Word: shahn
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This year's Charles Eliot Norton lecturer, artist Ben Shahn, has focussed attention on the problem of the creative artist at Harvard. The University's scholarly orientation, while having its positive values, does tend to stifle original art in the student...
Harvard has long emphasized the history of art, music, and English rather than painting, performance, or writing. Professors, moreover, are almost always scholars rather than creative artists. Occasional lectures by such men as Shahn, Robert Frost, Edwin Muir, and T.S. Eliot, however, have been both informative and encouraging. If the University would establish more visiting lectureships for artists as opposed to scholars, students would benefit from the different point of view, if only as a contrast with that of the scholar. Besides a possibly finer sensitivity to human problems which the mature artist attains through the creative experience, he offers...
...Shahn, American artist, will deliver his second Charles Eliot Norton Lecture, entitled "The Biography of a Painting," this evening at 8:30 p.m. in New Lecture Hall. This is the second lecture in a series of three to be given by Shahn. He will give the background of the development of one of his paintings. Reconstructing the process of imagination...
More specifically Shahn cited three blocks to artistic development at the University. "Dilettantism," he felt, drained the artist's energy and discouraged the necessary serious attitude...
...Finally, Shahn urged revision of the common conception of the artist as a "mad genius." The value of unorthodoxy and why it exists, he continued, must still be acknowledged...