Category: craft

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Where is the line between art and craft?

The line between art and craft is a modern one, and it’s resulted in banal, boorish and ultimately meaningless work being foisted on us as art.

Carved cravat, c. 1690, Grinling Gibbons, courtesy Victoria & Albert Museum

“Was Grinling Gibbons an artist or a craftsman?” a student asked. It’s a fascinating question, and one that points out how we’ve changed our ideas about human thought and endeavor.

The term intellectual is a recent invention, first written down in 1813, by of all people, Lord Byron (a man who was anything but). Prior to that, the literati would have been known as men of letters. They were literate in a time when many people weren’t. It wasn’t until the 20th century that the term acquired distinct social cachet and came to mean a person who was educated, artistic, and worked mainly in the realm of ideas.

Grinling Gibbons, c. 1690, after Godfrey Kneller, courtesy National Portrait Gallery

Grinling Gibbons was born in Rotterdam in 1648 to British parents. He learned to carve in the Netherlands before emigrating to London. He rapidly attracted attention from the highest circles, scoring his first Royal Commission in 1675. He went on to be the most celebrated master-carver of his day. His portrait was painted by Sir Godfrey Kneller, whose subjects included ten reigning European monarchs, Isaac Newton, John Locke, and the members of the Kit-Kat Club. In other words, Gibbons was working and living with the crème de la crèmeof British society.

So why, in the 21st century, do we call Kneller an artist and Gibbons a craftsman? They would not have made such a distinction themselves.

The Stoning of St Stephen, c. 1680-1700, Grinling Gibbons, courtesy Victoria & Albert Museum

Historically, painters and sculptors were held in low regard. The Greeks had nine muses for the arts, and—pointedly—none of them were visual artists. Sculptors and painters were thought of as manual laborers, barely above slaves in the social order. That’s not because they weren’t any good; Greek sculpture, in particular, approached the sublime.

It’s just that, prior to the middle of the 18thcentury, fine artists were considered craftsmen, along with jewelers, weavers, and everyone else who made consumer goods. While they may have been very successful and well-paid, they had no intellectual pretensions.

The Enlightenment changed all this, by casting artists in the role of communicating the civic virtues. This raised their status from artisans to gentlemen. Their training moved from the old apprenticeship/atelier model to formal art schools.

The Enlightenment also brought us the Cult of Genius, with its handmaidens, Feeling and Creativity. The artist no longer primarily tried to render beautiful images; he was engaged in profound and creative thought.

Limewood carving of musical instruments, c. 1690, Grinling Gibbons, courtesy National Trust Images/Andreas von Einsiedel

Grinling Gibbons’ medium was wood, and it was used for decoration. There’s a modern assumption that there’s nothing profound about beauty, so the artist-as-craftsman is sadly out of touch with our times.

Western society has become caught in a trap where our civic virtues are now considered liabilities. This is vividly demonstrated in the stark contrast between our own dissection of shared values at the same time as Ukraine fights to the death to preserve theirs.

The focus on ‘genius’ is what has landed us in the modern dilemma of having so much banal, boorish, casual and ultimately meaningless material foisted on us as art. The intellectual mind can always be seduced by the idea of transgression, whereas a craftsman generally seeks to raise his standards to the highest degree possible. Given that this is the modern dividing line, I’d personally prefer to come down on the side of craft.

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Party dogs

What is art? That’s something nobody can agree on.

Great Danes and Doberman Pinschers talk about what they plan to wear to my daughter’s wedding.
Last night I assembled an august panel of artists to help me with a project. Barb is a printmaker with an art degree from University of Maine. Sandy is a gallerist with degrees from Pratt and Hunter College. Together, we dressed 42 dogs in wedding finery. (As so often happens in sweatshops, I ‘forgot’ to pay them.)
“Is this art?” I asked two other artist friends.
“It’s like asking if a soy product in the shape of a chicken leg is food,” said one. “Technically, yes, but it’s bad food.”
“I guess the individual sculptures are art,” hedged the other, who then raised the question of whether they’re craft or even, just possibly, crap.
Two coats of silver and three of glitter… good taste, by the way, is repressive at times.
‘Artistry’ is easier to define than art itself. That means the skill necessary to produce a work of the imagination. But what defines the product of the imagination as art rather than engineering or craft?
Ars longa, vita brevis, wrote Hippocrates. He probably meant that it takes a long time to acquire and perfect artistry, but that the practitioner has only a short lifespan in which to practice. We repeat it, instead, to mean, “art lasts forever, but life is short.” That is, of course, a modern conceit. The ancients understood that “what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal.” (2 Cor. 4:18)

