I'm currently reading Ben Shahn's The Shape of Content, a short little book consisting of six lectures the artist gave at Harvard University and published in 1957. His chapter, "On Nonconformity," is a stark reminder that we've been here before, and that the artists who are the least likely to bow down to authoritarianism, both politically and artistically, are the ones who will be the most remembered after they're gone. The entirety of the essay is below.
On Nonconformity
The artist is likely to be looked upon with some uneasiness by the more conservative members of society. He seems a little unpredictable. Who knows but that he may arrive for dinner in a red shirt, appear unexpectedly bearded, offer--freely--unsolicited advice, or even ship off one of his ears to some unwilling recipient? However glorious the history of art may be, the history of artists is quite another matter. And in any well-ordered household the very thought that one of the young may turn out to be an artist can be a cause for general alarm. It may be a point of great pride to have a Van Gogh on the living room wall, but the prospect of having Van Gogh himself in the living room would put a good many devoted art lovers to rout.
A great deal of uneasiness about artists is based upon fiction: a great deal of it also is founded upon a real nonconformity which seems nevertheless to be innate in art.
I don't mean to imply at all that every artist is a nonconformist or even that most artists are nonconformists. I dare say that if we could somehow secure the total record it would show that an enormous majority of painters, sculptors, and even etchers have been impeccably correct in every detail of their behavior. Unfortunately, however, most of these artists have been forgotten. There seems to have been nothing about them, or even about their work, that was able to capture the world's attention or affection. Who knows? Perhaps they were too right, or too correct, but in any case we hardly remember them or know who they were.
There was a great commotion aroused in Paris around 1925 when it was proposed by officials that one of the pavilions of the coming Exposition des Arts Décoratifs be housed in the space traditionally reserved for the Salon of the Independents. It was suggested that, in view of the new enlightenment, there was no further need of an Independents' show in Paris. An indignant critic promptly offered to give twenty-five reasons why the Independents' show ought to be continued.
The twenty-five reasons proved to be twenty-five names: those of the winners of the Prix de Rome over as many years--the Prix de Rome being the most exalted award which can be extended to talented young artists by the French government. But all these names, excepting only that of Rouault, were totally unknown to art. The critic then called off twenty-five other names: those of artists who had first exhibited with the Independents, who had not won a Prix de Rome, and who could not by any stretch of the imagination have won such an award. They were Cézanne, Monet, Manet, Degas, Derain, Daumier, Matisse, Utrillo, Picasso, Van Gogh, Toulouse-Lautrec, Braque, Gauguin, Léger, and so on.
This incident has great bearing upon the matter of conformity. For it was through the questionable virtue of conformity that the Prix de Rome winners had prevailed. That is to say, they had no quarrel with art as it stood. The current concepts of beauty, of appropriate subject matter, of design, the small conceits of style, and the whole conventional system of art and art teaching were perfectly agreeable to them. By fulfilling present standards drawn out of past art, the applicants had won the approval of officials whose standards also were based upon past art, and who could hardly be expected to have visions of the future. But it is always in the future that the course of art lies, and so all of the guesses of the officials were wrong guesses.
What is it about the public, and what is it about conformity itself, that causes us to require it of our neighbors and of our artists and then, with consummate fickleness, forget those who fall into line and eternally celebrate those who do not?
Might not one surmise that there is some degree of nonconformity in us all--perhaps conquered or suppressed in the interest of our general wellbeing, but which may be touched or rekindled or inspired by just the quality of unorthodoxy which is so deeply embedded in art?
I doubt that good psychological or sociological opinion would allow such a view. On the contrary, I think that the most advanced opinion in these fields holds that we are by our natures doomed to conformity. We seem to be hemmed in by peer groups, hedged by tradition, struck dumb by archetypes; to be other-directed, inner-directed, outerdirected, over-directed. We are the organization man. But it is not allowed that we may think for ourselves or be different or create something better than that which was before.
