Quote of the Day (Patti Smith, With Advice for Young Artists)

“The most important thing is the work and the evolution of the work….So focus on the work. That is the greatest gift we have as artists, to create an enduring work.”—American poet, rock-and-roll singer-songwriter, and memoirist Patti Smith, quoted by Amanda Fortini, “Literature Innovator: Patti Smith,” WSJ. Magazine, November 2020

(The image accompanying this post, of Patti Smith performing at New York’s Bowery Ballroom, was taken by her sister, Kimberly Smith, on Dec. 31, 2007.)

Spiritual Quote of the Day (Flannery O’Connor, on Why ‘The Artist Penetrates the Concrete World’)

“St. Augustine wrote that the things of the world pour forth from God in a double way: intellectually into the minds of the angels and physically into the world of things. To the person who believes this—as the western world did up until a few centuries ago—this physical, sensible world is good because it proceeds from a divine source….The artist penetrates the concrete world in order to find at its depths the image of its source, the image of ultimate reality. This in no way hinders his perception of evil but rather sharpens it, for only when the natural world is seen as good does evil become intelligible as a destructive force and a necessary result of our freedom.”— American short-story writer and novelist Flannery O’Connor (1925-1964), “Novelist and Believer,” originally delivered at Sweet Briar College, VA, reprinted in Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose (1957)

Quote of the Day (John Ruskin, on the Artist as ‘A Seeing and Feeling Creature’)

"The whole function of the artist in the world is to be a seeing and feeling creature; to be an instrument of such tenderness and sensitiveness, that no shadow, no hue, no line, no instantaneous and evanescent expression of the visible things around him, nor any of the emotions which they are capable of conveying to the spirit which has been given him, shall either be left unrecorded, or fade from the book of record."— English art critic and social commentator John Ruskin (1819-1900), The Stones of Venice (1853)

Quote of the Day (Wendell Berry, on How Artists Deal With ‘The Problem of Limits’)

“It is the artists, not the scientists, who have dealt unremittingly with the problem of limits. A painting, however large, must finally be bounded by a frame or a wall. A composer or playwright must reckon, at a minimum, with the capacity of an audience to sit still and pay attention. A story, once begun, must end somewhere within the limits of the writer’s and the reader’s memory. And of course the arts characteristically impose limits that are artificial: the five acts of a play, or the fourteen lines of a sonnet. Within these limits artists achieve elaborations of pattern, of sustaining relationships of parts with one another and with the whole, that may be astonishingly complex. And probably most of us can name a painting, a piece of music, a poem or play or story that still grows in meaning and remains fresh after many years of familiarity.”— American novelist, poet, essayist, and environmental activist Wendell Berry, “Faustian Economics,” Harper’s, May 2008

(The image accompanying this post, showing Wendell Berry standing before the solar panels on his farm in Henry County, KY, was taken on Dec. 14, 2011, by Guy Mendes.)

Quote of the Day (Andre Gide, on the Artist and the Public)

“It was a dangerous thing for art to separate itself from life, dangerous for both art and life. When the artist no longer felt his public close to him, when art could no longer justify its existence or find its meaning and its normal use in society, in manners and morals, it did not pine away, as might have been expected—it did not die, for the laurel of Apollo is tenacious, and dies only with the race itself  that once nourished its deep roots. No, art did not die of this: it lost its head. The history of modern art is inexplicable otherwise; the artist who has lost a sense of his public is not fated to stop producing but rather to produce works with no destination."—French Nobel Literature laurate Andre Gide (1869-1951), “The Importance of the Public,” translated by Angelo P. Bertocci, in Pretexts: Reflections on Literature and Morality, edited by Justin O’Brien (1959)

Quote of the Day (Philip Roth, on the Artist’s Task)

“As an artist the nuance is your task. Your task is not to simplify. Even should you choose to write in the simplest way, a la Hemingway, the task remains to impart the nuance, to elucidate the complication, to imply the contradiction. Not to erase the contradiction, not to deny the contradiction, but to see where, within the contradiction, lies the tormented human being. To allow for the chaos, to let it in. You must let it in. Otherwise you produce propaganda, if not for a political party, a political movement, then stupid propaganda for life itself -- for life as it might itself prefer to be publicized.” ―Philip Roth, I Married a Communist (1998)

Quote of the Day (Katherine Anne Porter, on the ‘Work of the Artist’)

“Human life itself may be almost pure chaos, but the work of the artist — the only thing he's good for — is to take these handfuls of confusion and disparate things, things that seem to be irreconcilable, and put them together in a frame to give them some kind of shape and meaning.”—Katherine Anne Porter (1890-1980), interviewed for Writers at Work, Second Series (1963) edited by George Plimpton

Quote of the Day (Giorgio Vasari, on Michelangelo and the Sistine Chapel)

“When the work was uncovered everyone rushed to see it from every part and remained dumbfounded. The Pope, being thus encouraged to greater designs, richly rewarded Michelangelo, who sometimes said in speaking of the great favours showered upon him by the Pope that he fully recognised his powers, and if he sometimes used hard words, he healed them by signal gifts and favours. Thus, when Michelangelo once asked leave to go and spend the feast of St. John in Florence, and requested money for this, the Pope said, ‘When will this chapel be ready?’ ‘When I can get it done, Holy Father.’ The Pope struck him with his mace, repeating, ‘When I can, when I can, I will make you finish it!’ Michelangelo, however, returned to his house to prepare for his journey to Florence, when the Pope sent Cursio, his chamberlain, with five hundred crowns to appease him and excuse the Pope, who feared what Michelangelo might do. As Michelangelo knew the Pope, and was really devoted to him, he laughed, especially as such things always turned to this advantage, and the Pope did everything to retain his good-will.”—Giorgio Vasari, Lives of the Artists (1550)

Say what you want about Pope Julius II (and in a prior post, I said quite a lot about this “warrior pope,” little if any of it complimentary). But one look at this image also says this: you have to give him credit for knowing genius when he saw it.

