A book newly acquired by the Thammasat University Library should be useful for students interested in art history, literature, European culture, and modernism.
100 Artists’ Manifestos was edited by Professor Alex Danchev, who taught international relations at the University of St Andrews, Scotland, the United Kingdom, but he also published about the history of art.
The Thammasat University Library owns other books by him about both subjects.
A manifesto is a published declaration of intent, motive, or opinion.
The word derives from a Latin term meaning clear or conspicuous.
An art manifesto is an occasion for artists to tell us what they mean by their art, beyond what they have already put into their works.
100 Artists’ Manifestos covers the past 100 years of artistic movements, but manifestos date back even earlier than that, with English artists from the 1700s and French artists from the 1800s particularly enjoying explaining themselves.
Art manifestos are still being written today by international artists.
They usually underline the importance of freedom of expression and the interest in new viewpoints, instead of traditional ideas.
An early example of an art manifesto is by the English painter Sir Joshua Reynolds, who wrote in his Discourses on Art:
- Invention, strictly speaking, is little more than a new combination of those images which have been previously gathered and deposited in the memory: nothing can come of nothing.
Discourse no. 2, delivered on December 11, 1769
- You must have no dependence on your own genius. If you have great talents, industry will improve them; if you have but moderate abilities, industry will supply their deficiency.
Discourse no. 2; vol. 1
- A mere copier of nature can never produce any thing great, can never raise and enlarge the conceptions, or warm the heart of the spectator.
Discourse no. 3, delivered on December 14, 1770
- Could we teach taste or genius by rules, they would be no longer taste and genius.
Discourse no. 3; vol. 1
- If deceiving the eye were the only business of the art, there is no doubt, indeed, but the minute painter would be more apt to succeed; but it is not the eye, it is the mind, which the painter of genius desires to address; nor will he waste a moment upon those smaller objects, which only serve to catch the sense, to divide the attention, and to counteract his great design of speaking to the heart.
Discourse no. 3; vol. 1
- A painter must compensate the natural deficiencies of his art. He has but one sentence to utter, but one moment to exhibit. He cannot, like the poet or historian, expatiate. It must be remembered that painting is not the mere gratification of sight.
Discourse no. 4, delivered on December 10, 1771
- Words should be employed as the means, not as the end: language is the instrument, conviction is the work.
Discourse no. 4; vol. 1
- A painter must not only be of necessity an imitator of the works of nature…but he must be as necessarily an imitator of the works of other painters: this appears more humiliating, but is equally true; and no man can be an artist, whatever he may suppose, upon any other terms… Genius is supposed to be a power of producing excellencies, which are out of the reach of the rules of art; a power which no precepts can teach, and which no industry can acquire… The mind is but a barren soil; a soil which is soon exhausted, and will produce no crop, or only one, unless it be continually fertilized and enriched with foreign matter… The greatest natural genius cannot subsist on its own stock: he who resolves never to ransack any mind but his own, will be soon reduced, from mere barrenness, to the poorest of all imitations; he will be obliged to imitate himself, and to repeat what he has before often repeated. When we know the subject designed by such men, it will never be difficult to guess what kind of work is to be produced… Nature is, and must be the fountain which alone is inexhaustible; and from which all excellencies must originally flow.
Discourse no. 6, delivered on December 10, 1774
- Poetry operates by raising our curiosity, engaging the mind by degrees to take an interest in the event, keeping that event suspended, and surprising at last with an unexpected catastrophe. The painter’s art is more confined, and has nothing that corresponds with, or perhaps is equivalent to, this power and advantage of leading the mind on, till attention is totally engaged. What is done by Painting, must be done at one blow; curiosity has received at once all the satisfaction it can ever have.
Discourse no. 8, delivered on December 10, 1778
- You are never to lose sight of nature; the instant you do, you are all abroad, at the mercy of every gust of fashion, without knowing or seeing the point to which you ought to steer.
Discourse no. 12, delivered on December 10, 1784
- The art of seeing Nature, or in other words, the art of using Models, is in reality the great object, the point to which all our studies are directed.
Discourse no. 12; vol. 2
- No Art can be grafted with success on another art. For though they all profess the same origin, and to proceed from the same stock, yet each has its own peculiar modes both of imitating nature, and of deviating from it, each for the accomplishment of its own particular purpose. These deviations, more especially, will not bear transplantation to another soil.
Discourse no. 13, delivered on December 11, 1786
- The true test of all the arts, is not solely whether the production is a true copy of nature, but whether it answers the end of art, which is to produce a pleasing effect upon the mind.
Discourse no. 13; vol. 2
Two centuries later, the English artists Gilbert & George wrote a manifesto containing advice for sculptors, including:
- Always be smartly dressed, well groomed, relaxed, friendly, polite and in complete control.
- Make the world believe in you and to pay heavily for this privilege.
- Never worry, assess, discuss or criticize but remain quiet, respectful, and calm.
In the 1990s, the British group The Stuckists wrote a manifesto declaring, among other things:
Against conceptualism, hedonism and the cult of the ego-artist.
Stuckism is the quest for authenticity. By removing the mask of cleverness and admitting where we are, the Stuckist allows him/herself uncensored expression.
Painting is the medium of self-discovery. It engages the person fully with a process of action, emotion, thought and vision, revealing all of these with intimate and unforgiving breadth and detail.
Stuckism proposes a model of art which is holistic. It is a meeting of the conscious and unconscious, thought and emotion, spiritual and material, private and public. Modernism is a school of fragmentation — one aspect of art is isolated and exaggerated to detriment of the whole. This is a fundamental distortion of the human experience and perpetrates an egocentric lie.
Artists who don’t paint aren’t artists.
Art that has to be in a gallery to be art isn’t art.
The Stuckist paints pictures because painting pictures is what matters.
The Stuckist is not mesmerised by the glittering prizes, but is wholeheartedly engaged in the process of painting. Success to the Stuckist is to get out of bed in the morning and paint.
It is the Stuckist’s duty to explore his/her neurosis and innocence through the making of paintings and displaying them in public, thereby enriching society by giving shared form to individual experience and an individual form to shared experience.
The Stuckist is not a career artist but rather an amateur (amare, Latin, to love) who takes risks on the canvas rather than hiding behind ready-made objects (e.g. a dead sheep). The amateur, far from being second to the professional, is at the forefront of experimentation, unencumbered by the need to be seen as infallible. Leaps of human endeavour are made by the intrepid individual, because he/she does not have to protect their status. Unlike the professional, the Stuckist is not afraid to fail…
(All images courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)