In "The Minor Arts" (1908) La Farge writes about the division of "minor" from "major" arts. If I were to try and name the minor arts he's talking about I would have trouble, because they are not something I know about, being born in the 19-80s. Let's see: Bas Relief Maker? Moulder? Stained Glass Maker? He was a muralist and his idea is that we limit our appreciation of these types of arts because they are "strictly useful."
“Strictly speaking, perhaps, we could say that there are no minor arts. There is art turned, let us say, into less important spaces, into minor channels. And some of these less important spaces we so call, because they are strictly useful. Thereby they seem to escape, to be out of the greater ideal. We think so, for instance, of the details of a cathedral porch. And yet, not only the mass of these details, but even some part of them may be as beautiful, as wonderful in the artistic meaning as the big building itself. They may be more so. They may be less the work of convention. They may have an amount of personal life superior to that of the building, which building may be impersonal—one may say agglutinated. We may see that in the execution of certain mouldings, whose personal carrying out, upon a fixed program, saves the wall from commonplace. It would puzzle the very best sculptors of to-day (and our sculpture and European sculpture is going through an experience of life which is encouraging for the future), it would seem impossible for our very best men to equal in interest and artistic grasp most of the work done in medieval cathedrals, merely to fill in spaces with something ornamental. Our puzzle comes, our suggestion of an error comes, of course, from this, that the whole question is: Who is it that does? For example again: if we decide to call some of the helps and details, the ornamentation, the beautifying, the poetizing, the uplifting of architectural work, minor as art, what shall we think of the man working in the minor art of glass who made the tremendous windows of Chartres? He (or we perhaps should say they) were certainly superior to most of us painters to-day, even those of us covered with the honor of an academy, or followed by the respect of students, or the admiration or jealousy of fellow artists […]"
A form of democracy that is making an idealistic comeback
"We see in picturesque form, Michel Angelo or Raphael on the scaffoldings with their workmen, all getting the benefit of the life and experience in common. To the last workman, the influence of the greater poetic mind must have reached, and the reverse, the practical toleration of the limits of work, the benefit of momentary equality, we have in accord in the anecdotes clustered about such names as I have mentioned. Instead of diminishing either weight to us, instead of lowering them, these relations of the entire body of workers in art have a charm of superiority, intellectual and poetic, that does not envelop the segregated artist of to-day…
[...] I put aside all the enormous social changes which the last hundred and fifty years have brought about; which destroyed guilds and their relations for artist—which set up academies, dividing the superior from the common people; and which put, as it were, the hand of the government upon the more democratic forms of the old monarchical world."
You younger people degrade yourselves without any help from a bas relief
"Let us add to these enormous influences the influence of certain developments. I mean by development, both the things happening which increase or diminish the value of some division of art. Let us say, for instance, that more and more did sculpture retreat from architecture and become a specialized art. It was more or less the same all over the world, but here we can remember the queer title spotted the red plush or green reps of the Victorian era. You younger people have escaped a little of that. It is not many years ago that one of our best sculptors explained to me that he could not afford to take the commission for a great exterior bas relief on the outside of a wall of a church, because it was what workmen did. And people would be reminded of the time when he began. This was a minor art, might degrade him. So you see we have improved. At this date my fellow artist would take a square mile of it if there was that to give. […]"
"[…] But, meanwhile, these vast experiments into naturalism, many of which are glorious, tended to exaggerate for those who were not in it the so-called idealism of the schools. And within that retreat they were beautifully useless, and often foolish and sentimental, but with all the dryness of recipe. I need not name names that come up to our minds. And they were helped, of course, by the idea of division. They could manufacture a so-called ideal—a so called style—something unnatural, anyhow, so that the result of the separation of the decorative—the decorative and representative sides of painting, has been a number of foolish recipes for what is called composition—that is to say, arrangement of spaces within a set space. One sees these little rules applied innocently enough by the well-meaning artists, entangled in these paths which they have suppose to be the old and higher ones, because they have been so taught in their school days by their school ma’ams, or else we see arrogance insisting on cheap forms of what the French and Germans call stylization; which, alas, with them means running an iron ramrod through the growth of things[…]"