On All Saints Day in 1512, Michelangelo Buonarroti staggered the world of the Renaissance when his work on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel was exhibited to the public for the first time.

When the artist completed it, his immediate sensation might have been sheer physical relief. As Vasari, the fine artist who gave us even finer biographical sketches of the great paints and sculptors of the time, put it: “Michelangelo had to stand with his head thrown back, and he so injured his eyesight that for several months he could only read and look at designs in that posture.” (For someone like myself with a severe fear of heights, it’s equally daunting that he did all of this work atop a 60-ft. scaffold.)

The artist’s second feeling might have been sweet vindication in the game of artistic and Vatican politics. In his section on this great work of art, Vasari notes that the commission resulted from a booby trap laid by an enemy, the architect Donato Bramante. At least some modern scholars have disputed Vasari’s contentions (evidently held by Michelangelo himself) that a) Bramante was a kinsman of Raphael, and b) that the two, in an effort to undermine a rival for patronage, convinced Julius to hire the sculptor in an area where he felt less sure of himself: painting. (Michelangelo really wanted to do the tomb of the pontiff.) Nevertheless, Michelangelo felt angry enough about these two that he was still complaining three decades later that they caused the only troubles he ever had with the pope.

Reams of art criticism have been created about the Sistine Chapel over the past 500 years, but I think Michelangelo might have best enjoyed reading about himself in Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s travelogue Italian Journey (1816), in which the titan of German letters admits that he had grown “so enthusiastic about Michelangelo that I have lost all my taste for Nature, since I cannot see her with the same eye of genius as he did.”

Here’s the part that would have brought a smile to the competitive artist’s lips: “From the chapel we went to the loggias of Raphael, and, though I hardly dare admit it, I could not look at them any longer. After being dilated and spoiled by Michelangelo’s great forms, my eye took no pleasure in the ingenious frivolities of Raphael’s arabesques, and his Biblical stories, beautiful as they are, do not stand up against Michelangelo’s.”

One of my memories as a kid was watching the 1965 film adaptation of Irving Stone’s biographical novel of the creation of the Sistine Chapel, The Agony and the Ecstasy, with Charlton Heston as Michelangelo and Rex Harrison as Julius. What sticks in my mind (indelibly, because it was repeated ad nauseum) was the pontiff’s importunate question— “When will you make an end?”—and the artist’s equally disgusted response—“When I am finished!”

Through five centuries, millions of visitors to the site—and even more who have beheld it through lavishly illustrated books or some visual medium—are likely to agree that the wait was worth it.

(The image here is, of course, a detail of the great fresco from the ceiling on The Creation of Adam.)

Quote of the Day (N.C. Wyeth, on Teddy Roosevelt)

“When you said, ‘Roosevelt for me!’ I jumped clear out of my chair! ….I am deeply moved by your decision and congratulate you. I’ve gotten so much inspiration from him that my admiration has grown into affection.—I am not worshipping him like a fool, but have based my belief in him upon constant reading of his speeches and writings for years back, and feel that he represents, on the whole, the kind of leader we need. A letter from him not long ago, in answer to a very brief appreciation of my own, convinced me of his value to me. I am stirred to stronger manhood every time I read it!”—N.C. Wyeth, letter of October 30, 1912 to friend and fellow artist Sidney Chase, from The Wyeths: The Letters of N. C. Wyeth, 1901-1945, edited by Betsy James Wyeth (1971)

When I was in elementary school, the illustrations of N.C. Wyeth lingered in my consciousness even more profoundly than the boys’ adventure books they accompanied: Treasure Island, Kidnapped, The Black Arrow, The Mysterious Island. Now, following a tour of his studio (as well as the one used by his even more famous son, Andrew Wyeth) and a viewing of his work exhibited at the Brandywine River Museum while I was on vacation last week, I’ve grown as fascinated with the artist as with his work. And one of the things that endears him to me is that he was a huge fan of the 26^th U.S. President.

I’m not terribly surprised that N.C. Wyeth took so strongly to Theodore Roosevelt. After all, the illustrator and the President were both larger-than-life figures: men given to all kinds of fun and games with their children, ardent bibliophiles who especially loved history and adventure stories, bespectacled “dudes” from the East who went to the West for a few years in their 20s in short-lived attempts to make livings. Wyeth had not only received, as his letter indicates, a letter from T.R., but as far back as seven years before, he had attended the President’s inauguration in D.C.

Wyeth was likely to be especially excited on this day a century ago. For the first time since the attempt on his life earlier in the month in Milwaukee, T.R. would be speaking at Madison Square Garden in New York City. The words of the former President (now seeking a third term, as the Progressive Party candidate) reverberate as much now as they did then. Would that as many now were inspired by this call as the likes of N.C. Wyeth was then:

“We must not sit supine and helpless. We must not permit the brutal selfishness of arrogance and the brutal selfishness of envy each to run unchecked its evil course. If we do so, then some day smoldering hatred will suddenly kindle into a consuming flame, and either we or our children will be called upon to face a crisis as grim as any which this Republic has ever seen.”

(Photo of Theodore Roosevelt campaigning for President in 1912 from the New York Times photo archive; you half expect him to say, “If my hat’s not in the ring, it’s about to be!”)