Since I do not myself aspire to be a sociologist, I do not feel particularly committed to correct sociological behavior. I don't care a rap about my peer group. And as for my tradition, brave though it may be and nostalgic, I feel that I am on the whole well out of it. I cannot believe Statistical Man or Reisman Man (Reis-Man) and I can even dream of a day when perhaps both shall be placed alongside Piltdown Man in some wonderful museum of scientific follies.
Nonconformity is not only a desirable thing, it is an actual thing. Once need only remark that all art is based upon nonconformity--a point that I shall undertake to establish--and that every great historic change has been based upon nonconformity, has been bought either with the blood or with the reputation of nonconformists. Without nonconformity we would have had no Bill of Rights nor Magna Charta, no public education system, no nation upon this continent, no continent, no science at all, no philosophy, and considerably fewer religions. All that is pretty obvious.
But it seems to be less obvious that to create anything at all in any field, and especially anything of outstanding worth, requires nonconformity, or a want of satisfaction with the things as they are. The creative person--the nonconformist--may be in profound disagreement with the present way of things, or he may simply wish to add his views, to render a personal account of matters.
Let me indicate the mildest kind of nonconformity that I can think of. A painter, let us say, may be perfectly pleased and satisfied with art just as it stands. He may like the modern forms and lean toward the abstract. Within the abstract mode, however, he may envision possibilities and powers not yet exploited. Perhaps he is interested in light. He may feel confident that with the enormous freedom of paint manipulation afforded by abstract techniques, he himself can produce something new. He may believe that by relating colors and forms in a certain way--by forcing them perhaps--he can produce unheard-of luminosities. Even though many of this friends may feel that he is engaged upon a ridiculous project, he will pursue his vision, and he will probably ultimately realize it. He may be perfectly circumspect in his behavior, and may have no quarrel even with art. The point of his nonconformity will be just at the point of his new vision, of his confidence that it can be realized. There he takes lessons from no one, and is his own authority.
If there is nothing in the code, if there is no doctrine which holds that luminosity is a wrong and undesirable thing, then the artist's nonconformity is taken for granted as part of the art process. But if there happens to exist some such stricture, some rule or academic principle, or some official body or tribunal to obstruct his work or take issue with his purpose, then nonconformity becomes rebellion, intransigence, sometimes overthrow.
One thinks of Turner. For Turner, the great innovator, did so manipulate colors and suppress forms to create light. He anticipated Impressionism by many years, and he violated every accepted canon of academic art. Radical though he was, Turner created no outright explosion, simply because his work encountered little opposition beyond being called "tinted steam" by Constable and "soapsuds and whitewash" by someone else.
How different was the case with the Impressionists, who, with objectives almost the same as those of Turner, were made the outlaws and the outcasts of art, their paintings ostracized by academic edict. The French Academy, enjoying official status and some material power, had been able to set up a certain absolutism of standards. It had been pronounced upon the proper aims and objectives of painting, and the pursuit of pure and unalloyed light was not among them--particularly light at the expense of the entrenched method of underpainting in black, a heritage from the now sacred Renaissance. The Academy did seek to obstruct the curtail Impressionist nonconformity, and it thus produced the greatest art upheaval in history.
Nonconformity, even on a vast scale, does not necessarily imply any sort of violent or total overthrow. The transition from medieval art into that of the Renaissance was accomplished by the modest personal ventures of such gentle painters as Giotto, Cimabue, Duccio, and Ambrogio Lorenzetti, each of whom created his humane and freshly observed images within the framework of the medieval manner.
The Renaissance was of course a time of extraordinary artistic latitude, a time tolerant of nonconformity, able to expand to accommodate all sorts of styles and viewpoints, to endure the mediocre as well as to applaud the great, to be at once religious and pagan and classic. The world has enjoyed few enough of such respites from rigidity of mind--perhaps a space of a few hundred years in Greece, a period in France from the Enlightenment almost to the present, Victorian England--but whenever they have occurred, a flowering has taken place in the arts, in science, in literature, and most significantly, in life.
