Word: artfulness
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...rather with respect to those educational functions which, because most intimately linked with world change, stand most in need of continual revision, that I believe our colleges, Harvard among them, have been content with less than real accomplishment. For every potential specialist in art, undergraduate classes include many young men and women who are not there because they wish to lay the basis for a professional career in art, nor even purely for the sake of the intellectual discipline involved, but rather as persons whose taste in art, though they will never be artists themselves, will be of consequence...
...what extent are these functions of art instruction given place in our curricula and in our class-room methods? Only too frequently works of art are presented to students as aesthetic fragments torn from, their context in the lives, the ideas, the social habits, the cultural practices which produced them--very much as works of art are presented in a museum. This procedure, often necessary for the investigator-scholar, is a great disadvantage to the general student of art. His ignorance of the circumstances in which a great picture was painted, or a building constructed, not only limits the range...
...teaching of art history is discontinuous, ignoring the ground swell but making much of the wave-crests--schools, movements, isms, styles, which succeed one another much like the ducks in a shooting-gallery. To evolve a philosophy of art history which would give meaning to change and value to accomplishment, often requires that we study phenomena which are not, in the orthodox, artistic at all. How much simpler to build stone walls that make teaching easier though they make learning more difficult. Thus one avoids the charge of being an academic jack-of-all-trades, and remains the specialist behaving...
...Design through their paces, to make drawings and paintings which will be illustrations of basic principles of order, not an attempt to explore the relation between what the artist wants to say, to describe, to express, and the particular means he chooses with which to do it. If art is a language, then one can scarcely hope to learn its words without their meanings...
...Art Must Not Live on Past Reputation...