Of Artistry

The recently unveiled Obama portraits have sparked some mild, entertaining controversy.  There is no need for me to offer an artistic review.  I haven’t the credentials (not compared to my credentials for talking literature and philosophy, anyway); as for my taste, that is clear enough to anyone who has spent time on this blog.

But I did find it interesting when some people began to take note of the fact that Mr. Obama’s portrait may have been “outsourced to China.”  A cursory search (come, come, mon frowning frères, this is not my day job) indicates that bits of the work may well have been done in China, since the artist who painted the portrait, Kehinde Wiley, has a studio there.  According to New York Magazine …

Producing work in China cuts costs, but not as much as it used to, Wiley says. These days in Beijing he employs anywhere from four to ten workers, depending on the urgency, plus a studio manager, the American artist Ain Cocke. The Beijing studio began as a lark: After visiting an artist friend there and liking what he saw, he and a couple of his New York staffers flew out, rented some space, and started painting, “sort of like a retreat,” he says. One thing led to another—“another” being a five-year relationship with a Chinese D.J.—and eventually the Beijing studio became the main production hub as well as his second home.  (Source)

There has been some tut-tutting over this revelation—The Obama portrait may not have been painted entirely by the artist?  Quelle scandal!—but it really isn’t scandalous.  (By comparison, Wiley’s portraits involving severed heads—also discussed in the article above, and by the left-leaning site Snopes—are perhaps worthy of discussion.)  As the magazine observes, “There’s nothing new about artists using assistants—everyone from Michelangelo to Jeff Koons has employed teams of helpers, with varying degrees of irony and pride …”  At the same time, “Wiley gets uncomfortable discussing the subject.”

Should he?  I don’t know.  In the wise words (which I have quoted before) of Pitti-Sing, “Bless you, it all depends!”

For hundreds, probably thousands of years artists have used assistants to create their work.  It was common during the Renaissance for a master painter to run a studio where his assistants, themselves in training to become master artists, would fill in the details of large works under his direction.  (Here’s a quick primer on the topic.)  In fact, the practice was so common that museums sometimes list works as coming “from the workshop of —.”  (I don’t know for sure, but I assume there is some fairly sophisticated art detective work involved in determining whether an artist had assistance, and how much he had—in other words, when a museum decides to list a painting with that caveat, it may be a guess, but it is a well-educated guess.)

The same sort of attitude can be seen in pre-modern literature.  Shakespeare was famously not embarrassed to “steal” his plots from elsewhere—everybody did it, and everybody knew about it.  Such “theft” could even be a selling point for a new work.  During the medieval era a common trope was to claim “an ancient book” as the source for one’s own ideas, since readers attributed more authority to older works.  (Does the phrase “stood the test of time” ring a bell?)  The earliest collection of King Arthur stories was produced by Geoffrey of Monmouth, who makes an “ancient book” source claim.  In his time, he was probably believed.  Today, though scholars think there may well have been a chieftain (more likely several) who inspired the Arthurian legends, it is generally admitted the Geoffrey made most of his stuff up.

A modern instance of this sort of thinking can be found in varying attitudes towards plagiarism.  For many non-Western students (middle Eastern, Indian, and Asian), the idea that you oughtn’t repeat another person’s words without attribution is strange.  For some Asian cultures, there is an assumption that if a thing is worth repeating it is also the sort of thing that everyone would recognize.  One does not put Confucius in quotes because to do so would be insulting to one’s readers.

It is the West that changed, largely through the adoption of the Romantic idea of the Artist as Solitary Genius.  For figures as enormous as Byron or Beethoven, collaborating with mere mortals would have been absurd (and, probably, given the personalities involved, painful for everyone concerned).  Somehow this notion spread throughout the arts and among the consumers of art, so that today the idea that a painter—like Wiley—might not create every brushstroke seems practically scandalous to those outside the field.

Back to the article on Wiley himself:

… Wiley gets uncomfortable discussing the subject [of his assistants]. “I’m sensitive to it,” he says. When I [the reporter] first arrived at his Beijing studio, the assistants had left, and he made me delete the iPhone snapshots I’d taken of the empty space. It’s not that he wants people to believe every brushstroke is his, he says. That they aren’t is public ­knowledge. It’s just a question of boundaries. “I don’t want you to know every aspect of where my hand starts and ends, or how many layers go underneath the skin, or how I got that glow to happen,” he says. “It’s the secret sauce! Get out of my kitchen!”

So, Wiley is embarrassed by his studio.  And I ask again: But should he be?

Here’s a question that would resolve that question—and I don’t know the answer; and I should emphasize that: I don’t know the answer.  Does Wiley’s work as a master artist actually overflow into the work that his assistants do?  Or, to put that another way: How much of the style we see in Wiley’s work is owing to him, and how much to chance?  Film directors are not ashamed to admit that their cameramen contribute, but that’s because they give the cameras well, direction.  How directed are Wiley’s assistants?

But that’s just what he doesn’t want to show.  “It’s the secret sauce! Get out of my kitchen!”  I very much doubt he actually has anything to be embarrassed about.  He just thinks he does.  It would probably be to his benefit if he embraced the reality and let people like his friendly interviewer into the kitchen.  But our Romantic ideas are in the way.

Of course, the other question, and the other possible difference between Wiley’s method and that of Michelangelo et al., is that there was a presumption that the assistants of Renaissance masters were learning the trade in order to become masters themselves.  Some of them did—del Sarto, Romano, Botticelli, Perugino …  Some even surpassed their teachers—Michelangelo himself was the student of the less famous Ghirlandaio.  One of my favorite examples of “group work” is a painting of “Tobias and the Angel” attributed to the workshop of Verrocchio; the painting is famous in part because some of the detail-work may have been done by a young Leonardo da Vinci.

That, of course, is what takes the sting out of the terms “master” and “assistant.”  If the relationship is not exploitive, but more that of teacher and apprentice, there is every reason to applaud the practice of studio work.  Hopefully, Wiley’s Beijing studio meets that description.  Will we be seeing portraits of Asian women à la Judith and Holofernes in ten or fifteen years?  Time will tell.