Every successive change in the look of art--that is, every great movement--has been at issue with whatever mode was the then prevailing one. Protestantism in art seems almost to have preceded Protestantism in religion. The high style of the Italians, even though it constituted the very model and ideal of Dutch and Flemish and German painters, still appears somehow too fulsome for the lean and frugal Northern temperament. Holbein, Dürer, Grümewald, Bosch, were earth-oriented and did not or could not aspire to such sky-ey patters as the wonderful cloud-surrounded Transfigurations and Apotheoses at which the Italians excelled.
Protestant art itself was conscientiously, defiantly earth-oriented, and in opposition to it there was created the art of the Catholic Counter Reformation with the almost studied return to splendor. To Rubens, its greatest artistic spokesman, no excess of elaboration, ornamentation, or glorification of Church and nobility seemed unacceptable. As such lavishness descended to Rococo, there arose almost as if in revulsion the severe Neoclassicism of David and Ingres--a fast after a prolonged time of feasting. The Romanticism of Géricault and Delacroix may well have been a recoil from just that sterility. The Realism of Courbet took issue with romantic , effulgence; Impressionism and all the isms that followed it were a fragmentation of Realism, and then a denial, and then an outright opposition to Realism. All of which is not to elaborate upon the history of art movements, but only to point out the essential fact of nonconformity.
The artist occupies a unique position vis-a vis the society in which he lives. However depended upon it he may be for his livelihood, he is still somewhat removed from its immediate struggles for social status or for economic supremacy. He has no really vested interest in the status quo.
The only vested interest--or one might say professional concern--which he does have in the present way of things rests in his ability to observe them, to assimilate the multifarious details of reality, to form some intelligent opinion about the society--or at least an opinion consistent with his temperament.
That being the case, he must maintain an attitude at once detached and deeply involved. Detached, in that he must view all things with an outer and abstracting eye. Shapes rest against shapes; colors augment colors, and modify and relate and mingle mutually. Contrasts in life move constantly across the field of vision; tensions between the grotesque and the sad, between the contemptible and the much-loved; tensions of such special character as to be almost imperceptible; dramatic, emotional situations within the most banal settings. Only the detached eye is able to perceive these properties and qualities of things.
Within such contrasts and juxtapositions lies the very essence of what life is today or any day. Whoever would know his day or would capture its essential character must maintain such a degree of detachment.
But besides perceiving these things, the artist must also feel them. Therein he differs from the scientist, who may observe dispassionately, collate, draw conclusions, and still remain uninvolved. The artist may not use lines or colors or forms unless he is able to feel their rightness. If a face or a figure or a stretch of grass or a formal passage fails in that sense, then there is no further authority for it and no other standard of measurement. So he must never fail to be involved in the pleasures and the desperations of mankind, for therein is the very source of feeling upon which the work of art is registered. Feeling, because it is always specific and never generalized, must have its own vocabulary of things experienced and felt.
It is because of these parallel habits of detachment and of emotional involvement that artists so often become partisans in burning causes. And it is why also they are so likely to be nonconformists in their personal lives. Michelangelo, Leonardo, and Rembrandt were all noted nonconformists, each one of them expanding freely the set limits of mind and art and behavior. Dürer was a passionate admirer of heretical Martin Luther, David a prime figure in the French Revolution: Courbet helped push over the Vendome Column during the period of the Paris Commune, calling it a symbol of war and imperialism. Even the American Revolution had an artist participant in Charles Willson Peale--not to mention Paul Revere. The instances are numerous; I remember the Paris of the twenties, when the cafés teemed with talk of the still to be created New World and when every smallest aesthetic deviation had its own political manifesto. Then the thirties in New York--the depression--when almost no artist was without some sort of identification with political or social theory, as a solution for his time.
But considerably more revealing than active engagement or the personal behavior of artists has been the passionate testament of their sympathies as it is written across the canvases and walls of the world and carved into its buildings and filed away within its archives in engravings, woodcuts, lithographs, and drawings. Here the intransigent sentiments are stamped indelibly and are inseparable from the art itself.
