The Artist as Master
The Japanese Print: An Interpretation, byFrank Lloyd Wright. [Ralph Fletcher Seymour Company, Chicago.]
Henry Blackman Sell
“‘Aflower is beautiful,’ we say—but why? Because in its geometry and its sensuous qualities it is an embodiment and significant expression of that precious something in ourselves which we instinctively know to be Life, ‘an eye looking out upon us from the great inner sea of beauty,’ a proof of the eternal harmony in the nature of a universe which is too vast and intimate and real for the mere intellect to grasp.”
Yet our materialists would solve the Problem with their material intellects. And our theologians would solve it with their ecclesiastical deductions. The one would put Life in the cold hands of the scientist, expert in fact and figure; the other, gropingly indefinite, in the handsof the spiritualformulaist. Yet both are wrong. The Problem can be solved. The literal, objective guesses of the materialist are but flimsy realisms far from true. The indefinite, abstract dreams of the theologian are but the futile inaptitudes of man calculated to define that which cannot be defined.
But definitions are not what the world needs. The Solution would be interesting, but the Problem is fascinating. It is the Going and not the Goal that holds us to the bitter and the sweet, through mornings, noons, and nights, year by year.
If, then, we grant the Solution but a cold conclusion, and the Goal but a stagnation point, to whom can we turn but to the artists—those spiritual children of that great master who wept when he could find no imperfection in his masterpiece.
The artist, whose interests are in theinterpretations, and not in thetranslationsof Life, and whose interpretations have given Life all that it holds sacred.
There is no power but has its root in his ....There is no powerBut his can withold the crown or give itOr make it reverent in the eyes of men.
There is no power but has its root in his ....There is no powerBut his can withold the crown or give itOr make it reverent in the eyes of men.
There is no power but has its root in his ....There is no powerBut his can withold the crown or give itOr make it reverent in the eyes of men.
There is no power but has its root in his ....There is no powerBut his can withold the crown or give itOr make it reverent in the eyes of men.
There is no power but has its root in his ....
There is no power
But his can withold the crown or give it
Or make it reverent in the eyes of men.
Written philosophies of artist craftsmen are rare. Their busy lives find little time for penning rules; but when one does speak, it is with the captivating force of original thought: the summary of attainments through many trials and many failures.
And it is with this sure touch of deep artistic experience that Frank Lloyd Wright draws from the geometric beauty of the mystic Japanese prints his philosophy of the artist as master of the Problem.
“Real civilization means for us a right conventionalizing of our original state of nature, just such a conventionalizing as the true artist imposes onnatural forms. The law-giver and reformer of social customs must have, however, the artist soul, the artist eye in directing this process, if the light of the race is not to go out. So, art is not alone the expression, but in turn the great conservator and transmitter of the finer sensibilities of a people. More still, it is to show those who shall understand just where and how we shall bring coercion to bear upon the material of human conduct. So the indigenous art of a people is their only prophecy and their school of anointed prophets and kings. Our own art is the only light by which this conventionalizing process we call “civilization” may eventually make its institutions harmonious with the fairest conditions of our individual and social life.
“I wish I might use another word than ‘conventionalizing’ to convey the notion of this magic process of the artist mind, which is theconstant haunting reference of this paper, because it is the perpetual, insistent suggestion of this particular art we have discussed. Only an artist, or one with genuine artistic training, is likely, I fear, to realize precisely what the word as here used connotes. Let me illustrate once more. To know a thing (what we can really call knowing), a man must first love the thing and sympathize vividly with it. Egypt thus knew the lotus, and translated the flower to the dignified stone forms of her architecture. Thus was the lotus conventionalized. Greece knew and idealized the acanthus in stone translations. Thus was the acanthus conventionalized. If Egypt or Greece had plucked the flowers as they grew, and given us a mere imitation of them in stone, the stone forms would have died with the original. In translating, however, its very life’s principle into terms of stone well adapted to grace a column capital, the Egyptian artist made it pass through a rarifying spiritual process, whereby its natural character was really intensified and revealed in terms of stone adapted to an architectural use. The lotus gained thus imperishable significance; for the life-principle in the flower is translated—transmuted to terms of building stone to idealize a real need. This is conventionalization. It is reality because it is poetry. As the Egyptian took the lotus, the Greek the acanthus, and the Japanese every natural thing on earth, as we may take and adapt to our highest use in our own way a natural flower or thing, so civilization must take the natural man, to fit him for his place in this great piece of architecture we call the social state. And today, as centuries ago, it is the prophetic artist mind that must reveal this natural state idealized, conventionalized harmoniously with the life-principle of all men. How otherwise shall it be discerned? All the sheer wisdom of science, the cunning of politics and the prayers of religion can but stand and wait for the revelation,—awaiting at the hands of the artist that conventionalization of the free expression of life-principle which shall make our social living beautiful,—organically true. Behind all institutions or dogmatic schemes, whatever their worth may be, or their venerable antiquity,—behind them all is something produced and preserved for its aesthetic worth; the song of the poet, some artist vision, the pattern seen in the mount.
“Now speaking a language all the clearer because not native to us, beggared as we are by material riches, the humble Japanese artist has become greatly significant because he is the interpreter of the one permanent thing in the life of his people; that one permanent thing being the principle of a right conventionalization of life which makes of their native forms the most humanly significant, and most humanly joy-giving as in its ever varied moods and in evanescent loveliness he has made Fujiyama—that image of man in the vast—the God of Nippon.”