Quantifying the Artist's Intellect: left brain vs. right brain.
by H.A. Fraser, ABM Editor.
The Romantic period, it is claimed, altered the artist's view of himself more dramatically than any other in history. In Born Under Saturn, the Wittkowers suggest that for 300 years following the close of the Renaissance, the artist saw himself largely as an intellectual: "a man paints with his brain", claimed Michelangelo. By the late 18th century, however, a revolt of "the naive and intuitive artist" against the intellectual began in earnest. And it continued through the modern period, suggest the Wittkowers.
One problem with accepting that the intuitive side of the artist dominated and continues to dominate the intellectual is that upon close examination of the history books, most artists are described as intellectuals. In the history books (Janson, Reid, Panofsky, etc.) artists created art as much from the intellect as from the heart (or were the artists in the books chosen by academics who liked rationality?). Certainly, the late 19th and 20th centuries saw the artist reach a level of artistic freedom possibly unrivalled in western history. However, few artists in any period of art ever considered that they were unintellectual or that their art should be viewed as unintellectual. As for Blake (and others) who strove to create art intuitively, he would no doubt have been pleased to hear himself called a genius.
Marcel Duchamp, most renown for his urinal "sculpture" (which superficially suggests an utter loss of intellect), said in a 1946 interview that he "wanted to put painting once again at the service of the mind...." Duchamp believed that "until the last hundred years, all painting had been literary or religious". In other words, until the modern period art had appealed to the intellect first. In contrast, Duchamp called most modern painting "physical" or "sensual" (in agreement with the Wittkowers), that it appealed largely to the emotions of the viewers. Physical art for Duchamp included that created by the Impressionists and post-Impressionists, Cezanne and his followers. And yet, Monet who worked systematically towards an understanding of changing light, was also logical in his approach to painting. And Cezanne, who painted from nature using the cylinder, sphere and cone, actually wrote that artists should aspire to be intellectual (Chipp). Ironically, Duchamp considered Dada (viewed by much of the public as insanity incarnate) as an intellectual protest against modern "sensual" art.
Blake's mocking lines, and the ideas expressed by Duchamp and the Wittkowers, all suggest that the intellectual and the intuitive can be quantified -- one can dominate the other. The perpetuation of this concept, it may be suggested, is at the heart of most artists' economic struggles today. How can this be? The contemporary artist who believes he cannot be intuitive and intellectual at the same time, must reject half of his brain or at the very least find himself handicapped. Closer to the point of this article, however, as an Ontarian artist recently commented to this writer: "Artists are right-brained and, therefore, by their very nature, unable to learn about business."