One of the earliest of such testaments was painted by Ambrogio Lorenzetti in the early 1300s and spreads over three vast walls of the Council Chamber in the Palazzo Pubblico in Siena. A dissertation upon the sins of bad government and the virtues of good, it remains a monument to the medieval free city, a beautiful and majestic dream of justice. One of the latest of such testaments is Picasso's Guernica.
Compassion with human woes threads through all art from Masaccio's anguished Adam and Eve to the bitter sufferers of Kathe Kollwitz's Weavers and on down to the present, although for the moment it may have thinned. Partisanship on the side of the humble has been an ever-recurring passion in art--Breughel, Rembrandt, Daumier. And with these three and so many others, there is always the other side of the coin, the thrusts and satires upon social and political malpractice. Nonconformity.
While artists try to make their nonconformity as clear and unmistakeable as possible, it seems to be one of the challenging tasks of criticism to smooth over such nonconformity, and to make it appear that this or that artist was a very model of propriety. We read this sort of thing: "The coarseness of Goya is hardly noticeable unless we set out to look for it." Or again, "There is no evidence to prove that Goya actively assisted in any scheme of protest against the established order of society." But of course Goya did actively assist; indeed he protested with the most crying, the most effective, the most unforgettable indictment of the horrors of religious and patriotic fanaticism that has ever been created in any medium at all.
There is no propriety here. Beauty yes, but the beauty of a Goya painting is inseparable from its power and its meaning. Who is to say when a weeping face becomes a trenchant line? And who may presume to know that the line might have been trenchant apart from the fact? Who can say that this passage of color, that formal arrangement, this kind of brush-stroking could have come into being were it not for the intensity of belief which demanded it?
And so one reads of the color, the form, the shape, the structure, all this apart from the meaning which they hold, and apart from the context of life in which they took place. The fierce and dreadful fantasies of Breughel become "cryptic iconography" with little reference to the reality of tortures, violence, and burnings at the stake, those common practices of the Spanish occupation and its tribunal, the Blood Council.
Of course these artists were nonconformists. Indeed each of them stands out as an island of civilized feeling in an ocean of corruption. Civilization has freely vindicated them in everything but their nonconformity.
It is an amusing contradiction of our time that we do applaud a sort of copybook nonconformity. Everyone laments the increase in conformity; everyone knows that too much conformity is bad for art and literature and politics, and that it may deal the deathblow to national greatness. The deadening effects of over conformity are well understood. Yet, when it comes to the matter of just what kind of nonconformity shall be encouraged, liberality of view recedes. There seems to be no exact place where nonconformity can be fitted in; it must not be admitted into the university curriculum--that would produce chaos. In politics it is certainly inadvisable--at least for the time being. It cannot be practiced in journalism--witness the halting of Eric Sevareid's broadcast upon a free press. In science--least of all, alas!
Without the nonconformist, however, without the critic, without the visionary, without the person of outspoken opinion, any society of whatever degree of perfection must fall into decay. Its habits (let's say its virtues) will inevitably become entrenched and tyrannical; its controls will become inaccessible to the ordinary citizen.
But I do not wish to negate the significance of the conformist himself--or perhaps an apter term would be the conservative. In art, the conservative is the vigorous custodian of the artistic treasures of a civilization, of its established values and its tastes--those of the past and even those present once which have become accepted.
Without the conservative we would know little of the circumstances of past art; we would have lost much of its meaning: in fact, we would probably have lost most of the art itself. However greatly the creative artist may chafe at entrenched conservatism, it is still quite true that his own work is both sustained and enriched by it.
It is natural and desirable that there should occur some conflict between those two kinds of people so necessary to each other and yet so opposite in their perspectives. I have always held a notion of a healthy society as one in which the two opposing elements, the conservative and the creative (or radical, or visionary, or whatever term is best applied to the dissident), exist in a mutual balance. The conservative, with its vested interest in things as they are, holds on to the present, gives stability, and preserves established values. The visionary, always able to see the configuration of the future in present things, presses for change, experiment, and venture into new ways. A truly creative artist is inevitably of this part of society.