Lo! Decoration is separated from painting and sculpting by men with a need to classify (and no taste in Eastern art)
"…I cannot help remembering a séance of a well known foreign decorator who has, or course, as every one has, plenty of merit, in which discourse to various serious and important architects he explained how ‘cheap and nasty’ was Oriental decoration, how anybody could do it, how you struck a red sun somewhere and you put a stork of two alongside, and lo, you had the very best of Japanese decoration. To this he opposed the solemnity of British art. The art of Bond Street, or Piccadilly, or wherever it is the thing flourishes—remember that I have been all through it, and he gave us its principle in one single grave lesson, taken from one of his own patterns—a perpendicular, which was a tree in the middle—a tree that grew in one of the London streets, or rather the London shops, and then on one side a lady with a musical instrument, I think, and a gentleman in some sort of Anglican costume. This he gravely showed to the serious architects, who kindly smiles. I do not quote him at all, as in the way of reproach. It is merely an example of the profundity of poor thinking, which allowed an otherwise respectable person to believe in himself, and in his practice, to such a curious extent. This gentleman was the victim of what might be called the exaggeration of pure decoration—of the necessity for a classification. It was some years back, and the fashions may change and are changing, so that such firms as he might be connected with would give us other patterns. But one explanation goes on with him. The decorative side of art---of the arts of space—which is nearest to fundamental principles and beginnings, has been, therefore, forcibly separated in the arts of painting and sculpture from that side, which represented stories, or again which aimed at copying the aspect of nature, oblivious of rule, if I may so say."
John La Farge is a interesting facet in the smooth surface of art history. He's a decorator who saw himself differently, less commercial and more in touch with the innate rules of art, than the other decorators of the era (Morris, Tiffany, etc.), and they all called themselves 'artists.' Reading his work is difficult because the language we use now has changed. The split between 'artist' and 'artisan' that he notes in this lecture, is ingrained in our minds today. And no one with any interest in being taken seriously would ever label them self a decorator today.
"Therefore, as we have been seeing—the artist (I have to use this special term) was more and more separated from the artisan (another term which is also disagreeable to me because it helps to keep up this absurd artificial classing). Instead of lifting the artist, this degraded him, as happens to all parvenus, and he sought to make his pictures by recalling stories or subjects or intentions, or using studies from nature, and polishing them out of their natural appearance, instead of carrying all these things out through the physical qualities and advantages of his art. Therein he separated, and without knowing it he threw the whole power of his side of art to increase the apparent value of the other side. His very refinement and exclusiveness blossomed into commerce, as it has in England in forms of art which we may associate with certain names, for instance, that of Morris. All the genius of Rossetti and the intelligence of Burne-Jones could not escape from it. Burned-Hones complained to me that his own stained glass became commercial—and he could not see why, being immersed in the same waters. And if this intelligent artist was impressed by it, what could we expect from others! Burne-Jones had painted outside his work for glass, and was a master apart from this[….]"
We've hired an interior non-decorator to do the master suite
"With the separation that we have spoken of, no great artist has devoted time to these minor arts, except in the superficial way I am trying to explain. The result has been necessarily middle class art—the art of the house decorator, the ecclesiastical art furnisher. And against that we could not have a word to say if that could be lifted and expanded as it was in the past. Meanwhile, when the commercial decorator can challenge the artist in any other line, he may have a right to lead, but not before…"
La Farge, J. "The Minor Arts." Boston Museum of Fine Art, 1924. "Lecture delivered before the Committee on the Utilization of the Museum by Schools and Colleges; reprinted from the New England Magazine, 1908.) Excerpted and transcripted by ABJ Seattle Glass Online.
