passion and interests': the artist sees an immense talent, not because it has it, but because it wishes to have it; the collector discovers genius in tables, not because they contain some, but because they are on its wall; the merchant says that Untel is the largest artist, not because it is it indeed, but because it has his works in store.

  However, since one admits in the principle that there are very talented works and works which are it less, one must or to inform themselves of the rules which make it possible to distinguish the ones from the others, or to give up creating a hierarchy and schools, which, without rules, are absurd and odious.

  In fact, these rules exist well, and one conforms, since, with time, a selection is established, which gives rise to the final, public or private collections, and joins together to it what is called the great names of art.

  Which are thus these rules? The judgement of time? Undoubtedly, but the judgement of time is actually only the judgement of the men that time improved so that it became about final.

  However, since it is recognized that the same judgement of the men as regards art, can, with the purification of time, blind man to become clear-sighted, one is well obliged to also recognize that one holds the judgement of the men as regards art for good in oneself, and that it becomes bad only insofar as its nature is deteriorated by temporary circumstances. It follows that only change produced on the spirit of the men by time being satisfying, as well material as moral, this one seems the only condition necessary to the majority of the men for judging well in art. I say the majority, because it is necessary to make the share of those which do not have the love of art, and in visual arts, of the blind men for example, etc.

  Seen under this angle, which is the only possible one, the talent is not any more one enigma:

  The critérium of the judgement as regards art is the choice not involved in the whole of the public liking art.

  Indeed, as much the execution of a work of art requires extremely rare gifts and science, as much the appreciation of this same work of art requires only the love of the beautiful things, which is perhaps, with the good direction, " the thing of the world best divided ", because the directions by which one tastes the beautiful things are naturally lacking only with very little " the power to judge well and to distinguish truth from with the forgery " still says Descartes, " is naturally equal between all the men ". If this observation is right, as it appears to with it by the final authority that it was worth with its author, it confirms our thesis singularly.

  The divergences of opinions would be then due only to the competitions, the presumption, the hasty judgements, with the pusillanimity, which come to distort this aptitude for judging well. Boileau did not observe it that the cabals against Molière ceased with its death.

  " But, as soon as that of a feature of its fatal hands

  Parks had striped it number of human,

  One recognized the price of his MUSE eclipsed ".

  Consequently, that would it be necessary to regularly obtain a valid opinion on the works of art? Nothing other that to request the judgement of a public liking the works of art spontaneously; a calm public, released of the irritation of the newspapers, radio, as much as fear to displease to the holders of money.

  However, which does one see distributing distinctions, rewards, prices? Jurys, still of the jurys, and always of the jurys. And how are made up these jurys? Randomly intrigues of people having already usurped places, press, of the policy, or according to the orders of the trade, when it is not all that together. Thus a man without perspicacity nor impartiality can climb a level, then two, then three, then ten. Here it is finally the academician or professor, if not one and the other without it being able to say for as much which are the reasons to be of this academy, nor which it can really teach though it either, since it is unaware of what it must teach. It even sometimes happens to him to belong to this group of people who claim that the talent is a enigma, which is a nonsense for an academician or a professor, this opinion being opposed obligatorily to any hierarchy, with any professorship.

  It follows that if one finds among the academicians and the professors of the men of talent, they are only accidents, exceptions confirming the rule, and besides impotent to react against the tyrannical inconsistency their colleagues.

  The School of the fine arts, object of our investigation, is not a laboratory of experiments, but, by definition even, an academy: it is not a company of scientists having learned all that one can learn, and in search to discover what one is unaware of still, but a company of schoolboys with which, consequently, one is supposed to teach principles already discovered.

  All the question is thus to know which principles discovered teaches the School of the Fine arts. If one put this question with burns-pourpoint, or even in their giving the time of the reflexion, to those which currently direct the School of the Fine arts, I am quite certain that the response of the majority of them would betray an extreme confusion. The ones, supposedly the " advanced ones ", would speak very high, once more, of "alive " art, which does not have any direction properly, because there is neither alive art nor dead art : art is or is not (moreover, the qualification of " advanced " is extremely elastic: Meissonier was convinced that the institute had been renovated in read opening its doors).

  The others would undoubtedly evoke art eternal, which is creditable, certainly, but does not define a teaching.

  However, don't the busts of Chick and Puget surmount the entry of the school of the street Bonaparte? Aren't the courses, the dormice, the gardens of this one decorated reproduction of the ancient, medieval statuary and various times, in which one finds a similar concern to fix the innumerable aspects of the beauty borrowed from the visible life? Aren't whole rooms decorated with copies according to the masterpieces of Raphaël, several others, and of a great painting of Ingres, i.e. of as many perfectly figurative Masters?

  In short, is this yes or not the principles which inspired the Masters that one wants to transmit to the younger generations?

  If one regards these principles as out-of-date at the School of the Fine arts, that it is said it frankly and that cease the lie of all these witnesses of the art of last who can only obstruct the application of the new principles, and create the ambiguity to let believe that one remains attached to old.

  Lastly, if these are not any more the principles which guide the school, we have the right to know those which really guide it, since it is us, finally, which pay this school.

  But perhaps will have we some sorrow to know them, because the academy of the Fine arts, with which fall the serious task to direct the School of the Fine arts does not appear very well to know itself where it is. A member of the aforementioned academy, Desired-Lucas Mr., recently wrote things which make suppose that the current institute is very dubious as for the way to follow. Indeed, Desired-Lucas Mr. declared here even, in the " Apollo " of last July, that if it were necessary to condemn certain exaggerations of the modern school, one was to however be pleased to have banished finished art "this unbearable which choked the emotion ". I acknowledge that I do not disentangle, when Desired-Lucas Mr. with all his weight of authority of member of the institute, proscribes " the unbearable one finished which choked the emotion ". If it refers to finished of Raphaël, Holbein, Memling, Ingres, or to that of Meissonier, which was of sound living one of glories of this same institute, from where Desired-Lucas Mr. launches today his lightnings against finished.

  And when he still writes that " the Art of imitation was to yield the step to the Art of expression ", does want it to say that Van Eck has less of expression than Mr. Rouault?

  While waiting, much pupils of the School of the Art schools make a kind of works in which one seeks in vain which plastic principles they obey. It is thus allowed to believe that if one subjected these works by the vote of this invaluable faculty " to judge well and distinguish truth from with the forgery ", that Descartes grants to a spontaneous public, vote which is with the remainder, the only possible critérium, and in the final analysis, that of, these works, say I, would not collect any approval of it.

  In short, the School of the Art schools takes place to be only insofar as it transmits tested principles: however, it does not appear that it transmits anything similar, nor that, moreover, its leaders are capable to define what they teach there.

  One has thus the right to ask up to which point the people charged by the government with teaching the fine arts at the School of the Fine arts, know the trade which they make, and consequently, to take again the formula of Napoleon, up to which point they do not fall into immorality.