There takes place from time to time an imbalance between the stabilizing and the visionary elements in society. Conformity is then pressed upon everyone, and growth and change and art come to a standstill.
In the year 1573, the painter Veronese was summoned before the Inquisition to answer a charge of blasphemy. In a painting of the Last Supper he had created an outer scene of worldliness in contrast to the inner scene of solemnity. Among the figures of the outer scene was a dog, and it was the dog that constituted the blasphemy. Ten years earlier the Council of Trent had decided upon the proper iconography for this and other religious scenes; their decision was held to be final, and a dog was not among the items listed.
The painter sought to explain the formal considerations which had led to his arrangement. His explanation was disregarded and he was ordered to substitute a Magdalene for the dog or be subject to whatever penalty the Holy Tribunal might decide to impose.
Veronese did not yield(he retained the dog and changed the title of the painting). But let us note that art itself did yield to the increased pressure for conformity. It was in an atmosphere of enforced acts of faith, of fear of heresy, of trial and ordeal, and of the increasing harshness of the Inquisition that three hundred years of Renaissance greatness came to a close in Italy.
In our own generation, there is a record of a Russian trial not dissimilar to that of Veronese. A Soviet painter named Nikritin was accused of decadent Western formalism in a painting which he had made of a sports event, the specific complaint being that he had employed symbolic devices at the expense of Soviet Realism. Defending himself before a tribunal made up of fellow artists and a member of a cultural bureau, Nikritin explained the artistic reasons which had prompted his choice and arrangement of figures. His defense was unsuccessful. It was decided that such symbolic treatment that which he had employed was not understandable to workers and was indeed an affront to them. One of his fellow artists described him as "one of those fellows who want to talk at all cost about themselves...an undesirable type of artist." The verdict: "What we see here is calumny; it is a class attack inimical to Soviet power. The picture must be removed and the appropriate steps taken."
Perhaps equally significant is the story related by my brother after he had returned from a trip to the Soviet Union. He was curious about the status of art there and arranged to meet a number of artists. After he had visited several studios he was struck by the fact that all of artists seemed to be working in groups rather than singly and to be producing more or less the same subject matter. After a great deal of inquiring he learned of one man who painted along, and he made his way to this man's studio. There he found the solitary painter, the individualist, who in spite of hardships was carrying on. When my brother looked at his work he was astonished to find that this man was painting exactly the same subject matter--the idealized workers, anti-capitalist themes, and portraits of heroes--which the collective artists were doing. Conformity is a mood and an atmosphere, a failure of hope or belief or rebellion.
It is well known that the function of art was determined by edict during the Hitler regime in Germany, and that it was charged with carrying out the policies of the state. It was to be Nordic; it was to reject the so-called degenerate forms of art in the democracies; it was to be purged of Semitic influences. German Expressionism, one of the most brilliant art movements of modern times, came to an abrupt end, and there arose in its place a cloying art of Kirche, Küche, and Kinder, stillborn and unremembered.
Nonconformity is the basic precondition of art, as it is the precondition of good thinking and therefore of growth and greatness in a people. The degree of nonconformity present--and tolerated--in a society might be looked upon as a symptom of its state of health.
The greater number of artists at any time whatever are no doubt complete conformists--not the outstanding ones, but the numerical majority. That is simply because mediocrity is commoner than genius. There is always an impressive number of artists who are overwhelmed by the nearest outstanding figure. They adopt his point of view and mannerisms and become a school; that is one kind of art conformity.
Another kind of conformity is derived from the wholly venal business of catering to a popular market. Still another results from trends and the yearning of artists--an almost irresistible yearning--to be in the avant-garde. A very noted painter confided to a critic recently that he sometimes wanted to do a more communicative kind of painting, but that he could not resist the excitement and that certain degree of glamour that goes with being in the avant-garde.
All these kinds of conformity are inevitable and to be expected. But there has grown around us a vastly increased conformity. One could say "conformism" here, for this is conformity by doctrine and by tribunal.
