Artists and Art Patrons

The Need for a Closer Relationship Between Them

JOHN JAY CHAPMAN

WHEN Michael Angelo was only fourteen years old he was sent to Florence and lived for three years with Lorenzo de Medici, mingling with the wits and scholars of the times.

He must have been a gawky lad; and I have often wondered what it was that Lorenzo saw in the youth, and how a man so rich as Lorenzo, and so busy and important, and so surrounded by scholars, antiquarians and clever people, should have had the time or attention to spend on a mere handicraftsman from the country, who—so Ghirlandajo said—had talent.

The answer is, of course, to be found in the rest of Lorenzo's life. He was a very extraordinary man and his was a very extraordinary age. Lorenzo was an artist himself, and he had that feeling of reverence for the creative spirit which liberates talent in others.

A work of art is a ticklish thing to produce. It comes out of the crucible of a "temperament." It draws upon unconscious powers. It is living, sensitive, wayward; must be both humored and controlled; must spring and yet be directed.

No two works of art are just alike.

When an artist tries to repeat a success, his capolavoro becomes a pot-boiler.

This is as true of small things,—stories and squibs,—as it is of great ones,— tragedies and madonnas. This primal fact about all art seems to be regarded as a joke, or as a cryptic piece of nonsense by all men who are not artists themselves, except that rare class of persons who are mad about genius in others. They alone revere the mystery.

IT is, to be sure, a strange fact that the man who orders a picture has almost as much a hand in its merit as the man who paints it. But there must be no non-conductor in the shape of a middleman. The little point of contact between artist and patron, which is conversational in its nature and seems so trivial, rules the whole situation. It creates or it destroys. Through this focus passes the whole work of art. Any third influence spoils the current. If a rich man who is building a palace says to a decorator, "Ah, Mr. Sawyer Jones, you have good recommendations; let us see what you can do. Perhaps we can use you in the Pompeian room. But you will have to see Mr. Cagliostro, the decorator, who has taken full charge of that sort of thing for me"—why, he ties the artist up and delivers him over to the interior decorator. Under such conditions the artist would be trying to please someone who was trying to please someone else.

He would be the slave of a slave.

To Cagliostro the desideratum is a safe and sane copy of something. He wants, at the best, a sample of Jones's work,—as near like what Jones did for the Midas's drawing-room as the conditions will permit. Jones's only safe course is to imitate his own style himself; and, by Jove, so subtle are these influences that the chances are that the artist—Jones—will soon do this unconsciously.

Goethe said that no sooner had a man done a good thing than the whole world entered into a conspiracy to prevent him from ever doing another.

The world wants the first one over again. The world wants pot-boilers, longs for them with a consuming passion; and, from end to end, society is rigged with effective machinery which shall produce pot-boilers at any cost. What that cost is no one knows, except the chance thoughtful person, who picks up some popular and successful artist's early sketch (or bust, or poem, or story) and wonders what the deuce has become of the author.

I HAVE had a somewhat kindred experience in writing for the magazines, the editors of which are the typical "middle men" of literature.

Some editor writes me, "Our magazine desires , twenty-five hundred words about modern fads."

Dear me! Twenty-five hundred words? How much does that make—in ideas?

"No, sir," says another, "our magazine cannot use your lines on Simonides. But we should be pleased if you would submit to us a short poem about France, like your recent lines on Italy."

Damned if I do.

I swear I will never correspond with these creatures again. They are the enemies of all the good work in the universe.

I must take a brisk walk and try to forget them.

The editors do for the public and for the literary world what the architects and artistic advisers do for the rich patron. They are looking for a product, but know nothing of the process. They can never say to the artist the only words which inspire creation in the human breast; namely: "I want something of yours, done in your own way—to please yourself" The world at large never says this to an artist till he has won his spurs, not until any work of his hand is a feather in the owner's cap.