In volume 21 of The World's Work, an essay on La Farge by Frank Jewett Mather, Jr. tells a story about his "Renaissance workshop." That your art work may be made by other people is taken for granted today, and in glass, because it is so difficult to work with, it is often the case. Or, your depth perception could be the factor.
"He renewed the lost tradition of the Renaissance workshop. From 1876 (when he organized that gallant emergency-squad which under cruel conditions of time and convenience decorated Trinity Church, Boston) Mr. La Farge always had about him a corps of assistants ranging from intelligent artisans to accomplished artists. Upon all of them he impressed his will so completely that even their invention cast itself in his forms. One who was long his chief assistant told me that there were scores of drawings and sketches about the studio which might be his own or the master's—he honestly could not tell. A well-known art-critic pleaded that the cartoon of the Confucius (every stroke of which was executed by this assistant) should be preserved in a museum as an imperishable memorial of La Farge's handiwork. His workshop dealt impartially with designs for glass or wall, accepting also humble decorative jobs, and drawing in on occasion woodcarvers and inlayers, sculptors, and even the casual visitor.
And here I am reminded of a club discussion concerning sculpture by proxy, the subletting of contracts, the employment of students' sketches, etc. Mr. La Farge diverted an argument that was becoming too emphatic by the following anecdote:
"The other day," he said, "I was painting on the garden of the Confucius while my chief assistant was working on one of the heads. In came V. I. and I set him at a bit of drapery. Time was valuable, you see. L. looked in, and I set him at a bit of foreground foliage. I saw that the dead coloring of the sky needed deepening. At that moment my secretary, Miss В., entered with a letter. I gave her a broad brush, showed her how to charge it and sweep it with a mechanical stroke, and against her protest she, too, was enlisted."
With that ineffable restrained smile of his he turned to me and asked, "Now whose picture was that?"
And I was lucky enough to blunder out, "It was a fine La Farge."
In this spirit the great decorators have always worked, and it is only by such devoted cooperation that we can hope to revive the monumental style. Mr. La Farge's genius for leadership — such men as Kenyon Cox, F. D. Millet, Will H. Low, W. B. Van Ingen, Humphreys Johnston, and the late Francis Lathrop, among others, have gladly served him — has almost as great impqrtance as his painting. If there were many such shops as his the complete irreality of much of our art-instruction would be abated. Such clever and legitimate use of assistance did not prevent him from achieving remarkable autographic feats. The whole landscape of the Confucius was painted by himself from sketches made in Japan. The grandiose "Moses on Sinai" (in the same series), with its magnificent volcanic landscape, a Hawaiian reminiscence, was begun and finished with his own hand, though he had reached his seventieth year. But he would never admit any inferiority in the work done by his helpers, and here he felt like his great predecessors of the Renaissance. I think that he was right. Nothing is more truly his, for example, than the heads of the sages in the Confucius — which I happen to know were painted by Ivan Olinsky."
"He Restored to Dignity Among Us The Art of Mural Decoration"
"THE charm and the personal authority of John La Farge were such that no acquaintance of his may hope impartially to weigh his long and multiform achievement. He restored to dignity among us the art of mural decoration; he invented a new and beautiful technique for stained glass; but in our moment of loss these deeds seem someway less than the man himself. Hundreds of cultured Americans who knew his work but vaguely valued his eloquence and bowed to his taste. As an arbiter, only Charles Eliot Norton rivaled him, and Mr. La Farge had the advantage of direct and guiding companionship with many of our best artists. Himself a near inheritor of the finest intellectualism of France, acquainted with artists and critics from Paris to Tokio, widely read in the classics of the East and West, an observer of cosmopolitan and of savage man — he represented to us a kind of universality of taste and worldly wisdom and was the living link between America, prone to forget its own yesterdays, and all the great past."
Mather, F.J. "John La Farge--An Appreciation." The World's Work. Vol. XXI. November 1910-April 1911. Doubleday, Page and Company. Google Books. http://books.google.com/books?id=Zm0AAAAAYAAJ&source=gbs_navlinks_s
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