Lecture for art students

By: Oscar Wilde (Lecture delivered to the art students of the Royal Academy in London, June 30, 1883)
Translated by: Neli Naço ("ExLibris" newspaper)

In the lecture which I am privileged to deliver before you tonight, I do not wish to give you any abstract definition of beauty, in general. For we who work in the fields of art cannot accept any theory of beauty in exchange for beauty itself, and being far from wishing to isolate it in a formula by calling upon the intellect, we, on the contrary, we seek to materialize it in a form that gives joy to the soul through feelings. We want to create it, not define it. The definition should follow the work: the work should not fit itself into the definition.

Nothing, indeed, is more dangerous to the young artist than any conception of ideal beauty: he is continually drawn from it either into feeble beauty or lifeless abstraction: whereas to touch the ideal you generally do not have to belt it her vitality. You have to find it in life and recreate it in art.

So while on the one hand I don't want to give you any philosophy of beauty (for what I want tonight is to investigate how we can create art, not how we can talk about it), on the other hand I don't want to deal with anything, such as the history of English art.

To begin with, such an expression as English art is an expression without any meaning. One also had to talk about English mathematics. Art is the science of beauty and mathematics the science of truth: there is no national school of either. In reality, a national school is just a provincial school. There isn't even such a thing as an art school. Only artists exist; that's all.

And as for art histories, they are quite worthless to you, unless you are looking for the obsequious oblivion of some art professorship. It is of no value to know the date of Perugino or the birthplace of Salvator Rosa; all you have to learn about art is to tell a good painting, when you see it, from a bad painting, when you also see it. As regards the time of the artist, all good works seem strictly modern: a piece of Greek sculpture, a portrait by Velasquez are always modern, always belong to our time. And, as far as the nationality of the artist is concerned, art is not national but universal. Then, as to archaeology, avoid it altogether: archeology is only the science of making excuses for bad art; it is the rock on which many young artists drown and perish; it is the abyss from which no artist, old or new, ever returns. Or, if he returns, he is so covered with the dust of ages and the mold of time that he is quite unknown as an artist, and must hide himself for his remaining days under the hat of a professor or only as an illustrator of history. of antiquity. How worthless archeology is in art you can judge from the fact of its being very popular. Popularity is the crown of laurels which the world places on bad art. Whatever is popular is wrong.

Then, since I will not talk to you about the philosophy of beauty, or about the history of art, you will ask what I will talk about today. The subject of my lecture today is what makes an artist and what an artist does; what are the relations of the artist with those around him, what is the education that the artist should receive and what is the quality of a good work of art.

Now, in terms of the artist's relations with those around him, by which I mean the era and the place in which he was born. All good art, as I have said before, has nothing to do with any particular century; but this universality is the quality of the work of art. The conditions that produce this quality are different. I think what you need to do is to fully understand your age, in order to get away from it completely; remembering that if you are, after all, an artist, you will not be the star of a century, but the master of eternity, that all art rests on a principle, and that only temporary considerations, after all, are not principles, that those who advise you to make your art representative of the nineteenth century are advising you to produce an art which your children will call obsolete. But you will tell me that this is an unartistic age, that we are an unartistic people, and that the artist suffers greatly in this nineteenth century of ours.

Of course he suffers. I, in spite of all people, will not deny this. But remember that there has never been an artistic age, or an artistic people since the beginning of the world. The artist has been and always will be a wonderful exception. There is no golden age for art; there are only artists who have created what is more golden than gold.

What? You will tell me: Greeks? Were they not an artistic people?

Well, the Greeks certainly weren't, but perhaps you mean the Athenians, the citizens of one of a thousand cities.

Do you think they were an artistic people? Let us take them at the time of their highest artistic development, in the latter part of the fifth century BC, when they had the greatest poets and the greatest artists of the ancient world, when the Parthenon was brought into harmony according to the orders of Phidias, when the philosopher spoke of wisdom in the shade of a painted portico, and the tragedy lay in the perfection of the procession and the pathos through the marbles of the stage. Then, were they not an artistic people? Not at all. What is an artistic people but a people who love their artists and understand their art? The Athenians could do neither.

And how did they treat Fidia? To Phidias we owe the great age, not only in Greek art, but in all art—by which I mean the beginning of the use of the living model.

And what would you say if all the English bishops followed by the English people descended from Exeter Hall to the Royal Academy one day, and escorted Sir Frederick Leighton in a prison carriage to Newgate on the charge of allowing you to use models alive in your projects for sacred paintings? Would you not cry aloud against the barbarism and puritanism of such an idea? Would you not explain to them that the worst way to honor God is to dishonor man who is made in His image and is the work of His hands? Would you not explain to them that if one wants to paint Christ he must find the most Christ-like person he can find, and if one wants to paint Our Lady he can find the most chaste girl he knows?

