The artist who works in stone, in color, sounds, words, building
materials, and often in steel, as in the designing of bodies for some of
the finer automobiles, is but the craftsman working in materials that
are often elusive and difficult to handle and bringing into his work not
only the skill of the craftsman but also the attempt at an expression of
some need of his own inner being. That is the whole story.
The Modern Movement, then, seen from this point of view, is in reality
an attempt on the part of the workman to get back into his own hands
some control over the tools and materials of his craft. In certain
fields it is very difficult. In the theatre, for example, the artist, to
work at all, has to have an expensive equipment. There is needed a large
investment and money doesn’t like to take chances. It is much safer when
the theater wants to be artistic to run into Belasco realism, bring a
Child’s restaurant onto the stage or have a real automobile cross the
stage at thirty miles an hour--something of that sort, some stunt, is
safer when large sums of money have to be spent.
However, the workman in words or in color has a better chance. If, for
example, I can make my living by going somewhere and delivering a dull
sermon, something like this, to a lot of good-natured patient people, or
by working six months of the year in an advertising agency writing soap
advertisements, I can perhaps save enough money to write disregarding
the magazines for another six months. I know one very good modern
painter who becomes a house painter when he is broke, and one of
America’s finest poets works as a reporter on a newspaper. In America,
just now, it is not too hard for a man to make a living, particularly if
he is discreet enough not to have children.
And then things are slowly getting better. In his “_Life on the
Mississippi_” Mark Twain said something to the effect that the writer in
the end always wrote what the public and the editors wanted. “We often
write what we think and feel but in the end we scratch all out and give
them what they want,” he said. I am not quoting exactly. You will find
it in the book. The fact is that it was pretty much true in Twain’s day
and isn’t quite so true now.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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