Well, to-day in America we ought to have art patrons enough. The country is full of merchant princes; full of palaces, good paintings, antique furniture, precious objects. We have, as a matter of course, a class of middle men; dealers, buyers, arrangers, of the fine arts, who find, import, restore, place, preserve the treasures of Europe, and play for us the part which the Greek rhetorician played for the Roman Senator. For several centuries every great Roman household employed a Greek scholar as a sort of domesticated expert on the higher education.

Our American millionaires are served by two kinds of confidential art-experts, —the architect and the near-priest. As for the architects, I hate to say anything against them, because we owe them much. They learned their trade from France and Italy just in time to take charge of our great and inevitable era of building which began in 1870. If it had not been for the good sense of our architects we should have had an epoch of barbaric eccentricity,—Etruscan cones, mausoleums, pagodas,—the indestructible monuments of power and ignorance. If, to-day, you cannot look out of a car window without seeing the influence of good, old, educated, European tradition, this is due to our architects. These men have taught us most of what we know of decoration; and they are in the saddle,—perhaps a little too firmly in the saddle.

Our second class of confidential experts are the decorators. They are of more recent origin than the architects. They are super-middlemen, and, as it were, near-priests or private chaplains of the fine arts. These men have a great, miscellaneous, amateur knowledge of historic decoration. They are, in their own sphere, hieratic persons,—something like the old-fashioned teachers of good form, who used to instruct the humbler classes in the proprieties of dress and dining out. They can do nothing with their hands. They belong to the social side of splendor, not to the technical side. But they have to be reckoned with at every moment.

I will not say that these near-priests have not had their utility, just as the architects have had theirs, but I will say this:—That the weakness in the whole situation of our art world lies in the remoteness of the patron from the artisan, in the separation of them by the architect and the decorator. If you could look down at the problem from the moon and ask "What does American art need? What power will resolve the knot of circumstance and break the dam for new talent?" you would say. "The element we need is an unguided clairvoyance on the part of the rich man himself."

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THERE is a risk in all true art patronage which no middleman can take. The near-priest is a good adviser about objects, but he cannot choose artists. If the middleman says to Mr. Maecenas, or to Mr. Rothschild, or to any powerful benevolent artistic person, "Buy that bronze Hermes," he is safe, because he knows the bronze to be a genuine Giovanni da Bologna. But, if he says, "Employ Mr. Jones, Jones is the rising man," he is unsafe, because Jones may prove to be a failure. Thus it comes about that the patron who is dying to encourage art, and thinks he is encouraging art, becomes, under the influence of his chaplain, the encourager of the antiquity shops.

There hangs about the word patron a historic odium, due to practices of those ages in which literature was patronized by the great. In those ages it was found that a writer could always become useful to his patron by turning sycophant. The rich men of old— the patrons of literature—soon discovered that the philosopher flattered: the historian lied. In each case the man's art (his writing) was at war with his employment.

But, with the fine arts (even with poetry), the case is far different. The assisted painter, poet, sculptor, becomes, perhaps, a little enslaved, but he is not artistically corrupted: his art is not enslaved.

SO, in spite of all that has been said against art patrons and art patronage—and in favor of institutions and popular art—I doubt whether any institution can supply the place of the right kind of Maecenas. The position of Maecenas gives play to natural selection and to the early favoring of talent. He alone can bear the immense outlay of cash which is required to foster an artist. And, above all, he alone has no conventional duties. He can throw the whole power of his own personality—his own genius, perhaps—into some inspired direction which his impulse discovers.

Without disparaging schools and museums, we must admit that there is a wide field of art that they do not fill.

If you take down the Encyclopaedia Brittanica and look up, at random, the biography of any man of very great special gifts who has during the last three hundred years made his mark in music or painting, you will find that he has almost always had early help from a patron. The elements have been given him as a present. His opportunity has been paid for by a friend.

The power to discern talent in others is a gift, and an inspiration—like talent itself. This power has always existed as a living part of the fine arts, and has often been the precursor of them. One cannot help feeling that this kind of personal encouragement to artists is certain to arise in an age like the present, when many men of wealth are passionately devoted to art, immensely benevolent, and—so far as their lights go—perfectly courageous.