Would you not rush in and burn Newgate to ashes, if necessary, and say that such a thing is without parallel in history?

Without parallel? Well, that's exactly what the Athenians did.

In the Parthenon Marble Room in the British Museum, you will see a marble shield on the wall. Above it are two figures—one of a man whose face is half hidden, the other of a man with the divine features of Pericles. Only for its realization, for the appearance in a bas-relief taken from the sacred Greek history, of the image of the great statesman who governed Athens at that time, Phidias burst into the cell and there, in the public prison of Athens, the artist died supreme of the old world.

And you think this was a special case? The mark of a Philistine age is the cry of immorality directed against art, and this cry was raised by the Athenian people against every great poet or thinker of their time—Aeschylus, Euripides, Socrates. It was the same with thirteenth-century Florence. Good handicrafts are suitable for the guilds not for the people. The moment the guilds lost their power and the people flooded in, the beauty and honesty of the work died.

And, thus, never speak of an artistic people; there has never been such a thing.

But, perhaps, you will tell me that the outward beauty of the world has almost entirely disappeared from us; that the artist no longer dwells in the midst of the gracious surroundings which, in former ages, were the natural inheritance of every one, and that art is very difficult in our ungracious town, where, after going to work in the morning or after returning from it in the evenings, you have to go from street to street through the stupidest, stupidest architecture the world has ever seen; architecture where every pleasing Grecian form has been broken down and violated, where every pleasing Gothic form has been broken down and violated, reducing three-fourths of the houses of London to being nothing but square boxes of the meanest proportions, as stunted as smoky, as poor as their pretensions—the hall door always the wrong color and the windows the wrong size, and where (even when weary of the houses you turn to contemplate the street itself) you have nothing to see but chimney caps, people with sandwich packets, red post boxes and you even do it at the risk of being run over by an emerald colored omnibus.

Isn't art difficult, you will say to me, in such surroundings as these? Of course it is difficult, but art was never easy; you yourself would not want it to be easy; and, besides, nothing is worth doing—except what the world calls impossible.

But, you don't bother to get answers only from a paradox. What are the relations of the artist with the outside world, and what is the result of the loss of beautiful surroundings for you, is one of the most important questions of modern art; and, there is no point on which Mr. Ruskin thus insists that the decadence of art has flowed from the decadence of beautiful things; and since the artist cannot feed his eyes with beauty, beauty departs from his work.

I remember that in one of his lectures, after describing the dirty appearance of a large English city, he draws for us a picture of what the artistic surroundings were long ago. Think, says he, in the words of the perfect, pictorial imagination, whose beauty I can but faintly imitate; think what was the scene which presented itself, in his afternoon walk, before a modeler of the Gothic school of Pisa—before Nino Pisano or one of his followers:

On each side of a clear river he saw a line of still brighter palaces, arched and pillared and paved with deep red porphyry and serpentine; along the pier before their gates rode troops of horsemen, noble in appearance and form, dazzling in crest and shield; horse and man a maze of separate color and reflected light—purple, silver, and alli fringes flowing over the stout limbs and over the winding road like waves of the sea over the rocks in the west. Opening up, on each side of the river were gardens, courtyards, and monasteries; long rows of white columns between crowns of vines; raising fountains through pomegranate and orange groves; and, still along the paths of the gardens, under the red and among the red of the pomegranate shadows, moving slowly, the groups of the most chaste women that Italy had ever seen—the most chaste because they were the purest and the wisest; trained in the highest learning as well as in all courtly art—in dancing, in song, in sweet wit, in high learning, in highest courage, in highest love—able alike to fill with joy, to charm or protect the souls of men.

Above all this landscape of perfect human life rose the dome and belfry glowing with white alabaster and gold: beyond dome and belfry the broad hillsides were whitened with the color of olive branches; far to the north, over a crimson sea of ​​heavy Apennine peaks, the clear mountains, the sharp slopes of Carrara raised their steadfast blazes of marble peaks to the amber sky; the great sea itself, burning with the expanse of light, stretched from their feet to the Gorgonian islands; and above all this, ever present, near or far (seen among the leaves of the vines, imagined with all his march of clouds in the course of the Arno, or set with the depth of the adjacent blue, against the golden hair and the burning face of the lady and the knight), that undisturbed and sanctified heaven, which was to all men, in those days of innocent faith, truly the indisputable abode of souls, just as the earth of men was; and which opened directly through the gates of cloud and veil of dew into the grandeur of the eternal world—a heavenly heaven in which every passing cloud was indeed an angel's chariot, and every evening and morning ray of itself poured out from the throne of God.

