Can Artistic Talent Ever Be Taught? Nature or Nurture?

[appalachiablue]

- Drawing a blank: can artistic talent ever be taught? The Guardian, Aug. 9, 2021. While Romantics insist artists are born not made, some of the best painters, sculptors and modern artists followed conventional teaching.

Modern Toss on whether artistry is a result of nature or nurture.

Genius cannot be taught but skills can. And even the wildest, most visionary of artists relies on the techniques they were taught. If you want to make digital art, you need to learn to code. A training in film will help with moving-image art. So much is obvious. But today we’re in thrall to a vacuous Romanticism that insists artists are born not made.

The first modern artists rebelled against a style of art education that had become deadening 150 years ago. The “academic” teaching tradition that evolved in the 18th century forced every aspiring artist to learn the same rules and habits – drawing from the nude, calculating perspective.

The likes of Monet and Cézanne broke with this academicism, and by 1913 artists such as Duchamp were putting bike wheels on stools, making collages and doing lots of other things no teacher had ever taught. Now we have art schools that teach Duchamp’s readymade to kids who discovered collage at primary school. But what if there was something in the older drawing-based art education after all?

“Poor is the pupil who does not surpass his master,” said Leonardo da Vinci. He outstripped his own teacher, Verrocchio, when as a teenager he added a brilliant angel to his elder’s Baptism of Christ. That’s genius. Yet the originality of Leonardo was made possible by a medieval art education. The kid from Vinci joined Verrocchio’s workshop in Florence as an apprentice when he was 17, and worked constantly at drawing and painting...

More,
https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2021/aug/09/drawing-a-blank-can-artistic-talent-ever-be-taught



- Susannah and the Elders, Gentileschi, c. 1610.



- Fountain, Marcel Duchamp, 1917.