We are all prone to attribute the new conformity to television and mass communications, and indeed they do play their part, but television is not so much guilty as it is itself the victim of conformism. For it has been tried on the basis of possible disloyalty; it has been purged, but not exonerated. It remains in a state of suspended verdict, liable to re-examination at any time.
So with radio; so with films; so with the press; so with education; so with all those professions which involve the exercise of judgment, intellect, and creativity.
Art has not yet come in for its official purgation, although it is understood to be on the docket. Nevertheless art has had its own ordeal of conformity. And it has its own congressional scourge in the person of a Midwestern Congressman who provides the Congressional Record with periodic messages under the heading: "Extensions of Remarks by Congressman Dondero." In the shelter of his congressional privilege he has recorded a list of artists whom he has designated as "international art thugs," "art vermin," "subversives of art," and so on. To museums and museum directors--that is, those interested in contemporary art--he has attributed reprehensible motives and practices. He regards the modern forms as a disguised plot to undermine our morals and our "glorious American Art." Such are the bludgeons of conformity.
So alerted, some sections of the public have felt that the call was for them, and have rallied to the cause of watchfulness. Civic groups or veterans' groups, all sorts of organizations and their committees and their auxiliaries, have assumed the solemn duties of the judging and screening of art. Crusades have developed in a number of places with some work of art as their subject. A mural in the process of execution in a federal building just barely survived a campaign to have it removed because it contained a portrait of Roosevelt. Another just barely survived because someone thought it failed to express American ideals. On a sail in a painting of a regatta, a city councilman professed to have discovered a Communist symbol, and he sought to close the exhibition of which the painting was a par. (The symbol turned out to be that of a Los Angeles yachting club.) Another large work was vetoed because it contained nudes.
The most recent of the civic crusades was directed against a very large exhibition of sports themes--paintings, drawings, and prints which had been laboriously assembled by Sports Illustrated with the assistance of the American Federation of Arts and was to have been displayed in Australia at the time of last summer's Olympic meet. The exhibition was circulated in a number of American cities before it was to be shipped abroad. It came to grief in Dallas, Texas. There a local patriotic group discovered among the exhibitors some names which had appeared under "Extension of Remarks by Congressman Dondero." So great was the Texas commotion (and probably so delicate the political balance there), that the exhibition was not sent on to Australia.
In such a climate all art becomes suspect. And while the paint-alone métier has itself come under considerable attack, it is on the whole a safer category to be in than is the more communicative kind of art. In paint alone there are at least no daring commitments to the future, no indiscretions, no irreverence toward relatively sacred individuals, or toward their manners, emblems, or favored slogans.
The aesthetic of line, color, and form, like any other way of painting, may always grow in the hands of a gifted painter; but today it has become the norm and the model of conformity. Young artists complain that our galleries freely press them into working in such a manner. One college department head claims that he sees no further necessity for forcing upon his students the hard archaic disciplines of academic study, since they will abandon them anyway.
The daily reviews in the newspapers are a concatenation of like descriptions of this artist's circles, or that artist's squares, or a third artist's spirals. Recently a reviewer, casting about for some adjectives with which to describe an unbroken yellow canvas, suddenly ended with the inspired words, "Since there's nothing to look at, there's nothing to say!"
Today's conformity is more than anything else the retreat from controversiality. Tomorrow's art, if it is to be at all stirring, will no doubt be performed upon today's forbidden territory.
I remember a story that my father used to tell of a travel in thirtieth-century France who met three men wheeling wheelbarrows. He asked in what work they were engaged, and he received from them the following three answers. The first said, "I toil from sunup to sundown and all I receive for my pains is a few francs a day." The second said, "I am glad enough to wheel this wheelbarrow, for I have been out of work for many months and I have a family to support."
The third said, "I am building Chartres Cathedral."
I always feel that the committees and the tribunals and the civic groups and their auxiliaries harbor no misgivings about the men who wheel their wheelbarrows for a few francs a day; the object of their suspicions seems inevitably to be the man who is building Chartres Cathedral.
---Ben Shahn, 1957