Do you think of it as a design school?

Then look at the dull, monotonous appearance of some modern city, at the drab clothing of men and women, at the meaningless and worthless architecture, at the colorless and dreary surroundings. Without a beautiful national life, not only sculpture, but all the arts will die.

Well, as for the religious feeling of the closing of the passage, I don't think I need to talk about it. Religion springs from religious sentiment, art from artistic sentiment: you never mistake the one for the other; if you haven't planted the right root, you won't get the flower you expect; and, if a man sees an angel's carriage in a cloud, he will probably paint it quite differently from a cloud.

But as regards the general idea of ​​the first part of this delightful piece of prose, is it really true that beautiful surroundings are necessary to the artist? I think not; I'm more than sure not. Indeed, to me the most unartistic thing, in this age of ours, is not the public's indifference to beautiful things, but the artist's indifference to things that are called ugly. Because, for the true artist, in general, nothing is beautiful or ugly in itself. It has nothing to do with the realities of the object, but only with its appearance, and appearance is a matter of light and shadow, of mass, position and value.

Appearance is, in fact, only a matter of effect; you are dealing with the effects of nature and not the real state of the object. What you must paint as painters are not things as they are, but things as they seem to be; not things as they are, but things as they are not.

No object is so ugly that, under certain conditions of light and shade, or in the company of other objects, it does not appear beautiful; no object is so beautiful that, under certain conditions, it does not appear ugly. I believe that in every twenty-four hours what is beautiful looks ugly and what is ugly looks beautiful, at least once.

And the commonplace character in a great measure in our English painting seems to me to be due to the fact that many of our young artists look only to what we may call "ready-made beauty," while you exist as artists not to copy beauty but create it in your art, wait and observe for it in nature.

What would you say of a dramatist who would put in his play none but virtuous men as characters? Wouldn't you say he was missing half his life? So for the young artist who paints nothing but pretty things, I'd say he's missing half the world.

Do not expect life to be picturesque, but try to see life in a picturesque state. You can create these states for yourself in the studio, because they are just states of lighting. In nature you can wait for them, look for them, choose them and, if you wait and watch, they will come.

At night, on Gower Street you can see a post box that is picturesque: on the Thames Embankment you can see picturesque policemen. Even Venice is not always beautiful, neither is France.

To paint what you see is a good rule in art, but to see what is worth painting is a far better thing. See life in a pictorial state. It is better to live in a city with changeable weather than in a city with pleasant surroundings.

Now, looking at what makes the artist and what the artist creates, who is the artist? There is a man living among us who embodies in himself all the qualities of the noblest art, whose work is a joy for all time, who is, he alone, a master of all time. Such a man is Mr. Whistler.

***

But, you will say, modern clothing, this is a bad thing. If you can't paint a black garment then you can't paint a silk vest. Ugly clothing is better for art—facts of appearance, not of object.

What is a painting? First, a painting is a beautifully colored surface, simply, with a message or spiritual meaning for you no greater than a piquant fragment of Venetian glass or a blue plaque from the Damascus wall. It is, first, a purely decorative thing, a pleasure to behold.

All the archaeological paintings that make you say “How strange!” All the sentimental paintings that make you say “How sad!” All the historical paintings that make you say “How interesting!” All the paintings that do not immediately give you such artistic joy as to make you say "How beautiful!" are bad paintings.

***

We never know what an artist will do. Of course not. The artist is not a specialist. All such divisions as animal painters, landscape painters, painters of Scottish cows in an English mist, painters of English cows in a Scottish mist, painters of racehorses, painters of hunting bulldogs, are all superficial. If a man is an artist he can paint anything.

The object of art is to enliven the most divine and remotest of the chords which make music in our souls; and color is, of course, by itself a mystical presence within things and tone a kind of guardian.

Am I looking, then, for simple technique? No. As long as there are some signs of the technique as a whole, the painting is unfinished. But what is completion? A painting is finished when all traces of the work and the tools used to produce the result have disappeared.

In the case of the artisan - the weaver, the potter, the blacksmith - there are traces of their hands in their work. But this does not happen with the painter, this does not happen with the artist.

Art should have no feeling about it except its beauty; no technique except what you cannot observe. One should be able to say about a painting not that it is "well painted", but that it is "not painted".

What is the difference between purely decorative art and a painting? Decorative art emphasizes its material: imaginative art denies it. A tapestry shows its threads as part of its beauty: a painting denies its canvas: it shows nothing of it. Porcelain accentuates its glaze: watercolors negate paper.

A painting has no meaning apart from its beauty; no message but her joy. This is the first truth about art that you should never lose sight of. A painting is a purely decorative thing.