Barb felt that a DeWalt glue gun was not the tool for the job.
Platosaid that art is always a copy of a copy, an imitation of reality. This leads us from the truth and to illusion, making art inherently dangerous. (Rich words from a philosopher!) Elsewhere, he hinted that the artist, by divine inspiration, makes a better copy of truth than may be found in everyday experience. This makes artists prophets of sorts.
A lot of artists have had a go at defining art. Many are coy, like Marc Chagall, who said that “Art is the unceasing effort to compete with the beauty of flowers–and never succeeding.”
Even in non-traditional art, imitation is a recurring theme. “Art is either a plagiarist or a revolutionary,” said Paul Gauguin. What makes an Andy Warhol painting of soup cans different from the soup cans themselves? Intent and meaning. Pablo Picasso said that art is a lie that makes us see the truth.
In some way, art is the taking of an idea and making it manifest. Otherwise, it’s just a fleeting thought.
Sandy and I sewed their garments, Barb dressed them.
People frequently debate the line between art and craft. Art is useless in practical terms; it exists solely to drive emotion and thought. Fine craft does that and more. It must serve a practical purpose along with being beautiful. Since I didn’t drill their noses out to hold flowers, my party dogs fall on the side of art. 
Neither fine art nor fine craft are mass-produced, however. That is manufacturing. Those brass birds from Home Goods, as inscrutable as their meaning and purpose might be, qualify as neither art nor craft.
“The craftsman knows what he wants to make before he makes it. The making of a work of art… is a strange and risky business in which the maker never knows quite what he is making until he makes it, wrote R.G. Collingwood in The Principles of Art. That sounds very nice, until I think of dye-master Jane Bartlett throwing pots of color into the snow to see what shows up. Her textiles end up as clothing, but her process is wildly unpredictable.
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Taking up painting after retirement

Yesterday I wrote about painters who continued working into their dotage. Today, I give you an example of one who didn’t even start until after most of her peers were dead.

Hoosick Falls, New York, In Winter, 1944, Grandma Moses
“The examples you gave yesterday are of people who have painted their whole lives,” a reader wrote. “I won’t have time to learn to paint until I retire. Do you think that is also true for people who take up painting at a later age?”
Leaving aside the idea that other work makes painting impossible (it doesn’t), we have a great example in Anna Mary Robertson “Grandma” Moses. She was born in 1860 in Greenwich, New York. She died in 1961 in Hoosick Falls, which is about twenty miles south. She had given birth to ten children, five of whom survived. She and her husband subsisted as small farmers, making much of what they had and doing without. From our 21stcentury viewpoint, her life was hard and limited in scope.
Wash Day, 1945, Grandma Moses
Still, that band of land from Greenwich to Hoosick Falls is arguably New York’s most sublime landscape, a region of soft rolling hills, fertile fields and pretty, old farmhouses. The other place where she lived for two decades, Staunton, Virginia, is in the Shenandoah Valley. It could be described exactly the same way. Both are places where rich urbanites come to vacation and appreciate the beauties of nature, but where the locals struggle to keep the house painted.

Grandma Moses did not take up painting until she was 78, but she showed an inclination toward art for her whole life. She had rudimentary art lessons in the one-room schoolhouse she attended (now the Bennington Museum in Vermont), and access to art supplies from the family who hired her as a farm hand at the age of twelve.
Mt. Nebo On The Hill, crewel embroidery, 1940, Grandma Moses
She produced quilts, dolls, and much crewel embroidery. Her unique painting style resonates with the values of her needlework, which in turn was influenced by the Currier & Ives lithographs of her childhood. Long before she was a painter, she was embroidering landscape paintings of her own design. In fact, she only took up painting when arthritis made holding a needle too difficult.  
Moses was discovered by art collector Louis Caldor, who saw her work in the window of Thomas’ Drug Store in Hoosick Falls. Three of the paintings he bought were then included in the Contemporary Unknown American Painters exhibition at The Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1939. Two one-woman New York shows immediately followed. This began Moses’s meteoric rise in the art world. By 1943, there was an overwhelming demand for her paintings. 
Photo is labelled on reverse: “Mrs. Thomas and Grandma Moses her paintings were displayed in Mrs. Thomas drug store Hoosick Falls, N.Y. that’s how she was discovered A man came by bought all paintings at $1.00 each.” c. 1940 (Courtesy Hoosick Falls Past and Present Facebook page)
Her homespun viewpoint contrasted sharply with the abstract-expressionist Zeitgeist of post-war intellectual America. She was popular for all the same reasons her friend Norman Rockwell was popular. By the middle of the 20th century, there was a noticeable split between the cognoscenti and the middle classes in terms of values and mores. It has only become wider and deeper today.
Most of Grandma Moses’s paintings were done on cardboard and are relatively small. She painted her scenes first, and then inserted figures going about the daily work of farm life. She didn’t draw from life or photographs, but from her own fertile imagination. Because of this, her paintings are reminiscent of the Labours of the Seasons from medieval Books of Hours.
Country Fair, 1950, Grandma Moses
She belongs in the pantheon of naĂŻve painters because she was self-taught, but to say that she was in any way primitive is risible, considering what has followed in the art world.